December Days 02025 #26: Rocks
Dec. 26th, 2025 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
26: Rocks
As in the proverbial box of.
There are times where I run into problems that I not only can't solve easily, but ones that I can't even find a toehold on to get going with. In games, this is not such an issue, as many times when playing, the presence of a difficult puzzle often means you don't have all the things you need to solve it. In certain eras of adventure and text games, this might mean having to backtrack significantly, or to start over again, on the realization that you do not have a key item that you now know you need. At least one infamous text adventure and several of the Sierra adventure games had items you were supposed to collect at the beginning and hold on to until the very end, when they would be useful to you.
And there are some games where you have to make a leap of logic, or remember a particular cultural expression, or do some other thing that relies upon the player's knowledge of things that happen outside of the game to solve the puzzle. In the current era, the kinds of puzzles that rely on that outside knowledge are frowned upon, and there will usually be at least some item inside the game to collect or look at that will provide the necessary methods of working things out if you're not immediately familiar with how to solve this particular set of soup cans.
One of the games I was introduced to at the latest small convention is a Javascript programming challenge wrapped in the guise of an early-style console Multiplayer User Dungeon. The beginning phases of the player-versus-environment game were good for teaching things like iteration and recognition of when something has gone your way instead of needing to try again. And there's an entirely robust set of other people out there, doing all kinds of things with their own scripts, some helpful, many not, and the question is how much risk someone wants to take and see if there's reward to be had for it. (Trust and Risk are also the names of the two primary forces involved in the world of the MUD.) The second tier of player-versus environment is in learning how to recognize patterns and deal with them efficiently and appropriately. And there are some skill checks there that in this spot that ask you to put your resources to use, and that hint at a larger problem space than what you currently have access to. So that encourages you to continue driving forward in the player-versus-environment to acquire more of the important resource - information. Currency is pretty easy to obtain, if you have working methods of obtaining it through PvE, and the gates on how much currency you need to move up to the next system tier are the equivalent of being able to solve 10 of the PvE problems at your current tier, so once you have the hang of it, you can amass significant amounts of currency quickly, and then find better ways to disperse it back into the game. I spent significant amounts of what I had earned acquiring some rare resources from the market, for example. in-game currency is definitely not the problem, information is.
And perhaps most tellingly, the problems that are the hardest ones to work out are the ones where you have to figure out how to tell a computer to do what comes naturally to you as a human, once you figure out the method to solve certain problems. Because solving problems often happens on a time limit, and therefore you need the assistance of your computers to get through the available problems within that time limit. (This is why it's a Javascript programming problem wrapped in an MMO. The lore has it chosen as the language to interact with the world because Trust is a little loopy sometimes.)
As I've mentioned before, I do better when I'm working with fragments that already work and can modify them to suit my purposes. At the lower tiers of problems of the game, there's generally lots of help, because the players of the game want more players to come in and have immediate success and stick around to go after the harder problems. Or to create content of their own for others to interact with. As you rise up the tiers of problems to solve, however, the help becomes less direct and more oblique, and at a certain point, the help mostly doesn't happen, unless you've joined an alliance of some sort (a "corporation") and they want to help you out, so that may have to be my next move. And there are fragments around here and there of things that may or may not work, and that are helpful to progressing further in the game. If, you know, I could understand anything of what I'm looking at when I look at other people's code, that might help, but since there's also constraints about how many characters you can use in scripting your way to succeess, many of these fragments and scripts have also been code golfed, and that makes them basically incomprehensible to me, even when there are comments on the things that supposedly explain what they do. This is why I like using descriptive variable names.
