There comes a time in every nerd's life when it is time to pick up a new hobby. In my case two of those came along at the same time, as I have picked up knitting and learning Drupal. To that end, I've moved this blog to my own fancy new domain. I have some plans to implement a customized theme and logo and whatnot - its pretty plain at the moment but I kind of like it. In any case, if you don't already know this blog will now be located here:
http://nomikkh.net/
Come by and see me sometime!
Friday, May 9, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Project Obrigado: Social Solidarity
Here's a public service announcement - never under any circumstances Google your medication. Or any medication you might be taking in the future. Back away from the keyboard slowly and deliberately and only return once the morbid curiosity fades. Made that mistake a while ago, and promptly freaked out because apparently Lexapro makes everyone gain 30+ lbs when they take it. This is not the case. But I didn't learn my lesson and looked up popular mood stabilizers earlier. That was a bad life choice.
I've been trying to articulate my thoughts on how I want the project's social platform to work, and today I had a few small revelations. There are plenty of communities out there whose members support each other, what would be so different about this one? The thing is, when you're a depressed person having a rough day its really hard to reach out to other people a lot of the time, even people who have offered their support multiple times. They could be afraid of using up all their "help tokens" and their friends will just give up on a lost cause. Perhaps they feel like, for all their kindness other people just don't get it and they don't have the energy to try and explain. After all the natural response to the statement "I'm really sad right now" is to ask what's wrong. Its frustrating to not have an answer to that question. So sometimes we don't bother. But what if you had a place to go where everyone knows exactly what you're talking about? Its the support group mentality I suppose - it would be a community for depressed folks first who happen to also be gamers. Like most ideas, I doubt this is a new thing - there's got to be something like that already in existence. Sure there'll be lots of conversation about whatever the group's common passion is but there is also a clear focus is on venting and supporting each other. And most of all understanding.
So taking it back to the game, I want it to be an environment where two people across the world from each other could get together for a mission/quest/whatever and chatting about an unexpected fit of hopelessness or an afternoon of being unable to concentrate over the jerk in your head is just a normal thing that happens. I also want people who are doing better to be rewarded for diving into the game with someone who's not. I've thought a bit about what those rewards would be and while I don't have specifics I know I want them to be visual and toggle-able. For example, say I'm having a good week and things are going well. I've used some of my free time to quest with players who aren't doing so hot, and because the game has integrated VOIP, listened to them talk about what's bothering them and offer my advice. Doing that nets me some kind of sparkly aura, nifty armor skin, or some cosmetic thing that differentiates me in-game as a person-willing-to-help. This reward would probably be based on XP given after the players I play with tell the game whether or not I was understanding. Of course a mechanic like this, rather than being dependent on one players own actions, would depend on the community as a whole to act. I don't think this is a bad thing. I also said I wanted it to be toggle-able because sometimes I'm not feeling up to helping. Maybe the internal catastrophizing is particularly bad, or Bob Ross is being melancholic again. So I can turn off my "Community Mentor" aura thing to let the game know I don't want to be approached.
This, along with the panic button I'll get into soon, was one of the first things I thought of when this idea started germinating in my head because I believe that helping other people is a powerful healing tool. It gives us a sense of agency - and by that I mean the power to affect the world around us and not just ourselves. This is something depression sufferers desperately need. Oftentimes we're plagued by hopelessness, helplessness, and the sense that everything is "just too much". But how hard is it to log in to a game you were going to play anyway and let someone cry on your shoulder for a few minutes? Depression is actually a pretty selfish disease (I say that of the disease, not the people who have it, mind) - it convinces us we're the center of a horrifying maelstrom of nastiness, the worst suffering is ours and no one could possibly understand. That's clearly not accurate, and by helping people in a similar situation we have irrevocable proof that we're not at the heart of a world of pain. Also, and this is true for anyone, helping people feels good. Seriously, has anyone ever in the world helped someone carry their groceries and then thought "Man this feeling of altruistic accomplishment is completely wrecking my day"?
The idea of solidarity is important when dealing with depression, I think, because its such an isolatory disease. Your brain fools you into thinking you're alone, that no one wants to help you, that you shouldn't reach out. In the end, reaching out to someone you know is in the same situation is much easier because they understand. Have you not showered for days because doing basic human stuff is as perplexing as the labyrinth? They've been there, they won't judge. That's not to say people who don't deal with MDD can't understand or will judge, but when your whole self is screaming at you to shut the hell up and stop bothering people, its slightly less hard to bother someone you know "gets it".
I'm calling the mechanic "Community XP" for the time being. How it would be calculated is something I'm not sure of yet. There are a lot of things where I am not sure of the calculation methods, which reminds me of that line in the Dark Knight from the Joker - "I just do things".
I just think things, guys.
I've been trying to articulate my thoughts on how I want the project's social platform to work, and today I had a few small revelations. There are plenty of communities out there whose members support each other, what would be so different about this one? The thing is, when you're a depressed person having a rough day its really hard to reach out to other people a lot of the time, even people who have offered their support multiple times. They could be afraid of using up all their "help tokens" and their friends will just give up on a lost cause. Perhaps they feel like, for all their kindness other people just don't get it and they don't have the energy to try and explain. After all the natural response to the statement "I'm really sad right now" is to ask what's wrong. Its frustrating to not have an answer to that question. So sometimes we don't bother. But what if you had a place to go where everyone knows exactly what you're talking about? Its the support group mentality I suppose - it would be a community for depressed folks first who happen to also be gamers. Like most ideas, I doubt this is a new thing - there's got to be something like that already in existence. Sure there'll be lots of conversation about whatever the group's common passion is but there is also a clear focus is on venting and supporting each other. And most of all understanding.
