Bullet Hell

Back when we played Astebreed for the Aggrochat Game Club, Ashgar also recommended the game Jigoku Kisetsukan as a more traditional example of the bullet hell genre that was free on Steam. Last night, staring at Steam and not wanting to start up anything requiring serious thought or time commitment, I decided to try it out.

I'm not entirely new to bullet hell shooters, though I'm nowhere near the aficionado that Ash is. There are quite a few examples of the genre on Kongregate, and I've played a number of them over the years, though never with any real focus. The gameplay is generally pretty similar throughout; you have a primary shot (often upgradable), a special attack that clears out all the bullets on the screen, and a button to slow your movement for maneuvering through tight spaces. That last one is crucial as the real challenge of a bullet hell shooter is dodging the insane storm of projectiles that get thrown at you. Most of the time in a boss fight my focus is squarely on my character to the point of having only the vaguest idea of where on the screen the boss is.

This is the second boss. On easy. It gets much, much harder.

The available characters in Jigoku Kisetsukan each have different attack styles that necessitate playing them somewhat differently. For instance the catgirl has a wide but short range shot that forces you to play further up the screen to keep enemies in range. The alien girl has a constant laser that narrows and powers up when in focus mode, so you have to pay more attention to where enemies are to keep damage on them. The starting character, some sort of minor forest deity or something, has a good middle of the road shot (wider than the laser and able to hit from the length of the screen) and gains homing shots when powered up. Those homing shots are especially useful since they let you focus entirely on dodging bullets and still be able to do at least some damage.

The story has something to do with trying to stop some sort of incipient darkness. I didn't really catch it. Mostly the motivation of the characters other than the primary one seem to be 'wander around and get into fights with other beings that look remarkably like teenage girls due to misunderstandings'. The story's not the point anyway; the point is to try and advance further through a combination of quick reflexes and pattern memorization. Much like a rhythm game now that I think about it; just themed as a shoot-em-up rather than a musical game.

Here we see an immortal diety and a centuries old extraterrestrial being.

Overall, it's a fun game with decent, if somewhat lo-fi graphics, (when you can actually look at them) and a catchy chiptune soundtrack. I would consider it worth the cost for a couple bucks, so for free I definitely recommend it if you have any interest in bullet hell shooters at all. And really, how many other games let you fly around blasting robots with a cat on your head? Actually, knowing Japan, probably quite a few.

Totenkopf

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I had grand plans of a four day weekend to get some things done and relax; instead I spent most of that time sick. Frustrating, but what can you do? It meant I got some reading done, and once I felt semi-decent I was able to do some gaming.

Firstly, I joined the Shadowrun game that Tamrielo has been running for a while now. It had been mentioned to me that the party was perhaps lacking in information gathering capability, so I put together a character loosely based on the Occult Investigator example in the book. I focused primarily on spellcasting and conjuring with a specialization in detection spells. I feel like I can still be useful in combat though, tossing fireballs and summoning spirits. My first run with the team went pretty well; we'll see if the rest of the long night goes as smoothly.

Second, I played through Wolfenstein: The New Order. Twice. Okay, not two full playthroughs. I picked up where I had left off when I started playing a couple months ago and got distracted; I had made it up to the train depot and was getting murdered by SuperSoldaten. Pro tip: once you can ignore the two SuperSoldaten that jump out of crates near the end of the level and just run to the train and GTFO.

In any case, I finished up that first playthrough and decided that I wanted to see the other timeline and pick up the collectibles I missed the first time through. It is amazing how much of a difference having most of the perks makes in that game. The first time through there were a few places that gave me a lot of trouble, particularly near the end. Second time through, I pretty much breezed on by. Having all the secondary fire options and laser upgrades was hugely helpful too. Once I realized using the scope made the laser fire a massive shot that could take down nearly anything my life got a lot easier.

These jerks were much less of an issue the second time around.

I was a little disappointed that the two timelines were mostly identical. I had hoped that the game might branch at some point or have some alternate levels for certain chapters, but apart from some shortcuts that are only available in one timeline or the other it's pretty much the same. Even the ending is entirely identical either way. The difference is pretty much entirely in the cutscenes in the middle of the game and which of two resistance members is present. On the whole, I think I preferred the Wyatt timeline; Fergus' snark started to wear on me after a while and I preferred J to Tekla. I definitely thought his final stand against the Nazis was cooler.

