Long time passing.... ;)

*clears throat* Anyway, very old musical references aside, I find myself swamped with changes and not much to go round to make it happen. First of all is my car, newly repaired and operational --Thank you, My-Friend-Ryan!-- needs to get an inspection sticker and be registered. probable cost $130 - $150.

Secondly, owe father for previous repairs to car. Probable cost $167 - $258, depending on who wins the argument about who's paying for the taillight my brother smashed.

Thirdly, must buy computer. This pile of junk is on its last legs and my job is dependent on email access whenever-wherever. Have $300 saved, will invest whatever the government decides to send me as an economic stimulus. This money is reserved for stimulating electronics stores. Approximate cost of new computer $900?

Fourthly, should probably catch up on student loan payments and credit card payments. Note to self: try not to be unemployed so long next time.

Fifthly, new possibly beautiful, possibly perfect styIe apartment has been located. Near Portland, within walking distance of all the sorts of things I need to live (stores, mainly) with built in roommate and fenced in yard for dogs. Would need to move in by mid-May! Yeek! My landlady will cry if I tell her I'm moving, for she loves me. But I can't live just left of the middle of nowhere forever, it hurts me to keep doing it.

I think second job, extra few hours per week is the way to make this happen. Don't want to start on that ASAP though, in case moving in May.

The craziness, oh the craziness.

Pictures from the Guitar Hero bash for celebrating my friend Kristen's agedness. I'm just going to put a whole heap-ton of pics in here, so if you've got a slow computer, I'll apologize in advance.

This is our Birthday Girl, as you can tell by her hat.

We played some Guitar Hero

This is what happens when they make me play on Medium.

Then Kristen's sister, Kimmie, and her friend Preston played some Guitar Hero

Then Kristen and Blair played some Guitar Hero

Then we drank a lot and got silly.

And Steph and Blair also got silly.

And we played Guitar Hero even more enthusiastically.

And Kristen was a rock star

Then, when we had really drunk a very lot, it was time for some DDR.

Kristen and Steph played DDR with great enthusiasm but little coordination.

And when we could barely stand up, we still were playing Guitar Hero.

Kimmie in particular, could not stop playing Guitar Hero, even though it was time to put on sweatpants.

And that was that. It was a good birthday party, I think. Even if Kristen did drop an entire bucket of Mai Tai mix out of the freezer. Also, there was ice cream cake. And that's the end of that.

The next day I woke up with an enormous bruise and a Facebook account, neither one of which do I remember getting.

Oh boy have the last few days been hectic. I'm running out the door in like two minutes, so I have to get this in quick and run.

Watch for pictures from my friend Kristen's drunken Guitar Hero birthday bash. Excitement, adventure. I'll try to get them up later tonight, 'cause they're funny. :P

For the First Part, click here.

Part Two: The "Wholesale vs. Premium" Gamer

Doesn't length of a game make a big impact on the Casual/Hardcore debate? Aren't we, the hardcore gamers, supposed to complain vociferously if a game isn't long enough to be worth its sticker price? Certainly that's been the attitude of certain cIasses of elitist gamers. But it's a fact, if little recognized outside our own circles, that the average video game devotee is getting older. While we may all have had time for hundred hour mega-epics like the Elder Scrolls games or Disgaea: Hour of Darkness while we were in college, that 40+ hour a week job sure makes us conscious of the value of brevity. Where handheld games were once considered the province of casuals and children, they're becoming more and more companions on the daily commute, valued for the ease of picking up and putting down as a chock-full schedule permits.

This is the point that Krpata next addresses. He says games can be either good or bad. They can also be too long, too short, or the right length. He further goes on to say that a bad game, regardless of its objective length is always too long. I'll go with him on this one, I've never met a bad game I wished was longer, that's for sure. He then says, we're left with four options:

• Good and too short

• Good and long enough

• Good and too long

• Bad [3]

This is where the distinction of the Wholesale vs. Premium Gamer comes in. The Wholesale Gamer, like Wal-Mart, wants lots of content for cheap. She has lots of time, and so wants to get her money's worth by playing the hell out of that $60 title she just picked up. The Wholesale gamer is likely to say a game is "Good but too short". The Premium Gamer on the other hand, is like a specialty store. He doesn't have a lot of time to spend doing every single hunt in Final Fantasy XII. If he's going to shell out $60 for a game, he wants to be able to complete it, and complete it well. He maybe doesn't get as much content out of a game, but he doesn't waste money buying extras he won't use. The Premium Gamer is likely to say a game is "Good but too long".

