Having Fun Yet?

After that last rant, one of my friends who server transferred dropped back in.

I’ve got several friends who changed servers, looking for that fabulous land where lots of people are logged in and many of them know how to play. They seem to have found people who can push the margins farther, and have accomplished things my guild hasn’t done yet. One of them, a healer who was sort of my mentor for a while, had some things to say about how my guild tends to blame catastrophes on the healers, wrongfully.

He wasn’t really telling me anything I don’t already know. For myself, I don’t have a lot of delusions about my skill, even though I could probably log into the game at any given moment and quickly find experiences where people both praise my excellence and berate my noobishness. Competence is relative, and a lifetime of many relaxing hours enjoying video games has shown me it would be very financially unproductive for a company to sell a game that I can’t beat, plus I usually can beat games that stump my friends. Anyway, whether people are flattering me or calling me names, I usually take it with a grain of salt. I do take pride on being able to get good gear on a server with bad players (who blame healers for everything), which to me means more than being able to get the same gear on a server full of competent gameaholics.

Anyway, he mentioned something another player asked him, post-server jump: “Are you having fun?”

That’s the main consideration, right? You play a game to have fun?

I haven’t been having fun with Sims 3 lately, so haven’t been playing it. I did order the expansion and will dutifully report if I get around to installing it after it arrives. But in order to have the kind of sim game I want, I’d have to spend many hours building and modding and other repetitious boring tasks, and then . . . take my fatty.

And don’t think I’m a fat hater. I’ve noticed a lot of fat hate in print lately. Usually from liberal sources, who treat it the same way certain conservative sources treat gayness: “some people think you’re born that way but it grosses me out and I think it’s actually that they are giving in to immoral desires because they lack willpower, so I think they should be forced to change their lifestyle and spend a lot of money to reprogram themselves, even if reprogramming doesn’t really work, and in any case, they should stay in the house so I don’t have to look at them, instead of pissing me off by asking for special privileges like not having people like me call them names.” For the record, I’d rather sit next to a fatty than a hater on an airplane, even though fat and hate both seem to adjust to fill the available space.

Anyway, so I have a Sims 3 fatty. He was part of my experiment to see if you could have a great big fat sim . . . who is a pro athlete, and has the “athletic” personality trait. He’s a linebacker, and amateur chef, and he eats dessert after every single meal, and always has a fridge full of freshly baked cookies. Sometimes I have to drag him away from the workout machine to get him to sit on the couch watching TV, but after a few repetitions, he got the “mmm cookies” behavior down. And since his athletic skill is maxed, he never has to work out again.

So what does he do when I release him from being the active household? He goes jogging. He turns up in the park, all slender and energetic. Does he ever go to the tiki bar to eat canapes and watch the plasma TV? Hell no, he’s over at the gym. Meanwhile, all the sims that lack the “athletic” trait apparently immediately raid Fatty the Linebacker’s fridge and pudge out whenever I leave them to their own devices.

If you’re reading this, EA, !@#!@$& you for taking what used to be the best sandbox game franchise ever and turning it into a moronic festering pile of social engineering crap. I really don’t care if WoW is using the “nudge” strategy to convince me a fish feast is healthier than a roasted boar; it stacks with the candy buffs after all. I do applaud the decision to put really fat people in the game to begin with, because diversity is good, but why include customization at all if you’re just going to grab the gamer’s hand and say “now now, that isn’t what you REALLY wanted to do, let me show you the CORRECT way to make digital representations of suburbanites.”

Anyway, Sims 3 is not fun. I don’t play it any more. WoW . . . is still fun. I think. Needs work though. And mostly these days I’m having fun with my “exit the server strategy” – leveling my hunter and my mage. And at the moment, I’m wrapped up in Halloween OCD – clicking the trick or treat NPCs every hour with several toons in the hopes of getting random rare stuff.

The guy who left, he wasn’t sure if he’s having fun. He’s got new achievements, his game time is more productive but it didn’t sound like he was enjoying the interaction as much. For me, once I’m not having fun with one aspect of the game (like dealing with other people) I latch onto another aspect (like PVP – I’m doing much of my leveling that way). And even the social aspects can be gratifying.

Example: the other night we were in a raid doing “cultural studies” after going through some new applicants, one of whom specified in his guild app that he is white, confusing us. Do other guilds track racial data? Is he looking for an all white guild? Does this mean, as a guildie inquired, that he likes to relax by chasing Jews around in his pickup truck when not raiding?

Before long, we were sharing our own cultural studies tidbits, such as Canadians eat waffles all the time, and people in South America aren’t really American but they should learn to talk American, and Japan is full of geishas wandering the streets, and orientals, and rugs, and people with southern accents play video games with possums running across the keyboard. It was all very stupid, and only stupidity rescued it from hatefulness, because we all knew damn well we were saying stupid things. And it was also very funny, because we all run into virtual culture shock from time to time.

And . . . back to the gender angle . . . I went in a 10 raid (even though I usually don’t do 10s) that was led by one of the other female members of the guild, Lorelei. We have a few, less than 10. Anyway, she did an awesome job. I made sure I told her that, and I also passed it along to the guildleader and a few others.

Next raid, everybody was ribbing her for allegedly dying a lot. She doesn’t, but after the ribbing started and her confidence got rattled, she did. I had a flash of déjà vu. Similar things have happened to me. Maybe it has to do with the old “uh oh, one of the guys is standing out, let’s bring him back to earth” thing I’ve seen guys do socially – but it takes on an edge of extra meanness when it’s guys picking on a girl as opposed to another guy, because they all want to get in on it, and they’re all trying to top each other, and the payoff is actual female attention, rather than getting another dude disgusted to the point where he logs out.

So I started pitching Lorelei extra heals, even when she seemed determined to self destruct. I’m a healer, I can do that. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the raid that can actually influence whether someone dies a lot, or not. Nope, sorry, you’re standing in the fire but I’ve got a shield on you, you’re gonna live, tough beans. The boys are going to have to joke about something else.

Anyway, it struck me later that if I actually had jumped servers, I wouldn’t have been around to do that.

So maybe there are also valid reasons to stay put. As long as it’s fun.