And Now a Counterpoint

The irony about my posting a good old fashioned rant on Tuesday is that I found an inadvertent response from YouTube. 

Oh, not an actual response, but one that did mention seasonal content in passing as part of a larger video about whether MMOs were fun. 

Yes, this is from Pint. You may know them from their YouTube video about WoW Classic Mages*...

Or maybe their video about attempting to beat all of the Elden Ring bosses in alphabetical order**...

Anyway, the video they posted yesterday was about their experiences with playing MMOs, and how they lost the fun in them, only to slowly regain the fun later.

I thought it a fitting counterpoint to my dislike of seasonal content in that this is what MMOs have become, and Pint's just coming in here and there in MMOs for bite sized content to avoid burnout is actually a pretty good thing. 

I can respect that. And it's good to see you're still kicking around, Pint. 

*I'll be completely honest in that I recognized all of the stereotypes in this video, and there were points where I laughed my head off, especially their escape from the max level Rogue in Un'Goro Crater. I've SO been there when I was first starting out playing on Stormscale-US back in 2009, and I counted myself incredibly lucky to merely escape with my life from certain encounters.

**I know I'd be abjectly terrible at 'souls' games, but I can appreciate their determination to prove their worth by setting off on a relatively insane quest to do all the bosses in order like that. It got even weirder when they made it harder on themselves by... You know what? Go watch the video, and you'll understand.

A Company Not Named The Embracer Group Makes News

Well, EA just got bought out by the Saudi PIF, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Private Equity. For a grand total of $55 billion dollars.

So... Private Equity bought out EA. Not sure which is worse: that it's a private equity buyout or who is now the owner.

If you thought that EA was already bad, I guess the company can now say "Hold my beer."

If you want speculation, I'd imagine that with the Saudis involved there will be a lot of "selective editing" of content in Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Maxis' The Sims, and other games to more "align" the games with Saudi-approved content. And no, I don't mean removing only LGBTQ content, but all PG-13 and M (for Mature) rated sexual/adult content. Except head shots and explosions, of course.

My second guess is that EA will largely replace all development staff with AI-powered coding. Saving money on salaries, you know, to boost profits. If AI creates skins for The Sims or Apex Legends to sell online, there's a boatload of profit created by, well, nobody. Same thing goes for AI-generated maps for Apex Legends, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor.

I guess EA is going to forge ahead into game development oblivion much faster than Microsoft is, even though Microsoft is forcing all employees to utilize Copilot to the point of integrating it into employee evaluations.

I sure hope that AI bubble bursts soon, because this is getting ridiculous.

Thirty Plus Years in the Making

I recently became reacquainted with an old friend of mine, Master of Orion. I don't mean the newest version out there, but this one:

From 1993 with love, although I'd bought my original
copy in 1995 or so at a used video game store.

Yeah, it runs on Steam via DOSBox, but you have to tweak the configuration settings a bit to get it to a decent size. Graphically speaking, it's still in ancient times, so setting the config file to Original means it's very small in modern monitors and Full Size means it's far too large for old resolutions. I set it to 1024x768, and it seemed to work well enough.

It's very raw in parts, especially with the diplomatic UI, but otherwise it is still an engaging game. If you're used only to modern 4X space games, such as Stellaris or Galactic Civilizations, MOO 1 is probably a bit plodding for you, but for me it hits all of those beats I loved in the genre. You don't have to have all the tension all the time to find a game engaging and fun.

It's still in the early to mid game here, but I've grabbed
all of the planets near me before the Silicoids could
get them first.

Still, there are quirks that highlight just how far gaming has come. For example, the Humans you see on screen are all male, while the Mrrshans (cat people) are mostly female. It does suffer from a bad starting point syndrome, but that's what you get when you start with a randomized galaxy. At least the games don't take that long --it only feels longer until you boost the speed in DOSBox by a bit-- so you can knock out a game in an afternoon.

I'm just glad that an old friend like this is not only still around, but able to run on modern equipment. 

#Blaugust2025

Tim Cain on Being Happy

I've mentioned this before, but I religiously watch Tim Cain's Cain on Games videos on YouTube. Having the perspective of developing games since the early 80s, and working in a field that I can relate to, is incredibly fascinating. That Tim not only survived the meat grinder but also has carved out a lasting and impactful career is inspiring to me, since my software development career lasted a little over 5 years.* That he worked on games such as the original Fallout, The Bard's Tale Construction Set, Pillars of Eternity, Wildstar, and even Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines speaks to how his games impacted my life as a gamer. 

Tim is also a genial person**, and he has a passion for games and game development. He's opinionated, but he's not an asshole about his opinions. That's something I can get behind.

On his Fun Friday video today, he had a short discussion about Being Happy:

Anyway, his first point of emphasis (and the reason for this post) is to stop rage watching videos and rage playing games. You know, the idea that you watch something that makes you angry --and you know it's going to make you angry but you watch it anyway-- and then you complain about it. It's corollary, rage playing games, is going out and playing a game that you hate and then you go online and talk about how you hate the game. 

This resonated with me because of my personal experience with my health issues and social media. And, well, the news.

Before somebody complains that being a CIS white guy means that I can tune the news out, fine. Yes, I am a CIS white guy. I'm also a CIS white guy who has health issues, especially hypertension, and I need to cut out stress in my life or I won't be around for very long.*** You can't vote if you're dead, even in Chicago nowadays.