So taking it back to the game, I want it to be an environment where two people across the world from each other could get together for a mission/quest/whatever and chatting about an unexpected fit of hopelessness or an afternoon of being unable to concentrate over the jerk in your head is just a normal thing that happens. I also want people who are doing better to be rewarded for diving into the game with someone who's not. I've thought a bit about what those rewards would be and while I don't have specifics I know I want them to be visual and toggle-able. For example, say I'm having a good week and things are going well. I've used some of my free time to quest with players who aren't doing so hot, and because the game has integrated VOIP, listened to them talk about what's bothering them and offer my advice. Doing that nets me some kind of sparkly aura, nifty armor skin, or some cosmetic thing that differentiates me in-game as a person-willing-to-help. This reward would probably be based on XP given after the players I play with tell the game whether or not I was understanding. Of course a mechanic like this, rather than being dependent on one players own actions, would depend on the community as a whole to act. I don't think this is a bad thing. I also said I wanted it to be toggle-able because sometimes I'm not feeling up to helping. Maybe the internal catastrophizing is particularly bad, or Bob Ross is being melancholic again. So I can turn off my "Community Mentor" aura thing to let the game know I don't want to be approached.
This, along with the panic button I'll get into soon, was one of the first things I thought of when this idea started germinating in my head because I believe that helping other people is a powerful healing tool. It gives us a sense of agency - and by that I mean the power to affect the world around us and not just ourselves. This is something depression sufferers desperately need. Oftentimes we're plagued by hopelessness, helplessness, and the sense that everything is "just too much". But how hard is it to log in to a game you were going to play anyway and let someone cry on your shoulder for a few minutes? Depression is actually a pretty selfish disease (I say that of the disease, not the people who have it, mind) - it convinces us we're the center of a horrifying maelstrom of nastiness, the worst suffering is ours and no one could possibly understand. That's clearly not accurate, and by helping people in a similar situation we have irrevocable proof that we're not at the heart of a world of pain. Also, and this is true for anyone, helping people feels good. Seriously, has anyone ever in the world helped someone carry their groceries and then thought "Man this feeling of altruistic accomplishment is completely wrecking my day"?
The idea of solidarity is important when dealing with depression, I think, because its such an isolatory disease. Your brain fools you into thinking you're alone, that no one wants to help you, that you shouldn't reach out. In the end, reaching out to someone you know is in the same situation is much easier because they understand. Have you not showered for days because doing basic human stuff is as perplexing as the labyrinth? They've been there, they won't judge. That's not to say people who don't deal with MDD can't understand or will judge, but when your whole self is screaming at you to shut the hell up and stop bothering people, its slightly less hard to bother someone you know "gets it".
I'm calling the mechanic "Community XP" for the time being. How it would be calculated is something I'm not sure of yet. There are a lot of things where I am not sure of the calculation methods, which reminds me of that line in the Dark Knight from the Joker - "I just do things".
I just think things, guys.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
ESO First Impressions
ESO seems like the trendy thing to be discussing lately on the Internets. Will it fail? Is it really an ESO game? Will it fail? And so on. Unfortunately I appear to have a somewhat unpopular opinion based on the people I've interacted with, and that is that its a flawed but ultimately incredibly fun game that's worth the money I spent on it.
Most of the complaints I've heard are from other Elder Scrolls fans who think its too much like an MMO and not enough like Elder Scrolls. I don't particularly feel that way myself, but I can understand the sentiment. There are some things I like doing in Elder Scrolls games that I can't do in ESO, most of them involving the physics engine and random items - I've mentioned before my Skyrim character is a cheese-obsessed klepto. I also (at this point) can't own a house wherein I lovingly and painstakingly arrange all the random crap I've picked up along the way. I can't go through a dungeon and pick up every single rake and pile them at the entrance. These things would require a level of interactivity that's not possible in a multiplayer experience as far as I can see. At the very least elements like this would be prohibitively complicated to code in a multiplayer environment, so I can completely understand the designers not including them. After all, there are other parts of the game to enjoy beyond rake-piles.
There's a lot of character customization possible, but admittedly it is not as much as single player Elder Scrolls games. You only have 4 classes to choose from, but those classes have a staggering amount of variability because of the various weapon, armor, and class skill options. Unlike other MMOs, you are not locked into a certain type of equipment based on your class - if you pick it up and you're high enough level you can use it. So if you want to make a heavy armor-wearing sorcerer with a giant axe, you can. Even within the same class there's several ways to make your character unique. Its not the same as single player for sure, but I think Bethesda did a great job with the skill trees. I will admit I miss being able to Frenzy a group of enemies until there's only one left for me to deal with, there are other things about combat I find very nearly as fun. And that's a tactic that's not really possible in a multiplayer environment anyway. Its not as though you can yell at people coming by to not attack because you're about to do something really cool. Or you could, but I guarantee no one would heed your words.
On the topic of bugs, I have found a couple that are a little irritating. The first has to do with grouping. As far as I can tell the way ESO is built your character, while walking around the same world, might occupy a different "world state" than other characters based on what quests you were doing and how far into them you were. This causes a big problem when you're grouped with someone who happens to be in a difference world state, as you will disappear from each others' sight whenever you enter an area in which you have temporal dissonance. For people who always group and play the game together this isn't an issue, but not everybody does that. This is really the only bug I hope they come up with a solution for soon, the others are minor annoyances.
I probably should say however that some of the things I consider to be minor annoyances others might consider to be game-breaking rage machines. Probably the most irritating was the bug I came across when I got to the third zone in the Aldmeri Dominion and needed to complete a quest before I could fully access the starting town. I wasn't able to finish it because there were too many people trying to finish it at once and so the final boss zone was having trouble resetting. However, from this particular bug came one of the most hilarious trolls I have ever seen.
So the quest is called Unsafe Haven, and to finish it you need to stop some invading pirates and necromancers from doing a ritual to summon zombies all over the town. I got through the sewers and into the keep and entered the place where the ritual was supposed to happen. Nothing was there. On my way to this area other players were yelling things like "DO NOT GO IN ROOM, DO NOT PULL MOBS" and "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET OUT OF THAT ROOM". Very puzzling, until I got to the empty ritual area and found a bunch of players hiding out in front of this side room waiting for some NPCs to spawn. Somehow word had gotten around that to complete the quest you had to wait for 3 specific NPCs to spawn in this room and then kill them. Of course people are terrible at waiting, or didn't know what was going on, so someone would run into the room before the third NPC could spawn and rage flowed like a river of continuous invective. I actually believed the nonsense about waiting outside the room for a hot minute but got bored quickly and logged out to do something else until the zone wasn't so crowded. Some people waiting outside that room for hours. Turns out the quest has nothing to do with that room at all - as an awesome Twitch streamer named Antpile pointed out - but only that the zone was having trouble resetting because of the traffic. You can fix this by relogging over and over until you get an instance that isn't bugged, or if you're a sane person you can do what I did. Which is something bloody else and come back later. I came back at 6am because I like to get up early and game before work and finished the quest right away. So all those people crouching outside that stupid room were actually inhibiting the zone from resetting by just being there. Like I said, brilliant troll if that is indeed what it was.
