I'm Rin. I'm Emily. I am the host of Geeknives. It is a podcast. If you enjoy anything that happens in the next 55 minutes or so, then there are thousands of hours of my voice on the internet, along with a guy named Scott who couldn't make it here today, and I will just leave it at that. And I am one of the art leads at Stignes Entertainment. We're working on a remake of Colossal Cave Adventures, so yay! If any of you went to the Adventure Games panel yesterday, that's my boss up there, so that's very exciting. But yeah, so I make games. He talks about games, then... Most importantly, I talk about games, but I don't actually make them, so take a little bit of what I say with a grain of salt. But today, we're here to talk about music, and I would like to start with the game. How many of you have never heard of or played or seen a game called Dwarf Fortress? All right, a few people. So if you encounter someone who plays Dwarf Fortress, what you will find is that they will tell you these amazing stories.  Here is this tale of 10 years of my children's lives in this game, and Hydra, we'll talk about this like it is Game of Thrones time Star Wars. But then, you might think, huh, that game sounds kind of interesting.  To be fair, they did do a graphical version recently. Yeah, there's a... I won't say better. I'll say updated version on Steam. But this is a game where if you show this to a person who plays the game, and you show them that, they know that something horrible is happening. But the thing about Dwarf Fortress is that you cannot win it.  Now, Dwarf Fortress people like to define fun in a very special way.  Dwarf Fortress games usually end with your last dwarf weeping, bitter and alone, locked in his room. All of his friends are dead. The civilization is in ruins. The orcs are pounding at the door, and he breathes his last breath, and that is the moment when a Dwarf Fortress player will say, I had fun. And that is what we're going to talk about today. Failure and losing and why it's necessary in order to have fun. Failure? If nothing else, failure is entertaining. If you've seen this movie, Snatch, isn't that a bunch of thieves who are all terrible at what they do? They do nothing but fail. The few people who succeed do so by accident. This movie would not be good if everyone succeeded at what they want to do. So can we all agree failure can be entertaining? I mean there's the whole phrase, a comedy of errors. So if failure is entertaining, then I have another supposition for you. I would argue that games should be fun. Does anyone disagree that games should generally be fun? It's like, why do we do them if they're not fun? Exactly. Because they're not work. But games do include losing. Therefore, logically, losing should be fun. This is logical. And this is the fundamental thesis of this talk. This is our hypothesis that we are going to set up to prove it. We will come back to these slides later on, so I hope you are taking notes. But we do have to address something. In a lot of game talks, people like to have a big whole section talking about the definition of the word game and the definition of the word fun. And extremely terrifying nerds will follow you around, trying to tell you that what you like isn't a game. That's not a game. Games require like this, like the Berlin interpretation of road lines. People will get very, very sweaty about this. So what is a game? I mean, patty cake is a game. We could play patty cake right now. I would say let's play a game of patty cake. So already I'm using all those words. Yeah. One of my, well, actually not one of my favorite games, but a game that I enjoy. I had a hockey on that slide before. But that is also a game. I guess Settlers of Keptan is a game. And Dungeons and Dragons are games. But these things are also games. So very wide definition. Can you lose patty cake? I mean, I guess if you really, really struggle with it, but let's go even further. What is play? I play a piano. I play a game. It's like, I feel kind of like game is the noun and play is the verb that's associated with it. And like right there, you see two very different interpretations of the verb to play. So in nature, a lot of animals playing actually leads to survival skills. It's a way where like here the yellow wolves or we have a bunny at home. And you watch when they are having fun, they tend to do things to practice survival skills like hunting or escaping or agility in a safe and enjoyable way. And is that not what we're doing playing games?  But I want to experience what it would be like to have that challenge even up to losing. So I learn as a conscious being, that's kind of how we learn how the world works. That's how wolves learn how the world works. Rabbits play with each other by chasing each other and jumping around. And they also play with foxes by running away from them. It's the exact same. What if they lose in that context? So play and games and all these definitions, if anything really hard about what definition of game would we use in this panel? And I remembered in Richard Garfield's book, Character and Sits of Games, he had a pretty good quotation around this. Now, full disclosure, when I was putting together the slides with Emily, I didn't remember exactly what he wrote, so I left this placeholder slide in the panel. But then I realized this is actually really funny and this is what we intend to say. I do have the actual code here and I'm not going to read this good thing, but what he effectively says in this book is that generally, you can't have a very precise definition of a word like game because generally, people like gatekeepers, they want to control the narrative. They want to exclude things in order to kind of uphold their own definition. And so our basic thing is, we're going to be pretty loose about the idea of game and don't be an insufferable pep. Exactly. So what do game designers like, actual game designers, the people here, you're all to see it pass. Some of you probably are game designers. What definitions did they use? Generally, you'll find that almost every game designer on earth uses one or two of these very simple definitions. They're very broad. This is a pretty big umbrella and it will cover most of our definitions. Like you could put sports under the third one and you could put a non-competitive game under the first. Exactly. And these are the core. These are the roots. You're making a game. You think about, what is my game? Am I testing a skill? Am I giving the player a series of interesting and or meaningful decisions to make? Is it just an interactive amusement? Is it just patty cake in VR? Is it narrative? Is it non-narrative? All these things kind of apply. But to go even further, we can actually take a page from the industry because ESA, a trade organization dedicated to video games. We've all heard of ESA. Many of us have good opinions and bad opinions and mixed opinions about them. But do you know what ESA stands for? The Entertainment Software Association. So for the next 45 minutes or so, we're going to be talking about the history of losing in entertainment software. So for most of the history of video games or entertainment software, it couldn't really win. Almost every early video game was inevitable loss. You would play until you ran out of quarters.  You would play until the game literally became impossible. There was nothing you could do other than get a high score and lose. Not or lose and lose. It was always lose. I mean, my favorite game as a kid, Kaboom, that guy just keeps hucking bombs down forever. There's no way to stop him. There's no narrative when you climb up there and stop him from throwing bombs. Though he will, there is one slight narrative beat. That little guy up there, if you get to a certain particular high score, he stops smiling. But he keeps throwing bombs. He's like, come on, lose already. I want to go home. In fact, a lot of games, they're ended up being a de facto ending, partly because designers never expected anyone would actually ever get that far. But I know, what's this look like? This reminds me of something we saw earlier in the panel. What's going on here? I would argue that this was more compelling than everything else up to this point. We didn't have narratives. You can't win, Pac-Man. But imagine if you hit the screen and the internet didn't exist.  That's a legend you tell to your friends. You found a scene of high drama that the dwarves would approve of. So we played these games, like, despite the fact that losing is inevitable and losing isn't uninteresting. If anything, losing meant I ran out of quarters, I had to go bug my mom for another quarter. But if he gets the high score, then losing, you lose what you win at the same time. Well, did I win? I very rarely got the high score, but I unplugged the arcade cabinet when no one was looking. But then things changed, and this is where we can start to dwell. This is where things get interesting, because games started to have narratives. Games started to have a story. They started to have something you could achieve or you could say, I have defeated it, I have beaten it, I have won. A concrete victory condition, basically. And you would see this out. You want to know what happened. You want to know the story. You want to see what happens to Mario. Does he ever save the princess? Is there even a princess?  Of course, these endings, as great as they were, in fact, I think I remember we were talking the other day about how when I was a kid, I might have used a landline to call my friend Joe Ogilvy to tell him that I've beaten Final Fantasy I. Not Final Fantasy IV, but Final Fantasy I. And he didn't believe me, because no one can beat that game.  There's no one who beats Zelda II! Beats that game. But of course, these narratives were not necessarily always compelling. Bonus points if everyone knows what that game is. So you get all the way to the end, and it's kind of like, well. But this is the meat of it. This is what the games we're talking about look like. This is what we are doing. The deaths, the story of Mario is not. Mario falls into a pit six seconds in, and literally dies game over end credits. Goomba got him. Yeah, the second Goomba, or the third Goomba, or the fourth Goomba, or the large Goomba. These losing states are undifferentiated. They're basically Mario can die any number of ways, but they're all kind of equal in terms of gameplay. Yep, it's not like you see Mario fall into the pit and something happens down there. It's just, it's over. Losing just means you stop. You are kept away from that victory. It's a barrier on the way to winning. But like we said, we played these games. We all played these games. We still play these games. So let's forget about victory. We could talk about why I cared what happens to Cecil in Final Fantasy IV. Why did I care about Mario? Why did I put up with losing so much? A game could have a compelling story where we want to see what happens. I was very invested in what was going to happen in Undertale. I really wanted to know what the deal was. A lot of games you put up with losing because it's like the carrot at the end of it is the narrative. You want to see the ending of the game. Yep, and arguably if there was nothing in your way, then that is a very different kind of game. It's more like a movie. It's a different kind of entertainment software. So you get this sense of victory of I achieved this. It might just be a compelling world. Think about how beautiful Breath of the Wild is, but think about how scary it is when you see a whiz robe for the first time. There's danger. You don't know what that guy's deal is. There's an interesting world that you're exploring, but the danger in that world makes it more interesting. It provides a challenge while you're exploring.  