This seems like a useful categorization also, because how often do we hear games like Heavenly Sword and Ico berated for not having enough content, and how equally often have we sat back perplexed at our own motivations as we reluctantly put back BioShock in favor of Assassin's Creed because Assassin's Creed had the higher chance of being completed in the forseeable future? And what about those of us who have so little time left for games that it's more economical to rent? "I'll GameFly it, spend two days with it and send it back if I don't have time", has become a very common response to a hotly anticipated title.

Where do I fit in? My choice on this one is a little bit easier. While I like a short game occasionally to break up a monotonous streak or as a refresher, I love long games. I play games slowly and thoroughly, I like to take my time and strategize, and I've often been disappointed when there wasn't more to a title when I've finally finished. I've thought many, many games were "Good and too short" and very few even rate "long enough". I'm almost always ready for more. I'm a Wholesale player. Ugh, unflattering comparison: I'm the Wal-Mart of video gaming. Fortunately that doesn't mean I like to buy cheap crap, it just means I want to pay the minimum per hour for my gaming enjoyment.

Ultimately, What does this say about me?

Krpata theorizes that most Tourists are also going to be Premium Players, and most Skill Players will also be Wholesale Players. He says it better than I do, so I'll quote at length:

The Tourist is looking for dramatic gameplay sequences and narrative high points, and isn't terribly interested in finding hidden items or achieving a perfect rating. That seems to match up with the Premium Player, who is willing to pay more per hour of play in order to finish a game. Skill Players are more likely to also be Wholesale Players. Our Skill Players would seem to want the extended gameplay a Wholesale Player seeks; for the Completist, that means lots of things to find and the time necessary to find them, and for the Perfectionist, many challenges to conquer. [4]

I find myself one of the exceptions in this case, being certainly a Tourist-type but wanting the 100-hour experience. I don't think that's inconsistent, and I'm not surprised to find myself in a a category that seems counter-intuitive. I've rather imagined I'd turn out to be kind of an odd duck in some regards, I'm always slipping into the cracks among my gamer friends. But that's ok, gives me more possibilities on who to side with in the next great debate.

It explains a lot about why I like the things I do, for example why I preferred the story-driven Ocarina of Time to the more hands-off Majora's Mask. Even though both are nice and long, and both are Legend of Zelda titles, they're not the same. It also confirms why I prefer turn-based strategies like the Total War franchise over their real-time cousins. RTS is a skill, something to master, while TBS is an unfolding. I auto-calc the battles because I care about becoming emperor, not about the outcomes of individual battles or the movements of individual peasants.

Conclusion: Putting the Pieces Together

The failings of the Casual vs. Hardcore terminology should be pretty clear by now. A player who defines herself as "casual" might be the soccer mom with the worldwide top score in Zuma. She'd be a Perfectionist who's also a Premium Gamer, though she'd probably deny it vigourously. Then there's the player who's completed every Final Fantasy since VII, but doesn't know what Omega Weapon even is. This player's a Tourist, and probably a Wholesale Gamer as well, since JRPGs aren't usually known for being concise. Neither "hardcore" nor "casual" really properly applies to either one of those examples.

What Krpata hopes, and what I hope too after reading this excellent series, is that more gamers will be willing to consider what they really want from a game and begin making intelligent comparisons based on objective common ground, and that less of us will feel a need to get defensive over the incursion of "casuals" into our sacred space. There's more to breaking down taste than what first meets the eye.

**

Note: this was originally all one gigantic post, so numbering of quotes picks up where the first part left off.