One of the things I've done over the past several years was to cut out social media in my life, because first I couldn't stand the misinformation floating around social media with the pandemic, and then because of people within my extended family going down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole when they ought to know better. 

I can draw a parallel to this from a couple of decades ago when I cut out some news channels because their modus operandi is to generate a strong emotional reaction (frequently anger) as those strong reactions can turn into dedicated viewership. It becomes it's own feedback loop: keep throwing out red meat at their viewership, and their viewers get mad and tune in to listen or watch more often. I realized I was getting angry when those channels were on, and when I stepped back and turned them off, I realized I was much happier as a result.

***

But recognizing that rage playing games --or even just playing games that have changed over time into something you don't like-- isn't healthy is one piece of the puzzle. You have to break the chain and go play other games that you might actually enjoy. As Tim points out, there's oodles of games out there on Steam right now, so why not try other games instead? And if you don't like the game, return it and try another one. 

Before you ask, no, I'm not using this as a prelude to doing something drastic such as quitting WoW and playing only Civilization IV or something. After all, I still derive a lot of fun from playing Classic WoW, and yes, I've even enjoyed poking around here and there in Retail**** as long as I limit my interactions to places I'm familiar with and I ignore all the helpful suggestions to try Retail's version of Green Eggs and Ham. 

I will not try Dragonflight in a boat, or with a (space) goat, Blizz-I-Am.

--Dr. Seuss, maybe

Anyway, Tim has gotten me to thinking that I need to work more on trying to be happy, or if I'm not careful I will turn into a "get off my lawn" old guy, and sooner than I'd like.

*I should be clear: I enjoyed that software development part of my life, but I'm glad I'm no longer involved with it. Knowing what I know now about my health, I doubt I would have remained married or even been alive in 2025 given all the stress involved in what was a CAD/CAM software development job. 

**Yes, I know, he presents that way on YouTube, and people might not be like that in real life, but since Tim basically makes his videos in one take it's kind of hard to fake it for over 500 videos without using a lot of editing. Still, I haven't experienced him as either a coworker or a boss, so I can't speak to that. 

***I just had my six month check in with my doctors --both cardiologist and my primary care physician-- and I'm still hanging in there. I wasn't planning on providing an update in a post this June, but the TL;DR is that I need to keep doing what I'm doing, and my primary doc keeps hounding me to take vacations and relax more. Of course, working on projects such as woodworking do help me relax more, so there's that at least.

****Within reason. Without "playing the game" by questing or anything like that, I can simply move around the Old World and enjoy what I see for the art alone.

How About Enforcing the ToS?

Under the header of "that was unexpected", I found yet another Brandon Sanderson video (released yesterday) in my YouTube feed. This one, however, was more related to gaming.

If you want to skip the first half of the video/podcast where Brandon and Dan Wells discuss Magic: the Gathering (I don't play M:tG, so I can't comment here) and a sandwich food heist in Norway, the multiplayer video game portion begins here, at the 11:40 mark.

The TL;DR is that since there are adults/parents who no longer have the reaction skills, but they do have disposable income, is to provide a subscription service to pay for moderators to come in and monitor the chat/voice discussions to remove obnoxious behavior from the game or the lobbies.

When I first heard the word "pay" I thought "Oh crap, he's going to ask for whale-ish items in a cash shop," but then when Brandon fully described his idea I then thought "Oh, you mean like what we're paying Blizzard to (theoretically) do in World of Warcraft?"

I do have to wonder just how much it would cost to actually have real enforcement of Terms of Service of multiplayer games such as Marvel Rivals or League of Legends, not just lip service. Obviously too much, if you see all of the bad behavior in multiplayer games and MMOs that I've seen over the years, because I'm at the point where bad behavior is pretty much expected unless proven otherwise.*

Among other suggestions that Brandon and Dan floated were a "little brother/little sister" mode for multiplayer games (beyond the games that already have it) so that the little kids could play along too. I personally had no issues grouping up with either the mini-Reds or even my Questing Buddy's kids to just goof around, but if you're playing a game such as a Zelda title** and the wee set needs help, having that sort of mode would be a godsend to both the kid and the parent/older sibling. 

Or maybe the parent needs help on Elden Ring, having their teenaged kid zone in and help them out would be a decent solution rather than trying to use third party addons (or simply giving the controller to the teen) to bypass the game.

Anyway, I expected explicit "god mode" pay to win type of suggestions, but got something that should have been taken care of by a game's ToS. Anyway, it was interesting enough of a suggestion that I decided to post about it.

*Yes, I've been told via whispers in the past that they expected me to be an asshole of some sort when I joined a group event but the people whispering me were pleasantly surprised to be found wrong. And no, I don't understand why people would look at my toons or how I was acting and think that I was going to ruin their fun. 

**I almost said Elden Ring or Mass Effect, but I immediately shut that one down. Why on earth would you let a 5 year old play Elden Ring? Or the cutscenes in Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3?

Keeping that Sense of Mystery

I make a point to watch long standing developer Tim Cain's Cain on Games YouTube channel. He has decades of experience creating video games, and as a long time player/coder myself*, I really enjoy his insight into designing and creating games. Today, his post was a quick world building tip:

For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation. 

This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling. 

Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.

You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away. 

That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.

Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well. 

One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.

And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)

*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.

I Ain't Blind and I Don't Like What I Think I See...

I've been on a bit of a 70s kick lately, and that doesn't mean I've been wearing loud clothing* or considering putting in wooden paneling in the house.

