Why I am worried about Tom Clancy's Division and you should be too (if you're a gamer)

Lately I've been on a huge first-person shooter binge, sinking a lot of time into Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (which I am enjoying immensely much to my surprise, but maybe that's another blog post) as well as a few old-school shooters (like Republic Commandos, Counterstrike 1.6 and the first Jedi Knight), and a bit of time with Star Wars Battlefront (which - thank God - I didn't buy, but borrowed from a friend instead). This coincided with a huge amount of information dropped about one of the most anticipated AAA games of 2016 - Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division (and you can see a bunch of collected game media impressions here on Kotaku). You might also enjoy this impression by a very popular YouTuber AngryJoe.

I was tentatively excited about The Division when it was first announced. It looked like a blend of persistent world MMO, with heavy shooter elements, some MMORPG-style abilities, and a bleak near-future apocalyptic story, all set in a 1 for 1 recreation of New York. Since then the game received its share of controversies, suffering form delay after delay, clear visual performance downgrades (at least on consoles - there has been no footage of the game running on PC in an unscripted setting) and confusion regarding what this game is supposed to be. However, with the media embargo regarding hands-on impressions lifted (as witnessed by the links above) a lot of that confusion has been clarified. On the other hand it also got me worried about the game quite a bit.

The first thing that's got me worried is how hard most game media journalists who have played The Division are trying to both make The Division sound like Destiny ('it's just like Destiny you guys! But you're fighting hobos and looters with realistic guns, instead of fighting aliens with sci-fi magical guns!') and NOT make The Division sound like Destiny ('it's nothing like Destiny other than both are shooters with RPG stats and damage numbers!'). So that's a first warning sign as they (game media and Ubisoft) are trying very hard to sell the game to both fans of Destiny and those who either hated it or never tried it (for the record, I still haven't played a single minute of Destiny and doubt I ever will). Granted, The Division was announced before Destiny actually came out, but it's still weird to see how much effort is spent on fitting The Division into the meta-narrative of the evolution of shooters and RPGs on consoles.

The second thing that makes me doubt the game's staying power is that there doesn't appear to be a huge variety of enemies or environments. You're shooting hobos, looters, criminals, what looks to be rogue cops and army dudes, some weird hazmat-wearing flamethrowing guys and so on. You're shooting them with real-world guns and using near-future but perfectly plausible tech (rolling micro-drones, personal radar systems, etc.) but you are essentially just shooting people with your gun. In games like Call of Duty that's totally fine because: a) the single-player campaign is usually quite short and ends before it gets too repetitive, and b) when playing matches where you shoot other people with your guns, personal skill, map awareness and knowledge of the game count for far more than the stats on your gear and the DPS of your gun. So there needs to be some kind of a greater incentive (both in terms of loot and in terms of narrative) when 'shoot people with guns' is dropped into an MMO-esque RPG. Destiny achieves it (to my knowledge) with having many different-looking worlds, big variety of instanced missions or dungeons (so that you're not just shooting people or the same race of aliens all the time), big variety of enemies and just big visual shifts between areas. The Division appears to have none of that at this moment. You're fighting in urban areas and you are shooting people all day long. It's kind of weird to see that a boss in a mission is some guy named Rudy (or Joe or whatever) but he still looks like the rest of the hobos around him while acting like a giant bullet sponge as if he was a raid boss from World of Warcraft or Destiny. It just doesn't seem like the Division would be able to sustain my interest for too long. Now, maybe the developers are a lot smarter than this, and maybe New York is just the FIRST stage and there are other cities or locations you travel to later on in the game, and maybe later on some weirder enemy types get introduce (robots, or infected or something) and they are just keeping this under wraps. However, given Ubisoft's previous track record with story telling and keeping surprises under wraps I find this difficult to believe.

Then there's the whole loot gathering and crafting progression. Basically I have no time or willpower to play another MMO. Even if, as the developers claim, most missions in The Division can be completed in under an hour. The point is that all of the gameplay videos released recently (see links above) show that the game progression is hugely dependent on gathering or crafting increasingly better loot. It's the same grind as in WoW, FFXIV or (as I am told by hardcore Destiny players) in Destiny and I have no time or patience for that. Especially if, as the developers and game journalists are constantly stressing, The Division will be a kind of game you'll want to play with friends. If my friends outpace me in terms of gear and levels, what am I supposed to do then? Also, I just find gear grinding to be very boring.

The other big concern for me is the tone. The cut scenes, the environment, the music and the ambient dialogue all paint this grim Tom Clancy-ish setting which is utterly at odds with the focus of the game on loot, DPS and shooting a bunch of people. So you're supposed to be restoring law and order in New York in the wake of a deadly epidemic and breakdown of society, but it seems that the primary motivation of the players is to get better guns and gear. Woo! I got a better scope/backpack/gun holster/laser sight! In other words, I feel like there's a big disconnect between what the game is about and the actual gameplay. Also, this disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay coupled with modern day realistic setting raise some rather ugly questions. The looters you shoot in the early stages of the game all wear "urban" clothing (read: African American hiphop influenced fashion), the National Guard elements helping you seem uniformly heroic, the US government (in a typical Tom Clancy military fiction fashion) generally means well and is prepared in some fashion and that society in the absence of the long arm of the government will inevitably break down. But you know, all of it is just an excuse to shoot a whole bunch of people with realistic guns.

