Puny mortals!
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about GamerGate.
GamerGate is an unfolding nasty slap-fight between low-status nerdy video game players and high-status hipster smartasses. It should be small and meaningless, but it’s blossomed into something big and ugly…and emblematic.
I’m firmly on Team Nerd, but I haven’t been able to articulate what I think about it — and before I managed to do it, someone at PopeHat did it ever so much better than I could, with links and references and everything. (If you don’t read PopeHat, I recommend that you do. This group blog frequently pisses me off — I’m just sure they take more pokes at my team than they do the other guys — but is nearly always thoughtful and interesting and seldom wasted time).
Clark does a bang-up job relating the current kerfuffle to the larger historical trends, which is the very thing I have been thinking about lately. Larger historical trends, I mean. If you haven’t got time for the whole thing, skip to the bit that’s sub-headed “Our forces have Technograd surrounded are pounding it with shame bombs, and our sappers are inside the walls” (I’d link to it directly, but there isn’t a tag for me to grab onto. That’s nerd talk).
Oh, and see you back here tomorrow, 6pm WBT, Dead Pool Round 70!
October 23, 2014 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 8
a competitive athlete passed this way
It was beautiful here today. Sunny, blue sky, high puffy clouds. Shirtsleeves weather. The nicest you could ask an October day to be. For all I know, though, this might be the last Summery day of 2014 — they’re predicting shit ‘n’ chips, starting tomorrow.
So we went to Sissinghurst for the afternoon. Stopped on the way and bought sammiches and hung out in the garden for a while. De-lightful.
On the way back to the car, under a horse chestnut tree — these horse chestnuts! But these are not as they fall from the tree. Nay, nay! These have been removed from the spiny outer casing, examined for flaws and tossed aside as unworthy.
Yes, that means the competitive Conker Season is upon us! This is when Brits (children, mostly) take horse chestnuts, drill a hole through them, thread a string through the hole and whale away at each other until somebody’s conker falls to bits. There’s more to it. Of course there is.
Like cheating.
The kudos of having a high-ranked winning conker is not limited to the playground and there have been many traditional ways of (illegally) hardening conkers before battling. Hardening methods include soaking or boiling the conkers in vinegar or salt water; soaking in parafin; partially baking them for about a half hour in the oven to case-harden them; coating them with clear nail-varnish; filling them with glue or simply storing them in the dark for a year (the shrivelled ones often seem to get the better of the young shiny ones). My favourite however is that described by two-times World Conker Champion Charlie Bray who says, “There are many underhanded ways of making your conker harder. The best is to pass it through a pig. The conker will harden by soaking in its stomach juices. Then you search through the pig’s waste to find the conker.” Yuk!
And grievous bodily harm.
“There’s no defence at all. When you’re playing, it’s natural to flinch when this thing is being swung at you, especially if it comes very close to your knuckles. The best thing to do is look away and think of England or something else.”
Make no mistake, it’s a deadly serious business. Good weekend, folks!
October 3, 2014 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 14
Duck fashion show
Because ducks. Because Aussies are crazy. And because I want to go play Mass Effect (I think I’ll finish it tonight).
No, I did not get a pee sample 😮
September 23, 2014 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 10
Space opera, soap opera
I don’t usually opt for a female character in video games that give a choice, but something about the face of the default male Shepard in the Mass Effect games kind of creeped me out, so I played Mass Effect 2 as this chick here. My Stoaty Shepard is pretty badass; somehow I can’t see her getting up in the morning and putting on mascara and a little eye shadow. Maybe machines do that in the future.
I’m finally playing the third and final installment of Mass Effect. You start (optionally) by importing your character from Mass Effect 2. One of things that gets carried over is which of your crew members you’ve had affairs with.
Wait, what? This was an option? How on earth…?
Trust me to carry my social ineptitude into video games.
September 15, 2014 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 9
+1 fang damage
Somehow I’ve been a geek and a gameplayer all these years without getting sucked into a Magic: The Gathering type collectible card game. Welp, I’ve done it now — I’ve been playing Blizzard’s Hearthstone, which is currently in free beta (and it had better stay free to play, because I’m enjoying it, but not enough to pay money for it).