Sorry, that's not Boston, but The Doobie Brothers. (True story: my dad had absolutely no clue what a "doobie" was, so when I made a joke back in the 90s about the Doobies' concerts probably smelling pretty dank, he looked at me like I'd grown another arm. "Dad," I said, "A 'doobie' is another name for a joint. So the band's name is a bunch of friends smoking marijuana.")

Anyway, as I've been cleaning since my oldest left home, I've stumbled on the old Intellivision console that we now have in a plastic storage container, and I've begun some investigations as to how to get that and our Atari to connect to a modern television. Ironically enough, the easiest "solution" out there --outside of finding an old CRT television-- is to pull out a VCR and use it to convert the RF signal to a composite signal. Still, I'm not entirely convinced of this method, so I'm poking around at solutions that actually work that don't involve another large piece of electronic equipment.

It may not look like much, but given a 4KB
game limitation, it's really quite impressive.
From YouTube.

I periodically check out the prices of old 70s-era receivers and other audio equipment, and the asking prices make me cringe. Knowing that a lot of that equipment would likely need the electrolytic capacitors replaced as well as the belts for the cassettes, it's rather sad just how insane the used market has gotten. 

Instead of that, at least I could listen to music from the 70s. Hence that Doobie Brothers' line from Takin' It To The Streets in the title.

***

I suppose with a title like that you'd be forgiven if I was referencing the shenanigans happening in Retail WoW's latest expansion, The War Within.

From a blue post on Blizzard forums.
Thank you, Snip-and-sketch.

I'm not surprised, and my natural inclination is to look at this as a way to convince more people to spring for Early Access for the next expansion. After all, the beta test ought to have shaken this sort of issue out, but maybe that's an indicator that the beta wasn't as useful as it could have been.

But in general, I'm not shocked by this sort of behavior. 

Does anybody else remember the Quel'Delar questline that began with the Battered Hilt drop in the Icecrown Citadel 5-person dungeons in Wrath? When those dungeons were first released, the Battered Hilt dropped far more frequently than intended, so those first several days a ton of people got to work on their Quel'Delar quests before the drop rate was nerfed down to intended levels. Those of us who followed behind those who rushed ahead were left scraping for the occasional drop if you didn't want to spring for 5000 or more gold for one on the Auction House.** Of course, that was a drop for a specific questline, not a general nerf to the actual leveling experience in the game.

Again, given that Microsoft plopped a ton of money on purchasing Activision Blizzard, they want a maximum return on their investment. So, while this ain't loot boxes, this is a way of using FOMO and other psychological tactics to convince people to hand over their money. I expect more of this sort of behavior in the future from Blizzard. Even if the entire issue is an innocent one it will always be viewed from the lens of profits first, players second, because once the trust between developer and player has been broken, it can't easily be restored.

And that's all I'll say about that. 

*With or without Garanimals tags. You don't know about Garanimals? Hoo boy... Where do I begin?

From Pinterest.

Whomever came up with Garanimals basically made pattern matching easy for parents. Clothing came with animal tags on them; match the animals up for the different pieces (shirts, pants, skirts, etc.) and you have matching clothing. Sounds great in theory, but the joke among my peers as we became teenagers was that the clothing was so loud you needed help just trying to figure out what was supposed to go with what. Garanimals were all the rage in the late 70s and early 80s, but they've recently made a comeback aimed at clothing for babies and toddlers.

**Even back then I was pretty poor, gold-wise.

#Blaugust2024

Why Don't I Play more Characters in Video Games?

I've been asked this question periodically in MMOs by a variety of people, especially when we need someone like a tank or healer in a group format, and I've typically waved the question off with a "I just like playing Mages". 

Of course, when I started playing WoW back in 2009, the answer would have been that I just liked playing Paladins --I think I have three in Retail at this point in time*-- but by the time I quit playing Retail in 2014 I'd switched to playing Rogues. That style of toon persisted through Age of Conan, Elder Scrolls Online, and into my early forays into Classic WoW, but I have since returned to being primarily a Mage or Mage-like player and I don't deviate from that very much at all.

If you'd have given me the opportunity to play an Elemental Shaman in TBC Classic --and I did request that-- I would have likely continued playing that Shaman a lot longer. After all, of the three specs a Shaman has, Elemental is the DPS caster type**, the most Mage-like of the Shaman specs.

But when I hear about people who, to get ready for a new expansion to whatever MMO they're playing, plot out the leveling and preparation process for all of their toons, I simply don't grok that. If you like that, great, but to me that looks too much like work. 

From this WoW Forum thread.
From Imgur too.

***

Maybe it's because I simply don't love these games as much as other people do.

Me: We've discussed this already, Card.
I'm not saying I dislike you.

My reasoning for that conclusion stems from my deck work.

In order to figure out how to renovate the deck, I had to do quite a bit of research to make sure that not only could I accomplish this task, but the order in which I was going to accomplish it. As my kids have pointed out to me on numerous occasions, I do love to research a topic when I'm going to do something. 

On Friday, I was at the auto dealer while our old '97 Accord was getting regular maintenance taken care of***, and I was writing out what steps I need to perform to complete the deck renovation sometime next year. After that was finished, I began jotting down other projects that I'll be working on the next few years --there are quite a few-- since the kids have left the house and I don't have to worry about waking them up in the morning while I'm working. Before I finished, I'd already plotted out a basic timeline and potential costs and pitfalls before judging the priority of each project.

So why do I research projects such as these, I thought suddenly, but I refuse to do so for video games? 