The conclusion I came to from that experience was reinforced what I said at the beginning; even though ESO is a flawed game, I am enjoying it quite a bit. I don't feel like I've wasted money and I plan to continue my subscription after my free time ends. Because even though there are bugs that for a while make part of the game worth playing, there are hundreds of other things to do, other characters to explore, and areas to discover. And hell, if I can't finish something because of a bug I have faith that the development team wants the game to succeed and will work to fix it. Until they do I can always log off and do one of the zillion other activities vying for my free time.
All that being said however, I feel a little trepidatious about the future of ESO. While I enjoy it greatly, its not blowing my mind in any capacity and I feel like in order for it to continually draw players back it needs to do that at least a little. Yes, the NPC AI is much richer than any other MMOs I can name, the system itself is quite fun, and exploration in game feels very Elder Scrolls-y to me. But my feeling is that being just "Elder Scrolls, but ONLINE" isn't enough. Sure it'll keep the fans like me coming back - but not all of them as I know several Scrolls fans who don't like the game. And Bethesda seems to me like a company that will do something on their own terms or not at all. I don't think this game will ever be free to play, I think if its not successful Bethesda will pack it up and go back to single player games. Or try again, but larger in scope. Either of these things would be fine with me but it doesn't say great things about this particular game's future.
And of course there will be the ravening hordes wanting their money back. My outlook is this - the developers will make the game they want to make and I will either enjoy it or I won't. When I stop enjoying it, I'll stop playing it but I don't feel the time I have spent on any game is wasted. Did I give up on KoTOR when I lost three hours of gameplay because my character got stuck in a wall? No. However, I don't really think that attitude is common to the masses. So when (or if) ESO gets packed up and filed in the Vault of Forgotten MMOs there might be a bit of backlash for Bethesda. I'm pretty sure they can handle it though - they kind of have the ultimate trump card. They make Elder Scrolls games.
Most of the complaints I've heard are from other Elder Scrolls fans who think its too much like an MMO and not enough like Elder Scrolls. I don't particularly feel that way myself, but I can understand the sentiment. There are some things I like doing in Elder Scrolls games that I can't do in ESO, most of them involving the physics engine and random items - I've mentioned before my Skyrim character is a cheese-obsessed klepto. I also (at this point) can't own a house wherein I lovingly and painstakingly arrange all the random crap I've picked up along the way. I can't go through a dungeon and pick up every single rake and pile them at the entrance. These things would require a level of interactivity that's not possible in a multiplayer experience as far as I can see. At the very least elements like this would be prohibitively complicated to code in a multiplayer environment, so I can completely understand the designers not including them. After all, there are other parts of the game to enjoy beyond rake-piles.
There's a lot of character customization possible, but admittedly it is not as much as single player Elder Scrolls games. You only have 4 classes to choose from, but those classes have a staggering amount of variability because of the various weapon, armor, and class skill options. Unlike other MMOs, you are not locked into a certain type of equipment based on your class - if you pick it up and you're high enough level you can use it. So if you want to make a heavy armor-wearing sorcerer with a giant axe, you can. Even within the same class there's several ways to make your character unique. Its not the same as single player for sure, but I think Bethesda did a great job with the skill trees. I will admit I miss being able to Frenzy a group of enemies until there's only one left for me to deal with, there are other things about combat I find very nearly as fun. And that's a tactic that's not really possible in a multiplayer environment anyway. Its not as though you can yell at people coming by to not attack because you're about to do something really cool. Or you could, but I guarantee no one would heed your words.
On the topic of bugs, I have found a couple that are a little irritating. The first has to do with grouping. As far as I can tell the way ESO is built your character, while walking around the same world, might occupy a different "world state" than other characters based on what quests you were doing and how far into them you were. This causes a big problem when you're grouped with someone who happens to be in a difference world state, as you will disappear from each others' sight whenever you enter an area in which you have temporal dissonance. For people who always group and play the game together this isn't an issue, but not everybody does that. This is really the only bug I hope they come up with a solution for soon, the others are minor annoyances.
I probably should say however that some of the things I consider to be minor annoyances others might consider to be game-breaking rage machines. Probably the most irritating was the bug I came across when I got to the third zone in the Aldmeri Dominion and needed to complete a quest before I could fully access the starting town. I wasn't able to finish it because there were too many people trying to finish it at once and so the final boss zone was having trouble resetting. However, from this particular bug came one of the most hilarious trolls I have ever seen.
So the quest is called Unsafe Haven, and to finish it you need to stop some invading pirates and necromancers from doing a ritual to summon zombies all over the town. I got through the sewers and into the keep and entered the place where the ritual was supposed to happen. Nothing was there. On my way to this area other players were yelling things like "DO NOT GO IN ROOM, DO NOT PULL MOBS" and "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET OUT OF THAT ROOM". Very puzzling, until I got to the empty ritual area and found a bunch of players hiding out in front of this side room waiting for some NPCs to spawn. Somehow word had gotten around that to complete the quest you had to wait for 3 specific NPCs to spawn in this room and then kill them. Of course people are terrible at waiting, or didn't know what was going on, so someone would run into the room before the third NPC could spawn and rage flowed like a river of continuous invective. I actually believed the nonsense about waiting outside the room for a hot minute but got bored quickly and logged out to do something else until the zone wasn't so crowded. Some people waiting outside that room for hours. Turns out the quest has nothing to do with that room at all - as an awesome Twitch streamer named Antpile pointed out - but only that the zone was having trouble resetting because of the traffic. You can fix this by relogging over and over until you get an instance that isn't bugged, or if you're a sane person you can do what I did. Which is something bloody else and come back later. I came back at 6am because I like to get up early and game before work and finished the quest right away. So all those people crouching outside that stupid room were actually inhibiting the zone from resetting by just being there. Like I said, brilliant troll if that is indeed what it was.