But this happens in all kinds of other puzzles and riddles in the world, too, many of which are the kinds that if you understand the answer, it makes sense to work back to the problem from there. Lateral thinking puzzles are sometimes things that I can do, and very rarely, the logic puzzles that are supposed to be about processes of elimination based on various statements, but I mostly seem to work with language puzzles the best. Boggle boards, the beginner cryptic crosswords, word jumbles, anagrams, and the like. Things that require actual tactics and strategy, eh, not so much. I can put up a decent game, but I usually get foiled by whatever random elements are present, and in games with no randomness, I usually get pwned by someone who is more experienced than I am. (Playing board and card games with the family has helped us all learn how to play well in difficult situations, and how to hedge against terrible hands, but it doesn't give us an opportunity on how to play optimally, or how to figure out when it's a good idea to try and play for the best possible hand, instead of expecting the worst possible thing and playing accordingly.) Sometimes, if the RNG is being particularly mean, I get frustrated, but many of the games that come out these days are well-designed so that if you keep getting blocked on one pathway toward victory, you can still make progress on another based on what you've been dealt. Or you'll have a situation where you take a small point loss and get a big point gain in trade for it.
Games and puzzles are not only the ways that my family has bonded with each other and with those who we invite into our houses, but they were also used as practice tools in the household for skills that would be school-useful. Not as much about writing essays or performing advanced integral calculus, but for the matters of learning words and practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. One of the things that my parents were very good at was assigning the responsibility of handling transactions to whichever child was taking part in the game, and usually the youngest child that was playing in the game, because that was the child with the most opportunity for mathematics practice or other such. So by playing all of those games, we got a pretty strong foundation for many of those school skills that we'd need later on.
Theoretically, I was supposed to have also picked up on some social skills along the way, but I don't know that I got more than the basic packages of how to interact with other people. (Given how that is apparently enough to get over the bar regularly, I'm not complaining, but I wonder what the deluxe packages might be like here and there, to be able to communicate well and get my point across in the absolute best way that I can.
Where I start feeling bad about myself are with those problems that I don't understand and don't have even the slightest way of starting to understand them. Sometimes it's because I'm looking at a puzzle that requires a certain amount of expertise that I don't have, and I won't be able to make any progress on that kind of thing until I get at least some of that information or expertise and start applying it to the problem. Sometimes it's because it's one of those problems that requires lateral thinking, or careful analysis, or examination of the particulars until there's finally something to grasp and start solving. Games like The Room, or escape room experiences, are like that, although they do a fair amount of showing you puzzles, sometimes even showing you that you need a specific kind of thing to continue in the puzzle, and then making you hunt all around the room and do all the other puzzles before you find the thing that will help you with the puzzle that you first looked at when you got into the chamber.
[Diversion: The one live escape room experience that I did with coworkers was very much that kind of situation, where we were all looking at five or six puzzles at any given time and trying to figure out which ones were the ones that we could solve, and what puzzles those locks unlocked. So long as there were enough puzzles for all of us to focus on a couple, we marched through quite a few of them, sharing solutions and artifacts with each other. As the number of puzzles dwindled, we started slowing down in our solves until we were on the pathway to the end point, where we had to actually solve things one at a time, as each of us joined up from our separate pathways. I'm glad I had so many people, because we could all concentrate on the puzzles that were our strengths without having to slog through ones that we weren't as good at, or didn't get the lateral thought process or the wordplay necessary to understand a puzzle. The person who was our minder and game moderator complimented our divide-and-conquer strategy toward clearing rooms and puzzles. Yes, it was a bunch of library workers in there, so we were going to tear at the puzzles provided, but I still think we went at it with a greater clip than most teams might have gone at.]
Being reminded of my limits is humbling, yes, and also sometimes hits me in the childhood trauma for being the "smart kid" who turns out not to have the answer to everything, or who can't think through the riddle answer that other people's experiences make more obvious or easy to understand. It's frustrating to chew on a problem and not feel like there's progress being made, even though it's entirely possible that there is progress being made and I just haven't made it to the breakthrough point yet. So, sometimes the correct thing to do is to let it sit for a bit, and go do something else, and let my brain chew on the problem as a background process while doing other enjoyable things. I would like my brain to stop trying to make me think about solutions to problems or refinements to issues in the middle of the night, though. I want my full sleep periods, thank you very much! (I have, however, learned how to get my brain to rev down again, usually by reading socials or playing Simon Tatham's puzzles until brain or body goes "okay, time for sleps now." Brains. What are you going to do about them.) I've learned to accept that, just like my computers, sometimes my brain needs time and cycles to process its way through what's been going on. Or it needs a nudge or a hint, and then can go forward from there with more understanding. With time and age, and the practice of librarianship, where people are not looking for perfect solutions, but instead for what will do for the moment, I have gotten better at not getting frustrated at not coming up with instant and perfect solutions.
