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I like what I like

Sunday, January 4th, 2015

Over the weekend, I had some more free time than usual, so I decided I’d try to take my own advice and actually try to pare down my backlog a bit. The problem I run into is that lots of the games I have are so long, and my time to play them has shrunk as I’ve gotten a career that doesn’t involve me playing video games all day. That means that I look at games just sitting there waiting for me to play them that take 30+ hours to play through once, and then I think about the time commitment, the opportunity cost of doing something else (like reading something or watching something on television), and the lazier option usually wins.

But I decided that I wanted to make an effort and actually get through some of these things that have been sitting in my library (in some cases, for years). Or, if not get through them, at least try them to see if they’re any good. So, to that end, I decided to play a couple of indie darlings that weren’t too long: Fez and Journey. Both looked interesting, and I more or less knew what I was in for (and I knew that I could do a playthrough of them over the course of a long evening or two). What I found surprised me: I didn’t really like them.

Fez, I didn’t like because the primary mechanic made the game clunky and tedious. Journey, I liked a little bit better, but it seemed like it was trying too hard. I’m clearly in the minority on both accounts.

It’s been suggested to me on occasion that my tastes in games is weird and I don’t like popular games just because they’re popular and if you tell me I have to like it, I won’t like it out of spite. That’s only partially true.

It’s true that I do like weird, off-the-wall games. Always have. I also liked some popular games like the Half-Life series, or the Final Fantasy series (through 8, I haven’t played anything past that except for the MMORPGs). But there are also hugely popular games that I didn’t like for one reason or another, such as the original Halo or Dragon Age: Origins.

I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of popular games that I did or didn’t like, but the point I’m trying to make is: I’m not wrong. If you like the games that I didn’t, you’re not wrong either. I know that this is going to sound corny and completely obvious, but different people like different things for lots of reasons. That’s a wonderful thing.

Your opinion is uniquely your own. And, no matter what critics or naysayers say, you owe it to yourself to form your own, and to not take the word of reviewers or experts as gospel. Consider their opinion, certainly, but never feel like you always have to agree with the herd. Just remember: if you’re honest, going up against popular opinion doesn’t necessarily make you a hipster or a troll. It just means that your opinion is not perfectly in line with everyone else’s.

That doesn’t make you weird. That makes you normal.

Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

Posted in advice, blog, blogs, confessions, conjecture, crummysocks, culture, editorials, Final Fantasy, follow-up, Internet, MMORPGs, opinion, ps3, ratings, reactions, video games | Comments Closed

Another year

Friday, January 2nd, 2015

I’m not one for navel-gazing, but I wanted to take advantage of the change in the calendar to reflect a bit on the past year, and what I’m doing now.

When I last updated, we were on the cusp of participating in the Extra Life for Kids video game marathon. We were successful, and were able to raise $600 for Riley Hospital for Children. That was pretty great.

I also managed to keep this site updated for several weeks in a row, something that I slacked off on when I started preparing for the marathon. However, I also was working on launching This Videogame Rocks, which is a website to chronicle my love of video games and video game culture, and to tie in and hone all of the skills that I’ve acquired while farting around with this site, while having a less embarrassing domain name to say. I’m still working on finding my groove over there, so it’s pretty light on content for the time being. But, please, check it out and let me know what you think.

This is also the time of year (well, last week was, I guess) where people tend to set New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t do that. Not because I think I’m better than anyone or because I don’t think that I can improve in any way, but because New Year’s Resolutions almost never stick. Setting a whole bunch of lofty goals all at once and then getting frustrated because I can’t do them all flawlessly is just a recipe for failure. Besides, why would I vow to improve myself only one time a year? Self improvement is a never-ending process, and one that I maybe don’t do as well as I could. But I don’t worry about that. I look at what I’m doing and where I want to be and make adjustments as needed. I might fail, I might not. But, as they say, the journey is more important than the destination. So, if I’m destined to fail (and I hope I’m not, but who can say), the best thing I can do is to make sure that I have fun while failing.

So, join me, won’t you?

Won’t you?

Posted in about, articles, blog, conjecture, editorials, General, Misc, site news, sites, time wasters, updates | Comments Closed

Know Your Onions

Sunday, October 12th, 2014

One of my English teachers in high school liked to say that at that level, we’re not actually learning history, we’re actually just learning History’s Greatest Hits. At the time I just laughed it off as a silly joke (he made lots of those), but, over time, I realized he was right. You go through school and get an overview of history (and just about every subject) by hitting the high points so you’re not completely ignorant of how the world and the US got where they are today. But the thing is, there’s so much history (and more of it all the time!) that it’s impossible to know it all. If you’re interested, though, you will go beyond the bare minimum required to pass your high school (and even college) classes. Most of us, though, probably don’t care about that kind of history enough to do more than watch the occasional documentary on PBS, or whatever Drunk History counts as. So, we know some history, but historians, people who love history, know lots more. That sounds obvious, but they do more than watch documentaries in order to feel smart. They do research: they read books (the horror!), they talk to other historians, they visit historic places, and so on. They know that there is more to history than everyone was required to learn in school, and they know that knowledge is out there, they just have to go get it. A lot of times they’ll specialize in one particular area and learn everything they can about it.

You probably think that being a hardcore historian is probably not for you, though. You may not care if Shakespeare actually wrote all his plays or not. You may think that Socrates is just some dead Greek dude who was the subject of a few jokes in the first Bill & Ted movie. Besides, you like video games (well, if you’re reading this site, there’s a pretty good chance that you like video games). Video games are way better than boring old history any day of the week.