Well, that one's kind of easy: I'd rather figure that out myself since, by and large, whether I fail or succeed at a video game won't directly affect my life. 

But screwing up a deck rebuild just might, especially if it collapses while I'm standing on it.

That's fair, I decided as I left the dealership. Despite the opinions of a certain subset of gamers, games don't rise to the level of seriousness found when you're doing repairs or a project around the house. If you've ever had to pay a plumber to show up and fix your fuck-up, you know what I mean.

By extension, if I like playing MMOs, why don't I do more than play one or two toons?**** I just play pretty much one character in a type of game that encourages multiple playthroughs with different types of characters, so why don't I follow along?

Looking back on my game playing, once you get beyond my stand by games such as Sid Meier's Civ series, some of the Total War games, and some other city or civ builder games, I really pretty much stick to a couple of characters. The only real exceptions to this are Stardew Valley and SWTOR; the former you could argue doesn't rise to the story level of a BG3 or World of Warcraft, and the latter I did play through (almost) each class once just to see all of the stories.

(Confession time here: I never finished the Imperial Agent's story in SWTOR; I'm at the end of Taris as far as the story goes, and I kind of left it at that and haven't been back since. So... 8-10 years, maybe? Then again, the reason why I don't play SWTOR much at all has to do with the broken companion pathing, and since that hasn't been fixed in at least 5 years I doubt it will ever get fixed.)

***

The funny thing is, I don't feel like I'm not enthusiastic about video games, it's just... Well, if everybody does it, why should I do it? 

It's not as if I haven't leveled new characters before. I went through the stage of starting a new toon for each new expansion in WoW, and I quickly discovered that if I wanted to examine content solo, that was the way to go. By the time the two toons I was leveling in Cataclysm reached their first L80-81 zones, they were mostly empty. And Mists... Well, Pandaria was worse, because Pandaria really was empty. The only exceptions to that were the areas where there were farming dailies and location of that Black Dragon who gives out the legendary questline (whose name escapes me); beyond that there were times when the number of people in a zone were less than 5. Believe me, that starting area once you land in Pandaria would have been a lot easier if I had some more bodies around, but starting out with quest greens from Deepholm and Uldum (which was where I dinged L85) and jumping straight to Pandaria wasn't a fun time either.

I suppose that my experiences leveling those toons in a post-Cataclysm world may have something to do with my lack of desire to level multiple alts, but at the same time game companies have come up with all sorts of ways to speed up the leveling experience itself. Less pain all the way around, right? That might work if you're inclined to level multiple toons and the leveling itself is getting in your way, but... I'm just not really interested.

***

I've seen it bandied about that when you play WoW, you're a WoW player. There's not much room for another game when you play WoW, because playing WoW will consume all of your available time. I do have a bone to pick with that assertion, as I know plenty of people who play multiple MMOs and play other video games on a regular basis. That being said, there's more than a kernel of truth to that statement. If you plot out leveling all of your alts so that you have all of your professions covered and/or all of your potential mains raid ready, well, that takes time. And all of the speedy leveling experiences in the world won't eliminate the time sink of maxing out a half dozen or more toons over the course of an expac.

(Somewhere an altoholic laughed until they wheezed, because they likely have 30 toons to level in the upcoming Retail WoW expansion.)

I guess it comes down to what I want to do with my time. Do I enjoy the leveling experience so much that I want to repeat it a dozen times over? Or even a couple of extra times? And even if I do, will I want to speed along at the pace offered me, or do I want to poke around, doing it my way?

Bender is missing that middle finger,
and we're missing "Don't You Forget About Me"
playing in the background, but you get the idea.
From Tumblr. And The Breakfast Club.

*In an era of dozens of potential toons 3 may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that the toons I've played to a significant degree in Retail WoW are only 6, then 3 is about 50% of my WoW toons.

**The other two being melee DPS (Enhancement) and Healer (Restoration/Resto).

***Before you ask, while I'd like to do this stuff myself, I don't have the tools to make it happen. And I'll be honest in that a car built in October 1996 could decide to give up the ghost at any moment, so I'd rather bring ol' Putt-Putt to a shop that actually has people who have worked on this generation of Hondas before.

****Or replay long story driven video games like other gamers do? Such as finishing Baldurs Gate 3 then restarting the game with a different main character and a different class. Or one of the Mass Effect stories, but with a different person to romance. Or replaying one of the Diablo games ad infinitum. 

EtA: Not sure what happened, but was missing half of a sentence. Corrected. Also, corrected a formatting error.

#Blaugust2024

Fighting the Demons

The other week, my son asked me how Baldur's Gate 3 was going. 

"I haven't really touched it since we last talked about it a month ago," I replied. He is quite aware that I try not to go bananas when playing a video game, and for me that means playing a game in fits and starts.

Yes, I'm aware that I play MMOs --and WoW Classic Era-- very regularly. The thing is, in those games I'm not very goal oriented these days, so it's more to play just so I can hang out with other people. Or people watch wherever I'm at.

There's always something going on in Vivec City.
Even at the bank.

Still, I worry about my ability to control myself, as I have the tendency is to go "all-in" on playing a game I like that I'm progressing through. So I play a bit, then I force myself to back off. Once I create a bit of separation, that magical pull that a game or a book or a piece of music has on me lessens, and I feel better able to balance my desires with my needs. 