Gosh, I can't imagine what 'J' could be short for.

I've Got the Funk

I appear to be in a bit of a gaming funk lately. I'm not burned out on games necessarily, but nothing really seems appealing enough to be worth the effort to actually start up and play. Last night I logged into Magic Duels long enough to finish up a couple of daily quests, but after that I quit out and just stared at my Steam library for awhile. I considered trying out Diablo 3 since that's where everyone else seems to be right now, but it sounds like I need the expansion to access a lot of the new features and that thing's still $40. I can't really justify that for something I'll probably play for a couple weeks and then let lay fallow.

No, not that Funk. But thank you Old Gregg.

If nothing else I need to play more Tron 2.0 since, you know, it was my choice for the month. I have played a decent way in at this point and it matches up reasonably well with my memories. The fact that the default crouch key ('C) appears to also be set up to take Steam screenshots is driving me slowly mad though. Steam's settings don't show it as being mapped to that, and remapping the crouch key in game just made the space bar start taking screenshots. I don't even know at this point. I may just have to use the external launcher that the unofficial patch includes. But I want to be able to take screenshots, and I'm pretty sure there's no built-in screenshot function in Tron 2.0. Gah. (Edit: I have been informed in the comments that 'F8' will take screenshots in .bmp format. Problem solved!)

Fabulous hopping action!

Mostly I've been reading. I've been reading through old D&D supplements for my Monday feature, and I finished reading The Martian, which I'm looking forward to telling you all about tomorrow. I suppose there are worse ways to be spending my time. In any case, if this nominally gaming blog seems light on game related posts lately, now you know why. I'm sure it'll pass in its own time.

#Blaugust Day 28: Addictive != Fun

While listening to some podcasts I happened to actually look at my podcast app and noticed an ad for some terrible mobile game or another at the bottom. As I watched, some quotes from presumably random reviews scrolled by, and I noticed one in particular: "Love it, Addictive as Hell!" It got me thinking, when did 'addictive' become a positive thing?

Best game ever!!! So addictive!

Up front here, I am by no means an expert on addiction. If I fail at clever in the course of this post, please let me know. It is absolutely not my attention to minimize or insult anyone who has had to deal with addiction directly or indirectly.

Addiction implies that you're taking actions that you know are harmful to yourself, or that you don't really 'want' to do so much as 'need' to do. If anything, addictive behavior seems to be the opposite of fun; something one tries to avoid and then feels guilty about afterwards. I don't know if my time with World of Warcraft ever reached the level of addiction, but it certainly got to the point of not being fun anymore. The fact that I was able to drop it and not look back implies that it wasn't an addiction. How much worse then, to be in that situation and not be able to quit.

I guess this weird view we have of addiction isn't really new. How many times have you heard someone call themselves a 'shopaholic' or 'chocoholic'? I'd hazard to guess that most of the people using those terms about themselves aren't really addicts though, they're trying to use the language of addiction to describe how much they enjoy the thing. It seems a little thoughtless when I stop and think about it.

So maybe the problem is that, as a culture, we still don't really understand addiction. Not what it really is or how it really feels to be addicted to something. Maybe that's something you can't really understand unless you've experienced it. What I do know is that calling a game addictive is about the last way you'll ever get me to try it.

Game vs Metagame

Tam's recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don't like certain games.  In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice.  In a word, metagame.

...game

I've come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won't want anything to do with it. If there's a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I'm actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don't get to take joy in improving, since I'm aware that I'm actively not playing 'the best way'.

Beyond that, I'm being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game 'properly' rather than actually playing the game.  Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game.  So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.  And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I'm 'doing it wrong'.  At least if it's a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn't optimal.  In a multi-player game there's the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you're stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I'm having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.

Building Puzzles is the Hardest Puzzle

I picked up Hexcells recently on the basis of Kodra and Rae's talking it up, and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I've always been a big fan of logic puzzles of any sort, so it was right up my alley.  The basic gameplay is much like Minesweeper, where each cell is either part of a pattern (blue) or not (black). Yellow cells are of unknown status and must be marked by you. To solve the puzzle you must successfully mark all of the cells. Unlike Minesweeper, however, each puzzle gives you some information to start with and can be solved with no guessing at all.

