Well here we go: the last bit of the Slate piece dives right into this “why do so many games have a women-alienating adherence to a culture constructed around adolescent male tropes” notion I’ve been blogging about here, complete with links to blogrants on the subject other than my own.
So, woot. Other people appear to have noticed. What now?
I finally found mentions of the only games I play in the Slate comments section, where people note that Sims and WoW are hugely popular. I also found a brief “I hate sports games” confessional somewhere in the linkage (further evidence of this rift between game-players-looking-for-a-movie-substitute and game-players-looking-for-a-game), and another link blaming Spore’s disappointing performance on various factors.
I’ve been lately offended by a couple of marketing campaigns, one for Windows and one for some other computery thing, might be Yahoo. Anyway, both campaigns feature people who look like they’d be high-maintenance complainy attention-sponges going on about how finally their favorite computer corporation realized they are the only person in the world and tailored their products exclusively around them. The one that caught my attention today had some guy in an impeccably razored goatee asserting that Windows made their OS faster because he told them to.
Something about both campaigns feels extremely clueless and conciliatory. “All you test market focus groups who didn’t like our earlier ads, fine! Here’s our new campaign, it’s about how everything’s all about you, and I hope you’re happy now, asshats.”
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if computers, the internet, video games and everything had been invented in a different era. Like say, the fifties. All the games would be about cowboys and Indians, with maybe a few daring-edgy-topical games about WWII. Games for men and women would be segregated . . . sort of how they are now, but with less jiggling boobage and more subtle entendre. And there would be no token female NPCs standing around with assault rifles and broadswords.
Or how about the sixties? It’s hard to tell whether the whole psychedelic drugs and flower power thing would have involved computers, a lot of the proponents of that scene seem a little math-impaired. Still, computers can help produce psychedelic light shows and mix acid rock, so might have been glommed onto by futuristic early adopters to email Grateful Dead mixes all over the place. And if computers had been around in the sixties, they probably also would have picked up a dubious taint of association with hippies. “Oh come on grampaw, not the computer again, Hendrix is old school and those light shows cause seizures.”
The seventies would have been great for computers. I mean, consider that all those disco hits were mixed in labor-intensive analog (you know, where you have to splice audio by making actual cuts to the storage medium, with a razor blade) (also . . . they frequently used real orchestras, not just samples). And George Lucas might have been able to get the FX right the first time in Star Wars. There was also a fad for organic and unprocessed things, which might have led to an anti-computer backlash (much sci fi from the period is about humans rebelling against a large omnipotent computer trying to control them), and might also have led to computers in plastic cases with factory-applied wood-grain painted on (like an alarm clock I had when I was a small child; I also had some headphones that were covered in blue denim, so maybe all the laptop bags would have been made out of old jeans).
I had computers in the eighties, but most people didn’t, they were still pretty primitive, especially in the graphics department. There were Nintendos and Ataris for console fun, and coin-ops were very popular as they had lots more dedicated processing power. And the games then . . . the field was wide open and hadn’t been fenced off into genre corrals, so you could make a video game about smashing asteroids in space or being a yellow smiley face fleeing ghosts through a maze without a lot of assumptions about what players wanted. The creativity far outweighed the technology, and there were many games around asking you to suspend your disbelief long enough to pretend that the low rez brick on your screen was a person, or a dragon, or a treasure chest. And people played them, enthusiastically.
You could even say the same for the nineties, and in fact, people are still playing retooled versions of nineties hits like Warcraft and Sims and Civilization and Diablo. Then the turn of the century happened and games became Serious Business, and the idea of a little company (like say, Bullfrog) putting out genuinely entertaining little snarky games became unthinkable – to unleash a game, now you need a Cecil B. DeMille like cast of thousands, backed by many corporate dollars, under the helm of . . . some guy who has no clue whatsoever about games, and thinks female-friendly franchises like Sims need to be fixed by introducing Indiana Jones.
And the games developed this serious boys club atmosphere that had previously been lacking, back when if you didn’t want to play a soldier firing at civilians it was okay, there were a thousand other games to choose from. Ms. Pac Man was basically the same as Pac Man, and didn’t need a lot of pink packaging and buzzword-filled hyperbole about “girls are wired for social networking and boys are wired for pwnage.”
Since there are lots of factors involved, and since computer games are new, and since they are also lucrative enough to inspire clueless management types to try to force them to comport to previous standards for products such as movies, it’s hard to tell whether the gamerverse will be the same in ten years. Or whether the playerbase will be for that matter. Maybe there will be a backlash, which would be nice. Maybe the “thousands of little games” environment which morphed into “you may have a product from a limited selection produced by huge multinational corporations” will be something entirely different in 2015. The medium itself pretty much begs for the end-user to tweak and rewrite it despite the fervent longing of late 20th century types for a world where everyone shops at the same store for the same top ten movies while wearing the same brand of jeans. That paradigm is gone and will never be back (woohoo).
