Other Things I'm Not Good At, Part Whatever

When I was a kid, everybody (and it certainly seemed like everybody) had an Atari 2600. If their parents decided that the Atari was too "inferior" --which meant that they listened to George Plimpton's commercials-- those kids had an Intellivision instead.

My parents, despite my brother's and my pleas, had neither system in our house.

We did have a basketball net, however, and since I played basketball in grade school* I played a LOT of basketball during the summers. One day, as motivation, my dad said that if I could make 10 free throws in a row, I could get an Atari.

"Cool beans!" I thought**, and proceeded to miss several free throws in a row. 

This was not gonna be easy.

Yeah, kinda like this. Only that
I'm not an NBA caliber player.

 

I spent the entire summer shooting free throws as often as I could, and finally one day in late September I made all 10 with my dad watching.

"Woo!" I exclaimed. "We're gonna get an Atari!!"

"I never said that," my Dad replied.

That brought an end to my celebration real fast. "What?? You said that if I hit 10 free throws in a row you'd get us an Atari!"

"I never said that," he repeated.

And that was that.

Nursing my resentment, I made a vow to never do that crap to anybody else. It meant I was never going to be a good salesman, but I could live with that. The casual half truths that salespeople tell*** drives me bonkers, and I could never do that.

I was thinking about my Atari misadventure when I was perusing the Steam sale listings a few days after Christmas. Not because I was hunting for Haunted House --we do have an Atari 2600 now in storage, with a ton of cartridges-- but because of the decisions that go into buying a game these days. 

Despite the Steam sale, video games aren't cheap. 

Look at The Sims 4 as an example. The base game on sale is under $5. Great deal, eh? Well, look at all of the addons for it, including ones (such as Cats & Dogs or Get To Work) that you'd think would be part of the base game, but it isn't. When you add up all of the addons, the price for The Sims 4 is over $500. Which is kind of nuts for a life simulator that The Sims 4 is.

Awkward first date or sticker shock
from the price of what The Sims 4
really costs? You decide.
(From the Steam Store sample pics.)

 

Of course, here I am talking about that while I pay a subscription fee for playing a couple of MMOs, but I digress. The point is that even when things seem cheap, the reality is something different. It's like the bait-and-switch at a car dealership, where you go in with a checklist in hand, a loan pre-approved, and a car make and model in mind, and the salespeople try their damnedest to get you to over commit so they can maximize their profits. The difference is that there's no visible salesperson there, prodding you to plunk down your money on video games. There's only you, the Steam app, the "reviews"****, and the ticking clock on the upcoming end to the Steam sale. It's all in your head, but you're conditioned to "seek a bargain", and seeing the posts for "50%" or "70%" off, you get this urge to pull the trigger and reel that bargain in.

Not everybody has that willpower.

This kind of bothers me, not because I feel superior or anything, but because people who shouldn't be blowing money on a Steam sale (or whatever sale, whether it's at a car dealership or Amazon) are out there doing it. As if we never learned anything from the last debt bubbles.***** I'd see this sort of behavior at gaming conventions as well, where people would think nothing of blowing several hundred dollars on games and gaming material, or to bring things closer to home people dropping a couple of thousand dollars on fireworks for the Fourth of July.

Remember to shoot those
fireworks off safely....
From makeagif.com.
(or someplace like that.)

 

Oh yes, I've neighbors who do the whole "we're gonna blow close to a month's worth of salary on fireworks" thing. And yes, several thousand dollars' worth. And I just shake my head and say "at least I'm getting a show out of it".

***

But to tie this whole thing back into gaming, from another angle, there's the whole in-game economy thing that goes on. Unless you do what I did in late Classic and basically made all my own potions to save on gold from the AH,  you're going to have to spend gold if you're a raider.

Or if you want epic flying in TBC Classic, you have to get 5000 gold.

In both cases, that means you have to make some gold somehow.

Unless you're like me, who is notoriously uninterested in being a slave to the Metagame, and instead tries to skate by doing as little gold farming as possible. 

Seriously. I'm practically the only person left in the raid team who doesn't have a fast mount on their main, and I wear that like a badge of honor. After all, I made the choice that if I had a couple of thousand gold in my pocket, why push to get fast flying? So I could get to the raid faster? So I could then farm for materials quicker? So I could spend more game time doing things I'm not that keen on doing?

No thanks. I'd rather do things on my own pace. And dailies? Please. I'd rather read something, or go for a quick walk, or even chill before raid time. I'm so anti-Dailies that I've never even completed the seed quests for Ogri'la and The Shatari Skyguard. I did the dailies thing back in Wrath, and I'm good.

To me, the acquisition of gold isn't very interesting --or important-- because in the end it would kind of suck for people to say of my time spent playing as "Well, Cardwyn knew how to make a lot of gold." I'd much rather be known for other things, such as being a friend or helping people out. 

But you know, some people want to be known as the Greedy Goblin type. Gevlon certainly did.

*I was good enough to be on the "A" team from 5th through 8th Grade, but I sat on the bench for the most part. My 8th Grade year, due to a leap in physical performance and a sudden ability to actually make some shots, was shaping up to be very good for me until I broke my collarbone during school recess. I was out of commission for almost two months, and by the time the brace holding my shoulder together came off I was relegated back to the bench.

**Hey, it was the 80s.

***With many of my so-called friends in high school having salesmen for fathers I got to see this in action all the time. Well, that and their parents' explicit racism too.

****Most of those reviews are totally worthless. You can spend more time combing through the reviews than actually playing some games. 

*****Like the people who went out and spent over $50,000 on a half ton pickup truck and are now complaining about the price of gasoline to fill those gas guzzlers. If you need one for work that's one thing, but you should have known going in that gas prices weren't going to stay historically low forever, and they still haven't hit the high points of the mid-2000s yet.