Just Who Are the MMO Players, Anyway?

Ben Milton, of the YouTube Channel Questing Beast and the creator of the RPG Knave, had a video up a couple of days ago that got me to thinking.

It's about 21 minutes, and he does a great job
discussing this particular topic.

The big theme that he had in this video was that D&D is going to be the top dog in RPGs not because of a superior ruleset but because it is the game people think of first that satisfies what he calls Rule 1: "To play the game, you simply describe what your character is doing, and then that conversation, that description affects the game world."*

Ben references Mike Mearls, one of the major creators behind D&D 4e, and even provided a clip of a recent video Mike had released concerning why D&D 4e failed. What Mike discovered during playtesting for 4e was that people would have these character sheets full of powers, and they'd look down them and say "I swing my sword," instead of using said powers. This led Mike Mearls to the realization that the majority of D&D players aren't there for the ruleset, but for their friends and to have a good time.

While watching this video, I swear you could have swapped D&D for WoW and a lot of this stuff would still track.

There are the people who want complexity and all the crunch and huge rotations and mechanical difficulty out of their MMOs, and then there are the folks who are just there to chill, slay a few internet dragons, and enjoy the show. Those who are into min/maxing, utilizing all their abilities in interesting ways, are a minority of players but a majority of the crowd found on the company forums, on Reddit, and on the hardcore websites.

WoW will always be the number one MMO, and in general it remains so, because people will equate MMO = WoW in the same way RPG = D&D, and it satisfies that itch to allow you to pretty much go wherever you want to go in a massively multiplayer world that makes MMOs a distinct genre from other video games. You're not going to "beat" WoW by having superior raid fights or ability combos, but rather you get enough people who just want to chill with their friends to come along and hang out.

Now, this doesn't exactly map to WoW, because I believe the WoW Endgame playerbase comprises a larger portion of WoW players than the hardcore RPG crowd does to D&D, but that's also a function of WoW catering to that crowd as the more ephemeral casual crowd ebbs and flows over the course of an expansion. D&D itself was temporarily eclipsed by Pathfinder in the early 2010s because, well, RPG players wanted to keep playing D&D 3e and Pathfinder was essentially D&D 3e with some minor changes. Once Wizards of the Coast pivoted back to a more traditional design for D&D with 5e, they reclaimed their top spot and kept it as of date of this post. 

The video does strike me as having a salient point: don't shoot for the Moon, shoot for a niche. That is something that both tabletop RPG and video game designers can heed, particularly AAA designers who think that they'll make World of Warcraft amounts of money by creating their own WoW-killer. You're much better off carving off a niche and making a somewhat smaller amount of money. 

*From "It's time to face reality..." by Questing Beast, at the 6:18 mark.

Why is it Just the Way I Like It, Anyway?

After my post last Thursday, when I said in so many words that I prefer the peace and quiet in my MMOs, I spent some time in reflection. Why, after all this time, do I prefer a quiet and empty world so much?

I enjoy group content, and I've often complained about how changes to games to make them more solo friendly* haven't led to an enjoyable time for me. I also enjoy --to a certain extent, I might add-- reading Gen/World chat in MMOs. Yes, often it reads like watching a train wreck in real time, but other times the flow of snarky and humorous conversation brightens up an otherwise dull day. 

Still, despite all of this, why do I prefer the solitude of empty zones while questing?

***

Part of it is my history, I suppose.

When I first started playing WoW in 2009, Wrath of the Lich King was in full swing. What I didn't know at the time was that the vast majority of players were at max level in Northrend while I was toiling away in what is now standard MMO behavior: empty zones save for the occasional new player or leveling alt. To me, the world seemed so huge that I didn't run into too many people while leveling, particularly in the Old World or Outland. 

To be fair, when you cut your MMO teeth on a PvP server, the fewer people you encounter the better. I still get twitchy when I'm near Tarren Mill**, despite I've not been on a PvP server in well over a decade. Encountering anybody out in the field while on a PvP server is a cause for concern unless you know the person is on your faction, although that's not always a guarantee of safety as there are people who create "spy" toons to find lone targets to hunt. 

But regardless, the vast open expanse of the Barrens and other places in WoW are made even larger when there are so few people out and about. By nature, a game world can't approximate the real world because the size would become unplayable for those wishing to interact with others --not to mention the amount of storage and horsepower required to keep a fully realized world-equivalent running-- so the limited size of Azeroth is made larger by artificial means, such as the more modern layering systems.

When I finally arrived at Dalaran in Northrend***, I was both overwhelmed and stunned by the sheer number of toons roaming throughout the place. I now understood just how many people actually played WoW: enough people that when Dalaran was busy, the resulting lag would drop framerates down to the mid-teens or single digits. It took a short time before I grew used to the crowds, but it never quite felt home to me in the way some of the lesser populated cities, such as Silvermoon, were.****

***

As much as I want other people to actively play in the MMOs I participate in, I'm also perfectly happy that they are all off somewhere else. I don't have to deal with random invites to either group up/join a guild, worry about my quest targets being overwhelmed by people rushing to level past me, or bots farming everything that isn't nailed down.