Go read this great series! If you missed the first link, you can find it here: A New Taxonomy of Gamers on Insult Swordfighting.

I ran into an interesting article on N'Gai Croal's blog, which talked classifications we use to describe ourselves as gamers. Croal pointed, in turn, to this very interesting article: A New Taxonomy of Gamers which is, in fact, an eleven part series by reviewer and blogger Mitch Krpata on "What we talk about when we talk about games." The author points out that we've long had very descriptive and specific terminology to use for games themselves:

You probably have concrete, specific associations with words like "platformer," "JRPG," and "brawler." Hell, "Metroidvania," with all its rich connotations, has even made its way into the lexicon.[1]

He then points out that the only commonly used sub-classes of gamers themselves are "casual" and "hardcore". Part of the problem with this, is that these terms have so many different meanings they're practically meaningless. If I was to try to define what a "hardcore" gamer is out in the forums, I'd probably start a flame war to put System Wars to shame. Is the definition of hardcore a matter of how much you play? Or is it how good you are at playing? Or is it what genres you prefer? Which platforms you own? Your Gamerscore?

I've always wondered about this, because I certainly don't consider myself casual. I have six systems currently connected (eight if you include my mostly-defunct PC and my DS) and almost two hundred games, after all. But I've never felt the slightest desire to "pwn n00bs" and in all the time I've had my Xbox Live subscription, I've played multiplayer a total of once. Does that make me casual? The New Taxonomy says Hardcore vs. Casual is an argument without a solid semantic foundation, and I tend to agree. So what other characteristics should we categorize ourselves by?

The next suggestion is "Skill players vs. Tourists", or as Tycho from Penny Arcade is quoted as describing it, "people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy."[2] This seems like a fairly useful distinction, because every gamer knows one or two people who feel strongly on one side or the other. Krpata expands this thought to say, Skill Players are the ones who chase Achievement Points and unlockables and who desire to master a game and see every side quest and area to its fullest, while Tourists want to hit the high points of a game, experience the main quest or storyline and aren't likely to replay on completion.

Krpata further breaks down the Skill Players into two sub-sets: "The Perfectionist and the Completist". These categories are really very self explanatory; the Perfectionist wants to have the highest possible techinical prowess at any given game (this is the guy who measures his success by his standings on a leaderboard, or relentlessly pursues high scores), while the Completist is the gamer who wants to get every optional upgrade, fill in every map, and see that holy-grail number 100%. Most Skill Players should fall into one of these two camps, and even many Tourists can have an undercurrent of one or the other.

Where do I fit in? Well, I found this cIassification the teensiest bit problematic, as I am a huge replayer of games and I do also like to pursue a lot of sidequests, but I'm definitely not a Skill Player. In fact, I'm not very good at games. I can't play fighting games to save my soul, and even hack n' slash types that require button pressing combos aren't my forte. The only puzzle game I was ever reasonably good at was Tetris, and who isn't good at Tetris? I don't play competitive multiplayer, my Gamerscore is under 2000 after a nearly year of 360 ownership, and I've never 100%-ed any song on any difficulty level in any Guitar Hero game. And I don't care. None of those things matter to me. So I conclude, I'm a Tourist. I'm the kind of tourist, though, who picks the same vacation spots year after year, and loves the obscurest nooks and crannies. So I'm going to say I'm a Tourist with a strong undercurrent of Completist underneath. That's when I feel I'm getting the most out of a game, when it gives me a new experience and lots of it.

What about you? Where do you fit in so far?

**

Note: Quotes are linked to the page they were taken from.

Watch for Part 2, Gamers Taxonified by Length and Budget.

I started playing Dreamfall yesterday, a game I've been making sad eyes at since I didn't own an Xbox last generation. Fortunately, Microsoft has decided to make my life easy by offering it as an Xbox Originals title, so I downloaded it and off we go.

Zoe Castillo is a pretty likeable heroine, even if she looks and sounds so much like Kiera Knightley I sometimes forget she's not an actress playing Zoe Castillo. Unlike some female videogame characters, she doesn't seem like her entire purpose is to provide a focus for goggly-eyed males. When she goes someplace snowy, she puts on a coat. And pants.

