At its most basic level, gaming journalism is heavily rooted in consumerism. The very purpose behind an in-depth examination of the features and shortcomings of a game are suggestion; a suggestion to play, or a suggestion to not play. Although systems exist in which the trade and playing of games is not done through capital, a system of review nonetheless remains focused on the suggestion of playing or not playing above and beyond any other consideration. That is not to say that games cannot be viewed from a non-suggestive perspective - academics and authors of other studies are (hopefully) immune to such considerations.
The justification for this thesis of suggestion is that most, if not all, of gaming journalism is centered around the consumer in a marketplace of video games. Whether or not they have financial incentive to look favorably on one game or another is not particularly relevant - the gaming journalist that strives towards creating a service for consumers is equally as centered on suggestion as the gaming journalist that is paid by a parent company.
With this in mind, I believe that gaming journalism ought to be done under different guidelines than those of other journalists.
Most journalists I have encountered would argue that a lynchpin of their method is objectivity, or to be as objective towards their subject matter as possible. Whether or not pure objectivity is possible is a difficult question - but one that is not relevant for a gaming journalist. This is because any given gaming experience is, at its core, an experience - from the perspective of a player, from the perspective of the writer, and from the perspective of a journalist. In order to effectively characterize a game and draw conclusions from material presented inside of it, this experience cannot be extracted from the writing process lest a critical piece of the game be lost.
Is any given game merely the sum of its working parts? Would, for example, World of Warcraft be the same game if individual components were removed, or graphical representations significantly altered? Is World of Warcraft its user interface and sound presentation? Yes, to all of these questions; its also player interaction, exploring, killing monsters and so on. But is it more than these individual components stacked on top of each other?
In my obviously anecdotal experience, gamers that I am in communication with that have played World of Warcraft all share one thing in common: their experiences. For one player, it might be an incredible experience - banding together with 39 other friends and killing giant dragons and evil eyeballs. For another, this predominant experience might have been terrible - being repeatedly “farmed,” for example, by an enemy player for hours.
To be “farmed,” by the way, is to be repeatedly killed by an enemy in such a fashion that it prevents the player-being-slayed to do anything but be repeatedly slain.
If either of these players were asked what they thought about World of Warcraft, they would likely respond in, respectively, positive and negative fashions - but they would probably both explain why. “World of Warcraft was awesome - the game let me slay huge monsters and acquire great-looking armor,” the former might reply. And the latter? “World of Warcraft sucked, man - too many gankers.”
A “ganker” is one that engages in farming against another player. They are also known as griefers, and have been playing online games since their inception in millennia past.
These experiences - although made up by me - are fairly generic and common ones found among players of World of Warcraft. Although each individual player will have an individual, personalized experience, they will, I believe, all share the act of having an experience-in-general in common.
So - does a gaming journalist writing about a specific game also have these experiences?
If they aren’t, then they’re doing something wrong - and are in the business for the wrong reasons. These are clearly opinions and will be in no way supported further, but just the same - if a gamer isn’t actually getting the full experience out of the game, then how can they write on it and have an effective opinion about it? I do not believe they can - but I also do not believe critics and journalists somehow miss these experiences.
Yet gaming journalism, outside of a few notable authors in recent years, have failed to successfully integrate these experiences with their professional opinion of a game. So, in a sense, since they are failing to effectively understand or convey a game, then they are failing the primary function of their position: suggestion.
It is with this in mind that I turn towards subjective journalism, almost in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson - ‘Gonzo Gaming,’ perhaps - to illustrate the potential of a game to a potential player of the game. By permitting the writer to shed the entrapments of objectivity, it allows him to fully embrace not merely the game, but his experience with the game - and how to convey that to a reader. There are most assuredly consuming gamers that prefer the nitty-gritty of facts and charts to determine their game selections; this style of games writing will not be tailored to them in the same sense that Thompson’s style alienated many people.
But for many people, his style brought his subjects to life in a way that no other writer in the field was capable of. So, too, can this occur with games - by sharing individual experiences with their readers, writers demonstrate to readers just what it is that a given game is capable of. Did it allow for the writer - and, by the extension of possibility, the reader - to slay a giant dragon with 39 other comrades? Did it allow him to farm an enemy mercilessly?
_________
I recently made a post on my primary blog (here: http://www.40oz1game.com/2009/10/405/) about what amounts to a staged event on behalf of the Something Awful Goons in the new MMO, Champions Online. One of the most-espoused features of Champions Online is the character creation system; an evolution of the system found in (__that other superhero mmo - ack!__), it further expanded on the possibilities of the sort of avatar one could play, and was widely-praised for being far more customizable than anything else on the market. Early previews of the game, and even reviews, were awash with a staggering variety of player avatar designs - giant claw-head things, huge eyes, meathook-hands, and so on. But it all lacked context - sure, it was cool that you could do that.
But what the Goons did actually made me want to play the game. They more or less recreated, on a huge scale, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers of Saturday morning cartoon fame (or maybe after school, depending on your age). While I detest the Power Rangers and most Jpanese pop-culture remnants along the same aesthetic lines, the Goons - in their absurd rainbow of power ranger costumes - made me want to be a part of Champions Online.
That was because, for the first time, I was able to see what sorts of experiences could be had in Champions Online. Even if I signed up this evening and had the game running tomorrow morning and played instead of going to video game class, I still could not be one of the pseudo-Power Rangers - this is because this experience is unique to them. But I could slowly build a gang of hook-headed creatures to fight alongside me, or build the security arm of a left-wing militant group: the possibilities are endless.
And it is these possibilities that made me want to play Champions Online - not the composite of its aesthetic values, not the vivid, cartoony realism (haha) of the sound effects, nor the towering and sometimes-ominous city-skylines - but the possibility of creating my own, engaging, and unique experience.
It strikes me that the greatest service that a gaming writer can perform lies in charting out these experiences; admitedly anecdotal and unlikely to be recreated by the player, they instead show the player what they /could/ do. Instead of explaining to the player that Red Faction: Guerilla has a series of enemy installations that must be destroyed to make progress, a writer could instead chronicle the campaign of increasingly-brutal insurgent activities against a fascist state and the constant use of fellow insurgents as little more than fodder and distractionary tools. Instead of explaining the charcoal and sooty landscapes of the UT:2004 mod Red Orchestra that is occasionally brought to life with the beauty of the occasional flower, a writer could rather wax and wane the philosophic after he stumbles across a lone flower in a harsh landscape when looking through the iron sights of his machine gun (http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/09/done_column_battle_klaxon_on_r.php)
Of course, a gaming journalist must not only elaborate on more abstract notions like “experience” and “possibility” - they must also address the structural pillars of the game, too, like sound, graphical presentation, and so on. But why must these be the focus of most review and criticism? Gaming as a medium is fundamentally about experiences and play - not the elegant arches of gun barrels or the fractal beauty of a fireball spell. These things are certainly a key part of the experience, and should be treated as such - but they should not sit atop the pedestal they currently reside on. Slightly further, it also strikes me that relying on these pillars to support writing is an easy way out - following a formula of “graphics/sound/gameplay/story/replayability/etc” is as boring as a formulaic novel or film is.