BG3 is definitely a game that I enjoy playing. It has some moments that make me go WTF, such as your companions' backstories*, but overall I enjoy it a lot. It scratches that RPG itch that I don't get often enough these days, just as Age of Wonders 4 scratches that Fantasy building game itch that Master of Magic first gave me.**

Hey Sundren, how are you doing?
I remember you from Age of Wonders III.

So when I told my son that I hadn't played in what was effectively a month, he wasn't surprised. One of his friends had begun playing BG3 recently, and he was having to balance the video game with all of his grad school work that needed to be finished before the end of the semester. I didn't envy that friend of his one damn bit.

***

I suppose I've always known to a certain extent that I am prone to addiction. 

If I find something I like, I tend to do it over and over to an almost unhealthy extent. Even before the Satanic Panic derailed my D&D youth, I used to read and re-read The Lord of the Rings. And before that, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.

This was the version of the books that I had.
From Amazon.

I clearly remember my dad coming into my room when I was in 8th Grade and sick with a cold, and he informed me I had better start reading something else than "those darn Tolkien books". Of course, that made me want to re-read them even more often just to spite him, but I instead turned my mind toward other Fantasy and Science Fiction***.

During my freshman year at college, I had problems transitioning to college level work because I got distracted by Star Trek, of all things.**** That Fall of 1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, and the friends at college and I would watch the show religiously and talk about it after. The internet was still in its protracted infancy and email access was restricted at UD, so those of us who liked geeky pastimes could only rely upon face-to-face contact for such discussion. So there I was, struggling to keep up with my studies, but all I could think about was Star Trek. 

Yes, I was a nerd. You had to ask?

When my grades began slipping to the point where my scholarship was in danger --and my dad made sure I knew about it-- I had to take drastic action. So I began dialing it back on Captain Picard and crew.

I wasn't as self-destructive as some people I knew in college, such as the person who lived in the dorm next to me. He didn't last a semester at college, as about 6-8 weeks in he discovered the pleasures of partying and simply stopped caring about his classes.***** His girlfriend (who was attending Notre Dame) contacted us because he had even gone silent with her, and she was worried. My roommate and a couple of other people on our dorm floor, including our Resident Assistant, basically held an intervention and convinced him it was smarter to drop out to get his life back together before he ruined it completely.#

Still, watching that happen was a sobering experience. There were several instances of people on my dorm floor imploding and getting themselves on academic probation, enough so that the joke was that our floor had the lowest GPA in the entire building, and that was despite several people with excellent grades calling our floor home.

***

Even today I have to be careful lest I get sucked into some distraction to the point where I haven't gotten any of the normal activities of home life completed. This goes for work as well, because I've had to be told more than once over the course of my career to basically "stay in my lane" and not do other work I found interesting but wasn't part of my job description. 

So while I'd love to be farther along in playing some of these video games, I know that I have to be on my guard. Writing down lists of things to do, much like how you'd write out a grocery list, help to keep me on track from being distracted too much, but even then my sense of time can get all thrown off when I'm absorbed in something. Maybe I ought to set a timer.

You and me both, Jodi.

*I have a post I'm working on about that.

**I should clarify that the original Sim City, Sim Earth, and hell, even Santa Paravia for those old farts like me were the video games that inspired my love of building and development games. 

I actually have a printout of the source code
of the game in TRS-80 BASIC. I'd meant to convert
it to TI-99 4/A BASIC, but I never got around to
it. Something something hormones something something.
From datadrivengamer.blogspot.com.

***Likely to his displeasure. He never read fiction, much less F&SF.

****Given that I went to an all-boys high school, you'd think that I'd have said "girls" instead of Star Trek. And you're not wrong in that having girls in classes were a distraction after years of not having them around, but you have to understand I dealt with that already in high school. My junior year of high school I took Spanish III, and since only two of us signed up for the class they sent us over to the "sister" all-girls high school next door. I should have known that something was up when my classmate and I discovered we were in two separate classes, but even I was surprised on that first day of school I walked to the classroom and knocked, only to see thirty pairs of eyes turn and look at me. 

"Spanish III?" I asked.

The teacher smiled. "Sí sí," she replied. "Red?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, my face likely showing my mind turning to mush, as a wave of laughter swept the the class. It wasn't enough that I was outnumbered 30:1, but that they were all really attractive as well meant that I was in for a very long year.

"Do you want to sit somewhere up here?" the teacher asked, motioning to a desk in front. 

"No, I'll take this one right. back. here." I replied, sliding into the desk in the back by the door to another round of light laughter.

TL;DR: I survived the year, but that's because I made myself as invisible as possible. I'd say about 5-6 of the girls knew me from grade school, so most of them were a total unknown to me. My biggest takeaway from that year was that if you kept quiet you got to hear all sorts of interesting things about people's lives, particularly their love life. I also (now) realized that I missed a few obvious hints that some of the girls dropped that they were interested in me. This period of my life will come back from time to time, so don't be surprised if this reappears in a subsequent post.

*****I was there when it happened; we'd gone out on a Saturday night to the university village, nicknamed The Ghetto at the time, and we came across a student house that had kegs there but very few people in attendance. At the time I didn't drink so I passed (they got me a Mt. Dew, I think), but about halfway through his first beer our floormate decided he really really liked that stuff and he just started plowing through the beer like there was no tomorrow. He and another guy we were with got totally plastered and it took us the better part of an hour to walk them back to the dorm.

#As far as I know, it didn't help. Someone who was a mutual acquaintance ran into him at a concert back in their hometown a year or two later, and he was well down the "throwing your life away" path.

