All alone and happy in Azeroth

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Although it’s updated somewhat sporadically, Scott Miller’s Game Matters is one of the more thought-provoking game blogs out there. While catching up on my reading there, I came across an interesting post suggesting that World of Warcraft‘s extreme popularity is due at least in part to the fact that almost alone among massively-multiplayer games, it can be played alone. Says Miller:

There’s one overriding reason I played WoW, while I never played previous MMOs: I could solo all the way to the top. Not once did I group to enter an instance. Occasionally I grouped with players in the same area doing the same quest, and occasionally with a friend to share a quest, but 95 percent of my experience was as a solo player. And that’s how I prefer it. I like to be able to jump into the game and play without waiting to form a group, getting right down to the business of fun.

It’s a relief to see somebody else admit that, because I’ve had a similar experience with WoW and have wondered how common it is. For a multiplayer game, WoW works surprisingly well as a single-player game. I enjoy grouping up with other players a bit more than Miller apparently does–when the teamwork comes together, the experience of conquering a tough dungeon as part of a group is a real thrill–but I confess I’ve rather guiltily enjoyed a lot of the game without interacting much with my fellow players.

Miller then asks the obvious question: if you’re going to play the game solo anyway, why not stick with single-player-only games like Morrowind and its ilk, and avoid paying the montly Warcraft fee? It may sound strange if you’ve not experienced it, but his answer is dead on: it’s somehow just more fun when the world is populated by “real people,” even if your interaction with said real people is quite limited. Crossing paths with other lone adventurers in the far corners of Azeroth, making my way through the teeming, diverse crowds of Orgrimmar, and knowing that the potions I’m selling at the auction house are being bought and used by other real people–there’s just an intangible thrill to it all. There’s a hard-to-define depth and sense of immersion that simply isn’t there in even the most elaborate single-player games.

So it’s good to know that on those days when I just don’t feel like interacting with other players–when I just want to hike off into the Badlands without having to chat it up with guildmates, when I don’t feel like spending an hour organizing an expedition into the Wailing Caverns–I’m not alone. Solo players of World of Warcraft, unite keep goin’ it alone!

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Some miscellanea: kung-fu fighters and not-so-scary government conspiracies

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I was in Chicago last week for a conference–and while the conference was reasonably fun, my annual trip to Games Plus was even more so. Each year, as a reward for surviving several days’ worth of networking and schmoozing at the conference, I travel to Games Plus to browse the aisles of that gaming Mecca.

My acquisition this year was Weapons of the Gods, a wuxia martial-arts game set in mythic China (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). This is one of those games I purchased at least partly so that I can boast that my gaming library includes it–my game bookshelf (OK, make that bookshelves) contains RPGs covering most every genre known to man–fantasy, sci-fi, horror, western, pulp, samurai, and various combinations thereof), but nothing that would be of much help should a group of angry gamers burst into my living room and demand that I run a mythic China RPG right now. (Hey, it could happen!)

Of course, I had brought along some RPG reading material to the conference to help me survive through the several days until my Games Plus trip. My evening reading this year consisted of Conspiracy X and the new d20 version of Dark*Matter, both of them set in the government/alien/conspiracy genre and quite clearly based heavily on The X-Files.

Both are great games, but is it just me or is the whole government-conspiracy angle decidedly less compelling than it was a decade ago? Back in the early 1990s, it was perhaps shocking to learn, when confronted with a mysterious event or sinister cover-up, that The Government was responsible. Imagine, our own government doing something shady behind the scenes! These days, I’m so jaded that I’d be shocked to hear that the government isn’t responsible for a given sinister conspiracy. Whether or not the government-conspiracy angle is still scary, I may soon find out–both CX and D*M are on the list as potential candidates for my annual Halloween Game Day.

In the meantime, I’ll try and hark back to the day when “trust no one” wasn’t a perfectly reasonable way to approach politics, government, and everyday life…

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It makes no sense

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I can certainly identify with these journalists, faced with the challenge of making sense out of David Lynch’s latest movie:

Asked if the film was supposed to make sense, Lynch told a news conference following a press screening: “It’s supposed to make perfect sense.” […]

Lynch was in no mood to help journalists fathom the film’s meaning.

When asked to explain the appearance of three actors wearing rabbits’ heads, one of whom stands in the corner doing the ironing, the 60-year-old replied: “No, I can’t explain that.”

I can appreciate Lynch’s desire to not out and explain the symbolism behind his movie before mainstream viewers get a chance to try figuring it out for themselves. But I think I’m going to have to side with the bewildered journalists here. I can testify that Lynch’s films, while interesting in a what-the-heck-is-going-on sort of way, definitely do not “make perfect sense,” and if Lynch is under the impression that they do, then somebody’s confused, and it ain’t just the people watching his movies. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are two of the least comprehensible films I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve seen some truly noble and tortured attempts online to wring coherence out of both of those films, but to little avail.