You're learning too. You're learning how to exist in the world.  And then you're like, oh my God. Oh, so we have a friend who will not be named, but let's just say this friend at a Megfest long ago, we were at a convention, might have had a lot of a particular substance that comes from a certain plan and went into the other room and started playing Breath of the Wild for the first time. Dude did not get off the tutorial island after like six hours. He was on that plateau and just vibing. But he was having a grand old time because the dying and everything that was happening was still compelling. A challenge. Some people do, it's a good challenge. Yeah, you were like, this is difficult. Therefore, I want to attain mastery over it. Yep, and the harder it is, the more you fail, the more sweet that victory feels. In fact, Super Meat Boy is a fantastic example because Super Meat Boy did something so clever it turned losing into a proportional reward. If you have not played Super Meat Boy, the way this game works. When you beat a level. Yep.  So you see this wave of meat boys gradually being winnowed out as each of them die various ways throughout the course of your play history. And so when you see that final little guy get to the end, you're like. But it's sort of very satisfying. You're sort of like investing in it. Like, you know, the later it is, it might be 3am, but you really got to beat that level because every meat boy you've added just makes this so much more worth it. That can go a little too far. There are definitely games that test the patience of even the most skill driven player. But I think there are some people who are really into that. We talk about, there's this, I think it was from a tweet or something. But the idea of type one versus type two fun. And we talk about that. We like to do a lot of sports like hiking and cycling and stuff where sometimes you get to the point where it's a bit of a slog and your legs hurt and you're just like, oh my god. But you really want to get to the end to reach the top of the mountain to finish that bike ride. And that's what I would consider type two fun. So type one fun is you're just having a good time and the actual activity in and of itself is just enjoyable the whole way through. Nobody has type one fun in the Silver Surfer ever doing that. Nobody. Type two fun is the journey might be a bit of a struggle. And during the activity you might be just like putting in a lot of effort. You're running, you're like running that marathon. You're just like so tired. But then you get to the end, you're just like, yes, that was awesome. Imagine being the speed runner who can beat this game easily and what it feels like to have achieved that. You don't think that much about what it took to get there. I mean, I've heard some people talk like that about Dark Souls. That game is so cruel to me, but they like it anyway. It's fun. What about just a compelling experience? Journey is just some entertainment software that literally takes you on a journey. And this is the opposite, right? It's not about the ending. It's about the journey. And I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you've never played this game you can't really lose at it.  There's a big asterisk there. If you've played the game, you know exactly what this game is about, but you should play it and see what's happening here. You can't win, you can't lose. You just experience it. So I put punishment in quotes for a reason because the gameplay of a game like Five Nights at Freddy's not that fun, not that directly compelling, but the jump scares on why people play these games. I would argue that people who play Five Nights at Freddy's are playing it because they want to be punished. They want the jump scare. Well, it's like watching a horror movie. You want to have that scary moment. You want to be scared on purpose. And so in this game, losing and being caught by Freddy is basically kind of the point of the game. Otherwise, if you just sat there in that little booze with nothing to do for the entire night, what? There's a link to the slides, and we'll share that at the end. But there's a video essay I put together years and years here about the detailed mechanics of how this game basically takes an adult who doesn't believe in ghosts or aliens or anything. Hard to scare me. Put me at a haunted house and mostly laughing. But like Louise Belcher in Bob's Burgers, I want to be scared. And this game mechanically was able to scare me because of the design decisions that were made along the way. And it is a fascinating topic that we just don't have time for today. But that is on YouTube. I remember very specifically when you first played this game, you yelled so loud, you scared me by proxy. I had my back to the game and I was like, whoa. I did play the VR version of this game and I might have jumped into the wall. But that's what I'm there for. It's not punishment. The people who play these punishing games, they're into it. They are absolutely here for that. They want to lose. But then things started to change again. We all know Chrono Trigger is one of the most beloved games to have ever been made. There's a reason no one has ever really made a credible sequel to it that captured the same audience. You can do not just a panel, you can make a whole convention around Chrono Trigger. But what did Chrono Trigger do? What was the thing that made it so good? We've added something. We're starting to explore the top of this chart. The depths are still the same.  Nothing interesting happens. But suddenly, you find Cynestar along the way, and now you get the bonus Cynestar in there. There's different paths. There's different victories. It's like a victory plus. You can have a victory A, victory B, and there's more narrative choices. There's more going on. This is where most video games have gone. This is like, this became the future of video games when games started doing this. But if there is a victory plus, that implies that there is a victory minus, that there could be an ending, that is not as good. Obviously, you want to save her. I guess spoilers for Chrono Trigger if someone hasn't played it. You don't have to save her. You can save her. But it changes the ending of the game. And it's like, I distrust people who don't save Magus. Oh no, you can't save Magus.  Good. But this started to really open up what you could do with games. The idea that you can explore this narrative, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about negatives. We're talking about death. We're talking about losing. So the idea of final states being branching, so an ending being branching and being different is an important one because this is really where it started to grow in terms of games. So I want to take you on a brief journey. We're going to go from victory plus to a narrative of victory minus to a narrative of death. So if you've never played Shadowgate, which was released on many, many, many, many different platforms, but I'm going to use the NES one as an example, this is a game where you'll encounter a wraith. What do you do? Well, let's say I try to use the broom on him. Dad. What if I throw the skull at dad? What if I try to burn him with my torch? Dad. So how do you get past this wraith? Well, it turns out on that death screen there, see I've got torches three. And then I've got just a torch. Something weird about that torch. You know the old game logic? That torch kills the wraith. Why?  But as you play this game, pretty much everything kills you. But not only that, everything that kills you, kills you in an increasingly gruesome way. A very unique fashion. I mean, dad.  You leap off the bridge and into the blaze. You're instantly fried.   That is not a puzzle. I hope that is not a puzzle. I hope that you don't look at this room and think I should jump into the fire. That is definitely how to solve it. But the game designers realized that having a variety of deaths and also that exploring those deaths could be fun. Since you're playing a game, dying in a bajillion different ways in this scary spooky dungeon is, you know, it's of no consequence to you personally. It just becomes a fun thing to do.  In fact, maybe players were into meeting our boy here because this is a particularly interesting day.  The rest of your body soon follows. This scene, if it happens to you, is when you use your torch on yourself. And if you do it once, you sing yourself and the game tells you, yo, that was a bad idea. If you do it a second time, the game is like, you've got second to reverse. You really shouldn't do this.  Fine, you're on fire. You're dead. And the answer was yes, we were ecstatic.  You can't even scream because you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx. Our boy was very prolific and I must stress, this game was for kids. So what was happening here? Now suddenly we got something really interesting about that. We got victory plus. We also have losing plus. You would play this game to see every possible gruesome way you could die. That is how I played this game. That's how everyone I knew played this game. Imagine if Mario won, every kid had a different horrific gruesome death that was rendered out in the game for you to explore. And in some ways that kind of relates back to our earlier talk about play in nature and the ability of creatures to explore danger without actually experiencing it personally. Yeah, what will happen if I see that giant vada acid and I just start drinking it? Well, guess what? Death. So many games explored this concept. Out of this world, a full-motion video game ish from a long time ago on the SNES, this game had terrifyingly elaborately animated deaths. If you so much as touch the controller at the wrong moment, you die and you get to watch it in terrifying gory detail.  It was like, how do we see beautiful theatrical quality animation of this poor knight getting killed all these different ways? So. But I think the notable part here is the rise of streaming in YouTube. One, I took a screenshot like eight years ago, so I think this video has more than a hundred thousand views.   Yeah. Sierra games in particular. So these types of adventure games, deaths serve a bunch of different interesting purposes. So for example, the games have obtuse puzzles. That's like one of the hallmarks of a lot of the early adventure games, a lot of modern adventure games. And these games, the death sequences, they'd be gory or funny or something, but they also give you a hint effectively. They tell you, all right, the direction you were trying to go with that lantern was not the right way to go.  So, I mean, not to name drop or anything, but we were having dinner the other night with my boss, Roberta Williams. And one thing she was talking about is the most important thing about adventure games is letting the player explore. And that exploration also means the ability to fail and letting players just kind of poke at stuff and gently saying, oh, maybe that's not a good idea. Sometimes that will lead to death, you know. In this case, this was not a Roberta game, but this was, you know, you try to pick your nose. Yeah, the games I was mooching to that were adventure games when I was a kid were the Quest for Glory series. But they had a mechanic where you could learn how to pick locks. And of course, they did this for a lack. If you use the lockpick on yourself, it tells you to delicately insert the lockpick into your left nostril. And guess what? Death. Unless you level up your lockpicking skill.  