Lest ye think I’ve been writing

Oh, nay.

I’ve been playing Globs, an insanely addictive game in which you merge with colored spheres by flipping to their color. The goal is to clear the board in 25 moves or less, and — here’s the real hook — your score doubles for the moves you have left over under 25. The piddly 2 points per sphere you get as a base score is nothing; it’s the geometrical growth of your score that drives gameplay. The board starts relatively small, but by level six you have 14 by 14 grid. At 14 by 14, you have to either be lucky or put in some brainpower to clear the board in under 25 moves.

The color of MADNESS!

In my defense, I do come home tired at the end of the day, and it’s tough overcoming the potential energy hill to get into writing mode. It’s much easier to play Globs. Easier to play Globs than to play World of Warcraft. Amazing, eh?

I’ve been trying to crack the top ten on the daily high scores list. To do so, you need a score at least in the quadrillions (which, amazingly, you can reach by level 20 with some skill and luck). And I finally managed to do that just a moment ago, only to discover that the high scores list is disabled. I wonder if that’s enough to kill my addiction?

The game has been permeating my brain. A few days ago I found myself in bed in the middle of the night in a limbo state, half asleep, half awake, and I was flipping my own color to merge with the bed, the floor, the room . . . It might have been interesting to merge with the universe, all very Zen of me, but I was up to merging with the room when I realized what I was doing and kicked myself out of bed and had a good pee. The Buddha peeing beside me was having a good laugh at my expense, so I elbowed him in the ribs and he peed all over his own bare feet. Touché!

D.

Buy WoW gold and support your Chinese overlords

It makes sense, in that inevitable gut-wrenching way, like when you first find out that poor people are selling their kidneys for cash: in China, prisoners are forced to farm gold in World of Warcraft in order to make some extra cash for their jailors.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.

Later in the article, the writer notes that there are over 100,000 full-time gold farmers in China alone. I’m betting that Blizzard wishes they had seen this coming, and had planned some way to take a piece of the action (over and above their monthly user fee).

We’re on our way to San Diego today, so just a quickie, folks. See ya.

D.

Best free timesuck ever.

The Universe Sandbox takes just a couple of minutes to download and install, and then you are God. Give the Moon Saturn’s rings and see what happens to ’em. Give the Earth the mass of the Sun and see what happens to the solar system (I was shocked to see Mars getting ejected from the solar system within a few days’ time). Create your own solar system. Learn first-hand the basics of orbital mechanics.

And it’s free.

This reminded me a bit of an old simulation game, Sim Earth, that I played back in the early nineties. You could control many different parameters of early Earth, then let time scroll forward to see if life would or would not develop. Or (if I recall correctly) you could start with present-day Earth, monkey with the variables, and see how long it took to turn our world into a sterile ball of mud. Fun! The graphics sucked by modern standards, so I’ve often wished someone would take the bother to update it.

Universe Sandbox, for that matter, does not have the most amazing graphics . . . inasmuch as the universe is a drop-dead gorgeous place, so it would have been cool to capture that angle. Still, what do you expect for free? And you do get to play God, after all.

What I’ve been doing: working. Sleeping. And playing World of Warcraft all over again.

I’ve reinvented myself as a noob. There was a time when I wasn’t a WoW noob, but I’m definitely one now. Yesterday, I found a very kind and long-suffering Level 70 shaman to take me through Shadowfang Keep. I should have just followed along, staying out of his way and sucking up loot, but no. I had to help. And I got myself killed, and THEN I forgot that this shaman could have resurrected me, but I forgot that too. And when I finally got back to the dungeon, I got lost and he had to come back and lead me through all over again.

He was more than gentlemanly through the whole thing, but I felt like such a doofus. It made me remember why I like soloing so much.

D.

In defense of grinding

From Wikipedia:

Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or boring tasks not pertaining to the story line of the game. The most common usage is in the context of MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Tibia, Lineage and Dragon Quest IX in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over again to advance their character level to be able to access newer content.

It’s not unusual to hear someone using the term grinding in a pejorative sense. The implication is that killing fifty furbolgs is not an interesting or particularly useful way to spend one’s evening. I would counter that ridding the virtual world of fifty furbolgs makes that world a better place, at least for the fraction of a minute it takes for those furbolgs to respawn (randy bastards that they are), and thus good for one’s virtual soul.

Some critics argue that grinding reflects laziness and/or a failure of imagination on the part of the game designers. I disagree. I feel that I’m closest to an otherworldly in-game experience when I’m grinding, since grinding is so much like real life. Quest-design, now THAT is where laziness and failure of imagination plays a huge role. Escort quests drive me nuts, particularly when the NPC* I am escorting purposefully blunders into enemies, can’t or won’t defend himself, and has next-to-nothing in the way of hit points. For example, I’m currently stuck on an escort quest in the game Bully, wherein I play an obnoxious punk who would sooner head-butt, melvin, and wet-willy you than ask you for help on his algebra homework. He has to escort one of the chubby nerds from the library to a bathroom. Easy, right? Wrong. There’s a timer, so if you don’t do it fast enough, the nerd will wet himself. And it seems like every other bully at school wants a piece of him, so you have to fight off something like five other guys to get your nerd to the bathroom. The nerd has zilch in the way of hit points, and the bullies all target him, not me.

I haven’t succeeded yet. He keeps getting knocked out, or he wets himself, or both, and then I’m time-warped back to the library and we have to do it all over again. I’m not sure if I’m trapped in his hell or he’s trapped in mine, but it’s not fun.