But what about video game history?

Felipe Pepe wrote an intresting article on Gamasutra the other day lamenting that a lot of so-called ‘hardcore gamers’ don’t know much about the history of video games past five or ten years or so ago.

That is a disappointing realization.

Video games are becoming (or maybe have already become) a mainstream form of entertainment for everyone, but they’ve been around in one form another since at least the late 1940s. No, that’s not a typo.

Warning: From this point on, I’m going to probably sound like either a hipster or an old man yelling at a butt. You have been warned.

When I say “retro gaming” or “old video games” what do you think of? I’m going to guess that it’s Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda. Maybe just the NES, Super NES, and maybe even the Genesis. Possibly Pong. You may even know that Pong was a big deal in the 80’s. It was, but it was an even bigger deal when it came out in 1972.

You may have heard about the Commodore 64, but do you know anything about it? Can you name five games for it without looking them up? Have you ever heard of the VIC-20? The PET? The Commodore 16? The Commodore 128? The Amiga? Do you know who Jack Tramiel was? Do you know why Bill Cosby is an important figure in Commodore’s history?

You might have heard about the Atari 2600, but what about the reissued Atari 2600 Jr.? The Atari 7800? The Atari 8-bit line? Do you know who Nolan Bushnell is?

Did you know that Texas Instruments had a line of computers that played games? Did you know that the TI-99/4A is actually a revised model of the TI-99/4? Did you know it supported a voice module to enable real actual speech? Do you know who its spokesperson was and why that’s important?

Do you know why games like Diablo are called ‘rogue-like’?

More importantly, have you ever actually played these games that are more than 5 years old? How about 10? 20? Further back? I don’t mean ‘load them up in an emulator and fart around with one for five minutes’, I mean actually play them for a decent amount of time. Try to finish one or set a high score (without abusing savestates, natch). Did you play something outside of the games you’ve heard of (the ‘video games greatest hits’)?

The Problem

While doing some independent research on Ironsword, the game infamous for having Fabio on the label, Wikipedia cites a GameSpy article that says:

You wouldn’t know it from the cover, but IronSword is actually a sequel to Wizards & Warriors. But thanks to the presence of Fabio on the cover, gamers got confused and thought they had accidentally picked up one of their mom’s romance novels.

It also posts a cropped picture of the label (with Fabio’s Fabulous Hair) with the caption that “Anything Fabio is involved in becomes automatically bad.”

I suppose the author was trying to be funny, I get that. But it’s pretty clear that the image was cropped to make that joke, since the full image clearly has, “Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II” at the top of the label. And, I guess I could mistake a video game for a book if I had never seen a book or a video game before. And the game itself is actually pretty good.

The problem is threefold:

  1. Old consoles are hard to find, take up room to store, and emulating games is questionably legal.
  2. A lot of writers for big sites are in their 20s. That’s not necessarily a problem, but a lot of these games came out before they were born, and since old consoles are tough to find, they probably won’t bother. They just rely on Wikipedia, cruddy Youtube videos, and other sources of second-hand (or even third-hand and fourth-hand) information.
  3. Since old consoles are hard to find, and a lot of people won’t bother trying to find or buy them anyway, the echo-chamber effect starts to take over. For instance, Phalanx for SNES usually gets lambasted as having a dumb box featuring a hillbilly playing a banjo. The game must be terrible, whatever it is, right? Wrong. It’s a passable shoot-em-up. Or, ET for the Atari 2600 is the worst game ever made, right? Nope. ET isn’t even the worst game on the Atari 2600 (Sneak ‘n’ Peek, for example). Custer’s Revenge gets a bad rap as one of the worst games ever made (and it is bad, don’t get me wrong), but it was one of those porno games, like Bubble Bath Babes on the NES (don’t Search for these games at work). It was never sitting on the shelf at your local Hills next to Kaboom and Chopper Command.

What all this means is that we have a lot of people writing authoritatively on things that they know very little about. It’s like if you were writing for a music website, but the only thing you knew about music older than 10 years is the songs from your local radio station’s 80’s dance mix, and you just assume that everything pre-1970 is either The Twist or the Foxtrot.

So, what’s the solution?

Unfortunately, I can’t demand that everyone writing about video games broaden their horizons in any meaningful way (if only). But what I can do is demand excellence, both from myself, and from the publications that I read. At the risk of being labeled a pedant and a hipster and a fogey, I can point out why your top whatever list is dumb and wrong, like this list of the 100 best games of all time that only has one game made before 1990 on it (which is Mega Man II. That’s not even the best Mega Man game on the NES).

I don’t want the industry, the consumers, or the media to forget what got us here. I don’t want the past 50+ years of games distilled down to Pong, Pac-Man, some NES stuff, and then everything else. I want to be able to discuss Pix the Cat as being a cross between Pac-Man Championship Edition and Flicky without someone not knowing what I’m talking about. We need to have one eye on the past and another on the future. And a video camera on the present, I guess? I’m not good with metaphors. Video games have a vibrant history, and a lot of that history directly shapes what we have today. Several of those experiences have not been duplicated. They may have been refined or cast off as the medium evolves, but when we study them, it helps us to know why things are now the way they are.

