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Busy and a Little Bored

03.24.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment

It’s both been very busy and somewhat boring in our lives the last week. We’ve been bad at writing posts here, but we’ve got a bunch of topics we want to cover and I have about half a dozen drafts in the queue that I just need to finish writing. Anyway, what we’re up to:

Lord of the Rings Online - All four of us in our apartment are playing this, which I touched on last week. We’re all in our teens (Sally and I just hit 17 on our characters) and exploring Bree. Our roommates were out of town this weekend so we didn’t play too much, both because it’s more fun to play as a foursome but also because J (whom we will call J until he creates a nickname for himself) has been the main driver of play (which is funny to me that’s he so into the game, but that’s another story for another time).

Personally, I’m a little “meh” about LotRO. I’m not a giant Lord of the Rings fan, so the lore and worlds aren’t captivating enough to pull me through all the time. It is fun to be a dwarf and adventure in the Shire, which is beautiful with my new video card, but it just doesn’t feel like it has a lot more to offer than WoW. In some areas, it definitely falls short - my main beef is with the user interface. To avoid reiterating a lot of another post I’m writing, suffice it to say that non-moddable UIs are a pet peeve of mine, especially when managing the interface becomes a burden or when not enough data is exposed to me so that I can really understand what is going on with the mechanics of the game.

We also just need beefier machines to play the game at a level we expect. I’m playing on High graphics at 1440×900 and it seems to stutter and lag all the time. Now, we don’t have the most up-to-date machines (which is something that needs to be remedied), but scaling down the graphics takes so much away from the game. In fact, the first time Sally and I played, we didn’t last long due to the fact that we weren’t done with WoW yet and the low graphics settings left a lot to be desired.

Rock Band continues unabated. Sally and I finished got the Hall of Fame finished on hard which was pretty sweet. We’ve been systematically working through the songs on expert, me on drums, her on guitar. I definitely feel like the step from hard drums to expert drums is a bigger jump than on guitar. The bass pedal sequences are far harder and just require a lot more footwork, period. Those half beats are still killers, too. But, it’s still a lot of fun and the only way we can get new fans in our main band.

I’ve been playing a little bit more EVE recently as well. I started playing with exploration yesterday using my covops and astrometrics skills which I had trained up months ago but never gotten around to using. I’ve only done a couple system scans but so far I’ve found exploration to be uncannily fun and interesting. The game mechanic requires a lot of patience and a little bit of puzzle solving (mainly relating to where you put scan probes in the system). It’s oddly satisfying though, even though so far I’ve only found one complex that was pretty crappy (just had some waves of drones, but I did have a reason to use my assault ship which is kind of fun).

I included “bored” in the subject to this post because that’s how Sally and I ended up a lot of the weekend. J&T were out of town this weekend so we putzed around the apartment trying to find something to do. We had a very hard time both finding any of the coop options interesting and spent most of the time trying to avoid picking. This is partly a function of both of us being indecisive about figuring out what we want to do as well as us just not both finding the same game/activity as interesting as the other. Rock Band is only playable for so long over a weekend before my leg or Sally’s hand gives out.

Last note is that I’m looking for a job now. In a mutually agreeable decision between myself and my employer, I have left my position as a database developer and am looking for something back closer to my web development roots. I’ve spent most of the last week working on my Resume, web portfolio, and have started writing cover letters and applying to various game companies in Boston. Getting a job at a game-related company is the ideal goal right now but I’m not sure how likely it is, given that I have no real professional experience at a game company. I’m hoping something might pop up though and I’ll keep you updated around here
OH GOD NO CHOICE SO SORRY

03.20.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment
Weekend Report (All Quick Like)

03.17.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment

To the detriment of you, our readers (both of you), we apologize. We have been too busy actually playing games to post here. And contemplating and changing life-defining career choices. So, a quick recap of recent activities.

