Tales from Walmart, Episode 1

An old lady and her husband walk into the store and, when I find them, they are looking at laptop computers. This is always a harrowing experience since, no offense meant to my older friends, the elderly (at least in this area) have proven resilient to being educated about the workings of computers. This is an unfortunate state of affairs for two reasons. Firstly, one should never be afraid or even apathetic about learning new things. Too often people hide behind the excuse of being "too old" to learn and even, to some degree, that it is acceptable to be ignorant about technology because they're "just no good with it." I find this unusual because no one ever boasts about being ignorant about anything else, but I hear this all too often in the electronics department. People wear their technological ignorance out in the open without shame. Not that they should be ashamed of it, of course, but it should certainly be something they should be excited to overcome. Knowledge is its own reward, after all. Secondly, when you're looking to purchase something, you should never be completely ignorant about it. This puts you at the mercy of the salesperson who, at best, knows nothing about your needs or what you want to help you make the right decision and, at worst, is looking to eke as much money out of you as possible.

So, this old lady is looking at laptops and I approach fully expecting to begin my usual Computers 101 class. However, when I approach and ask her if she needs anything, she surprises me by asking: "Is this the only quad-core processor you have?"

I am relatively blown away by the question. Usually my older customers don't even know what a processor is, let alone a "quad-core processor." At this point, I am cautiously optimistic and I inform her that it is not, but it is probably the cheapest one and she would be looking to spend another $100 to $200 more for the next option up. She seems thoughtful about this answer for a moment before saying:

"Oh, ok. I really need a quad-core processor. I play a lot of Farmville."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. My immediate thought was, "I wasn't aware you needed a computer to play Farmville. Can't you run that on a graphing calculator?"

A One-Party System

Ok, I haven't written in awhile. I've been busy with my thesis and work and gaming and having my computer blow up and upgrading my aunt's computer and gaming on that and drawing and writing other things for fun.

So yeah, I've been busy.

But tonight is election night here in the US and I just watched Obama absolutely sweep the floor with Mitt Romney. I honestly did not expect that. Now, it's not that I thought Romney was better than Obama in any way shape or form. As far as I'm concerned, they both would have continued our gradual and disappointing road to ruin, just in different directions (though not as different as you might imagine). It was the landslide that surprised me. I honestly thought it would be a closer race than it was, that people were at least a little fed up with Obama--I at least thought they would have to wait until the next day to determine a winner...but they'd made the call by the time I got home from work at 10 p.m. Obama by a landslide.

I was a bit surprised when I first read the announcement. Did this mean that people were HAPPY with Obama? But when I stopped to think about it for awhile, it made perfect sense...and I believe it is the start of a trend.

People weren't happy with Obama. They were disenfranchised with the Republican party.

For years now, Republicans have been fed up with Obama. A lot of them, I believe, didn't like him simply because he was a Democrat. They'd been raised to hate people with Ds in front of their names, after all. But those of us with legitimately conservative leanings knew Obama was just growing the government, pushing the budget to its breaking point, and not really pushing any of the legitimate liberal talking points (drug legalization, gay marriage, whatever).

But there was a more deep rooted issue at the heart of just about every Republican in the US. They were disappointed in their party. They'd watched George W. Bush push forward budgets that were every bit as liberal as Clinton and his ilk. They watched him tread on their individual rights and continue to make mistake after mistake after mistake. Republicans had expected--were raised--to hate a Democratic president. But it'd been so long since they'd had a candidate that they could legitimately get behind.

This election was no different. Romney was a party boy through and through, the sort of talking head and expensive suit that we'd seen a hundred hundred times. Now, more than ever, the Republicans had wanted something different, someone that would shake up the tree. They wanted a Ron Paul, they wanted a Chris Christie. They wanted something that could wow and dazzle them like Obama did with the Democrats.. But all they got was another politician.

In the past, there'd been a mentality of voting for the "lesser of two evils," but the Obama administration saw a sharp upturn in voter involvement and outrage. The Tea Party, whatever you may think of it personally, was an amazing display--people actually getting involved in the system, a downturn in apathy. People wanted real change, real progress towards THEIR ideals, not the ideals that big wigs in Washington, with no real connection to the public, thought were their ideals.

This began a clear splintering of the Republican party. While you certainly had your old apologists, those who touted the party line because it was all they knew or they believed it was still effective, you also began to see an upturn in these Tea Party types who, for the most part, were radical righters. Now, I don't say radical in the fashion that they bombed buildings or slurred hate speech every chance they got. The reports of the Tea Party rallies being hot beds of hatred and biggotry were flat out lies. I went to one of these events and I felt comfortable and safe. But they ARE radical in that they want the Republican party line, the traditional party line, to be pushed without compromise. One could call them super Republicans.