Being an introvert does mean that I'm perfectly happy doing my own thing and being social when I want to be, not when it's foisted on me. 

***

I can understand people who do not like lines.

From Icy Veins' Facebook page.

Me, I grew up attending Kings Island, the local amusement park and home of several iconic roller coasters, such as The Beast...

The ride on the world's longest wooden roller coaster is worth it, in my opinion, but some people are put off by the 1+ hour wait on the weekends.***** Me, I don't mind if I'm with friends; there's plenty of time to chat and dry off from getting splashed in some of the water rides. (And to be fair, there's plenty of women in bikini tops on a hot Summer day, so a lot of views as well.)

Still, I get where people have places to go and people to see when they're playing WoW, so waiting in line isn't for them. 

In WoW, waiting in line isn't for me for another reason. The last time I did that, in Classic WoW Era, the number of random whispers for guild invites was highly annoying. So, it wouldn't be so bad were it not for the crowd itself. 

From what I've observed, courtesy of social media and anecdotes, I'm perfectly happy to avoid all that in WoWF. Holding out until Christmas might seem a bit excessive, but it's not like I'm not doing anything at all. I've got toons to level on the Anniversary server, so there's that, and I have some other games to play as well.

*Such as the removal of 4-person Heroic events out in the world in SWTOR or the removal of group quests in a post-Cataclysm WoW. Or the removal of elite mobs entirely.

**For those not in the know, Tarren Mill and Southshore, the Horde and Alliance hubs in Hillsbrad Foothills, have been a traditional spot for PvP in WoW. The Horde players are typically about 5-10 levels lower than the Alliance players, so while there are far more Horde players in the area due to the proximity to The Undercity, they are also cannon fodder for the Alliance players. PvP fights also escalate quickly to where one side invades the other home base, often with max level toons, and wreaks havoc on the area. There were plenty of times when I'd login to WoW and a Horde toon in Tarren Mill, only to find myself almost instantly killed. I learned very quickly to avoid certain spots on the map, such as Tarren Mill and the entirety of Stranglethorn Vale.

***It bears a repeat explanation that I was always confused when I'd do a "/who" on a player and find them in Dalaran, when I knew where Dalaran was in the Old World map and saw a crater whenever I visited the place. It was only when I finally made it to Dalaran as the central hub in Northrend did I fully understand the meaning for the crater: the Mages of Dalaran had used the arcane to basically turn their city into a floating citadel.

****The irony is that Silvermoon is now the main hub (or it was, anyway) for Retail's Midnight expac. 

*****If you want to avoid the lines, go midweek during the Summer. Tuesday and Thursday work really well.

Forget about the Bots, The Agents Are Here

Okay, let's talk about agentic AI and gaming.

People are talking about agents cloning software, including games, to the point where Anthropic is attempting to build in guardrails so that Claude Code won't make clones of already existing software.

By the time this post is released, things will have changed, so just keep an eye on the news.

But I'm here to talk about something that will become a greater and greater likelihood: agents playing games for you.

Maybe we could have laughed it off before where you are easily able to identify bots in-game, but I think that it's not going to be a laughing matter much longer. It's only a small leap from an agent such as Muse going out and ordering takeout for you, obtaining tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, and texting a potential date to healing in a raid.

Imagine losing a Call of Duty match to this thing
and having it talk about having marital relations
with your mom. From Meta via The Wall Street Journal.

And if you thought Blizzard had issues before with keeping people engaged in the leveling process, look out...

***

Okay, that pretty much begs the question: why are you playing a game at all if you're letting an agent do it for you? It's pretty much the same thing as paying a person to level your toon so that you can take over when you're at max level. Or if you feel like your physical skills aren't as good as they used to be, let the agent go into the raid and get the gear for you. 

No fuss, no muss.

Or, in a PvP game such as EVE Online, some wealthy individual attempting to create a ton of agent-driven clones to augment a fleet action. (Aside for EVE players: given that EVE is famously an "all's-fair-in-love-and-war" kind of game, is that a violation of the TOS? Or would that be applauded as a "solution to a problem" in-game? And if agents get good enough at playing, would Fenris even recognize that agents are running accounts?)

The last time I thought about this, there was the guy who created a WoW private server with 1800 bots, but that was prior to the release of Muse. The existence of a Muse demonstrates that you can have an agent do so much more than was possible only months ago, and it's only a matter of time before agents are directly adapted to gaming.