Adventure games would play these deaths for laps. They'd play these up for a lot of different reasons. Game mechanics, like there's this whole world of death in adventure games just for it. There's comedy to that. There's also teaching, right? You're letting somebody explore their environment and also by using these failure states, teaching them the right and the wrong way to use these different items or to solve these different puzzles. Yep.  Everything you do in the game is just like, you can't do that. You can't do that. It's way more fun if every time you try to use an item it kills you or it does something funny. So this game is unfortunately not playable anymore. RIP Flash. On the internet. It is called what you think it's called, but don't flip your pants. And this is a text adventure. I want to point out this. No, it's graphical. Well, it is text input, but it is a graphical adventure. It is described in the survival horror genre. And this game is exactly as straightforward as you think it is. You have one goal. And that is to not flip your pants. You've got 35 seconds to not flip your pants. And guess what? It is really easy to not flip your pants in this game. However, once you successfully beat this game or fail at it, there's achievements. The game is basically saying, poop your pants at least seven times. In a myriad of different ways. Let's see. We promise it'll be worth it. It's the curiosity about how, how in these branching narratives here, how can we explore failure to successfully go to the bathroom? So my favorite adventure game is UFO 5440, which was a choose your own adventure book. These books are games. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong. But these games were notable in that they did usually have a good ending. I say the average choose your own adventure book had between zero and one good ending. This one's a zero. That's what's notable about this particular one. You've never read UFO 5440? There is no escape. There is a page you can read that takes you to this like eight page you find paradise like the good ending. There is literally no way to get there. The path is blocked off. Except by cheating. But how did we play these games when I was a kid playing this kind of game? What I would do is when you get to a page and it is like, well, do you take the safe well lit path toward your destination?  And of course, what did we all do? We put our fingers in the face. We go read the gruesome death where the scorpion boat kills us. We laugh at it. Then we back up and then we continue with the story. These literally were the first safe states. You would miss out on a lot of the book. The book would be a very fast read if you just chose the safe path all the time. Usually it would be like right in the beginning it would be like, you don't open the magical door.  Oh my God, there's one I remember. I forget what it was called where there's a mad scientist doing something and the first decision you make is do you open this door and see what's up and you just ignore it. And if you just ignore it, the world ends.  You never find out what happened. The end game over. So put your finger in the page. You flip through the book and that's how a lot of these electronic entertainment software will play out. And much like with Shadowgate, these books tended to have terrifyingly gruesome deaths because at least as a nine-year-old that's kind of what I was into. I think a lot of nine-year-olds are into that kind of thing. So The Stanley Parable is not the first game to do what we're about to talk about. But it's a very good example because suddenly there's no more line. Well I guess there's literally a line but it's yellow. Suddenly there isn't a narrative of it. You can't win this game. You can just play it. You can just experience it. It would be very hard to even define what winning means in this game. There are points in this game where it tells you you won and you will feel like you did not win. But what if we try to impose a narrative on this game? What if we say that you have won this game if you find every possible path? You play the longest possible route through this narrative. You even find the secret pipe that one of our world was up to. That's a bad ending. You find absolutely every ending? Even then, have you won this game? Have you lost this game? Or did you much like Journey just experience this game? So we're not actually going to go too deep on multiplayer because we want to get into tabletop role-playing games. But I will say straight up first what do we mean by multiplayer entertainment software? Richard Garfield does actually have a very specific definition for the kind of game we would talk about. Orthogame. That is what we use, the word we use when we want to talk about a competitive game. And I was going to say these are often easier to define in terms of losing because of that ranking aspect to them. You can say you win if you are number one in the ranking and you lose if you are less than number one in the ranking. Yep, but I don't think we'll have time to talk about these games today but what I will link you to is we gave a talk at PAX Australia 2014. It's about 20 minutes long and it covers literally anything we could say about orthogames and losing. And yes, that's a shameless plug. Like and subscribe. Talk about sports. But we do want to spend most of the rest of this talk talking about tabletop role-playing games. To this day, I don't know if our friends realized that I've been using the same photo of our D&D crew. This picture from like over a decade ago. That picture is from between 2005 and 2009. Bunch of nerds. But tabletop role-playing games are a really interesting space because you really shouldn't be able to win them or lose them. Yet if you go to pretty much any place where people can type words online, teravinder is a type of lot of words about that. So when you play a role-playing game, you've got the story. I know we all love to hear our friends tell us about their D&D campaign and their epic story where they saved the day and saved the princess and everything was great. But you really want to hear that story? Like are you really interested in what fag the barbarian was up to for over the course of four hours? How often do you find you and your friends not telling the story when you beat the campaign but telling the story where you burn waterdeep down by accident? The struggle and strife stories. The stories of your failure conditions often are more interesting than the stories of, yeah, and then we beat the lich. I mean, how many of you have burned down waterdeep or the equivalent of waterdeep in one of your D&D games at some point? You definitely tell that story because remember, I'm skipping ahead, failure is entertaining. So in a role-playing game, shouldn't we be speaking failure? That's where things start to get a little interesting. So we're going to take another definition. This is a definition from a talk we gave back in 2008 also at PAX Australia. Now we gave it at PAX West in 2008. We gave it again in PAX Australia in 2013. This is a definition that I like to use when we're talking about role-playing games to head off those sweaty notes. They all they are is a mechanism to use to resolve conflicts about what direction the story is going to go so that you and your friends can together tell a collaborative story. So yeah, so we were talking about branching narratives before. Tabletop is a space where narratives by their very nature are always going to be different, are always going to branch, and there are a myriad of different ways they could go. So you need to kind of figure out, okay, do you fail or do you succeed?  I knew a dude who cheated at D&D and he had a D20 that was weighted. It would always roll a 20. He's the other one that would always roll on. But what's the point of that? Because in order to have an interesting narrative and an interesting thing that I've actually thought about a lot because I'm also a writer is that you have to have a certain amount of conflict and a certain amount of failure in your story in order for it to be satisfying to have an ending where you feel like something has been achieved. And we're talking about role-playing games. So if we just role-play, that's improv theater. You can go improv theater forever and that can be fun. That's a lot of things without roles. If you just play a game, that's just rock and sock and robots. There's not much of a compelling narrative there. The whole point of role-playing game is that you and your friends aren't just going to make up a story. You don't actually know where that story is going to go. Or at least you don't all know where it's going to go. You don't know the details of how it's going to get there. It's emergent. So if failure is entertaining, then we need another corollary when we're talking about tabletop role-playing games. Failure is not losing. That is something that the person at your D&D table maybe is the problem. We all know the person at the table who is the problem. Oftentimes they have conflated their character succeeding with them succeeding. They have conflated their character succeeded with meaning, dungeons, and dragons. I think that is in almost all cases, toxic. Well, they're certainly kind of cutting themselves off through a big part of the experience. Actually, again, putting yourself aside and making it so your character is not you, but you're able to fail safely and fail in ways that are entertaining is a big part of telling these collaborative stories together. So I don't know if any of you are a Star Trek Deep Space Knight that recently did a rewatch. So this is very fresh in our minds. Usually I'd lose Dark Vader on the slide, but did Marco Limo lose at the Star Trek role-playing game because Gal DeCot failed? No. It would be really fun to play Gal DeCot, to play a character who is evil, sucks, and loses. But it's still fun to play that character. That's the whole point of D&D, to play a character, to embody a character. So losing really doesn't have...  