The conclusion I came to from that experience was reinforced what I said at the beginning; even though ESO is a flawed game, I am enjoying it quite a bit. I don't feel like I've wasted money and I plan to continue my subscription after my free time ends. Because even though there are bugs that for a while make part of the game worth playing, there are hundreds of other things to do, other characters to explore, and areas to discover. And hell, if I can't finish something because of a bug I have faith that the development team wants the game to succeed and will work to fix it. Until they do I can always log off and do one of the zillion other activities vying for my free time.
All that being said however, I feel a little trepidatious about the future of ESO. While I enjoy it greatly, its not blowing my mind in any capacity and I feel like in order for it to continually draw players back it needs to do that at least a little. Yes, the NPC AI is much richer than any other MMOs I can name, the system itself is quite fun, and exploration in game feels very Elder Scrolls-y to me. But my feeling is that being just "Elder Scrolls, but ONLINE" isn't enough. Sure it'll keep the fans like me coming back - but not all of them as I know several Scrolls fans who don't like the game. And Bethesda seems to me like a company that will do something on their own terms or not at all. I don't think this game will ever be free to play, I think if its not successful Bethesda will pack it up and go back to single player games. Or try again, but larger in scope. Either of these things would be fine with me but it doesn't say great things about this particular game's future.
And of course there will be the ravening hordes wanting their money back. My outlook is this - the developers will make the game they want to make and I will either enjoy it or I won't. When I stop enjoying it, I'll stop playing it but I don't feel the time I have spent on any game is wasted. Did I give up on KoTOR when I lost three hours of gameplay because my character got stuck in a wall? No. However, I don't really think that attitude is common to the masses. So when (or if) ESO gets packed up and filed in the Vault of Forgotten MMOs there might be a bit of backlash for Bethesda. I'm pretty sure they can handle it though - they kind of have the ultimate trump card. They make Elder Scrolls games.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Bloodsucking Fiends - Vampires and Feminism what?
It could be said that I like vampires quite a bit. It could also be said that the sky is a very nice shade of blue today, zebras generally have stripes, and for the most part fish like to be in water. Are you picking up what I'm laying down, here? Vampires are pretty much my favorite fictional creature after dragons. I've tried to pin down why that is, and I've got two possible reasons. The first is that I am attracted to things that frighten me - I was so afraid of the original Bela Lugosi Dracula when I was a kid that I would hang a glow-in-the-dark rosary over my bed while I was sleeping. The second is that since I am a heathen and don't particularly believe in an afterlife I have a vested interest in living forever. There could be a combination of both going on.
So one might imagine that I've read a ton of vampire books, which would be a correct thought so congratulations. A lot of them I don't like, and many I actively hate for various reasons. I don't like the Anne Rice vampire books - too languid and "oh pity me I'm an eternal hottie and I'm tortured". I've never read Twilight, but I've seen some of the movies and known enough people who have read them to hate it simply because of the horrifying messaging. Give up your ambitions to sublimate yourself to a (way older) dude right out of high school, girls! Base your whole self image on another person! Chimo is ok, because bonding! I don't give a crap if the storytelling is good (which it probably isn't) I hate those books on sheer principal, leaving aside the sparkling.
Ok, I'm getting the Rage, its time for a Goon interlude.
So one might imagine that I've read a ton of vampire books, which would be a correct thought so congratulations. A lot of them I don't like, and many I actively hate for various reasons. I don't like the Anne Rice vampire books - too languid and "oh pity me I'm an eternal hottie and I'm tortured". I've never read Twilight, but I've seen some of the movies and known enough people who have read them to hate it simply because of the horrifying messaging. Give up your ambitions to sublimate yourself to a (way older) dude right out of high school, girls! Base your whole self image on another person! Chimo is ok, because bonding! I don't give a crap if the storytelling is good (which it probably isn't) I hate those books on sheer principal, leaving aside the sparkling.
Ok, I'm getting the Rage, its time for a Goon interlude.
Oh the endless ROFLs! Spoiler alert, he beats them up.
There are several vampire books I very much enjoy however. The Nightwatch series is excellent, and of course there's the original Dracula. But today I would like to talk about a little book called Bloodsucking Fiends by Chrisopher Moore. Its a comedy like his other books, but it also has one of the most accurate of the female perspective that I've ever seen from a male author. So its funny and thought provoking! Warning - I don't consider myself a militant feminist by any means, but I am a lady and I've had some experiences that are unique to those who are ladies. I'll try to generalize as little as possible and keep this out of "RAAAGHRR all men are idjits!" territory.
Fiction has long been a great way to explore and illuminate social issues through the venue of story. The main character of this particular story is Jodie, a normal lady with a normal job until she gets singled out and turned into a vampire for the sport of a really bored old-as-dirt vampire. After that happens, she suddenly finds herself in the unique situation of being a woman who doesn't need to be afraid of anything.
As far as society has come in the last few decades, we ladies still struggle against labels, inconvenient socialization, and fear. Dr. Nerdlove talks a bit about it in his blog, which is definitely worth a read. I don't take quite the extreme view that he does - that being that most women instantly evaluate men they meet on a threat-assessment basis. However I admit the way my brain works gives me a tendency not to care much about personal safety. I've waited for buses at 2 am in parts of Seattle that really shouldn't be frequented by civilized folk at those times.
However, there is one thing I've noticed in myself that's really irritating, the socialization to be nice. I'm not talking about being kind, or noble, or anything like that. Just being nice. Not making waves, being accommodating, and polite even when the person on the other side of the conversation really doesn't deserve it. How many of us have smiled and tried to keep reading on the bus while all you really want is to be left alone, only to have a conversation forced on us? Giving someone a fake phone number instead of just saying "Sorry I just don't find you attractive" - an instance where the difference between nice and kind really stands out. I'm not going to say that this experience is unique to women, but I will say that it is more culturally forced upon us than it is upon men.
