05/16/13

Progress?

It’s probably not nearly as benign as it sounds, but there have been a couple of stories that appear (on the surface) to be positive news. First, Microsoft is reportedly planning to bail on its Xbox Point system. This is good news for those of us that dislike the practice of converting real money into fake money into digital goods (see more here). It seems like they may still do the “wallet” thing, where you put money into a bin now to purchase things later, which has its own issues, but at least we will be able to see the actual, real price of things, rather than having to do on-the-fly currency conversions, which human brains are notoriously bad at. I mean, I’m still not likely to run out and buy a Windows Phone – or even necessarily go out of my way to upgrade to Windows 8 – but when I inevitably buy games on my shiny new Xbox’s digital download service, this should be a slightly-less-exploitative experience! Hooray.

The other bit of news is that EA is supposedly going to be ditching their Online Pass scheme. This is awesome. I’m still not going to rush out and buy a hundred EA titles – there are plenty of other totally legitimate reasons to avoid them – but it is at least one terrible business practice that they are rolling back. Along with their apparent need to TOTALLY CONFIRM, GUYS that you can play The Sims 4 offline, it’s possible that they are at least responding to protestations in ways that end up better for us, as consumers.

And with both Microsoft and Sony doing pre-emptive walkbacks of their always-online system requirements (or, at least, dumping future blame on developers/publishers), I feel like this is a good trend. I’m sure that there will be some other overbearing, stupid DRM and/or anti-consumer news to break us out of this loop, but we might as well enjoy this moment while it lasts. Yes, I’m claiming a (minor) victory – one that will surely come back to bite me in the ass – but we might as well take them where we can.

house_yay

05/14/13

Testing a new feed

I’ve set up a Feedburner feed for RSS, and want to make sure I didn’t totally break everyone’s subscriptions. So please ignore this post. If you see it. Which hopefully you will.

Why am I doing this? I don’t know. Apparently it’s easier to see subscriber numbers, etc. Blame Liore.

05/14/13

Good News, Everybody!

Actually, it’s not good news. RIFT is apparently going free-to-play this summer. I’m pretty sure that this sucks. I feel like I’ve talked about subscriptions and F2P a lot, in general, but I find it even more frustrating when a) it’s a game that designers have said many times is not going to go F2P, b) has been championed for its subscription -> rapid content updates service model, and c) that I still have 213 days worth of prepaid time for.

I think the last bit is the one that frustrates me the most. It’s not that I’m upset with having given Trion my money – the choice I made to purchase a year’s subscription along with Storm Legion is one that I’m still reasonably happy with (despite not having actively played RIFT very much in the last couple months) – it’s that the thing that I paid for is being swept out from under me. Given that the developers have said that they have been actively investigating F2P conversion for more than a year, it is clear that they made the pay-for-a-year option available knowing full well that some part of that year would probably fall under the F2P umbrella. I don’t know whether I still would have gone for it, or not, but it feels like the negotiation is made in bad faith when one side is holding out on pertinent information (sidenote: Apple does this same sort of thing a lot, by being extremely tight-lipped about product launch schedules. Informed consumers can make decent inferences from past behavior, but lots of people still end up buying a new computer in the week or two prior to product launches.).

Now, Trion is doing that thing where they convert all of the subscriptions into “Patron” accounts – giving them perks like trainer-summoning and extra storage space or whatever – but that is a very different type of service from what those of us who paid for subscriptions were committing to (i.e. access). Trion is also introducing things like purchasable raid gear which sounds like a truckload of landmines. Theoretically, it’s only going to be the not-top-most gear, and only things that are otherwise obtainable in game, but man does this seem like a good way to destroy any sort of reasonable progression structure. Who knows though, I’ve been in a position before where I really wanted a viable catch-up option (say, to join a more progressed guild).

I’m way more worried about the social implications. Will people still be interested in running tiers-behind raids at the end of an expansion, like I was doing, when there are more direct shortcut methods to gear? If I join up with a new guild that happens to be ahead of where my old guild was in progression, will I be expected to drop $40 on a complete set of cash shop gear? Or maybe just $5 here and there to fill in holes when the boss doesn’t drop my shoes for 6 months?

Two other things they are adding are pretty standard cash-shop fare: xp/token boosts and cosmetic items. I’d like to go on record here and now that XP boosts, in particular, are a complete fucking travesty of game design. To me, they indicate that you have failed to build a game that people actually want to play – if people are willing to give you money to not play your game (or to “have” to play it less), then you should probably reevaluate the game systems. And yes, I absolutely realize that for some portion of the population in any given MMO, the “max-level experience” is all that they are really after. In fact, I’ve played with that mindset at various times. But the thing is, if you want to provide end-game-only players an opportunity to ignore the part of the game they aren’t interested in (and think that this is actually a good idea, which I doubt), then why not let them ignore the part of the game they aren’t interested in? Why not just sell them a max-level character, complete with some standard of gear that lets them actually complete whatever tier of content they want? Why even force them to bother with the leveling experience at all?