That's it. Not having fun is the key thing. So what are we seeking in our role-playing game? We're seeking a compelling narrative for us. We're telling our own Star Wars. We're telling our own Deep Space Knight. Now I'm thinking of... We were playing a burning wheel game years ago. Oh, yeah. I know where you're going with this. So, Dwarf Fortress, right? We decided we wanted to role-play Dwarf Fortress. And if you're thinking that sounds like a bad idea, we'll strap in. So we used the burning wheel system. We got characters. We started playing this game. We're trying to just role-play Dwarf Fortress. And it's not going well. We are failing. We tried to port one type of epic game to another type of epic game. And it didn't quite line up. Like we're trying to make our Fortress succeed using the mechanics of a particular role-playing system. And it's getting worse. It's getting worse. We're not having fun. And eventually we're just like, you know what, screw it. This will be the last session. We're done. During that last session, partly because no one cared about winning in the dark. Because failure was ever present. We got a little weird. Two of the Dwarves went off and murdered like all the people in the nearby town. It ended to skip a long story of, let me tell you about my damp campaign. The last two Dwarves who were alive are rolling around half naked in the mud during a magical lightning storm, trying to choke each other to death. But here's the thing. Since the way that what they built the characters was not in any way like a fighter character, they were too weak and could not succeed in killing one another. So it was absolutely as a spectator, it was hilarious. I do not remember what those last two Dwarves were even fighting about. What they were mad about. Is them rolling around in the mud failing to choke each other to death. But that ended up being the impetus for the rest of the game. We're suddenly rising out of those ashes. We told a really fun story together. We almost had to fail before we could succeed. So I want to walk through a few examples of some role playing systems and how the mechanics make failure and losing interesting and fun. Burning Wheel might be our favorite here. We play a lot of Burning Wheel. A lot of our campaigns are in Burning Wheel. And one thing that's so interesting about the Burning Wheel system is I talked about how failure in the real world can sometimes lead to learning. Like you make a mistake and in your human brain you say, well I won't do that again. So this kind of codifies it. And the way you level up is not by winning dice rolls. But in a lot of cases by failing dice rolls. So think of this one mechanic of this game if you roll the dice it matters. There's no such thing as I try to pick the lock. I fail. I can't pick the lock. I try to pick the lock. I fail. You do pick the lock but there are guards on the other side. Every failure drives the story. It makes something interesting happen and every die roll matters. If the dice don't matter you don't bother rolling dice. So couple that with the fact that to get better at something you have to speed at easy tasks a small number of times. And you have to fail a few times. So you have to practice. If die rolls matter always and you have to fail to advance how do you get better at sword fighting? You lose a sword fighting. Imagine if D&D rewarded you for losing a sword fight because that was the interesting thing to happen in that scene. I remember specifically because it's very skill based and you have a number of different skills for your character. And in one campaign we were playing like the kind of country bumpkin town guards.   And basically I remember one of us got put in jail and they were trying to get a message out. And I think only one of our crew was literate or had the right skill. And so you had one character failing to write a letter and then they finally get it out and the rest of the people we were all guys well you failed to read it and that led to almost half a session worth of shenanigans. A failed write test followed by a failed read test is one of the only things I remember from that game. I have no idea what the contents of that letter were intended to be what mystery we were trying to solve. But I remember Scott losing his foot in the swamp. Oh so Scott the codes is not here.  But this was also accompanied by the GM giving him these various tasks and these failure conditions and rolling very poorly and Game Master's life is pretty cold out there. Are you sure you want to do that? Cool. Another thing this game does that's really fascinating is that there are mechanics where if you have a trait, a character trait so like you know you write your backstory for your D&D character like yeah my uncle was Kelvin Blackstaff and I have a beard too. That doesn't do anything mechanically. My aunt is an FS. Your Game Master definitely rolls her eyes and says uh-huh Kelvin Blackstaff sure and that's never going to come off again. In this game when you make a character you can spend points to say no Kelvin Blackstaff is my uncle and suddenly he is. They cost like 15 points to make a character like that related to you.  So you get the relationship this often narrative based very helpful relationship at a discount if it's likely to lead to negative consequences shall we say. Yeah there is the other trait so you have a trait or an instinct instincts are upon the counter so you can basically write little macros for your character like if X then Y like if I'm startled draw my sword. Let's say I have that instinct that will protect me from encounters where you know we encounter some goblins I can say regardless of what was happening I had my sword out that was my character's instinct. But you get rewarded if it gets you in trouble. So let's say that same character is presenting his case to the king. We're in court in front of the king and then my hated enemy comes in with surprise witness. So it comes out. King's none too please. I don't have to draw my sword but if I do draw my sword I will get XP. Mechanically you get rewarded for things that are narratively dangerous. Mechanically causing trouble rewards you is one of my favorite mechanics in all role playing games. So many modern role playing games do this and it's almost leaning into this idea of metagaming.  I would argue, we would argue that metagaming actually makes any role playing game better because the writers in the DS9 writers room in Star Trek they knew what was happening they knew what the characters were thinking they knew what the story was going to be but they would still write to make sure that the dramatic moments happened. It's way easier to hit those dramatic moments to hit those epic failures if you all are trying to get to them on purpose to get it. A great example of this that I've seen many times is the the old idea of Emily's got the one ring in her pocket. I don't know that. I am trying to get the one ring because I am evil. My character does not know that Emily has the one ring in her pocket. Emily does not know that I am the one seeking the one ring but our players will know that the characters will know that. We want to make this happen this conflict we want to fight with each other basically. I saw a panel at a PAX a long time ago where two people are brought from the audience and given the scenario until we'll play it out and they kind of just very carefully walk past each other and that's it that's all that happened. So then the first friend of the panel said all right play that scene again but uh metagame and the person with the ring just walks by whistling and like flicking the ring and like it's gone. So metagaming to make your character fail metagaming to make sure the players at the table know your dark secret so they will play to it that will make your game so much more fun than playing D&D like an ortho game. Sometimes that can be adversarial. Inspectors is a fun little game that basically is Ghostbusters the role playing game but it doesn't have the word Ghostbusters in the title. In this one it's almost like player versus game in a way because it's if you roll well you and the rest of your party get to kind of control the whole of the narrative. You succeed and say yeah and we totally trap that ghost but if you fail the GM gets to decide and they write the part of the story and guess what just like a writer in a writer's room they want to give the characters a little bit of chaos and strife. And you see this in a lot of more modern RPGs where oh you got a good role tell me what happens that's now canonical got a bad role I'm gonna tell you what happened and you have to react to it that is also canonical. Blades in the Dark is a game that I'm playing a lot lately and it's basically it makes snatch happen it is you're a bunch of thieves doing your thief thing it's a fantastic role playing system but it has a mechanic that I think is just so perfect for this panel so we can play this game throughout all of the COVID pandemic through this point like every other week on Discord and we leveled off and our thieves gang is going pretty well and everything but we failed and at the end of the last season of the game we lost we all got arrested we all went to jail the game goes to prison this game basically has rules that say oh so your entire gang got arrested they went to prison and you have lost turn to page 128 now you're playing in prison there are mechanics for being in prison like it's a whole other side of the game I gotta tell you trying to get out of prison or maybe trying to stay in prison and run the gang from prison probably more compelling than anything we did up to that point in the game so this game actually directly has a rule that says if there's a TPK total party kill now you're in hell fight your way back to the surface let's go so there's another talk we gave again like a subscriber whatever but this is an hour-long talk we gave years and years ago that goes into extreme terrifying detail on mechanically exactly how these kinds of role-playing games drive this kind of storytelling drive this kind of play and why it works and if you can't get that QR code before I cut to the next slide do not worry because we have a link to all of these slides already available on the internet but we want to spend the next 10 minutes winding down where do we actually go where do we take you on this weird journey because we covered a lot of disparate topics like failure losing negative game states but are they really negative it's basically like if you are having fun if the losing makes the winning that much more sweet and if you in the middle are failing at something find something to laugh about with your friends something to enjoy it's something to tell people later then I would say that losing can be fun logically so first losing is contextual the concept of losing means very different things and very different types of games and very different types of life sometimes losing is being killed by a whole bunch of spiders sometimes losing is watching the character that you played for 10 years and this long-running D&D campaign that spanned three editions of D&D die at the end of their journey sometimes losing is watching Goldicott absolutely bite it at those stupid games that nobody cares about but losing is just it's there it's in games but it's not a monolithic concept and you can't really talk about like a monolithic concept you can't have a very specific game design definition of losing and fight about it for an hour that's pointless not every game needs to even have losing I still say you can't lose D&D unless you're not having fun and I think a lot of tables really need to internalize that we have definitely watched people play D&D games or campaigns that they are not having fun in and sure their characters are leveling up they're winning mechanically but are they winning in life losing affects winning and before nerds get sweaty that is a very correct use of that word perfectly counting but you cannot achieve cannot experience winning without having the possibility of losing you can still have fun without losing but you cannot win mechanically without also having losing you're like two sides of the same coin I feel like the Game Master giving the evil villainist monologue of oh I'm the evil wizard but without me could there be good and of course you stab him before he finishes the stupid stage never let's drop finish talking but losing is absolutely necessary if you want your game to include winning as a concept but it doesn't mean you have to include winning as a concept it is entirely optional experiences, entertainment software can guide you on a journey and I think that is one of the most unexplored areas of games today games you can't lose games you can't win games you experience I played a VR game that was just meditate with fractals for an hour I guess I could lose that if I fall over maybe even save this slide or save this image and send it to that friend who's the problem at your table it is that your Game Master is not being mean to you if they hurt your character the social