Posted in Arcade, articles, atari, blog, classic gaming, confessions, conjecture, culture, duh, editorials, games, gimmicks, history, Internet, Misc, Nintendo, old news, old school, opinion, Pac-Man, Pinball, reactions, site news, video games | 2 Comments »

Indie, Indie, Indie (Games)

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

We live in a weird time for video games. They’re becoming (and some might say, have already become) mainstream entertainment, and as they grow and mature, and grow, and then grow some more, we start to see some interesting things happen. The barriers to enter the video game market are as low as they’ve ever been, anyone with a computer, programming reference materials, time and passion, can make a game and get it to market, but budgets for so-called “AAA” games are bigger than they’ve ever been, and are getting bigger all the time. Bigger budgets mean that there’s more of a needs to recoup any costs, and doing that means playing it safe. Do what worked in the past, tweak it a little bit, increment the version counter, and then sell it again.

The downside to this is that there is less risk-taking, less variety, and more homogenization. This is good, if you like the current blockbustery flavor-of-the-month game, which I usually don’t. If you’re anything like me, and I’m starting to think that very few of you are, then you want something new once in a while. Something with new characters, new settings, new gameplay ideas, and new concepts.

This is where ‘indie’ games have started to step up their game. Apparently, the only real qualification to be an idie game is that it is developed without backing from a publisher. In the traditional model, a game company would either have an idea, get it to a prototype stage, and search for a publisher to fund the remaining development of the game, or they would be approached by a publisher about making something and then they would get funding to make it. This is weird, since a big-name developer can develop a game and technically it would still be ‘indie’, even though the idea of ‘indie’ seems to be a small team slaving away in a tiny studio somewhere, that’s not always the case.

*I feel like I should note at this point that indie game developers have been around since removable media was invented. You might remember something called ‘shareware‘.

So, what all this means is that, if you want to look for them, there are lots of games being released outside the traditional channels. They won’t necessarily show up in stores or on your favorite video game “news” site. But they’re out there. In fact, there are so many indie games out in the wild now that it’s quickly becoming impossible to even attempt to play them all. And, if you want to develop and release something into the Indie World(tm) you’re going to almost immediately get lost in the shuffle. Unless, of course, you generate buzz.

How do you generate buzz? Word of mouth works, if your game is truly amazing, and you can get a critical mass of people playing about it in the first place, and those people actually tell other people about it, and those people actually download the game and like it, and then continue the cycle (which is much harder than it sounds). Or you can try to get some coverage on one of the millions of game blogs out there. Or you can try to get your game into one of the dozens of ‘indie bundles‘ floating around the internet. Or, etc., etc. All while combating piracy, providing technical support, and maybe trying to work on whatever’s next, all while trying to put food on the table and make sure bills are getting paid.

This means that for every Minecraft or World of Goo or <insert_favorite_indie_game_here> there are dozens of games like Kairo, Goat Simulator, or Dungeon Hearts that just aren’t very good (if you liked them, fine, I’m not here to start an argument), and finding the gems in the firehose of mediocrity is extremely difficult.

So, where does all of this leave us? On one hand, we have formulaic games coming out at a rapid clip with high production values, high cost, and high marketing budgets, and on the other we have games that come out and absolutely insane pace, have production values all over the place, cost a bit less (usually), and have marketing budgets so small that you couldn’t use it to buy a Big Mac. The signal to noise ratio is about the same, but “news” about blockbuster games falls into my lap, and I have to work to find an indie game I might like.

I don’t really know what the solution to all of this is. Maybe there is none. But I do know that the video game landscape is changing faster than the media covering it has been. Weren’t blogs supposed to be faster, and more agile than print media, without the physical limitations? Weren’t they supposed to be able to react and adapt to change, while still covering what’s important?

I’ll tackle that can of worms next time.

Posted in blog, blogs, classic gaming, confessions, conjecture, development, duh, dumb, editorials, marketing, opinion, video games | Comments Closed

Video Board Gaming

Sunday, September 21st, 2014

Making video games from board games always seemed weird to me. You can either buy and play the board game, or you can spend the equivalent of two or three times the cost of the board game (not including the cost of the console to play it on) to play the exact same game on a television instead of on a table.

For instance, the cost of the analog version of Monopoly is about $16, and the price of the video-game adaptation is about $30.

So, I’ve decided to run down a few of the differences to see why buying one over the other might be the better deal.

Video game versions are (usually) smaller – There are always exceptions, of course, but in general the video game version of some board game these days is going to be in a container that’s roughly the size of a DVD case. The board-game version, though, is going to be the size of several DVD cases. I’m discounting things like card games because a deck of cards or something like Uno or Rook might technically take up less room, a collectible card game might very well take up a great deal more room, so I say it’s a wash. +1 point video game versions

Video game versions have AI or Internet opponents – If you have a hankering to play a board game, but don’t have anyone handy to play with, you can always go up against computer-controlled players. Sure, it’s not the same, it’s hard to trash talk the computer or beg for favors or team up on whoever the winner is, but it will generally do in a pinch. And if a game is playable over the Internet, there’s a good chance that someone out in the world is ready to play right now. +1 point video game versions.

Analog versions let you bend the rules – Most people who have played Monopoly have a house rule about Free Parking: money collected from fines goes there and is collected when someone lands on it, is the one that I’ve heard the most. But, the thing is, that’s not a part of the official rules. House rules can make things more fun, can make things more interesting, and can make things balanced in the case of a skilled player going up against novices. They can also make the game longer, more boring, and less fun if used improperly, but so can a bad choice of radio station to listen to while the game is going on. +1 point analog games.