When Jodie becomes a vampire, she slowly starts to forsake all the socialization she's been subjected to her entire life thanks to a conservative childhood in Carmel. (Woo! Monterey Bay FTW!) It starts with makeup. Somehow having to survive on blood makes stabbing yourself in the eye with a mascara wand completely irrelevant. She starts saying exactly what's on her mind, to hilarious effect especially given the super hearing. Walking around the city at night is exhilarating instead of terrifying. Its an interesting statement, becoming something inhuman enables her to forget all the rules and fears that society forced upon her.
There are three books in this series, and it also explores Jodie's life with her boyfriend Tommy after she turns him into a vampire. He has the exact opposite reaction to the change that she did - where she felt powerful and unafraid he feels confused and frightened. He doesn't like being a vampire, its too far out of his comfort zone. But Jodie's "comfort zone" was so spectacularly uncomfortable that anything else is a relief. I say "uncomfortable" because her life before being a vampire wasn't bad. She had a job, a man, parents that irritated her, but she was always afraid of something. But then, all of a sudden she wasn't. And so when she's offered a cure she turns it down.
I find the contrast between Jodie and Tommy and their reactions to being vampires incredibly interesting. Tommy, who already knew (at 19!) his place in the world, is thrown on tilt. Looking at it from a feminist perspective, that makes a bit of sense. Tommy, being a quintessential male, is comfortable with his place in the world. Even though he becomes a more powerful entity, he isn't happy.
All that aside, the book is hilarious, a highlight being the parts narrated by Abby Normal, the teenage PerkyGoth. Hilarious, I tell you!
Friday, March 14, 2014
A Multiplayer Experience
Writing about the ESO beta got me thinking about storylines for multiplayer games - MMORPGs specifically. Multiplayer strategy and shooter games less so, because the point there is to have fun with the mechanics whereas the online RPG is all about creating your own character and guiding it through a series of stories. After all, quests are supposed to be stories not monotonous level grinds, right?
I guess that would be the first premise I’m starting with here. A thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time and RPGs are story games. Particularly, they are character-driven story games. You might think this isn’t worth pointing out, but I think its something that MMORPGs have lost touch with. Or maybe they never had touch. Maybe they’re like one of those super conservative homeschooling couples that has a gabillion kids but you can’t be sure they’ve ever had sex or if they just reproduce by budding. Just me? Ok, self, lay off the homeschoolers. This is no time to air one’s childhood grievances. As the hilarious Yatzee once said, there is an inherent existential crisis that resides in the MMORPG genre. View his whole review of WoW: Cataclysm here, in which he asks that terrifying question - “Why do you raid?” When you raid for the sake of loot and loot for the sake of raiding, what exactly is the point?
At this point I should make a caveat about my own opinions. I have never been particularly interested in MMORPGs because I felt that by their very nature they couldn’t have immersive stories and I don’t find any appeal in raiding for the loot and vice versa. At least, I’m not interested in playing a game long-term for that reason. That includes single player games - as much as I love Elder Scrolls games I stop playing them once I’ve exhausted the storylines. I can’t be completely engrossed in looting bandit caves if there isn’t some reason I’m doing it. Therefore my experience playing MMOs is somewhat limited. I played Guild Wars 2 enough to get a character to the level cap, a smattering of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and up to level 10 in WoW. At which point I decided it was boring and grindy and no amount of “Oh its really fun once you hit level 90” was going to get me to slog through the hours it would take me to get there. So anything I say here will be colored by that point of view, which I realize may not be shared by all humankind. Ok then, now I’m getting on the soapbox.
I said that I don’t believe MMO storylines can be immersive by their nature, and I should probably revise that statement. I don’t believe the currently accepted formula for an MMO storyline can be immersive because there’s always an inherent conflict between the what is presented to the player and the player’s knowledge. My experience has been once I create a character I am presented with an epic quest wherein I am the Most Special of all Snowflakes and am the last great hope to save the world. This is a wonderful starting point for a single player game, but when I’m looking at dozens of other players around me who are being told the exact same thing the epicness of my journey rings hollow. I am clearly not the sole savior of the world, lone swinger of the Great Spatula of Justice, or any of that. I’m just another player in the machine that is the game, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that if you can see the machine behind the game there’s something amiss. I wonder if there’s a way around that, a story that can still feel like a hero’s journey but also take into account the fact that there are many people involved.
Perhaps I am still power-tripping over being a Master of Dungeons but thinking along these lines brought me quickly to D&D, which is a story-driven multiplayer game. In a D&D group, the DM has to consider the entire party when planning adventures. Certainly there can be quests involving a single character’s background, but the overall focus has to be on the party as a whole or players will lose interest. Have you ever played in a group where the DM’s significant other joins the game and all of a sudden the game has a laser-focus on one character? That is the anti-fun and players will generally leave. They will also leave if the DM tries to run each of them through the exact same situation concurrently. That would be bewilderingly bad DMing. So I guess my question is if player demand necessitates the production of true multi-player focused content from a single human, can we not demand it of huge companies comprised of many people?
That’s not to say that game developers need to become Dungeon Masters, that would be silly. There is a difference between tabletop and virtual environments, one of them clearly being of scale. Where a human DM can spend her time creating content for a specific group of players, game developers have a whole host of players to consider. They can’t be expected to continually monitor the player base and create content based on their actions. However, the current solution in my experience has been in essence to railroad players into a static storyline that is common to all. I think there is a better way, and since there are essentially no new ideas I’m not the only one who thinks so. Bethesda introduced the Radiant Story in Skyrim, and hopefully will continue to refine it in Elder Scrolls Online.
What I would like to see though is an expansion of the dynamic story beyond the sidequest and into a game as a whole. In fact, what I would really love is to play an entire game whose developers didn’t write an actual story at all but rather a potential story waiting to be activated by the players. By now any real game developers are probably staring at their monitors in horror, wondering if I realize the magnitude of what I’m asking. Truth is, I do and I don’t. I realize it is a huge thing to undertake, and I have an imagining of the kind of work necessary, but I am neither a game designer nor an AI engineer so specifics aren’t something I could really speculate about.