At the same time, a third group of Republicans (or I suppose it would be safer to call them conservatives) began to gather more steam. The Libertarians began to gain favor with younger Republicans who were savvy in the fiscal and economical aspect of Republicanism but maybe felt like the government shouldn't be involved in social aspects of our every day life. Libertarianism is, to put it simply, fiscal conservancy with a dash of liberal social policy. This is an over simplification, of course. Libertarianism doesn't preach for gay marriage or whatever, it just calls for a smaller, less involved government--a government that has no place making social decisions.

There are, of course, other splinter groups within the Republican party, all based on important bullet points in Republican policy: war, immigration, economy, social policy, whatever. Every single bullet point seemed to splinter people more and more away from the party.

Now, this is both good and bad. It's good because it shows a free-thinking public that is capable of making its own decisions. For every Rush Limbaugh blindly touting the party line, even when it makes absolutely no sense in a sane and rational modern world, you also have one Jason Lewis who actively questions everything about his own party.

However, we saw the first signs of what I predict to be a trend that is a major downfall of this split. Obama's landslide victory over Romney shouldn't have come as a surprise to me. I knew about this splintering of the Republican party. I was one such person who turned away from the party line and steadfastly refused to vote Republican. I should have seen this coming. We currently live in a two-party system. You can fancy it up however you want, but we will never in my lifetime have a third-party president. The president has always been and will always be either Democrat or Republican.

But what happens when the Republican party essentially becomes a third party? Well, we're going to have a whole lot of Democrat presidents, that's what.

Think about it like this. Say you're in a room with 100 people and, come dinner time, it's decided that the group will order a (really, really large) pizza. For whatever reason, the pizza can only have one topping and the topping with the most votes will be what the group orders. Fifty people want peppermint ice cream pizza and fifty people want hot fudge pizza.

Naturally, a fight breaks out. The peppermint ice cream people can't even fathom a pizza with hot fudge topping, while the hot fudge people start calling the peppermint ice cream people idiots. This goes on for awhile until, after an hour or so, a chunk of the hot fudge group stops and says, "...wait a minute, hot fudge pizza? That shit would be AWFUL!" So they change their vote. Twenty people decide on the good old fashioned pepperoni, ten people want sausage, five people are boring and want just plain cheese, and the last five people steadfastly refuse to admit that hot fudge pizza is a horrible idea. It's tradition (of the last hour). So, when the time comes to vote, what happens?

Everyone eats peppermint ice cream pizza because the first group remains unified.

That's what's going to happen with our two-party system, I fear. The Democrats are going to remain unified in their core values while the Republicans are splintered over theirs. We're going to have the equivalent of a half dozen or so third parties and one major party that will win EVERYTHING.

Now, to be clear, I don't think this splintering of the Republican party is a bad thing. I think it shows a natural evolution of thought. Much of what the Republican party stands on is based in old traditions, particularly religious. Say what you will, but these traditions have no place in the government (maybe not even in our modern society in some cases). The fact that we have a major government party continuing to say that a man marrying another man is wrong is just...silly in my opinion. Personal opinion aside, what government institution has a right to tell us who we can and cannot marry?

But I digress.

What is the solution to this problem? Well, honestly, I don't think there is a solution. In discussion the issue with some of my (liberal) associates, I mostly received hopeful praise for the party. They believed that this was the start of the Republican party cutting itself free from the sort of stagnancy that had been holding it back for so many years, the warhawks, the religious nutjobs, etc. I don't necessarily disagree, but the problem with this is that those people are voters. They'll still be voting for the party line candidates and it still leaves us with a Democrat president, perhaps even with no one in Congress or the Senate to check him (or her). This means we're going to have a one party system and an ever-expanding government with nothing to stop it.

The Epiphany of Facebook Games

I just had an epiphany.

For awhile, I played Facebook games somewhat regularly. Most notably the "-ville" games of Zynga's. Not Farmville--heavens no! But I did enjoy Frontierville for awhile and, more recently, Cityville and Castleville. I won't spend time bashing Zynga (because that seems to be what pretentious gamer nerds like to do) because, in some ways, I like their design. It's the same reason I enjoyed Harvest Moon...the appeal of building and maintaining something rather than always destroying is a strong draw to these sorts of games, and the fact that you could only play it so often before having to turn it off and let your crops grow, your animals rest after constant milking (or constantly slaughtering chickens that never seem to die), or your buildings refresh their "tax collection," while mildly disappointing if I just wanted to play the game for a couple hours on end, wasn't entirely game-breaking for me. It forced moderation, and forcing me to slow down only increased my anticipation.

At times.