I wonder if we're going to be seeing the eventual endgame of some of these multiplayer games if agents get good enough at behaving like real human players that basically we'll see agents playing against agents, with no real humans involved. About a year ago I would have laughed at the idea, since the entire point of playing a game is for you, a human, to enjoy yourself. Now, I'm not so sure. The ease at which a Muse can simply keep you from having to deal with other humans is quite astonishing*, and the temptation is there to say "I don't really want to run Sunken Temple myself, but I need the gear in there. Maybe I'll let Blizzbot (tm) run it for me." I know people who simply despise certain instances or questlines, so letting an agent do it for you will become a viable option really soon. Once that happens, the dam has burst and it becomes easier and easier to let the agent basically run your account for you.

Before you say I've been taken in with all the hype, I haven't. I still think the AI bubble is real, and I still am betting on it bursting sooner rather than later. I also think that a lot of the tech bro community underestimates just how much ire is focused in their direction with data centers and prices being out of control for consumers. When you're wrapped in your own little hype bubble, you don't see what people out in the rest of the country are saying and thinking, and I believe there's a reckoning that will be coming soon. That, however, doesn't preclude me from realizing that these agents are getting "smarter" at an incredible rate, and things that we used to believe were years or decades off might be arrive much sooner than we realize.

*This is me making a value judgement based on the articles I've read about Muse. There's no way in hell I'd let Meta have access to all of my finances and emails and whatnot. You don't even need to have any skeletons in your closet to realize we're talking about huge blackmail potential. I wonder if Zuckerberg is so sold on Muse that he'd let it control all of his finances and personal interactions (such as his private email) without any qualms whatsoever.

Stars in the Firmament

This week the world of Star Trek and Science Fiction in general is a bit emptier, as both Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart passed away.

Koenig's Pavel Chekov, the so-called "Nutty Russian" on the original Star Trek, was both comic relief and provided a baseline for everybody to understand what might be going on in episodes he was featured in.

Kirk: All right, here we are, birds in a gilded cage. The question is, how do we get out of here?

Chekov: I don't know, sir, but it's a very nice gilded cage. 

--From Star Trek S2, E8: I, Mudd 

 

I suppose most average moviegoers saw Chekov in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, given it was by far the most popular Star Trek movie. His humor played well there, because the overall comedic tone of the film led to broad audience appeal.

It feels weird to see both Nichelle Nichols and
Walter Koenig in this still from Star Trek IV, because
both have passed away. From Screenrant.

Like many genre actors, Walter found himself typecast into SF roles throughout his career. One of his later roles was in a show I didn't watch yet has a cult following: Babylon 5. 

I can't talk about Walter without acknowledging the tragedy when his son, the actor Andrew Koenig, committed suicide in 2010. This is something I really have trouble wrapping my head around, because I don't think I would handle it well if I were in the same situation. Walter turned his tragedy into another mission, to educate people about mental health and suicide prevention, for the rest of his life.

***

It feels weird seeing the outpouring of emotion for Sir Patrick Stewart, given that I first encountered him in the David Lynch adaptation of Dune:

Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck.
From X.

Before that, my mom knew him as Lucius Aelius Sejanus in I, Claudius (courtesy of the PBS rebroadcast*):

From Reddit.

For a man who so embraced his roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company, pop culture had to have been a bit of a shock.

I remember when I heard that Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming out I was hopeful yet quite concerned it would be terrible. Anybody who watches the innumerable reboots of intellectual property these days probably understands my trepidation, but back then in the 80s this was kind of new territory. Who knew what we were going to get?

Apparently, that concern was shared by Patrick Stewart, who was hesitant at accepting the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Yet accept it he did, and we are all the better for it. 

In its own way, his later role of Professor X in the X-Men movies, acting opposite other stage actors Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman, were closer in theme to his love of Shakespeare. Marvel's X-Men was originally conceived as shining a mirror on the two main reactions to the quest for Civil Rights in the 60s, with Charles Xavier embodying the side of Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach and Magneto's side embodying Malcolm X's Black Power movement, and both Stewart and McKellen embraced those opposing views in several iconic scenes.

Patrick and Ian developed a very close friendship over the years, where Ian officiated at Patrick's wedding and they shared the stage in Waiting for Godot:

***

I guess I'm at that age when more and more of the people who I grew up with or informed my earlier adulthood are passing away. I'll miss them both, but I can also rest easy knowing both Walter and Patrick lived a full life. 

*PBS rebroadcasts of British productions are how I was introduced to Roger Rees (The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), David Suchet (Poirot), Joan Hickson (Miss Marple), Peter Davison (All Creatures Great and Small), Jeremy Brett (Sherlock Holmes), Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), and James Burke (Connections and The Day the Universe Changed). I guess you can tell that mysteries and documentaries were big in my past.

Meme Monday: Pre-YouTube Memes

I was watching this grooming video...

...and the goat's name is Dill.