Finally, Ubisoft is rather notorious for dropping post-launch support for titles that have no sold so well or that have lost a lot of player base post-launch due to various issues (poor story, buggy gameplay, poor performance). For example Watch_Dogs or Assassin's Creed: Unity. I pity anyone who had bought a season pass for those games because both games have received very little support post-launch. Ubisoft seemed to have dropped both like a hot potato and resolved to never ever speak of them again. Heck, I seem to recall even some sort of apology for Assassin's Creed Unity (and the excellent Assassin's Creed Syndicate seems to have swept Unity aside as a true next-gen Assassin's Creed). Basically, if
a) The Division fails to sell the number of copies that Ubisoft is hoping for, and/or
b) The Division fails to sell the number of season passes that Ubisoft is hoping for, and/or
c) The Division fails to retain the number of players post-launch that Ubisoft is hoping for
Then I am not holding out much hope for the post-launch support or Ubisoft's willingness to invest into the future of the game. Ubisoft needs to realize that MMOs and MMO-style games need constant post-launch support and that no online games come out of the game perfect. WoW didn't start out with 10 million subscribers, FFXIV has not become the huge commercial and critical success until Sony made the gutsy move to first shut down the game, then completely rebuild it, and then provide big monthly updates and an enormous expansion.

So what would make me pick up The Division after it launches (because I sure as shit ain't pre-ordering it or picking it up on day 1)? One, the launch has to be smooth - some server issues are expected, but it better not be a complete shit show. Two, the game needs to feature more than just New York - other cities or at least non-urban environments are a must for me to avoid the tedium. Three, the grind for decent gear should not take as long a time as FFXIV or Destiny. Four, Ubisoft needs to be very clear upfront as to what future additions (via season pass) will hold and approximate dates when they will come out. Five, they seriously need to add a persistent clan option and more social support. For a game that's supposed to be enjoyed with other people it's surprising to me that it has such limited emotes, no clan support, and awkward grouping.

Then again, maybe it'll be an amazing game from day 1. :P

The Classroom of the Future... tomorrow!

Spurred on by Margaret Wente's shrill diatribe against teachers and their unions in Ontario (not wholly undeserved - I could say two or fifty unpleasant things about the Ontario College of Teachers), and by the end of the school year, I started thinking about what would an effective classroom look, say, 7 years from now. A lot of this is going to be generalizations though, but I think the numbers bear out. So given that:
- the supposed purpose of education is to provide valuable skills and knowledge to the new generation
- the costs of education per student are going up, while enrollment is actually slowly decreasing, and education is consistently the second highest portion of government spending not just in Ontario but across Canada
- education is seen as being vital to a 'successful' career
- teenagers are busier than ever with part time jobs, community hours, trying to find internships to help with business/pre-law/pre-med/etc. applications
- all phones will be equivalent to today's cutting-edge smartphones
- Internet access will be ubiquitous (it might be heavily censored in the future, but at least access to it will be a given in Canada)
... I think that the current model of education will be dangerously unsustainable and counter-productive in every way. The province is already trying to cut $70 million this year in under-used schools (see link above), and this number will only increase in the future even as class sizes increase. Education as it is right now is unsustainable. It is unsustainable economically, it is unsustainable environmentally (the cost of power, the cost of fuel to transport students to the school, the tremendous waste of supplies created by ever school, cost of constant renovations), and it will soon become unsustainable morally.

"Wait, what?!" Hear me out. Schools no longer have a monopoly on information for young people, nor do they any longer have much of a moral ground when it comes to teaching some kind of objective knowledge and giving useful skills. Maybe up to a certain point (say Grade 6 or 8) the institutional, structured, orderly classroom is preferable, but afterward the students are wasting time and potential. I'm not talking just about gifted students, I'm talking about students in general. The only reasons the lesson periods are as long as they are is because we (education system and society) need to: a) keep them from 9 to 3, b) because the classes are damn big and much of the lesson gets lots in the static and needs to be repeated. The high school years as they are structured now are a big waste, and the amount of time spent on transmitting the curriculum requirements into their fragile young minds can be condensed. Even if we keep 12-grade system, the amount of time per grade could be reduced without sacrificing quality. Assuming that we are willing to do some radical changes, that is.