Analog games are cheaper and more portable – Of course, there are exceptions to everything (collector’s editions, themed editions, etc), but, in general, $20 or so will get you the full experience of the board game. On the other hand, to play the electronic version, you need the game, a console, some extra controllers, a television, and electricity. You may argue that you already had all of that stuff to make the game work, but if you take your electronic copy somewhere else, those things might not be available. But the traditional version will work in the middle of the Mojave desert, although, you need to ensure that the jackrabbits don’t abscond with your pieces. +2 points analog video games

It’s harder to lose the pieces to a video game – Getting deep into a game of Mousetrap and realizing that the rubber band has gone missing, so you can’t actually complete its setup and the game is unwinnable is disappointing. Trying to play anything with a deck of 51 cards is a non-starter. +1 point to video game versions.

That brings our grand total to:

  • Analog board games – 3
  • Video board games – 3

This isn’t as cut and dried as I expected it to be. I’d say that having a mix is probably the best way to go. Video games are great (no, really!), but it’s nice to unplug once in a while, too. Besides, nothing beats an evening with good people, good food, good music, and friendly competition in the same room at the same time.

Posted in analog, board games, conjecture, crummysocks, duh, site news, updates | 1 Comment »

LAN Party Redux

Sunday, August 31st, 2014

A little bit over a year ago, I wrote about how I was going to the first actual LAN party that I had been to in several years. My intention was to write a followup to that article after the event, but I kind of got sidetracked and didn’t actually remember to do that until right now.

In the older piece, I expressed some concern that LAN Parties might be a relic of a time when broadband internet access was something that was nigh unattainable, and online gaming was tough to organize. Now that broadband internet access is (relatively) cheap and (relatively) ubiquitous, tearing your computer down, driving 100 miles, setting it back up, playing video games constantly while taking breaks to sleep in your car, a LAN Party just seems like a solution for a problem that no longer exists.

So, I took my four days off work, tore down the computer, packed it up and drove to Louisville, KY to see whatever became of the LAN party where I spent so many of my weekends during my college years. And to my surprise, I learned that almost nothing had changed. I don’t mean that in any good way. I’m just going to run down a few of my recollections from the event:

  • There was a projector projecting mostly short videos on the wall with audio being piped over the house speakers. The videos being shown were mostly from the early 2000s, when I went last, with a few newish ones mixed in. One of the videos that got a lot of play was a kind of mean-spirited video where a young kid ran his mouth about his Unreal Tournament skills, and got ‘put in his place’ by one of the ‘pros’. I’m not going to link it here, but the footage from that video was recorded in March of 2002 and the video came about some time around that same time. We were reliving a moment of history that was only mildly interesting to a portion of the 200 people that attended 11 years prior. If any of those guys even attended, do any of them still think it’s funny?
  • There were very few LAN games being played. I figured as much in the leadup article to this one, where I speculated that most gaming was moving toward MMORPGs and Free To Play titles that you played over the Internet. Even Diablo III did away with LAN play that was a huge part of its predecessors. You play games while connected to the server on the Internet at all times. Period. To curb piracy, or stop resales, or whatever reason you want to subscribe to. So I had to look around to see if I found any games that people were playing that I could join. And I found lots of DOTA, lots of LoL, lots of MMORPGs of several flavors, lots of Team Fortress 2, and not a lot not being played offline. But that’s not too bad, we had a connection to the Internet2 backbone, and speeds were good, until people started showing up. And anyway, I could always hop in IRC to see what people were talking about and shoot the breeze for a bit during downtime
  • The IRC server was practically dead. I might be showing my age, but I spent a lot of time in college fooling around on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat for you whippersnappers out there. There were usually a few dozen people in IRC that were in the channels between games or taking a break or whatever, so you could talk about just about anything that you wanted: what was going on during a tournament, comment on the video playing, make requests for food or whatever you wanted. Basically, it was something to do that didn’t involve losing whatever game you were playing. Except that the IRC server was practically empty. There were a few people in there talking about what servers they had up on the network that were hosting games nobody was playing, or hosting files for trade (ahem), but very few actual people having very little conversation about just about anything. The biggest issue I saw was that some person was expressing some concern that there were naughty words in the chat, and that there were children present, so they shouldn’t be seeing that. The staff member poo-poohed these concerns by saying that the event was not and had never been family-friendly, and seemed to indicate that if parents had a problem with it, well maybe they shouldn’t have brought kids to the place in the first place, since it’s really not an event for them. I pointed out that not only were several of the attendants that had been coming for years old enough to have kids who, themselves, are old enough to come to the event now, but the organizer of the event, President LAN Party himself, had his kids in attendance, working the snack table. So, maybe considering making the event more family-friendly wouldn’t be an altogether bad thing. But that, of course, was not acceptable.

And so on, and so on. It turns out that I requested four days off of work and paid to attend for four days, but only stayed for about 36 hours. In those 36 hours, I played a lot of RIFT, I played a lot of Team Fortress 2 on the Internet, and I used the 100mb/100mb to download a lot of the titles in my Steam library that I had been putting off doing. I wanted to be able to say that the magic was still there, that the few hundred attendees that make the semiannual trek to keep the party going are keeping a piece of history alive. But what I found was a shell of a party. Going through the motions of the event that they’ve done a hundred times before. Every strand of cable is in place, and every mark is hit with expert timing. But the passion just isn’t there. The sense of community isn’t there. An event that needed to change with the times, but just didn’t. A time capsule that’s only been maintained in the very barest sense of the word that continues to exist just because it’s been going on this long, and maybe some people can’t imagine life without it (or they bought a lot of networking equipment that will go unused otherwise). Either way, I’m glad I went back to check on it. It reaffirmed that I may not have outgrown LAN Parties in general, but I’ve certainly grown away from this one.