I won't bother discussing the drawbacks of this model in any great detail. I do think there is a happy medium to the timed gameplay of the Zynga games, but it's not necessarily a bad model. However, I will discuss one thing in this blog that had been bothering me for awhile, and that's the necessity of real-money transactions in these casual games. Zynga is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only offender here, but they are probably one of the worst. One of the biggest differences between, just to pick one parallel example, Farmville (perhaps Zynga's most popular game) and Harvest Moon is the fact that, with Harvest Moon, you have to pay (some might consider a hefty price) to buy the game while Farmville is "free." But of course we all know how free Farmville is, and that is to say "not at all."  It's about as free as League of Legends. I maintain that in the life of your average Farmviller, they will end up spending exponentially more for, arguably, a less rewarding experience than Harvest Moon...but even that's not my point. No, my point is that to get the most out of Farmville (and indeed any Zynga -ville game that I've played), you are forced to spend money. At some point, you will not be able to enjoy the game anymore, and certainly not to its fullest extent, without spending money (also not without whoring the game out to your friends to get them to be your neighbors, but that's a discussion for another time).

Of course the argument can be made that this is the point, that Zynga has to make spending money on their game appealing, even necessary, or no one will play. But let's compare these Zynga games to some other casual F2P games I've been playing lately: Small Street and Monster Park.

Now, I picked up Small Street recently on my Kindle Fire, and I can't even explain why I find this game so appealing. It's a nice game to have sitting open next to me while I'm doing something else. Every so often I ferry another visitor to my bustling street, restock the shops, or even build a new business or residence if I've got enough money. Its appeal, like the appeal of the Zynga games, isn't that you can engross yourself for hours at a time, but rather, as something you go back to periodically to see how things have grown and set it to grow some more while you go off and do real life things for awhile. Monster Park is similar, but with different mechanics. I can set a couple monsters to breed, buy a few baby monsters to grow so I can put them out, grow some crystals (monster food), and then leave for awhile and come back when it's all done.

Now, I have spent money on both of these games I'm ashamed to admit. Not a lot, mind you, but I had a bit of a bigger paycheck this week than expected and figured I could drop a couple bucks on the game without busting my bank. This, of course, is the mentality of these casual games, that you will spend maybe $5 every couple of weeks and the developers will make a profit. So the question remains, how have I completely resisted the urge to spend money on any of the Zynga games I've played for weeks, even years, but spent money on these two games that I only just started playing? Simple, I didn't need to spend money on Small Street or Monster Park to enjoy the games.

lolwut?

This seems counter intuitive but, like I said, I just had an epiphany. As I was sitting here trying to think of why I spent money on these games but have absolutely no desire to spend money on any Zynga game (and indeed don't even play them anymore), it struck me: with a Zynga game, it would never realistically end. Sure, I could spend a little money on Castleville. Speed up production on my crops, buy a neat little decoration for my courtyard, expand my buildable area, whatever...but that one purchase would only realistically extend my enjoyment of the game for another couple weeks before I would need to spend money on it again, because all the best parts of the game are hidden behind the wall of dollars you have to spend to get to them. Without spending money, you're left with a weak and shallow experience. Now, with Small Street and Monster Park (the former particularly), EVERYTHING is open right from the start without the need of the special "money" you can buy with your real money. Of course you get something for your money, but most of the time it's things you could buy yourself if you just waited a couple days or, in the case of Small Street, there are special aesthetic things you could buy, costumes for your street citizens that make them better at a certain job or are just amusing to look at. But they're not required, they just add a little life to your street. In the case of Monster Park, everything that is essential is available for the in-game currency, but some important structures, like the breeding room or the nurseries where you grow baby monsters into adults, require the special currency (really need to come up with a better term for the currency you spend real money on...) to build more than a certain amount. It greatly speeds up the production in your park (or street) but you don't need it.

But more importantly, once you buy it, you have it forever. When I spent money on Monster Park and Small Street, I knew, going into it, that I would never need to spend money on these games again even if I wanted to keep enjoying the games...because it was never ultimately necessary to do so in the first place. The idea in Castleville that, yeah, I could spend money now, but I would have to do it again in a couple weeks anyways if I wanted to keep enjoying the game, greatly reduced the lifespan of the game in my mind.

So we have an interesting dichotomy here. In order to encourage people to spend money on the game, you have to make the for-money purchases in the game unnecessary but still somehow appealing and rewarding. It's an interesting balancing act, but I maintain it's one that these two games have mastered...and Zynga either has not or chooses not to. After all, if they're actually making money off of these games, they have no reason to. It ensures a constant cashflow from each player.