It's always hard going back a generation. I've only just gotten used to the fact that most newer games don't have the slightly angular look or the stiff plastic facial expressions of last gen, and now I'm finding Dreamfall to look just a touch outdated. However, it's very well done as far as graphical consistency and quality. Each new environment has a sweeping camera pan which introduces you to the area and what challenges lie ahead, as well as showing some truly breathtaking vistas. The characters are diverse in appearance, which is reason enough to give the game resounding applause. I have not yet seen two identical NPCs with speaking parts. Kudos, Aspyre.

As far as the game plays, so far so good again. The gameplay is kind of a mix of exploratory adventure games with a little action thrown in. The fighting is a little bit clunky, Zoe doesn't move much as she's trying to evade blows, which can make things feel a bit stiff and unresponsive. The fighting isn't really a main focus though, and can almost always be avoided by a clever resourceful player, so this is forgiveable. I've found the navigation around the world to be a little iffy, I get hitched up on objects more often than I'd like, and Zoe never bumps into something with her hip and slides by. She bumps into something with her hip and walks in place while you try to figure out which of several nearby items you're snagged on so you can properly avoid it. Particularly annoying during quasi-stealth scenes. Also, I did once get stuck between two barstools in an inn and had to restart the whole game to get unstuck. Not cool.

The autosave function has saved my butt a few times, I wish it saved a little more frequently however, as when I had to restart with the barstool incident I had just spent an hour doing non-lifethreatening fetch quests around town and hadn't found it necessary to save often enough, thinking the autosave would catch me at the end of each objective. Hah! Instead it was a totally obnoxious hourlong setback.

The game has a neat atmosphere, managing to blend the humdrum feel of real life with a horror vibe at times. The whole atmosphere reminds me quite a bit of Indigo Prophecy. In fact, Zoe reminds me of Carla Valenti in a lot of ways, not least the styIe of some of her clothes. The sudden switches from "normalcy" to suspense are less prominent than in Indigo Prophecy, but thus far I think better handled. They pull off the surprises nicely, I found myself gasping aloud at several points as something caught me unawares. Zoe switches between several vastly different types of area seamlessly, there isn't a place that I've found so far that feels less than fleshed out, or out of sync with the rest of the world.

I am psyched to see where the story goes from here. Dreamfall has totally captivated me, and I'm going right now to play a little bit more. I tend to get a little heavy on the negatives when I write impressions, because those are the things that stick out from the rest. Besides, even its few downsides have been productive for me... last night I quit after the barstool fiasco. And because the sun was coming up.:oops: Otherwise I might still be playing it now.

The first amendment "games-as-porn" debate has come to my backyard. Massachusetts House Bill 1423 (pdf) aims to add "Interactive Media" to their current definition of material that can be harmful to minors. They've inserted the obligatory description of violent games as "patently offensive to prevailing standards" appealing "predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors" and lacking in "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value".

Despite the fact that similarly worded bills have been declared unconstitutional (or failed to pass because they were deemed too likely to be overturned anyway) in several states, more and more states keep jumping on the bandwagon. This worries me, because traditionally where Massachussetts leads, Maine follows. The Maine legislature is liable to look up from its campaign against puppies and notice that the current trendy move in being parent to the masses is to legislate video game sales.

Another thing that worries me is the fact that when I try to search out news on this bill, I google for EIGHT pages without finding something that isn't directly from a pro-games site.

This is where I found myself before giving up on finding mainstream news on the subject.

This is the top story on the eighth and final page I searched, including very specific search terms.

What this tells me is that this issue really isn't on the public radar. It's not something that people can easily find on an outside website, it's not something that's going to come up on their "AOL today" homescreen. I know I'm in the vast minority of people who keep GameSpot News on my iGoogle homepage and have quicklinks to sites like GamePolitics and IGN. If this issue isn't out there in the mainstream media, regular people are not going to hunt up a video game site to find it, and if they do they're not going to consider it worthwhile.