And, as a more casual player, still working through the available questing content, why would I be happy about getting some XP boosts that make me miss out on cool quests and exploration time that much faster? If I don’t have a group waiting for me, then all I have to look forward to is tooling around town waiting for an instance queue – and I’m not especially keen to get to that place faster than intended. Same thing if I am leveling up with a friend. If one of us happens to get XP boosts, and the other doesn’t, then all it does is break our ability to play at the same level. Sure, I can “just not use them”, but then I’m actively throwing away part of what my money is paying for.

I just… really, really hate XP boosting items. If you want people to experience a leveling curve and area storylines and things like that, it seems important to understand approximately how quickly a character will move through a zone. Blizzard got this completely wrong when they introduced heirlooms and refer-a-friend bonuses, and they made it so very much worse when they redid all the leveling zones in Cataclysm. Even when doing my best to avoid rest experience, I couldn’t finish an area without quests going grey on me. And, again, I could just not care about that (and tried not to), but that doesn’t meant that it isn’t completely terrible tuning.

And quickly, on cosmetic items. I’m typically glad when there are more cosmetic items available. I love customizing characters and giving them personality. I even just like collecting bags full of weird robes or hats to show off for 5 minutes and then put away. MMOs typically offer a lot of opportunity to collect things – and, more importantly, show them off a bit. So sticking the vast majority of “cool” items behind a pay wall is sort of getting old. Hopefully, they’ll end up similar to the costume items in Defiance – where the models aren’t unique, but the colors are – but I think that will be hard with the (totally awesome) dying mechanics in RIFT.

 

04/25/13

Random Thoughts

Earlier this week, Liore posted a guest post that I wrote for her on DLC and why it is dumb and potentially unhealthy. I don’t know that there are a lot of people that read this blog but don’t follow hers, but on the generous assumption that there are, you should check it out. 

I read this article on Gamasutra today, and it follows up this one on Destructoid. They both make a similar case to my post on Learning the Language about why things like “Easy Mode” are not actually bad. I think it’s important to remember that, for a lot of us, we grew up learning this stuff. And yes, the number of people who have played games is ever-increasing. But if we really want this passion of ours to be taken seriously – to be able to talk about it publicly without the silly nerd-shame that is so easy to feel – we need to be able to share actual games with other people. This was the magic of the Wii, and being able to play things like Wii Sports and Tiger Woods with my dad was awesome. Even if he never picks up a long-form RPG or joins me in the Borderlands, I think he has a better appreciation for why I might actually find these things fun. And that’s awesome.

Likewise, being able to hand over Spec Ops: The Line or Bioshock: Infinite to a friend of mine that only plays games occasionally – but really appreciates film and storytelling – would be great! I don’t really feel like we’re there, yet, but I’d love to get there. The more I think about this, the more I appreciate things like Twitch TV or Let’s Plays. Even if I don’t personally love watching other people play through a game (mostly because I want to jump in and do it myself because they are clearly making the wrong choices), I think that having those types of things available to people is awesome. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to push through the language barriers that exist. There are already people doing things like making “movie” versions. This is something I would be able to share with non-gamers (even if it’s a little long). And then we could all talk about Bioshock.

Speaking of which, I played through Bioshock Infinite over the last couple weeks. I really enjoyed it! And, more importantly, I keep thinking and reading about it. And not in the SimCity schadenfreude sort of way (oh god it is horrible). I don’t want to talk about specifics just yet, but I think we are planning a spoiler-heavy podcast discussion soon. Many things will be said then, and possibly I will write something up afterwards. Until then, this post is an interesting spoiler-free discussion (the comments are not spoiler-free - DO NOT SEEK THE COMMENTS).

That said, this is the sort of thing that made me love the game visually:

Why yes, that is a George Washington robot with a machine gun.

04/3/13

A Hellbug Ate my Screenshots

Cat Context Turns OneSo, first things first, the podcast is coming up on its one-year anniversary! To celebrate (and also because some WoW guildies, Liore and I were going to be there, anyway), we will be doing a live podcast from the Aria in Las Vegas on Saturday, April 20 at 2PM! Hooray! And party hats! Definitely tune in, because I am sure something fun will happen. At least, it will be fun for us. Hopefully, Arolaide will be able to make it by interweb phone.