Take a look at League of Legends as well. That game, literally, is self-contained within its free-to-play label. You absolutely do not need to spend money on the game. You can unlock more characters to play simply by playing the game and earning "influence points." "Riot Points," the currency you have to spend money on, will also unlock characters, but the only thing that requires riot points are champion skins...which are completely unnecessary (but very fun to have). In fact, the runes that you buy to increase your stats (which are required to be competitive) cannot be purchased with Riot Points. At all. So, in the end, you absolutely do not need to spend money on League of Legends...and that seems to make people want to spend money on it even more because they can always tell themselves, "I'll spend $10 on it and I won't ever need to spend another dime."

Then they tell themselves that the next time two days later. And the next time a week after that. Then the next day, then a couple days down the line...

It's so free!

Sion and the Hero Complex

Allow me to regale you with a tale, fair reader, and with it, a greater understanding into the League of Legends community in specific and the Internet gaming mentality in general.

So, as those of you who know me are already aware, I have been playing a game called League of Legends lately. League of Legends is an online MOBA style game (MOBA herein standing for multiplayer online battle arena). Like most MOBA games, it is team oriented. Five (or three) players team up in order to push into the enemy's base and take their "nexus" (a simple central goal point) and win the game. The playing field is separated into three "lanes" in which the players separate and push down through creeps (hostile "monsters" or minions) and enemy towers. The nuances of the game are deeper than this, of course, but I shan't waste your time explaining it.

Anyways, a few days prior to this entry, I played in a game with my friend Hinote. Hino and I have been playing quite a bit lately in ranked games and have experienced a reasonable amount of success teaming up in the same lane together. This is a theme I would like to return to later. In any case, Hino and I were in a game a few days ago that had us in separate lanes, unfortunately. Fortunately, things were going fairly well early on. My teammate was competent and the other lanes seemed to be doing well, so I was pretty comfortable that we had another win on our hands.

I was not disappointed in the end, but the road to getting there was quite...enlightening.

So, as I said, things started out well enough with my teammates holding their own and indeed generally winning their lanes (meaning they pushed harder than their counterpart from the enemy team). Hinote was "jungling" (farming neutral monsters and occasionally coming into one of the three lanes to help out) and he was doing very well, killing the enemy in the top lane several times. Of course, things didn't stay simple for long...obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this blog. I still remember the tipping point. It was after one successful gank that the enemy, playing a champion called Sion, said:

"i give up :("
"jk im sion"

Things started going downhill from there. Our top lane player started slowly getting pushed back. At first, he was simply forced to leave the lane, but soon enough, Sion was killing him rather handily. Things began getting out of hand from here as Sion is a champion that snowballs fairly effectively. Soon, Sion was pushing hard, and I mean hard. He was in our base before we even knew it and it took all of us to force him out.

I thought the game was over here, but a peculiar thing began to happen. Sion began to think he was the hero.

"gg sion," Sion said about (and to) himself, "you carried hard."
"thx man," he replied (to himself again), "add me"
"KK <3"

While the rest of his team fought us (generally ineffectively) in other lanes, Sion continued to push alone in his own lane. Predictably, we caught on to his little ploy and put an end to his shenanigans. But he didn't seem to learn. Occasionally he would join his teammates, but more often than not, he just kept pushing his lane on his own. And mama Gacke didn't raise no fools...nor did the mamas of everyone else on our team. We continued to catch Sion, out of position and overextended. He was tough, a good player even, but all five of us had no problem defeating him every time. Once he was down, the rest of his team, which had been pushed around after having to work all game without him and was in no position to defend against us, was easy pickings.

Predictably, Sion began blaming his teammates. After all, he was so good at this game that he was able to push into our base on his own, right? He was the hero. The telling factor, however, is how Sion continued to react to how the game was unfolding. After being killed numerous times on his own by our entire team, did he change his tactics? Did he learn from his mistakes? No. He continued to push, on his own, continued to get caught alone by our entire team, continued to die. Even after his team pleaded with him to join them and win the game, he silently refused, never thinking for a second that the problem was him.

This is the problem I've been having with internet gaming for many years now. It started with MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games).The game conditions you into believing you are special. That you are the hero. Even though you are playing with thousands, even millions of other people. This mentality, which is basic human nature, carried over into first person shooters and, finally, MOBAs. Now, I have no problem with people believing they are special of course (sometimes it's even true, huehuehue), but in a team game, this is the exact wrong mentality to be going into the game with. You need to start out believing in your team, relying on them...and then you need to decide what skills and benefits you bring to the party. It is a team game and should be played as one.

It is not uncommon for someone in League of Legends to complain after being beaten by an entire team, to say something like "Hah, it took all of you to beat me!" I usually respond, "It's a team game." To be surprised that the enemy would attack you in force, particularly when you are strong and alone on the map, is to completely miss the point of the game.