If that name sounds familiar, and you suddenly want to break into song, this might be the source of your musical nostalgia:

Yep, good ol' Albino Blacksheep. They'd converted the old Flash video to YouTube.

So in honor of those old Flash videos that were everywhere before the rise of YouTube, here's a Meme Monday for you.

You can't have this sort of Meme Monday without
The Llama Song... From Cheezburger.

Yes, I know the story behind this legendary
Rainbow video, but it's still hilarious. From Facebook.

Ah yes, the duck who constantly asked
for grapes. From Reddit and Imgflip.

It ba-dee ba-dee ba-doo-doo....
One of the first big memes out there, The Hamster Dance.
From the late 90s, and from Reddit. (Which it predates too!)

The Family Guy impersonation of the old Flash meme.
From Facebook.

And while some Flash videos have
not aged as well (Elvis Lives in Flash with
an appearance by Bill Cosby, for example) 
the old chestnut All Your Base Belongs to Us
still is haning in there. From Reddit.

Correcting an Oversight

I somehow missed the passing of David Clayton-Thomas this past June.

For a lot of people of my generation, they may not remember the name, but they'll remember his voice on a couple of iconic songs from the end of 1968.

Yes, he's by far the most well-known singer of Blood Sweat & Tears.

David was also living proof in the power of music to inspire and better yourself. He was raised in an abusive household and ran away at the age of 14 to escape his alcoholic father, living on the streets and often finding himself in jail. While in reformatory he came into possession of a guitar and taught himself to play. In the early 60s, while surviving in Toronto, he managed to attract attention with his singing voice. He spent time playing with Blues players, including John Lee Hooker, and fronting some minor bands, but caught a huge break in 1968 when Judy Collins heard him sing and told a friend in Blood Sweat & Tears about him. BS&T had just released their first album but had suddenly had 3 members quit on them, so after a short audition Clayton-Thomas joined the band along with 3 others.

The album they released afterward, the self-titled Blood, Sweat & Tears, was an absolute smash. Between the first two songs above and And When I Die, BS&T dominated 1969's record charts in the US. 

My dad loved Spinning Wheel --or rather the single version of the song-- so I knew of the song since I was little, but I'd never heard the entire album until recently. To my mind, it is so unlike many other pop albums of the era I could see how it simply exploded on the scene. From a version of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies to Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child to the Motown sound of You've Made Me So Very Happy, the band charted their own path. 

David played and sang well into his 70s, as this video of him at Eastman Theatre in Rochester, NY shows:

Godspeed, David Clayton-Thomas. He was 84.

Speed Runners Gonna Speed Run

My YouTube feed is starting to calm down from the WoW Forever hysteria of the past few weeks.

I won't say that people are any less excited about a new version of World of Warcraft, but the initial rush of YouTube and blog posts seems to have calmed down quite a bit. Still, one of my observations that the game may change but the community doesn't seems to remain accurate...

And...

The speed running crowd certainly seems to be working things out right now, which kind of defeats the point of WoW Forever. Those seeking to monetize the optimized leveling process, such as Zygor, are prepping their tools for a release alongside (or shortly after) WoW Forever releases. 

If nothing else, the WoW community does not disappoint.

Okay, let's be honest with ourselves: speed running was definitely going to happen. There's no two ways about it, really. The concept of speed running has been baked into video game culture for decades now, and it is so ingrained into MMOs such as WoW that any attempt to slow the speed runners down has drawn lots and lots of gripes by the larger WoW community. Concepts such as time-gated content, staggered raid wing releases, and abilities (such as flying) locked behind reputation grinds are all there to combat speed running and protect the community from themselves. 

I guess someone ought to create a WoW Forever bingo card based on when they observe certain classic WoW community behavior in WoW Forever, with others providing a Shocked Pikachu face when it happens:

Use it or lose it, I guess. From all over the internet.

Instead of the Center Square being free, it could be a behavior which is effectively free: Saying "I'm bored" in Trade Chat. 

Oh well.

About In Game Economies

So. 

EVE Online.

No, I'm not thinking of playing it, but while I was away in Milwaukee, a joint venture between Micro and How Money Works on YouTube created this video:

As soon as I saw the title, I knew it was EVE Online. I wasn't disappointed.

Now, the real query for me is what those I know who play EVE Online think of the video. Nogamara? Wilhelm?

The Girl from Sevier County

Everyone I know goes away in the end.

--from Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (and Johnny Cash)

I knew this day would come, but it still was a bit of a shock.

Dolly Parton died yesterday at the age of 80.

Here's a message from the family:

I will not say I'm a fan of Country Music; to the contrary, if there's one music I tend to dislike in general, it's Country. Of course there are exceptions, such as some Kenny Rogers songs, but by and large the biggest exception was for Dolly Parton. 

She was something else. I'd call her a force of nature, but when people typically think of that they think of people who went through life like a tornado, wreaking chaos and destruction in their wake. Dolly was most definitely not that. Born into poverty, she rose up to be the person she became, and yet she never forgot where she came from. 

