History of the game

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Over the last few months, Shannon Appelcline has been writing a column I’ve found really fascinating–A Brief History of Game, a history of some of the great companies of roleplaying history. Some of the great game companies of yesteryear are still around, while others are long dead and buried, but they all contributed something to the hobby.

Of particular interest to me was the two-part history of Iron Crown Enterprises (part 1, part 2)–that company was responsible for much of my gaming enjoyment when I first got into this hobby, and I’ve long tried to piece together from scattered internet rumors the details of their rise, fall, and subsequent rise again. Interesting stuff–and I’m glad somebody’s writing it all down for posterity.

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Burning crusade… of nerds

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Where were you at midnight on Monday night? If your answer is anything other than “standing outside the local Gamestop in freezing-cold weather waiting to pick up a copy of the World of Warcraft expansion,” you’re a better person than I. Behold:

The lucky few at the front of the line. You can’t see him very clearly, but the guy in the bottom left is, indeed, dressed like a Warcraft character:

From my vantage point, way toward the back of the line. Who knew that this mid-sized midwestern town was home to so many WoW fanatics?

Victory at last! My copy of The Burning Crusade in hand, I drive home to fire it up and create a hot female blood elf character.

The experience of standing in line in the snow did not quite match up to Gamestop’s enthusiastic description of the event as a “release party.” I, at least, spent more time shivering in the cold and questioning my own sanity than I did actually partying. Nevertheless, I had a good time; it was fun interacting a bit with some fellow nerds in a social environment where conversation filler consists of questions like “So, is your druid spec’ed out as a feral druid, or as a healer?” rather than “So, mighty crazy weather we’ve been having lately!”

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Violence and bloodshed and videogames, oh my

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Good and thorough thoughts on video games and real-life violence over at the Empires of Steel developer’s diary. (A week or two ago, I was privileged to discuss this very topic with Mr. EoS Developer over a cup of coffee.) He’s tracked down some statistics about murder and other violent crime rates since Doom and its ilk kicked off the “violent video game” genre–go check it out. As they say, it’s hard to argue with the facts.

Video game violence and its relationship to real-world violence is a topic I feel strongly about, but I’ve resisted the urge to get on the soapbox here about it. This is a topic where I genuinely feel that people on both sides of the argument have something worthwhile to say–the relationship between game violence and real-life violence is correlative at best, but on the other hand there really is some disturbingly anti-social behavior depicted in games and I find it hard to believe that doesn’t affect our cultural soul, if not our crime rates.

But for over a decade now, the entire debate has been mired in the increasingly ridiculous debate over whether games “cause” real-life violence. Until we can get past this overly-simple idea, we’ll never have a meaningful discussion about the questions we should be asking, and which have a hope of leading to productive answers.

Why does gaming culture purchase and sometimes even celebrate games with extreme violence and anti-social content? Why does the gaming media often promote and review ultra-violent games without asking serious questions about their social value? What can the game community do to draw more attention to the many, many non-disturbingly-violent games out there? Can, and should, the game industry/community encourage developers to consider the social value of their games before making them? If gamers are willing to buy ultra-violent games, does mean that it’s morally acceptable to make those games, since developers are just meeting market demand? If parents are seemingly failing to perform due diligance when it comes to the violent video games their kids are playing, is it reasonable to ask the government to intervene? If violent video games do not cause crime, do they have any other negative societal impact?

Those are questions I’d like to see asked. But in the public/political sphere, at least, everybody seems to be content to have the same old “Video games turn your kids into killers!” “No they don’t!” “Yes they do!” argument. Wake me up in twenty years, when video games are either illegal, or we’ve progressed past this pointless bickering.

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Pay it forward

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Things were looking grim for my undead warlock in World of Warcraft. I was out of spell components and thus could not summon the familiar upon whom I depended for protection. I was far, far away from the nearest friendly Horde outpost, and had inadvertently stumbled upon an enemy Alliance encampment. In the course of escaping from it, I was spotted by guards and flagged as “player vs. player”–which meant that any Alliance player who spotted me (and deep in Alliance territory as I was, there were plenty of them roaming around) could attack and kill me.

I was not pleased.

I began to travel back in the direction of “home,” trying my best to stay hidden behind trees and to keep off the main roads. If an Alliance player spotted me out here I was dead meat.

Seconds later, an Alliance player appeared atop the hill in front of me. Many levels higher than me, riding a mount that could outrun me without breaking a sweat, and covered from head to toe in gleaming red battle armor. He saw me, dismounted, and sprinted towards me.

I knew I had a zero chance of survival in a fight. I began to run away, then stopped and turned to face my soon-to-be killer. If I was going to get killed in one blow, at least I would take it like a man, not spend my final undignified moments scrabbling futilely to escape.