My good friend Sion clearly believed himself to be the hero of his own little story. He was rarely with his team. When he was, we usually had a hard time dealing with them all, but more often then not, he wanted to continue pushing on his own, to grab the glory. If he had won, no doubt he would have, as he alluded to before, claim that he carried the entire game on his own shoulders...and when he lost, he blamed his team, even though he was never around to help them. This is a clear hero complex, and it is absolutely the reason his team lost the game...and, perhaps more relevant to him, the reason he lost the game.

When I play League of Legends, I play as a support. These characters take many shapes (I may write a blog about them soon, simply as a practice in theory), but largely they are there to heal their allies, set up plays, or control the flow of battle. They are not the champions that get kills. They are not the ones that start or end fights. Sometimes they help keep their allies alive during the fights. Sometimes they help them do more damage. Sometimes they help the enemy do less. In any case, they are not the heroes of the game. They help the heroes be heroic.

I enjoy playing support. I enjoying knowing that through my actions, someone else will experience the thrill of victory (and I may experience it vicariously through them...not that I'd ever admit it). I don't want to be the hero. The hero is the one that has to climb mount Doom and fend off giant spiders and twisted mirrors of themselves. The heroes are the ones that find out their fathers were corrupted by evil and want to conquer the galaxy. Heroes are the ones that have to take years-long journeys overseas and face trials and tribulations the likes of which we mere mortals could scarcely dream of.

You can have it.

I don't mind lending a hand. Hell, I don't even mind holding their hand through it all. But I'll leave the heavy lifting to Hino and let him enjoy the fruits of his success while I bask in the glow like the moon reflecting the rays of the sun. Do my efforts usually go unnoticed? Hell yeah. People constantly praise Hino (or whomever I am laning/fighting with) for excellent plays, completely forgetting that I put a shield on them so they could take more damage, or made them stronger, or stopped an enemy from getting to them. But I don't mind. I like being in the background. I enjoy succeeding, even if someone else gets the credit.

I don't know if it's the Internet or human nature, but this doesn't seem to be how people's minds work...and this, I believe, is the problem I see with a lot of people who play support in League of Legends. Let me be perfectly clear: I rarely have to fight tooth and nail to play support. 97% of the time (and I say that quite straight-facedly...out of 100ish games, I can only recall about three where someone wanted to play support instead of me), no one argues when I say "I'll play support" when we are chosing our champions. No one wants the job. It's boring and unrewarding and it's almost like they feel they will be unable to bask in the glory of victory when their team wins because they weren't on the front lines shooting people in the face or hitting them with a giant axe or throwing fireballs at them. Of course this is complete silliness, but it seems like this is how people think.

You'll even see people make silly mistakes playing support (arguably the easiest role in the game in my opinion, though maybe it's just because I have a knack for it or it clicks with me because of my mentality) because they fail to enter into the game with the proper mindset...to help make someone else the hero. Maybe they buy items that make themselves stronger rather than ones that make their teammates stronger. Maybe they level up skills that do damage rather than help their teammates do damage. Maybe they'll jump in for the kill on an enemy, even though their teammate could use the rewards for that kill (gold and experience) more. And I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw a support player who didn't spend their hard-earned money on wards (small, single-use items that reveal portions of the map for a short period of time...usually considered to be the support's job to get them), forcing the other members of the team to get them instead of items to make themselves stronger.

If it sounds like I'm a bit passionate about this, I am. I believe a team needs someone who's willing to think about other people first. Obviously, I believe that every member of the team needs to think of the team first...but it's the support's job to think of every member of the team individually. If that makes sense. Maybe not.

This brings me neatly back to our good friend Sion. Was he a bad player? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. He won his lane quite handily. Did his team lose because he was bad at the game? To a certain degree, yes they did. Sion defeated anyone that came at him. He pushed into our base single-handedly. But in the end, he failed miserably at two basic aspects of the game: first, of course, he failed to realize that his tactic wasn't working and continued to try and be punished for it every time. But more importantly, he failed to realize that he was playing a team game. He failed to realize that there was a reason those four other people were in the game for some reason completely unrelated to making him look good. He wanted to be the hero, but in the end, no matter how much he tried to blame his team, his team lost because of him.

Trending downward

I do not like the current trends in gaming. I remember a time when we paid for a game and that game was ours. We could do whatever we wanted with it, had access to all parts of it, and never had to worry about things being added, blocked off, or expanded upon.

I know this is making me sound a bit like an old fuddy-duddy, and I probably am, but as I sit here playing Tiny Village (one of the few examples of micro-transaction games that I feel does what it does in a more or less inoffensive way), it has struck me just how much games have changed. I'm not one of those people that demands nothing ever change, but I definitely am one of those people that is concerned that things are changing for the worse.