And, it turns out the people are still happy to help out with some of the puzzles that are involved in the PvE of this game - I got some small encouragement that the thing that I was doing was actually correct, but that there were more steps in the process than I actually knew, and that there were some things that I hadn't discovered (or, more properly, held on to) that would help me in figuring out how to get from point a to point b. And encouragement that the particular tier of PvE that I've stepped up into is one that requires an awful lot of time and data to work through to the point where I can start approaching the possibilities of what might happen. And since there's so much of that time and data that has to be sifted through, the encouragement is also basically about continuing and persisting and keeping at it until it finally clicks and then it's possible to do the things. So, basically, the same kinds of things that I've been doing now, with the tinkering and the shuffling, and the making things work better until they're ready to go. Just with additional problems on top of the problems that I have already managed to work my way through. I will work my way through this particular problem, and then when it unlocks and produces the next set of problems to deal with, I will go after those with a certain amount of zest, zeal, and absolute frustration that I'm getting my backside handed to me by them every single time.
Just like with all the other problems in my life. Most of them I can outlast, several of them go away with the application of time or money, and the ones that remain are ones that I can try to turn my intellect toward, or my persistence toward, or those skills that I have developed in my life toward. There will still be limits, of course, but at least for the things that aren't the really serious ones, I can accept my limits and also carry a growth mindset toward those problems that can be solved with increased knowledge and persistence.
26: Rocks
As in the proverbial box of.
There are times where I run into problems that I not only can't solve easily, but ones that I can't even find a toehold on to get going with. In games, this is not such an issue, as many times when playing, the presence of a difficult puzzle often means you don't have all the things you need to solve it. In certain eras of adventure and text games, this might mean having to backtrack significantly, or to start over again, on the realization that you do not have a key item that you now know you need. At least one infamous text adventure and several of the Sierra adventure games had items you were supposed to collect at the beginning and hold on to until the very end, when they would be useful to you.
And there are some games where you have to make a leap of logic, or remember a particular cultural expression, or do some other thing that relies upon the player's knowledge of things that happen outside of the game to solve the puzzle. In the current era, the kinds of puzzles that rely on that outside knowledge are frowned upon, and there will usually be at least some item inside the game to collect or look at that will provide the necessary methods of working things out if you're not immediately familiar with how to solve this particular set of soup cans.
One of the games I was introduced to at the latest small convention is a Javascript programming challenge wrapped in the guise of an early-style console Multiplayer User Dungeon. The beginning phases of the player-versus-environment game were good for teaching things like iteration and recognition of when something has gone your way instead of needing to try again. And there's an entirely robust set of other people out there, doing all kinds of things with their own scripts, some helpful, many not, and the question is how much risk someone wants to take and see if there's reward to be had for it. (Trust and Risk are also the names of the two primary forces involved in the world of the MUD.) The second tier of player-versus environment is in learning how to recognize patterns and deal with them efficiently and appropriately. And there are some skill checks there that in this spot that ask you to put your resources to use, and that hint at a larger problem space than what you currently have access to. So that encourages you to continue driving forward in the player-versus-environment to acquire more of the important resource - information. Currency is pretty easy to obtain, if you have working methods of obtaining it through PvE, and the gates on how much currency you need to move up to the next system tier are the equivalent of being able to solve 10 of the PvE problems at your current tier, so once you have the hang of it, you can amass significant amounts of currency quickly, and then find better ways to disperse it back into the game. I spent significant amounts of what I had earned acquiring some rare resources from the market, for example. in-game currency is definitely not the problem, information is.
And perhaps most tellingly, the problems that are the hardest ones to work out are the ones where you have to figure out how to tell a computer to do what comes naturally to you as a human, once you figure out the method to solve certain problems. Because solving problems often happens on a time limit, and therefore you need the assistance of your computers to get through the available problems within that time limit. (This is why it's a Javascript programming problem wrapped in an MMO. The lore has it chosen as the language to interact with the world because Trust is a little loopy sometimes.)