Posted in articles, Artifacts, blog, confessions, conjecture, General, pointless, site news, time wasters | Comments Closed

I don’t have any gaming guilty pleasures

Sunday, August 24th, 2014

Every once in a while, probably to foster discussion, I see a website or a twitter account ask what gaming guilty pleasures that I have, and my answer is always the same: I don’t have any.

So, what is a guilty pleasure, anyway? A guilty pleasure is something that you enjoy (game, music, movie, activity, whatever) that you feel guilty about liking, and maybe want other people to not know that you do.

That’s odd, right? It’s not just me, is it? You have a thing that you like, but you have to keep it a secret so that other people don’t find out about it, because if they do find out about you liking the thing, then they’re going to think you’re weird. Especially if they all dislike the thing. Then you’ll be the only one in the group that likes the thing that everyone else doesn’t.

Which is not that big of a deal.

Maybe it’s because I grew up at a time where video games weren’t as mainstream as they are today. It was a time where having an interest in computers and video games was something that weird outcasts did, so it didn’t really matter what I liked. The other outcasts and I would talk about whatever games we liked amongst ourselves, and that was pretty much that. We liked a lot of the same games, sure, but we also liked games that the others didn’t, or even that the others had never heard of. But that meant we had more games to try and like or not like as appropriate.

Or maybe it’s because I’m comfortable in forming my own opinions without worrying what other people are going to think. Especially on matters as trivial as the kind of entertainment I like. I realize that this might sound like I’m being preachy or like a chapter out of a self-help book, but I don’t have a problem telling people what kinds of games I like because my friends don’t mind if like something that they don’t. Sure, they might think it’s a little weird that I don’t like the newest Shootymans 3 game or whatever, but I think it’s just as weird that they do like it. Besides, with friends lists, always online consoles, and game collections and activity being on the public Internet, trying to hide a game you’re enjoying playing from your friends is borderline impossible:

Oh, look, I spent 12 hours playing Faerie Solitaire, or I played a video game based on professional wrestling on the Xbox 360, or I imported a cutesy puzzler from Japan to play on my PS3.

So, I’m going to continue on, liking what I want to, and disliking what I want to without feeling bad about it in the slightest or worrying about what other people might think of something as trivial as my preferred video games.

Posted in about, achievements, Arcade, blog, confessions, conjecture, culture, editorials, Japan, Misc, not news, old news, old school, opinion, ps3, Xbox 360 | Comments Closed

Operation: Get Stuff Done

Sunday, August 3rd, 2014

I’ve written on more than one occasion about how ponderously large my video game backlog has gotten. I would tell myself, “I’m saving up so I’ll have something to do when I retire.” Jokingly at first, and then semi-seriously. I kind of stopped saying that when I realized that the backlog had gotten so enormous that, at the rate I’m acquiring games today, even if I retired tomorrow, I might not be able to finish them all.

I mentioned before that a big reason that my backlog has almost taken on a life of its own has to do with the social component. Most of my friends and I have diverged in what kinds of video games we play, so there’s not as many things we can discuss about whatever game we’re playing, and there’s no friendly rivalry to see who can get all of the Gold Skulltulas first, or whatever.

But I think that’s only a part of the equation.

The second part is that there are just too many video games. There are so many video games coming out these days, and between the ludicrous number of bundles out there the wallet-destroying digital sales (Steam, Origin, GOG, etc.), it’s very easy, and sometimes very cheap, to quickly get so many games so quickly that the sheer number of the things hits you like a tidal wave. It looks daunting, but you can steel yourself. You know you can do this, you’ve been playing video games for years.

So you start trying to figure out what you want to play and analysis paralysis sets in. Do you want to play something relatively short, or do you want to play something that will take dozens of hours to complete? Which of these looks like it will be long enough, but not too long? Will I have time to play it around the times where I have to do Grown Up Stuff(tm)? Will I be able to put it down for a couple of days or even weeks and then be able to come back and remember where I was? What if it’s no good? The critics were all over the place with some of these games, what if I wasted my money on it? What if my instincts were right and I find that a game is actually good, in spite of the critical score. What if it was critically acclaimed, and I thought it was boring?

All of these whatifs were really slowing me down. I’ve been getting dragged down into analyzing the minutiae of my potential game experience and hemming and hawing about what game to play so much that instead of playing games, I’ve just been thinking about how nice it would be if I could play some of these games in my backlog, but I just don’t have time.

Or is that really true?

I wasn’t sure. I mean, I have more responsibilities now than I did when I was younger. I have a full time job, a house, I have to do my own laundry, buy and prepare my own food, maintain my own vehicle, and so on. But I’m not actively doing one of those things every moment of every day. For example, I do sleep on occasion. But what do I do with all of my time? Where does it go? I decided to find out by my typical method: overanalyzing the situation, to find out. And that means, making a chart.

Pretend there’s a chart here that shows what I’m likely to be doing at any given hour of the day.

The chart was interesting. It showed me that I have about 30 hours per week where I’m doing nothing in particular. It also showed me that even though I don’t have an 8-5 job any more, that I’ve still got my sleep schedule set up like I do. And that means that I’ve got a couple of hours that I’m spending idle every morning that I could be using for something besides sitting around waiting for time to go to work. I also have more time during the weekend than I originally thought, even though it’s pretty well scattershot through the day.