But generalizations are something I can speculate the hell out of, and if what I’m calling “potential storytelling” in my head were to come about I have a couple ideas on how it might happen. I do know a little bit about relational databases and analytics - enough to know that the more data you have, the cleaner it is, and the more refined your methods of analyzing it are the better your results will be. If the result is to be player engagement, then the more “data” or potential stories you have the better. I believe (and this is the “faith” use of the word not “I believe you are full of crap”) this can be accomplished by building a network of smaller interconnected blocks of character archetypes, lore, morality codes, quest examples, and so on.
And here’s where I get science-fictiony. You need more than a network of ideas to make a story, there has to be a plot. The game still needs a Dungeon Master, one that can simultaneously create adventures for the solo player and for the group in hundreds of different places at once. Or rather it needs something that does what D&D groups do when they get to big; split off into another group with another DM. You see where I’m going with this, right? An AI so powerful with such a vast database of possibilities that its calculated creativity is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Maybe the Singularity will happen in the land of the MMO - perhaps that is even where it should happen. Don’t give me that look, I’m being serious.***
The landscape of gaming is changing. With the newer consoles and super-powerful PCs the graphics race that defined previous generations is becoming less relevant. Games are looking more and more like their concept art as time goes on and “having cool graphics” isn’t the badge of honor it used to be. Rather, I think the focus should be more on what technologies can be leveraged to make games more dynamic and immersive, more alive if you will. If I’m being honest, if there’s any one thing I believe with anything approaching religious certainty it is that if a technology can be sufficiently imagined it can (and probably will) be created. I would like to see this particular technology happen in my lifetime.
I find it a little ironic that after all that my solution to MMOs that seem too much like machines being a machine that appears human. Granted, I could still be high from unwrapping 3 epics and 2 legendaries in Hearthstone yesterday and I’m just talking nonsense. I should probably stop before I hurt myself.
***The author would like to reiterate that she is neither a game designer nor an AI programmer, but a crazy lady with a blog.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
ESO Beta Impressions
Like the phoenix I rise from the ashes of unproductivity and laziness, ready for the coming flood of vociferous creativity! And also gratuitous lexical chest-puffery. Yes, after a long silence I like to break out the $5 words.
Moving on past the odd ways my ego likes to manifest, there are folks in this world who find writing therapeutic when they’re depressed or having a hard time. I’m not one of those people; when I’m in a tough spot trying to articulate my thoughts is just too exhausting. But shit is better now, these things happen etc etc etc. I’m slowly learning to celebrate my successes instead of beating myself up for failures. For example, instead of dwelling on how I didn’t go to my capoeira class for a few weeks, I’m trying to celebrate the fact I went on Monday. Its not important that I haven’t been writing before, what matters is that I’m writing now. Right then. Here's a picture of my Skyrim character as a bard.
Two beta weekends before the most recent one I received a key to play Elder Scrolls Online. My theory is they have some kind of social media search algorithm that looks for people who are super desperate because I made with the puppy eyes on Twitter and ended up with a beta key. Whatever the reason, it turned out I didn’t play that much on my first beta outing, nor in the second. I did play enough to decide that I liked the combat - it’s far less clunky and inconvenient than Skyrim combat (I say that with love, Skyrim). The addition of MMO-type action hotkeys makes battles much more dynamic and fun rather than something you have to do so you can take the person’s stuff. Personally my Skyrim playstyle is to avoid outright conflict altogether, either by stealth-murder or casting Frenzy spells at large groups so they thin each other out and thus I have fewer enemies to deal with. This is partly because I am an honor-less p’tahk and partly because I find combat so cumbersome. But I quickly found myself wanting to get into combat in ESO so I could see what my abilities do. I also like the fact that your default attack is bound to mouseclicks instead of constantly cycling through a cooldown. Although I quickly found that spamming clicks doesn’t make your character move faster.
On the flip side of that, the presence of other people in the game quickly made me realize that my normal sneaky habits were not going to be as useful. Sure, you can try to sneak up on that flame atronach but chances are someone else is going to clomp in front of you and beat them to death while you’re still quietly approaching. In fact, lets talk about other people for a second. I’m not going to lie, when I first started playing I was mightily annoyed that there were all these idiots in my Tamriel disturbing the heartbreakingly gorgeous landscape. After playing for a while I was still annoyed but resigned, and I have to admit playing ESO with a friend is quite fun. If I have to deal with feckless strangers so I can play with a group of people I actually like, I am ok with that. All the Elder Scrolls games have been partially social experiences for me - when I was playing Morrowind in college my friends and I would drink beer and talk about our conquests (and the hilarious bugs we encountered) for hours. Same thing with Oblivion and Skyrim - talking about playing those games is almost as fun as playing them. So actually playing an Elder Scrolls game with friends to me is worth the trouble of dealing with the faceless hordes.
The question is, then whether or not ESO is truly an Elder Scrolls game in the way the single player games are. What is the Platonic Form of an Elder Scrolls game? Open exploration, random awesome occurrences (I once found a ghostly headless horseman in Skyrim. No quest, he was just riding around.), memorable locations, great lore, fun sidequests, and I suppose I can stop there though I could probably go on. Possibly to the NPCs who are pretty much identical to The Silence - once you’re not looking at them anymore you completely forget they even exist. They exist only as “That Guy Who Wanted Me To Do That Thing” and possibly not even that. Seriously, the only Elder Scrolls NPC that ever stuck in my mind was the vampire who was the count of Skingrad. Anyways. The exploration is definitely still there - I spend half my time doing quests and the other half just picking a direction and running just to see what was over there. I was rarely disappointed when I did so, although I did wander into some zones that were far above my character’s level. The towns don’t have quite the same amount of sticking power to me that the single player games do, but they’re still pretty. The lore is definitely still there - there are lorebooks hidden around the world that makes exploring more rewarding, and a lot of the sidequests are made richer the more you know about the world. For example, I did a quest that involved some Argonians who believed the Dark Elves were trying to poison their Hist tree. Seems pretty simple, but having knowledge about what the heck a Hist tree is and the history between the Dunmer and the Argonians made it much more interesting. Although that quest bugged out for me at the end so I couldn’t complete it.