contract of most role-playing games is you're asking the Game Master to hurt your character if your character is not hurt how are they going to grow how are you going to tell a fun story again back to the idea of play sometimes you can use failure in the safe space of games in order to fail enjoyably one would say and also realizing that letting your character fail can be a positive thing so because it's not you you're not the one who's disgraced and outcasted by the king you're not the one who has you know failed your right check I would like to experience big and out for the store doing something cool but I don't really want to experience getting stabbed in the kidney by the other Elfers mad at me so games should be fun so we would argue if you're playing any game of any kind and you are not having fun it's not saying that is a bad game nor is it saying that you are wrong in some way that game is just not for you whatever's going on in that game it's not for you and you are probably best walking away from it don't play games that aren't fun fun could be many different things like type 2 fun we'd like to 100 miles in New York State a few weeks ago you know what 80 miles of that fun type 1 20 miles was a little bit rough dwarf fortress fun type 2 but in the end we still enjoyed the experience but if you bike 60 miles and your butt hurts and it sucks you can always just take a cab home you don't have to keep going if a game isn't fun hit the bricks that applies to all games in all contexts especially if you get pulled into what your friends say is a 2 hour game of Twilight Imperium they're lying to you it's a 6 hour game of Twilight Imperium it's still going you don't even have to make up an excuse you should just be able to tell your friends I'm not having fun this isn't fun I would like to leave if you can't quit it's not a game anymore I would get an affordance of games is that you can quit them because the rabbit can quit me chasing him around in the house if he's bored the rabbit can't quit being chased by a fox but being chased by a fox is not a game anymore and then on these definitions there are the people out there we encounter them especially online less so in person it's almost like they're afraid to say these things in front of real humans who might react to them but the people who try to argue that whatever game you're playing is not a game however sweaty they get just think back to that Richard Garfield quote they are objectively wrong and you can throw that in their faces but more importantly don't worry about what they think just play games with other people so I realized we actually had about five minutes left usually we're drawn out of time to lose things so we could possibly even I could come out there we could take one or two questions before we write this up which is an extreme rarity for anyone who's seen us give talks before oh and I can also come go to the expo hall and talk about a game where you can explore and you can fail and there is a bit of that you know interesting failure going on is colossal cave adventures so stop by the business booth then we'll have great okay yeah see where Marcus over there are our producers so so if anyone has a question we can take probably two questions you raise your hand first I'm gonna roll over there so my question how do you go back to what they only had a few years back about brave rage playing in this sense that you said a game should be fun or lose a game should be fun and what do you want to say is when you're raged you think this is still fun and you should just walk away that is a feature that's a must so I think there's something everyone has a personal fine line I don't think I've ever rage quit a game personally and if you're playing a game and you're frustrated some people just have the personal ability to crystallize that into I want to get that like right now in DPS and Overwatch I am bronze care I am like garbotee if there was a wood tier below bronze that's what I am ah it is freighter natural how bad I am Star Wars Squadrons we gave up playing with humans because the game literally cannot find people that enough we have to play as easy AI's but I think if personally if you find yourself quit stopping playing because you're mad and you're still mad later you're not having type 2 fun if the next day you're laughing about how you teleported the entire team into a cliff because you're really bad at symmetrical might have done that recently and you laugh about it by all means proceed but in competitive games and this is I think a very good point to to sort of explore this more if you're playing a serious competitive game in the competitive ladder especially a team game then great quitting harms the other players you've almost signed a social contract to play so if you find yourself quitting games that actually punish players for quitting like Overwatch many competitive games do this now I would say just not playing those games until you get to the point to where you can roll with failure and not just quit but I do also argue that games that cause those feelings they're not necessarily bad but they could be designed better also forfeiture is a type of losing that kind of allows for that be like okay this isn't going well there's some extenuating circumstance whether it's emotional or situational where you're like I would like to cease playing this game and lose on purpose you know take the L and just move on some games do have forfeiture yeah I remember Natural Selection you could hit F4 to jump back to the ready room and if a majority of players did that the game would end and the team that was ahead would win but you get into a weird trolling situation where people who hit the slightest difficulty like they get killed once suddenly you're like screw this F4 F4 everybody F4 game over game over so I do think that the games industry and game designers don't need to do a better job of guiding players toward having fun and minimizing the impact of players aren't having fun because I know we talked about in the other panel but for the benefit of the crowd who weren't there there's the concept of griefing where people play against what they're trying to do in the game most griefing happens because someone is not having fun but rather than quitting maybe the game won't let them quit maybe the game is a competitive game where they have punished for quit so instead of quitting they will do as much as possible to annoy everyone in the game and spread their anger to the rest of the crowd because the game is basically telling them that is the only thing they have left to have fun with so games do need to be designed better to handle this and I think that's still an area of exploration that we haven't quite settled on how to address it case in point competitive games in general look at Fortnite Fortnite made the game less competitive on purpose to make the game more fun there was a release a few years ago where they would reward you for getting kills and what happened was if you got more kills you were more likely to win the game so the kids who were trying to build a form three 40-year-old dudes would roll in and roll them and roll everyone on the server and 20% of players were having fun and 80% of players hated it so the Fortnite designers actually did something brilliant they removed them they went back and said you know what we're not going to reward that style of play because our goal is fun the competition is secondary to the fun and I think we really are going to see a big divide between esports and competitive gaming and how that handles these situations from literally all other games and I think that distinction is necessary and I mean like when you're talking about games like something like Fortnite where there is a discrete winning and losing condition like it's more like a sport right like if you play a game of hockey then it's like okay this team won this team lost I think there are there's a whole spectrum in there where it's like softer wins and softer loss and so like the less competitive you make it you can have like a friendly game where you pick up basketball where there's like okay you're just goofing around with your friends so there is a winning and losing but it's less strictly defined and it's less you get less upset and stay tuned for our upcoming lecture probably at PAX East where it's competitive versus casual and we're still doing research but we're looking at can competitive and fun casual play exist in the same game in the same ecosystem can they play that? and that is a very difficult question to answer and all evidence points to no so far but we're still doing some research we're out of time thank you for coming thank you very much enjoy the rest of class


The key to understanding supernova behavior is to examine its early light profile. But because these explosions are transient events without location for knowledge, we haven't analyzed very many from their earliest minutes. But modern astronomy has new facilities to rapidly identify transient events and communicate them around the globe in real time. One of these is the new Zwicky Transient Facility, ZTF for short, at Palomar Observatory in Southern California operated by Caltech. Each image is more than 24,000 by 24,000 pixels, and 4 terabytes of data will be collected each night. This new facility and others like it will greatly improve our chances for finding supernova very early in their explosive stage.


but injustice is not like the weather. Injustice is created by people and it can be removed by people as well. It's temporary. This is the job we have. This is the job we have. It is crucial that we protest and we keep protesting in great numbers and we have this optimism and determination and resilience. But a protest, of course, as we all know, is not just about turning up and we batter ourselves on the back and then we go home and think the job is done. This is a launchpad. This isn't about feeling better. It's about beginning to fight back in every single community in this country. And what that means is we all have a responsibility. We've all got to become leaders now. That means going into our communities and committing all the time we have to building a grassroots movement from below that organises people who don't vote, that organises those working class people with fears of housing and jobs and services in the future of their kids who've been peddled a politics of fear by the likes of UKIT. Instead, we've got to offer them a politics of hope instead.


Well, Yerba Buena Gardens is one of the first places that pops to mind and of course City Guides just happens to have a tour there. There's so many hidden stories within that Yerba Buena Garden, walk the Union Square and enjoy the buzzle of the city out there too. I think Union Square will be a great place to go to. It is the shopping area, so if people wanted to shop they could do that too. But I think it's a great place to see people milling about. We have the Mission Dolores neighborhood, which is not too far away. We have a wonderful walk called the South of Market Stroll. Lots of activity going south of market, not too far away from the ferry building. We have a great ferry building walk and of course there's always historical market street. And I've been asked to do a special tour of Chinatown for the Asian American librarians. So I'm looking forward to that. The Martin Luther King fountain. I don't think our modern art museum is open, but certainly the Jewish museum is down there. That's really good. And to eat. Might as well just stay down there and eat, just keep eating and drinking.