People born outside the US may have absolutely no idea of the impact Dolly had on reading. Through her Dolly Parton's Imagination Library* that she founded in 1995, she put books in the hands of millions of children. The Imagination Library was a book gifting program that mailed a book per month to children from birth through age 5 completely free of charge. Dolly initially focused on her home of Sevier County, Tennessee, but the program quickly expanded beyond that nationally, and then later internationally to include Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. 

The thing that made this endeavor work was that the gifting was completely unconditional: it was open to all children regardless of family income. Dolly just wanted children to read, to have the chance to succeed in life. 

***

I grew up in the late 70s to early 80s, which coincided with Dolly Parton's rise to superstardom on the pop charts. So yes, I was quite familiar with Dolly. And yes, hitting puberty in the early 80s meant that of course I knew all about Dolly's most famous assets. If you were a boy of that age at that time, there was no way to not know about them.

From Know Your Meme.

Dolly, of course, played up on that quite a bit. 

From The Chive.

Still, she had undeniable talent beyond her physical assets. She was a great songwriter and singer, and on one fateful day back in 1972, she wrote both Jolene and I Will Always Love You. The former is always tied to Dolly, and the latter was re-recorded by Whitney Houston and became a complete smash in 1992.

From iFunny.co.

And that's not even counting Nine to Five or her duet with Kenny Rogers, Islands in the Stream.

***

Dolly was one of those people who was beloved by everybody. I don't think I've ever heard someone say a bad thing about Dolly Parton, and that's saying something. 

Farewell, Dolly. You had a much greater impact than you may have ever realized.

*The website is understandably swamped right now, so don't be surprised if you have issues accessing it.

#Blaugust2026

Writing and Re-Writing

There are times when I sit here, writing away, and I have trouble making things click. It's more prevalent when I'm writing fiction, but I've had it happen during regular blog posts too. There's no way around the reality that it really sucks when it happens. 

What drives me bonkers is that I'd write something, decide it really isn't going in a way I want it to, and start over. When I do push through all the way to the end and then go back to edit it, I still end up tossing all that writing for something else. 

I really blame the writing of some 80s era cartoons for some of this. Some of the writing for Voltron, a show my brother really watched but I was kind of peripherally involved with, has shown up in earlier drafts of some of my stories. When I go back and edit and I say "Holy crap does this sound bad! Where did this come from?" I find out weeks later watching some random YouTube video a clip from Voltron or Star Blazers and realize the origin of that dialogue.

For an example, this particular snippet of dialogue took me about 3 weeks to write to where it's in this form. Obviously it's still a work in progress, so it'll likely look different than at this point, but at least I like the flow and the direction of the dialogue.

“Hmmph.” My sister sat down next to me and stared out over the pond. 

 

If she thought I was going to overshare, which was the sure sign of a guilty conscience, she was going to be waiting for quite a while. Still, I figured I’d lay out the one thing that Linna likely most feared. “I’m going to have Zarg do it.”

 “Do what?” She tore her eyes off the far end of the pond to look me over.

“The investigation that needs to happen. I’m not an idiot, you know, and I’m quite aware I’m not healthy enough to do it myself.”

 Linna’s face twisted; not quite disgust, and not quite disapproval. “And you’re going to let her do it.”

“Yes. She knows a lot about the Cult, after all, and people always underestimate her.”

My sister involuntarily glanced over at the slumbering Neve.

“I already cleared her,” I supplied. “What about your Draenei friend?”

“She’s safe as well.” Linna had a long pause as her face went through a myriad of emotions.

“You’re thinking of that place, aren’t you.”

Her expression settled on anguish. “Card…”

“They don’t know her like they do me, so it’s safer for her to do it.” I felt strangely at peace with that admission. I’d always done things myself, and relinquishing the responsibility for investigating my curse was a difficult step to take. It was also going to be quite dangerous, dealing with the Cult of the Damned, but if there was one thing I was confident about it was that Zargala could handle herself. “If you get a chance, can you carry a note from me to Mathias? He deserves to know about what happened here.”

“Yes.” Another pause. “I don’t want to lose you.”

I nodded. “Nor I you. But you have to trust me.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

“My name wouldn’t be Cardwyn if it was.” I looked around. “Carys should be back soon.”

“I told her she could come back when I was done talking to you.”

“I bet you didn’t make sure the other two weren’t snooping.”

Linna stared at me for a moment. “Shit,” she blurted and split.

I heard her footfalls fade, then I turned my focus back to the pond. “Okay, Lewys, I know you’re out there. Come on out.”

There was a rustle in the brush, and a very guilty-looking nephew emerged.

I raised an eyebrow as a smirk crept across my lips. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to explain what we were talking about.”

