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.

(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.

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.

It was my birthday weekend and we decided to spend it quietly hanging out and playing games.  And play we did.  Here’s the rundown of what we spent our time on.

Zack and Wiki: Sally got this for us as a birthday present and we got to spend a couple hours playing around it.  First impression is that it’s a totally solid adventure/puzzle game.   Super cute graphics, pretty clear game mechanics, and fun little puzzles.  We’ve finished off the first area and started working on the second.  So far the puzzles are pretty fun to work through and it is turning out that two heads are better than one, most of the time.  It certainly wouldn’t be hard for one player to play through the game, but a second person certainly doesn’t get too bored and can have some good input into the solution process.  The puzzles and game mechanics can sometimes be a little obtuse, but between in-game hints and a little tenacity, it’s not too bad.  The most annoying thing we’ve encountered so far is in one of the earlier levels - there’s a sleeping bad guy that you have to incapacitate to be able to use a fishing pole.  The only problem is that the timer for when he wakes up is a little unclear - there’s no real way to know how long he will be out and you only have a few seconds before he wakes up, so it’s very easy to get caught and either have to revive or restart the level.  Overall, I’m looking forward to playing more of it.

Rock Band: Spend a decent amount of time every day this weekend getting some songs in, sometimes just me playing guitar (expert Highway Star can DIAF), and sometimes three of us in the house manning the instruments.  I’m getting closer to being able to play hard drums reasonably well on most songs.  We’re getting pretty close to being able to do all three instruments on hard for the group tour, so it’ll be fun to try and get some more fans for our little band.

Any expert RB guitarists out there?   The solo on Deep Purple’s Highway Star is just killing me.  I’ve been using the older guitar without the solo fret buttons and I think I might have to use the new guitar for those buttons.  Hopefully we should be getting a replacement guitar in the next couple of days since our strum bar is too loose and often misses strums.

EVE Online: So, my corporation had a big outing on Saturday.  I dragged Sally along to check out a large group (the fleet was almost up to 200 at times) PvP operation in low security space.  The whole experience was really slow (waiting for a smaller group to form and move out to the main fleet, getting into the main fleet, getting into the right squads, etc).  We ended up sitting on a station with about 150 people harassing some local pirates for most of the times we were actually there.  Got to see a pirate’s dreadnought undock for a little bit (he redocked as soon as we got him into armor), I was on the killmail on a Dominix (the pirate posted on their killboard that he was giving us some fun and collecting insurance for the ship), and just sort of milled about.  A pirate sniper Eagle showed up and took out a couple of our frigates and kept warping around bookmarks, so we never had a serious shot at getting him.  One of our covops pilots also managed to get into position near an interceptor and allowed a lot of our smaller ships to warp to his location and get a kill.  I had a pretty good time just being with the fleet and being part of a couple of kills.  I found being part of such a large fleet pretty fun even though we didn’t see much action - really, no one is going to mess with a fleet of 150.

I’ll let Sally talk about her experience of the op but I think it’s safe for me to say that she found the whole thing pretty boring.  She was in a Vexor and lagged out for the kills or didn’t really know what was going on or why it was happening - this is certainly my fault to some extent.  I was hoping the op would be a little more interesting and maybe spur some more interest - I cling to the idea that Eve would be a lot of fun to play together if we could find some common goal in the game or if we could find something that Sally could sink her teeth into.  Honey, please tell me to stop if I become insufferable and/or let me know if I’m already there.

So, new design should be live.  It’s based on the Upstart Blogger Minim template and using a fun image from a WarGames poster.  We’ll be playing with the design some more, I’m sure, but I think we’re happy with this iteration right now.  Let us know if anything is a little wonky (bad links, inconsistent style, etc).  About the only weird thing with how we have links set up - they are part of the main blog but do not appear on the front page.  They show up in the RSS feed with the text ‘[link]‘ prepended and link to the URL, not back to ther permalink on this site.  These link posts will appear if you go through individual posts and have the links not as the title, but on a separate line.

Anyway, let us know what you think!

We’ve just started playing Zack and Wiki (only had about 30 minutes), but it seems like it has some potential. We thought there would be more direct interaction for both of us in the game, but it turns out the second (or 3rd or 4th) can only actually “draw” on the screen and use a pointer to guide the first player to objects in the game.  The style is fun, light, and cute if a little J-Pop (lots of ‘…’s).  Anyway, we’ll see if this one gets fun.  It looks like it’s got the possibility to be a good pass-the-controller back and forth kind of game with some fun puzzle solving that’ll take two brains.  More on it when we get some more time to play it.