That’s encouraging.

That means that I do have time to get some game playing in, and I can slowly whittle down my backlog if I can manage to shoehorn it into the timeslots I have available. But, there’s another problem.

Motivation.

It’s weird to think that I would ever need to get myself mentally motivated to play video games, an activity that I have enjoyed for most of my life, but sometimes that motivation just isn’t there. I could play a game anyway, and see if that forces me to get motivated to play it more, but I don’t think I want to do that. Forcing myself to do something when I don’t really want to seems like a good way to sour me on the whole thing, which seems like a bad idea. But I can use that time to do other things related to games. I could update my blog (see the last few weeks’ worth of updates), I could read something, watch a video, create a video, and so on.

*A very important aside, I know that loss of interest in activities that you used to enjoy can be a possible sign of depression. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have that, but if you think you might, nothing I say in this article is going to help except this: I encourage you to find someone qualified to help with depression and they will help you. Depression is a serious issue, and not something that this article (or any other article on a crappy blog site) is qualified to help with.*

I also want to set some goals for myself so that I can revisit this post somewhere down the line and see if I’ve actually made any progress in whittling down the backlog. Feel free to follow along or add your own:

  • Play something for a few minutes every day.
    • Even if it’s something that I’ve played to death, playing something for a few minutes is going to keep my momentum going to tackle something bigger
  • Ignore the Backloggery
    • The Backloggery is great, but it’s a pain to remember to go update it when I buy something, when I finish something, when I 100% complete something, when I start playing something else, etc. etc. Plus, there are no penalties for failure, and no real reward for succeeding, either
  • Don’t go for 100% completion.
    • I wasn’t doing this much these days, anyway, but I need to avoid trudging through a game, trying to collect ant heads or whatever for some unlock or a trophy or something.
  • Don’t rush through the game, either
    • I’m weird, I know, but I hate rushing through a game the first time I play it. I like to soak in all the ambiance and immerse myself into it if I can.
  • Play one new game per month
    • This one is going to be tricky, and my not be sustainable. But the idea here is to at least try something in the backlog instead of letting it sit there and rot, especially if it’s one of the shorter games, to see if it’s even something that I’ll like. I’ve bought some duds before, and didn’t find out about it for over a year because it took me that long to get to them.
  • If a game is terrible, shelve it
    • This goes hand-in-hand with the above. If I try out the new game and it stinks, well, then I just won’t play it any more and I’ll move on to the next one. I don’t need to force myself to slog though it to the end, hoping it will get better. It might, but I don’t really want to waste my time not having fun now for promises of something that might be kind of fun later. I need to trust my instincts, if it’s not fun now it probably won’t be fun later, either.
  • Limit MMORPG time
    • MMORPGs are great, but they will sink and steal time like no other activity I know. And, since they never really end, there’s always something for you do to in them. I had to kill my World of Warcraft subscription a while back because that was all I was doing with my free time at the time. Now, since there are so many MMORPGs that are free to play, it’s incredibly easy to get lost running around a virtual world doing things for hours and hours without actually spending a dime. That’s almost worse than a paid subscription. A paid subscription makes you feel like you need to play something to get your money’s worth out of it, a free subscription is always there, waiting on you to have an hour or three to kill, and that can be dangerous.

Of course, these are only guidelines. Who knows if I can actually stick to them or not, but I won’t know if I don’t try. I’ll be refining them as I go on, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I don’t expect to ever have a backlog of zero unless I just sell all of my games and consoles (fat chance of that happening any time soon), but I can do more to get it pared down, it’s just going to take some work.

And, who’s afraid of a little work?

Posted in about, achievements, blog, conjecture, difficulty, duh, editorials, fire emblem, gimmicks, howto, Internet, MMORPGs, money, not news, old news, opinion, site news, steam | 7 Comments »

Gamers are generally okay people.

Sunday, July 13th, 2014

I want to talk about some topics that I normally don’t discuss on this site, but before I do, I do want to make a few things perfectly clear:

  • Sexism is a real problem, not just in video games, but in every facet of life.
  • Racism, likewise, is a real-life problem.
  • Gender and sexual identity are deeply personal issues, and can be extremely complicated.
  • Neither I, nor anyone else, has any right or ability to tell you what should and should not offend you. All I can do is offer an opinion from my point of view, and it’s up to you to agree or disagree.

Please, refer to that list up there frequently as we go through the discussion today. I’m going to try and touch on a lot of topics that are a lot heavier than what I usually go over here, and I’m going to do it as objectively as I can, but the main point that I want to make today is: gamers are generally OK people.

If you go to Google right now and check, there are millions of pages out there that will tell you that gamers are horrible people.

Google Search that shows 70 million results for gamers are terrible people

70 million articles can’t be wrong!

They’re racist, they’re sexist (usually misogynist), they’re manchildren living in their parents’ basements (or college dorm rooms). They’re slovenly behemoths shoveling Cheetos into their gaping maws with their permanently-stained orange hands, washing it down their throats with a cocktail of Red Bull and Mountain Dew, and only pausing long enough to screech crumb-filled epithets into their headsets at the poor schlub on the other end of the match. That schlub is frequently a games-blogger. A no nonsense professional ‘games journalist‘ who plays games, not necessarily for fun, but because it’s part of their job. A person waist-deep in the gaming culture who occasionally takes time of their day to remind the community, the very community that makes up their audience, the very community that the author depends on to make a living, that they’re terrible people.

