What Drives You?

People play games for different reasons, and even those reasons may change over the course of your lifetime. 

When I was growing up, my family would have regular game nights. Those included some of the classics, such as Waterworks,

This was the version at our home,
which dates to 1972. I believe Mom still
has the game around somewhere. From eBay.

or Authors,

I should have this version around the
house somewhere. From eBay (again).

or Clue,

While I was unsuccessfully trying
to find my copy of Authors, I found
my circa 1980 version of Clue.

but they also included games that are no longer published, such as Scan.

This is circa 1970 or so.
From Rahmiano Anderson via
BoardGameGeek.

We also played card games such as UNO, Hearts, or Michigan Rummy, the former two of which received new life when I went away to college. However, those days of my youth were fueled by the desire to beat my dad at these games. It was partly a competitive streak in me, but Dad was easily the best player in the house, and so if I wanted to finally prove my worth (in my own mind) I had to beat him. 

As for chess... Let's not talk about chess. I only beat my dad once in chess despite years of trying, and my brother was on the chess team at his high school, so I kind of got used to losing at chess.

But still, it all fed into my primary motivation: Beat Dad.

The simple straightforward concept of "beat the other player" is not exactly new, and this is the basis of a lot of PvP video games today.*

It was only when I was a teen that I began to break out of the 'beat Dad' mentality and understand that there were other reasons for playing games. I wasn't giving up my quest to win, but that drive to win doesn't necessarily fit well into other types of games.

Some of that comes from learning RPGs. Sure, there's a "beat the Big Bad" component to RPGs, there's also the social element to those sorts of games. 

Back when I was a kid, we approached playing AD&D as if it was The Party versus The DM. Who became the DM in our campaigns rotated, but the resulting competition was always the same. The DM tried to kill us, and we tried to outwit the DM. 

The high point of any Party vs. DM competition was
ALWAYS The Tomb of Horrors. Let me just say that
of the two options above, there are no right answers.
IIRC, one will destroy you utterly, and the other
one will merely strip you of all your gear and clothing.
From TSR Hobbies via The Alexandrian.

Understanding the concept of a shared story or a shared plot with the DM not as an antagonist but rather a facilitator came about much later, but old habits do die hard. It was then, when I was an adult, that I finally realized that merely killing things and beating the DM wasn't nearly as much fun as a well crafted story that both we as players and the DM participated in. 

Sometimes it's part of a big story arc like what you'd find in a premade module, or sometimes it's something we purely make up as we go along. Or maybe it's something that we work on in creating a world together, but what I found to be the most fun is the story and my participation in it. Perhaps I'll never write a novel, but this is the closest I can come to actually doing just that.

Sure, I love puzzles, but I recognize that they're just that. The long term enjoyment, however, comes from the stories I participate in. Given my love of reading, I guess that's not that much of a surprise.

So... What drives you? What do you play for? 

*Despite complaints from players otherwise, I sure as hell go into Alterac Valley in WoW Classic wanting to win, and the constant losing in Battlegrounds by the Alliance during the Mists of Pandaria expansion just wore me down to where all I was feeling was anger. That was when I knew it was time to leave WoW.

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes, Part... eh, whatever

Time for a bunch of miscellaneous memes once more!

That's... A scary thought. From Pinterest.

Although the ones that get pissed
off the most are the Rogues. Just sayin'.
From Reddit.

This actually happened in our last
AD&D game, although it was a percentile
roll and our Illusionist/Thief rolled a 100.
From Pinterest (again).

Somewhere, Richard Pryor is
smiling. From Pinterest (once more).

A Collection of Guild Names, Season of Discovery Edition Part 2

The variety of guild names that I've found on WoW Classic Season of Discovery servers is quite impressive. I wasn't joking when I mentioned in a comment somewhere that I had enough for another post on guild names, and that was a few days ago.

Hey, look who I found (and targeted for visibility) hanging
around the Stormwind mailbox! Harpy Riot! Don't know
whose toon this is, but it's someone in Wilhelm's guild.

