I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
I’m Not Always Making Progress, But I’m At Least Not Getting Worse Again…
Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
Continue readingGrinding Through The Content Mines Of Final Fantasy XIV For Every Scrap Of Joy I Can Fid
In the last month (as of you reading this, anyway), I have played some 120 hours of Final Fantasy XIV. I started playing it around the start of the year by mixing it into my regular game rotation and it has slowly taken over all of my gaming time. Aside from days when I’ve gotten home from work too late to start playing a game or days when I’ve had other stuff to do (like watching episodes of TV shows in preparation for listening to my favorite media analysis podcasts, Media Club Plus and A More Civilized Age, or doing chores), I’ve spent most of my free time playing FFXIV with my friends who got into it a few months before I did or desperately trying to grind through stuff so I can at least sort of catch up to them. Or, in a few cases, grinding through the Main Scenario Quests so I can have the next group activity ready for when my friends are online. I’ve had very little time for puttering around, which is unfortunate since that is part of what I enjoyed about the game the most in the early days, but there is much to dig through in the content mines and most of the puttering activities I want to do are difficult to do when your inventory is almost always constantly full of junk that you’re holding onto because you will one day want to have it for other crafting you’re probably going to do. It’s all interconnected after all. The crafting systems, I mean. Unless you’ve got a paid account and can buy stuff on the market from other players, you need to go make all your own stuff. Which is a lot! There’s so many things you need.
Continue readingBlogging Through The Horrors
I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingGetting Caught Up In Virtual Reality In The Magical Millennium
After a couple lengthy breaks for the holidays, The Magical Millennium finally met up again! This time, we spent the entire session running through a virtual reality “escape room” type adventuring experience. The party’s goal was to find the four employees stuck in a factory where all the magitech machinery had gone haywire and then safely guide them out of the building. They had gone through a few rounds in the previous session where, thanks to their decision to split up and cover as much ground as possible, they’d found the first three employees AND a safe route to the front of the building. This time, they got an unconscious employee back on his feat, convinced the three employees they’d found that they knew a safe route out through the front door, found the fourth employee, found and fought an electric ghost, lost more faith in adults by uncovering the secrets of the cost-and-safety cutting manager, discovered they could have been shutting down the dangerous machines this whole time, and managed to get all of that done in a touch less than two in-game minutes. It was a pretty wild, busy session as I did my best to ride herd on the group, striking a careful balance between ushering people along and letting everyone have fun since I realized fairly quickly that we probably weren’t going to finish the rest of the virtual reality dungeon in this single session. I think I did a pretty good job of that, getting through twenty busy rounds of a dungeon while keeping the information flowing as the group solved the mysteries of why the factory was going haywire and briefly touched on the last secret of this gamified experience that would let them go wild in the VR Dungeon Sim they were trying to win. After all, this is a timed competition! They need to finish in first place so they can show up all their rivals and haters. At this point, I mostly just hope that they don’t overextend themselves and lose as a result of taking too many risks. They’ve got the time to be careful!
Continue readingA Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingRecovery Is A Process
Well, after pushing my limits as far as I could pretty much every work day for two weeks, my physical testing is one day from being done (well, for now. No testing is ever truly “done” and there’ll be more physical testing coming as soon as new parts show up and I’ve got so much software testing that needs doing that I’m starting to think about working on future weekends) and I am exhausted. My arms are sore, my hands are stiff, my forearm muscles have gotten much larger than I ever expected them to be, and I’m ready for another weekend of rest. And maybe another few days past the weekend. I wouldn’t mind some more time for my hands to recover, for my muscles to rest, and for my joints to get some relief. Even keeping my goals modest by sticking to fifty test cycles a day rather than aiming for my previous target of one hundred, the toll this work has taken on my body is considerable. My physical therapist, though, thinks it’s all a good thing since my problems seem to all be muscular now and that I’m as generally resilient as I am about it. I feel better each morning. I’m capable of moving in ways I couldn’t when I was on those medications. I actually got up from a laying-down position using core strength alone and It’s been a good nine months since I even attempted that. I just, you know, ache from repeating the same strenuous activity fifty times a day every day, on top of all my other laborious work. Normal stuff. Anyone else would ache as much, if not more than I do.
Continue readingSurprisingly Relevant Politics In Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve written before about games that are so big that you can find almost anything you want to look for in them. In games like Dragon Age: Origins, it leaves you with a game that isn’t really saying anything or that buries the things it would like to say in smaller chunks of storytelling so that you, the all-important player, can make whatever choices you’d like and still wind up doing some form of the “heroic” thing in the end. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it never says anything but presents you with enough opportunities for you to say something about what you’re seeing that you will find a story emerging from your experience with the game. I’ve always preferred the latter, where the game relies on setting things up for you to discover or lend your voice to, because all of my experiences with things like the former have left me feeling satisfied with my video game time but unfulfilled. I’ve never really blamed games like that because how the hell are you supposed to write a story that can account for that much player choice without sacrificing a lot of the direction you’d like or rendering most player choice meaningless? How could you craft a story meant to have wide appeal that still makes a stand about what is good and what is bad in a way that will surely be alienating to some people? Well, Final Fantasy XIV does it mostly by (so far) taking a few weak but potentially alientating stands on some issues and letting everyone you skip all the cutscenes you’d like (with a few exceptions, but none of those ever seem to overlap with a story that has something to say beyond “hero good, villain bad”). Which I find incredibly surprising now that I’m digging into more and more of the story following the story that plays out over the first fifty levels of your character in the game given how it abjectly refused to do anything of the sort early on.
Continue readingFinding Our First Clues In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
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