Human Resource Machine: End Composition

 I haven't finished the Human Resource Machine, but this is the concluding article. A combination of other events and an increasing difficulty thwarted my attempts to solve the remaining puzzles in a reasonable time. And so I finish with these parting thoughts.

The game does not offer any instruction or help for solving puzzles. In The Talos Principle tools were introduced with elementary puzzles and the difficulty scaled over time. In HRM each puzzle requires a new technique, with insufficient assistance or explanation to begin to implement it. In the World of Goo, a game created by the same core developers, they chose to include the ability to skip a limited number of levels. These skips were earned and could be stored up, but HRM forgets this helpful tool. It would have been useful to move past a puzzle the player is stuck on, allowing them to try a different thought process instead of remaining frustrated and frozen on the same one.

The game includes a simple story communicated through short cut-screens every five to seven puzzles. The developers display a quirky and dark sense of humor as your avatar struggles in a confining corporate environment. Occasional news bulletin viewed by secretaries in the break-room hint at an ever increasing danger outside the office. These intimations are combined with a deterioration of the office rooms, until the building is falling apart in massive chunks. Eventually it becomes obvious that a robot revolution is threatening, and in the final cut-scene this is confirmed, along with the news that your avatar's work has created a computer. There must have been computers already, as is evidenced by the complex robots terrorizing the workers at the end, so the achievement doesn't seems like much, but coveys the atmosphere well.

There resided within a desire to complete the game, some measure of perseverance and ego to succeed. Searching the internet would have yielded the solutions to the last few problems. But there was no rewarding reason to do so. The only payoff the game offers for the difficult employment of completing puzzles is the satisfaction of solution by ones own effort. Outsourcing the work to the internet brings no pleasure, only a hollow victory.

Though the game might be useful in the basics of theoretical computing, it seems to have no practical relevance. Playing Human Resource Machine to learn to code would be like playing Guitar Hero to learn to play the guitar. It might be fun, but not a efficient method by which to develop a skill. Ironically, I've learned more about programming on constructing the blog. Understand I use the premade blogger by Google, but I've learned how to automatically resize images, adjust individual video sizes, cut away links, ensure that left clicking a link opens up a new tab, and create links that leap to the specific part of a website instead of the top. These aren't amazing feats by any means, but they have made the site easier to use.

In conclusion, programming (in HRM) is not like writing. Both have a flow to them, but programming is so full of jumps that move on from place to place. It reuses and repeats, an undesirable trait in most writing. Constructing a program seemed like create a series of disparate and separate programs which then were linked together. One could argue that writing is the same, but in writing each part impacts the whole. In HRM each section could be created independently and then once they were all finished, combined with only minor alterations. The technical word is beyond me, but each function is a separate entity, not like a paragraph in a novel.

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