Games

Me rude?

August 25, 2006
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A guildmate and fellow officer a few weeks back mentioned that I was blunt in the way I talk to people and that I make situations worse off. That made me think about the plane incident and I wonder if I need to be more cautious of how I say things… Have I always been like this and is it consistent? Or maybe I am now noticing it since I’m maturing, and maybe it is just sporadic. Everyone has bad days, right?

Last week, some people in guild were making one-liner references to a movie. It was getting a little extreme, and the references were really obscure. (My way of telling when someone’s entered the nerd-zone–the socially awkward part–is if they persist in talking about something no one else in the room gets.) I got a tell from another guildie saying that they were getting annoyed, so I said something in guild chat to quiet it down. Only, the way I said it was really rude. My excuse was that I was in the middle of wiping in MC and that we were having a particularly frustrating night, but still… is that an excuse? When do you chalk stuff up to “he’s having a bad day” vs. “you shouldn’t let your problems effect relations with others?” Luckily for me, the people I chastised in guild chat didn’t login all their alts and /gquit, and I was able to apologize publicly and in tell. But… I still feel bad about it and don’t know how they feel about me and the guild now…

Penny Arcade Expo

August 1, 2006
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I’ll be going to the Penny Arcade Expo this year with my advisor and fellow gamer Jen Stone. I also invited all my guildies from Portland to come up and visit that weekend (last weekend in August). And finally, we’re also planning on going to the Game On exhibit at the Pacific Science Center then. If you want to come, give a hollar.

Shaman and paladins are friends now.

July 21, 2006
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Crap.

Rather than linking to a news site, I’ll link to the thread on my guild’s forum about Paladins and Shammies being available to both factions because I’m self-serving like that…

Nice way for Blizzard to solve the problem about certain raid bosses being easy-mode for the Alliance.  Not.

One week with the DS Lite and…

July 21, 2006
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I am totally convinced this is the best gaming related thing I’ve ever bought.

The reason is the same reason why I am scared to hell about it. I can game anywhere. (well, except when it is too bright outside)

Yesterday, I played at a local park. Holy shit; I got some sun.

Got a DS Lite

July 15, 2006
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Aaron is in town and wanted to get a portable gaming device for his plane trips… He decided on a DS Lite and since Ari has a DS also, I decided to get one, too.

We found out that a lot of games have a downloadable component which other DS owners can get to play certain game modes without owning the game cart. So we played a little Mario Kart, Metroid, FIFA, and Advance Wars. The Advance Wars Combat mode is fine but some sort of turn-based mode for download would have been great. The FIFA game advertises on the box that the download mode is from 2-4 players but they lie; it’s only for 2 players. Totally lame.

My first ever portable… can I afford it? We’ll see…

You CAN teach an old dog new tricks!

June 27, 2006
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This past weekend I started playing Beyond Good and Evil on the PC. The developers did something I’ve never seen before which was to allow inverted mouse movement that forced one to have the X-axis inverted with the Y-axis. WTF?

I tried to use both ways and neither made much sense to me. I’m used to flight sims and treating the mouse like I would a joystick for camera/POV movement.

Then I looked it up on the BGaE forums and found that other people were having the same problem as me. I found someone’s blog post (snarfed.org) about it which referred to his journey for a way to invert only the Y-axis through a third-party solution. His write-up led me to email a guy named Moritz who wrote a custom mouse driver which would let a user toggle Y-axis orientation. It worked okay… sometimes didn’t seem to work… anyway, when I started playing the game again, the menus and such (especially the code entering screen for locked terminals and doors) were too hard to navigate.

That night, I was thinking about it and visualizing why I am so used to the flight-sim method of input. I pictured my head and my right hand on the back of my skull pivoting my head up and down. But that analogy doesn’t hold true for right and left because if I move my hand right, my face should point left as a result… which isn’t how I was used to moving and isn’t how joysticks work for flight sims.

This made me frown. In other words, I introduced a cognative dissonant thing into my thinking… and when I went back into the game the next morning, I was able to think of using the mouse on a 2D plane instead of embodied in my head. My task was to point the center of the screen (or the mouse cursor) up or down, left or right. (Insert philosophical questions about whether 3D game interfaces should be embodied in a 3D environment or on a 2D screen here…)

And it worked! When I went into World of Warcraft later, I found that the inverted Y-axis that I set up in that game was no longer working for me. In three days I retrained myself through mental visualization how to use a mouse to navigate a 3D environment and unlearned what I had been using (A LOT) for the past 20 years! Wow.