As you graduate to more and more complex puzzles, additional methods of providing information to you are introduced. You'll be told how many blue cells are in a particular line of cells, or that all the blue cells in a particular line or around a cell are contiguous. Eventually you start getting cells that contain a number signifying the number of blue cells within two spaces of that cell. Ultimately you find yourself having to combine information from multiple sources to identify cells properly. It's very difficult by the end, but extremely gratifying when you successfully solve a puzzle.

There are 3 Hexcells games, each with 36 puzzles of increasing difficulty. The difficult also increases more quickly in each successive game, so you're quickly solving puzzles harder than the previous games hardest.  By the end they're downright fiendish and I found myself having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes on multiple occasions (thankfully the 3rd game saves your progress on partially completed puzzles).  Ultimately though, I made it through and finished the final puzzle.

My wife saw me playing and asked "Are you a bee?"

The third game, Hexcells Infinite, introduces Infinite Mode, which boasts 100,000,000 computer generated puzzles.  Put in a numerical seed, get a puzzle.  Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, they're just not as good as the set puzzles you get up to that point.  The game's main puzzles contain a paucity of information, forcing you to determine which of a very few existing clues your latest moves will combine with to identify your next move.  The generated puzzles I've tried, on the other hand, are overrun with numbers from the very beginning and are mostly a matter of scanning through the puzzle for the next obvious move.  Occasionally I'll have to stop and think a bit, but it's mostly just click click click done.

The problem is that programming a computer to build interesting puzzles is difficult.  Much more difficult than writing a program to solve puzzles; that's generally trivial if the puzzle is based on pure logic and intended to be human-solvable.  Building a puzzle requires you to develop explanations for what make a puzzle good that can be expressed in code.  I have no way of knowing how the Hexcells puzzle generator works, but if I had to guess I'd posit that it generates the field of hexes and assigns them each blue or black based on an algorithm that uses the seed as input, creates all the possible clues the puzzle could have, then starts hiding cells and removing clues while checking that the puzzle remains solvable.

With a million possible puzzles, I'd guess that from sheer happenstance some clever ones will show up, but Sturgeon's Law appears to apply in this case.  That said, it's still a great game and would have been well worth my time if the Infinite feature didn't exist at all.

Hello there, Ladies and Gentlemen

Welcome to any new readers that came from Massively to check me out!  I'm actually double glad Syp linked to me, as he mentioned the post that he made some years back that was my inspiration for my ability identification post!  For some reason I was misremembering it as something I saw on the LotRO forums.

I don't know how many folks might stick around and keep reading, but I've been considering a state of the gaming post in any case, so what better time?  Here's what I've been up to recently.

FFXIV

The 2.5 patch came out Monday, and for the first time I was entirely caught upon the various questlines.  I didn't really have time last night to try running any new group content, but I got everything unlocked and am ready to give some of it a try.  The Hildibrand questline continues to be the best thing ever, and I'm especially looking forward to the new Gilgamesh fight.

Apart from the new stuff, there's still plenty of existing goals that I'm still working towards.  I've leveled all my crafting and gathering classes to 50, but I still have plenty of better gear to work on so I can craft 3 and 4 star items.  I've been in a bit of a conundrum where I didn't want to spend a lot of gil melding materia into gear that isn't best in slot, but working on desynthesis has opened up my ability to craft the best jewelry for gathering and crafting, so that should help me move on up the chain.

I've also been working on my battle classes and have 3 of those at level 50.  Bard remains my main to which I've added Dragoon and Warrior.  I'll probably be focusing on White Mage or Scholar/Summoner next so I have a healer job available, but I haven't decided which yet.  I suspect I'd actually be better tanking as Paladin than Warrior, but I won the most absurd axe in the game off Titan a couple months back, and I've been wanting to use it ever since.

Dat Axe

Marvel Heroes

I've honestly not done much in Marvel Heroes recently apart from try to log on once a day to collect daily rewards.  I'm sure I'll swing back around to it again before too long, but for now FFXIV and occasional single player games are dominating my PC gaming time.

Shadow of Mordor

Among my Christmas presents this year was Shadow of Mordor, which I have been enjoying the hell out of.  I absolutely love Arkham City, so the basic gameplay is right up my alley, and the orc captains are a great element.  I had one poor idiot come back a total of 4 times, jumping me out of nowhere each time and looking rougher and rougher as it went along.  I do have trouble focusing on the story at all since I keep running into captains that need killing and Power Struggles to deal with.  I need to at least get to the point where I can brand captains so that getting them promoted actually benefits me.