Which brings me to hilarious Elder Scrolls bugs. While they are a frustrating but endearing part of the single player Elder Scrolls game, I really hope that won’t be true for ESO when its released. A game that’s played online, where your character and progress are saved on a server instead of your hard drive, with no save files to edit for that matter, simply can’t survive being buggy. I encountered a few glitches this beta weekend, most of which were resolved by reloading the UI.
Let me tell you a story. Playing Skyrim the other day with the Dawnguard expansion I came across an interesting bug wherein Durnaviir got stuck in the ground and was flying around like a land shark. Hilarious, no? Except then he flew under Shadowmere, broke free of the ground and carried my horse off into the horizon where the poor thing probably fell to his death. Really funny in a single player game where you can reload a save or open the console and fix it, but this situation would be incredibly rage-inducing if you’d just spent a bunch of non-reloadable gold on a horse only to have it carried away by a stray dragon.
The only real complaint I have about ESO has to do with the story, and its not a big enough complaint to keep me from enjoying the game overall. At the very beginning, starting in a prison as usual for an ES game, you are presented with your Destiny. You, and you alone must release a powerful prophet from this hellish prison and save the world. It is very hero’s journey, and very in line with the single player installments. But its not a single player game, and its pretty clear that while this Prophet dude is telling me all about my Great and Momentous Task he is telling a gajillion other people the same exact thing. It really breaks the immersion and feels like all of the players are in their own bubble Tamriel universes that intersect each other only at certain points. To illustrate - I grouped with a friend and we went to do a story quest that I had already done, but he hadn’t. When we entered the building where it was to take place he disappeared and I was left behind. I felt like I was in that Stargate SG-1 episode where Sam, Daniel and Mitchell all get stuck in a parallel reality. He was walking around in there but I couldn’t see him. The Prophet was talking to him, but to me he was just sitting in a chair muttering. It was jarring to the point where I’m hoping at some point in the story we find out that the Prophet can be in multiple places at once and individually interacting with all these people is part of his master plan to raise an army of maniacs. And when you find out he just shrugs and says “What, you think I was putting all my eggs in one hero basket?” And then the body of players would become a single protagonist in an effort towards a goal. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
However, my gripes are not going to keep me from playing because honestly I don’t expect immersive stories from MMORPGs, so even though the Elder Scrolls factor was in play my expectations weren’t very high. But it did get me thinking about how one could make a truly immersive and rich multiplayer story, one where the player isn’t a special snowflake (who clearly isn’t special at all) but a part of a whole. I don’t know if its possible, or if people would even play it, but its definitely something to think about.
In conclusion, I will be playing this game. I've already pre-bought the Imperial Edition and I'm happy about the early access because I have some seriously cool names I want to lock down. I think it has the soul of an Elder Scrolls game and it never felt boring or grind-y. I hope they get the bugs ironed out before release though, or I'll just make sure to stay away from the land shark dragons.
Moving on past the odd ways my ego likes to manifest, there are folks in this world who find writing therapeutic when they’re depressed or having a hard time. I’m not one of those people; when I’m in a tough spot trying to articulate my thoughts is just too exhausting. But shit is better now, these things happen etc etc etc. I’m slowly learning to celebrate my successes instead of beating myself up for failures. For example, instead of dwelling on how I didn’t go to my capoeira class for a few weeks, I’m trying to celebrate the fact I went on Monday. Its not important that I haven’t been writing before, what matters is that I’m writing now. Right then. Here's a picture of my Skyrim character as a bard.
Two beta weekends before the most recent one I received a key to play Elder Scrolls Online. My theory is they have some kind of social media search algorithm that looks for people who are super desperate because I made with the puppy eyes on Twitter and ended up with a beta key. Whatever the reason, it turned out I didn’t play that much on my first beta outing, nor in the second. I did play enough to decide that I liked the combat - it’s far less clunky and inconvenient than Skyrim combat (I say that with love, Skyrim). The addition of MMO-type action hotkeys makes battles much more dynamic and fun rather than something you have to do so you can take the person’s stuff. Personally my Skyrim playstyle is to avoid outright conflict altogether, either by stealth-murder or casting Frenzy spells at large groups so they thin each other out and thus I have fewer enemies to deal with. This is partly because I am an honor-less p’tahk and partly because I find combat so cumbersome. But I quickly found myself wanting to get into combat in ESO so I could see what my abilities do. I also like the fact that your default attack is bound to mouseclicks instead of constantly cycling through a cooldown. Although I quickly found that spamming clicks doesn’t make your character move faster.
On the flip side of that, the presence of other people in the game quickly made me realize that my normal sneaky habits were not going to be as useful. Sure, you can try to sneak up on that flame atronach but chances are someone else is going to clomp in front of you and beat them to death while you’re still quietly approaching. In fact, lets talk about other people for a second. I’m not going to lie, when I first started playing I was mightily annoyed that there were all these idiots in my Tamriel disturbing the heartbreakingly gorgeous landscape. After playing for a while I was still annoyed but resigned, and I have to admit playing ESO with a friend is quite fun. If I have to deal with feckless strangers so I can play with a group of people I actually like, I am ok with that. All the Elder Scrolls games have been partially social experiences for me - when I was playing Morrowind in college my friends and I would drink beer and talk about our conquests (and the hilarious bugs we encountered) for hours. Same thing with Oblivion and Skyrim - talking about playing those games is almost as fun as playing them. So actually playing an Elder Scrolls game with friends to me is worth the trouble of dealing with the faceless hordes.
The question is, then whether or not ESO is truly an Elder Scrolls game in the way the single player games are. What is the Platonic Form of an Elder Scrolls game? Open exploration, random awesome occurrences (I once found a ghostly headless horseman in Skyrim. No quest, he was just riding around.), memorable locations, great lore, fun sidequests, and I suppose I can stop there though I could probably go on. Possibly to the NPCs who are pretty much identical to The Silence - once you’re not looking at them anymore you completely forget they even exist. They exist only as “That Guy Who Wanted Me To Do That Thing” and possibly not even that. Seriously, the only Elder Scrolls NPC that ever stuck in my mind was the vampire who was the count of Skingrad. Anyways. The exploration is definitely still there - I spend half my time doing quests and the other half just picking a direction and running just to see what was over there. I was rarely disappointed when I did so, although I did wander into some zones that were far above my character’s level. The towns don’t have quite the same amount of sticking power to me that the single player games do, but they’re still pretty. The lore is definitely still there - there are lorebooks hidden around the world that makes exploring more rewarding, and a lot of the sidequests are made richer the more you know about the world. For example, I did a quest that involved some Argonians who believed the Dark Elves were trying to poison their Hist tree. Seems pretty simple, but having knowledge about what the heck a Hist tree is and the history between the Dunmer and the Argonians made it much more interesting. Although that quest bugged out for me at the end so I couldn’t complete it.