It’s a bright future we’re heading into - gaming is still a relatively new field, and the criticism and writings of it are even further nouveau. But here’s the question: do you want your future to be made of the cold steel of numbers, graphics scores, and clothing selection commentary, or a golden dawn made from the tapestries of stories, heroic exploits, and nefarious deeds of a camping griefer? It is in these experiences that suggestion will be best characterized with.
Camping, by the way, is just another term for griefing.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Words from the Field
I recently had a couple of questions regarding gaming journalism that I wasn't quite sure of; 1: how to best reference initial awareness of a new thing, and 2: how exactly the "videogame/video game" issue should be dealt with. Thus, I asked a new games journalist that I tremendously respect - Kieron Gillen. Here are some of his words:
There isn't really one [way to cite initial sources], basically. RPS being a conversational blog, I normally mention where I found the actual story in the first line. Other, more formal blogs, just drop it in at the end. To be honest, that seems a bit rude in most cases, as that minimises the chance of sending hits to your source's way. And that's surely the point, yeah? POLITENESS IN ALL THINGS.
Regarding videogame/video game, I use videogame, but I'm far from standard (or even coherent) in my language. I think making it clearly a neologism focuses on the fact we're talking about a unique cultural entity. It's not really about video and games any more. In fact, videogames aren't always games in a classical sense. It's something else, and making it a new word makes it clear that we're talking about a new thing.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Red Faction: Guerilla
As the walls that once housed the fuel containers of a small, EDF-controlled fuel depot fall and trigger a chain reaction of viscerally beautiful explosions before me, a solitary thought dominates my mind: I did this, and I did it alone. No scripting help from the game engine, no computer-controlled character holding my hand and telling me where to place charges and when to run, and no loss of control in the form of a cut-scene - and it is in this independence that Red Faction: Guerilla finds its apex.
Although certain missions are required to advance the plot of the game - and therefore the weapons, items and areas that are available to you - Red Faction: Guerilla usually leaves the player alone to make their own decisions. Each district, which must eventually be liberated from the EDF, the militant arm of the apparent police state of Mars, has a series of voluntary missions that may be completed in any order. Or not, really - it’s up to you, although some combination of them must be completed. Thankfully, there is such variety both in the mission types and in their delivery that they remain fresh and new with each undertaking.
But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something - and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens - but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly - the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.
And really, much of the game seems to have been designed around getting you to do this sort of thing. Missions often tally the total amount of monetary damage you’ve caused, and the entirety of the second district in the game revolves around dismantling the money-making apparatus of the EDF on Mars. Of course, to accomplish this, you are required - well, asked by the game, really - to go out and kill buildings with hammers and explosives while inflicting similar things to the soldiers of the EDF.
That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human - but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.
Fleeing works well because of the way health regeneration works: don’t get hit for ten seconds, and your life meter rapidly refills. When combined with the sprint key and a mad dash for relative cover, Alec becomes almost unkillable - which is quite possible the strangest thing about the game. This is because Alec Mason, the protagonist, and the Red Faction that he works for, are essentially an outlaw labor union fighting with sticks and hammers and guns for the freedom to live their own lives. During the first five minutes of exposition, we learn that the EDF is better-armed, better-trained, and more well-prepared for military dominance on a planetary scale. We learn that the only way to defeat them is to strike quick, bloody them, and then fade into the outlying deserts. It makes logical sense, and it works.
Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.
Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house - Red Faction camps - to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem - a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF - which for me was easily two dozen - all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed - didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this - that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion - take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.
That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters - even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is simply the nature of life on Mars.
Scoring:
Visual Representation: 1.6/2.0
Explosions are vibrant and intense and complement the overall, red-grey aesthetic of the game in a highly complementary fashion. The overall design sense of the game is solid all-around, whether it come in the form of the design of the protagonist, his animations, or the interface game information is presented through. However, the health bar is small and located at the top of the screen, independent from the rest of the interface, making quick reading access difficult. Further, enemy design tends on the generic side; the EDF troopers look like every other fascist solider you’ve ever seen.
Gameplay and Level of Immersion:
1.5/2.0
The integration of independence and player choice provides for an intuitive and engaging experience; the sledgehammer feels heavy and brutal when killing either buildings or people, and avatar movement feels natural and flows well. However, narrative difficulties - like the EDF ceasing in pursuit and the badass-level of Alec Mason - shatter the illusion on occasion.
Mechanics and Technical Considerations:
1.7/2.0
This is where the game shines with the intensity of a thousand exploding nitrogen tanks; buildings collapse onto each other realistically, player-placed traps detonate how it seems like they should, and the sound effects are powerful and persuasive. The paper doll death-effect is a little overdone, and gravity seems to be slightly off. The vehicle sections were often difficult to control and aim and, since they were required, were more bothersome than anything else.
Quality of Narrative:
1.4/2.0
The Marxist/Maoist backdrop provides a compelling reason to dismantle the corporate structure of Mars, giving Alec Mason good reason to be an angry badass with a sledgehammer. However, his motivations for joining up with Red Faction and his relative strength compared to his enemies alienate this from typical Marxist/Maoist dialogues and, given the importance of these dialogues that the game places on itself, it tends to fail in this. Close, but not quite.
Connectivity:x/2.0
As I played a, well, non-online version, I am unable to effectively speak on this. However, multiple leaderboards and deathmatch/team fighting scenarios seem available through Windows Live.
Total: 6.2+x / 10
Although certain missions are required to advance the plot of the game - and therefore the weapons, items and areas that are available to you - Red Faction: Guerilla usually leaves the player alone to make their own decisions. Each district, which must eventually be liberated from the EDF, the militant arm of the apparent police state of Mars, has a series of voluntary missions that may be completed in any order. Or not, really - it’s up to you, although some combination of them must be completed. Thankfully, there is such variety both in the mission types and in their delivery that they remain fresh and new with each undertaking.