I love a good perplexing book or movie that requries concentration, discussion, and even research to interpret. Some of my favorite such stories are those that, even after I’ve read and understood them, still leave me with the nagging sense that I haven’t really uncovered everything the creator intended me to find–those are books and films I can revisit years down the road, always finding new bits and pieces of meaning. But if you don’t provide the audience the contextual clues they need to even begin deciphering your work of art, then you might as well just be making the film for yourself, because nobody else has the slightest clue what you’re trying to say. Maybe Mulholland Drive makes perfect sense to David Lynch, but I’ll go ahead and bet that 99% of its viewers were left scratching their heads when the credits rolled. He’s certainly created something that’s vaguely impressive, but a work of art that speaks to people? Not so much.

So go ahead and keep making movies, Mr. Lynch. But try not to act quite so surprised when nobody seems to know what the heck you’re trying to say. The rest of us are busy entertaining ourselves with much less artsy fare–things like Arrested Development, with such populist and unsubtle scenes as this:

Rita: Is that a story?
Maeby: Not yet. It doesn’t have an ending. He’s in LA, she’s in Japan–how do I get these two characters together?
Rita: Maybe they could walk.
Maeby: Across the ocean?
Rita: If it’s not too deep.
Maeby: No… deep is good. People are gonna say “What the hell just happened? I better say I like it,” ’cause nobody wants to seem stupid.
Rita: I like it!

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l33t L1nuX haxxor

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Last week, I managed to get XGL running in Linux. (Given the infamous difficulty–at least in my personal experience–involved in successfuly implementing anything video card-related in Linux, I think this qualifies me as some sort of extreme hacker.) At the moment, XGL basically adds a number of nifty features and eye candy to the Linux desktop. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it looks really nice, and several of the features are right on par with the Mac desktop features they’re clearly imitating. Other goodies include some slick-looking window animations and assorted 3d-ish effects. Here’s a few screenshots, of the fancy desktop-switching eye candy and the OS X Expose-style window selector respectively:

I don’t think it’s going to have Mac users tripping over their discarded MacBooks in a frantic rush to embrace Linux–at least, not until XGL takes less than a days’ worth of tweaking to install and get running. But it’s certainly nice to have a Linux desktop that looks as nifty-keen as a Mac desktop for a change!

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Sex and babies and ECs, oh my!

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note: I’m taking a break from my usual posts about Warcraft and other frivolities to offer some Social Commentary. Proceed with caution.

I saw a blog post the other day that bothered me. I wouldn’t comment on it, but over the last year I have actually seen more than one post/article along the same lines, and feel obliged to put some thoughts down in writing. I won’t link to the blog post that prompted me to write, because I want to avoid picking on a particular person here.

What has been bothering me are posts and essays–I’ve seen at least three recently along these lines–that describe a situation in the poster’s life like this:

a) Poster has sex, during which birth control fails, making pregnancy a possibility.

b) Poster has a reason for not wanting a pregnancy. This ranges from having a medical condition that would make pregnancy difficult, to simply not wanting to be inconvenienced by a pregnancy.

c) It’s the weekend or late at night, so poster goes through the local phonebook calling pharmacies looking for a physician to provide her with emergency contraceptives. She is unable to find anyone who, after learning that she was not raped, is willing to do so.

d) Unable to find a physician without moral qualms about said contraceptives, the poster feels like she’s being judged and punished for having sex outside of wedlock.

e) She posts angrily on her blog, citing her difficulty in attaining emergency contraceptives (hereafter ECs) as evidence that the woman-hating conservative fascist theocracy is finally upon us. Outrage at this latest blow against personal freedom spreads across the internet.

The first thing that strikes me as I read this story is this: people seem to have forgotten that pregnancy is a natural, intended result of sex. Whatever other benefits it may have, its main basic purpose is to produce babies. Yet this does not seem to stop people from engaging in sexual activity and then being totally taken aback when pregnancy results. I realize that they were using birth control, and it failed; but I’m pretty sure that most everybody knows that birth control is hardly guaranteed to work 100% of the time. Hey, I know that, and I’m a prudish reformed conservative male; certainly enlightened liberal feminists know it too.

Why am I babbling about a highly personal subject like this? Because it bothers me that somebody who really doesn’t want to get pregnant–whether for medical reasons or personal whim–is engaging in sexual activity with only the mildest thought apparently given to the possibility of pregnancy. Different types of birth control have varying rates of success; and there are medical procedures you can undergo to reduce or eliminate the chance of pregnancy if you are unable or unwilling to go through a pregnancy. But instead of taking advantage of these, the couple in question decided to have sex with a prone-to-failure method of birth control and then expect society to provide them with a way to fix things after the fact when–surprise–sex results in pregnancy.

