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Weekend report

02.25.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | General

For about the 10,000th time, Harry and I are jumping back in to WoW, predictably right after we canceled our accounts. Until I get a better machine or have more energy in general, WoW continues to be the easiest way for us to have a guaranteed satisfying play experience together. One of the things that’s frustrating me regarding my interest in trying new games, especially ones that I might have to learn to like, is that I’ve just been tiiiired recently. The kind of tired when you get home from work and you can feel your brain flatline. I’m easily frustrated, especially by things that don’t come naturally to me (like most games). I have the irrational (and, frankly, deeply irritating) expectation that if I can’t pick up some new skill or hobby and do it better than most people after five mins I don’t want to try it at all. Call it Precocious Child Syndrome or whatever you like, but it’s exasperating for both me and those around me and drastically limits the kinds of things that I find to be fun. And let’s be honest here. I did not grow up with a game controller in my hand, my family didn’t own PCs (Macs only for us) so I missed the years and years of practice that most of my peers have in twitch aiming, jumping, interface understanding, RTS evolution, etc. Put simply, I suck balls at most games. And I do not like sucking. At all. Not one little bit. I am fiercely competitive (which is why, on this blog you will see such an emphasis on cooperative game play rather than simply multiplayer game play) and that mixed with Harry’s better-than-average abilities at all things game related sets us up for a lot of no-fun interactions.

Going back five tangents, all of this is to partially say that playing and really getting in to a game which does not immediately captivate me in some visceral way is a chore for me. It requires energy and patience and a good mood and a willingness to learn, and when I’m tired I generally possess none of these qualities. WoW, on the other hand is the one game that I feel solidly capable in. I’m no uber god of PvP nor do I know every last little in and out of every spell in each class, but dammit, I know my way around. I had 3 60s back in the day, two of which (the horde ones) got leveled to 70. I’ve at least dabbled in more or less every aspect of the game. I’ve leveled (and how), pvped, raided, helped run guilds, played the AH. I, finally, three years later, feel as though I have fairly good grips on the game. I’m not embarrassed to be see on my main or my alt in their gear, I feel like I belong. This coming from someone, mind you, who refused to run the lvl 60 5 man (back when you could do them as 10 man) instances because I was too afraid of looking like a noob. So playing WoW is easy, and to some extent it’s gratifying.

I would love it if some game would grab me viscerally in the same way that WoW did. I saw Harry playing it and just thought it looked neat, everything about it was novel to me at the time and the graphic style, the nature of the quests, the kinds of characters you could be both appealed to me and seemed like they were inviting to a new player. A lot of people have talked about WoW’s ability to be something of a gateway drug to other games, and I think that’s really true in my case. My frustration is now that I’m here, what do I do?

FPS are generally too hard (sub-topic on hardness levels in games and my irritation at when they make you feel like a giant pussy for choosing easy mode to come some day), RTS’ have evolved in to such a technical and complex genre that I feel if you didn’t grow up with them as they evolved they are very hard to pick up with no prior knowledge. I’ve had good luck (unsurprisingly) with RPGs, but Harry has trained me well, I’m min/max, and most of them are not developed for co-op play. Also, I love a good story line, but ffs STOP WITH THE INTERMINABLE DIALOGUE SESSIONS. And the over serious tone and graphics.* Also, WWII? And WWI? and Vietnam? You were not fun the first time around. You do not engladden my soul. I do not want to escape in my free time to the ever-so-fun hyper-realistic worlds of simulated RL war. So, it seems that I’m a gamer, who likes to game, but hates gaming? I also understand that a lot of this is simple gender lines, and I’m reinforcing all the bias, and my interests are reflective of a still much underdeveloped part of the gaming market, but it’s frustrating. That means, for the time being, we’ll probably be talking some about our re-involvment in WoW and our (seemingly futile) search for other games to play. Hopefully whenever Apple releases the new MacBook Pro line I’ll have some more motivation to try out new and shiny games and maybe I can get my foot in the door with some of them.