But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something - and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens - but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly - the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.
And really, much of the game seems to have been designed around getting you to do this sort of thing. Missions often tally the total amount of monetary damage you’ve caused, and the entirety of the second district in the game revolves around dismantling the money-making apparatus of the EDF on Mars. Of course, to accomplish this, you are required - well, asked by the game, really - to go out and kill buildings with hammers and explosives while inflicting similar things to the soldiers of the EDF.
That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human - but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.
Fleeing works well because of the way health regeneration works: don’t get hit for ten seconds, and your life meter rapidly refills. When combined with the sprint key and a mad dash for relative cover, Alec becomes almost unkillable - which is quite possible the strangest thing about the game. This is because Alec Mason, the protagonist, and the Red Faction that he works for, are essentially an outlaw labor union fighting with sticks and hammers and guns for the freedom to live their own lives. During the first five minutes of exposition, we learn that the EDF is better-armed, better-trained, and more well-prepared for military dominance on a planetary scale. We learn that the only way to defeat them is to strike quick, bloody them, and then fade into the outlying deserts. It makes logical sense, and it works.
Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.
Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house - Red Faction camps - to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem - a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF - which for me was easily two dozen - all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed - didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this - that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion - take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.
That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters - even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is simply the nature of life on Mars.
Scoring:
Visual Representation: 1.6/2.0
Explosions are vibrant and intense and complement the overall, red-grey aesthetic of the game in a highly complementary fashion. The overall design sense of the game is solid all-around, whether it come in the form of the design of the protagonist, his animations, or the interface game information is presented through. However, the health bar is small and located at the top of the screen, independent from the rest of the interface, making quick reading access difficult. Further, enemy design tends on the generic side; the EDF troopers look like every other fascist solider you’ve ever seen.
Gameplay and Level of Immersion:
1.5/2.0
The integration of independence and player choice provides for an intuitive and engaging experience; the sledgehammer feels heavy and brutal when killing either buildings or people, and avatar movement feels natural and flows well. However, narrative difficulties - like the EDF ceasing in pursuit and the badass-level of Alec Mason - shatter the illusion on occasion.
Mechanics and Technical Considerations:
1.7/2.0
This is where the game shines with the intensity of a thousand exploding nitrogen tanks; buildings collapse onto each other realistically, player-placed traps detonate how it seems like they should, and the sound effects are powerful and persuasive. The paper doll death-effect is a little overdone, and gravity seems to be slightly off. The vehicle sections were often difficult to control and aim and, since they were required, were more bothersome than anything else.
Quality of Narrative:
1.4/2.0
The Marxist/Maoist backdrop provides a compelling reason to dismantle the corporate structure of Mars, giving Alec Mason good reason to be an angry badass with a sledgehammer. However, his motivations for joining up with Red Faction and his relative strength compared to his enemies alienate this from typical Marxist/Maoist dialogues and, given the importance of these dialogues that the game places on itself, it tends to fail in this. Close, but not quite.
Connectivity:x/2.0
As I played a, well, non-online version, I am unable to effectively speak on this. However, multiple leaderboards and deathmatch/team fighting scenarios seem available through Windows Live.
Total: 6.2+x / 10
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The Weight of Credibility
I found Ben Dutka’s “Edge Killzone 2 Review: A Disservice To Game Consumers” to be an incredibly entertaining piece, if only because of several of the devices that Dutka uses to sway his audience and establish his opinion as a dominant one. Logic, ethical considerations, and a lack of bias seem to have been almost intentionally purged from this explorative work; Dutka’s primary argument seems to continuously return to emotive and deeply personal ideas and reasons, but he manages to use these in such a way that they seem to be authoritative, definitive statements. He’s a sophist in the most negative use of the word, not seeming to be concerned with getting at any sort of truth as much as he is about propagating his own perspective as truth.
Dutka’s first mechanism concerns his establishment of himself as a non-authoritative voice in the field, spending almost 20% of his total word count explaining that no review can be “right” and that a breadth of opinions is required for a healthy critical field and for the consumer. Charmingly, this has the effect of actually lending credibility to Dutka; clearly, this is a writer that has some grasp of the purpose and structuring of a videogame review. We should then, therefore, take him seriously when he closes his introduction with his opening guns: “This being the case, we advise all of you to ignore the desperate-for-attention, we're-going-to-prove-our-elite-status so-called "review" from Edge that has the entire Internet talking.”
The assault on Edge’s review, at least in this sentence, manages two things: first, it makes the first of what will be many of the same argument that the Edge review of Killzone 2 is more or less garbage. It also demonstrates how different PSXextreme’s review was different by suggesting that it is all of those things which the Edge version is not; not-desperate-for-attention and not-seeking-of-elite-status. Dutka then further amplifies the reduction of credibility from Edge by “not linking to it” because “it doesn’t deserve to be linked to.” Generally speaking, there are only two reasons to refuse to provide a source to the original material, and Dutka seems to want ti invoke both of them; either its so offensive and corruptive or any other number of troubling things that it would almost be a crime to show it to your audience, or because you fear that allowing for a gateway to the original work will help to establish its legitimacy.
While Dutka returns to similar devices throughout the four paragraphs, he failed to make a genuinely compelling argument - at least, to anybody that understands how to see a fallacious argument. His early attempts to establish himself as a reasonable, rational critic are undermined by his logical fallacy of suggesting that he is an authority simply because he knows what a good review consists of - but he doesn’t actually demonstrate that his review, or his capacity as a writer, makes him a good critic. Dutka continues along this path; “...if you're scoring on a scale of 1 - 10, there's no way on earth KZ2 gets a 7 in direct comparison to the other products on store shelves. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.” I’m not sure that anyone capable of thought would consider “it just doesn’t” to be a valid argument for anything. Dutka also continuously strikes at this idea that the Edge writers are out to attain a sort of “elite cred,” which, from reading Dutka’s piece, seems to be achieved by deceiving consumers and arbitrarily placing low scores on excellent games. However, although he’s quite clear in positing his view of this cred, he never quite manages to demonstrate that they’re actually doing this - it’s great that he feels this way, but close-reading his work only demonstrates that he’s frothing at the mouth and barely creating coherent thoughts.