Second things second, I am sad that I haven’t written in a while! I had a goal of making at least one post a week this year, and I have clearly fallen behind that goal. Hopefully, I haven’t lost you guys, since infrequent updates are the bane of bloggers in a world where Google thinks that RSS feeds are lame. But I’ll assume that I haven’t, because, afterall, we all know that Google is wrong. The other thing we all know, is that it would be totally awesome if I was able to get a job that paid me $1.03 million a  year for running the company that was about to be voted Worst Company in America for the second year, running. Seriously, it wouldn’t even be that hard to turn them around! I’d just, you know, not be a total asshole who builds my business around shitting on my customers and rejecting risk-taking and innovation. But hey, what do I know? I only play the games and/or yell about them on the internet. (Also, if you haven’t, go read Aro’s post on SWG and its free-to-play implementation. Because it’s dead on.)

But enough about stupid stuff. Because today was supposed to be a happy occasion! Look, here’s what’s important. The last few weeks have been a pretty awesome time games-wise for me. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been writing – but probably it’s because I’m lazy. I’ve played through the new God of War: Ascension, I’ve played yet-more Borderlands 2 (since the new level-cap increase and playthrough DLC dropped yesterday), Tomb Raider has been causing the internet to pour out some simultaneously horrible and heartwarming stories (and is sitting on my desk waiting for me), and Bioshock Infinite appears to have broken the ratings meter (I swear I will eventually get to this).

Even with all of those things to talk about, I have decided to go in another direction. Yesterday (although, also, sort of, on Monday), Trion released the game-half of Defiance – it’s new hybrid shooter MMO/SyFy network television show. The show, itself, premiere’s on April 15th, and the trailers all look really fun! People that have seen the pilot are up on it, and I can always go for some relatively cheesy sci-fi, if that’s what this turns out to be. The background is something like… Aliens came to Earth, but they weren’t necessarily aggressive. However, some Bad Shit™ went down, and there was a big war and now the Humans and Irathient (one of the Alien races) are surviving together in a post-apocalyptic deathscape. Also, there are ginormous head-crab looking things that want to eat you. And you can drive around in a Mad Max-style DODGE CHALLENGER or on an ATV or whatever.

It really doesn’t matter, because the game is a ton of fun. At least, from the few hours I played in beta and over the last day and a half. I have no idea what was really going on, except that I picked one of four primary skills (Cloak, Decoy, Overload and Blitz) and then just started sticking points in a couple of surrounding boxes that seemed fun. There do not appear to be any classes, at all – everyone gets to make the same choices from the same palette and the initial skill choice just indicates where you start. It’s very much like the FF VIII skill tree thing, if you guys remember that. It looks like, eventually, everyone will have all the options available to them, and respecs are reasonably affordable. You can also build out loadouts (which include sets of guns/shield/grenades, and maybe skills?) and swap between them fairly easily. Honestly, I don’t know that much at this point, but I also don’t care.

My plan was to just post a bunch of screenshots here and talk about the awesome hardcore human dude I made and the badass Irathient that Telaan made, but all of my screenshots were instead just black images. Shtako!

Instead, I’ll just leave you with an official screenshot or two, and this general description of how my evening went:

Arkfall events are like Rifts!

Start out with a fun cutscene in which an angry space captain and a weasely-seeming corporate scientist (who I apparently work for?) are yelling about who is actually in charge of this mission. Shit goes down, and I find myself disoriented on the ground somewhere near Mt Tamalpais (hey, I live sort of near there – also, there is a ridiculously good cheese named after it). Cortana EDI My EGO implant talks to me and teaches me some stuff, but mostly there are mutants and bugs to shoot. I run around and find the space captain and a badass Irathient woman who gives no fucks, get an ATV, see a giant red indicator on my minimap, follow it and SHOOT GIGANTIC HELLBUGS (pictured above) FOR AN HOUR. Seriously, it was awesome.

Is anyone else playing? There are no official servers in the game – apparently, you are just sort of put in the same phase with your friends/guildmates on an ad hoc basis (and can travel to them) – so not even that amount of coordination is needed. Supposedly the first couple weeks in-game are going to have things that lead directly into the first episode of the show, so join up and shoot things if you’re so inclined! Cause first impressions are that this game is going to be fun, and Trion has proven to me their ability to rapidly fix any issues that are currently hanging around.

02/27/13

Just Shut Up and Play

The title of this post is something that I have to constantly tell myself when I game. And, as it turns out, that is not nearly often enough. People have threatened to give me a stack of Post-It Notes to stick all over my monitor and/or wall with that emblazoned on it, and it still probably wouldn’t help. Specifically, here, I am talking about my tendency to overanalyze choices and turn an ostensibly fun hobby into something that is much closer to a stressful chore.