*While we’re at it, as much as I love getting to be a Blood elf or an Undead lady or a Troll, WoW is just tongue in cheek enough. There’s something about the dead-serious approach to the graphics that seems to be the norm in most other fantasy oriented games, especially MMOs like Everquest that I cannot play with a straight face. I secretly, kinda, sorta, maybe would take some enjoyment from being an elfin lady of hotness with fairy wings and the whatnot but for the love of god i have to draw the line somewhere for the sake of my dignity. Plus, I am not, NOT going to sink to the level of stereotype of fat-girl-IRL-plays-sexy-elfin-nymph. Nuhuh. nope. My mains are a Tauren and Undead female. This makes me giggle. I like my bovacious heifer.
And Then There Was WoW

02.25.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

We’ve resubscribed to WoW for the moment and are happily levelling our low 50s shaman and warrior (we’ve played this duo on and off for the past month or so). Managed to get about halfway through 52, won an AV and got our weapons from the primary AV quest, and dinked around in the Western Plaguelands and Felwood for a bit. The arms warrior / enhancement shaman duo is a pretty potent team; between knocking out quests left and right, we managed to take on 3 alliance of similar or higher levels and won.

I played through my first game of Sins of a Solar Empire this weekend and had a good time. Sally looked on for a bit and was vaguely interested so we may try a game of that together at some point - we’re not quite convinced that we want to buy 2 copies of the game just yet, so we’re hoping for a demo sometime soon (which all signs point to). It may also be possible to get a copy on her machine that works in single player or LAN mode, so we may try that at some point as well. The game’s got potential as a cooperative platform, it remains to be seen if that’s actually fun or compelling though.

Aside from that, I played around with various demos and games that my machine hasn’t been able to play (another <3 to Sally for getting me the new 8800 GT ) - Company of Heroes demo, Crysis demo, and a few others. A buddy brought Overlord over and we saw a co-op game style in there, so we may try that out at some point as well.

With all that said, we’re still having a slightly hard time getting interested in the same stuff. WoW is a common interest in that we both enjoy it a certain amount. We’ve leveled before (we each have two 70s) and don’t really have any long term goals for these characters. Sally wants to try out tanking and I’d like to actually play a DPS role for once, but there are no aspirations for arenas or raiding, at least at this point. The time for endgame activities isn’t something we’re willing to commit right now. It’s also the game that runs best on our current hardware - my machine is better suited for newer games (the LotRO trial runs pretty well with my new card) but Sally’s isn’t quite beefy enough to handle LotRO. We had the same problem with Tabula Rasa a couple months back when we tried that out. Badly performing games are just not that fun to play or look at. Hopefully the hardware issues will be sorted out soon - we have a new MacBook Pro budgeted in Sally’s future as soon as Apple gets around to bumping the current models with upgraded processors and possibly video cards as well.
The Search

02.21.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

So, here we are again - comfy playing space, decent PC(s) (thanks honey! Hopefully you’ll get yours soon), all the time in the world, and… no games to play together. So, we’re looking for ideas in addition to some ideas we have of our own. Here’s the kind of stuff we’ve liked in the past:

WoW: this is a no-brainer and sets the bar pretty high. We spent about two years playing WoW, leveling multiple characters to 70, PvPing, raiding, and just hanging out. The problem with WoW at the moment is that we don’t feel like we have the time to raid and my interest has waned in favor of EVE. So, LotRO is one option we’ve been looking at that would fulfill many of the things we liked in WoW.

Team Fortress 2: We had some fun playing this for a little while, but it doesn’t hold our attention for very long at any given time. We pop back in every once in a while.

We found a few console titles to be a lot of fun. Beyond Good and Evil was a lot of fun both to play and to watch - it was easy to pass the controller back and forth and to do a little backseat driving. There are a number of other console titles that really try to fill the co-op niche of the puzzle variety that we never really got into. The Adventures of Cookies and Cream was one that seemed to be pretty perfect except that it was a little single-minded and direct - there wasn’t much to explore, there was little to no story. It really just boiled down into a series of relatively straightforward puzzles that required two people.

Some of the titles we’re looking into at this time:

Sins of a Solar Empire: the co-operative skirmishes could be fun if we both find the game systems appealing. We really won’t know until we try it or get a demo to putz around with. We had some fun playing co-op Civ 4 but the combination some technical problems along with the turn-based structure bored us relatively quickly.