“But…”

“Sometime later, but not now.” I patted the ground next to me. “Sit.”

He dragged his feet a bit, but Lewys eventually sat down. “Take my other rod,” I told him. “I loaned it to Briganaa, but she’s not here right now.”

Lewys picked up the fishing rod and began casting with me. “Aunt Linna was really mad at you,” he finally offered.

“Yeah, I know.”

“How come?”

“Why does everybody think I’m going to tell them that?” I sighed. “Okay, I’ll give you this much: she was scared.”

“Scared? Aunt Linna?”

“Yes, she was. She was scared of what I might do, because I sometimes do things without thinking. And in our little talk that you so conveniently eavesdropped on, I assured her I wasn’t going to do anything like that.”

“Oh.” He made a face. “This is all hard.”

“Yeah, life is hard. Even when you’re all grown up.”

"That doesn't seem fair."

"It isn't. But I'll let you know if it ever does turn out fair; I think I'd like that every once in a while." 

 

I suppose I ought to have saved an earlier draft to show you what I wasn't keeping, but still I wanted to share a bit about the difficulty I face in writing. It can be a lonely and humbling process, and agonizing over something as simple as this is a guaranteed way to drive me nuts. 

But the thing is, I derived some inspiration from the fact that many famous people --geniuses, really-- agonize over their craft in their own way.

Here's a short clip of Maximillian Schell and Leonard Bernstein discussing Beethoven and what made him a genius. 

Speaking of geniuses...

The fact that Beethoven struggled and agonized over the creation process makes me feel better about my own struggles. Not because I think I'm a genius, but because people of Beethoven's stature struggled to come up with their works of art. And here I am, just struggling to put words on a page that made even a smidgen of sense. 

So many other modern creators, particularly those who loudly proclaim their own genius, loudly trumpet the ease at which they make their creations. Yet I think it is more humbling to see the real struggles people have --and what they have overcome-- that inspires me to try harder. In that case the real genius is perseverance. 

#Blaugust2026

Not Exactly a Gaming Evening

Yesterday was pretty wild here for non-gaming reasons.

From the livestormchasers.com Instagram feed
for August 11, 2026.

There were a about 3 or 4 of what I'll charitably call F0 or F1 tornadoes in that line of storms that hit us last afternoon --including one just across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky-- but my neighborhood was missed. One tornado was a couple of miles south of us, another a couple of miles north of us. 

And really, you don't need a tornado to do some massive damage. This is what happened to a gas station in Brown County, Ohio, a couple of counties to the east of Hamilton County (where I live):

We lost some vinyl siding on our house, but luckily for us it landed across the street completely intact. That's relatively so, because it slammed into their front door before flopping to the ground. (I'm still not sure how it stayed intact.) I ought to be able to put it back into place when the roof over the garage dries out and I can safely get up there to put it back. We got extremely lucky overall, with only that damage, whereas our neighbors had chimney caps torn off, trees toppled, and debris crashing into the side of their houses, damaging the siding. There has also been downed trees, power lines, and even in the Columbus area (the central part of the state) a car driving on the I-71 interstate was flipped over by the winds that hit them in the late morning. 

As for us, a tree toppled across I-71 here in Cincinnati and crashed into a truck that had the bad luck to be driving by.

Before you ask, yes the two of us are both fine, and my son who lives on the east side of Cincinnati was fine as well. My wife was at work, and they closed up the store and ushered everybody --employees and customers-- into the fire safety corridor, which was the safest part of the building. They were there for 45 minutes, but outside of hearing the noise from the storms they had no idea what was going on. 

As for me, I had a doctor's appointment earlier in the afternoon and got home in time before the storms hit. When the sirens went off I turned on the news, and when WLWT's Meteorologist Kevin Robinson said for my immediate area to head for shelter something slammed into our back door, picked up by the wind, and I scampered to the basement and stayed there until the worst of it passed.

So yeah, gaming hasn't exactly been on my mind this evening.

This intersection is 2 miles from my home as
the crow flies. And no, that's not mountains;
That's clouds and rain. From Steve Bowling via WCPO.

#Blaugust2026

Talk About Your Perfect Storms

I was watching this video from Gameranx about the potential Sony PS6 launch being in a perfect storm of problems, and it got me to thinking.

This video was focusing on the console itself, but the shortages affecting all parts of the computer industry will not only affect the next generation of consoles (and PCs), but the peripherals and monitors/televisions as well. When you get down to it, all electronic devices utilize memory and storage and processors to a greater or lesser degree, and the shortages across the industry will also impact the price of those devices too. 

Looking to upgrade your television to a 4K or 8K version to take advantage of the new capabilities of the PS6? It'll cost more.* Need a decent sound bar? That'll cost more too. How about a new headset or controller? Yep, those will be hit by price increases as well.