FFX

Finally, I picked up the FFX/X-2 remaster recently and have been playing my way through Spira again.  I'd forgotten how dark that game is underneath the surface once you know what's actually going on.  So many things that were relatively innocuous the first time through have a whole new level of sad attached to them.  Really though, I guess Final Fantasy games have a history of darkness. mass genocide in VI, the whole Cloud/Sephiroth thing in VII, and Tactics, man don't get me started on Tactics.  It's like a Shakespearean tragedy told with Precious Moments figurines.

In any case I just wrapped things up in Luca and am headed out on the Mi'hen Highroad.  X is one of the Final Fantasy games that I not only beat but pretty much burned to the ground content-wise the first time around, so it's interesting seeing what all I remember and deciding how in depth I'm going to go.  I have a hard time not collecting all the things, but I don't know if I'm going to be willing to put forth the effort this time around to, for instance, get Lulu's final weapon.

Ladies

Some people get really weird about playing characters of a different gender than their own.  I don't mean in an "I wish Assassin's Creed had playable female characters" way, I'm talking about people, mostly guys, who seem to think that choosing to play a female character makes a man less of a man.  Look around on any MMO forum and you'll likely find the 'why do guys play girl characters, what's wrong with them?' thread.

You see a lot of reasons suggested, ranging from 'their gay lol' to 'they want people to give them stuff' and so forth.  It's depressing, honestly.  So many of the posts always seem to boil down to 'I don't want to do thing X so anyone who does must be wrong/different/weird'.  There's a self-centeredness and lack of empathy that seems emblematic of so much of what's wrong with online culture.

When I create characters in online games, tabletop, or whatever, I generally have a basic outline in my mind when I start.  I'll either have a class or a personality in mind and everything else flows from that.  One of those elements is gender.  I'd feel as strange trying to make a character male that I've pictured as female as I would the reverse.  Playing a female character is comparable to playing a dwarf, or a robot, or a psychotic little cat thing for me.  I'm not any of those things in real life, they're elements of a character I choose to inhabit.

That's not to say my views on characters are the way, the truth, and the light.  I can absolutely understand wanting to play 'yourself' (or more likely an idealized version thereof).  My version of the Avatar in Ultima games has always been simply me at the core.  It's also not at all surprising that a transgender person would want to play a character of the gender they identify as.  For me such a role is a challenge to attempt; for them it's an opportunity to inhabit a more comfortable skin.

I think a lot of my view on this comes from my roots in late 80s and early 90s tabletop role-playing.  This was a time when story and setting was really coming to the fore, and games tended to involve a lot of social elements along with the combat.  Like most players I started out pretty much playing 'me with magic', but that gets boring after a while.  For role playing to be interesting, the role needs to require some effort.  As one gets better at it, the effort needs to increase.  Particularly once I started running games, I needed to be able to play all sorts of different NPCs, some of whom were female.  From there to a female PC isn't much of a stretch.

Ultimately, choice of character gender is just one of many, many ways that different people play the same game in a different way.  Trying to claim that someone else is playing wrong because of that choice says a lot more about you than it does them.

Role-playing vs Roll-playing

Well hello there!  It's been a while.  I'm feeling the urge once again to exposit on things, so here we are.  I don't know that I'll be keeping a regular schedule or anything, but I'm gonna write some stuff in any case.

I've been thinking about a number of things revolving around protagonists in games and otherwise and their characterizations.  In trying to find a good place to start in discussing them, I hit upon the age-old tension between role-players and non role-players.  Most of what I want to talk about in the near future ultimately relates back to that divide.

Pretty much as long as games where one plays a character have existed, there's been a divide between those who view that character as a role to be played, as an actor would, and those who view the character as a collection of statistics to be used as a direct avatar of the player (the 'roll-player').  A role-player will develop an internally consistent characterization and make decisions based on that, where a roll-player will base her decisions on what best increases their character's power.  It's easy to see where the conflict can arise; a role-player may make decisions that result in increased difficulty because doing otherwise wouldn't be consistent with the character they've created.  A roll-player may focus on what improves their capabilities, even if the resulting character behavior is wildly inconsistent.

