One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.
I wanted to write today about gaming communities and I was trying to think up some clever little tag for the title. Unable to come up with one of my own or remember something that somehow related to what I wanted to talk about, I went to the web and ended up finding this old Chinese proverb.
I’m not sure how much it will tie in to what I had originally planned to talk about, but I couldn’t help but think how appropriate this proverb is to online gaming.
Back when people were creating MUDs for people to play online, there was a whole lot of fumbling in the dark. For every Meridian, there were probably more than 1000 games that no more than 2 or 3 people ever even heard about. Programmers poured their heart and soul into a game that they wanted to play, and no one liked it or played it. Every rare once in a while, a fluke would occur and a game would garner a following. Once the first one or two MUDs were successful, everyone tried to copy elements to make a bigger and better game based on a tried and true method.
The same occurs in online gaming. Each game that is released copies elements of the games that have gone before and each game that is successful and sticks around owes much of their success to the games that were successful before them. If Ultima Online, Everquest, and Asheron’s Call had all had runs like Anarchy Online, Dark and Light and Vanguard, there would be no World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online. Those games are enjoying the success of the market that the pre-three (as I call them) created.
Or, to stick with the spirit of the proverb, they are sitting in the shade of the trees planted by the first MMO’s.
I guess there really isn’t any need to go in to what I was going to talk about because it will just piss me off. Earlier this week, Star Wars Galaxies reached its 4 year anniversary. As part of the celebration, the developers gave everyone an in-game gift. In typical SWG community style, the boards lit up with bitching and crying over the gift and how it didn’t have any real benefit.
Reading some of those posts reminded me why I quit reading those boards and why I quit going to the community sites of any game. Gamers are such pissy little babies. They get a free gift that the game companies didn’t even have to give them and all they can do is bitch because they wanted something better. That’s like a child who gets an XBox 360 for his birthday and throws a temper tantrum because he didn’t get an XBox 360 AND a PS3.
Anyway, fortunately, finding that proverb derailed me from my original intent because I probably would have ended up writing a 10 page essay that could basically be broken down to one sentence… which would be “Gamers need to grow the fuck up.”
Instead, I think I will go sit in the shade of that tree over there and think happy thoughts.
Hmm
There are so many jokes bouncing around in my head concerning this that they are colliding together and giving me a headache.
So, I will just keep quiet and let the beauty of the article speak for itself. Maybe later, once I clean the Dr. Pepper off my monitor and get over the pain of snarfling it through my nose while reading the article, I will have some kind of an epiphany about this.
Please let go of my hand
I’m glad that I am not the only one who feels this way.
I have now tried EQ2 again. I was excited to try it. I wanted to love it. Everything that I read about the changes got me excited to jump right in to it.
I’m already bored with it.
I have never liked, enjoyed, or supported the new trend in MMO’s where questing is the way to level. I think that it is very poor planning and very poor design. Sue me.
There are a few reasons why I do not like questing as the way to leveling.
Questing all the time takes the adventuring right out of gaming. No one cares about exploring anymore unless they have a quest for exploration. No one cares about crawling a dungeon anymore unless they have a quest for something inside that dungeon. No one cares about learning how best to balance the abilities of different classes unless they have a quest that requires they seek help from others.
I used to love grouping in EQ. You would go out into the world… maybe to a place you knew well or maybe to some completely new spot. You would look around and try to find a group. While you were in that group, you might pick a spot and camp there for a while or, in the case of a dungeon, you might start at the top and work your way down.
Was it boring? Sometimes, sure… especially if you were camped in the same spot for several days in a row. Did it get old? Absolutely. From time to time, everyone got sick of the grind.
So, why on earth would I miss it?
Back during the height of EQ, I had more friends than the friends list would allow me to have. I knew more people in more parts of the world in more guilds than I could count. I met them all while grouping. We had a common goal. We had a common purpose. Through the heat of battle, we got to know one another. We talked. We laughed. We socialized. We became friends. We never once, in my 8 years of playing, ever said, “I just got my drop. I have to go turn in this quest and get another one. Thanks for the help.”