These days, it seems like every game is hiding half of its content behind a price tag. Between MMOs requiring a monthly fee (admittedly, this is a dying trend, which I can't say I'll miss), free-to-play games having micro-transactions, Facebook games requiring you to spend money on in-game currency, and the overabundance of DLC and expansion packs that have been coming out for every single game, I'm concerned that game developers are losing what it means to make a full, complete, stand-alone title that requires nothing out of the box...if it even /has/ a box.

Now, I'm not going to say there's no place for the Zyngas and Popcaps and MMOs of the world, but I am going to say this: there are far too many of them, and it's troubling. I know free to play games make serious, /serious/ bank, but--and maybe I'm starting to sound like a long-haired artsy hippy type--I feel like gaming needs to be something more. When Zynga hides 90% of its game behind micro-transactions, I feel like I'd almost rather pay $10 up front and have access to most of the game from there, and if developers hope, as I do, that gaming can really come into its own as an art form, eventually they are going to have to think about more than just making money. I mean, they can't continue to do what they do without making money, of course, but there has to be a line...

A good example of this is a game called Pixel Mall. This free Android app is a fun little clicky time-waster in which you drag your piggy mall owner from shop to shop, helping customers and checking them out (not like that, you pervert). The point is to get them in and out as quickly as possible in order to build up customer appreciation and level up your mall...and, of course, earn money. The money you earn in the game can be used to purchase more shops, level up your mall owner, and buy other upgrades that generally make your job a lot easier and allow you to keep up with the ever-increasing work load as customers stream in like mad. One thing that is available for purchase in this game is additional helpers, adorable little characters that apparently can perform the same tasks as your piggy mall owner. I say apparently because I cannot buy any of them...all but one are only available if you spend real money on it. The last one is available for in-game money, but he is quite expensive to purchase and getting enough money to purchase him is difficult without having additional help. And let me be clear: you need additional help in this game. You /will/ hit a wall that makes the game all but impossible without spending your real money on this virtual game and I find myself wishing I could just buy the game for $10-$15 and have everything unlocked from the start.

Now, I know that this is a good way for game designers, especially untested newcomers, to make money, but it seems like every new game that comes out is hiding most of itself behind these micro transactions to the point that I cannot even try and play any of these games because I simply do not have the money (I'm spending it on League of Legends, natch). And this, boys and girls, is where we're going to run into trouble...only the heavy hitters, the Zyngas, are going to make any money on this model...because people are going to keep sinking money into the games they already play. Eventually, no matter how good a micro-transaction game is, it's going to fall flat because people just don't have the money to spend on it.

Another example of this trend is the over-abundance of MMOs on the market today. I know I've hashed out this topic already in this blog, but I have to touch on it again because I just heard that the new Neverwinter Nights IS GOING TO BE A GODDAMNED MMO. This is /hugely/ disappointing to me because I'm starting to see 90% of the major RPG releases in any given year being MMOs...and then dying out slowly and painfully because they can't compete and they're just plain poorly designed. I know MMOs make tons of money, particularly the gammut of free to play ones that are being made or just converting over, but that's only if they actually become popular. Ask the makers of Warhammer Online, Aion, Rift, and Age of Conan how much they wish they'd just made a single-player RPG and sold it for $60 now...if you can find them in the wellfare line.

(as a note: yes, I know they probably turned a bit of a profit on half of these as they went free to play, but I can't imagine it's more than they would have made if they'd just made a simple single-player RPG). MMOs make a lot of money, but they're also HUGELY expensive to produce. Making a single-player RPG would likely be cheaper, so I have to believe the profit margin would be considerably higher if it was a good game.

And what of the fabled non-massively multiplayer RPGs (I really should come up with a phrase for this...minorly multiplayer RPGs maybe)? The games where you can connect with one or two friends and romp through a huge, Skyrimian world together completing quests and experiencing an epic plot? That's right, there aren't any. In fact, there are very few multiplayer games on the market these days that aren't massively multiplayer or some kind of deathmatch shooter. You can't tell me Skyrim wouldn't have even more appeal if you could join your friends, even if you were just following them around and enjoying their plot with them, even if your character was an utterly insignificant hanger-on.