Let me paint you a (totally hypothetical and in no way real) picture, here. Say that you are trying out a new game – one that you’ve even ridiculed in the past for being dumb. This is a game that presses all sorts of silly (and/or terrifying) buttons, and one that you aren’t expecting to ever do anything more than mess around with for a few hours before you find something else to distract you. You spend the time to download and install the game, maybe take a quick glance at the official website to get a feel for what your options are, and then dive right into the character builder.

At this point, most games offer you a choice. Sometimes it’s a class, sometimes it’s a race. In this (again, totally made up) situation, it’s to pick your race. This isn’t actually too bad, since I have a few things that I tend to like and dislike aesthetically, so I pick one. Let’s say it’s the hilariously adorable uplifted animal race for the game. Cool, we’re on the path to playing and deciding if this game is any fun! Obviously, it’s hard to choose between the slightly-too-realistic sad cat (think Puss in Boots) face and the proud-of-himself hamster with a curly handlebar moustache. In the end, both are awesome, so you go with one. Still, even at this point, there is a nagging sensation in the back of your head… But you soldier bravely on!

Now comes a trickier choice. Which class will you play? Let’s assume that there are, I don’t know, eight classes to pick from. Those classes can be broken down in several ways. First, I usually try to decide if I want to play a melee class or a ranged class. But then there are other, more subtle choices. Do I want to play someone that can tank? Heal? Do I want to use magic or a bow? Do I want to use DoTs or direct spells? Do I like to AoE, or do I want to be strong on a single target? Does the game offer stealth, and is that something I would want to explore anyway? Do I prefer axes or swords or two weapon combat? Holy shit there are a lot of options and now I do not know which one to pick and this matters so much even though I am only playing this game on a lark to appease my curiosity and it was free anyway and what if I decide I really like this game but all my friends are healers and my class is a healing class and then we can’t go to do group content together because you can only take one healer and that other person definitely likes healing but I haven’t healed in several years and I might suck at it and then everyone will be sad and they will quit and they will blame me or worse yet I will get left out and/or have to reroll into a useful class and start this whole process over and oh god what is happening this is the hardest decision of my life!

So, umm… yeah, that happens to me. Usually, I end up just picking one, playing around with it for a while and letting all those thoughts stew in my mind. Inevitably, those demons get the better of me and I’m like, “Well, I’ll just try this other one out for a little while cause I saw one in the game and it looked pretty cool!” But then the same thing happens again and again. And while I am still in the starting area – rerolling level 1 characters and fiddling with the character generator - the people that don’t suffer from this same crisis of thinking are happily puttering away and spending their attention-for-this-game capital by actually playing the game. At which point, I start to feel like I’m falling behind, and that certain people have already established themselves as “the tank” or “the mage” or whatever, and the process turns in on itself again.

This is not some new phenomenon in my gaming life. And I know that I’m not truly isolated here. There are plenty of people who have come up with some sort of term for this – the one that I’ve always used is Multiple-Character Disorder (MCD) – and I’ve seen plenty of talk about the same kinds of issues on forums from time to time. I’m just not really sure how to combat it, or why it happens. But I do know that I’ve been suffering from MCD for almost 20 years now. This started back in GemStone in the mid 90s. There were just so many cool mechanics and classes to try! WoW was, of course, a serious offender here. I’ve struggled with it in RIFT, and SWTOR, and basically every other game I’ve played since. And when I tried out the SWGEmu thing a few weeks ago, I was already over-stressing about it. And I only actually was logged in for a total of about 5 minutes before I remembered how genuinely unfun that game was at the beginning!

The strangest thing, to me, is that I don’t always have this issue. In games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, I am (usually) able to pick a class and just go with it. If I ever have any regrets or misgivings, I am able to say, “Yeah, it might be fun to do that – maybe I’ll take a crack at it on my next playthrough!” That extra playthrough that never happens, by the way, but I guess the point is that it could. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m able to deal with it better in games that have a defined lifespan because there is the potential to replay it. Whereas characters in MMOs tend to be a much larger investment of time, and they live without any really well-defined end point. I guess, in those cases, the gravity of that choice appears much heavier.

Do you guys struggle with these issues? What have you done to combat them, if so? I’m definitely open to suggestions. Although, again, they probably boil down to “Shut Up and Play”.

Also, in case it wasn’t obvious, the latest game that I was referring to was TERA. Actually, nevermind. Let’s never speak of this again!