Welcome to MOOC course on Introduction to Proteogenomics. After understanding how mutations in a given gene or specifically on P sites can alter expression of the gene and its effects on the signaling pathways. We will now learn about how gene list can be transformed into the pathways by Dr. Kastren Krogh. He will talk about how one could interpret the role of differentially expressed genes in clinical conditions as compared to the healthy individuals by analyzing the pathways which are affecting them. He will also talk about various pathway and databases which can be used to analyze pathways such as M6DB, wiki pathways, keg and others.  So, let us now welcome Dr. Kastren Krogh to talk in more detail about how one can use various tools and transform the gene list to the pathways and make sense out of the data which one is obtained using various omic technologies. So, in this lecture we want to talk about how we can come or how we can transform gene lists into pathways.  You end up with long lists of differentially expressed proteins, phosphocytes or genes and possibly, you know, a high weight or like a higher proportion of those might be false positives, meaning they are actually not differentially expressed in your sample. And this makes it very hard to interpret these results biologically. So, this is just an example here. So, if you look at luminary and basal breast cancer subtype that we have looked at yesterday in the hands-on session, we see there is more than 1000 proteins are percolated in basal or differentially regulated between basal and luminal, you know, but actually what we want to know, what are the biological pathways that drive these kind of separations between luminal and basal. So, in order to do that, there are many different ways how to perform pathway analysis and it all starts with a pathway database. And you know, how do we represent the pathway in a computer? So, pathway in the most simplest case is a crew of genes that are members of a pathway or to share some common biological process, right. So, it is basically a pathway is a list of genes, gene symbols. And there are many different resources for a pathway databases like MCDB developed at a broad, we do pathways, net path which has been developed here and by Alex, by Penny's group. There is the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, Reactome and there is even more. So, here these, if you click on these links, it will directly forward you to the actual website of these databases. So, I just want to briefly point out Vicky Pathways which is a very promising research resource for curated pathways which has been, you know, developed over the last couple of years, but now it really starts to take off. So, this is like a Wikipedia for pathways. So, everybody who is, you know, studying a specific pathway. So, maybe you and you in your particular lab, you are interested in one specific pathway. So, actually you are the expert to do this kind of curation of a pathway, right. And this website or this entire resource, you know, should enable you as a researcher to help the community to provide well and highly accurate curated pathways. So, we are also using that resource a lot and, you know, they also have like a curator of the week here and things like that. So, if you are really contributing a lot to that resource, you might end up on their webpage. So, ok, there is pathway databases. So, now we want to do pathway enrichment and there is basically two different ways how to perform that or how to approach that problem. So, one is, you know, based on some sort of test. So, here just pointed out the fissures test where you test for over or under representation of pathways in a list of genes, in a list of differentially expressed genes, you know, in two conditions. Let us say tumor normal. So, meaning what that means, you have to define this list of differentially expressed proteins beforehand before you do your pathway analysis. Let us say you compare basal and luminal and then you will do your statistical test, two sample t-test and you look at everything that is differentially expressed at 1 percent FDR. So, that is the input to your pathway analysis. The other approach is so called gene set enrichment analysis which has been introduced in 2005. It is, you know, highly cited.  Let us say like a protein does not maybe pass the threshold for being statistically significant in this pathway. But if you observe many different members of the same pathway that might not change a lot, but they are all changed in the same direction, right, which increases the evidence that your pathway might be enriched. So, and the main difference compared to the first approach is that here we are looking at all measurements. We do not filter anything beforehand, but we look at all measurements, you know, at once. So, briefly about Fisher's x-ray test, I am sure that many of you guys are aware of that. It is a test to, you know, to test significance of contingency tables. So, tables that, so, you know, that is a little story that Manny used to tell here. So, it has been developed by I, Fisher and to address claims by a good friend that he had, she was called Miss Bristol and she kind of insisted that she is able to tell whether the milk or tea was poured first in a cup. And so, in order to prove her wrong, he conducted a little experiment, you know, by, you know, conducting the experiment eight times and he would pour three times the tea first into the cup and three times the milk first into the cup. And then he just, you know, filled out this contingency, he counted the number of successes of the lady, you know, and filled out this contingency table and then you can basically calculate Fisher's x-ray P value by just enumerating about overall possibilities and calculator P value. So, in this case, he proved her wrong. And you can do the same with pathways. So, let us say you want to compare your pathway and your differentially expressed list of genes. So, you have your gene list on the x-axis and you ask the question whether the gene is in your list or not and here on the y, you look for pathways, meaning if the gene is in your pathways or not, right. And then you can fill out this matrix, it should, if you always compare against the background. So, the total end should sum up for example, to all genes in your human genome, which in this case, depending on which database you are using this number might be slightly different. In this case, we have roughly 19,000 genes. And here is a little example. So, let us say this is my pathway, this is like an arbitrary theoretical example.  So, meaning 6 of your gene list members on this pathway and so on and so forth. And your background is in this case, is the universe of 20 genes. Again, Justin is an example to how to fill up this contingency table. And then you can basically, again using R, you can just calculate for just p-value. In this case, it is not significant whatsoever, all right. So, this is something you do for every pathway that you want to test. One very, you know, convenient tool to use and very powerful tool is called David, which has been published several years back, but is very powerful and very easy to use. You can, as I just described, you can just paste in your list of differential genes. You can tell the software, whether this is my gene list of interest or whether this is my background list, then you can perform these sort of tests that I just described. And you will get, for all in every pathway, you will get the p-value and enrichment scores and things like that. So, it is very convenient to use because, to use because, you just go into Excel, do your, or go into the result of your statistical tests in Excel, you filter your significant genes and then just paste them in here. So, now we want to talk about geneset enrichment analysis or GSEA. And this is also something we want to try during hands-on sessions. So, I hope that we make that work.  And so, it is basically what I just said. So, Genesets, so pathways are also called Genesets. So, basically with the introduction of GSEA, the broad also came up with a collection of Genesets, which again, is just a collection of genes, which might refer to a pathway or, you know, the shared biological process and so on and so forth. But in general, Geneset is nothing else in a pathway. And there is a large collection of those you can find in the molecular signatures database or MCDB. So, if you go to this website, you will find this kind of overview. So, these are different categories of Genesets, which you can find in MCDB. And here I just highlighted, I guess, which are the most commonly used Genesets in MCDB. So, one is the so called Hormark Geneset data set or Geneset, which is a very small database. These are just 50 signatures or 50 pathways, but they are highly curated and represent very important and common cancer Hormark pathways. And the other one is the so called C2 CP. CP stands for Canonical Pathways. So, that is a collection of Genesets that have been derived from other, you know, pathway databases like CAG or Reactome and so on and so forth. Canonical means, you know, these are. So, what we believe is the actual pathway. And there are others that and there are others that might or might not be of interest. For example, if you are used to like genontology terms, you can also look into the category C5 and so on and so forth. So, the general principle of GSEA is shown on this slide here. There is actually a figure one, I believe, from the original publication back in 2005. So, again you start with a data matrix. So, we have seen this kind of data format a couple of times in our workshop. So, you measure features, in this case it is genes on in your rows and you measure these features across a set of samples. And you know, you always want to compare at least two phenotypes, two conditions. So, in this case it is condition A or phenotype A and phenotype B. Let us say one is tumor, one is normal. So, and you somehow rank these geneless and you would rank it in a way that you rank that you would rank differentially genes accordingly. For example, you do your two sample t-test and then you rank it according to your p-value. So, the most significantly differential genes are on the top and then the further down you go the less significant it is. It becomes. So, you have a list of ranked gene sets or genes and then you take your pathway of interest. So, this is now just one pathway again and to look where in my ranked list of genes do the members of this pathway fall. So, all of these like horizontal bars are locations of members of this gene set in my actual data right. And here you see that here in this upper part of this plot you see there is many more horizontal bars than down here. So, there is an enrichment of this pathway just visually you can see that right. So, there is an enrichment of this pathway among you know, among genes that are differential between A and B that is the principle. So, how you calculate that? So, they calculate a so called enrichment score or ES by basically. So, now we are we have transposed this matrix. So, we are now looking at the ranks on the horizontal axis here. So, from high to low and now we basically calculate an enrichment score by walking down this list here. And whenever we see a member we observe a member on our data set we increase our running some statistic here. And if you do not observe a member we decrease it right. And this builds up this kind of mountain plot here and at some point you do not observe enough members of this pathway anymore that. So, meaning this running some statistic starts stops to increase you constantly decrease. And then there is different ways how to quantify this enrichment score. So, one is just taking the you know, the maximum deviation here or you can also calculate the area under the curve and things like that. So, there is you know different nuances to that type of analysis, but that is the general principle. So, just to mention. So, this is one enrichment score in order to calculate the Piva you for that enrichment score you would you know repeat this analysis 1000 times you know you would do 1000 permutations and you would do you would permute your class labels. You would shovel your class labels just to get a background distribution and you would repeat this analysis you get a distribution and then from that distribution you can calculate an empirical P value for your observed enrichment score. All right. So, that is a general principle of GSEA you compare two phenotypes and you have measured a sufficient number of replicates like biological replicates in your phenotype A and B. So, another approach to this kind of gene set enrichment analysis is also is the so called signature projection method or single sample GSEA which basically works in a single class data set. So, there you do not necessarily want to compare you know two conditions or you might not have any replicates. So, you just have a single data vector let us say this data vector can be anything it can be you know expression values in a single condition. So, you just have one experiment measure the proteome in one time point let us say and you want to look at high abundant and low abundant proteins in general or you can do you can you know look at RNA protein correlation coefficients you can your ranking would be you know highly correlated protein or genes in proteome and RNA space you know compared to low correlated or negatively correlated genes and so on and so forth. So, that is the principle. So, basically what you do if you have a data matrix you would project your let us say these are gene centric matrices and you would project each column into pathway space and we will do that during hands on and I hope that this will become a bit clearer, but basically that is that is why it is called a signature projection method. So, you start with your genes or proteins whatsoever and then you apply this method and in the end you have the same kind of matrix, but instead of looking at genes you are looking at pathways and with this matrix you can again do like all kinds of statistical analysis like you know supervised or unsupervised marker selection type of analysis and so on and so forth. I hope you have learned how the pathways provide information for the combination of correlated genes making a network to make a system functional. You also learned that wiki pathways is like wikipedia for pathways. We also learned about hyper geometrical test which is based on Fisher's exact test where one can compare clinical conditions with healthy individuals and make a pathway based on differentially expressed genes. Other pathway enrichment approaches like gene set enrichment analysis or GSEA it includes all the proteins in the study without filtration and mapping a pathway. The next lecture is going to be the continuation of the pathway enrichment by Dr. Kruk. Thank you.