Fortunately a few public figures do have things to say about this. Austin (MrChup0n) brought this one to my attention today (via Kotaku): Stephen King, horror author extraordinaire (and Maine resident), speaks out in his column in Entertainment Weekly in defense of video games and in opposition to the demonization of popular culture.

To quote King's editorial:

"According to the proposed bill, violent videogames are pornographic and have no redeeming social merit. The vid-critics claim they exist for one reason and one reason only, so kids can experience the vicarious thrill of killing. Now, what does and doesn't have social merit is always an interesting question, one I can discuss for hours. But what makes me crazy is when politicians take it upon themselves to play surrogate parents. The results of that are usually disastrous. Not to mention undemocratic. "

Entertainment Weekly is probably not the best platform from which to reach the masses, but hey. It's a start. There are tons of Americans out there who don't realize that there's a precedent of these laws being ruled unconstitutional. They don't realize that there's any sort of resistance to the idea of regulation. They don't see the double standard presented by violent music, movies, and even fiction going largely unregulated. Public awareness needs to be raised.

I don't want to see this issue on the table in my home state. However if it does come here, I want to know that the general public-- just not the self-proclaimed experts-- will be aware of the issue and its background. I want to know if I'm calling up my representative's office that I'm not the only one.

[During the course of writing this up, I ran across one (and only one) source that states that the bill has been tabled for one year but since this hasn't popped up anywhere else yet, and since "tabled" and "altogether scrapped" aren't interchangeable terms, I'm gonna go ahead and leave this commentary. It took too long to write it to table it now. ;)]

I don't know what's worse, having to call up my mother and make an actual appointment for her to take me grocery shopping, or the fact that she can literally require me to dress up in exchange for the privilege. Now I understand why she might want to dress up, she works for a vet and therefore spends most of her life in scrubs feeling like a fat cow. I, on the other hand, spend most of my life in fleece pants feeling like a lazy yet comfortable person, and the fact that I have to run around putting on six layers of makeup so I can be my mom's cool young friend and bribe her into taking me to buy food is humiliating. Going to the grocery store is an exercise best suited for jeans and sweatshirts, not dressing up like I'm going to a job interview.

Also have only slept about four hours, which makes the entire scenerio just that much more irritating.

I have always been a fan of role-playing games, even before I really knew that was what I was looking for. As a fourth-grader, I tried very hard to make Oregon Trail into a RPG, agonizing for ages over the choice of name and profession and every supply I put into my cart. My parents were of the generation who heard as youngsters about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, and so real RPGs were hard to come by in our household. No Final Fantasy, not even any Zelda until I was old enough to start making my own purchase decisions.

When that finally happened I was in college, and it was the post Final Fantasy VII heyday of the JRPG and I snapped it up and loved it threadbare like a favorite teddy bear. I went back and played through the cIassic SNES RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, I savored Final Fantasy IX and X. I bought Disgaea and Dark Cloud and anything else I could get my greedy hands on. While I had loved Super Mario World and the other platformers and puzzle games I'd played as a child, they didn't have the emphasis on story and character that I was finding in my precious beloved JRPGs.

And then there came a game called Morrowind. I grew very excited reading the case, hours upon hours of sidequests, open roaming around the world, and a character I could design. I snatched it up (even though I didn't own an Xbox) and carted it straight away to a friend's house where I planned to spend blissful hours recreating myself as a fictional denizen of a fully realized world.

I hated it. The game was so dark, I couldn't see anything. The first person controls made me dizzy and nauseous. I kept getting lost. I couldn't figure out what on earth I was supposed to be doing. My character had no personality, and was there even a story here? I sure couldn't find it. This was not an RPG as I knew it, this was some kind of weird hybrid that felt far more like those befuddling action games than the bright-colored, melodramatic, turn-based bliss I'd expected.

From that day on I became a purist. I didn't love RPGs. I loved Japanese RPGs. Anything else was an insult to my clearly superior good taste, and maybe even my intelligence. Bethesda was a dirty word. I eschewed anything that boasted open-ended gameplay or real time combat. I avoided MMOs like they carried the plague. It was the peak of the PlayStation2's reign. There were plenty of JRPGs pure enough for the purest purist, I didn't have any reason to look elsewhere.

