April 2008

The Archives

• Geeking out

  04.29.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | General

  One of the things which I think Harry and I had hoped would become self-evident on this blog, but which we have yet to figure out how to really do,  is sharing the reason that we really like gaming together. Which, quite simply, is the hours upon hours of chattering about games when we aren’t playing them.  In fact, I think for the two of us, often our time in-game is simply a vehicle for doing what we *really* like to do, which is talk and theory craft about them outside of game.   When we were helping run a guild and lead raids in WoW, that itself was fun but the actual enjoyment was the late night coffee runs with our laptops, sitting somewhere and devising loot rules, raid strategies, bitching about guild drama etc.  We could do this forever.  We really never get tired of it.    When we were driving our car back this last weekend from Madison we were listening to some Terry Pratchett on audiobook.  This inspired a three hour long thought excercise on our favorite idea yet:  World of Diskworld.  The Munchkin of MMOs.  It doesn’t matter that in the end no one is ever going to care what we have to say on a Diskworld MMO, it’s just great fun thinking about it.  And, even without knowing a lot about actual game development (limitations of technologies, marketing decisions, etc) it helps us think through the games we play, what we like about them, what we don’t, what we wish we could do in them and what the consequences of those game play choices might be.

  We have a bad habit of going to bed late, already running on a sleep deficit and then blabbing for two hours every night about this and that, usually game thoughts.  The complexity of systems in MMOs gives us an almost unlimited amount of material to chew on, we both really like learning and perfecting the systems, everything from how to maximize DPS to pondering the social landscape.

  Where we’re so far failing in this writing endeavor is figuring out how to take the inventiveness and spontaneity of those conversations and get that in to this blog.   We have a hard time figuring out how to have this space be a documentation, or an extension of our late-night gab fests, re-writing them feels redundant, and we always lose some of the depth that was present the first go-round.  We really want to capture the back-and-forth nature of our conversations, how we play off of each other’s ideas and take conversations in directions that are surprising and interesting (at least to us).

  But, all of this said, I think we’re going to stick with this blog for a while.  I think, with enough time we can figure out how we want to use it so that it both provides something to the two of us and is hopefully interesting to others as well.   That probably means that the writing here is going to be awkward, unfocused and spotty at best for a while.  But hang in there with us.  We think we’re pretty neat.

  Soon to come:

  Our thoughts on World of Diskworld!

  My senior paper!  And the dizzying prospect of going back to school!

  Raiding!  Will we get back in to it?  Only time will tell!  Stay tuned…

• Hello, old lover…

  04.22.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | General

  We’re bad bloggers. We get all wrapped up in our little lives and forget about you, our public.

  So, as seems to be Harry’s and my pattern, we give up WoW to search for greener pastures only to spend 6 months bored and disconsolate until, with heads hanging low, we crawl back to the sweet embrace of Azeroth.

  We really, really tried to like LotRO, and, objectively speaking, it’s a great game. But it’s not quite our cup of tea, just not quite. The visual style doesn’t quite do it for us, and while we both like Tolkien it’s not our #1 most captivating imaginary world, and, in some ways, using the world of Tolkien keeps some visual, plot and game play choices fairly rigid. And, honestly, we’re min/maxers. We like mechanics, we like efficiency, we like information and lots of it. WoW gives us these things in spades whereas LotRO is much more about socialization, collecting, experiencing. It’s not bad, it’s different, but it doesn’t quite fill our particular OCD hole. I don’t want to put words in our roommate’s mouths, but they really enjoy LotRO and I think it’s because J like collections of any kind and T is often more immersed in character development, and crafting. They tend to explore virtual worlds more, at a slower pace, with more thoroughness. Harry and I are speed demons. The game we play is getting from point A to point B FASTER BETTER HARDER NOW NOW NOW.

  ATM, we’re leveling 2 little mages, which is always fun. We’ve done matching mages before, and I have a 70 mage already, but damit, mages are just a hoot to level up. We’re going fire this time, since my 70 and our two previous ones were both frost, and things go asplody. We are also reveling in the luxury that is FINALLY having low level spell dmg gear available. THANKS BLIZ. Harry really wants a high lvl pure DPS class (having a mage and a hunter myself I can hardly blame him), so we might take these all the way to 70. However, I feel absurd having two 70 mages. I might swap out at 40 for my priest or my lock or at 50 for my war, but eh, we’ll see.

