Coming Out of My Funk

So, this blog has been dead for over a year. To be honest, I had totally forgotten about it.

I'm actually kind of in a gaming funk right now. I'm coming off my RIFT MMO trip. My guild was going pretty strong and about a month into it, we all just dropped off. There's just not any video games I'm in the mood to play right now.

I've been wanting to play a table top RPG using online table-top software. Someone made a MapTools client for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition. The problem is, there's a ton of people who are wanting to play, but no one willing to GameMaster a session. Therefore, no games.

It looks crazy fun. It's a lot more lethal system than D&D. You're not playing this paragon of awesomeness. Many times, you're just a commoner and soldier who forced into heroic situation...with little chance of making it out alive. It's based off the table-top wargame and really expands on the game's 25-year old lore.


I've been contemplating running one myself, but having never actually played the game, I'm not as familiar with the rules as I'd like to be.

And on top of that, I got tired of DMing for D&D, which, was the result of no one I knew willing to run a game. I want to be the player for once...

So, I plan on getting this blog up and running again. Later.

Married to my MMO

I have a love-hate relationship with Massively Multiplayer Online games. I get excited to see the new ones coming out, I sign up for open beta and I might even buy it when it comes out. However, it never fails that once I've played it, I'm overcome with guilt.


Not so much buyer's remorse, but owner's remorse. I am, by nature, an easily distracted gamer. My friends have a running joke that I only play each game for two weeks...

For the most part, that is true.

I do however have a stable of games that I'm constantly coming back to. Most of these games I payed the one time price to own it and I can pick it up and put it down as often as I want, for as long as I want.

I can't do that with an "MMO." This is due to the trend that the majority are subscription-based and require a monthly fee of $10-$15. I don't mind paying that either, as long as I'm playing it.

However, it never fails that I cannot bring myself to commit myself to a game long enough to justify payment. I begin to feel an obligation to the game that I wouldn't have to a normal one. Once my attention to the game begins to wane, my guilt increases.

The result? I end up canceling the subscription. Which then causes me another dilemma. In two or three or six months down the road, I may want to play that game for a little bit. Nope. I then have to fork over payment for another month while I may only play for a matter of hours.

So you may think by now: "Haven't you learned your lesson and given up MMOs altogether?" No. Eventually a new MMO will come out that utilizes an intellectual property I'm a fan of like Star Wars or Star Trek and I will succumb to the "buzz" that is surrounding and I will end up playing it for two weeks...

Maybe one day I'll learn restraint.

R.I.P. Azrael - Level 28 Soldier

So, two blog posts ago I wrote about the fascination with the collection of “things” in games. In that final thought, I revealed myself to be one of those collectors. I’m okay with that…until something like what happened Saturday morning happens…

As I stated in my last blog, my friend, Phil, and I started up some brand new characters in Borderlands, Karl and Todd, respectively.

Before the night ended, Phil saved Todd’s character file to an Xbox memory unit so I could take “him” home and we could continue their adventures online. Little did I know what I was about to do.

The next morning, I plug the memory unit into my own Xbox and proceed to copy Todd onto my hard drive where I also have my level 28 Soldier, Azrael, stored. I should make it known that I had logged about 20 cumulative hours with Azrael and he was sporting a fairly awesome arsenal and a metric BUTT-TON of cash.

Strangely enough, when I go to copy the file, that inside of the Xbox browser specifically states “Todd – Level 12 Hunter,” a message pops up stating “Would you like to replace the existing file?”

Here’s is a transcript of my inner monologue:

Hmmm… did the Xbox already copy Todd onto my hard drive?
I guess it did.
Sure. Why not copy it again for the sake of completion?

Done.

Odd, where did Azrael go?

Oh, surely it didn’t…

But the files have different names!?!?! Why would it have replaced it!?!?!

NOOO!!! (Notice the three exclamation points…that’s how you know I was angry.)

A little research on the ‘interwebs’ revealed that the filenames one sees in the Xbox browser are NOT the true filenames, just aliases the game creates for recognition purposes.

In reality, because Azrael was the first character I created on my Xbox, the game named the file “sav001.sav” Then, when I signed in under my profile on Phil’s Xbox, I created my first character on THAT machine, Todd. Since he was the first on that hard drive, the game named that file “sav001.sav”

Well, crap…

There I sat… controller in limp hands. Reminiscing about all the hours me and Azrael had together. As if a dear friend had passed away…and was buried with his HUGE arsenal and arse-loads of cash (hehe, unintentional alliteration is awesome.)

Why am I so pissed at losing 60 kilobytes of data? What was I going to do with any of that digital property outside of that game? Nothing. Yet, I am devastated.

Then my own post from the prior night hits me… they were just stamps, and I had fun collecting them. You know what? I’m going to have just as much fun trying to find them all again.

So Happy Together

Okay. So I understand that this blog is called “Playing with Myself,” and that title might suggest to some that I only play single-player games, and the majority of the time that is true.

I do love multiplayer gaming.

The awesome part is, since the advent of broadband internet, it is now easier than ever to play multiplayer games online with your friends or complete strangers for that matter.