Lord of the Rings Online: we tried this briefly in the past and saw some potential. The problems we ran into were that it didn’t run very well on our machines and it felt like we’d have more fun just replaying portions of WoW. We also started as humans and those initial zones really did nothing for us. We’ll probably check it out again and play as hobbits to see if The Shire is more appealing.

EVE: I’m going to do my best trying to find some aspect of the game that interests Sally. We were talking about this last night and, again, the concepts are very appealing to her, it’s the actual means to those ends that she can’t get fired up about. We’ll probably run some missions together and possibly throw together some cheap, expendable ships for some low-security ratting and PvP excitement at some point. My corporation may also have some fun events coming up that we might hop in on.

Tabula Rasa: Again, with better machines this might rope us in a little more. We tried the 3 day trial and enjoyed it, but technical aspects held us up some.

What else should we be trying?
Why Don’t Women Play Eve?

02.21.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

Linky

Crovan stirs up some good discussion.
Trying to play EVE: Otherwise known as when I live up to all the stereotypes of being a girl.

02.20.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | General

To my great and persistent dismay, I cannot get in to playing EVE. I want to want to play it. I find it theoretically fascinating. From a sociological/academic/game theory perspective I think it’s one of the neatest virtual worlds out there. And I really, really dislike it for all the wrong reasons. That said, space games as a general rule have never quite done it for me. Sci-Fi is fine, I like Star Wars and Star Trek like everyone, I like a good (or bad) novel or movie what with the aliens and the spaceships. I am not opposed to sci-fi as a genre just about anywhere save for “fly a spaceship around space” games.

But really the deal here, and I cringe saying this to my deepest inner soul, is that in many ways EVE just isn’t pretty enough. I can’t anthropomorphise my character, and I don’t want to explore the “world”. (And a small part of me has just died committing these words to screen.) In WoW, sure, yes I like the pretty but damnit, I was not some namby pamby RPer who would only play an elf. Gear was always function over form. My female undead mage wore leggings and tunics from 60-70, and if you’ve ever seen an undead female in leggings you know what a sacrifice to aesthetics that was. And I have never, ever, save for in jest, RP walked ANYWHERE just to see the sights. And yet. There was a strong element, deep and dark though it may have been, of enjoyment that I took from really loving the imaginary world my character was living in. There is an element of make-believe, childish imagination and sensory enjoyment that the world and the characters that inhabit WoW provided. I gut-level like the colors, textures and noises of the game. I developed strong emotional attachment to my characters, reminiscent of the personalities I gave to my plush animals as a child. Not, I think, in a particularly childish way, but more like how a character in a good novel becomes real to you somehow. Even with my min/max uber efficiency tendencies, there was a bit of my brain that secretly (or, in the case of my rabid obsession with non-combat pets, not too secretly) really REALLY liked “living” in WoW’s aesthetic of a fantasy universe.

This part of my brain is, to say the least, underwhelmed by space.

Turns out, especially in the EVE version of space, space is big. it’s also dark, cold and exceptionally hard to stylize. Also, one’s avatar is no more than a head shot of a very hard to personalize stone-cold space bitch, swarthy shark-like space he-man or, assuming you have the artistic eye for human proportions of an iguana, a deeply off-putting skeletally inbred space-hick of creepiness. This avatar never comes out of their ship, and the ships, while being quite beautifully rendered are.. well… ships. Big, clunky, awkward, metallic ships. The ships look uncomfortable. They don’t strike me as being particularly fun to captain. They probably smell weird and look a lot on the inside like the ship from Alien Resurrection, all rust and steam pipes and rugged functionality. There’s a chance that I might be able to look past this and get in to the game were the UI a place of attractive buttons I could push (honestly, kill me now) but no, even that is as cold and stark and austere as the rest of it, and even more irritating given the fact that as UIs go, EVE’s is not particularly good, functionally speaking. It’s fine, just a bit.. clunky. You learn to live with it, but it’s not as though in my case I can look through the design of it to the brilliant ease of use.