50 worst game titles ever.

June 23, 2006
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This is why I like games.  Nuts and Milk!
http://www.gamerevolution.com/feature/worst_names

What’s missing from World of Warcraft and other MMOGs

June 23, 2006
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I've thought of this for about 15 months now, but it recently came up in a great conversation I had with two cool people, Tom Baer and Theresa Horstman, yesterday at the Cafe on the Ave.

There is a quest line in WoW that happens pretty early in the life of a Horde player. Thrall wants you to investigate some baddies in a cave outside Orgrimmar, the Shadow Council or whatever they're called want you to go into Ragefire Chasm, etc….

My memory sucks. Most of the quests in WoW blur together for me.

But I do remember this: I thought there was a build-up happening between Thrall and the Council who wanted to usurp power from him. I thought (thoguht) that, as a player, I would get to choose sides. How silly of me to think the developers would let me decide how to role-play.

It is a sad world we live in right now when players cannot count on CRPGs (not just MMOGs) to let us act and make decisions based on information that we get in the game in interesting ways. It's like they go halfway… they have a cool story, but then don't follow through by taking advantage of the interactivity of the medium.

Summary: World of Warcraft and many, many other computer role-playing games are missing the most important part of a role-playing game. They don't let players choose how their character would act and react in the dynamic worlds that've been created for them. I would love to have to make decisions about who to ally with and who to betray–moral and ethical decisions.

WoW instead has different factions you can gain reputation with… but none of them mean anything. Their only mechanic is to act as a time-sink so you can craft stuff with questionable utility. It would be interesting if the factions weren't so clearly divided into who you are meant to ally with and who you are meant to attack. Wouldn't it be cool if gaining faction with Argent Dawn made you lose faction with Cenarian Circle, for example? That would be a real choice.

Wouldn't it be cool to funnel some of your money and wool and silk and other crap collection into the Shadow Council to secretly work agains Thrall or vice-versa rather than just giving it to the Horde collector?

Bah… I ramble… What I want is a game that actually makes me grapple with who I am, who I want my character to be, and who my friends are.

Hitman coaching

June 19, 2006
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So, a friend from high school, Grey, was here during the crazy week of papers, professor deaths, and emotional turmoil. My apologies to him for not being able to devote as much time as I had hoped to gaming.

We and another high school friend of ours who also lives in Seattle did, however, get to make it to a monthly boardgame fest held by a couple who work for Wizards of the Coast (well, at least one of them does I think). Anyway, they have a lot of games. We played Killer Bunnies, some color-matching card game, Cartejena, Witch Trial, some ship moving collect and sell resources at ports game, and that archeological dig game with the tokens… Sheesh.. I need to remember the names of these games better.

We also played Hitman Blood Money on my PC. I had played the previous Hitman games and also played a bit of Blood Money before Grey showed up. He played a little on his own at night but one morning we were playing together. One would watch while the other played and we would switch off whenever someone failed. It was pretty clear that I knew the levels and the patterns of people walking around and what events were happening more than he did for any given level/mission. So when he was playing and I watching, I had to think about how much information should I give Grey and how much should I just let him explore on his own.

Actually, it felt a lot like how I felt when I was looking over TEP students' shoulders while they were working on their websites or blogs. Just thought I should write that feeling down before I lost it… What was similar about both was that I could feel the students and I could feel Grey wishing I would just tell them what to do. But in a game, part of the fun is exploration and discovery. I think that should be part of learning, too, and believe strongly that the best way to learn something is to just mess around with it for a while with a goal in mind. Am I wrong?

What works in an adventure game

May 3, 2006
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Last summer I played a whole bunch of adventure games… I mean a whole bunch… check out that link and look at Summer 2005. Old school games, newer games. The whole gamut. BTW, I think Still Life had the most engaging story of them all and the best presentation. Indigo Prophecy has been touted as a great way of reconceptualizing the mechanics of the genre, and it is a great game, but the story fell apart, and honestly the story is king in an adventure game.

Anyway, I typed up some quick notes in August of what works and what doesn’t work (at least for me) in these point and click third-person games. I recently uncovered this document and tried to clarify it a bit… I wish I could say more, but my memory sucks. Here’s what I have.

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