EtA: I corrected the time from 3-4 weeks to 6-8 weeks, as it was late October when this began.

Some Short Ponderables For a Saturday

None of these items are enough for a post on their own, so I strung several that have been living rent free in my head into a single miscellaneous post.

***

In World of Warcraft, main raids typically have a gear set for each class known as a Tier set. In Vanilla WoW, there's even a pre-raid Tier set, known as T0, that you can accumulate via dungeons.* However, why is AQ40's Tier set considered T2.5 and not T3? It's not a set that came along later and was shoehorned in to give people a chance at better gear, like the T0.5 questlines, so why is it colloquially known as T2.5? 

You'd think that going from Molten Core -> Onyxia/Blackwing Lair -> Temple of Ahn'Qiraj -> Naxxramas would be Tier 1 through Tier 4, but noooo....

***

Ex-Blizzard head honcho Mike Ybarra has this idea in his head to allow paying customers to tip game devs. Given that while he was in charge at Blizzard he had the ability to pay the development staff --all of them-- more money if he liked their work, why is he even suggesting this?

Apparently tip jar stickers are a thing
that you can buy. From superostmk.live

Because he wants to turn game development into the equivalent of the wait staff at American restaurants, who survive on tips because of the low pay. 

I mean, I get it if there's a tip jar out for free-to-play games, since that could make sense if you don't want to buy stuff from their cash shop (assuming there is one), but when a guy who was in charge of a game development studio makes these suggestions, it certainly seems less like he's trying to say "game devs deserve extra for a good game" and more like "I really want to find new ways to pay people less to increase my profit margins".

***

One thing that always puzzled me about the Plaguelands in WoW is how the land is so obviously diseased and plagued --both there and in the Ghostlands in southern Quel'Thalas-- but the NPCs and the players seem to be immune to the Plague itself.  You see this in Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King as well, where in the Troll city of Zul'Drak has Plague Spreaders everywhere, but the Crusaders and the players are effectively immune to that. I would have thought that anything who stays long enough in Plague infested lands stands a very high chance of contracting the Plague themselves, but I guess plot armor is stronger than the Plague of Undeath.

Thought I'd go with a Ghostlands screenshot
for a change. Even in broad daylight it looks like this.

***

I'm not the brightest bulb in the universe when someone tries to subtly tell me something.

If you ever read some of those Reddit threads about guys totally missing out that they were being hit on, yeah that'd be me.**

For some reason I was thinking about the term Netflix and Chill, and it occurred to me just what other "come hither" signals in the past did I miss. I knew of "come up for a cup of coffee", but I personally never encountered that one, but beyond that outside of the stereotypical 'booty call' --calling someone up after midnight to ask them to come over to your place-- I don't know of any. And I certainly don't know of any references used by people playing various video, pencil/paper, and board games, for certain. 

Still, maybe it's something to pursue for a while. Yes, I am such a dweeb. Or maybe I just want to look back on my past and smack my forehead and go "Oh CRAP! How did I miss that one??!!"

Sometimes being middle age is a bitch.

*Yes, I know that they're not all that good in terms of what your class is best at, Blizzard was still figuring this stuff out in Vanilla, you know, so it's not perfect. Still, the Rogue set and the Mage set do look nice from an aesthetics standpoint.

**There's a ton of them out there; I only linked one but if you want to read more, go ahead and search for "clueless guys reddit thread". Trust me, they'll pop out.

A Drop in the Bucket

Something that frequently gets overlooked is that --relatively speaking-- non-mobile video games are still something that not a lot of people play. 

Sure, video games may make more money than movies and music do combined*, but when you look at sales of the games themselves, you realize that a lot of money globally comes from not that many people. 

I was curious about how many copies of Madden 2024 were sold, and I discovered that it was around 5 million or so. To put that in perspective, EA sold Madden 2024 to roughly the entire population of Alabama. That may seem like a lot, but when you remember the population of the US --the prime target of Madden, given it's American Football-- is 333 million, you realize that's kind of a drop in the bucket. And when you realize that the average viewership of CBS' comedy Young Sheldon is 8 million viewers, you get a better comparison between passive viewing and active playing. 

MMOs are even more of a niche market, given that the largest MMO out there, World of Warcraft, pulls in somewhere between 4 to 8 million or so subscribers** globally. Yes, only at best 0.1% of the world's population play WoW. 

So, when people talk about how WoW was a phenomenon, it's all relative. More than twice as many people bought the Spice Girls' Spice than the best numbers World of Warcraft posted in the last 8 years.

And we don't want to compare WoW to the number of people who have cable and/or satellite television subscriptions, do we?

***

So why bring this up?

I was reminded of this because I frequently interact with people at work and at other places who aren't gamers of any sort, and they have --at best-- only the vaguest idea about what might be going on in the gaming industry. They may know that game companies are making a ton of money because it improves their retirement accounts, but beyond that they are left in the dark.

When people find out I'm a gamer, I usually get a "Oh, like Madden?" question directed my way.*** 

If I respond with an "Actually, I play WoW," I get "those" looks. 

The "you're a weirdo" looks. The ones that I used to get when people found out I play Dungeons and Dragons.**** I have no idea what it'd be like if I said League of Legends or Fortnite --since I play neither of those-- but I'd imagine there'd be similar reactions. 

The irony is that people in my WoW friend group aren't all aware of the industry beyond WoW itself. When I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, only one person in the chat said "Yeah, I play that too!" There were a couple "can't afford that right now" and a few "Huh? What game is that?" reactions.