The Alliance player approached, stepped into combat range. I waited for it. He moved right up to me.

And gave me a hug.

And then he was gone. I stood for a moment, half-expecting the killing blow to come after all. When it didn’t… I turned and ran for home.

Anonymous Alliance player… thank you. In your honor, I swear I will show mercy to the next Alliance player I catch in similar circumstances.

[Yes, there’s a ‘hug’ command in World of Warcraft.]

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Batman Meets Rainbow Brite: the beauty and horror of internet fan fiction

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I spent a few hours the other day reading Transformers fan fiction.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, “I always knew he would come to this point… but I hoped he wouldn’t.” And for the rest of you, yes: I am talking about fan-written fiction based on the world of the Reagan-era transforming Robots In Disguise–Optimus Prime, Megatron, and the whole crew. But I’d like to think aloud a bit about this topic, because I have a dark confession to make: fan fiction, whether it’s about Voltron or G.I. Joe or the X-Files, fascinates me.

It doesn’t fascinate me in the sense that I particularly love reading it, although I’ve read some pieces of fan fiction that were enjoyable. Some fan fiction is, of course, quite wretched, for various reasons; much of it is badly written, and some of it exposes you to sanity-shattering ideas and images that will remain seared into your psyche until the merciful hand of Death finally ends the horror. (You know what I’m talking about; and if you don’t… cherish your innocence while it lasts. It is, alas, too late for me.)

But I don’t want to talk about the really bad stuff. The sort of fan fiction that interests me is the serious kind: the reasonably well-written, often lengthy, often surprisingly entertaining stories that people write in an earnest effort to explore and add depth to the characters and places of imaginary worlds not their own.
The question that always springs to my mind upon coming across fan art–whether it’s a story, a piece of artwork, or a song–is: Why didn’t this obviously talented person put their skills to use creating art that is their own?

Why are they pouring time and energy into writing stories set in, say, the Star Wars universe, when they have no real ownership of (and certainly no legal right to) that universe? Why spend hours sketching elaborate pictures of He-Man characters, when you could be drawing up fantastic images of your own creation? Why write long, introspective essays about the effects of war on the Decepticon Soundwave’s relationship with his family, when the same story with the names changed would be a perfectly respectable novella that isn’t tied to a cheesy (and copyrighted) ’80s cartoon universe? (Wait—Transformers can have children? But how do they *EMERGENCY BRAIN SHUTDOWN*)

My usual reaction–and I think the standard reaction–to fan fiction (and art, and music, etc.) is to see it as the result of stunted or broken creativity. These fans have trapped their own considerable creative potential in a box built by somebody else. They lack “true” creativity that would inspire them to create their own characters and worlds, and so they squander what artistic vision they have on other people’s work. This is an especially frustrating observation because some of the fan fiction/art out there is really, genuinely, good. A lot of it is written or drawn by people who, judging by the quality of their fan art, really could make a go of it in “real” art or literature, if they would only try. (Somehow, I don’t picture most fan fiction authors also writing a lot of original material at the same time, although this could be a false impression.)

But I find this reaction unsatisfying (and unduly harsh). For one thing, it’s fairly strict and demanding in its definition of “true creativity.” Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that there are different kinds of creativity out there, and that some people are extremely creative but would simply rather put that creativity to use refining others’ works, rather than “reinventing the wheel.” This creative eye spots (or invents) depth and nuance in characters and places that the rest of us casually dismiss. I don’t know why somebody would look at Soundwave (the Decepticon who transforms into a cassette player–admit it, you remember it well) and think “I’d really love to explore the emotional havoc the Transformers war is wreaking on his family life.” But hey, the end result is a story that’s strangely interesting and certainly adds depth to a cartoon character otherwise saddled with a completely one-dimensional personality. That might be a bit weird, but it’s not a bad thing, and if it’s either Soundwave fan fiction or no creative output at all from this amateur writer, I’ll take the fan fiction.

One of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate the odd creative value of fan fiction is that I see a lot of this type of creativity in myself, specifically as it’s evidenced in the way I play roleplaying games. I love to run roleplaying games, and as any gamer will tell you, it takes at least a modicum of creativity and storytelling ability to run a successful roleplaying game. But I have the hardest time in the world coming up with my own game and adventure ideas from scratch–I almost just can’t do it. After 15ish years of gaming, if I were given a blank notebook and instructions to write a cool game adventure, I would probably just stare blankly at the pages for a while before finally producing a stale and unoriginal variation of something I’d seen or read before.