To my great disgust, I’m finding all of the above so off-putting that I really can’t work up any enthusiasm for playing the game even with the incentive of being a) a better girlfriend to Harry b) less bored c) intellectually stimulated by playing a game I find to be socially and academically fascinating d) part of another guild (which I always love) and e) a member of a snooty self-identified in-crowd of EVE players who’s nerdy elitist club I would very much like to be on the inside circle of. Even with ALL of these very good reasons why EVE is the place for me, every time I sit down to play it I end up with my head on my keyboard, groaning like a sick hippo as all my will to live seeps oh so slowly out of me and in to the infinity of darkness that is space. Until, of course, I go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Did you know how many options there are for the bow on her head!?

/facepalm.

I am sure, as Harry and I progress on this blog I will have a great many more things to say on the subject of EVE. Hopefully they will become more constructive as I settle in to accepting (or find a way around) the fact that it simply doesn’t appeal to me.

As it stands, me liking EVE feels like it would be a magic bullet. All the fun and togetherness of WoW with even more personalized goals and even more dynamic small group play! Right now I really miss WoW because I really miss Harry. I miss having a place where we were evenly matched, where we learned and problem solved and critically thought about things together. So far, the best (if not only) place we’ve found this kind of interaction with each other is through gaming, and if I could just get myself a little bit more enthusiastic about EVE I feel like we could have it again, easy, without having to work at it. It could go back to how it was. Not liking EVE enough to get really involved in it both disgusts me in a more roll-my-eyes-can’t-believe-what-a-girl-I-am kind of way but it also scares the crap out of me and makes me feel guilty. We don’t know quite how to find the same connection WoW gave us, we don’t know where too look for it or what to try outside of an MMO, and certainly not outside of games. If I could only fall in love with EVE it would be so easy. Save for a few months when we took a WoW break, we’ve never been without a default, go-to, always easily accessible activity that we find stimulating to do together, and I think it has somewhat shocked and scared both of us how much we have come to expect and need that kind of interaction, and how very very bad we are at providing it for ourselves outside the framework of an MMO that we both enjoy.

Which, of course, means that here we are on this little blog. With that, I’ll end this rambling post and let Harry explain in his post just what the heck we might be doing on this little rock we’ll call our own in the great icy wilderness of the internet.
The Idea

02.20.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

Sally and I have been together for over three years now. I’ve always been a gamer. Sally realized she was as well while I was playing WoW and the cornerstone of our free time was found. In WoW, we found a shared activity that was fun, interesting, cooperative, had social aspects and problem solving. We connected with previous friends around the country as well as meeting and befriending many new people. Sally even based some research off of our experiences and wrote a paper about it. It turned out to be a really good time.

We’ve recently moved to Boston and in the process have changed social groups, jobs, and habits. In the months we’ve been here, finding the time and/or interest in games has been harder. I’ve gotten restless with WoW and picked up EVE which Sally hasn’t gotten into. We’ve played around with our roommate’s Wii and 360, but haven’t really found or settled on anything.

So the idea here is to make this site the primary shared activity. The brilliant idea is that even if we don’t like the games we try, we can write about why they didn’t work together. And if we do find things that we like, we have a place to engage and share with the larger gaming community.

What can you expect to find here? We’re planning on doing the usual posting of what we’re playing with a focus on how we are playing it together; what we find interesting individually and as a couple. We might talk about our relationship in particular as well as couplehood in general. We’ll try to process any relevant news with our relationship-focused lens. And we’ll probably post pictures of lolcats as well, because, c’mon, we’re on the interwebs now.
Picking Up Steam

02.20.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

So, we’ve got our computers finally set up the way we want them, we have a comfy couch to sit on, and we’re getting back into the state of mind to play some games together. A laundry list of possible games to try is slowly forming into an actual plan and the hardware to back it up may actually be bought. I’ve been poking and prodding at the blogging software and getting myself back up to speed in managing all of this, so this will all settle down into some semblance of a real site sometime soon as well. We might actually make this thing happen, who knew?
Blog, Redux

02.17.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 2 Comments | General

Gonna try this blogging thing out again. Stay tuned for stuff.

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February 2008

The Archives

Weekend report

And Then There Was WoW

The Search

Why Don’t Women Play Eve?

Trying to play EVE: Otherwise known as when I live up to all the stereotypes of being a girl.

The Idea

Picking Up Steam

Blog, Redux

Gamers in Bed

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