In a tabletop game the gamemaster can step in to defuse a lot of this tension.  He can provide opportunities for the role-player to play their character while still giving the roll-player ways to improve their capabilities.  In video games this becomes more difficult.  The goals of a role-player are difficult to assign numerical values to, so they tend to be secondary to the main game.  Particularly in MMOs, character development becomes a purely numerical affair where the 'correct' choices and the best gear can be determined mathematically.  The player for whom characters are simply a collection of statistics will have difficulty understanding why a role-player chooses a non-optimal path.  Even worse, when the role-player's choices make the game more difficult for an entire group, conflict tends to erupt.

Personally, I lean towards being a role-player.  When I create a character, I generally imagine a basic personality for them to go with their physical design.  I think this is part of why I'm perfectly willing to play female characters as well as male; that character isn't me, they are a separate being who I am playing as.  It's similar to writing a story with characters who are different from me.  That said, I've sometimes had to accept acting out-of-character in-game.

In World of Warcraft I played a dwarven hunter, Thalen.  I imagined him as an exterminator who became caught up in events beyond what he ever expected and went from dealing with minor pests in Ironforge to slaying dragons and the like.  Ultimately, though, he viewed it as all the same.  There were pests that needed to be dealt with, and that was his job.  This led to a matter-of-fact sort of character who focused on the job at hand.  In part, I chose this characterization to try and avoid conflict with non-role-players.

Despite that, there were still occasions where my character was at odds with the optimal choice.  Thalen used guns.  He was willing to use crossbows in a pinch, but bows were just not right.  This was difficult to stick to, however, as often a bow would be the best available weapon to me, particularly in Vanilla.  Eventually transmogrification came along and I never used a non-gun again, at least not visually.  Along the same lines, I was never willing to play as a Beast Master; it simply didn't match my vision of Thalen.  Even in Burning Crusade when Beast Master was the best spec by far, I stuck to Marksman.  Luckily I was a good enough player to still be viable, and I was in a raid that was willing to allow sub-optimal play.  It was still a hard thing, however, having to choose between character and power.

Who Are the Creators?

Zubon at Kill Ten Rats wondered how much meaning "From the Makers of" really has.  It's a good question, especially with the way the software industry works.  Big layoffs after games ship are not uncommon; case in point, ZeniMax's recent layoffs.  Which parts of Elder Scrolls Online were the devs who are no longer there responsible for?  If another company ends up hiring a decent subset of those devs, does that mean the project they work on next is "from the makers of Elder Scrolls Online?"

It gets a little easier to anticipate what you'll get when you start paying attention to individuals.  Of course that only works with the relatively rare superstar developer who makes a name for himself.  If Peter Molyneux, or Richard Garriott designs a new game, you'll have a pretty good idea of what that game's genereal feel will be before you play it.  When Double Fine was founded after Lucasarts decided to quit making games that weren't Star Wars, I knew that these were the guys that made Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango, so I could feel pretty certain that whatever they made next, I would enjoy.  And sure enough, Psychonauts is one of my all-time favorite games.

 You see the same thing in other collaborative media, such as comic books.  Marvel Comics puts out a lot of books, and they vary greatly in feel.  Most readers aren't going to like every single thing they publish.  You can follow specific characters, but you'll find that as the creative team in control of a particular character changes, the feel of that character's adventures will change too.  Spider-Man written by Todd McFarlane was vastly different from Spider-Man written by J.M. DeMatteis.  If you want stories with a particular feel, you're better off following creators from book to book.  I know if I pick up a story by Mark Waid, or by Kurt Busiek, that I'll likely enjoy it, no matter what characters are involved, or even which publisher it's from.

Gamers Behaving Badly

I really didn't want to have to talk about this.  I'm not a confrontational person by nature.  I much prefer to be diplomatic and avoid saying anything that could be divisive.  But ignoring the problem is part of what's led to things getting as bad as they have.  So we're going to talk about it.  Or at least I am, right here and now.

You've probably already guessed what I'm referring to.  I'm not going to use the stupid term that's been coined for the whole mess because a) The original 'scandal' that it refers to is a tempest in a teapot and b) I refuse to contribute to the tired nomenclature.  Watergate was called Watergate because the apartments that were broken into were the Watergate Apartments.  Slapping 'gate' on the end of something to make it a thing is just old and tired now.  Please stop.  I digress.

A woman made a game.  Already this was enough to get her harassed by the scum of the internet.  It happened to Jade Raymond nearly a decade ago and now it happened to Zoe Quinn.  Then her ex-boyfriend decided to drag their personal past out and throw it up on the internet, and the hate parade really got going.