02/15/13

Gaming in an Anarchist’s Paradise

For some reason, I was having a conversation with Liore and Arolaide the other day about the end-of-Burning Crusade zombie event in Warcraft and whether or not we thought it was the most awesomest thing ever. For those that don’t remember (and I hardly recall the specifics), there was a plague going around the major cities that turned all the infected characters (PC and NPC alike) into zombies. Zombies that could explode and infect other people. When you were a zombie, you moved slowly, were attackable/could attack other people, and got a special hotbar with skills (hiding your own for the duration). Basically, this ended up with a ton of dead NPCs and the main cities being unusable for standard activities. I think the whole thing lasted a week or two, but my memory on that is fuzzy.

The community, as usual, was split. Some people seemed to love it and think it was the greatest thing that WoW ever did. And then there were other people who yelled and yelled and yelled about how horrible it was and how it interfered with their ability to play the game and was essentially Blizzard-sponsored griefing. And, for a lot of people, those feelings still burn almost as brightly! Which, to mean, only strengthens the fact that it was awesome. In our conversation, Liore basically said, “That kind of chaos is the whole reason I like multiplayer games! People are content and I want them to be able to do horrible shit to me!” Aro, on the other hand, came down firmly in the “Don’t fuck with my experience, griefer asshole” camp.

For my part, I basically called Liore an MMO Libertarian (although I think Anarchist is probably closer to what I actually meant), but simultaneously told Aro that she was wrong. Is that incongruous? Probably. But it’s how I felt. I really *like* world-affecting events, and I want more of them. They make things feel alive, and give the setting a feeling of constant change. On the other hand, people are jerks. I don’t know that I’d really want to spend a lot of time letting them be jerks to me (or defending myself against that inevitability).

Back in MY day…

I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my major gaming influences was a MUD-style game called GemStone IV. Its mechanics are based on the Rolemaster P&P game, and there are just so many “hardcore” things about it. Aside from the Rolemaster crit-tables of doom (one point of damage to the wrong place could be enough to kill you), the game itself had a strong time-limited experience mechanic. Levels took progressively more experience to gain, but the XP/hour was more-or-less fixed – often leveling time was counted in weeks. If you died, you would drop your weapons on the ground – where, if the monsters didn’t pick them up and kill your rescuers, the in-game garbage collection algorithm might sweep through and destroy them forever! If you weren’t rescued within a certain amount of time, then your corpse would decay and you’d return to life naked – with all of your gear left behind to the same fate. On top of that, if you hadn’t bribed the church enough (another increasingly expensive endeavor), your character would just be lost to the underworld forever.

The game was also set up so that free-for-all PvP was enabled at all times. Characters with the pick-pocketing skill could steal loot from other characters (limited to small commodities and cash), but unless you were diligent about closing every container you wore – or spent valuable training points in perception and pick-pocketing yourself – you might not realize that your healing herbs were gone until you went to grab them at a vital moment in combat. When you were in town, there was an automated sheriff who would sweep through and arrest people that killed others or were somehow caught stealing (and accused promptly). But, in general, the thieves would hang out just on the edge of the sheriff’s jurisdiction because they were also the only people who could open lockboxes – the game’s primary form of treasure reward – and sometimes those boxes were trapped and would kill everyone around them when a skill check was failed. So, typically, you were out of luck if someone jacked all your treasure in the few moments you had to spend in a place like that.

Player killing was moderately regulated – the GMs didn’t particularly appreciate people who just went around killing others for fun, and killing people multiple times in a row was strongly frowned upon. But, in the end, the world was very loosely patrolled externally. Most of the societal constructs had to be built by the players, and the “rules of the town” were only as strong as the enforcement of the community.

The problem, here, is that it’s really easy to find situations in which the community either can’t or won’t mete out appropriate consequences. In GemStone, for instance, there was a constant meta-debate on the forums about whether stealing was something that was reasonable for people to do. “The skills support it, so it’s totally fine!” and “Elanthia is a frontier setting, and bad people get ahead!” competed with “I just want to do my own thing, and this sucks” and “Real frontier towns would have hanged repeat offenders”. And I was pretty firmly on the side of “stealing sucks” – despite having a rogue that was fully trained in it. There were also plenty of people who would just provide services to everyone regardless of their reputation for doing shit like paying their healer and then immediately stealing back all of that money.

But would Elanthia have been as fun if there hadn’t been any of these choices and arguments? I’m not sure. I am sure that a Might-Makes-Right society sucks unless you are Mighty enough to actively participate in the rule-setting process. Despite that, I played GemStone for years.

That’s great, but how does it relate to zombies?