He even seems to succumb to this weird, shadowy temptation of all videogame critics to lie to their readers; “If it's your job to be faithful to your readers, you are not allowed to do things like this. You are not allowed to indulge your massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention.” Given the nature of his prose and the suggestions he’s making, Dutka sounds to have a much more sinister and dominating hidden agenda than that of any critic. It hardly seems a service to fans to me to defend a beloved game without actually saying why the game should be praised.
Not that the Edge review shouldn’t have been criticized - it definitely should have. The writing was unclear and winded along uncertain paths, and seemed to assume that the reader had a familiarity with the Killzone world. (The irony there being that one of their complaints about the game itself was that it assumed a familiarity with Killzone.) It had many, many aspects that could have been attacked, and probably effectively - but Dutka didn’t bother to look into these, instead contenting himself with establishing him as a definitive authority (“Video game journalists aren't exactly treated with a ton of respect by other entertainment journalists (I know, I was one)”, and then using that authority alone to paint the Edge review as wrong.
edit: forgot to mention this - it's awesome that his almost fanatic, right-wing fundamentalist-style attacks were on a website called PSXextreme. I'm sure they don't mean it that way, but come on ..
Dutka’s first mechanism concerns his establishment of himself as a non-authoritative voice in the field, spending almost 20% of his total word count explaining that no review can be “right” and that a breadth of opinions is required for a healthy critical field and for the consumer. Charmingly, this has the effect of actually lending credibility to Dutka; clearly, this is a writer that has some grasp of the purpose and structuring of a videogame review. We should then, therefore, take him seriously when he closes his introduction with his opening guns: “This being the case, we advise all of you to ignore the desperate-for-attention, we're-going-to-prove-our-elite-status so-called "review" from Edge that has the entire Internet talking.”
The assault on Edge’s review, at least in this sentence, manages two things: first, it makes the first of what will be many of the same argument that the Edge review of Killzone 2 is more or less garbage. It also demonstrates how different PSXextreme’s review was different by suggesting that it is all of those things which the Edge version is not; not-desperate-for-attention and not-seeking-of-elite-status. Dutka then further amplifies the reduction of credibility from Edge by “not linking to it” because “it doesn’t deserve to be linked to.” Generally speaking, there are only two reasons to refuse to provide a source to the original material, and Dutka seems to want ti invoke both of them; either its so offensive and corruptive or any other number of troubling things that it would almost be a crime to show it to your audience, or because you fear that allowing for a gateway to the original work will help to establish its legitimacy.
While Dutka returns to similar devices throughout the four paragraphs, he failed to make a genuinely compelling argument - at least, to anybody that understands how to see a fallacious argument. His early attempts to establish himself as a reasonable, rational critic are undermined by his logical fallacy of suggesting that he is an authority simply because he knows what a good review consists of - but he doesn’t actually demonstrate that his review, or his capacity as a writer, makes him a good critic. Dutka continues along this path; “...if you're scoring on a scale of 1 - 10, there's no way on earth KZ2 gets a 7 in direct comparison to the other products on store shelves. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.” I’m not sure that anyone capable of thought would consider “it just doesn’t” to be a valid argument for anything. Dutka also continuously strikes at this idea that the Edge writers are out to attain a sort of “elite cred,” which, from reading Dutka’s piece, seems to be achieved by deceiving consumers and arbitrarily placing low scores on excellent games. However, although he’s quite clear in positing his view of this cred, he never quite manages to demonstrate that they’re actually doing this - it’s great that he feels this way, but close-reading his work only demonstrates that he’s frothing at the mouth and barely creating coherent thoughts.
He even seems to succumb to this weird, shadowy temptation of all videogame critics to lie to their readers; “If it's your job to be faithful to your readers, you are not allowed to do things like this. You are not allowed to indulge your massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention.” Given the nature of his prose and the suggestions he’s making, Dutka sounds to have a much more sinister and dominating hidden agenda than that of any critic. It hardly seems a service to fans to me to defend a beloved game without actually saying why the game should be praised.
Not that the Edge review shouldn’t have been criticized - it definitely should have. The writing was unclear and winded along uncertain paths, and seemed to assume that the reader had a familiarity with the Killzone world. (The irony there being that one of their complaints about the game itself was that it assumed a familiarity with Killzone.) It had many, many aspects that could have been attacked, and probably effectively - but Dutka didn’t bother to look into these, instead contenting himself with establishing him as a definitive authority (“Video game journalists aren't exactly treated with a ton of respect by other entertainment journalists (I know, I was one)”, and then using that authority alone to paint the Edge review as wrong.
edit: forgot to mention this - it's awesome that his almost fanatic, right-wing fundamentalist-style attacks were on a website called PSXextreme. I'm sure they don't mean it that way, but come on ..
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
And Then it Happened: Game-Changing Events and the Drugs That Induced Them
Here’s the thing with crystal meth-amphetamine: you don’t feel anything when you take it. Unless one is mainlining or taking it in vast quantities, there isn’t a high, there isn’t a rush, there isn’t really any tangible quality to it - except in your perception of the world. The world slows down, allowing you to receive and interpret data received by the senses with a speed that feels positively super-human. Even though it’s always clear that this is just a mere effect of a narcotic, it doesn’t matter, because you feel faster, quicker, and much more nimble than everything around you - it’s like getting a speed powerup in any given videogame. Crystal meth-amphetamine developed the street slang of speed for a reason.
I attribute my ultimate victory over the first Knights of the Old Republic directly to meth. I’d been trying to kill the final boss of the game - Darth Malak - for months, and simply could not do it. As will be further explained at later, I have a tendency to move through some games at a quicker pace than I imagine most other people do, and as a result - especially in roleplaying games - I find that my character(s) are often weaker than they should be and ill-prepared for major, endgame-level encounters. Due to choices made during the development of the primary character, whom is the only character useable in the final encounter, Seris was incredibly weak and almost broken. I had chosen initially the stealthy Scoundrel, and then later, the wizard equivalent of an evil Jedi - paths that, in a Dungeons and Dragons setting, would have brought me success, but did not in KoToR due to the inherent weakness and incompatibility of the two character development paths.
Darth Malak must have killed Seris more than fifty times before the winter of 2004 when I’d moved into a new area and acquired a more refined taste for narcotics. I’d certainly ingested, nasally, a certain volume of the chemical compound before that fateful evening, but I hadn’t done so while playing videogames - and as soon as I tried, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t attempted it earlier.
And then it happened: on a whim, I threw my KoToR disc into my Xbox and booted up my furthest save with my room mate as audience and a near-full pack of Camel’s as food - and proceeded to completely annihilate Darth Malak on my first attempt.