We played a ton of Rock Band this weekend. Sally on hard guitar, me on hard drums. And we’re still having a blast. We had to keep taking breaks due to my weak, almost fragile, thighs. That kick pedal gets intense on some of the songs. Our little band is almost up to 400 stars and we can breeze through the toughest of songs with ease, unless they’re actually hard. The Outlaws song gave us a problem initially, until we realized the drum section is pretty easy (though soul crushingly repetitive). Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills, however, gave us more trouble. And those were the songs in a two song random set. Which was harsh. We even tried a couple songs on expert as a duo and it looks like we might be inching our ways towards that difficulty, though I think I’m going to have a harder time getting used to it than Sally.

We are also playing around with Lord of the Rings online along with our roommates (who still need pseudonums, hint, hint). We’re all pretty much at level 10 after a good long session yesterday and are enjoying ourselves a fair bit so far. It’s nice to have a very WoW-like experience but without it being WoW. Our little party, er, fellowship of a Guardian, Hunter, Champion, and Minstrel seems like a good little group. We all went through the intro and then headed to the Shire, though we grow somewhat weary of the delivery quests. Anyway, we have lots more of that game to chew on and write about.

The only other news is that I am actively looking for a new job now. My dream job would be a web development position with a game company, though we’ll see if that actually pans out. There seem to be quite a few jobs out here that I’d be perfectly happy with. But, if you happen to know of a company looking out for a pro PHP/MySQL developer (or similar technology, I’m just most familiar with those tools), let me know!

Now, back to mining some more copper…
MMOs Have Spoiled Me (Part Deux)

03.11.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 2 Comments

Read Part I

Ok, now with all that history out of the way, I’ll try and jump into the guts of why it is I like MMOs so much and why they are the games I find myself playing and wanting to play.

Probably the best reason is because of my experience playing with Sally in WoW. The built-in support of grouping in MMOs makes them such a great activity for couples. Very few other games allow the two of us to have separate but complementary roles together. We always have a questing buddy, a group of two is more resistant to ganking, and you always know at least one of the people in a larger group is someone you know and trust. Very few other types of games have such a rich set of tools or variety of actions that a duo can engage in.

That social/group aspect that we have together is appealing in general. The existence of shared goals and needs for grouping are something that I find I miss in single player games now. Unless a single player game has a very good story that keeps me interested in the world, I’d almost always rather be playing a game that has other people in it, especially if I can work with those people in a group.

The constant character advancement is also seductive and a well known mechanic in MMOs. Getting that next piece of armor or making a little more money to afford the new item is an obviously powerful incentive system that I buy into wholeheartedly. Sure, I could play Crysis for a while and it’ll be fun, but it has no longer term implications. Every action in an MMO, however, is part of the larger story which I get caught up in. Running missions in EVE in isolation isn’t as fun as playing Crysis. But the mission running is part of a larger story: I’m both making money and gaining standings so that I might possibly be able to set up my own station, afford better ships for PVP, or play the market on a larger scale. In addition, I might be running those missions with people from my corp or at the very least, talking with other folks who are playing the game about what we’re doing.

There are certainly non-MMO games that capture my attention now and again (Rock Band being the primary one these days), most games just don’t have enough to grab my attention for very long. Add the same reasons for Sally as well, and you get a double whammy that doesn’t have us playing many non-MMOs either together or apart.
Sally’s gaming history

03.11.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment

Seems only fitting to follow up Harry’s post with one of my own. I am a relative newcomer to games and gaming in any serious way. As a kid, I never had a console system. My dad briefly owned an Atari that we set up every now and then but most of those games were too hard for me when I was so young and it never captured my interest. I’m an only child so I didn’t have older siblings (or a brother in general) to insist on owning a console. None of my girlfriends had console systems either, or families that did. Some of my younger cousins had Nintendos and the like, but they were all boys and all younger than me, so while I did at least see Super Mario and Sonic and all those classics of the era getting played at holidays, I generally wasn’t included and would get bored and wander off.