Which brings me to hilarious Elder Scrolls bugs. While they are a frustrating but endearing part of the single player Elder Scrolls game, I really hope that won’t be true for ESO when its released. A game that’s played online, where your character and progress are saved on a server instead of your hard drive, with no save files to edit for that matter, simply can’t survive being buggy. I encountered a few glitches this beta weekend, most of which were resolved by reloading the UI.
Let me tell you a story. Playing Skyrim the other day with the Dawnguard expansion I came across an interesting bug wherein Durnaviir got stuck in the ground and was flying around like a land shark. Hilarious, no? Except then he flew under Shadowmere, broke free of the ground and carried my horse off into the horizon where the poor thing probably fell to his death. Really funny in a single player game where you can reload a save or open the console and fix it, but this situation would be incredibly rage-inducing if you’d just spent a bunch of non-reloadable gold on a horse only to have it carried away by a stray dragon.
The only real complaint I have about ESO has to do with the story, and its not a big enough complaint to keep me from enjoying the game overall. At the very beginning, starting in a prison as usual for an ES game, you are presented with your Destiny. You, and you alone must release a powerful prophet from this hellish prison and save the world. It is very hero’s journey, and very in line with the single player installments. But its not a single player game, and its pretty clear that while this Prophet dude is telling me all about my Great and Momentous Task he is telling a gajillion other people the same exact thing. It really breaks the immersion and feels like all of the players are in their own bubble Tamriel universes that intersect each other only at certain points. To illustrate - I grouped with a friend and we went to do a story quest that I had already done, but he hadn’t. When we entered the building where it was to take place he disappeared and I was left behind. I felt like I was in that Stargate SG-1 episode where Sam, Daniel and Mitchell all get stuck in a parallel reality. He was walking around in there but I couldn’t see him. The Prophet was talking to him, but to me he was just sitting in a chair muttering. It was jarring to the point where I’m hoping at some point in the story we find out that the Prophet can be in multiple places at once and individually interacting with all these people is part of his master plan to raise an army of maniacs. And when you find out he just shrugs and says “What, you think I was putting all my eggs in one hero basket?” And then the body of players would become a single protagonist in an effort towards a goal. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
However, my gripes are not going to keep me from playing because honestly I don’t expect immersive stories from MMORPGs, so even though the Elder Scrolls factor was in play my expectations weren’t very high. But it did get me thinking about how one could make a truly immersive and rich multiplayer story, one where the player isn’t a special snowflake (who clearly isn’t special at all) but a part of a whole. I don’t know if its possible, or if people would even play it, but its definitely something to think about.
In conclusion, I will be playing this game. I've already pre-bought the Imperial Edition and I'm happy about the early access because I have some seriously cool names I want to lock down. I think it has the soul of an Elder Scrolls game and it never felt boring or grind-y. I hope they get the bugs ironed out before release though, or I'll just make sure to stay away from the land shark dragons.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Heeeeeeeyo I have a Twitch Channel!
Well, technically everyone does so that's not exciting. Whatever, crazy lady that's like getting excited about your breakfast cereal. Which is Cheerios, not Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Reese's Puffs. What is exciting is there is going to be something on my Twitch channel!! Hurray!
I've never really had the urge to stream myself playing games (except for that brief early Hearthstone period where I was entertaining the silly notion that I could become the Most Powerful Wizard in the land) because there's nothing really exceptional about me or my gaming skills. Unless you count "most distance physically traveled trying to force Mario over a jump by jerking the controller" as being exceptional. I which case I am the CHAMPION. However, I've been wanting to run a Pathfinder campaign for a really long time - I actually did get it started briefly back in Seattle but it didn't go very far. My friends and I were all in food service, and trying to get three bartenders to have the same 6 hours off is like herding cats. Feral cats, and you don't have any thumbs. But this campaign idea has been kicking around in my brain ever since and the other week a golden opportunity came about for me to run it and start my very first stream.
The first session is this Sunday from 12-4 PST and will probably be boring because it will be all about character creation. But if anyone is interested in following the adventures of some awesome DayKnights on Sundays, and possibly watch me make an ass of myself imitating NPCs demonstrate my amazing shouting prowess go and follow my channel! I'm really excited about this because there are so many moments in tabletop gaming over the years I really wish I had a video archive of. There's a creativity and openness to tabletop RPGs that just isn't possible to have in the vidja games. Also I'm an attention whore.
One last thing, I'm using roll20.net to run this game and so far it is a seriously sick little piece of programming. Check it out if you're thinking of running a virtual game yourself!
I've never really had the urge to stream myself playing games (except for that brief early Hearthstone period where I was entertaining the silly notion that I could become the Most Powerful Wizard in the land) because there's nothing really exceptional about me or my gaming skills. Unless you count "most distance physically traveled trying to force Mario over a jump by jerking the controller" as being exceptional. I which case I am the CHAMPION. However, I've been wanting to run a Pathfinder campaign for a really long time - I actually did get it started briefly back in Seattle but it didn't go very far. My friends and I were all in food service, and trying to get three bartenders to have the same 6 hours off is like herding cats. Feral cats, and you don't have any thumbs. But this campaign idea has been kicking around in my brain ever since and the other week a golden opportunity came about for me to run it and start my very first stream.
The first session is this Sunday from 12-4 PST and will probably be boring because it will be all about character creation. But if anyone is interested in following the adventures of some awesome DayKnights on Sundays, and possibly watch me
One last thing, I'm using roll20.net to run this game and so far it is a seriously sick little piece of programming. Check it out if you're thinking of running a virtual game yourself!
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