The encounter with Darth Malak revolves around executing his Jedi prisoners before he lifedrains them, which restores his life. I was aware of this in previous encounters, but couldn’t quite perfect a strategy for both damaging him and removing his ability to restore his life while keeping Seris alive. The drug didn’t induce an epiphany, it didn’t bring a golden, brilliant revelation of clarity, and it certainly didn’t, on an intrinsic level, explain to me how to kill Darth Malak. What it did do was make me set aside strategic considerations and focus purely on reacting to what Malak was doing, and this enhanced reaction time allowed me to pre-empt him every time, ultimately destroying him and saving the galaxy.
As I was an evil Jedi, the galaxy was not saved, but rather enslaved under a new tyrant - Darth Seris.
The culmination of the events and chemicals of that evening brought to me an awareness of the power of enhanced and altered gaming, and the lessons learned have stuck with since the passing of five years - and I suspect will never leave me. I’ve moved past meth - recognizing the physical danger posed and addiction possibility it represents - but continue to embrace altered and enhanced gaming, albeit in an (I hope) safer fashion, preferring to avoid illegal substances almost altogether.
Meth-amphetamine usage, in retrospect, seems to be an almost natural progression of habits I’d developed when I was younger. The first game that I ever spent a genuinely enormous amount of time playing was the second American release of a Final Fantasy game - and never was a play session begun until I knew I could count on several cans of Mountain Dew or some other highly caffeinated and sugared beverage. Food was and still is never involved, as sticky controllers and keyboards continue to be a personal bane that must be avoided at all costs. Similar to my experience with the nigh-unkillable Darth Malak, I had bashed my bruised and bloodied skull against the final boss of Final Fantasy II for months without making any real progress.
As I cannot recall this day - more than a decade and a half removed from present - with any clarity and thus cannot directly attribute caffeine to victory, I also cannot ignore the impact that I’m sure that it had. If nothing else, it granted me the chemically-induced focus and level of fanatic fervor for the game that proved necessary for victory. Again similar to my later experience with KoToR, my characters as a whole were underpowered and ill-suited for the final encounter, an alien-wizard thing named Zeromus. This was made painfully clear to me as I struggled to even survive for more than a few moments of the encounter, and indeed, I could only barely manage to get to Zeromus - he was situated about ten minutes away from the final save point at the end of a difficult dungeon, and my party could not effectively kill most of the enemies found within its glassy corridors.
If one has played any of the Final Fantasy games, particularly the second American release, then they are probably aware of the importance of the spell Meteo. The final spell for any black mage, it represents the culmination of arcane mastery and is the single highest-damaging attack in the game. It was received by Rydia - the black mage of the party - when she attains a certain level. My Rydia never attained this level - in fact, at the time, I’d just assumed that Rydia never even learned the spell. This level progression doesn’t merely determine the availability of spells one can cast, but also their strength and ability to withstand punishment - and Rydia’s failure to attain a reasonable level was a systemic problem throughout the party.
And then it happened - I sat down one afternoon after school and utterly annihilated Zeromus on my first attempt. To this day, I am unaware of exactly how this feat was accomplished - I have never met another person that can claim to have beaten Final Fantasy II without having the spell Meteo. I attribute this entirely to the enhanced reaction time created by caffeine and desperation. There were lessons learned from this victory, however, and the primary lesson was even demonstrated in the fight against Darth Malak - the hardest encounters are defeated not through repetition, but rather on the first attempt after an extended pause from the game.
Perhaps fittingly, within seconds of killing Zeromus, my mother insisted I remove myself from the basement to help her with something. By the time I returned, the ending sequence of the game had completed and the cartridge returned itself to the title screen. I have never seen, in person, the ending sequence of Final Fantasy II.
The game that had perhaps the strongest singular impact on me - and ultimately demanded the complete and total refinement of previously-learned lessons - was World of Warcraft. Although some eight million people played the game during its peak, I was something of a minority - I was one of those dorks that were made fun of for spending twelve or more hours each day within the confines of the game. Although I experienced many wonderful and frustrating moments in Azeroth, there is one event that I hold above all others: the tenth time that I killed the Lord of Blackrock, Nefarian.
The nine deaths of Nefarian had been witnessed, from me, during my tenure as a member of an elite raiding guild called Demolition. Demolition was the top guild on my server, and I wound up among its ranks due to cultivating a friendship and having a brother already inside of the guild. By the time I had joined, Demolition had killed every boss in Blackwing Lair - the dungeon that Nefarian ruled - except for the Lord of Blackrock himself. Although a relatively simple encounter when looked at in the context of today’s encounters, it was complex and challenging at the time, and it took Demolition several weeks of attemp ts to defeat him. While there was certainly great rejoicing both inside the guild and among the Horde community as a whole when he was killed - the first time for the Horde on my server - I was not terribly excited or surprised. This is because it seemed that slaying Nefarian was inevitable and required only time to be invested into it, as the nature of top-tier guilds in WoW is to defeat any encounter before them (note that pre-nerf C’thun of Ahn’Quiraj is perhaps one of the major exceptions to this, but obviously not the focus of this narrative).
As a result of changes in lifestyle, I was forced to leave Demolition - I could not meet the time requirements demanded, rightfully, by the guild. I returned instead to a group of players that had recently reformed that I had known since the opening months of Warcraft - a guild now called Order of Discord. When I joined, they were progressing - slowly - through Blackwing Lair. Not having the “hardcore raid” mentality of Demolition, the roster on any given evening was seemingly random. Some nights healers would be in abundance; others saw half the volume of required healers. Of the forty people that can be in the raid group, about 20 of them were present for each raid, myself included. This has the effect of lengthening the time it takes for a guild to defeat any given encounter, due to a disparity of armor/weapon quality and awareness of encounter mechanics. After two months of slogging through Blackwing Lair, Order of Discord finally stepped onto the balcony where Nefarian had built his throne.
It’s an imposing and intimidating place. The rough stone blocks that form the walls, railings and floor panels are a dirty, depressing red, and the sky has the look of a recently-erupted volcano. The balcony is perhaps 150 yards across, and at the opposite end of the balcony from the entrance lies a great throne upon which Lord Victor Nefarius, the Lord of Blackrock, rests in human form. He sits almost lazily, his crown tipped to one side, and laughs as his minions slay your friends. And when you’re stoned, as I usually was when raiding, it’s a pretty scary image.