Usually right about now someone will point out those profit numbers and how many people tend to watch the League championships. That's nice and all, but League still has a ways to go to match the viewership of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, and that World Series was the least watched Series in television history.

By comparison, 300 million people
worldwide watched Joe Frazier beat
Muhammad Ali in 1971.
From Sports Illustrated.

It's kind of strange how boxing doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to have, but I honestly believe that the pursuit of profit and moving boxing from something you could see on television to a strictly pay-per-view environment hurt the long term health of the sport. If you don't have eyeballs watching your product, it'll fade from public consciousness.*****

So, video games are this financial juggernaut, but that's largely on the backs of mobile games and live service games, where you constantly feed money to the beast.

But the long term cultural impact? Well, that remains to be seen.

My perspective as a gamer is that gaming is having a large cultural impact, but that's because I'm inside the ecosystem. However, my work and life take me outside the ecosystem, and for that reason alone I remain skeptical. We may no longer be in a world where a single cultural event dominates over all others --such as the final episode of M*A*S*H or the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller-- but that doesn't mean that gaming is lost in the noise.

I think that we gamers just need to realize that we're not as culturally important as we think we are.

*As of 2022 via a Forbes article which I won't link to because it's behind a "stop using your adblocker" wall.

**Courtesy of the leaked graphic about WoW subscriptions.

***If they don't at first think that I go out to gambling casinos, that is.

****That's gotten better over the years, but you still have to read the room before you declare your full frontal nerdity to people.

*****And before somebody pipes up with the violence inherent in boxing, the popularity of MMA and UFC belies that. Those latter two can be easily found on television without pay-per-view.

Friday Musings: The Missing 90's

The 90s were, for me, kind of a lost decade.

I graduated from college, got married, and we began having children all during the 90s. I had a series of jobs, which included a stint as a Salesmaker at Radio Shack*, and only settled into a relatively stable position midway through the decade. We bought a house right at the time we became a family, and the last two years of the decade were spent learning both how to be both a father and a homeowner.

Because I was so preoccupied, I kind of missed out on a lot of touchstones for people who were in their 20s back then. While I kept my interest in Metal and Alternative, I developed an interest in Celtic, Folk, and Jazz, so I missed out on the major musical trends of the decade.** 

Alice In Chains' Dirt was released 32 years ago. Yikes.

As was this version of the song Kilkelly, from the

album Music at Matt Molloy's.

Gaming kind of followed in its wake, with me becoming interested in Euro-style board games when they first began appearing here in the US in the mid-90s. 

We still have our copy of Settlers of Catan
that we purchased in 1996. It's certainly
seen better days, but it's been well loved.

Their appeal, promising short game times yet with just as much deep gameplay as longer titles such as Avalon Hill's Civilization and Games Workshop's Talisman drew me in. That my wife was also willing to play the games was a bonus, because she simply wasn't interested in RPGs.*** And to be honest, neither was I at the time.

***

It wasn't that I was over pencil and paper RPGs, it was more that I'd left my old game group behind when I graduated from college and I had no real group to replace it. RPGs no longer had the boom of the late 70s-early 80s --or even the "bad boy" image from the Satanic Panic-- to fuel interest in them. The game store I frequented had a bulletin board for game groups, but they were all (or mostly) out of the University of Cincinnati or Xavier University, comprised of college kids looking for groups. And I, being a grad in my 20s, wasn't really the target audience.

I'd largely moved on from D&D and spent a few years DMing a Middle-earth Role Playing campaign, but that fizzled out by the mid-90s. D&D itself was slowly being weighted down by the tons of settings that TSR was cranking out, and they'd even lost their position as the flagship RPG to some edgy upstart published by White Wolf named Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM captured all of the vibes that had previously been AD&D's until the Columbine school shooting in 1999 brought goth subculture (including V:tM) under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. 

While AD&D 2e moved away from controversy,
even renaming Demons and Devils to something
tamer, Vampire: the Masquerade reveled in its
association with horror. This even rubbed off on
it's predecessor, Ars Magica, in it's 3rd Edition
incarnation. From Wikipedia.

So for me, pencil and paper RPGs were not really on my radar.

***

What about video games, you may ask?

Well, we puttered along with an old 486DX66 machine (originally a 386SX25 that I scrounged for replacement parts for incremental upgrades) that I kept running throughout most of the decade, but most of my games were used. There were a couple of used PC games stores around town, and for a few dollars I could own games that were 4-5 years old. Given that I'd fallen in love with GEnie and then USENET, I was fine that my games were aging relics of the early 90s while consoles such as Nintendo's N64 and the original Sony Playstation were running rings around my own PC. 

Ah, the original Master of Magic.
Not only was it a Fantasy version of the
Master of Orion gameplay found later in Age of
Wonders, but the artwork in the game manual
had a lot of BDSM in it. If my parents had
ever seen that manual, they would have had
a heart attack. From Wikipedia.

***

I guess it's only natural that I've become interested in games from the 90's, given that 1994 was 30 years ago and I feel there are huge gaps in my geek cultural knowledge that I need to fill. 