Today we're going over all the releases said to drop this month in January. It's a pretty light month, but there's still some good shoes. Let's go ahead and get started with the first one. First up, we have the Black Sail Air Jordan 2 High. Now this shoe is going to disappoint you because it's a women's drop. Hey, this right here, man. Oh, man, if they could get these at my size, I would rock these. It's a clean shoe, all white. You got that kind of like reptile, kind of basketball looking material on the side. And then you got the black wings logo on the tongue. Black hits on the bottom, sail on the bottom instead of the pure white. Why are they doing this to the women's shoe only? I don't know. You know everybody over. You need to talk to somebody. You need this colorway? Honestly, there's been a lot of great Jordan 2 colorways and the women's drops, especially like we've even with the low tops, like we've seen some good ones. And then when it comes to the men's low tops, they've been like, all right. That's a high, too. I mean, they don't make highs like they used to anymore. Yeah. Everything is three quarters of minutes, whatever you want to call it. These just look like nice. You know what I'm saying? Like they look nice, but they also look like you don't want to pay retail. You might catch them on sale. You know what I'm saying? Like it's one of those. Nah, nah, nah, nah. I can pay retail on these. I mean, yeah. I think depending on your shoe size, a larger men's size that can fit into the women's sizing, it makes sense. Okay, go after it. What's retail? I think it's 175. That's not bad. Isn't it, man? It's cool. But it women should be like 150. But yeah. So for me, I'm like, I like the shoe. But again, there's a lot of Jordan 2s out there that are better than these. Yeah. So I'm like. But you know what I mean? I like simple. I get that. Like I'm a simple colorway. Yeah. And that's it for me. And that's like, man. No, I like the shoe. I just don't see myself. I don't think I'll have the opportunity to wear the shoe anyways, but I don't see myself like going after it and purchasing it and wearing it. Like it just doesn't align with my purchasing right now. Right. So I don't know. That's just kind of like a pass for me when it comes to that one. Now, right here, we got these yellow ones and it's like a sway. It's kind of like the UNC ones. But the yellow ones, you know, like ghost dealers right here. It's like Arizona one high and these now these are up my alley. I like these. Okay. Well, I think like this, I think this is a must cop shoe. Yes, because we like the Steelers because we like that whole vibe of the yellow stuff, right? When it's a high, I think like, I think that's what makes like this being taller and everything up to me. I like that. And I can't tell, but like the leather around the collar, the black leather, it looks like it's nice. It looks like the leather on the side is tumbled. It looks like you got nice leather on the toe with the white area. Right. This way it looks like it's solid. I think this is going to be a solid shoe that that the people that do get the shoe are going to appreciate, but I think it's going to still sit on it's going to sit. It's going to be one of those things because we've seen a lot of wanted to do like this before the pollen ones, the different stuff, which I think these are better than the pollen ones. But we've seen other shoes and they're just sick.  Now I think if this shoe came out, you know, 2019, 2020. Oh my gosh. People would have been 450, 500 reselling crazy. Now it's going to be like, damn, they're sitting here. The market is not like it used to be right now. Yeah. So I think it's a great shoe, great addition to the collection. One of those shoes that you buy now and then later is 350 and people is like, I think it's going up in outlets and then we can get it later. That's hot. But okay, look, prime example, you had the Navy metallic ones, the red metallic ones, OG colorways. Right. Retro OG high, sitting at outlets, sitting at outlets. I remember because I was buying them, the storm blue ones, sitting at the, I bought them there, the black toe ones. I bought those all at the outlet. And then what happened? Years later, 500 bucks, 600 bucks. So to me, I'm thinking like this is kind of like not exactly in that category, but close to that category. Could be good. So I think overall, it's clean though. It's definitely a cop. For sure. Good shoe. Okay. Next up right here, we got the diffused blue airship. Wait, this says releasing in March. Did it not just say it was January releases? Maybe it got pushed back. Okay, we'll still talk about it since we're already talking about it. I still, that's why I got pushed back because it ain't worth it. They pushed it back. See, all right, look, it wasn't worthy. The airships, they thought they were going to like build it up and make it all this hype. And they did for a split second. There was like a few months where the shoes were really expensive. Right. And then they did the collaborations and so and so gets a collab and so and so gets a collab and nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody knows who the collab is with. Nobody. It's a fire colorway. Great everything. Great. But sitting on shelves, even collabs. Like the retail on the shoes like a hundred something bucks, they're resounding for like $68. Just throw your buddy away. It's crazy. Like it's like a third of the retail price. Like it's wild. You owe somebody for buying them. I think this is like, again, one of them shoes that's like, you go on stock action, you look right now and it's like all these colorways. Like if you like these shoes, you can get them for really affordable prices. Wait on it. But do you think it's going to go up? I don't know because my thought is like this throughout all the years I've been collecting, right? I knew what the airships was. But at the same time, like I didn't care about them like that to go and have 10, 15 colorways in my collection or like pay $800 for a pair. You know what I'm saying? It's something about the airship versus the Jordan one. It's just like, I'm going to get more ones than I will with those. Like I'm going to have some airships in my collection. You know, I got a few pairs. But at the same time, I'm like, I can't just be going to get 12 pairs. No. And then they blew it with the broken down diffused and blah, blah, blah. Come on, stop. Either way, it's a pass. Definitely a pass. Okay. So this next one is the Python. Those are kind of clean. It's funny because we got the air pythons, which is a different model shoe, but it does look like the air Jordan too. They kind of feel like they took that style and vibing and put that onto the shoe. So instead of the all black, you kind of just switch the colors a little bit and you got that Python material. You got the black on the sock line on the tongue, black on the logo, that's cleaner gray on the bottom. Yeah, a little bit different. Yeah, but still similar. Really, really that'd be a cop for me. That colorway is clean to me. These look better than the other ones with the first one. The first the first Jordan to that we talked about earlier in the video. Oh no, I like the color blocking on these more. Yeah, I say I like the color blocking more. Yeah, I can't say that the way out the tongue and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I'm still not spending my money on these. I would spend my money on these. No, you wouldn't. Okay, I would spend your money on these. Exactly. He's lying. He would not buy these. No, look, I would buy those. No, you wouldn't. At the outlet store. Yeah. He'd be like 80 bucks. All right, I'll do it 180 bucks. I can already see that that is not happening. So that's another one that's like, yeah. So this month is like, so usually the year starts out like January. It's real light like it's real, real light because it's February comes. You got all star weekend. So what's that mean?  So this year, I think it's like the Brad Ford's. They're doing that in a reimagined version and they got different shoes. It was dropped during that weekend.  So it's usually chill. Like I remember back in the day, we saw like Chicago Tans and a couple of different shoes released in January, but nothing crazy over the years. It's always like, hey, you spent all your money in December. We'll let you have that laugh.  So it's a light month, but this one, they did a pack. So every year, not every year, but for the past years, for the past years, recently, they got this new thing, Chinese New Year. Oh, yeah, yeah, a lot of people have been doing an Air Jordan one low og low and they're doing the color reminiscent to the year that it is. So like you're the dragon, you're the tiger. So we got you're the dragon this year. Right. Right. So this right here is the Chinese New Year real quick, real quick. The reason I say that is because they did an alcohol. So they alcohol bottle alcohol bottle is the same thing. Yeah, the New Year is the blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's why I'm saying I know about that. People doing that. Anyway, yeah, you see that a lot in different like industries and different products and stuff. Yeah, definitely a heavy train. So I haven't gotten a single period. Finally, he missed something. The Chinese New Year series, the low chopped ones. I don't have any of them. And in the times that I had a chance to get them, I'm like, oh, 340. I'm not doing that. I ain't doing it, but then I forget my size. Right. Next thing I look at $1,200. I'm like, bruh, so this year, if I don't get them, don't go down. I might pay the price because I started to realize and I'm like, again, I get it. It doesn't have a full significance to me, but from the collector standpoint and again, I don't like all the colorways, but like these ones, I'm like, they're cool, but I do want to go after them still and kind of make my mind up when I see them because they put like nice materials and stuff on a shoe. So Year of the Dragon Air Jordan 1 low. This is a shoe you got. Oh, you got nice. You know what I'm saying? Like it's a cool shoe. I like it. It's kind of like elevated premium kind of got that grown kind of coloring to it. It's not like young and kiddish like, so I think it's a really clean shoe. I don't know if this is the again best low top or top 10 low top ones out there, but at the same time, I like it. I like where they're going with it. It makes sense with the clean black laces