By the time OoD reached this balcony for the first time, it had a core group of raiders that were excellent at their jobs - but there was also a certain casual element among them, which, frankly, slowed progression greatly. The focus of OoD, however, was not progression - it was to form a cohesive social structure of friends, and in this it succeeded greatly. This is why I was able to be lit when raiding with OoD - while the substance increased my overall damage output (I actually tracked it), I tended to miss critical details and die more often - which, obviously, can be bad. Just the same, I enjoyed playing high - I found it less intensive and myself more detached, able to simply play for fun while kicking ass and taking names.
With, presumably, everyone in the raid sober, it took Demolition a month or two to slay Nefarian, and OoD managed it in a little bit more time than that - but the learning curve was far more brutal and elongated for OoD. Whereas Demolition had 35 raiders at every raid, OoD had, again, about 20 - this forced the guild to teach and gear twice as many people. For the first month, it seemed that OoD would simply never kill Nefarian - we couldn’t even defeat the first of three phases. I suspect that more people in OoD also showed up to raids in altered mental states, and one of the rogues that I mentored - Thuglord - I know for a fact never once logged on sober.
And then it happened. Order of Discord blazed through the second half of Blackwing Lair, killing each boss on the first attempt, and we arrayed our forty members on Nefarian’s balcony and triggered the encounter. For the first time, OoD successfully completed the first phase of the encounter, in which hundreds of monsters, coming from two separate doors, flood the balcony and must be killed - and we did it, inexplicably, without a single casualty. When this was completed, Nefarian turned into a gigantic black dragon and began attacking our tank, Grachuus, who angered the dragon sufficiently and moved him to an ideal position. With rogues flanking and wizards fireballing, Order of Discord threw everything they had at the beast - and killed him. Just as with Final Fantasy II and KoToR, the defeat of a major, endgame-level encounter was achieved on the first attempt of a playsession.
Of course, by the time Order of Discord had slain Nefarian, a new dungeon - and a new endboss, C’thun, whom was actually a god - had been put into the game, and we were thus no longer truly endgame.
I am still unsure if marijuana actually has a positive impact on my level of gaming expertise, even though it remains my favorite mode of playing - in addition to good beer, but that’s a constant that needs no mention. I played a rogue in World of Warcraft and was among the highest of damage-dealers in the guild, with only my jerk friends Bokike - a fireball and pyroclasting mage - and Shuzzi - a troll knifeman - able to compete with me. Pushing to the highest levels of DPS - damage per second, the metric by which damage-dealing classes are measured - required an excellent sense of timing, and to this end marijuana aided me greatly. However, it lowers situational awareness, so I found myself more likely to miss critical details - like needing a healer to remove a nasty spell from me - fairly often. As an aside, I found playing a priest - a healing class - to be impossible while high in a raid environment due to the immense level of situational awareness required and the terrible toll mistakes exact as a healer.
My development as a writer, gamer, and embracer of certain chemicals have all gone hand-in-hand, and I’m not sure that I could successfully remove any of these without directly compromising the other two. Not that I need to be in an altered state to write or to game at this point - these things usually revolve around alcohol and tobacco, making me something of a nerdy cliche - but it certainly elucidates the process and makes it more enjoyable for me. The sweeping bulk of my ideas for poetry and prose come to me while either drinking or dozing off on a couch while high, and most of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred while under one influence or another. In fact, my metric for knowing “how much is too much” is the point at which I can no longer manipulate a mouse and keyboard in the confines of a game successfully - I use this metric even when removed from gaming and at a social event where I won’t even be gaming, simply because it has allowed me to understand my body well enough to know when I’m in a comfortable place.
And then it happened: I realized that, unfortunately, playing videogames while under an influence presents something of a problem for me professionally: I tend to enjoy all media, whether it be in the form of text, film or computing, more when I’ve ingested some chemical or another. This strikes me as a loss of objectivity, and the permitting of external influences to determine my final opinion of a game. As an individual attempting to pursue a career in game criticism and academics, this could be a rather large problem. I’ve begun separating gameplay time into categories - one for pleasure, and one for semi-professional reasons, but I find this distinction troublesome. For better or worse, there seems to be only one thing to be said about this necessary distinction: it’s life; it happens.
I attribute my ultimate victory over the first Knights of the Old Republic directly to meth. I’d been trying to kill the final boss of the game - Darth Malak - for months, and simply could not do it. As will be further explained at later, I have a tendency to move through some games at a quicker pace than I imagine most other people do, and as a result - especially in roleplaying games - I find that my character(s) are often weaker than they should be and ill-prepared for major, endgame-level encounters. Due to choices made during the development of the primary character, whom is the only character useable in the final encounter, Seris was incredibly weak and almost broken. I had chosen initially the stealthy Scoundrel, and then later, the wizard equivalent of an evil Jedi - paths that, in a Dungeons and Dragons setting, would have brought me success, but did not in KoToR due to the inherent weakness and incompatibility of the two character development paths.
Darth Malak must have killed Seris more than fifty times before the winter of 2004 when I’d moved into a new area and acquired a more refined taste for narcotics. I’d certainly ingested, nasally, a certain volume of the chemical compound before that fateful evening, but I hadn’t done so while playing videogames - and as soon as I tried, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t attempted it earlier.
And then it happened: on a whim, I threw my KoToR disc into my Xbox and booted up my furthest save with my room mate as audience and a near-full pack of Camel’s as food - and proceeded to completely annihilate Darth Malak on my first attempt.
The encounter with Darth Malak revolves around executing his Jedi prisoners before he lifedrains them, which restores his life. I was aware of this in previous encounters, but couldn’t quite perfect a strategy for both damaging him and removing his ability to restore his life while keeping Seris alive. The drug didn’t induce an epiphany, it didn’t bring a golden, brilliant revelation of clarity, and it certainly didn’t, on an intrinsic level, explain to me how to kill Darth Malak. What it did do was make me set aside strategic considerations and focus purely on reacting to what Malak was doing, and this enhanced reaction time allowed me to pre-empt him every time, ultimately destroying him and saving the galaxy.
As I was an evil Jedi, the galaxy was not saved, but rather enslaved under a new tyrant - Darth Seris.
The culmination of the events and chemicals of that evening brought to me an awareness of the power of enhanced and altered gaming, and the lessons learned have stuck with since the passing of five years - and I suspect will never leave me. I’ve moved past meth - recognizing the physical danger posed and addiction possibility it represents - but continue to embrace altered and enhanced gaming, albeit in an (I hope) safer fashion, preferring to avoid illegal substances almost altogether.