My Dad is a huge tech nerd, but his particular flavor of dorkieness ran in the direction of Apple computers which also limited my exposure. Thankfully my best friend Melissa’s family had some PCs and (come to think of it, I have no idea why) lots of games. We spent hours and hours playing Doom and Wolfenstein, but it wasn’t until much later that I had any connection between playing those games in her basement and the larger culture and history that existed in the 80s around this new media. Plus most games, I thought, were for boys or little children. My family did have most games that came out for the Mac, primaraly strange nerdy things like 3 by Three (which is still an incredible puzzle game if you go download it) and I really liked the, for their time, pretty dynamic hypercard driven exploration games like The Manhole and Spelunx (which, now typing them sound SO DIRTY. But I digress). The latter two were produced by Cyan who went on to make Myst, etc which my family was a HUGE fan of. Mom and Dad had always liked text based adventure games, so Myst was something they were familiar with. We played them as a family fanatically every time a new one came out. And this fit pretty well with my speed as a kid, I did not like fast, frenetic things. I read a lot. I liked drawing and art. Nice, slow, quiet, contemplative activities.

Games got dropped all together for a couple of years between middle school and the end of highschool. I was far too busy trying to be artsy and eclectic and generally weird. I should have realized that any child who went to the state and regional science fair competitions every year for 7 years running would never be able to escape nerddom but I was trying really hard. Somewhere in there, during college, I managed to buy a PS2. Maybe for Dance Dance Revolution? I can’t quite remember what made me spend what I’m sure was a month’s worth of my expendable cash on a system. I certainly didn’t know many titles. I can only assume I saw DDR or Katamari over at a friends house and fell in love. Or, hm, I think I also decided that I really needed a DVD player and thought a used PS2 would be a more fun way and the same price. Couldn’t tell you. Regardless, somehow this made it in to my house and then I actually started paying attention to games. I was AMAZED to find that there were cute! fun! non-twitch demanding things out there. I killed a ton of time playing stuff like Sly Cooper, Dark Cloud 2, Jax and Daxter, Katamari, Final Fantasy, etc. The introduction of adventure, RPG and platformers changed my gaming perspective completely. I was only really familiar with FPS, and assumed Mario was only for 6 year olds since that’s the age my cousins were when I saw them playing it. T’was a revelation unto me.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’ve broken up with my then-boyfriend, let him have the PS2 (grrr) and then I met Harry. When I broke up with my then-boyfriend, I decided I’d had it with artsy-fartsy musicians and pretentious hipster scenes and awkward goth clubs and the whole nine yards. I finally let myself settle in to the hopeless reality that A) I’m a big dork. B) I need to date a big dork. I was specifically looking for my nerd-in-shining-spectacles when Harry arrived on the scene. And then all the glory of heaven and the soft glow of a flatscreen monitor did shine upon me. Our descent in to being Gamers-with-a-capitol-G happened quickly. He started introducing me to console games I had missed, and then he started up WoW. I had, up to that point, NO idea that the technology in WoW was possible. I was blown away that I had somehow totally missed the newsflash that MMOS of this level of sophistication were possible. And it was pretty! And totally ridiculous enough to be self-consciously silly (something I always appreciate in fantasy games). And, glory be, it ran (well, kinda) on my ancient MacBook. I remember seeing Harry playing his hunter in Uldaman and going “well shit, I want to do that”.

From there I’ve been hooked. I wrote my college senior thesis on games, MMOS in general and WoW in particular, I’ve gone to conferences, I play a mean Guitar in rock band/guitar hero. I pew pew with my Heavy in TF2. I’m slowly, slowly working my way back through the canon of video games to catch what I missed. Yes I’m picky, and I’m not terribly good at fast-reaction games, and there are still too many games out there that are way to “boy” for me to work up a lot of interest in, but I feel, in gaming and by being a self-proclamed “gamer” that I’ve finally found my home. An identity that fits, that aligns me with like-minded people who I genuinely enjoy, rather than my failed attempt at being artsy which aligned me with a group people who’s aesthetic I enjoyed but who my personality never meshed with. I still struggle to know how to define myself within this community, especially when it brings up so many gender stereotypes, but it challenges me and has connected me to more wonderful friends and intellectual stimulation and flat-out fun than I would have ever known.
MMOs Have Spoiled Me (Part I)

03.11.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 1 Comment

Some History

For my gaming habits, World of Warcraft changed everything. Before WoW, I played a variety of games, primarily on the console since I almost never had a PC powerful enough to play the current games. College was full of PS2 and Xbox games, with friends and on my own. I’m got to be pretty mean in the Tony Hawk series and my friends feared me when I had a pistol in Halo. Jody would kick my ass with Jun in Tekken every time, but that was mainly because he cheated. I would head over to Andrew’s room any time a good new PC game came out and steal his machine for as long as he would allow me. Before college, it was all about playing Quake against bots or playing whatever new Nintendo 64 or PlayStation game that was around. But once I got my grubby mitts on WoW, it all changed.