  We have some interest in re-joining end game WoW activities, we certainly have people who’d let us raid with them in a heartbeat, so we’re giving that some thought. Especially since our gear isn’t too out of date yet and badge gear makes it easier to catch up. Mostly though it’s just been nice playing something that we’re so good at together. We’re a pretty fierce machine of two in WoW, we’ve been playing for long enough that we intuit what to do. We sort of fall in to almost a kind of shorthand communication, it’s really pretty satisfying.

  We shall see what comes of it, especially when Harry’s new job starts up and we fall back in to some kind of pattern.

• What We’re Up To

  04.22.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  Been busy with life stuff, hence the lack of recent posts.  We have been playing some games in addition to handling the other aspects of Real Life, so we at least have something to talk about.

  First off, I have a job!  Woohoo!  I start very soon and I’m really excited.  More on that in the future.

  Sally and I have dusted off our WoW accounts and have been duoing two Blood Elf fire mages.  We’re up to level 26 and having a pretty good time.  Enemies go asplody, basically.  I can also kind of run 2 accounts on my machine and we actually have 3 accounts at the moment, so Sally uses her 70 hunter while I play the 2 mages and we go and demolish the low level isntances and get our phatty bluez (which, by the way, are way better since patch 2.3, I believe).  We always like levelling, so it’s been a good time so far.  We also know the areas and quests so well that we’ve been catching up on Battlestar Galactica while we play, so that’s a good time.

  I’ve been waiting the last couple of weeks to actually start my new job, so I’ve been sitting around at home playing quite a bit of EVE.  One of my characters has gotten most of the exploration skills to a decent level, so I’ve been doing a lot of that.  I’ve actually made quite a lot of money doing it and am pretty much up to my first liquid billion in ISK, so that’s pretty exciting.  I left my old corp due to an over abundance of empire wars and started my own little corp to make things a little more convenient and am looking at joining one of the larger alliances out in 0.0 space which would be a pretty exciting endeavor.

  Other than that, there’s been the little bit of Rock Band and LotRO, but not a ton.  It’s really been a lot of WoW and catching up on old shows.  Well, we also finally added HD capability to our cable but we actually haven’t watched as much of that as we’ve been intending.  Because lord knows we need to see How It’s Made in High Def.

Gamers in Bed

Gamers that play together, stay together

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Dave and Mara share their experiences and thoughts about gaming as a couple.

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omglinkblog

Jul 18, 2008
•  » das tweets :: my twitter feed, if anyone doth care -Dave
May 27, 2008
•  » How Rock Band saved my marriage :: -Dave
Mar 12, 2008
•  » Gamers With Jobs Podcast with a couple guys from Turbine :: Really interesting podcast with two developers from Turbine talking about LotRO and more stuff.  This podcast is always good, but the guys from Turbine are really, really good in this one. -Dave
Mar 7, 2008
•  » I’m that asshole… ::  ...who's giggling out loud in a quiet room full of cubes at work.  Finally got around to watching Jonathan Coulton performing "Still Alive" in Rock Band.  Awww, they tried so hard. -Mara
Mar 4, 2008
•  » Walk, Don’t Run :: Escapist article on Grim Fandango, one of the best adventure games ever made. -Dave
•  » Fighting with Monsters :: Escapist article on Beyond Good & Evil, one of our favorites we've played in the last few years.  Article contains some spoilers about the plot of the game. -Dave
Mar 1, 2008
•  » Ms. Constance :: The incredibly hip, ultra hot, super savvy Constance Steinkuehler. She's a prof. at the U of Madison and is doing really interesting research on gaming and culture and community. I want to be this woman. She heads the conference linked in the next post down. -Mara
•  » You should go… :: to this awesome conference. I went two summers ago and it was seriously one of the coolest things I've ever done. Take game devs, community developers and academics all in one space and get them jabbering about why games are not only neat but what they can be used to do for society. Awesome stuff. -Mara
Feb 29, 2008
•  » EVE Alliance Tournament Live Stream :: For any EVE nerds out there, the alliance tournament is going on right now.  Check out the live video coverage of the tournament. -Dave
Feb 28, 2008
•  » Epic Dolls :: Women-run blog and podcast about WoW. -Dave

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