Meth-amphetamine usage, in retrospect, seems to be an almost natural progression of habits I’d developed when I was younger. The first game that I ever spent a genuinely enormous amount of time playing was the second American release of a Final Fantasy game - and never was a play session begun until I knew I could count on several cans of Mountain Dew or some other highly caffeinated and sugared beverage. Food was and still is never involved, as sticky controllers and keyboards continue to be a personal bane that must be avoided at all costs. Similar to my experience with the nigh-unkillable Darth Malak, I had bashed my bruised and bloodied skull against the final boss of Final Fantasy II for months without making any real progress.
As I cannot recall this day - more than a decade and a half removed from present - with any clarity and thus cannot directly attribute caffeine to victory, I also cannot ignore the impact that I’m sure that it had. If nothing else, it granted me the chemically-induced focus and level of fanatic fervor for the game that proved necessary for victory. Again similar to my later experience with KoToR, my characters as a whole were underpowered and ill-suited for the final encounter, an alien-wizard thing named Zeromus. This was made painfully clear to me as I struggled to even survive for more than a few moments of the encounter, and indeed, I could only barely manage to get to Zeromus - he was situated about ten minutes away from the final save point at the end of a difficult dungeon, and my party could not effectively kill most of the enemies found within its glassy corridors.
If one has played any of the Final Fantasy games, particularly the second American release, then they are probably aware of the importance of the spell Meteo. The final spell for any black mage, it represents the culmination of arcane mastery and is the single highest-damaging attack in the game. It was received by Rydia - the black mage of the party - when she attains a certain level. My Rydia never attained this level - in fact, at the time, I’d just assumed that Rydia never even learned the spell. This level progression doesn’t merely determine the availability of spells one can cast, but also their strength and ability to withstand punishment - and Rydia’s failure to attain a reasonable level was a systemic problem throughout the party.
And then it happened - I sat down one afternoon after school and utterly annihilated Zeromus on my first attempt. To this day, I am unaware of exactly how this feat was accomplished - I have never met another person that can claim to have beaten Final Fantasy II without having the spell Meteo. I attribute this entirely to the enhanced reaction time created by caffeine and desperation. There were lessons learned from this victory, however, and the primary lesson was even demonstrated in the fight against Darth Malak - the hardest encounters are defeated not through repetition, but rather on the first attempt after an extended pause from the game.
Perhaps fittingly, within seconds of killing Zeromus, my mother insisted I remove myself from the basement to help her with something. By the time I returned, the ending sequence of the game had completed and the cartridge returned itself to the title screen. I have never seen, in person, the ending sequence of Final Fantasy II.
The game that had perhaps the strongest singular impact on me - and ultimately demanded the complete and total refinement of previously-learned lessons - was World of Warcraft. Although some eight million people played the game during its peak, I was something of a minority - I was one of those dorks that were made fun of for spending twelve or more hours each day within the confines of the game. Although I experienced many wonderful and frustrating moments in Azeroth, there is one event that I hold above all others: the tenth time that I killed the Lord of Blackrock, Nefarian.
The nine deaths of Nefarian had been witnessed, from me, during my tenure as a member of an elite raiding guild called Demolition. Demolition was the top guild on my server, and I wound up among its ranks due to cultivating a friendship and having a brother already inside of the guild. By the time I had joined, Demolition had killed every boss in Blackwing Lair - the dungeon that Nefarian ruled - except for the Lord of Blackrock himself. Although a relatively simple encounter when looked at in the context of today’s encounters, it was complex and challenging at the time, and it took Demolition several weeks of attemp ts to defeat him. While there was certainly great rejoicing both inside the guild and among the Horde community as a whole when he was killed - the first time for the Horde on my server - I was not terribly excited or surprised. This is because it seemed that slaying Nefarian was inevitable and required only time to be invested into it, as the nature of top-tier guilds in WoW is to defeat any encounter before them (note that pre-nerf C’thun of Ahn’Quiraj is perhaps one of the major exceptions to this, but obviously not the focus of this narrative).
As a result of changes in lifestyle, I was forced to leave Demolition - I could not meet the time requirements demanded, rightfully, by the guild. I returned instead to a group of players that had recently reformed that I had known since the opening months of Warcraft - a guild now called Order of Discord. When I joined, they were progressing - slowly - through Blackwing Lair. Not having the “hardcore raid” mentality of Demolition, the roster on any given evening was seemingly random. Some nights healers would be in abundance; others saw half the volume of required healers. Of the forty people that can be in the raid group, about 20 of them were present for each raid, myself included. This has the effect of lengthening the time it takes for a guild to defeat any given encounter, due to a disparity of armor/weapon quality and awareness of encounter mechanics. After two months of slogging through Blackwing Lair, Order of Discord finally stepped onto the balcony where Nefarian had built his throne.
It’s an imposing and intimidating place. The rough stone blocks that form the walls, railings and floor panels are a dirty, depressing red, and the sky has the look of a recently-erupted volcano. The balcony is perhaps 150 yards across, and at the opposite end of the balcony from the entrance lies a great throne upon which Lord Victor Nefarius, the Lord of Blackrock, rests in human form. He sits almost lazily, his crown tipped to one side, and laughs as his minions slay your friends. And when you’re stoned, as I usually was when raiding, it’s a pretty scary image.
By the time OoD reached this balcony for the first time, it had a core group of raiders that were excellent at their jobs - but there was also a certain casual element among them, which, frankly, slowed progression greatly. The focus of OoD, however, was not progression - it was to form a cohesive social structure of friends, and in this it succeeded greatly. This is why I was able to be lit when raiding with OoD - while the substance increased my overall damage output (I actually tracked it), I tended to miss critical details and die more often - which, obviously, can be bad. Just the same, I enjoyed playing high - I found it less intensive and myself more detached, able to simply play for fun while kicking ass and taking names.
With, presumably, everyone in the raid sober, it took Demolition a month or two to slay Nefarian, and OoD managed it in a little bit more time than that - but the learning curve was far more brutal and elongated for OoD. Whereas Demolition had 35 raiders at every raid, OoD had, again, about 20 - this forced the guild to teach and gear twice as many people. For the first month, it seemed that OoD would simply never kill Nefarian - we couldn’t even defeat the first of three phases. I suspect that more people in OoD also showed up to raids in altered mental states, and one of the rogues that I mentored - Thuglord - I know for a fact never once logged on sober.