If you have no effing idea what I’m talking about, these are strategy card games based around fantasy (and sometimes scifi) type themes. I suppose they’re derivative of the old pencil-and-paper type D&D games (which I also never got sucked into). They’re easy to play and hard to play well. If you hit the link above, you can see a video example of gameplay. Though, if you have no effing idea what I’m talking about, you probably could not possibly care less. And that’s okay.
Anyhoo, the part that I don’t get is the appeal of rare or legendary cards. People pay big bucks for rare cards with unusual attributes (this is possible to do with both physical cards and virtual ones). I mean, I can understand wanting them as works of art, but not for gameplay. What’s the fun of a strategy game, if everyone doesn’t have access to the same deck?
February 24, 2014 — 11:52 pm
Comments: 12
I did not know this…
Interesting article in the Metro about free-to-play games and ‘microtransactions’. The current crop of free phone/tablet/browser games offer gameplay enhancements and add-ons for small sums. At today’s exchange rate, per the figure in the graphic, that’s almost a million bucks a day one game is taking in. (Games trigger the same reward brainjuice as cocaine, you betcha).
In the abstract, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. We’re all grownups and game designers gotta eat.
Provided the charges aren’t hidden, or easy to rack up by accident. Or aimed at kids. Or centrally important to a game you’ve actually already paid a lot of money for. And some of these new games have apparently done those bad things, but I suppose that’s to be expected. New idea shaking out and all.
I think their constituency is commuters and other bored people with smartphones. Not really my kind of gaming, happy to say. I played vanilla Angry Birds through once — fairly obsessively until it was done, I have to admit — and that scratched the itch.
January 29, 2014 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 17
I’ll take “games that are a little too much like reality” for 500
So I bought the Stanley Parable in the Steam sale. You wake up in a cubicle, and then…it’s supposed to be better if you don’t know anything about the game before you start, so I won’t spoil anyone’s fun. Main problem I have, I’m not sure when I’m done.
True story: I dream about my old job almost every night. It’s partly because I worked the same job in the same building for so long, but I think it’s mostly because I left with a whimper. Most of my long-time colleagues had either left before me or were out of town when I left. I didn’t get, like, a big party or anything.
So, in my dreams, I’ve always popped back over to clear up a few last things. I don’t know anybody and I’m always getting lost in the corridors and hoping nobody figures out I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Five years, and I’m still having that stupid dream five nights out of seven.
Good weekend, all. Sunday is Twelfth Night, if anybody’s counting. I suppose I shall try to bestir myself to politics come Monday.
Or not.
January 3, 2014 — 11:48 pm
Comments: 13
I made this!
Because I am a monkey! A stupid, stupid monkey!
For those of you who don’t game (which I assume is most of you), Steam is a gaming application that allows you to buy, store and play games. I’ve posted about it before. I didn’t like the idea when I was first forced to join (it was the only way to purchase HalfLife2), but then I had a catastrophic computer failure and…Steam quietly downloaded all my old games onto the new computer.
Okay, I still don’t like the idea of cloud computing, but that there was pretty neat. I admit it.
Then Steam introduced the concept of achievements. I don’t know if they invented the idea, but it means if you do certain non-obvious things in a game — kill a certain number of foes by using your gravity gun to fling toilets at them, for example — you ‘unlock’ an ‘achievement.’ Which is a little icon. Which other people can see if you look at your profile.
Bear with me. It hasn’t gotten as losery as it gets yet.
Then they introduced the idea of virtual trading cards. You get these things mostly by playing games. They just appear in your inventory after a certain amount of gameplay, I think. Which made everybody (well, me’n the other losers) go back and play ancient games just to get the card drops. Because, monkey.
But wait, there’s more. You can’t get the entire set by playing. You get about half. You get the rest by trading in the trading forum, or buying them in the Steam marketplace. Sell any duplicates or unwanted cards, buy the ones you don’t have. They go for about 10p apiece, on average. All of which goes in and out of your Steam wallet, which you can use to buy games. From Steam.
Oh, it gets losery still. Once you get a complete set of any one card, you can ‘craft’ a badge. Which creates a little icon. You can stick on your profile. In case anyone in the whole wide world is losery enough to check your profile and gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut if there’s a badge on your account.