So here we go, let's put our futurology hats on:
- Education needs to be far more virtual and distributed than it is now. Rote memorization of knowledge in the age of ubiquitous internet access and smartphones is laughably obsolete. A smartphone with net access is for most intents and purposes a crude exocortex memory. The age of polymaths and encyclopaedics is over - you can either be an expert in a very specific field, or you can know a little about a lot of things and depend on freely accessed knowledge for anything that requires greater detail. What we really need to focus on is the development of research, search and analysis skills. We assume that young'uns today are super-duper tech savvy because they spend so much time on their damn phones, but nothing is further from the truth. I can do things with browsers, spreadsheets, word processors, or PowerPoints that leaves their mouths gaping, and I'm not even especially computer-literate.
- To make education more virtual and distributed than it is now, reverse classrooms need to be implemented widely, from Grade 9 on. What is a reverse classroom? The teacher posts the lesson in the form of a document, a YouTube video or podcast (typically 20-30 minute length), Smarttech lesson, etc. online and assigns work related to the lesson. The students watch/read the lesson on their own, and come to class to work on their homework, assignments, or get further assistance from a teacher. Only we need to gradually push the envelope further. The work can also be completed online - a simple bot could watch the completion of work and compile a report for the teacher on which students did their work and in what time. What does the teacher do with the rest of his/her time? Well...
- The class sizes will become bigger. That is inevitable as the governments (witness McGuinty's slow about-face on teacher wages going on right now) will reduce education expenses. With reverse classrooms, however, the class sizes will approach mid-range university classes (40-50 students per teacher). The teacher, however, will spend most of his/her time evaluating work, preparing lessons, assisting with any inquiries, and facilitating. Facilitating what...?
- Student apprenticeships. This is not a new idea and indeed many schools already implement it, but rather stupidly only for those students who have no chance at all of academic success. Well, we should replace those community hours (so many of which end up being faked anyway) with meaningful and varied apprenticeships. Build a professional online network of Ministry-of-Education-approved local businesses in each school area. Let students have a large degree of freedom when selecting their apprenticeships, let them try out a different job every month, maybe even hold bidding competitions on who gets what position.
- A typical student day might be something like getting up in the morning, checking messages from guild members (read on!), teachers, heading off for a few hours of apprenticeship. While on the way, listen to a lesson or two, fire off a couple of questions or quick homework. After work meet up with guildies online or IRL, raid some lessons (OK OK, I'll get to it in a second), complete the work. Once or twice a week come to progress meetings with the teacher, or remote in.

Alright, so here's my crazy/maybe-revolutionary idea of the day. Education needs to start taking cues from the psychology behind social networks, facebook games, and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs). All three of these are so wildly successful because:
a) we connect to other people and we can share our success and brag about it
b) the tasks are broken down into small incremental steps, and the completion of each step rewarded with small but increasing rewards
c) as rewards increase, so does the difficulty
d) they create a community built around common interests and goals
I think it's all too plain how the MMO/social network can apply to education. The requirement for teamwork and cooperation and social learning is already written in the curriculum, but it's not very meaningful in the current homework. Students can complete work in short bursts, with each successful completion opening up new challenges, but also rewards. What rewards? Maybe preferential bids on apprenticeship gigs, grades, whatever. Even money (see the effect financial rewards have on grades - heck universities and colleges already do so with bursaries and scholarships)! So while the overall grades and performance of the student will be assessed on an individual basis, progression through curriculum and additional perks will be possible through social interaction and actual teamwork. Heck, plug in augmented reality eventually and it will really be like something out of science fiction!

Everyone has problems

Just thinking out "loud", but these are the problems I think will become increasingly important to Canada and the world at large. Regardless of the headaches that this kind of thinking causes, sometimes it's good to take a look at the big picture, at the map ahead. In no particular order:

- Climate Change. This one's going to be huge for way too many reasons to list. "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer is probably one of the most insightful books on the subject meant for popular audiences.

- End of cheap goods. There's every indication that the rapid Chinese growth spurred on by Western demand for cheap goods is coming to the end, due to currency imbalance, living quality growth in China, and growing consumer demand within China. Now it is likely that other countries will pick up Chinese slack, but for a confluence of reasons China was the ideal place to provide cheap manufactured goods to the rest of the world, and that might change.

- Growing polarization of politics, especially in Canada. I think that we are already well into our own Canadian Culture Wars and it's going to get worse before it gets better, especially with the latest election results and growth of Conservative media outlets and popular sentiment.

- Sustainable Development (or lack thereof): the problem is not that of technology. That much is very clear by now. The problem is that of political and social will. Our political system prevents any kind of meaningful long-term planning and development, and our social system prevents us from dropping our favourite childhood toys and grow up. The world's not going to stand still and wait for us to get our act together, but our leaders and masses are unable and unwilling to come to grips with it.

- Clash of Civilizations: personally I hate this term. I think it's misleading, dangerous, and smacks of high-blown rhetoric and demagoguery. However, looking at the current political climate, it might just become a reality. Whether this is a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, it remains to be seen.

- Peak Oil. 20 years ago the idea of global Peak Oil was deemed preposterous. Today respectable textbooks (McGraw Hill, Pearson, etc.) publish graphs showing that peak oil is happening right now. While the deposits in Alaska, the China Sea, Canadian oil sands, etc., might give hopes that there are still vast reserves of oil to offset Peak Oil and stave off oil production collapse for several decades, that's a little like arguing that an addict shouldn't abandon his heroin addiction because there's still plenty of heroin available.

Well, that's all for now. More thoughts as they come.