WoW hooked me pretty quickly. I started playing in early 2005, not too long after meeting Sally. She was often very busy with her college courses, so I spent a lot of time playing around with my hunter and got that character into the 50s at about the same time Sally started to have some more free time. She indicated interest in the game so we grabbed her a trial account and started our first pair of characters, my undead priest and her undead mage. And that was really the beginning of the end.

We had a blast leveling that pair up to 60 over the course of several months as well as some other alts. We met some great folks along the way and just enjoyed ourself. The first time we hit the endgame, though, our interest lagged. We did some of the high end dungeons a little bit, went on one brief Molten Core run, and then pretty much quit.

After quitting, we basically just flailed around looking for things to do. The first incarnation of this blog was spawned during that time. We grabbed a GameCube and started up GameFly to try out games on a variety on consoles. This was partially successful, but we kept missing the experience we had together in WoW. After a few weeks, we played the EverQuest 2 trial, were somewhat interested, and picked up 2 copies of that. After playing for two or three days, we immediately cancelled our EQ2 subscriptions and resubscribed to WoW starting new alliance characters.

From there, we leveled some more 60s, decided we didn’t like alliance, and created new Horde characters (on a third new server). Those are the characters we stuck with the longest and explored most of the end game content with. We PvPed a ton and raided Zul’Gurub a little before The Burning Crusade expansion came out. Once the expansion hit, we leveled to 70 very quickly and got into the new end game of level 70 dungeon running, started running Karazhan with some friendly people we had met in game, and eventually became officers with those friends of a then up-and-coming raiding guild.

There are many stories from leading that guild that we’ll share in due time. The short version is that we did pretty well for a while, but due to a combination of leadership burnout and our move to Boston, we left the guild and stopped playing WoW. Which brings us to the near-present. In our lack of things to do, I fired up a trial EVE account for the second time to look into what was going on and got Sally involved for a little while. As she’s said previously, she never found anything that hooked her into the game while I fell in head first. I’ve been playing EVE for the last several months on and off (mostly on) while we’ve been looking for other activities.

Anyway, I fell into my/our gaming history rather than talking about what it is about MMOs that I’ve found to like so much. I’ll get to that in the next post.
a quick update

03.10.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment

We didn’t get around to writing this weekend because we were all busy doing crazy things that require such nonsense as “leaving the house” and partaking in activities like “dinner and a show”. Bizarre, I know. That said, if you (yes, YOU) ever have an opportunity to see the Blue Man Group, do it. You probably won’t regret it, even if you regret having to get out of your pajamas on a perfectly good weekend. We shall resume our regularly scheduled programming of loafing about our apartment and then writing about it as of tonight.
Playing With Sally

03.06.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment

So, Sally and I have given each other some simple writing assignments and this is the first one I’m tackling. The topic: why/how I like gaming with Sally.

The short, general response: it’s great to play with the people you love, especially when they are good players. And it’s fun.

The long answer touches on a lot of things we’ve been talking about: sharing a common activity, having built-in goals and discussions, combining out collective smarts (or lack thereof), and just having fun together.

Sally is an incredibly bright, deep, warm, and social person. Being able to share one of my primary interests with her and have access all of her reactions, insights, and capabilities into what we’re doing is pretty awesome. Not just that, but she’s a great teammate. Working on a shared goal as a team is a pretty rewarding endeavor and games are the place where we can have that team and have fun at the same time.