But give me a pre-written adventure–where somebody else has sketched out an outline of the adventure and its characters–and I’m golden. I love taking adventures others have written and reworking them to fit my preferences and the interests of the friends with whom I’ll be gaming. I’ll often wind up practically rewriting the entire adventure–changing characters, locations, plotlines, dialogue, and everything else to fit my interests. Why, if I can competently rewrite and run somebody else’s adventure, don’t I just write my own from scratch? Because for some reason, I need a creative groundwork laid out for me before I can unleash my own creativity.

That’s why I’m hesitant to look down on fan art of any sort: it’s genuine creativity at work, and just because it’s using non-original ideas as a launching pad doesn’t lessen the value of the work put into it. It may be that this is an incomplete or underdeveloped creativity, but I suspect it’s more likely just a different creativity. It’s creativity that works best when the initial groundwork has been done, leaving the artist free to sketch out their own vision atop that foundation.

Let’s face it: your meticulously-written epic about the romantic tension between Storm Shadow and the Baroness isn’t going to launch you into the halls of literary fame, but if it’s the story your Muse demands of you… well, get out there and get writing.

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Don't take away my turn!

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Over the holidays I played a number of different boardgames with friends and relatives, and in the course of doing so I had a personal revelation of sorts:

I really don’t like it when a game makes you “lose a turn” as a gameplay penalty or obstacle.

This realization came to me after I played in several games where being forced to lose a turn was a routine penalty for unlucky dice rolls or falling afoul of other players. Used sparingly, it’s not a big deal to skip a turn every now and then (and in some games it is a logical gameplay element), but in one game I lost four turns in a row due entirely to bad luck–that’s about twenty minutes of sitting and watching other people play the game you showed up to participate in.

So yes, I’m bitter about that experience, but I would prefer that games try to find some other way of penalizing you than basically making you sit in the corner for a turn. An in-game penalty should make winning more difficult; it doesn’t need to take away the fun of actually playing the game. Take away my game tokens, make me go back to Start, lower my score, make me lose a few cards… but please, don’t make me stop playing!

(On a similar note, I’m a big fan of games that make sure that every player gets to “do something,” however minor, during every other player’s turn; even if all you’re doing is drawing a card or rolling a die while the other player takes their turn, it’s more fun than waiting for five minutes for your turn to roll around again. But I’ll save that rant for another day.)

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Happy New Year; or, a watched Battletech miniature never dries

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Happy New Year! Now that the holiday craziness is over, it’s back to Real Life (and, hopefully, regular posting).

So what did you do to celebrate New Year’s Eve? A night on the town, perhaps, waiting for the ball to drop at midnight? Or maybe you got together for an evening of bacchanalian festivities with friends and loved ones? This being a blog about games, you can probably guess that my New Year’s Eve was spent doing something game-related. Truly, what can match the excitement of a holiday evening spent painting Battletech miniatures? Yes, my friends, that is what I was doing while you were out drinking too much and kissing your significant other at the stroke of midnight. Here’s the result:

It’s the first Battletech mini I’ve painted in well over a decade, and I’m sure it shows. Nevertheless, I’m pleased with how it turned out. The mech is a Kurita Dragon, an unremarkable but solid workhorse, chosen for my first paint attempt because it was simple to assemble. The color scheme is for deployment in a forest-type environment. As you may note, I used a very diluted black wash to give it a battle-worn appearance–what’s supposed to look like carbon scoring, smokestains, and rust marks. That effect didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped (remember, it’s my first time!), but I learned a few lessons for use on the next mech (an Exterminator, already primed and ready to be painted).

I didn’t spend my mini-painting holiday evening alone, of course. While my wife happily played The Sims in the computer room, I was sharing my painting workbench (aka the dining room table) with my friend Chad, who painted several incredibly cool Star Fleet Battles miniatures in the time it took me to paint the engine housing on the Dragon. Chad’s masterpiece of the evening was a very nice-looking Gorn cruiser–it was really fun to watch it come to life as he painted. (Check out pictures of Chad’s work at the above links.)

All in all, a fitting way to greet the new year. I hope 2007 is already shaping up to be a good year for you, and I hope that your list of New Year’s resolutions includes at least one pledge to do more gaming this year!

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Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heavenly birth

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How can you not love a book that presents, with a perfectly straight face, the following two lines

The man gaped at her. “Are the apes after Kenny? I knew something like this would happen.” — p. 134

Doyle kept his face impassive, but his mind was racing. God help us, it’s Romany again, he realized. What in hell is the man up to here? What can he hope to gain by brainwashing Lord Byron and turning him loose to make semi-treasonous speeches? — p. 203

Both quotes are from Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, a time-travel novel that was definitely one of the best books I read this year. A very fun read, if you’re looking for something entertaining and a bit light-hearted. Really, I can’t recommend it enough.

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