really helped with that. This is whatever dark. I'll say this is red. This is all color black. It's red, red, gold and green, but it looks like it's all purple. I'm horrible. That's why I stayed to the simple color. So you see like the gold on the back right here. Everything the shoe is clean. I'll show you some pictures of some other pairs as well and then they got the stuff on the inside on the sock liner and everything. So to me, I'm like, I'm going after the shoe. I want to get these retails like 140 bucks. They're going to look good. The year of the rabbit ones last year fire like I wanted those just missed out on them. He still want them at retail. Somebody got them. I still like man. I like the year of the rabbits. Those ones, those ones are clean and then they did like a satin bread one. It was like, oh, they're so far. I reviewed them before. So they're taking it to the next level. They're really trying to lean into this project. Right. And now they have like eight shoes that's coming out compared to like issues like one or two for the Chinese. Yes. So that's the one that like everybody cares about. Now this is the one that probably not that many people is going to care about. So you got the low top. They tried to finesse it. They did a low top one s e in the in the terrible color blocking or not the terrible, the terrible mold of the shoe, like this is the retro cut. You see it's all bulky. It looks weird in the tongue. I like they just tried to flip it. But at the same time, like the model itself is trash. And it's like, yeah, it's a cool colorway. But like, you know, they went off to the pandas. Right. So they did good. We like we're going to do this. They're trying to finesse it and run up the bag. So then they also did a low top two and they're like cool. I like the low top two. They're like, let's run. That's clean. That's way better. This is better. That's way better. The low top two in the low top one. I'm like, okay, those will be fire in the set. You know, yeah, but I would prefer to have the ones over the twos and then they're like, let's throw some 38s in there. Let's get the hype around Jordan basketball. What is this? Jordan Brown. What are y'all doing? I know y'all see these videos. You got some Chinese New Year's 38 call us before you do this like that don't even sound right. I just said the Chinese New Year's 38 that just sound like a picture. Hey, you got some Chinese New Year's 38. Yeah. So, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't want to dog the designer though. Maybe it's not the designer's fault. Who's is it? Somebody above him. No, that's the thing though. No, that's the thing. I made a decision. The design ain't bad on certain colorways. It's certain colorways just like the Tatum like it's the colorway that make the shoe like trash or fire. So yeah, so this is like a Jordan model shoe that they've been pushing a lot too. They're like, let's put energy around it. So these are the Jordan Stadium 90s. They came out. They sat on shelves. Nobody cared about them. They took different iterations of different models of Jordan fives. The Jordan ones, the Jordan force prove it. You see all the different for me. They blew it like the six rings on this. These are this is me. Like you don't take all these shoes and put them together and go, look, we got a shoe. Yeah, stop it. Yeah. They didn't George say that stop it. Stop it. But look though. Okay. Now this, this is all I was saving for him. I'm not exactly sure, but I think there's two bear. And if this is right, I rock with these. I need both of these. Let's see. The gold version. Okay. Low top OG. See, this is kind of like those gold shoes. We got that. Yeah. With the like the green scale on the, on the swoosh. Yeah. You got the, so they got the heart. It was a green with the gold and then it's a gold with the green. Yeah. So that right there fire. I know this is going to be a polarizing for some people. They may or may not like it to me. I think they're dope, but I can't tell based off of the shaping of the shoe. If this is like a kids version. It looked like kids to me. Right. So I'm going to be kind of salty for just a kids version. It looked like kids to me because these are hard. They look, they don't like, I have enough shoe whole laces. Yeah. So either way, two, four, six, seven. So I have like nine. No, but it's seven on the retro eight on the OG, which is like a whole nother topic. And then here's another one. It keeps going. These are so trash. The Jordan legacy 312. I'll tell you, if I can get a pair of these right here, he would do it all the way burn them. I'm like, I'm waiting to hear what you say. This is a hazard. These are trash. What did you try to do? Take a Michael vehicle. No, but that's what makes me so mad because I'm like, what the hell? They put a Jordan. They put. What do they do here? They got like four, five pairs of shoes in this. It's like eight shoes in there. I don't even know. Either way, I'm not rocking with it. And as you see, like, they're like, let's milk this cow. Let's get this money. But they're losing money. That's why they're doing what they're doing right now. Restructuring because they got people on a team right now is doing things to the shoes like this. That's blowing it again. What is it? What do you have to do? You got to hit numbers to keep your job to keep the stock holders healthy to keep the distance to that. Like there's so many. They went down 14% yesterday, but yesterday. You saw that? Who got that Nike stock? Yeah, we'll talk about that later. We do stocks too. Don't forget property stocks and shoes. Yeah. Come on. Y'all better watch the other channels. Okay. But look, but anyway, so the two low top ones and the low top twos out of this set. I'm rocking with them. Right. Again, they're not my favorite out of the whole Chinese New Year's that have been coming out over the years, but these is cool. But they clean. I like these. I want to have these in the collection and I think I might have to start like seeking out the other pairs. I might have to wear some trades. Then you're going to get a whole collection. You're going to have them all. You know what I'm doing for 2024? What? I think I'm going to go after original 85 ones and complete the set with all the originals. There's like 16. I think it's 16 or 18. There goes 150,000. Yeah, I want my desktop though. So I think about, I think I'm about to start going after this, but anyway, off topic. All right. So that basically recaps a month again. Short, light month. What do you think it? I'm thinking the yellow ones for me. I take the twos the first Tuesday. But you're not confident though. I would. I think that I don't know. I really like them clean. All right. We'll say a potential cop even though you won't and then we'll say yellow ones for sure. A hundred percent. Those and then for me, I'm going the gold one low and the year to dragon green one low and I go the other twos. I'll take the two twos. The twos. Yeah. The two tops. No, just the high. I don't know. I like the low tops too. I think all three pairs. Yeah. This too. That's what's this one. You're the dragon. You're the dragon low and a python and a python. And then yeah. So he won all the twos. I want all the ones. Yeah. The twos don't be comfortable. I don't know if y'all got any twos. No, they are. For sure. They're a little bulky at the top. Yeah. A little bulky, a little bulky at the top, but they got a lot of padding. The mugs be comfortable. Good shoes. Good shoes. Okay. So wrapping up. You got anything to say before we go. Starting off 2024 high. Hey, y'all save your money. Yeah. I think the reason why I'm saying this, I think that halfway through the year, I think they'll get better. And so people save up a little bit and wait. Some of it, they'll be able to get the stuff in you know, cheap stores and then wait and then they'll come out with something better. Yeah. I think also we got like we're seeing fear threes and all the fours and these shoes are going on sale. Like I'm seeing people buying these shoes on sale. Oh man, I fit that video you had. What was your head in New York or something? Probably. And it had all the blue ones. Oh, you had like seven shoes like all this stuff is sitting. Yeah. You went in there and it's like they had all the shoes. I'm like and then you see them going on sale now and they're like 120 bucks, 120 bucks, 130 bucks. So people are getting stuff on sale. So again, be patient, be patient. You don't have to write. The shoe is the same shoe, whether you get it now or two months from now. And a lot of them, like I said, a lot of them is dropping. So like I said, save your money for a little bit and wait and see what it's going to do. And remember what we say all the time, buy what you like. Don't buy it because it's hype. Don't buy it because somebody else said this and that and buy what you like. Yep. You know, if you get an opportunity to catch it on sale, catch it on sale and do it. That's it. All right. Subscribe to my channel. Then subscribe to my channel. Hey, I'm going to start hitting more stuff on my channel. He's been saying that for the past year. I got to. I got to get some things on there. And I'll get better at it. We got videos going up like once a month. Basically. Yeah, we got to get it together. We got it. I need to get I need to get more on there. I appreciate y'all. Thank you for watching. We out. We'll see you guys in a four letter deal. Am I going to that? Yeah. I'll see y'all in four letter. If you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more, I have a ton on the inside when it comes to my sneaker head Academy. It's a eight week program that breaks down everything when it comes to the ins and outs of the shoe game, learning the market and how to grow and scale your collection at the same time or turn it into a hustle and get a bunch of money if you'd like to do that as well. And if you want to invest in the real estate, I have all the tips and tricks in live meetups where we do monthly meetups and everybody jumps in and we go over a call and we talk about different goals and aspirations that we have and how we can help each other get there. So if that's something that you're interested in, hit the link down below.  I would love to see you on the inside. It's the holidays right now. So we got a special going as well. All right, you guys, I'm out. I would never let you down and send my DNA. The only choice I like to make what I'm aware today. I was made for it.