As I've mentioned before, I do better when I'm working with fragments that already work and can modify them to suit my purposes. At the lower tiers of problems of the game, there's generally lots of help, because the players of the game want more players to come in and have immediate success and stick around to go after the harder problems. Or to create content of their own for others to interact with. As you rise up the tiers of problems to solve, however, the help becomes less direct and more oblique, and at a certain point, the help mostly doesn't happen, unless you've joined an alliance of some sort (a "corporation") and they want to help you out, so that may have to be my next move. And there are fragments around here and there of things that may or may not work, and that are helpful to progressing further in the game. If, you know, I could understand anything of what I'm looking at when I look at other people's code, that might help, but since there's also constraints about how many characters you can use in scripting your way to succeess, many of these fragments and scripts have also been code golfed, and that makes them basically incomprehensible to me, even when there are comments on the things that supposedly explain what they do. This is why I like using descriptive variable names.
But this happens in all kinds of other puzzles and riddles in the world, too, many of which are the kinds that if you understand the answer, it makes sense to work back to the problem from there. Lateral thinking puzzles are sometimes things that I can do, and very rarely, the logic puzzles that are supposed to be about processes of elimination based on various statements, but I mostly seem to work with language puzzles the best. Boggle boards, the beginner cryptic crosswords, word jumbles, anagrams, and the like. Things that require actual tactics and strategy, eh, not so much. I can put up a decent game, but I usually get foiled by whatever random elements are present, and in games with no randomness, I usually get pwned by someone who is more experienced than I am. (Playing board and card games with the family has helped us all learn how to play well in difficult situations, and how to hedge against terrible hands, but it doesn't give us an opportunity on how to play optimally, or how to figure out when it's a good idea to try and play for the best possible hand, instead of expecting the worst possible thing and playing accordingly.) Sometimes, if the RNG is being particularly mean, I get frustrated, but many of the games that come out these days are well-designed so that if you keep getting blocked on one pathway toward victory, you can still make progress on another based on what you've been dealt. Or you'll have a situation where you take a small point loss and get a big point gain in trade for it.
Games and puzzles are not only the ways that my family has bonded with each other and with those who we invite into our houses, but they were also used as practice tools in the household for skills that would be school-useful. Not as much about writing essays or performing advanced integral calculus, but for the matters of learning words and practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. One of the things that my parents were very good at was assigning the responsibility of handling transactions to whichever child was taking part in the game, and usually the youngest child that was playing in the game, because that was the child with the most opportunity for mathematics practice or other such. So by playing all of those games, we got a pretty strong foundation for many of those school skills that we'd need later on.
Theoretically, I was supposed to have also picked up on some social skills along the way, but I don't know that I got more than the basic packages of how to interact with other people. (Given how that is apparently enough to get over the bar regularly, I'm not complaining, but I wonder what the deluxe packages might be like here and there, to be able to communicate well and get my point across in the absolute best way that I can.
Where I start feeling bad about myself are with those problems that I don't understand and don't have even the slightest way of starting to understand them. Sometimes it's because I'm looking at a puzzle that requires a certain amount of expertise that I don't have, and I won't be able to make any progress on that kind of thing until I get at least some of that information or expertise and start applying it to the problem. Sometimes it's because it's one of those problems that requires lateral thinking, or careful analysis, or examination of the particulars until there's finally something to grasp and start solving. Games like The Room, or escape room experiences, are like that, although they do a fair amount of showing you puzzles, sometimes even showing you that you need a specific kind of thing to continue in the puzzle, and then making you hunt all around the room and do all the other puzzles before you find the thing that will help you with the puzzle that you first looked at when you got into the chamber.