And even now, the situation is changing to “the meager selection of available corporate games is misogynistic and depressing despite large budgets and colorful graphics so I think I’ll just go get another iPhone app instead.”
Time for a sidetrack. I fussed around with the beta version of the Sims “create a world” utility this weekend. I’m pretty good at this computer stuff, and it confused me, so I’m going to leave it alone until it’s out of beta, although I’m sure the fine folks that have been producing Sims hacks for the rest of us, such as More Awesome Than You, will be diving in and creating all kinds of worlds, and maybe even writing more user-friendly interfaces to re-customize them.
I did read the manual though. The emphasis seems to be on helping players to create small, download-friendly sim neighborhoods that can be shared. I’m someone who likes to create huge places filled with custom content (and someone who looks down their nose at lazy designers trying to get players to do the creative work – if customers went to a movie and were treated to fifteen minutes of a director going “well, we’ve got a romantic male and female lead but nobody could figure out if they like each other or not so ushers will be passing out notebooks for you to write the rest of the story” there would be rebellion).
But from an artistic standpoint . . .
Let’s get back in the time machine, and this time, let’s bring Harper Lee to ten-years-or-so-from-now, to re-write To Kill A Mockingbird (which is one of those books that Everybody Has Read, so if you haven’t, you’re out of step, go read it, or at least the Wiki summary). Instead of narratively leading young Scout through her neighborhood, meeting Boo Radley and Dill, watching her dad’s case enfold in court, Ms. Lee could create a virtual version of the town (Macon, if I remember right), and build the important houses, complete with the hollow tree near the school. Then you, as the player, could go into that world, meet the characters and decide what you want to do there, whether it’s hanging out with Atticus in his law office after hours or helping the kids make their costumes for the school pageant.
You’d be trading narrative flow for detail. You’d also be taking the chance that some antisocial players might prefer staying in the house with Boo Radley, or cheering for the evil characters in the courtroom drama.
There still might be a story in there, however . . . remember the people in the Slate article who had no use for the campaign scenario and just wanted to group up with other players for some pwnage? What if most of the Virtual To Kill A Mockingbird players wanted to ignore Scout entirely and hang around in Macon’s red light district drinking moonshine and sexually harassing women? What if the lynch scene became the focal point of the game, with players competing to stop the lynch mob (and griefers joining the lynch mob just to mess with the “nice” players), and all of the carefully delineated character development went by the wayside?
If there is art in that kind of scenario, especially art that has to peacefully co-exist alongside people who are only there for the adrenalin, it would take a different kind of mind to bring it forward and make it time-independent enough so that narrative no longer takes the focus.
Maybe those are the sort of “novels” our grandchildren will encounter, with the details waiting in the background for those patient enough to discover them while the masses stampede through in their quest for immediate distraction.
It intrigues me, though. Maybe I should stop fussing over my ideas regarding the novel I’d like to write and try something a little more experimental, and see exactly what a creative and formerly-writerly person can do with a three dimensional town simulacrum as opposed to a sheet of paper and a narrative trajectory.
And as far as the “boys club” dilemma, people are talking about it, which makes me think that more people want to make large amounts of money by solving it. Until they get there, I still need twenty-three more levels on my mage, and my DK and hunter need some better gear, and my priest needs to learn jewelcrafting, plus I’m going to need a whole lot of abyss shards. Did I mention I really love the new looking-for-group interface? Best WoW invention yet. There are several “oh no, I accidentally wound up in a social environment with a jerk” defenses such as blacklisting and “voting them off the island” and most people seem to have figured out that being a jerk will cut them off from the free-flowing supply of gold and shiny things. Most of the complaints I’ve heard are actually from abrasive people moaning about how they can’t force people to put up with them any more. My heart bleeds for them . . . well, actually, no, it doesn’t.
Incentivize the desired behavior. Penalize the antisocial behavior. Duh. About time these game designers figured that out.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Of Mummies and Men
Slate has been running an interesting piece on games and gamers this week, and it’s touched on several themes I’ve ranted about so here’s the link.
There’s discussion about narrative versus games (the writers, being writers, are predictably focusing on the narrative and sometimes have derisive things to say about the “sports gamers” who prefer strategy to lore, or the heathens who ignore all those cut scenes and focus on the team play). There’s some riffing on the demographics, the overwhelming white-male-ness of games.
[By the way, white males, I’m aware that some of you read this blog, and that some of you take offense at white-male-bashing, which is sometimes justified and sometimes isn’t. Personally, I like white males about as much as I like any other general category of humanity, and I’m not really interested in vengeance, or in making you go away. I’m just getting tired of you acting like it’s all about you. The rest of us gamers would really prefer it if you would STFU and make some game products that don’t irritate the crap out of the majority of the population, thereby increasing revenue. So would all those downsized people from EA.]
And there’s some talk about “moral” games, which always reminds me of the old Ultima games, where you got niceness points for giving cash to beggars and meanness points for doing mean things, which eventually had an effect on your character once you built up enough morality or lack thereof. I expect this to be discussed even further once KOTOR comes out.