Nope. Still haven’t plumbed the depths. Another way you earn cards is by buying stuff during the semi-annual Steam sales — a card for every $10 worth of games. Also, by voting on what should go on sale next — a card per every three votes. You can vote every eight hours, and the sale was about 10 days long. It’s just finished.
And here’s where we plumb the very depths of my loseriness. When I went to check my account this evening, there was a little announcement that the Steam Sale 2013 Badge could only be crafted for a limited time. I don’t even remember how many hours, I just panicked and ran to the marketplace for those last two cards.
And there it is: my Steam Sale 2013 Stupid Monkeybadge. I hope you’re impressed.
— 12:49 am
Comments: 23
An adventurer was me!
I haven’t played Kingdom of Loathing in, like, seven years, because I forgot my username. You can forget your password and recover it, but use a forgettable login name and you’re stuffed.
Anyway, I was banging around the house today, surveying the damage and unloading the dishwasher when a small, lonely braincell way in the back piped up and said, “by the way, your KoL username is Snack.” Huh. So it is.
If you don’t know Kingdom of Loathing, Wikipedia’s explanation is pretty good. Short version: it’s a free online, turn-based adventure game based on snark. Just when their schtick is about to get tiresome, something happens that makes me snort (I never actually, really LOL at anything I read — do you?).
My Turkey Day was awesome. Somehow, I drank too much, lost my footing and go-bust my upper lip. Just a little. And it doesn’t get any better than that.
p.s. All the hand-wringing I’ve read about the sweetheart deal we’re trying to give Iran, and nobody’s brought up Valerie Jarrett. You know, Obama’s chief adviser — the one some people call the real president — who was born and raised in Iran. Well, up to school age, anyway. Her first language was Persian, for cri-yi. You think that maybe has a little something to do with it?
p.p.s. And speaking of hand-wringing, all the boo-hooing over Black Friday — I’m sorry, I have to tell you, I just *love* it. I love that people camp overnight and fistfights break out and the unwary get trampled to death and…oh, I don’t know, all the greedy, violent acquisitive American joy in BUYING STUFF. It seems so healthy and vital.
When we go to the supermarket and get into the 10 or Fewer line (and yes, the signs do get the grammar right here) I always carefully count our stuff and solemnly inform the cashier, “where I come from, a person can get shot for getting into this line with 12 items.” What I don’t say, but I think very loudly, is and that’s as it should be.
Good weekend, folks!
November 29, 2013 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 13
LOL WUT?
Ladies and gentlemen, behold — the levitating chickens of Whiterun.
I’m playing through Skyrim again (because awesome is why) and this time I’m doing it with a few mods. Many game companies have traditionally and wisely encouraged players to build and distribute game modifications — bits of extra programming that add anything from new types of clothing to extra music and sound effects to whole new storylines. These extras don’t cost the company anything and help prolong the shelf life of popular games. Also, they sometimes poach talent from their best modders.
Generally speaking, most add-ons behave well. But occasionally, not. What you’re looking at is a glitch, an unintentional result of who knows which mod I have added. Someone somewhere used an identifier for chicken that someone else had used for the height from the ground of a catapulted stone.
Imagine my surprise today when my brother in arms let go the catapult, and every chicken in the neighborhood shot 50 feet straight up into the air, hung lazily in the sky for a moment and slowly drifted down like rose petals. It was…majestic (though I missed a pic of the first time it happened when, like, fifty chickens did this…I was just too transfixed with awe to remember the screenshot button).
Just a reminder of the strange and wonderful things that can happen when multiple people work on the same body of code. And speaking of Obamacare, more and more pols are ‘fessing up that, yes, actually they realized the law meant that millions of people who liked their insurance wouldn’t actually be able to keep their insurance.
I’m transfixed with awe about this one, too. Did they think that would just…blow over? That the joy of the poor gimps who finally got health insurance would drown the screams of the many millions of not-rich people who took a big ol’ financial hit? The level of denial or magical thinking or just plain stupid here is just…I just have no words.
October 29, 2013 — 11:27 pm
Comments: 22