Sure, RAM prices get all of the attention, and justifiably so, but it's not like they're alone in price increases. The data center boom is sucking up all available manufacturing capability to the point where components earmarked for the consumer market (or even the traditional business market) are put on the back burner. Don't be surprised if the lack of priority extends to manufacturing such as automobiles, commercial jets, and even items such as those damn Flock cameras.**

I do wonder whether the conspicuous consumption of electronics in general will grind to a halt given all the headwinds we're facing. Job losses, hardware shortages, software price hikes, economic uncertainty, and tariffs all combine to create a potential perfect storm to nuke consumer spending. Of course, a lot of these companies aren't interested in consumers, but the B2B market space that LLMs live in. The thing is, if people can't afford things, that will create a ripple effect backward through the economy, and the push to adopt LLMs will suddenly dry up when companies' bottom line becomes affected.

Gloomy thoughts for a Saturday, I suppose, but still I look at the short-sightedness of all of this behavior and think that there's going to be a lot of upset people in a couple of years.

*Or manufacturers like Samsung and others will put ads directly into their software, like Stellantis is doing with putting ads on the screens in their cars.

**Just remember, when you buy a smart doorbell such as one made by Ring or Google (the Nest) and use a subscription to save "your data", it's really going to be deposited in one of these data centers. It may not be one utilized exclusively for AI usage, but it will be put in a data center. It's more a matter of "pick your poison". I'd personally consider a doorbell camera if it meant I could keep the data locally on a hard drive, but those that do (such as TP-Link) don't exactly give me warm fuzzies in terms of security.

***Well, a Friday as I was writing the bulk of this while sitting in yet another presentation about using LLMs to improve my output.

#Blaugust2026

Gen Con 2026 - Under Construction

This year's Gen Con began with rain on Saturday.

I'd reserved a car at one of our local rental agencies for Saturday, and I figured that I'd drop my wife off for work in the morning, then when it was time to pick up the rental I'd leave her car at her employer and walk to the rental agency. It's about a 10 minute walk, and I didn't mind getting in some exercise. 

But I hadn't counted on it being a very rainy walk. It absolutely poured (and thundered) for all save for the last minute of my little jaunt, so even though I wore a rain jacket I looked very much like a drowned rat when I got to the rental agency. I waited in line for about 20 minutes, because they were absolutely swamped with people showing up looking for a rental*, and when my turn came they asked me if I was flexible with what rental I got. 

"Sure," I replied. I mean, I wasn't going to be an ass about it; the compact SUV I'd reserved was just cost effective and decent in gas mileage enough that I could work with it.

They ended up giving me an upgrade, a Toyota Camry SE Hybrid.

This is it, parked at Lucas Oil Stadium.

While I've driven a hybrid before (a Toyota Prius as a rental for a work trip last year), I've never driven a car that had over 200 hp under the hood. My '97 Accord gets something around 125 hp, so while it's peppy enough I know it takes a few moments to get going. The moment I mashed the pedal on this car on the drive home, however, it absolutely took off. That took some getting used to.

What also took some getting used to was the mileage, where (in US terms) I got 45 miles per gallon for the entire trip. With the exception of that Prius, the best gas mileage I've ever gotten out of a car on a long distance trip was about 30 MPG in my wife's old 1990 Pontiac 6000 back in the day.**

Anyway, the trip up to Indianapolis was somewhat uneventful, outside of the fact that it started raining the moment I crossed over from Ohio into Indiana, and only let up when we got to the Indianapolis city limits. 

The walk from Lucas Oil Stadium to the Convention Center showed me two things: that Ravensburger was heavily promoting their Disney Lorcana collectible card game...

Yep, Pooh Bear in a wizard's hat.

And that Indy is under a LOT of construction.

Here's a view of some of it from the inside
of the Convention Center.

It was as if Indianapolis looked at all the construction around Columbus and Cincinnati and said "Hold my beer." There was a new hotel going in across the street that was also going to be connected to the Convention Center via a Skywalk; they were reworking the entire walkway (shown above) leading to what used to be the mall; the old mall itself is being rebuilt into a mixed-use open air space called the Traction Yards (first phase to open in 2030); and the street north of the convention center toward the Statehouse is being rebuilt with cobblestones. 

Part of the gravel base. There might have been sewer line
work going on too, but there was so much gravel and brick
around that I couldn't tell for sure.

All this construction didn't deter any Gen Con attendees, as the place was completely sold out.

Inside the Convention Center the place looked blessedly free of construction as the foyer near the Exhibit Hall had the three video screens recycling ads for games...

This was just a brief view of what was up there.
It's amazing just how much space these GIFs take up.

Including one unexpected advertisement...

Yes, that's a realtor.

I can understand why people might be interested in moving to a place with a lower cost of living and a central location to a lot of the Midwest (Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and St. Louis) and the South (Louisville, Memphis, Nashville), but as my son pointed out, you'd have to live in Indiana. So... 50:50, I suppose.