Because the current model of game, for the most part, is predicated on the theory that gamers all want to spend their gaming time seeing life through the eyes of a really awesome charismatic dude who can slaughter all kinds of mobs without any kind of remorse or repercussions or speculation on how this behavior will later affect his life or anything wussy like that, mostly solo, in a simulated world where laws are not only unenforced, you get points for breaking them.
A profile that accurately reflects only a small percentage of the population, and when you add in the idea that this awesome charismatic dude exists in a land where 80% of the population is white and male, the reality gap grows a little steep.
While on the other hand, if you make a game that reflects some diversity, like say, Madden Football, or Sims, or even WoW with its rainbow of skin hues and accents, all kinds of people play it, and your audience is not limited to mainstream journalist types trying to review it while crying about the fact that other players don’t give a rat’s ass about the plotline while longing for games to be as awesome as Mad Men.
Anyway, I mentioned Sims again, and I’m still playing Sims 3. It got patched yesterday, which I thought was interesting because the patch included more background music, and hopefully less crashing-to-desktop. It also included a direct ingame link to the website where you can buy more Sims loot with real dollars. No doubt thought up by the same (empathy-lacking, grandiose, relationship-impaired, “you’re not the boss of me”) asshat who came up with the notion that Sims players all secretly want to be playing Atari Raiders of the Lost Ark. And no doubt that this asshat, who probably charmed his way into the job in the first place, will treat his employers with the same warmth and kindness as is shown in his preferred style of play (loot everything then move on, leave the place a mess, others are only there for your amusement).
But there are some non-asshats working on Sims 3, and you can see their work all over the place, in the detail on the trees waving in the wind, and the restrooms conveniently placed in dungeons, and the snarky merchandise names, and the Egyptian spy base that’s run by three techno-listening ladies, two plump and one skinny, all in headscarves.
And the mummies.
I had heard vague references to “mummy ghosts” and thought the dungeon mummies (which walk around going “mmmm” and assault you unless you know kung fu) were all this game had to offer in the mummy department But no, one of my sims actually became a living mummy. She no longer has to sleep or go to the bathroom, and can stay up all night writing mummy romances instead of sleeping.
(Sims 3 sleeping seems proportionately longer than it did in past sim games. I usually play Sims at high speed; still, the “staring at the house for a minute or two without building or clicking or doing anything while my sim’s sleep bar goes green” part is really annoying, and I’ve been giving sims the “super fast sleep” talent and the deluxe beds as a first priority.)
My mummy got that way from combining a collection of canopic jars with a sarcophagus. I haven’t found a way to cure her mummification, but that’s cool, she’s more interesting as a mummy. This is the girlfriend of my official Indiana Jones sim, by the way. He met her in France, and I wanted to see if he’d get extra visa points from marrying a citizen, but alas, they took away her citizenship instead, and they’re not even legally married. Yeah, I know, he flirts with both men and women, but the French girl was the first sim that actually responded to his advances. He’s cleared all three countries, but I can’t even remember if the asinine quest chain ever came to a conclusion
Then I decided it would be cool to have an even bigger mummy presence in town, so I made a sim called Abdul Al-Hazred (insane, evil, bookworm) whose goal in life is to become a mummy, and start an evil mummy cult. And voila, Sims 3 is interesting again. And Mr. Al-Hazred is an ideal character for running around in foreign countries stealing antiquities; he’s mean and crazy, duh. As soon as he gets mummified he’s going to steal my first mummy away from her fiance, just because he’s a jerk.
And hopefully, this hypothetical EA guy I’m bashing is trying to call his sweetheart right now. But all he gets is voicemail, because she has her phone turned off and is in a hotel room with Tiger Woods, and there’s a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the doorknob.
There’s discussion about narrative versus games (the writers, being writers, are predictably focusing on the narrative and sometimes have derisive things to say about the “sports gamers” who prefer strategy to lore, or the heathens who ignore all those cut scenes and focus on the team play). There’s some riffing on the demographics, the overwhelming white-male-ness of games.
[By the way, white males, I’m aware that some of you read this blog, and that some of you take offense at white-male-bashing, which is sometimes justified and sometimes isn’t. Personally, I like white males about as much as I like any other general category of humanity, and I’m not really interested in vengeance, or in making you go away. I’m just getting tired of you acting like it’s all about you. The rest of us gamers would really prefer it if you would STFU and make some game products that don’t irritate the crap out of the majority of the population, thereby increasing revenue. So would all those downsized people from EA.]
And there’s some talk about “moral” games, which always reminds me of the old Ultima games, where you got niceness points for giving cash to beggars and meanness points for doing mean things, which eventually had an effect on your character once you built up enough morality or lack thereof. I expect this to be discussed even further once KOTOR comes out.
Because the current model of game, for the most part, is predicated on the theory that gamers all want to spend their gaming time seeing life through the eyes of a really awesome charismatic dude who can slaughter all kinds of mobs without any kind of remorse or repercussions or speculation on how this behavior will later affect his life or anything wussy like that, mostly solo, in a simulated world where laws are not only unenforced, you get points for breaking them.