Anyway, here's a bunch more guilds that I found in Season of Discovery (and Classic Era)...

Figured I'd start here, since it was just in the
above screencap.

Yeah, that's me. I have to be picky about
my burritos these days, however.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of
this particular guild name.

Kinda-sorta yeah, I guess....

Hmm... If you say so...

Okay... Was this a take on "I didn't inhale"?

At first I thought this was a reference
to the old NBC show Wings, but that's 
not the case. 

I ran Deadmines with Mythenis here, so
I ought to have asked about the guild name
when I had a chance.

There are days when I deny it too!

I like banana bread as much as the next
person, but you know, it doesn't really
work all that much.

This sounds like a riff on the glasses
from that old 1980s movie They Live!, 
but I'm not sure.

This is a pretty popular guild, given all the
toons running around, and there's even a
guild for alts called "Great Alts of Nazarick".

Shouldn't this have been an all elf guild?

If you've got emotional damage, do you need
someone to come to your Emotional Rescue?

Oh, I bet you're sweet...

"Get out or I'll call the Goon Squad!"
"I'm on the Goon Squad."
"You're on the Goon Squad, you ARE the Good Squad!"

Oh, this could go in quite a few ways...

Why do I get the feeling that they like
cooking in that guild?

I really like this one. It's as clear as mud.

Or as a riff on the very first Scooby Doo
episode, What a Night for a Knight!

This is my oldest's favorite guild name.
In WoW, that is. She prefers "Gloin's Loins"
from LOTRO overall, however.

At first I thought this was AKS
--as in American Kennel Society-- but I
kind of prefer this as-is.

Finally, a guild I'm actually in. This is
my Questing Buddy on her Mage alt in the
all-gnome guild that a mutual friend put together.

Good thing that, because have you seen
some of the LFG stuff lately?

Only somewhat? You need to try more!

Was kind of disappointed that this was attached
to a Dwarf, because I figured a Druid in 
bear form would be perfect here.

Damn. Now I want a cinnamon roll from
Cinnabon...

Ow, that hurts.

This is probably my favorite name on the list.

Zug zug!!!

Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.

Meme Monday: Tank Memes

Zargala, my questing buddy's Warlock, has a simple guiding philosophy. I rather succinctly summed it up the other day with the quip "Why use a flyswatter when you can use a nuclear weapon?"

Every time I see a post in Trade Chat or Looking For Group Chat saying that "want DPS pumpers"*, I think of her. Her Classic Era version of Zargala is just about at L60 right now, but even in her mid-50s she was putting out enough DPS to give my L60 version of Cardwyn with a lot of the best pre-raid gear for a Mage a run for her money. 

And given her background as a Druid tank, she knows just how much she can push as a Warlock before she drives group-mates nuts.

Having watched her operate, I've wondered whether I'd enjoy tanking myself. Or rather, whether learning the ins and outs of tanking would help my own DPS. 

Then I realize that I get stressed out by healing and I think "Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope....."

So, in honor of MMO tanking, here's today's Meme Monday...

The next time I see a Druid tank...
From Pinterest.

This is why I behave myself when I'm a DPS,
especially a Rogue. Kudos to the creator for
pulling out the NPC character Pained from
the WoW Classic version of Theramore.
From imgflip.

This could be a healer meme, could
be a tank meme. So, killing two birds
with one stone. From Reddit.

Back in the 1990s, NBA player Charles Barkley
used to say that he wasn't a role model, he was
just a basketball player. So when I saw this,
I immediately thought of ol' Chuck. From Imgflip.

*That's 'pumpers', NOT 'plumpers'. The first time I misread it and said out loud "why the fuck are they specifically asking for overweight people?" Thankfully, none of the mini-Reds were in the vicinity to laugh at me for that one. For the record: 'pumpers' refers to people who are great at putting out high amounts of DPS. Sometimes they're just great at doing damage alone (my Questing Buddy), and sometimes when you get enough of the same class in a group they do better together (Fire Mages).

How New Languages are Born

As I referenced here in this post back last August, there's a book out there called The Past is a Foreign Country that's actually on my To Be Read list --and that sucker is pretty huge, so it'll take a while to read-- that I'm looking forward to digging into.