PC gaming has been in the online multiplayer realm for quite a few years and even pioneered games coined “massively multiplayer” with upwards of 500 people all playing in one instance of a gigantic virtual world at a time. Consoles have only recently made the foray into the multiplayer world in the past 6 or 7 years. Microsoft was the first to launch a successful multiplayer platform via Xbox Live.

Now, as a husband and father, both going to school and working full time, it’s hard for me to find time to get all my friends together and play in person, so multiplayer gaming online has become the primary means for me to play games with my friends.

But as of last night, I remembered how much better playing multiplayer games with your friends is in person.

I went over to my buddy Phil’s apartment the other night to play a bit of Borderlands via “split-screen” multiplayer, and I had a blast.

First, let me start by saying, split-screen play is a major adjustment. For a while you feel like you have blinders on, and when you have to access a menu, you have to use the right analog stick to move the menu around to see it all. That’s kind of a pain. Soon after; however, I acclimated and we began rampaging through Pandora (the fictional plant the game is set on) just as we have when we’ve played online, and it was fun.

Now, it is hard for me to say what is so different about in-person multiplayer as opposed to online. The differences are subtle.

Both offer the same exact cooperative gameplay, and through Xbox Live we even have real-time verbal communication through our headset. Albeit, the voice chat audio is close to what I think Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call might have sounded like. And with multiplayer games, voice communication is probably the only essential communication medium you need between players.

That said the differences are subtle. The ability to look over at my pal with a look of disgust when he picks up the repeater pistol I had my eye on is great. There are just times when my facial expressions can say more than my words can. It does also seem that fewer things spoken tend to get lost in translation like they do over voice chat. My theory is that our voices carry subtle clues as to the target and tone of what we say that maybe can only be heard with both ears. Does our stereophonic hearing senses really aid in that? I don’t know, this is a gaming blog, not a medical study.

Then there is the obvious fact that is was good getting out of the house and seeing my friend again. Humans, I believe, have a built in desire to socialize. Perhaps, this need is not truly satisfied inside a digital medium.

At the end of the night, we copied our in-game characters we created that day to a portable memory unit so I could take them home and we could play with Todd and Karl online. We probably will, and we’ll probably have fun doing it, but I look forward to the next time we can both get together and play again.

Stamps and Assault Rifles

(originally written 3/21)

I’m a gamer… that’s my hobby. It’s a common hobby these days, and seems as if it’s becoming more popular than a lot of old fashioned hobbies… or it is an old fashioned hobby just in a new package?

Consider collection hobbies. Stamps, Coca-Cola products, Pez dispensers. People spend TONS of money, search eBay religiously and fly halfway across the country just to have that one, perfect piece that completes or fills their collection. Gamers like me might look at them and say they are obsessive and are almost like the “hoarders” one might see in A&E. Guess what…gamers collect too…

Granted, it’s not collection in any physical, fill-your-garage form, but in some games we are inexplicably motivated to collect.

On its most apparent level, one could take the Pokemon franchise for example. In it, players are encouraged to “catch ‘em all” and thusly explore the entire pixel landscape until they do and in the end have a checklist of 150 or so digital creatures all checked off. Whoopy-doo.

Now…Pokemon is marketed to kids and pre-teen. We “mature” gamers surely don’t succumb to this fruitless collecting of digital trinkets!!!

Wrong…

In 1997, Blizzard Entertainment released what would become a very popular action role-playing game franchise called Diablo. In this game players click through dungeon after dungeon, slaying demons in hopes of saving the town of Tristram from the devil himself. This feat could be done in a matter of hours, so why would I want to pay $50 for a short game? Surely there would be nothing to entice me to play through it again. Oh, but there was… You see the levels themselves were randomly generated so it never played the same way twice, but that was only a minor reason you came back. No, the main reason you delved back into the Abyss again was the LOOT!!! Weapons and armor that would drop from the monsters and pop out of the treasure chest were also randomly generated. Each new sword that fell could possibly deal more damage than your current one, or it could enhance a different ability than the last. This excitement of finding new and better loot is nothing different than when the Coke enthusiast finds that rare 1972 Santa Clause Special Holiday Edition bottle that had the misprinted ingredient listing. It keeps you lusting for more.

Then there are the “achievement whores”.

In 2005, when Microsoft released the Xbox 360, they also updated Xbox Live, their multiplayer gaming service, with the new feature called the “Gamer Score.” In every Xbox 360 game, players can achieve certain milestones inside of normal game play. These achievements each carry their own weight in points and add to your cumulative gamer score. The result? A larger and larger number. These achievements serve no more purpose than bragging rights amongst your Xbox friends. There is no leaderboard, so you can’t write it off as a meta-game on top of the games you play. They do not serve as a currency with which you can acquire any goods physical or digital. All they do is serve to show what more or less you have done than your friends.

And people will play the CRAPPIEST games to score easy achievements just to say they have them.

All that said… as of today my gamer score is 2,275 and I’m about to jump into a game of Borderlands to see if I can find a combat rifle that has a larger ammo magazine than the one I’m carrying now. Isn’t collecting a blast?