A profile that accurately reflects only a small percentage of the population, and when you add in the idea that this awesome charismatic dude exists in a land where 80% of the population is white and male, the reality gap grows a little steep.
While on the other hand, if you make a game that reflects some diversity, like say, Madden Football, or Sims, or even WoW with its rainbow of skin hues and accents, all kinds of people play it, and your audience is not limited to mainstream journalist types trying to review it while crying about the fact that other players don’t give a rat’s ass about the plotline while longing for games to be as awesome as Mad Men.
Anyway, I mentioned Sims again, and I’m still playing Sims 3. It got patched yesterday, which I thought was interesting because the patch included more background music, and hopefully less crashing-to-desktop. It also included a direct ingame link to the website where you can buy more Sims loot with real dollars. No doubt thought up by the same (empathy-lacking, grandiose, relationship-impaired, “you’re not the boss of me”) asshat who came up with the notion that Sims players all secretly want to be playing Atari Raiders of the Lost Ark. And no doubt that this asshat, who probably charmed his way into the job in the first place, will treat his employers with the same warmth and kindness as is shown in his preferred style of play (loot everything then move on, leave the place a mess, others are only there for your amusement).
But there are some non-asshats working on Sims 3, and you can see their work all over the place, in the detail on the trees waving in the wind, and the restrooms conveniently placed in dungeons, and the snarky merchandise names, and the Egyptian spy base that’s run by three techno-listening ladies, two plump and one skinny, all in headscarves.
And the mummies.
I had heard vague references to “mummy ghosts” and thought the dungeon mummies (which walk around going “mmmm” and assault you unless you know kung fu) were all this game had to offer in the mummy department But no, one of my sims actually became a living mummy. She no longer has to sleep or go to the bathroom, and can stay up all night writing mummy romances instead of sleeping.
(Sims 3 sleeping seems proportionately longer than it did in past sim games. I usually play Sims at high speed; still, the “staring at the house for a minute or two without building or clicking or doing anything while my sim’s sleep bar goes green” part is really annoying, and I’ve been giving sims the “super fast sleep” talent and the deluxe beds as a first priority.)
My mummy got that way from combining a collection of canopic jars with a sarcophagus. I haven’t found a way to cure her mummification, but that’s cool, she’s more interesting as a mummy. This is the girlfriend of my official Indiana Jones sim, by the way. He met her in France, and I wanted to see if he’d get extra visa points from marrying a citizen, but alas, they took away her citizenship instead, and they’re not even legally married. Yeah, I know, he flirts with both men and women, but the French girl was the first sim that actually responded to his advances. He’s cleared all three countries, but I can’t even remember if the asinine quest chain ever came to a conclusion
Then I decided it would be cool to have an even bigger mummy presence in town, so I made a sim called Abdul Al-Hazred (insane, evil, bookworm) whose goal in life is to become a mummy, and start an evil mummy cult. And voila, Sims 3 is interesting again. And Mr. Al-Hazred is an ideal character for running around in foreign countries stealing antiquities; he’s mean and crazy, duh. As soon as he gets mummified he’s going to steal my first mummy away from her fiance, just because he’s a jerk.
And hopefully, this hypothetical EA guy I’m bashing is trying to call his sweetheart right now. But all he gets is voicemail, because she has her phone turned off and is in a hotel room with Tiger Woods, and there’s a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the doorknob.
Monday, December 7, 2009
What I've been up to
Perhaps you’re saying to yourself “Darth Bunnywabbit, you lazy non-writing slug, you took a whole week off to lie around the house playing videogames and eating turkey, what’ve you got to show for it?”
Well, I’ve got a few inches of words to spraypaint on the virtual wall, or I will when I finish typing.
I suppose part of the answer is I’m doing other stuff besides videogames, or trying to, anyway, and another part of the answer is that my two favorite games, WoW and Sims, just aren’t doing it for me at the moment.
Sims especially. I actually felt guilty for trashing it so hard in my review. But hey, that’s the beauty of being an advertising-free blogger.
You never have to suck up to the sponsors. If a company puts out a stupid product, you can call them on it. With no middle-class anxieties about “ooh, there goes my cred in the industry not to mention my free mouse-hand squeezies with logos on them.”
Anyway, I did note that some of the stuff in the expansion was actually stuff I had wanted in the game, had blogged about. For example, the locally-flavored locals, none of whom so far are platinum blonde black people named Jose Torunaga. And more wacky supernatural occurrences.
So I decided to play the damn thing through, i.e., get my country acceptance level maxxed in each country, while leveling winemaking, uh, NECTARmaking and photography. Because that’s how I play games. Like a freight train, heading toward The End.
After getting Mary Sue, my first expansion sim, through most of the quests, I got to the point where I despised her and couldn’t play her any longer, something that happens frequently in Sims 3 after I’ve spent nine hours of clicking to build my toon an acceptable house or patiently waited for them to grow perfect cheese and steak plants. So I sent one of her neighbors on a journey to China only to discover . . . that rat Mary Sue already looted all the tombs, sprung all the traps and made off with the gigantic-boulder-smashing-hammer I’d need to pwn the tombs in Egypt. Game over.