The level of hate on display is absurd, and at the same time nothing remotely new.  This has been going on for years.  Those responsible for the harassment claim to be trying to defend gaming from some horrible feminist-led conspiracy to control the gaming press.  A lot of them probably even believe what they're saying. Conspiracy theorists usually really do think they've uncovered a secret truth.  But what this is really about is fear.

Video games have historically been viewed as a male space.  In reality, there've always been women playing video games, but men have been the majority and the medium primarily served that audience.  Over the years that view has been challenged.  More and more women are playing games, making games, and talking about games.   At the same time, women in general have been less willing to silently endure the constant background radiation of sexism that society exposes them to.  Put that together, and the He-Man Woman Haters contingent of gamers find their sacred space in danger.  In response they lash out, desperately trying to protect their ability to be sexist pigs on the internet, and just make things worse for everyone.

But here's the thing; they're going to lose.  These toxic gamers are a tiny subset of gaming as a whole.  They seem bigger than they are because of their bluster and bombastic rhetoric, but they're in the minority.  And I think they've finally gone too far and shown the rest of us that this isn't something that can just be ignored.  It won't be quick, and it won't be easy.  It'll take those of us who just want to play games and have fun getting out of our comfort zone and confronting them.  But it'll happen.  I have faith.

Wanting

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true." - Spock

I have trouble finishing games.  It didn't used to be so; I recall renting Final Fantasy 4 when I was a kid and playing from start to finish over the span of a weekend.  I finished the original Might & Magic and uncovered the secret of the world of VARN.  I completed Ultima 7 and banished the Guardian, then traveled to the Serpent Isle and restored the Chaos Serpent.  None of these were short games, but I stuck with them.  Now though, I find myself approaching the end of a game and start to get tired of it.

Part of the problem is time.  School and homework seemed like so much when I was young, but really I had all the time I needed to game.  Nowadays work, social obligations, and family pull me in multiple directions anyway, so it can be hard to fit gaming time in.  New games catch my attention and pull me away before old ones are finished.  Steam taunts me with games upon games that I've bought and not played for any length of time.

Really though, I think the problem arises when I've reached the point in a game where there's no more real growth to experience but the game isn't over.  That point in Skyrim where I've got Dragonbone armor and daedric weapons, and more alchemy items and random gewgaws than I know what to do with.  Or in X-Com when I've finished the research and have a fully tricked out squad.  The end of the story is still out there, but the things I wanted, I now have.  And the having is not so pleasing a thing as the wanting.

What is a Gamer?

The term gamer gets thrown around a lot, and it seems like some people are always trying to define who gets to be a gamer.  This seems a little odd, since classically those of use who identify as gamers have often felt excluded or like outcasts.  Sometimes it seems like now that we have an identifier of our own that we want to be able to turn around and exclude others.

I'll admit, it can be easy to feel like those who've come to gaming recently get to have it easy after the rest of us have gone through the hard times.  The folks whose first pen and paper RPG is the new Dungeons & Dragons never had parents and teachers tell them their soul was in danger.  Lots of gamers today have never played a game on a computer that could only display 16 colors at a time or a console with pixels as big as your thumb.  That doesn't mean they're not real gamers though.

As for the types of games people play, classic arcade games were some of the simplest games around, but I don't think anyone would argue that Pac-Man or Centipede isn't a 'real game'.  Classic BBS door games like Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars 2002 were precursors to today's social games, complete with energy mechanics.  You can't tell me those weren't real games.

Conversely, there are plenty of more complicated board games that don't get associated with the 'gamer' appellation.  You don't see chess players calling themselves gamers.  Monopoly, hated though it may be by many, is a game, but you don't hear about gamers playing it.  Almost as if the fact that these games have been widely accepted for their entire history is a factor.

Myself, I think anyone who considers themselves a gamer is a gamer.  Calling yourself a gamer implies that you consider the act of gaming a part of who you are.  It's more than just a thing you do, it's an element of your personality.  To me, a gamer is someone who believes that games matter.  That's all it takes.

Complexity and Depth

Arcadius made a good point in the comments yesterday about the difficulty you can run into in a game if you miss an aspect of play or of stat interaction or the like and end up handicapping yourself without even realizing it.  Getting into that state can lead to you feeling underpowered and getting fed up with the game.  Then, eventually, you find out you've been doing it wrong, often when you start searching around on the internet to find out why your chosen class is so incredibly underpowered.