Why bother? After all, I'm only vaguely involved with pop culture these days; if the hottest artists of today (and no, not the Rolling Stones) were to pass me on the sidewalk, I'd have no idea who they were.**** 

I don't think that it's because I miss the culture of the 90's, but rather it's because I want to keep myself from sounding like my mom when she starts waxing about how much better things were in the 50s. The pull of myopia is strong, and I know that despite it being a pre-9/11 and pre-Vladimir Putin world, the 90's weren't all that. Although the 90s were supposedly an economic boom time in the US, we personally struggled to get by. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to afford a house, much less three kids. There was also dealing with what felt like the perpetual disappointment of my parents, who expected better of their own children.

Maybe it's about putting some ghosts to rest. The 'what if' that can haunt you at night, wondering if the decisions you'd made 30 or 40 years ago were the right ones. I don't know if that's something you can ever be at peace about, and it's not like my own parents have ever confided in me about these sort of doubts, so I guess the best I can do is simply muddle through and hope for the best.

*Yes, that was the official name. Oh, I could write lots of posts about Rat Shack. I was fond of some parts of the job, especially when one of the local amateur radio enthusiasts or the electronics hobbyists came in, but far too many of my hours were spent dealing with people who didn't understand what a CD was or what a home computer was. Or they simply wanted the monthly free battery.

**To be fair, when I heard the boy bands at the end of the decade, I certainly didn't feel like I missed anything.

***I still blame her ex, the boyfriend before me, and a game group who introduced her to D&D immediately before that. I've made a couple of attempts to reintroduce her to the genre without success.

****I'm not sure what those celebrities would think of that, but I'd like to think that they'd at least be somewhat grateful that they don't have someone staring at them or otherwise bugging them.

Video Game Art: World of Warcraft

I was perusing Batttle.net's launcher the other day because the launcher is heavily promoting the somewhat controversial Plunderstorm event in Retail* when I was struck by the artwork:

The presence of a Draenei in pirate regalia makes
this event seem flirty and fun. Screencap from Battle.net.

While I have no real opinion on Plunderstorm itself, as it's a Retail only thing and I don't play Retail, I had to admit that Blizzard's art team does a fantastic job of selling the event. 

That was when I got the idea for this series of posts, which is intended to be an occasional event meant to highlight the artwork in and about video games. 

My sister-in-law's husband received a coffee table book as a present some years back of the artwork for the games for the original Atari 2600, such as this box cover for Atari's Haunted House:

We have this in a box somewhere, but
this graphic from Giant Bomb is much better
than I'd ever be able to scan.

Whether or not the game matched the artwork is kind of irrelevant, since the artwork is meant to evoke a specific emotion and intice you to purchase the game. Beyond that, it's really damn good all by itself.

So, I thought, why not highlight a slice of some video game art that I've found that I really do enjoy? I'm not an art museum or gallery, but it's something I want to present here to demonstrate that, well, video game art is just as much art as that found in any physical gallery.

This first installment of artwork comes from screencaps I made from of Battle.net's launcher --which is why there's the 'X' and the 'Back' buttons visible on them-- and show that the Blizzard art team is still at the top of their game. Alas that these aren't the full artwork, because the news entries only show part of the full piece, and if there's an attribution other than 'Blizzard' I can't find it on Battle.net's launcher. I realize that Blizzard likely did that on purpose so that their art team wouldn't be poached by other game developers or graphic art teams, but the artists who worked on these pieces deserve the recognition.

When the sky is shattered and looks like it's on fire,
that's not a good thing. Yes, this is from Shadowlands,
which is to show that no matter what you thought
of the expansion itself, the art does a great job
of showing a shattered world.

Yes, I used a cropped version of these two clowns
as a header for this blog for a while. I still have
mixed emotions about this graphic, because the art
is great but the memory of my progression raiding
ending without ever finishing Tempest Keep
still hurts over two years later.

Yeah, don't remind me that I only set foot in
Ulduar once. The artwork is still great,
because I can appreciate the Lovecraftian nature
of the Old Gods.

I'm still of the opinion that dragons --even in
WoW-- are not to be trifled with. They have
their own agendas, and woe to that person
who crosses them. That said, if you've got
one in your corner, you can sleep well at night.

Yeah, the fight at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraq was
kind of like this. Cardwyn took a bit of a beating
there in the fight --I seem to recall her getting
stomped and kicked into the next county--
but I'm glad I was there for the battle.

I believe this is inside the Icecrown Citadel
raid itself, because it doesn't look like
the entrance to the 5-person instances plus
the raid. Unlike Ulduar and the TBC raids,
I'm actually okay that I never made it here.

Sunrise over Thousand Needles.

Remember what I said about not quite
trusting dragons? How about dragons disguised
as gnomes? That's about as close as you can get
to someone holding up a sign that says
"Danger, Will Robinson!"

As much as I ended up disliking the Cataclysm
expansion, I can't deny the power of the artwork.

It's that "We are not amused" look that gets me.

Oh, look; the demon found himself a new
pet. While seeing the artwork for Serpentshrine
Cavern and Tempest keep hurts for me,
this likely would hurt my questing buddy, as
our raid team in TBC Classic fell apart
when they pushed to Sunwell Plateau right
before the guild transferred servers.

And finally, this stirs a lot of emotions in me.
Not bad ones, to be certain, but old memories
of my first Paladin in AD&D in the early 80s
taking on evil in all its forms. There's also more
than a bit of Arthur vs. Mordred at the Battle
of Camlann here as well.

*I know that Blizz wants to call it Modern WoW, but I prefer Retail since it also implies that you have to have bought the current expansion to be current with the present version of WoW. Modern WoW sounds like it covers everything from Legion onward, and at the rate Classic WoW is being released it'll reach Legion in a few years.