So I made my next toon, or toons, I should say: the Jabberwocks. I put them in their own virgin neighborhood with no tombs yet plundered. I made them as fat as possible and addicted to key lime pie. She turned out to be a brilliant surgeon despite my intent to have her be a stay at home mom or a cook, so for a while I was enjoying watching my sim with a BMI of about fifty dress up in her surgical scrubs and run off to save lives. They also looked cute on the bicycles and scooters one is forced to use in remote countries like France and Egypt, because those countries apparently don’t have cars yet, just a lot of ruins to loot and jewels lying around on the ground.
I tried questing both the Jabberwocks but stopped at the point where I realized that their quests might be solo but their instances were shared. For example, if Mr. Jabberwock got the quest to “go in the snake cave and get the icon of doom” and Mrs. Jabberwock had plundered that cave earlier in the day, Mr. Jabberwock was out of luck. So that was how Mrs. Jabberwock became a brilliant surgeon, I started just parking her at the chessboard to learn more logic while her valiant hubby went pedaling through the hills of China.
For the Jabberwocks, it all stopped when they had kids. The first one was sort of cute, a boy. Their first reaction was to run off to China, at which point a warning popped up that I couldn’t take Junior because children are not allowed out of the country apparently, and a Cruella de Ville-ish nanny popped up to tell me not to worry, Junior would be just fine.
Because I’m evil that way, I had the Jabberwocks conceive yet another child on their first day of vacation. And it took, the little “you’re knocked up, sim woman!” lullaby played. But she didn’t even start hurling until she got back home – just to ensure that no sims are born on foreign soil, I guess.
No, I haven’t tried shipping a pregnant lady sim out of the country. Yet.
So anyway, now the Jabberwocks had two boys. Which required a lot of work, and they didn’t make it out of the country again until the boys were teenagers. At which point . . . I had three inert sims to sit around the “base camp” while daddy went a-tombing. Granted, travel is “free time” and you don’t have to accomplish anything, your sims can take a free week in another dimension studying really hard or working out before reappearing at home refreshed and leveled. But four sims is too much. And I didn’t really like the dad sim to play him without his family.
On to the next sim. And I figured that if the game wants me to be an action-oriented boy whose great desires are to be Indiana Jones while winning martial arts championships – if there is a little girl out there with those two obsessions, buy her this game, and then go get therapy because I think you’re projecting heavily – I made a dude character named Erik Chimera who is max muscular, very slender, and wears a rakish beret over his cherry-cola-colored hair, along with a gray set of “Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee Time Travel To The Eighties And Shop At Banana Republic” adventure-wear.
This is how you bastards at EA WANT me to play your game, right? Oh, by the way, he’s bisexual and flirts with everyone. I want to see how that goes over in Egypt when he steals someone’s husband.
Anyway, my new sim Erik looks sort of like an emo Che Guevara, and when he’s not tending his garden, he’s working out with his martial arts dummy. He’s a master martial artist in fact. The animations for master martial artist look a lot like the ones for the noob martial artist. I think a high martial arts score will always beat a low one, but I suppose I’ll have to make a whole fight club to confirm that. Maybe Elitist Jerks will link me if I make a spreadsheet.
Erik has never really had a legitimate job, but he can fish. So far he’s made about fifty grand in the tomb plundering business. He’s welcomed with open arms in China, he’s got some scary looking cougar in France that keeps sending him on bogus errands and he’s never been in Egypt. He’s also free of the “mummy’s curse” so far, which has afflicted my two previous explorer sims, but I could never quite find out what that does or whether it’s even bad.
He also lags really bad. Move move move pause. It’s on a count of four. Step step step freeze. I tried adjusting my video card settings. I checked my other sims – the Jabberwocks are all fat and happy, and they have way more objects on their lot.
I copied Chimera’s house and moved him to a fresh neighborhood. No lag. But also, the tombs were still locked up, I’d have to start over. Can’t put him in my main neighborhood, Mary Sue already trashed the tombs there. Apparently you get one (1) quest toon per neighborhood, preferably male. Got that, all you girly-game-players? No more weddings, it’s time to pillage primitive countries like France.
Wonder if the Chinese government will ban it? Lol.
So if I ever get through this stupid last minute “quests in Sims” crap I’ll let you know. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying building stuff with basements and koi ponds when I’m not staring at Erik Chimera’s chiseled abs, and yeah, I feel dirty about the fact that I’m enjoying the parts of it I’m enjoying. But I’ve been feeling kinda antisocial, and it’s cold, and building sim houses is fun on a cozy winter night.
Meanwhile in WoW, or maybe this is why I’m feeling antisocial:
I’m, um six people, not counting the bank alts.