Some of the most fun we’ve had together over the last few years have been playing WoW together, from simply leveling up another duo while watching some TV to leading a relatively large raiding guild. Leveling is a pretty simple shared activity that requires little bits of cooperation and coordination with nice little rewards scattered along the way.

It’s also just hard not to like being jumped by higher level enemy characters and winning because we’re better players and/or better organized. That’s just awesome. You get to turn to each other, throw a high five o/\o, and then run the hell away before they come back with more people.

When we were some of the founding officers of a new raiding guild, we spent countless hours working together at coffee shops on boss strategies, guild member issues, and ideas on how to improve the guild and our experience in the guild. It was a great project where we were both on equal footing and had tons of little tasks in it that we could work on together (setting up raid schedules, determining fair loot policies, evaluating performances of members, and on and on).

It’s also very apparent when I play other games on my own, either when Sally’s not around or because the game doesn’t appeal to her, that I’m always wishing either that she liked the game I’m playing or that there was a good way to make it into a game where we could play together. Our experience in WoW together has almost spoiled me - most games are just more fun when we can play them together and both be into the goals we set for ourselves or are presented by the game.

I’ll also highlight one more time that Sally is, in general, just a good player. I definitely come to the games we play together with more experience in games and often pick things up faster, but it hasn’t really been an issue. It turns out, we’re both pretty hardcore gamers when it comes down to it, trying to learn as much as possible about the mechanics of the game and making sure we’re doing as well as we can in the roles we choose. Sally’s hunter was always in the top 5 damage dealers in our raids and I was almost always the main or primary off-tank. (I think she often feels like she’s riding on my coattails sometimes, but she’s always the only one who feels that way.)

Anyway, there’s a start to answer that question. I’m sure a lot of posts here will explore the whys and hows of our gaming as we continue writing.
Midweek Update

03.06.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 1 Comment

(aka I haven’t written anything substantive yet)

Been pretty quiet this week, we’ve all been tired and lazy. Sally and I have played a little Team Fortress 2 which is always fun. We do pretty well when we actually team up (me as Medic, her as Heavy). But while we like TF2 a lot, it’s really not something we want to play a lot for a long time. Definitely a snack game. The main issue is actually getting ourselves coordinated at first and then trying to hook back up after one of us dies. There’s also not a ton of communication or true cooperation needed during a match (no more than “spy on me” or “uber is ready”).

We got our new Rock Band guitar - our old one had a faulty, loose strum bar. I still haven’t gotten used to the new style and continually fall back to the GH2 360 controller - it just feels more precise to me and I tend to do better with it.

Otherwise, not much else. We continue talking about EVE a little bit as well as LotRO. We’ll be getting Sally her new MacBook pretty soon and we have decided to go with the PC gaming rig as well. So, once that actually gets ordered and assembled, games like LotRO won’t be quite so onerous to play (her current machine either requires stupidly low video settings or just runs like mud).

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get around to posting a post with some more interesting content today or tomorrow.
Sally’s Weekend Report

03.03.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment

This is my recap of weekend gaming activities. Harry wrote his perspective in the next post down. As he mentioned it was his birthday this weekend, but we’ve all been so busy and somewhat over-peopled that we (us and our two roommates - another couple who also game together (we’ll introduce you to them soon)) declared our apartment to be in social lock-down. No one goes in, no one goes out. Well, technically I think I left once to run and get groceries. Otherwise we all sat around and played games and watched movies and stayed in our pajamas. Bliss.

Zack & Wiki: I used Harry’s birthday as an excuse to get us this game. I’m so smart. It’s completely ridiculous and omfg cute in that way that makes you not sure if you should go “Awwww” or on a homicidal rampage. It’s style is probably not to everyone’s tastes. That said, it’s a completely successful puzzle/adventure game and makes really good use of the Wii. There, in my somewhat limited experience, aren’t too many games that make rather seamless use of the Wii controller’s abilities without getting gimmicky, but this incorporates it quite nicely. As Harry mentioned the only thing that was a bit of a disappointment is that only one person can interact with objects and move the characters, the other player’s remote is used solely for pointing and drawing (you can draw lines and arrows and such to make it clearer when you’re screaming NO YOU IDIOT, THE OTHER URN. SHAKE THE BELL BY THE OTHER URN). Thankfully I rather like backseat driving while Harry playes games, we worked our way through the whole Metal Gear collection with me making helpful (read: irritating) remarks while he drove. Totally fun. I know the Myst variety of games is a contentious issue for some but in my family, who only owned Macs, we got a new Myst game every time they came out and my Mom and Dad and I would all sit around the computer playing that together, one person taking notes, everybody making suggestions and someone doing the driving, so this method of collaborative thinking, puzzly games feels natural and satisfying to me.