As far as I am concerned, much of the social aspect to gaming began dying off with the release of Luclin in EQ. It had existed before, but Luclin really brought to light the “leveling treadmill.” Luclin had areas of such unbalanced experience gain that people quit adventuring and exploring. They had to level just as damn quickly as they could, so they followed the roadmap to quick leveling.
The games of today take that to an extreme. You can now level without ever having swung a sword. You can get to max level with a nice suit of pretty armor without ever having been in battle and having never met a single other person.
And one of the most significant downsides of this is that no one learns how to play. Try jumping into a raid encounter with 12 people who have never even killed a rat.
I always thought that quest experience was a bad idea with rare exceptions. If you complete a challanging multi-step quest, you should get a chunk of experience as part of your reward. If you successfully hail an NPC and then successfully hail the NPC standing right next to him, you should not get a chunk of experience.
Maybe I just don’t belong in gaming any longer. I don’t want someone to gently lead me around by the nose and tip toe me to max level. I don’t want to create a level 1 character and immediately know that I will soon be level 70 just by clicking on the right NPC’s in the right order.
I’m sorry, but I want to play. I want to be challanged. I want to meet people and join with them in battle to achieve a common goal. I want to marvel at the well-oiled raiding machine that can pull off fights so flawlessly because they actually know how to play their classes.
What the hell? While I’m wishing, I want to be rich too.
Someone needs a spanking!
I have played video games for most of my life. When I was around 6 years old, my parents bought one of those old, old, OLD pong console systems. For hours each day, I would sit there watching a square white “ball” bounce back and forth while I moved my little straight line self up and down to deflect it.
Later, my father brought home an old Apple III from his bank and I moved up to games like Wizardry and King’s Quest. Then, there was the old Atari 800 where I could waste away entire days playing Star Control, Missile Command, Space Invaders, and many other old arcade favorites.
During high school, it was computer games again… specifically, Star Flight. Then, I graduated to the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I went back to computers for Heroes of Might and Magic. I jumped back to a console for Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9. Finally, it was back to the computer again for Jedi Knight, XWing Alliance, Baldur’s Gate, and finally, MMO’s.
Today, as an adult, I exercise self-control. When I know that I have to be up at 5 in the morning to go to work, I don’t decide to join a raid that starts at 10 PM and will probably run until 1 or 2 AM. On the weekends, if I need to get some work around the house done, I do everything I need to do prior to turning on the PC.
When I was a child, I didn’t have the ability or even the desire to exercise self-restraint. I loved my games and I didn’t care what I had to miss out on in order to play them. Sleep? Who needs it. School? Pfft! Chores? I got to beat this next level.
And then…
“YOU GET YOUR ASS UP FROM THAT CHAIR AND GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK!!! I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU AGAIN, YOUNG MAN.“
“Young man.” How I dreaded hearing those two words. When I heard those two words as a child, it meant that I was a very short stop away from getting my butt whupped. As a teenager, I knew that those words meant that my weekend was about to be taken away and the console/computer was about to be disconnected and put away.
My parents disciplined me. My parents punished me. And yes, my parents spanked me. I was such a rat and got spanked so often that I am amazed that my mother didn’t break her hand and my father didn’t wear through his belts. And, I have to admit now, that I deserved nearly every single one of those spankings.
We live in a time where punishing a child for bad behavior is a thing of the past. In today’s world, punishing a child is called child abuse. In today’s world, spanking a child results in child protective services taking the child away. In today’s world, momma’s little darling can do no wrong and heaven help anyone who says otherwise.
We need to just have the United States government remove the words “In God We Trust” from all currency and replace them with the words “It Isn’t My Fault.” No one will take responsibility for anything anyway.
“I don’t like to cook, so I fed my child McDonalds 3 meals a day for 13 years and I never made him go outside and exercise. I’m suing McDonalds for $20 million because they made my child fat.”
“I don’t like saying ‘no’ to my child because I think it is mean. I have never raised my voice to him even once. I have never punished him or spanked him because that is just wrong. My parents punished and spanked me and *sniff* I needed therapy to get over it. My child never learned right or wrong from me. I’m going to sue the gun manufacturer for selling my child that gun because they didn’t warn him that shooting his classmates was against the law.”