The problem with relying on society to get you out of your little fix is, of course, that a large chunk of society considers the sorts of ECs sought by this person to be uncomfortably close to abortion. (And yes, I’m aware that there’s a big moral gray area between abortion and different types of contraceptive; but people are within their rights to hold their own convictions.) But in our story above, the poster finds it completely unreasonable that a doctor would have moral qualms about prescribing an EC on short notice to a random person. Society has no right to restrict a woman’s reproductive rights in any way or tell her what to do with her body, the argument goes–but the same society should force doctors to violate their consciences and prescribe medical supplies they find morally troublesome, all because somebody wanted to have sex without taking adequate steps to deal with the (very predictable) consequences.

It is often suggested by certain feminist and pro-choice activists that American women live under big restrictions on their reproductive rights. Stories like the one above are cited as evidence that American society unfairly limits the choices available to women who seek control over their own sexuality–hasn’t society, by not making ECs readily available to this person, denied her the right to choose whether or not to have a baby? I have never really understood this line of reasoning, because it seems to me that Americans have an absolutely enormous amount of sexual and reproductive freedom. You can have sex with anyone you want, however you want, using whatever form of birth control you want. When you get to the point of calling around at midnight trying to find a pharmacist who will give you ECs because your birth control failed, you have already made a whole lot of free, unhindered choices. At that point, you’re not asking for the right to choose–you’re just asking society to sweep away the results of your earlier choices.

I probably sound quite unsympathetic to this couple. The truth is, I’d be willing to lend societal help to a pregnant woman in a truly difficult situation–rape, extreme poverty, dire medical conditions, a clear inability to provide for a child–even if it meant compromising a bit on my generally pro-life beliefs. Some people really are trapped by life circumstances and are denied the ability to make choices about their future. But if you have the freedom and opportunity to avert pregnancy and simply choose not to do so, don’t expect anyone to violate their conscience to save you from the consequences of your own choices. You’ve lost the moral high ground.

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Return of the critical hit tables

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Looks like Beyond the Mountains of Madness isn’t the only classic game book being reprinted this year. Iron Crown is releasing Rolemaster Classic, a cleaned-up version of Rolemaster 2nd edition!

Rolemaster 2nd ed. was the system of choice during much of my early gaming years, and I have fond memories of it. I tried to keep up with the later editions of Rolemaster as they were published throughout the late 1990s, but my enthusiasm for the game slowly waned. I’m not sure if I just got dumber over the years or if Rolemaster got more complicated, but I swear, some of the later Rolemaster editions managed to take rules that I already understood, and make me stop understanding them. I’m sure somebody out there understood how the heck combat rounds worked in the Rolemaster Standard System rulebook, but it sure wasn’t me.

I haven’t cracked open my old RM2 books in many years–mostly because I’m afraid that I’ll find them incomprehensible, and that would confirm the “I got dumber” theory. But when the reprinted version hits store shelves, you can bet I’ll be standing in line, making my saving throw resistance roll vs. Purchase More Unnecessary Game Books.

Kudos to Iron Crown for reprinting an old favorite.

(And while we’re on the topic of the Good Old Days, just this week I picked up the new d20 Dark*Matter sourcebook, also a reprint of a classic game book. 2006 is shaping up to be an awfully nostalgic year.)

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Resurrecting the Mountains of Madness

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In my last post, I lamented that my youthful days of marathon gaming sessions were probably over, and resigned myself to a roleplaying future consisting largely of one-shot games and very short campaigns. But there is a part of me that secretly hopes against all odds that one day, a wealthy Patron of the Arts will shower me with so much money that I can quit my day job and devote all of my energy to running one monstrous, many-years-long roleplaying campaign.

I already have the book that I’m going to use to run that epic Campaign to End All Campaigns. It’s a sanity-blasting 400+ page Call of Cthulhu campaign called Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and it’s one of the best gaming reads you’ll find. I have no idea what would happen if I actually tried to run this beast, in which the PCs take part in a long and almost certainly doomed expedition to Antarctica. Based on this guy’s experience running it, I suspect it would both be awesome, and would permanently cure me of the desire to play another roleplaying game ever again.

I exaggerate a bit, I suppose. But still, I would love to run BtMoM sometime. What’s prevented me from doing so to date is simply the vast amount of time that would be required to run it; it’s not the sort of campaign you want to start and then drop partway through. Also, having read through it a few times, I’m not sure how even the most benevolent GM could get the PCs through the first half of the campaign alive, let alone all the way to the bitter end.

I mention this all because Chaosium has announced that they’re reprinting the long-out-of-print BtMoM in a nice (and nicely expensive) hardcover, and that’s got me salivating to once take this down off the bookshelf and fantasize about running it. Running such a thing would be my crowning achievement, and a worthy way to go out.

It’ll never happen, of course… unless you, dear reader, are a wealthy Patron of the Arts looking to finance the last hurrah of a bitterly aging gamer. I’ll try to keep my hope alive while I await your offer.

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