I have a bit more of a love-hate relationship with DLC, downloadable content, and expansion packs. I love the concept, of course. I love the idea that game developers can continue to add more and more to a game. After all, eventually you have to call a game done and ship it off...and while, yes I like my stories to have endings, it's usually fun to add more to it, more stories to tell, more places to visit, more characters to interact with. However, I have begun to notice DLC acting more and more like a crutch than a tool. Take a look at Fable 2. This was a game that was billed to be a gigantic, immersive sandbox in which the sky was the limit and anything was possible. What we got was a bland, characterless experience that you could finish in a weekend of casual play. This was a clear example of a game that was not finished. A game that /needed/ DLC to be the full game it was intended to be. This is a problem. I don't want game developers to get into the mentality that DLC can allow them to ship out an incomplete game (with the caveat that this is fine if and when they start charging less for said incomplete games) because DLC costs money...yet another example of parts of games (that you have already spent money on) being hidden behind a price tag. This was even worse in Fable 2 when you realize that the DLC added /nothing/ to the game. It was all insipid and vapid foolishness that added /nothing/ to the plot except lame jokes and uninteresting (and, more importantly, unrelated) side stories. This was especially troubling when the game ended on such a massive cliffhanger that it made the whole thing feel like half of a story. This is the exact wrong way for DLC to be handled, but I get the feeling more and more than bad developers are relying on it to allow them to ship out incomplete games and bilk people out of more money...and when other developers see that this works, they're going to have a hard time not following suit.

I never thought I would be old enough to say this, but I miss the good old days. The days when games came in a box and not in the internet in overly expensive chunks. I want to go back to a day when it was considered the norm to just give us a complete game right from the start. Maybe money is the problem, maybe game developers are seeing how much money they can bilk from us and foaming at the mouth in anticipation. Maybe they're lazy, realizing just how much they can procrastinate on in the production of a game. Or maybe it's just the way the market's going. Whatever the case is, I see it as a troubling road to travel down.

The end justifies the means

Here is all I am prepared to say about the ending of Mass Effect 3: amazing in concept, legitimately disappointing in execution. The claims of false advertising made against Bioware can actually be considered entirely legitimate, but the community is unnecessary hypocritical in leveling such wrath against Bioware, one of the few good developers left, when we have had to suffer so many broken promises by lesser developers (and Peter "Here, have the sun...oh, is that a lightbulb?" Molyneaux) and have nowhere near the coordinated rage. Is it because Bioware is amazing that we are unable to cut them any slack? I find this to be an unfortunate state of affairs. When you are a teacher and one student routinely gets A's on every single test, but gets a C+ on their final, you do not hold them back a year. You assume they simply made a mistake, perhaps chide them for it, and move the fuck on. When a student, let's call him Little Petey for example, continuously gets C's on his assignments (while continuously making the same mistakes every single time and promising that he'll get an A+ on the next one), you do not let up in your criticism for him because it's a lost cause. You continue to work on him until he actually lives up to his goddamned promises.

I think we can cut Bioware some slack on this one. The ending is legitimately disappointing, but there is enough there, as well as an /amazing/ game preceding it, that I feel like they've earned it.

That's all I want to say on the matter. I love Bioware. I would hate to see their good name blacklisted because of one lackluster ending to an otherwise fantastic game.

On Flawed Characters

So I've been watching a lot of cartoons lately, Young Justice being one of them (obviously, if you read my last blog entry). Normally I just watch television shows on my computer, either on Youtube or by downloading them (shhh...don't tell). Well, I enjoyed Young Justice so much that I actually shelled out the money to buy it on DVD--that and Walmart had a great deal: 12 episodes for $15--and even got up one morning (afternoon) to watch the newest episode. As I did so, I caught an episode of the new Thundercats. It wasn't great, but it was interesting enough to entice me into watching more of it, so I downloaded the episodes in an attempt to catch up. I used to watch the original Thundercats a bit, and I was curious to see how they reimagined the series.

While I don't intend to write a review of the Thundercats series, it would be remiss of me to not at least say what I thought of it: a resounding meh. It's got some interesting themes and it has a bit of nostalgia value. Unfortunately, it suffers from some hit and miss writing and animation, falling prey to what I like to call the Disney syndrome--if you watch the Disney animated serieses like Gargoyles and Aladdin, you'll notice some episodes are amazingly animated and others are just garbage. Thundercats' variance in animation quality isn't quite so gaping as some of the Disney shows I used to watch when I was younger (I swear to God, some of those old Gargoyles episodes were animated by a seven year old). As for the writing...in general it's been somewhat vapid, but there have been some really significant moments that made me continue watching. Overall, you could do worse, but it's far from perfect...which leads me to the subject of this blog: flawed characters. Specifically, flawed heroes.