First, I’m my main. On rare occasions. My main has all the gear she needs, along with a colossal sense of resentment towards another faction in the guild that I’ve complained about before. So she brings out her magical overpoweredness only during progression, of which there isn’t much. We finally got the beasts of Northrend down in heroic the other day, after a great many failed attempts. We also had a problem with people only appearing for the free ride raids, not for the heroic 25s where you have to work and might leve empty handed, so the guild officers took up this stupid “heroic 25 at a moment’s notice!” project by scheduling raids for “whenever the 25 people they felt were best suited were all logged in at the same time.”
I’m also a tank. Sort of. My tank has acquired 3/5 T9 (the ordinary set, my main has the trophy set). I had to veer off and get a couple pieces of damage gear. This is because I was showing up for raids only to have a preponderance of tanks, so they’d tell me to go dps. Except I didn’t have dps gear. Whenever I roll on dps gear, one of the people from the aforementioned faction of asshats pipes up “but that’s an alt off spec, you should give that to the new dk who just joined and will /gquit before the end of the week.” So my dps numbers would come out terribad, and then they’d tell me my playing sucked, and as dps, they’re right. And frankly, I resisted efforts to shove me towards doing tanking and dps on the same toon. I would rather have four specialists than two dual specs. Damned if I’m going to gear my warrior for dps and then turn around to get the exact same stuff on my death knight. They're finally coming around and letting me tank stuff like Onyxia without asking me to switch. But speaking of death knights. . .
I’m also my death knight. Having finally hit level 80, I’m waiting for the cross-server looking for group thing to start up . . . because I’m really really bad. Absolutely awful dps. I’ve been carried through Onyxia and a couple heroics, and I think I’m going to gear this toon some place where people don’t know me. I still do better DK dps than I do on my warrior though.
And I’m my blood-elf-turned-draenei hunter, checking out the alliance on my server. I’m in a great guild, which has carried me through some Ulduar achievements, and like the DK, I’m also waiting for the patch before I go into maniacal instance running mode and get geared. So far it’s been easier to get groups as a bad hunter than as a bad death knight, but both of them need carrying and I hate being carried, so my noob 80s will be doing a lot of heroics before I let them play with the grown ups.
I’m a level 55 mage now. I can portal to everywhere, but most importantly, when a death knight death grips me, I can freeze him in place, then teleport away and nail him with frost bolts – usually my teleport will be up by the time he staggers frozenly over to finish killing me. When a rogue gets the drop on me I die really fast, but when I notice him, or even because I thought I might’ve heard the “invisibility” noise, I can make a big annoying blizzard that freezes him in place and keeps him from vanishing until people in real armor arrive to beat him up. Paladins still give me a little trouble but hunters stop annoying you really fast when you sheep their pet and start spewing magic at them. In fact, sheeping is about the most awesome thing ever, and in five more levels I’ll be able to turn stuff into bunny rabbits – the whole reason I’ve been grinding this toon, she looted a tome with that particular spell. My mage has done less than 200 quests but she has a whole lot of honorable kills, and is well on her way to her second battleground epic mount. This could very well end up being my next favorite toon. She is down with the spirit of the bunny – treachery, speed, escaping, sneaking around causing mischief, avoiding the Fudds.
And then there’s the druid. Her guild doesn’t raid, so if she’s going to finish getting geared she needs to run heroics. But she’s on a tank-shortage server. I figure once the patch comes through I’ll be able to crank out up to five heroics a night on my toons that need gear, or probably two or three instance runs in less time than it would take to watch a bad movie. It just seems more efficient to gear everybody later rather than now, and focus on . . . hiding behind that tree in the middle of the field in WSG waiting for a self-important death knight with an incorrectly spelled name to stomp past, and turn him into a little lamb. Baaaah!
And now, back to see if Erik Chimera is still lagging.
If he is, it’s gotta be tied to the level of quest-completion. Otherwise, a clone of him in a virgin neighborhood would lag, and that doesn’t happen. And by the way, there have been some gruesome crashes with the new sims, several of which have resulted in a full system restart and one of which knocked my video card out of commission for several horrible moments after seizing up. Maybe the game isn’t really finished, they’re gonna patch it later, and maybe they designed it to hang whenever you get near the end.
And if I can’t handle the lag any longer, all the blood from all the paladins and rogues and death knights and gnomes and other evil creatures I slay in Alterac Valley tonight will be on EA’s hands.
Well, I’ve got a few inches of words to spraypaint on the virtual wall, or I will when I finish typing.
I suppose part of the answer is I’m doing other stuff besides videogames, or trying to, anyway, and another part of the answer is that my two favorite games, WoW and Sims, just aren’t doing it for me at the moment.
Sims especially. I actually felt guilty for trashing it so hard in my review. But hey, that’s the beauty of being an advertising-free blogger.
You never have to suck up to the sponsors. If a company puts out a stupid product, you can call them on it. With no middle-class anxieties about “ooh, there goes my cred in the industry not to mention my free mouse-hand squeezies with logos on them.”