[Diversion: The one live escape room experience that I did with coworkers was very much that kind of situation, where we were all looking at five or six puzzles at any given time and trying to figure out which ones were the ones that we could solve, and what puzzles those locks unlocked. So long as there were enough puzzles for all of us to focus on a couple, we marched through quite a few of them, sharing solutions and artifacts with each other. As the number of puzzles dwindled, we started slowing down in our solves until we were on the pathway to the end point, where we had to actually solve things one at a time, as each of us joined up from our separate pathways. I'm glad I had so many people, because we could all concentrate on the puzzles that were our strengths without having to slog through ones that we weren't as good at, or didn't get the lateral thought process or the wordplay necessary to understand a puzzle. The person who was our minder and game moderator complimented our divide-and-conquer strategy toward clearing rooms and puzzles. Yes, it was a bunch of library workers in there, so we were going to tear at the puzzles provided, but I still think we went at it with a greater clip than most teams might have gone at.]
Being reminded of my limits is humbling, yes, and also sometimes hits me in the childhood trauma for being the "smart kid" who turns out not to have the answer to everything, or who can't think through the riddle answer that other people's experiences make more obvious or easy to understand. It's frustrating to chew on a problem and not feel like there's progress being made, even though it's entirely possible that there is progress being made and I just haven't made it to the breakthrough point yet. So, sometimes the correct thing to do is to let it sit for a bit, and go do something else, and let my brain chew on the problem as a background process while doing other enjoyable things. I would like my brain to stop trying to make me think about solutions to problems or refinements to issues in the middle of the night, though. I want my full sleep periods, thank you very much! (I have, however, learned how to get my brain to rev down again, usually by reading socials or playing Simon Tatham's puzzles until brain or body goes "okay, time for sleps now." Brains. What are you going to do about them.) I've learned to accept that, just like my computers, sometimes my brain needs time and cycles to process its way through what's been going on. Or it needs a nudge or a hint, and then can go forward from there with more understanding. With time and age, and the practice of librarianship, where people are not looking for perfect solutions, but instead for what will do for the moment, I have gotten better at not getting frustrated at not coming up with instant and perfect solutions.
And, it turns out the people are still happy to help out with some of the puzzles that are involved in the PvE of this game - I got some small encouragement that the thing that I was doing was actually correct, but that there were more steps in the process than I actually knew, and that there were some things that I hadn't discovered (or, more properly, held on to) that would help me in figuring out how to get from point a to point b. And encouragement that the particular tier of PvE that I've stepped up into is one that requires an awful lot of time and data to work through to the point where I can start approaching the possibilities of what might happen. And since there's so much of that time and data that has to be sifted through, the encouragement is also basically about continuing and persisting and keeping at it until it finally clicks and then it's possible to do the things. So, basically, the same kinds of things that I've been doing now, with the tinkering and the shuffling, and the making things work better until they're ready to go. Just with additional problems on top of the problems that I have already managed to work my way through. I will work my way through this particular problem, and then when it unlocks and produces the next set of problems to deal with, I will go after those with a certain amount of zest, zeal, and absolute frustration that I'm getting my backside handed to me by them every single time.
Just like with all the other problems in my life. Most of them I can outlast, several of them go away with the application of time or money, and the ones that remain are ones that I can try to turn my intellect toward, or my persistence toward, or those skills that I have developed in my life toward. There will still be limits, of course, but at least for the things that aren't the really serious ones, I can accept my limits and also carry a growth mindset toward those problems that can be solved with increased knowledge and persistence.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-27 10:33 am (UTC)That game sounds like something I might enjoy, and it's good to hear you did, too! I'd probably have the same trouble with the code golf, as I'm more interested in making things work, with as many kludges as necessary, than in making it efficient. (I am luckily getting a bit better at it, but I doubt it'll ever be my primary concern.)
Lateral thinking puzzles are sometimes things that I can do, and very rarely, the logic puzzles that are supposed to be about processes of elimination based on various statements, but I mostly seem to work with language puzzles the best.
I've been working through a puzzle book with different kinds of puzzles in the last week, and I was surprised to find that I did quite well at the language puzzles, too! I'd had thought that I'd be best at puzzles involving numbers, but Sudokus seem to be the only one I can do without trouble (probably because I've had lots of experience at them)... It's good to have a better idea of what puzzles I'm good at, though the answer was a little unexpected.
(Finally, I'm glad to hear you had a good experience in an escape room; it just sounds like something that could become very stressful if done wrong!)