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…