And then it happened. Order of Discord blazed through the second half of Blackwing Lair, killing each boss on the first attempt, and we arrayed our forty members on Nefarian’s balcony and triggered the encounter. For the first time, OoD successfully completed the first phase of the encounter, in which hundreds of monsters, coming from two separate doors, flood the balcony and must be killed - and we did it, inexplicably, without a single casualty. When this was completed, Nefarian turned into a gigantic black dragon and began attacking our tank, Grachuus, who angered the dragon sufficiently and moved him to an ideal position. With rogues flanking and wizards fireballing, Order of Discord threw everything they had at the beast - and killed him. Just as with Final Fantasy II and KoToR, the defeat of a major, endgame-level encounter was achieved on the first attempt of a playsession.
Of course, by the time Order of Discord had slain Nefarian, a new dungeon - and a new endboss, C’thun, whom was actually a god - had been put into the game, and we were thus no longer truly endgame.
I am still unsure if marijuana actually has a positive impact on my level of gaming expertise, even though it remains my favorite mode of playing - in addition to good beer, but that’s a constant that needs no mention. I played a rogue in World of Warcraft and was among the highest of damage-dealers in the guild, with only my jerk friends Bokike - a fireball and pyroclasting mage - and Shuzzi - a troll knifeman - able to compete with me. Pushing to the highest levels of DPS - damage per second, the metric by which damage-dealing classes are measured - required an excellent sense of timing, and to this end marijuana aided me greatly. However, it lowers situational awareness, so I found myself more likely to miss critical details - like needing a healer to remove a nasty spell from me - fairly often. As an aside, I found playing a priest - a healing class - to be impossible while high in a raid environment due to the immense level of situational awareness required and the terrible toll mistakes exact as a healer.
My development as a writer, gamer, and embracer of certain chemicals have all gone hand-in-hand, and I’m not sure that I could successfully remove any of these without directly compromising the other two. Not that I need to be in an altered state to write or to game at this point - these things usually revolve around alcohol and tobacco, making me something of a nerdy cliche - but it certainly elucidates the process and makes it more enjoyable for me. The sweeping bulk of my ideas for poetry and prose come to me while either drinking or dozing off on a couch while high, and most of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred while under one influence or another. In fact, my metric for knowing “how much is too much” is the point at which I can no longer manipulate a mouse and keyboard in the confines of a game successfully - I use this metric even when removed from gaming and at a social event where I won’t even be gaming, simply because it has allowed me to understand my body well enough to know when I’m in a comfortable place.
And then it happened: I realized that, unfortunately, playing videogames while under an influence presents something of a problem for me professionally: I tend to enjoy all media, whether it be in the form of text, film or computing, more when I’ve ingested some chemical or another. This strikes me as a loss of objectivity, and the permitting of external influences to determine my final opinion of a game. As an individual attempting to pursue a career in game criticism and academics, this could be a rather large problem. I’ve begun separating gameplay time into categories - one for pleasure, and one for semi-professional reasons, but I find this distinction troublesome. For better or worse, there seems to be only one thing to be said about this necessary distinction: it’s life; it happens.
To Play the Hated Thing
I hated fighting against warriors. More than warlocks with their infernal Fear spell and life-leeching abilities, and vastly more than mages, with their devious blinking and Flame-Blasting ways. Even more than coming up against the hunter, whom was arguably designed to be a direct counter to beloved Seris - my rogue in World of Warcraft. The hunter was able to launch a flare into the air, which could pull Seris out of stealth and more than likely lead to her death. The hunter could place a mark on Seris when he saw her, preventing her from slinking back into the shadows she called comfortable, allowing him to see her no matter where she went or how craftily she hid. The hunter even could even train and command an animal pet, beasts pulled from the foulest corners of Azeroth, and then send them to slay me while he disabled the abilities I relied on.
But none of them - whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter - could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.
Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one - the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access - and coin to pay - to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.
And I’m pretty sure that the warrior went through all of the work to get one specifically to kill my dear and fragile Seris.
Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best - but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon - 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper - influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody - and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question - but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.
The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe - and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.
That’s why I decided to make a warrior.
The warrior most assuredly has weaknesses. If outnumbered, he has very limited escape possibilities. Against a skilled mage adept at manipulating the frozen forces, he had almost no defense and would die a slow, painful and very cold death. A paladin, while not able to put forth the raw damage output of a warrior, could slowly kill him while restoring his own health - something the warrior cannot effectively do. Besides, I didn’t want to play a warrior to be an all-around balanced fightery-sort, no - not at all. I wanted to play a warrior for one reason:
To kill the hell out of rogues.
I never did get Icthus - the warrior - to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper - by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, I parked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams - an enemy team and a team you were on - to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.
While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating almost everything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own - rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves - and even then, none could compete with Icthus.
Except rogues.
This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did - and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior - that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 - that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.
But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude - these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.
I was the hated thing.
Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision - a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset - when effectively utilized - enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.
In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen - so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.
Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters - that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again - my Knight of the Blazing Sun - brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.
Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer - the Slayer - could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.
I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.
But none of them - whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter - could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.
Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one - the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access - and coin to pay - to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.
And I’m pretty sure that the warrior went through all of the work to get one specifically to kill my dear and fragile Seris.
Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best - but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon - 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper - influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody - and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question - but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.
The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe - and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.
That’s why I decided to make a warrior.
The warrior most assuredly has weaknesses. If outnumbered, he has very limited escape possibilities. Against a skilled mage adept at manipulating the frozen forces, he had almost no defense and would die a slow, painful and very cold death. A paladin, while not able to put forth the raw damage output of a warrior, could slowly kill him while restoring his own health - something the warrior cannot effectively do. Besides, I didn’t want to play a warrior to be an all-around balanced fightery-sort, no - not at all. I wanted to play a warrior for one reason:
To kill the hell out of rogues.
I never did get Icthus - the warrior - to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper - by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, I parked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams - an enemy team and a team you were on - to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.
While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating almost everything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own - rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves - and even then, none could compete with Icthus.
Except rogues.
This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did - and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior - that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 - that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.
But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude - these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.
I was the hated thing.
Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision - a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset - when effectively utilized - enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.
In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen - so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.
Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters - that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again - my Knight of the Blazing Sun - brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.
Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer - the Slayer - could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.
I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
A Pair of Quotes
Videogames are blamed today as much as television and telephones were blamed in the mid-20th century for the corruption of young peoples. To that, I like to turn to the following pair of quotes:
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
and,
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."
They're from Socrates.
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
and,
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."
They're from Socrates.
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