If I’ve painted GemStone as some sort of free-for-all craziness, it really wasn’t. What it really was, first and foremost, was a role-playing opportunity. Certainly, there were parts of the community that didn’t participate as heavily, but straight-up out-of-character(OOC)/real-world conversations were unacceptable in public chat channels, and another good way of getting a talking-to from the GMs. Players created all sorts of interesting interpersonal relationships and storylines. But one of the most important sets of events were GM-run storylines. They’d build NPCs, script intricate world events, create unique items, etc. Basically everything you’d want out of a cool tabletop game, but with several hundred players trying to participate instead of just 5 or 6.

When I first started playing graphical MMOs, this was always one of the pieces that held me back. Star Wars Galaxies had a bit of world-building, and at least the world itself didn’t feel particularly static, but the storyline did. When I first started playing WoW, I spent a lot of time trying to get similar RP experiences – that’s really what I knew and what I wanted, a game with fun mechanics AND good RP. But the world and story were both SO STATIC. And I had to rely on players who had all sorts of different ideas about the world and what was fun, and it just didn’t work at all. So, a couple years later, when the Zombie Invasion hit, I was totally psyched up by it. It hit all the right notes about a changing world and the shit that was ostensibly going down affecting my character. Sure, I couldn’t train or do my professions as easily, but who cared? I got to (try to) fight off a zombie infestation in my city – and that was awesome. Yes, it sucked that I couldn’t actually fight off the invasion like I had been able to back in GemStone, but at least it showed a glimpse of it.

Many words, no real point

But how would I feel about an event like that these days? Is it something that a current MMO could pull off again? I’m not sure. I do know that Blizzard hasn’t had any major events like that since, and I think that’s a shame. There have been a few events in RIFT (like the end-of-1.x Storm Legion invasion) that did affect all the capitol cities and were hard to avoid, but none of them were really on the quite the same level of take-over. I think it completely depends on the type of game I am playing, and my reasons for being there.

I do not generally agree that people having the opportunity to be assholes to each other is necessary to gain really interesting gaming experiences. People say that a lot about a game like EVE (and also, 40 hours of boring spreadsheeting for 5 minutes of totally awesome gaming), but all that ever did was make me want to stay away from it. PvP servers are similar to me. MMO PvP can even be really fun! But getting murdered 10 times in a row while I’m just trying to pick berries and have literally no opportunity to defend myself is just… shitty. Sure, I can log off and go play another character for 30 minutes, but that’s letting the other guy win, and despite it not being fun, I am not built to accept that easily.

So, I don’t know. I guess I don’t mind when my game world is antagonizing me, but dislike when my fellow players are allowed to do that.

01/31/13

Magic is Fun! (Or, why I hate myself and my wallet)

I’ve mentioned it a few times before, but one of my non-video gaming hobbies is Magic: The Gathering. It’s a game that I picked up from a couple friends during high school (towards the tail end of Revised) and played fairly consistently for a couple of years, before sticking all my cards in a box and moving on to other adventures for a while. I think I played a couple of games during college, but didn’t buy any cards – or really think about Magic at all – between a pack or two of Alliances (in 1996) and a Deck Builder’s Kit sometime in 2011 (I think. I somehow have one or two cards from the 2009-2010 Zendikar block, but I’m not sure where they came from.)

At that point, a few of the folks in my D&D group started playing casually before our games, as a way to kill some time and expand our gaming. And that was pretty fun. I broke out my cobbled-together-from-booster-packs deck from 1996 and joined in with my horribly-outclassed Sengir Vampire and Norritt, and it was pretty enjoyable. I started looking at ways to modernize that deck, since all the cards that I used to think were good had strictly-improved replacements that had been printed over the last 15 years. I started messing around with printing out proxy cards, in the hopes that I could have a chance to play casually with my friends while not going down the black hole of wallet doom that Magic can be. It worked out because my friends were doing similar things – I bought a few cards here and there to at least make myself feel like I was vaguely supporting Wizards of the Coast – and everything was fine.

Except, the problem was, I’d gotten myself hooked again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s true. See, Magic is one of those games where you can spend far more time theorizing about the game than actually playing it. It’s vastly complex and, depending on the format that you choose, essentially impossible to understand all the angles. You not only have to consider the tactics that your deck is built around, but you have to understand the strategy of each of opponents’ decks (or, at least, some general approaches for various styles), so that you can be ready to deal with them. It’s really cool, and there are a ton of moving parts.

The problem, then, comes back to that black hole money pit I mentioned. At its heart, Magic is really the quintessential model for a microtransaction-based game. You build a ruleset (in this case, a good one, even!), get people hooked with introductory offers (Starter Decks, Intro Packs, etc) that have enough to be able to participate, but not enough to really be competitive, and then sell them incremental upgrades that constantly leave them wanting more. Magic is particularly insidious in that they sell randomized booster packs – a set of 15 cards, with an random selection from several rarity pools (1 super-common land, 10 “common”, 3 “uncommon” and 1 “rare”). A typically “good” deck, has a large number of the rare and uncommon cards, so in order to actually build one of the better decks, you are going to need to open a large number of booster packs. Or go to the secondary market, which is thriving – some cards from the newest set are going $20-30.