This, I think, is a major cause of the need people feel to do a lot of out of game research.  It's one thing to play a non-optimal way by choice, it's another to not even realize that if you geared a different way, or had spent your talent points differently that you could be having an easier time.  The thing is, I think a lot of the blame for this is on designers.  The two big problems I see are complexity for complexity's sake and poor feedback.

A lot of times it seems like complexity gets added into a game for no other reason than it can be.  Possibly the belief is that a more complex game will be deeper and thus provide more play time.  The thing is, time spent trying to figure out how the game works is not play time.  It's some weird sort of meta-play time.  For some people it's fun, maybe even more so than the game itself.  But for the average player, who's not an elitist jerk, it's usually a slog keeping them away from the actual game.

Worse, complexity is not depth.  Think about chess.  Certainly a deep game, lots of strategy, people get really serious about it.  How complex is it?  Not very.  There are 6 different pieces each with a very straightforward set of move options.  The depth comes from the combination of those simple parts creating a myriad of options.  The challenge of chess is not in figuring out where you *can* move, it's in deciding where you *should* move.

World of Warcraft definitely had an increasing complexity problem for a while.  Armor penetration and reforging come to mind immediately.  You'll notice the former was removed in Cataclysm, and the latter is going away in the upcoming expansion.  There's a reason for that; they didn't really add anything to the game.  They were additional complexity that just made it that much more necessary to rely on Mr. Robot to tell you what gear to look for.

The second problem, especially when you have extra complexity, is poor feedback.  Some games do it by design, hoping to stop the theorycrafters from determining the 'correct' build.  Others just have unhelpful tooltips.  The end result, however, is players who don't have full information about how their characters function.  Players need accurate information to make informed choices.  If full information is overwhelming, that's a good sign that the game has gotten overly complex.  And hiding information to dissuade the theorycrafters just isn't going to work.  If they have to record their play and count pixels on a health bar to try and determine damage output, someone will do it.  Don't hide data because you're afraid someone will solve your game.  Make a game that resists an optimal solution by being truly deep.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

As some of the other blogs participating in Blaugust have already noted, the Godmother of Faff has questions.  I have answers.  Let's do this.

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

At the time World of Warcraft came out, I was playing Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes.  My interest in both was beginning to wane a bit.  In SWG I had mastered my initial chosen professions and didn't feel like there was much more to do.  In City of Heroes, I had reached the point where there just wasn't much interesting to do solo.  Then came WoW.  Here was a game with quests and soloable content and non-stop stuff to do!

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

The day WoW launched, I created Thalen, a dwarven hunter on Argent Dawn.  That was my main until the day I quit.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

Dwarves with guns.  It was that simple.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

There've been so many it's hard to choose.  The one Belghast recounted is certainly high on the list.  Ultimately, I think I'd have to pick my very first Molten Core raid, particularly the Ragnaros fight.  A friend whispered me out of the blue asking if I was available for Molten Core, and I actually let my interest in it overpower my hermit nature.  The raid had downed up multiple time by that point, so I found myself in a non-stop whirlwind tour of giants, core hounds, and fire critters.  I came out of that raid with my first piece of Giantstalker and a hunger for more.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

Exploration.  Hunting down every quest and every secret that I could find.  Long before there were achievements, even before quests at max level gave gold rewards, I sought them all out just for completion's sake.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

Ironforge.  In Vanilla, my hearthstone was set to the bar near the entrance.  Even after expansions and additional auction houses stopped Ironforge being the center of the Alliance universe, I went back regularly just because.  When I finally quit the game, I took each character to a spot that seemed appropriate to them and took a screenshot before logging off.  Thalen's is of him sitting in his regular chair in that bar.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I can't check it now, but I know my /played on Thalen was over a year.  I started playing the day the game went live, and didn't quit until August of last year.  During that time I had the occasional period of burnout when I didn't log on for a month or so, but I never unsubscribed and for most of that time I logged on pretty much daily.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

Yup, always have, always will.  I want to know the story.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Not really.  I don't feel like it ever negatively impacted real life, and I have so many good memories and friends that I've made due to WoW, that I can't say I regret a bit of it.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

I'm sure I'm closer to my real life friends that I played with than I would be without WoW.  We adventured and raided together for years, after all.  Without WoW, it's quite likely we would have drifted apart.  And then I wouldn't have met my wife.  So there's that.