That does sound like a problem, doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong: death threats, rape threats, threats of bodily harm, and the like are never okay.

But before we go much further, I want to look at a few numbers:

There are currently about 318 million people in the United States, and of those, roughly 58% of them play video games, and 45% of those are female. That means that right now, today, of the 184,440,000 people who admit to playing video games: about 82,998,000 are female gamers and about 101,442,000 are male, of all ages. That’s an incredibly important set of figures.

That means that something like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, one of the poster children for video games that spawn abhorrent behavior, which sold 26.5 Million copies… only captured about 14% of the market.

Or something like Mass Effect 3, which had an ending that was so poorly received, that it had gamers up in arms with torches and pitchforks, ready to descend on Bioware headquarters and do horrible things, sold 1.85 million copies, which is less than one percent of the total game players in the US.

So, what am I getting at? Where is all of this leading?

Clickbait.

No, really.

Most of the blogs, magazines, web series, and etc. that cover video games are profit-seeking entities. The primary goal of a profit-seeking entity is to, you guessed it, maximize profit. Sure, they may provide a good or a service that you want, and those plums can be very nice, but those are all means to an end: revenue (usually ad revenue). With the staggering amount of websites now on the Internet and the absolutely insane amount of content generated every minute of every day, it’s increasingly difficult to get your voice heard by shouting into the void. So, you rely on one of the oldest axioms in media: “If it bleeds, it leads“.

The media loves a good firestorm, and is not above stoking the coals or stirring the pot, or just glorifying being a jackass to get the most potential clicks/views out of any story they can. The media is not stupid. It knows that controversy, fear-mongering, and sensationalism get viewers/listeners/clicks/whatever. More whatever means more ad revenue, and more ad revenue means that the media outlet can pay its bills, hire content creators to ply their trade full time.

I get that.

And it’s no great secret that ad revenue for virtually every media outlet is vanishingly small. But that’s how practically all of these megablogs on the Internet work: The sites exist only to deliver ads. The content is secondary, and only exists to show you more ads and generate more revenue. Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is either delusional or works full-time for an ad-supported entity. *By the way, I’m much more likely to put up with some nonintrusive ads if you provide me with something that I find useful and you ask nicely, but trying to guilt me into doing it won’t happen.

So, where does that leave us?

The takeaway I want everyone reading this article (both of you) is that:

  1. It would be very nice if the media stopped equating the abhorrent behavior of 14% of the video gamer community as representative of all of us (we also mustn’t lose sight of the fact that a small percentage of a large number, can still be an objectively large number). I realize that’s not likely to happen, but can we at least stop feeding the trolls? Once we do that, we might actually discover that most gamers are actually okay people, and once that happens, we might actually be able to have a real discussion.
  2. Sexism, misogyny, rape, racism, and gender identity are real issues that deserve real attention and thoughtful discussion. They shouldn’t be trivialized and used as a way to boost pageviews/clicks/ad revenue on a slow news day (or any other news day) or to build a personal brand. And they certainly shouldn’t be used as talking points to try and sell you something. These issues are more complicated than can be dissected in an occasional blog entry/video/podcast
  3. Your favorite ad-supported website exists solely to show you ads to generate ad revenue. If something even mildly controversial pops up on your favorite site and contains language that entices you to click (“…and you won’t believe what happens next!”), it’s probably there to try and generate a spike in pageviews (which equals ad dollars), and you can bet that it will continue showing up every so often to boost views/revenues. Controversy creates cash, after all.

These are all important issues, and I can’t tell you what to make of them. Use your own brain, come to your own conclusions. Consider opposing viewpoints and learn more about the issue whenever and wherever you can and be flexible enough to change your stance if you find you had some misconceptions. Don’t let the vocal minority color your perceptions of the whole community, don’t feed the trolls. Always, always, be mindful of articles trying to sensationalize something to get a rise out of you, they’re primarily concerned with clicks, ads, and eyeballs (as long as you clicked on it and looked at an ad, they don’t care about you, personally, any more). And, above all, don’t be a passive observer. Take action, participate in communities, champion ideas you feel strongly about, and help make the world a better place.

Posted in conjecture, editorials, General, marketing, politics | Comments Closed

My Love/Hate Relationship With Video Games Part 3 – Myself

Monday, September 30th, 2013

This is part 3 of my Love/Hate Relationship with Video Games series. If you haven’t already, I suggest you read Part 1 and Part 2 first, so we’re all on the same page. Don’t worry, this article isn’t going anywhere. Probably.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve liked video games for as long as I can remember. Since the first time I was able to operate a joystick to make the character on the screen do what I wanted was magical. From then on, I wanted to experience more. I wanted to explore these virtual worlds and experience as many of these virtual stories as I could. I also wanted to absorb every shred of ancillary information I could find about the games I loved, canon or not. My passion for video games was so intense that even after I cut my left thumb on a jigsaw in shop class (in the Summer of 1992), I spent the next couple of weeks playing through Super Castlevania IV in spite of the agony, which left me with a pretty nice scar as a trophy.