Anyway, I did note that some of the stuff in the expansion was actually stuff I had wanted in the game, had blogged about. For example, the locally-flavored locals, none of whom so far are platinum blonde black people named Jose Torunaga. And more wacky supernatural occurrences.
So I decided to play the damn thing through, i.e., get my country acceptance level maxxed in each country, while leveling winemaking, uh, NECTARmaking and photography. Because that’s how I play games. Like a freight train, heading toward The End.
After getting Mary Sue, my first expansion sim, through most of the quests, I got to the point where I despised her and couldn’t play her any longer, something that happens frequently in Sims 3 after I’ve spent nine hours of clicking to build my toon an acceptable house or patiently waited for them to grow perfect cheese and steak plants. So I sent one of her neighbors on a journey to China only to discover . . . that rat Mary Sue already looted all the tombs, sprung all the traps and made off with the gigantic-boulder-smashing-hammer I’d need to pwn the tombs in Egypt. Game over.
So I made my next toon, or toons, I should say: the Jabberwocks. I put them in their own virgin neighborhood with no tombs yet plundered. I made them as fat as possible and addicted to key lime pie. She turned out to be a brilliant surgeon despite my intent to have her be a stay at home mom or a cook, so for a while I was enjoying watching my sim with a BMI of about fifty dress up in her surgical scrubs and run off to save lives. They also looked cute on the bicycles and scooters one is forced to use in remote countries like France and Egypt, because those countries apparently don’t have cars yet, just a lot of ruins to loot and jewels lying around on the ground.
I tried questing both the Jabberwocks but stopped at the point where I realized that their quests might be solo but their instances were shared. For example, if Mr. Jabberwock got the quest to “go in the snake cave and get the icon of doom” and Mrs. Jabberwock had plundered that cave earlier in the day, Mr. Jabberwock was out of luck. So that was how Mrs. Jabberwock became a brilliant surgeon, I started just parking her at the chessboard to learn more logic while her valiant hubby went pedaling through the hills of China.
For the Jabberwocks, it all stopped when they had kids. The first one was sort of cute, a boy. Their first reaction was to run off to China, at which point a warning popped up that I couldn’t take Junior because children are not allowed out of the country apparently, and a Cruella de Ville-ish nanny popped up to tell me not to worry, Junior would be just fine.
Because I’m evil that way, I had the Jabberwocks conceive yet another child on their first day of vacation. And it took, the little “you’re knocked up, sim woman!” lullaby played. But she didn’t even start hurling until she got back home – just to ensure that no sims are born on foreign soil, I guess.
No, I haven’t tried shipping a pregnant lady sim out of the country. Yet.
So anyway, now the Jabberwocks had two boys. Which required a lot of work, and they didn’t make it out of the country again until the boys were teenagers. At which point . . . I had three inert sims to sit around the “base camp” while daddy went a-tombing. Granted, travel is “free time” and you don’t have to accomplish anything, your sims can take a free week in another dimension studying really hard or working out before reappearing at home refreshed and leveled. But four sims is too much. And I didn’t really like the dad sim to play him without his family.
On to the next sim. And I figured that if the game wants me to be an action-oriented boy whose great desires are to be Indiana Jones while winning martial arts championships – if there is a little girl out there with those two obsessions, buy her this game, and then go get therapy because I think you’re projecting heavily – I made a dude character named Erik Chimera who is max muscular, very slender, and wears a rakish beret over his cherry-cola-colored hair, along with a gray set of “Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee Time Travel To The Eighties And Shop At Banana Republic” adventure-wear.
This is how you bastards at EA WANT me to play your game, right? Oh, by the way, he’s bisexual and flirts with everyone. I want to see how that goes over in Egypt when he steals someone’s husband.
Anyway, my new sim Erik looks sort of like an emo Che Guevara, and when he’s not tending his garden, he’s working out with his martial arts dummy. He’s a master martial artist in fact. The animations for master martial artist look a lot like the ones for the noob martial artist. I think a high martial arts score will always beat a low one, but I suppose I’ll have to make a whole fight club to confirm that. Maybe Elitist Jerks will link me if I make a spreadsheet.
Erik has never really had a legitimate job, but he can fish. So far he’s made about fifty grand in the tomb plundering business. He’s welcomed with open arms in China, he’s got some scary looking cougar in France that keeps sending him on bogus errands and he’s never been in Egypt. He’s also free of the “mummy’s curse” so far, which has afflicted my two previous explorer sims, but I could never quite find out what that does or whether it’s even bad.
He also lags really bad. Move move move pause. It’s on a count of four. Step step step freeze. I tried adjusting my video card settings. I checked my other sims – the Jabberwocks are all fat and happy, and they have way more objects on their lot.
I copied Chimera’s house and moved him to a fresh neighborhood. No lag. But also, the tombs were still locked up, I’d have to start over. Can’t put him in my main neighborhood, Mary Sue already trashed the tombs there. Apparently you get one (1) quest toon per neighborhood, preferably male. Got that, all you girly-game-players? No more weddings, it’s time to pillage primitive countries like France.