This can all add up really quickly. And new sets of cards come out every 3-4 months, that change strategy (or push other, older cards, out of the Standard format), so there’s a strong incentive to buy early, buy often, and continue buying. If you want to build a specific deck (and there are tons of tools to help you build them without having physical cards, like Tapped Out), it’s probably better to just buy the singles. But when you see deck lists that consistently have a price tag of $300+, that seems… ridiculous. On the other hand, if you just buy a few more packs, well, maybe you’ll get something good! Or maybe you’ll get something that your friend wants – and maybe that friend has some cards that you want! And then the whole thing devolves into “Holy shit, my wallet is empty and I’m still missing these 5 cards!”

And all that is if you only want to build one deck and maintain it as new cards come out, which can get really boring.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it’s incredibly difficult to find a good line between having fun on a hobby that I like and not letting it take over my world – both mentally and monetarily. I know that the best thing to do is to just buy some extra printer toner for my casual games, keep playing in the occasional Draft (a format where you buy a few cards that you then use in the games and potentially win some prizes out of), and ignore the draw of a “real” deck. But my lord is it enticing to just buy that one next pack, and hope I get what I need…

01/24/13

Learning the Language

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in the video game world. EA is taking a fair amount of (deserved) heat in the blogosphere; there has been a renewed discussion of game violence, its affect on society, and the industry’s place within that conversation (a topic that we addressed this week on the podcast); we’ve seen yet more stupid marketing decisions that make us all look bad; and some interesting – if odd – product announcements at CES. And despite my intentions to write something here more often, I’m not yet in the habit of reacting to these things by spitting out words here. I’ll keep working on it, though!

Even with all those juicy topics out there, I’d like to talk about something else today. Specifically, the way that we, as gamers, deal with those that are less involved in our hobby. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video on College Humor that poses a “what if” – what if all games had a super-easy mode? It goes on to show Sonic charging off in search of coins, running a single loop-dee-loop and then passing through the end gate. Pac-Man is shown eating pellets around the outside of the map while the ghosts flail about helplessly inside the caged walls. And it goes on.

Look, I don’t want to be the comedy police here, and in a lot of ways, I think the video is funny! It takes things that many of us feel from time to time and pursues them to their ridiculous end. They’ve also done a pretty good job of actually constructing the animations in a way that look like they belong. So, that’s cool, too. And, honestly, I think I’d seen that video before (it was originally posted in 2010) – and probably thought it was sort of funny, at the time. However, having seen it again, I think the underlying assumptions that it tries to play off of are flawed. Namely, I think it promotes the same sort of “us vs them” mentality that leads to outrage in “casual vs hardcore” arguments – or the somewhat more insidious “fake geek girl” discussions.

There is an thought-provoking post here that suggests that, perhaps, we as gamers (or, more widely “geeks” or “nerds” or whatever) have a tendency to look down our noses at those that are not as educated as we our in our chosen discipline – an education that is evidenced either by gaming credentials like how many games of XYZ subgenre you have played, how many games you have 100% achievements for, or simply how many hours you have spent teaching your fingers how to handle an Xbox 360 controller. I don’t think this is a particularly large stretch, but the corresponding questions that are raised about how we treat so-called outsiders are a lot more interesting to me.

There are huge swaths of people that play games (the ESA has a ton of information here), and the numbers are growing every year. While it is certainly true that some of us dedicate more of our energy to games than others, I’m struggling to see why that should make us better than them on a fundamental level. Even if those of us who self-identify as gamers spend more money and more time playing games, should our desires completely override everything else? More importantly, shouldn’t we want to bring even more people into the fold?

I think that last bit is really the clincher for me. I love games. I love playing them and talking about them and thinking about them. I love playing them on my own and playing them with other people. So why in the hell would I want to keep other people from enjoying them? If a game has an incredible story and camera work, why wouldn’t I want to share that with my uncle who loves narrative fiction – books and movies both, but hasn’t really played any video games since Doom gave him motion sickness? Why would I decry the Wii as a platform for kids and old people and “non-gamers”? What does that even mean? I played a hell of a lot of Wii Sports with my family, and in doing so, my dad started to finally understand the language of controllers – and video games. In that case, it hasn’t turned him into a consistent gamer, but it certainly made him more willing to try out some other games with my brother and I.