Cutting my thumb open on a jigsaw is not enough to keep me from Super Castlevania IV

Cutting my thumb open on a jigsaw is not enough to keep me from Super Castlevania IV

This helped me out in a few different ways. We moved around a lot when I was younger, and by the time I graduated high school, I had gone to seven different schools. That meant that I was the new guy. A lot. And, as the new guy, I would usually hang out in the back of the class until I could find another kid who liked video games, and then try to make something happen. That mostly worked (not counting that one guy who decided to surreptitiously show me his wiener in the middle of math class (that actually happened)). But being a video game geek through the 1980s and 1990s was tough. I got a lot of grief from people because I might bring a copy of Nintendo Power to read before class started, or I might write a poem about a controller, or someone might start talking to me in shop class out of sheer boredom and make stuff up about games just to see how gullible I was (“Dude, you can totally shoot the dog in Duck Hunt and get a million points!” “If you go over the top of the screen in World 1-4 of Super Mario Bros., like, up by the score, you can totally skip straight to the end.” And so on), or because the other video game geek and I would talk quiz each other about some new game during homeroom, or any number of things. The point is, liking video games was still weird, and if you liked games, you were weird, and if you were weird, chances are, you got bullied.

Now, I don’t tell you all of this for your sympathy (not because I think I’m better than that). But I do think that it’s important to know where I’m coming from so that I can better paint a picture of where I’m going. I could talk about problems I had in my childhood all day, but most of that has nothing to do with video games, and isn’t really on the table today. That’s a part of my life that is behind me that I’ve dealt with and moved on from.

Once I graduated from the public school system and entered college where I didn’t have to deal with bullies and people who just didn’t like me for whatever reason, my whole worldview changed. As long as my work got done, I was free to like whatever geeky thing I wanted to, and nobody cared. I was even able to keep in contact with the few people I knew from public school that also liked video games. We could talk to each other at length (via X-Mail or AIM, or even on the telephone) about the latest and greatest games.

And it was great.

Around this time, I also discovered that LAN Parties were a thing, a place where I could get together with a few dozen people who were just like me (more or less), and we could play games, talk about games, and generally do whatever geeky thing we wanted to for two days or so and nobody cared.

And it was great.

I also started hanging out on my Friday and Saturday nights at one (or more) of the local arcades (back when those were a thing), making friends with all of the other people who hung out at arcades. We played arcade games and Lazer Tag, sometimes all night long, and nobody cared.

And it was great.

All of these things were great because it wasn’t just me experiencing them on my own. We had a community where we could share experiences with the games we were playing together, games we played on our own, and games we were looking forward to.

In short, we socialized. We shared our experiences and enhanced our enjoyment of whatever games we happened to play, and maybe convinced other people who had similar tastes to try out something that they otherwise might not have looked twice at.

But, some things started to happen all about the same time. Home consoles achieved graphical fidelity that matched or exceeded arcade games, and, with the enhanced penetration of broadband, you could find your favorite competitive game and play against an actual person somewhere in the world any time, day or night, from the comfort of your own house. Rendering the big selling points to going to an arcade in the first place moot, and arcades began their slow decline into irrelevance.

Computer games migrated to an increasingly-interconnected model where you either had to be online to play them at all or maybe just for multiplayer. But, again, with current penetration of broadband being what it is, you can find someone somewhere in the world that will play whatever game with you, any time, day or night. You can even buy, download, install, and play through a game without ever interacting with another actual human. It’s great!

Erm, sort of.

Don’t get me wrong. Video games are great. But it’s also great to be able to discuss them with someone. This applies to just about every form of entertainment, too. Saw a great movie? You want to tell someone about it. Read a great book? You want to tell someone about it. Heard a great new song? You want to tell someone about it.

But I’m at a point in my video-game-playing life where my video game tastes have diverged from the tastes of most of my remaining video-game-playing friends. Since the types of games we play don’t overlap much, we don’t usually have much to discuss. Secondly, I do a lot of my gaming alone, mostly due to the fact that I currently live alone, and, since a lot of my friends have gotten married and had kids while I haven’t, means, a lot of the time, we have even less to discuss. So, even on the off-chance that one of my friends is playing a game that we would both be interested in, they usually opt to play it with their significant other or their child, which is perfectly understandable, but that also means that if we want to play through something that I will end up either being the third wheel, or one of us will have already completed a portion of the game and want to speed through the parts that the other hasn’t already played through.

All of that is a long way of saying that: when I’m playing something new, I usually don’t have anyone around that I can share the experience with.

I think that’s why my backlog is so large. I still see and buy games that I want to play as often as I ever did, but without someone or a group of someones to share the experience with, my motivation to actually play through them has all but evaporated. I’ve taken a few steps to work around that with this very website (and a few others) along with the ‘Basscomm and (someone) play (something)‘ series over on Youtube. Which is a great start, but I need to keep moving. I need to keep sharing, keep participating, and keep my sense of wonder and, above all, keep having fun. I don’t need to force myself to play more games and just kind of hope that I’ll get over whatever it is that’s keeping me from making a dent in my backlog (that never works). I don’t need to chase and devour the flavor-of-the-week game as soon as it comes out. I don’t need to comb through mountains of news that isn’t really news and discuss every non-article to death. I don’t need to spend all my time reminiscing about how good things were during bygone days (even though they sometimes weren’t all that good). I need to figure out what it is that’s holding me back, realize that the way I used to do things may not work anymore, and figure out what I need to do to change what doesn’t really work into what does work. Video games have evolved significantly in the last 30 years, and there’s no reason that I can’t make some changes and meet them halfway.

I think I can manage that.

Posted in about, articles, blog, confessions, conjecture, crummysocks, follow-up, General, old school, opinion, site news | 1 Comment »

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