We met up with my oldest and her partner (who'd come down from Milwaukee) under the video screens, I distributed badges, and we had a good chat with my brother-in-law before heading into the Exhibit Hall. 

I tried getting a nice panorama shot of the hall, but
it didn't work out. There were artifacts I couldn't remove.

So, we split up and wandered the Hall for a while before reconnecting for lunch and then a second round of divide and conquer.

Some of the displays were for games that began as video games but then went "retro" into card and board games:

Yes, a Palword card game.
Somewhere, Nintendo is fuming.

Supposedly the Stellaris board game will be
out this fall. Given that this is about 4+ years
in the making, the crowdfunding backers are
a bit annoyed by now.

Okay, it's not a video game to board game 
transcription, but come on. Were it not for Link
and The Legend of Zelda, they wouldn't be selling
ocarinas at Gen Con. And boy could she play!

I'd mentioned this card game last year,
and boy howdy was there a crowd at the booth
this year. No idea if any VTubers were actually
there, but I'd bet that at least a few were.

Now, another part of going to Gen Con is viewing the art...

Sadly this is one of two booths in my pics that qualifies.
But also, rugs/tapestries!

This is the other one, but I'm not sure if it's for sale or
whether it was to attract people to their booth.

or the authors (who I sadly did not take any pics of), but there were other creators present that caught my eye. Maybe it's because it's about time for the Ohio Renaissance Festival***, but I checked out a lot of clothing and leatherworking booths...

Geek Orthodox had tees and other shirts
that made me chuckle.

And they also had "stained glass" designs
as well. Really impressive.

Is anyone in need of a corset or a puffy shirt (tm)?

And more outfits. The prices were pretty
high, but given the quality involved, 
I think it'd be worth it.

There were even jerseys for the
Catan World Cup. Yes, it's a thing.

Given that yesterday afternoon's weather-related events made some of Saturday's Gen Con a bit of a wash (pun intended) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at just how crowded the Exhibit Hall was. Even by 2 PM, when there's only 2 hours left and the crowd normally thins out quite a bit, it was still incredibly packed. So, I did what I normally do when things are far more crowded than I like: I escaped into the larger Convention Hall and wandered around.

As I took in the hallways of the Convention Center, I found crowds and all sorts of other interesting things going on...

The game put out by Critical Role and Darrington Press,
Daggerheart, was very much in evidence.

Speaking of Critical Role...

Given that Brandon Sanderson's
Cosmere was everywhere last year,
it'd make sense that there's a Mistborn
game out this year.

Oh yeah, League of Legends has
a Trading Card Game. No, I didn't go
check it out.

And I couldn't resist, given that
I've been keeping up with Aywren
Sojourner's blog and YouTube videos.

After some of these breaks, I went back inside the Exhibit Hall and found more interesting things over the course of the day. My Questing Buddy's son is heavily into Star Wars Legion, the minis game that you could look at as a gateway drug into Warhammer 40k, and I passed along this pic for her to show her son that his favorite game is well represented:

There were a lot of people playtesting Legion and some other Star Wars properties, such as the Trading Card Game and Shatterpoint.

But this is a Legion terrain setting that you can play with:

As for other games, here's some other highlights:

The name alone got me intrigued.

I could get behind a game called Charmed and Dangerous.

Paizo brought out their iconic goblins,
because you can't have a Gen Con without
a goblin or three around.

Pink Hawk Games had stuff that would be right
up my youngest's alley, given the cat themes.

And speaking of cats...

I did stop by the Dwarven Forge booth again this year, but I didn't take any photos of their displays. They are just too good looking (and expensive) for me to justify checking them over, so I decided to not linger. There were at least 3 vendors who specialized in making gaming tables (yes, Wyrmwood was there again), but every time I look at them I think "I can make that myself", or rather "I can try to make that myself", but I don't really have a place to put a gaming table right now.

The end of the day rolled around far too quickly for my taste, but that's what happens. We said our goodbyes and headed back home to Cincinnati. It didn't rain until we crossed over into Ohio, and then we got some downpours. 

I swear...

As for what I snagged at Gen Con, given the size of this post I'm going to bump that for another day. After all, I've got some explainin' to do...

Here, have a video of Mooch in the meantime...

*Which also included people making video calls on their phones while they were talking to the rental people. I mean, why do people do this? Everybody can hear whatever private conversation they're having.

**That was when the 65 MPH speed limits were just starting to appear back in the early 90s, so a completely different era. The 6000 also had a 4-cylinder engine that got maybe 100 hp, and boy did it struggle going up a hill with a full load of people inside. So if you doing purely highway miles and on flat land, it could hit 30 mpg, but otherwise it was in the low 20s.

***I don't think we're going to the Ohio Ren Fest this year; maybe next year.

EtA: Updated links.

#Blaugust2026