I was thinking about that "foreign Language" part today when I was perusing some gamer blogs I don't frequent that much. 

I'm quite familiar with the "language" of Classic WoW --the slang behind the game-- and to a lesser extent that of several other MMOs, but it was when I perused those sites/blogs that primarily focused on Retail WoW did I detect the so-called "lingual shift" that make the two groups entirely separate entities. 

I was reminded of something a high school teacher once mentioned in class about the Romance languages: all of those languages derived from Latin* were once simply local dialects of Latin that grew apart over the centuries. 

Despite the global reach of mass communication these days, there are times when you talk to someone from another English speaking country and you can't really follow what they're saying. There was a time this past Spring when I happened to have the television on a Saturday morning and there was a Scottish Premier League match on**, and while I was able to follow the play-by-play announcer, the color commentator... Well, at one point I turned to my wife and said "I have absolutely no idea what the hell he's saying."

It wasn't just the accent, since some Scottish accents are really thick --as my son discovered when he visited Edinburgh while he spent six months studying abroad at Lancaster University in England***-- but the slang he was using made absolutely no sense to me. 

Or, as I've discovered courtesy of an Aussie friend --met via WoW Classic, naturally-- that there's an entire subculture completely foreign to other English speaking countries merely using the word 'cunt' in Australia.

After a certain point dialects become separate languages. While that might be harder in this day and age, it won't stop happening. And even within online communities, the siloing effect of social media makes it easier for groups to self-isolate, and by that isolation they develop their own terminology/slang that gradually becomes a dialect all its own.

***

Circling back to gaming, when I read Retail WoW blogs that discuss the nuts and bolts of the game, it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Kind of like this. Thanks, Cap.
From Pinterest.

Some of it is not having played Retail WoW in a decade (and as far as PvE content goes, longer than that), and systems have grown and changed. Some it is also the slang surrounding the systems having mutated to the point where what you thought you knew in 2012 is completely out of step with 2024. 

When you need a translation guide for returning players, you know that lingual shifts have occurred. 

***

One thing I've noticed when I login to Season of Discovery or WoW Classic Era servers and simply hang around a capital city is that the questions people ask are answered more with, well, normal English rather than shorthand. That is less the case in Wrath Classic, and the few times I've ever logged into Retail the past year I've seen questions answered with shorthand that I would characterize as "gobbledygook"****. Admittedly, the RP community on the Season of Discovery server I'm on might have an impact there, but I've seen it on my "normal" Era server as well, so I think it's a tendency of people who play on these Era-type of servers to answer questions in plain English.*****

Of course, that doesn't stop the flame wars concerning whether the dungeon acronym "DM" means Dire Maul or Deadmines, but that's been going on in WoW since, well, forever. 

Kind of ironic that the one thing that still brings the various versions of WoW together is an argument over what to call The Deadmines.

All about that context.
From Know Your Meme.

Still, in the end, I do wonder whether the two communities have grown so far apart that they've become Balkanized, and that the slang/dialects used within the two communities is just a symptom of the overall problem.

*Thereby bursting the bubble of hormone-addled high school boys that these languages were the key to "romance".

**It was the March 5, 2023 match between St. Mirren and Celtic. Once the St. Mirren player Charles Dunne got a red card in the 39th minute... Boy, did Celtic kick St. Mirren's ass.

***He and a friend had gotten on a train heading north to Edinburgh and some announcements were read over an intercom by a Scot with an accent so thick that my son turned to his friend and gave the universal "I have absolutely no idea what was just said" shrug. There was also another time when he'd gotten on a train in Wales, where the announcements are made in both Welsh and English, and this particular time the announcer forgot to speak in English. "Well," my son quipped, "I guess we're going to find out if we're on the right train really soon."

****When they didn't get a response saying "google it" or "go to Wowhead", that is.

*****I might make a toon on a PvP server just to check. I certainly don't need the stress of being on PvP servers in general, not after my experience on Stormscale-US back in the day.