And then there are the countless World of Warcraft quests that involve killing X number of (fill in name of beast here) to recover Y number of (body parts). You would think killing one zhevra (think zebra) would yield four hooves. Strangely no. Killing named NPCs, destroying plans, lighting signal fires etc. are all variants of this quest type. Quests that are neither escort quests nor “do this action X times” are few and far between.

Grinding, however — that’s honest work. Sometimes a guy wants to nothing more than snipe furbolgs all night long, you know?

D.

*Non-player character, AKA “meat” or “wand-fodder.”

World of Warcraft, four years later

I couldn’t help myself. The craving was too strong. It’s just to sight-see, I told myself; the memories of Azeroth were as solid in my mind as real world vistas. And Best Buy, like any good pusher, was offering my first fix cheap: two dollars for a fourteen-day trial.

I had stopped playing for different reasons than Jake. My son, if I’m not mistaken*, stopped playing out of boredom. For me it was frustration. My main character, She-Witch**, had reached the level cap and had progressed about one or two levels toward the New and Improved level cap. I’ve always preferred to solo, mostly since when I team with others they get annoyed with my slowness, and soloing had become damn near impossible. I got tired of getting killed. I got tired of watching my leveling bar progress only a millimeter per hour, or something ridiculous like that.

But over the intervening years, my mind keeps returning to various areas of Azeroth and I’ve realized that I miss it. I won’t be able to take the grand tour as I would like to do, since my now-level-10 hunter troll would get her troll ass handed back to her in many of the medium-level areas, not to mention the high level areas where I imagine a passing mouse would kill her with a tail-flick. But I can still get a taste.

The environment has changed in a number of subtle ways. Jake and I were wondering how a seven-year-old game would manage to compete with the better graphics of newer MMORPGs like Rift, and the answer is, they’ve been updating it. Not only that, but they’ve been tweaking the game constantly, so towns look different, quests have changed, and whole areas are vastly modified thanks to the Cataclysm (which I haven’t bothered to learn the history of at the WoW Wiki). Oh, look, southwestern Durotar is a swamp! Cool!

Some things never changed. I still get challenged to duels by numskulls who have nothing better to do. Don’t they know that it’s all about leveling? And grinding is still grinding and will always be grinding. But even grinding has its merits. Let’s see, I could be killing quillboars by the dozens or I could be reading article after article on Cracked. It’s all a matter of what you’re in the mood for.

Will I purchase a full account once my fourteen days runs out? I don’t know yet. Maybe. It’s a question of whether I’ll get WoW out of my system, or, as with any junk physiology, WoW will have taken over my system.

D.

*He hates it when I misrepresent him in the blog.

**The name She-Bitch (not misogyny, I promise — it’s a reference to Army of Darkness) had either been taken or had been deemed inappropriate. I can’t recall which.

Yet another post that none of you will read

. . . or at least, you’ll stop reading once you know it’s about gaming.

But I have to say it. Portal 2 is freaking awesome. I’m only about 30 minutes into it and I’ve already gone back to replay the first thirty minutes, because the writing and voice acting is just that good. I didn’t want to miss anything, and I’m glad I went back, because you know what? I missed a lot of things my first time through.

It’s probably way too early to say this, but I think Valve has achieved what I never would have thought possible: creating a sequel that is at least as good as the original. While the novelty factor is gone, the humor is sharper than ever. Your lovable AI companion through the intro, Wheatley, is full of personality, which is wild considering he’s only an orb with a glowing eye and a pair of handles. GlaDOS (your not-so-lovable sociopathic AI companion) returns too, of course, and she’s as sadistic as ever.

And the grudge match is on.

I have this bad habit of forgetting puzzle solutions, which of course drives my son crazy. But you know what? It makes it possible for me to enjoy games over and over again. So I’m thinking, this intro is so great, forget the rest of the game. I’ll just keep playing the intro. But I’ll have to listen to it through ear buds so that I won’t have to hear my son’s screams of frustration.

D.

Could have used more Yiddish, but still a hoot

This weekend, I played through Shivah, by indie producer Wadjet Eye Games:

If you're that close to the third rail, don't mess with Rabbi Stone.

You play Rabbi Russell Stone, a New York City rabbi whose congregation has nearly abandoned him due to his absurdly gloomy sermons, and whose temple is seriously short on cash. After one particularly dismal Friday night service, a cop arrives, announcing that a man murdered three days ago has left Stone’s synagogue over $10,000 inheritance money. Stone recognizes the name of murdered man, but he’s puzzled. Jack Lauder was the last person Stone expected would leave him money. Smelling a pig*, Stone decides to investigate.

It’s an old-style game (think Space Quest, but with even lower production values) happily lacking in pixel-hunting and inventory-recombination puzzles. Most of the work resides in figuring out the dialog tree, which amounts to realizing that the “rabbinical response” (answering a question with a question) is usually the best option. Smooth sailing for the most part until the end game, where it is fiendishly difficult not to end your days as either a bullet-ridden corpse or a big yarmulkeh-adorned splat on the New York streets far below.

If you like the idea of grumpy rabbi as hard-boiled hero, Shivah is the game for you. And for only $4.95? Such a bargain!

D.

*Admittedly, rats are unkosher too (try to find a rabbi who will bless a dead rat), but smelling a pig is far less trite.

You know who else was a gamer? Hitler.

I’m sorry, but this never gets old.

My son asks what games would Hitler play if he were around (and not as old as Adam) today?

D.