Wonder if the Chinese government will ban it? Lol.
So if I ever get through this stupid last minute “quests in Sims” crap I’ll let you know. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying building stuff with basements and koi ponds when I’m not staring at Erik Chimera’s chiseled abs, and yeah, I feel dirty about the fact that I’m enjoying the parts of it I’m enjoying. But I’ve been feeling kinda antisocial, and it’s cold, and building sim houses is fun on a cozy winter night.
Meanwhile in WoW, or maybe this is why I’m feeling antisocial:
I’m, um six people, not counting the bank alts.
First, I’m my main. On rare occasions. My main has all the gear she needs, along with a colossal sense of resentment towards another faction in the guild that I’ve complained about before. So she brings out her magical overpoweredness only during progression, of which there isn’t much. We finally got the beasts of Northrend down in heroic the other day, after a great many failed attempts. We also had a problem with people only appearing for the free ride raids, not for the heroic 25s where you have to work and might leve empty handed, so the guild officers took up this stupid “heroic 25 at a moment’s notice!” project by scheduling raids for “whenever the 25 people they felt were best suited were all logged in at the same time.”
I’m also a tank. Sort of. My tank has acquired 3/5 T9 (the ordinary set, my main has the trophy set). I had to veer off and get a couple pieces of damage gear. This is because I was showing up for raids only to have a preponderance of tanks, so they’d tell me to go dps. Except I didn’t have dps gear. Whenever I roll on dps gear, one of the people from the aforementioned faction of asshats pipes up “but that’s an alt off spec, you should give that to the new dk who just joined and will /gquit before the end of the week.” So my dps numbers would come out terribad, and then they’d tell me my playing sucked, and as dps, they’re right. And frankly, I resisted efforts to shove me towards doing tanking and dps on the same toon. I would rather have four specialists than two dual specs. Damned if I’m going to gear my warrior for dps and then turn around to get the exact same stuff on my death knight. They're finally coming around and letting me tank stuff like Onyxia without asking me to switch. But speaking of death knights. . .
I’m also my death knight. Having finally hit level 80, I’m waiting for the cross-server looking for group thing to start up . . . because I’m really really bad. Absolutely awful dps. I’ve been carried through Onyxia and a couple heroics, and I think I’m going to gear this toon some place where people don’t know me. I still do better DK dps than I do on my warrior though.
And I’m my blood-elf-turned-draenei hunter, checking out the alliance on my server. I’m in a great guild, which has carried me through some Ulduar achievements, and like the DK, I’m also waiting for the patch before I go into maniacal instance running mode and get geared. So far it’s been easier to get groups as a bad hunter than as a bad death knight, but both of them need carrying and I hate being carried, so my noob 80s will be doing a lot of heroics before I let them play with the grown ups.
I’m a level 55 mage now. I can portal to everywhere, but most importantly, when a death knight death grips me, I can freeze him in place, then teleport away and nail him with frost bolts – usually my teleport will be up by the time he staggers frozenly over to finish killing me. When a rogue gets the drop on me I die really fast, but when I notice him, or even because I thought I might’ve heard the “invisibility” noise, I can make a big annoying blizzard that freezes him in place and keeps him from vanishing until people in real armor arrive to beat him up. Paladins still give me a little trouble but hunters stop annoying you really fast when you sheep their pet and start spewing magic at them. In fact, sheeping is about the most awesome thing ever, and in five more levels I’ll be able to turn stuff into bunny rabbits – the whole reason I’ve been grinding this toon, she looted a tome with that particular spell. My mage has done less than 200 quests but she has a whole lot of honorable kills, and is well on her way to her second battleground epic mount. This could very well end up being my next favorite toon. She is down with the spirit of the bunny – treachery, speed, escaping, sneaking around causing mischief, avoiding the Fudds.
And then there’s the druid. Her guild doesn’t raid, so if she’s going to finish getting geared she needs to run heroics. But she’s on a tank-shortage server. I figure once the patch comes through I’ll be able to crank out up to five heroics a night on my toons that need gear, or probably two or three instance runs in less time than it would take to watch a bad movie. It just seems more efficient to gear everybody later rather than now, and focus on . . . hiding behind that tree in the middle of the field in WSG waiting for a self-important death knight with an incorrectly spelled name to stomp past, and turn him into a little lamb. Baaaah!
And now, back to see if Erik Chimera is still lagging.
If he is, it’s gotta be tied to the level of quest-completion. Otherwise, a clone of him in a virgin neighborhood would lag, and that doesn’t happen. And by the way, there have been some gruesome crashes with the new sims, several of which have resulted in a full system restart and one of which knocked my video card out of commission for several horrible moments after seizing up. Maybe the game isn’t really finished, they’re gonna patch it later, and maybe they designed it to hang whenever you get near the end.
And if I can’t handle the lag any longer, all the blood from all the paladins and rogues and death knights and gnomes and other evil creatures I slay in Alterac Valley tonight will be on EA’s hands.
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