“I don’t want to disappoint my child and I don’t want him to think I am a bad person. I let him raise himself by playing video games all of the time. I want him to do his homework, but playing his game makes him happier. I told him that he needed to log off once and do his homework and he… he… he yelled at me! I was so frightened that I never asked him to log off again. I’m going to sue the video game company for forcing my child to become addicted to gaming and I’m going to sue the school district for daring to fail my prescious little child.”
If the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 had come out when I was a kid and I asked for one, my parents would have taken one look at the price tag and laughed their asses off. If I had kicked and screamed about wanting it, I would have been grounded. If I asked for it the year it came out and it was only available on ebay for $2000, my parents would still be laughing at me to this day.
They would NEVER have bought it for me. They would have let me buy it with my own money, but there were no handouts.
If my grades had dropped, they would have taken it away whether I paid for it or not. If I had started to become belligerent with them and anti-social with everyone else, they would have taken it away and given it away to one of their friends. If I had ceased all activities and all school responsibilities in favor of playing online games, my parents would have taken away the computer, grounded me, and made me spend every spare second doing chores like raking leaves and mowing every yard in the neighborhood. If I ever threatened my parents because they didn’t want me to spend so much time playing games, they would have busted my butt and then sold my ass to the gypsies.
They never in a million years would have laid the blame for my behavior on video game companies, the fast food industry, television, the gun industry, or anything else. The words “It’s not my fault” were not in my vocabulary because if I had ever tried to use that excuse, I would have learned what it was like to dig post holes at the age of 6.
There used to be an ideal in the world called Accepting the Consequences of your own Actions.
There also used to be a cool little trend among a man and woman who decided to have children.
It was called “Parenting,” and “Parenting” was never a euphemism for “Passing the Buck.”
Damn you Murphy!
I want to kick Murphy’s ass… Murphy as in “Murphy’s Law.”
I was so excited to jump back into EQ2. Then, all this mess with my job came up. It kind of sucked the enthusiasm right out of me.
I did get the game in on Tuesday. I loaded it up Tuesday night and ran the patcher last night. I even logged on for about 5 minutes, created a new toon, and leveled it all the way to level 2. But, my heart just wasn’t in it and I logged off to continue the job search.
I hate looking for a new job. It is one of my least favorite activities of all time. Of course, there is nothing official concerning this job here, but the way that my boss is acting right now, I keep expecting the hammer to fall just any minute now.
Just as my employment concerns were reaching the height of frenzy over the last few days, I realized that the inspection of my truck expires this month, I need to change the oil in my truck, and the tags expire next month. I get paid on Friday, but my truck payment is due on Monday and rent comes due before I get another paycheck. My student loan payment is due in a few days and my electric bill is past due. My cell phone (the only phone I have) bill is due in 4 days. The loan that I took out to help pay for an emergency surgery I had (that just happened to occur during a time when I didn’t have insurance) is due in 9 days.
Add all of those factors together and I’m just not in a gaming kind of mood right now. Hell, I am hardly sleeping right now because I am too stressed out.
In an ironic twist of fates, however, I found a very interesting job posting today.
Back in 1996-1997, as I was attending my final semesters of college, I saw a job posting for an on-campus position with the universities IT department providing desktop support. That was the job that actually began my downward spiral into the IT world. It directly led to my first professional IT job during a time when I thought I was just going to jump right into graduate school. I took the job instead and I have been working in IT ever since.
Anyway, I found a job posting for that university to fill the position that would actually be the manager of that department that I started IT in a little more than 10 years ago. The job would actually be a lateral move and actually probably a little less money than I’m making now. However, there is nothing, and I do mean nothing, quite like working for a university… especially if you are someone who enjoys school as I did.
I take that back. I hated school. I loved college. I loved the college atmosphere, I loved the classes, I loved the freedom, I loved the feeling that I was finally an adult… I just loved every part of being in college. When I went to work for the college, I knew what I wanted to become. To this day, one of my dreams is to become a university history or english professor.
I don’t know what my chances are for getting this job, but it did put a little bit of a spring back into my step just finding the posting.
Plus, one of my co-workers loaned me the complete series of Firefly on DVD. Now that is some quality butt-attached-to-couch time there!