Then, slowly, things began to change. The first thing I discovered was Kingdom Hearts. This was exactly the kind of game I'd been trying to avoid, it merged my favorite genre (and, gasp, my favorite developer as well!) with some kind of mongrel combat system that involved swinging an actual sword instead of choosing from a menu. Sometimes I even had to control the camera myself, rather than the game finding the most appropriate angle for me. Blasphemy! It was weird, but I liked it.

The next discovery came as I found people to play tabletop RPGs with. This was something I'd never had before. I came from the very conservative sort of family that looked on all that as voodoo satanic paganism, and I went to a college that was very constrictive culturally and reflected a similar viewpoint. So I was already a college graduate when I discovered the pencil and paper RPG. It was a miraculous discovery. I started with a game called Conspiracy X, a conspiracy-theory/supernatural/aliens themed game with a similar feel to the X-files but without David Duchovny. When our GM moved to China, I fell in with a group of friends playing D&D. The details of character creation and inventory, and the structure of the quests and the meticulousness of the storytelling... I was in love. Again. It was like a video game that didn't require quick reflexes, and I was in charge. Bliss.

It was this new familiarity with D&D that paved the way for me to love Knights of the Old Republic. I looked it over, I saw videos. I didn't like the idea of the interface, I didn't think it'd have enough strategy. I never would have tried it if my friends hadn't cajoled me into it with the promise that the character creation was just like D&D. It turns out it wasn't "just like" it, but close enough that I felt an immediate familiarity and ease in the system. I didn't get to finish it then, just enough to get a taste. And that was good enough.

KOTOR made me reconsider Final Fantasy XII, another game I'd been disproportionately disappointed in as I heard more and more about it. I didn't want a Final Fantasy title with (as I mentally termed it) "hands-free" party members. I didn't want to give up random encounters and the semblance of turn-based combat I'd been clinging to even with KOTOR. But it had a wait mode and beautiful easy to see bright landscapes, none of the samey dark corridors that I associated with "open world" games. And again, I was wrong. FFXII was awesome, I had good control of all my party members, it was just as strategic as its predecessors, and I really enjoyed it.

That left only one thing left I wouldn't touch. The "O" word. The game I'd been quite vocal in denouncing based on the shortcomings of its forebears: Oblivion. I bought it. I let it sit on the shelf and stared at it for a while. It's hard to let go of prejudices, even in something as silly as game genres. But eventually, finally, I played it. And it was good. The storyline didn't make me want to cry at any point, in fact I was kind of bored with the story at times, but I never got bored with the gameplay. I loved the music, I loved the visuals, I loved the Theives Guild quests. I bought some of the additional quests from the Marketplace. I put in 128 hours and I'm not done yet.

[My level 38 Wood Elf. She's a custom cIass that's half thief and half mage. I'm not sure why she has a cutlass on right now. She usually has a dagger or a bow. And I like the way she looks in clothes better than clonky armor. So I enchant them to the nines and she wears whatever she wants.]

And now I find I can't go back. At least, not all the way back. When I played Eternal Sonata the lack of camera control irked me so badly I wanted to throw the whole disc out the window. When I was playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant some of the linearity really got on my nerves. I think the "Western" vs. "Japanese" RPG sub-genres are going to come together more and more. Games like FFXII that take something from each camp are going to enrich the genre as a whole. The RPG niche market needs the change, for better or for worse. And for my part, I say better.

[Author's note: Events are discussed in the order that I personally came across them. Some games will appear vastly out of sequence because I found them later, not because I'm confused about when they actually were released. Also, apologies if the formatting is wonky, GS does funny things when I cut and paste.]

I have got me a job!

I have got me a job where I can work from home, therefore making it a very good thing that my computer works now and my car doesn't. If it was still the other way around I'd be in a heap-load of trouble.

Also, in celebration I have written a review. I don't do these all so very often, so I'm going to pretend the two events are related.