And this is how you get through to people. It’s how you shut down the arguments of the people calling for an end to all video games. This is how you give the proverbial middle-finger to people like Ralph Nader who call the game industry “electronic child molesters” (yes, he actually said that this week). It’s also how you get your friends and relatives to start enjoying one of your passions. You don’t do it by making fun of the fact that they can only get through a game on “Easy” mode. And you certainly don’t do it by decrying that mode – a mode which literally affects your gameplay options in ZERO WAYS – even exists. You do it, instead, by being glad it exists, so that people who otherwise might not have years of gaming experience behind them (or people who are simply interested in experiencing things differently than you are – a novel concept, I know) can be drawn in and captured by all the things that you already know are great.

So, look, there can be some humor taken from a video like the one I linked. But you know what a world where “Super-Easy Mode” exists looks like in my head? One where we can share our passions with a wider group, and not feel stigmatized for doing something that a huge number of people do. One where I can hand a game to a friend/co-worker/relative and say, “This is cool, you should really check it out – just put it on easy mode, and it will be fine.” and then, a few days later have them respond with, “Wow, that was fun! Have you got anything else you can show me?” Because yes, yes I do.

01/3/13

Indie Games, Established Expectations

Happly New Year to everyone! It’s the end of another holiday season, and that means that there was (is still, even) another Steam sale. With that comes the inevitable realization that I have way too many games. And while that realization does seem to repeat itself quite often, it hasn’t stopped me from participating. Again.

However, this year, I’ve been a bit more judicious than in the past. Or maybe I’ve just purchased most of the large packs that interest me already. Who knows? What I do know is that I’ve picked up a number of indie games that I have somehow missed in other packs or shopping sprees. So far, that has included Intrusion 2, FTL, Legend of Grimrock, Mark of the Ninja, The Binding of Isaac, and Hotline Miami (thanks Liore!).

I haven’t yet approached Mark of the Ninja or Legend of Grimrock – or FTL, since that kind of scares me – but Steam is reporting 8 hours on Hotline Miami, 2 hours on The Binding of Isaac, and 30 minutes with Intrusion 2 (enough for the point I’m going to make, here). And I have to say that while all three of these games are fun, they each very much suffer from being “indie”.

Hotline Miami is probably my favorite of the bunch, and the time I’ve put in backs that up. Sure, some part of that time was paused while I was doing things around the house, but I’ve completed all the levels, unlocked a number of the masks, AND gone back for more. It’s a cool mix of strategy and shameless beatemup, with a funky, violent vibe. It runs smoothly and supports my Xbox 360 controller well. But there is no way to control the volume in the game. Music volume has a slider, but the sound effects do not. I eventually solved this by using the Windows audio mixer to drop the sound level for the program, but that seems very silly. It also has been having issues with Steamworks – reportedly, enabling Steamworks will cause some installations to crash. For me, it just isn’t tracking any achievements. Which is annoying, because I scanned through the achievements and a lot of them seem really fun to try to pull off! I can obviously take on those challenges anyway (or make up my own), but it has definitely impacted the replay value for me.

The Binding of Isaac is a really bleak game that is set somewhere between a child’s nightmare and purgatory, with distinctive art and sound – I mean, you literally fight your enemies with your tears! The problem is, I am constantly fighting against the controls. It plays in a similar style to an old top-down shooter – say, Smash TV – and is crying out for dual joysticks. By default, these are implemented with WASD for movement and Up/Down/Left/Right for shooting. It’s undocumented, but you can also use the mouse to fire, with aiming direction determined by your cursor’s relative position to your character. This is… not the easiest. I went looking in the menus for controller support, and the game literally says “Gamepad? Use JoyToKey (Google it!)”. I mean, it’s nice that there are some breadcrumbs but also… fuck you. I mean, I got the program and set it up (with more googling for how to map a 360 controller to the keys, and a lot of experimentation for which mapping made sense), but I haven’t had to do this sort of shit for like 10 years. And JoyToKey does not seem to play very well with analog sticks – they seem to “stick” in a given direction occasionally. I mean, I’ve been pushing through it because the game is fun, but actually having precise control would be nice.

Intrusion 2 is another dual-stick shooter, although it’s more side-scroller and reminiscent of Contra than top-down. The problem here is just that it’s not smooth. Everything is just a little bit jerky and kind of frustrating. I want to like the game, and I don’t hate it, but I feel like I’m again missing out on some more responsive controls. This one at least works with my controller.

So I guess the meat of this is that I am sort of struggling with myself over the following questions: Given that I like a lot of things about the indie development trend (in terms of storytelling, interesting/innovative gameplay, publishing/pricing models), is it also unreasonable to expect some level of polish and support? Is asking for controller support, resolution control, and SOUND LEVELS too much? Should I just be happy that I’m getting to experience these games at all?