Rock Band: I <3 rock band. Not as much as Harry who gets totally OCD over it and is deeply, disgustingly, throw-up-in-your-mouth good at it, but I love it none the less. And, thankfully, they somehow retooled the difficulty on it compared to Guitar Hero. I haven’t gone back and played GH in a while, but I stopped playing it with any real interest when I hit my own personal plateau somewhere on the edge between medium and hard. There was a point where I could 5 star everything on medium and found it tedious and boring but I could only get through the first couple of songs on hard and wasn’t improving. With Rock Band I can actually see myself making real skill progress, which is addictive like crack. I can claw my way through, bloody and mangled though I may be at the end, through pretty much every song on Hard on the guitar, especially with a band mate or two. One of these days I’m going to take the plunge and play some of the easy stuff on expert, just to wet my feet. Our only gripe with Rock Band (aaaaaaargh! EVERY TIME I write “rock band” (did it again) I write “rock bank”. ffs. anyway) is that WHERE THE NUT are the female vocal songs? Because honestly? Two garbage songs, one dippy alterna-averil-wannabe and Hole do not make for a good selection (ok, the B-52s are awesome. I’ll give them that). Where’s the silly Grrrl rockers? Ok Sailor? Le Tigre? April March? Slater Kinny? Come on guys. I’d say 80% of the time when we play either as roomies or with a party going on we have a female singer and there is *nothing* in our vocal ranges. And I know there are tons of good girl rocker + guitar+drums music out there. But that’s a very tiny gripe about a very good game.

EVE: Aww, poor Harry. He tried so hard. As he mentioned there was a theoretically interesting big group PVP op. going on that we went and played around with for a while this weekend. I was….bored. Really, really bored. And I’m not quite sure what to blame, or how I could have been more interested. A) I always forget how much time stuff takes in this game, and I don’t really have much else to do. EVE, I know from watching Harry, is very often a game best played while having something to alt-tab to. Sadly, my RSS feed was empty and whereas Harry often has some little coding project he tabs to I have.. well.. atm.. not much. I mean, I could grab my book, but that seems a bit silly. B) I do not yet have the shared sense of meaning towards EVE activities that other EVE players do. Let me back up a moment and put this in WoW terms which I think apply. One of the things I find really satisfying about playing WoW is that when you do something neat, kill a hard boss, get that first char to 70, get your epic mount, kill someone a bajillion levels higher than you, there’s a whole huge group of people who understand what that means in terms of an achievement and the kind of time or skill required to accomplish it. On the other hand, bring your Mom in to Gruul’s layer and she’s probably not going to be all that impressed, or tell your teacher you finally got your epic omg third tier craftable sword of death and they’ll probably look at you rather blankly. There’s simply not the shared level of understanding around what that accomplishment is reflective of. Right now, I’m the equivalent of the mom or the teacher in EVE. I hung out with a huge group of people in low sec and while I know on an analytical level that there was something really impressive about what we were doing I didn’t have that emotional connection of *really* understanding how interesting/risky/politically tricksy/etc what was going on was. I also didn’t understand much of the conversation going on on Teamspeak or in chat in game. I’m not quite sure what we could have done differently to make me feel more connected to the activity or how to transform what was basically an hour and a half of sitting around waiting for people, an hour and a half of travel time and then another hour and a half of sitting in a fleet more meaningful to me. So I’m still struggling to find a hook in EVE. I haven’t given up hope but I’m still not sure how to approach it.

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OH GOD NO CHOICE SO SORRY

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