I love a good, flawed hero. Perfection is so overrated, after all. A "perfect" hero is one that we do not relate to, one that we do not necessarily care about. We don't care about them because they just don't seem real. They're not us, or our family, or our loved ones. They're not someone we could actually meet and have a drink with. They're just caricatures of a human being. A character with real flaws comes alive to us. After all, overcoming our own weaknesses to persevere and become greater than what we are is what it means to be human. It's interesting. If the character is already great, already someone who has overcome their weaknesses, there's no journey for them. This is particularly important in serial adventures, television shows that are expected to continue for a dozen episodes or more. We have to believe the character is going to progress somewhere, so common practice is to make the characters, particularly the heroes of the adventure, start out as green novices. Usually, this manifests as a character who is reckless and brash, jumping into danger without thought, though just as often they can be lazy or arrogant or heartless or any number of other flaws to overcome.

Thundercats is no exception. I don't remember the old series in any great detail, but I do remember Lion-o was a fairly unremarkable character. He was regal and brave and kind and gentle and all the good stuff we expect in our heroes...he didn't have any room to grow. Lion-o in the new 2011 series is the exact opposite. I don't mean to imply that he's not kind or good or brave or whatever, but he lacks the almost hyper-competence that his 80's counterpart had. He's somewhat foolish, often making silly mistakes and being goaded into dangerous situations, and more than a little reckless. Neither of these things are especially uncommon--I could have been describing any number of heroes from any number of series. The problem with Lion-o is that he doesn't always act foolishly--and, in fact, is quite often reasonably intelligent--but he is always made to look the fool. From the very beginning, he's painted out to be a bit...different. When his adopted brother, Tigra, is attending sword fighting lessons or tactical classes, Lion-o is off in the slums, bumming around with the locals and trying to get his hands on miraculous "technology" that everyone seems to think is a myth. Having an outsider be thrust into greatness is nothing new,and can be a powerful writing tool, but to continue having him remain the outsider is problematic unless you find a way to conform the rest of the cast to his way of thinking--the surprise twist that the outsider was right all along. The technology thing never really panned out because it turns out that it really /does/ exist and half the supporting cast ends up having more of an affinity for it than he does (in fact, Lion-o never really /uses/ technology after the first episode...Tigra has a gun and Panthro pilots the Thundertank, as well as making general repairs of it). They all seem to magically know how it works when it appears in their lives again...turns out the stuff is everywhere. There's even a race of robot bears hanging out not too far from Thundara. So they can't really fall back on that (turns out you really /were/ wasting your entire childhood, Lion-o, if your brother who hated technology is better with it than you are). Lion-o also has a soft spot for other species, wheras the rest of the cast seems to have a cat-centric sort of speciesism about them, believing the Thundercats are meant to rule Third Earth in some great empire. However, even this seems to blow up in Lion-o's face every time he exercises it...and this is where the character development starts to get a bit wearying: everything Lion-o /does/ ends up being wrong...even when he's being perfectly reasonable and intelligent.

A few examples:

In one episode, when faced with overwhelming lizard forces, Lion-o decides to turn tail and run instead of face them (entirely reasonable in my book!), hiding in a bramble forest where the enemy mechs can't follow. Tigra complains that this seems cowardly. At the end of the episode, Lion-o is bolstered by their experience in the forest and decides to charge back and fight the enemy head on after all. His decision is reinforced by the timely appearance of the long-lost Panthro and the Thundertank, which saves them.

In another episode that seems to be focused on Tigra's jealousy of his brother, who possesses but has failed to earn everything Tigra has ever wanted, Lion-o suggests that they enter a besieged city under the cover of night rather than risk a frontal assault. This is perfectly reasonable and everyone but Tigra agrees with him. After all, the lizards have far greater number...and hostages that they threaten to kill. Well, it turns out that the stealth approach was doomed to fail...but when Tigra brashly runs away to disobey Lion-o's orders and drive the Thundertank right through the front door, he saves the day. His brashness is rewarded with yet another victory and another chance to save Lion-o's tail (something he's constantly reminded of), while every time Lion-o attempts something so brash, he's punished for it.

After a major victory against Mum-ra, the enemy armies have begun to see an increased number of defectors. Lion-o has devised the tactic of ambushing enemy squads and releasing the soldiers, giving them the option to go home to their families or continue fighting a war that they have no stake in. Again, a sound tactic, but one that is met with criticism from his fellows...though only light criticism. The real trouble comes when Lion-o attempts to save a group of these defectors that have been captured. Both Tigra and Cheetara make the rather cold-hearted (and uncharacteristic in the case of Cheetara) comment that they shouldn't waste their time trying to save lizards that would probably just turn on them, but Lion-o argues that it's the right thing to do and charges in to save them. Well, it turns out this was a trap and once again (not that the prisoners turned on them, but they were being used as bait). Lion-o is punished for making what is obviously the "right" decision while the others get yet another "I told you so" moment.

In general, this is the feeling I get from the show. Lion-o makes constant mistakes while his supporting cast racks up a never-ending supply of "I told you sos." While there is nothing wrong with having a flawed character, having one that is /constantly/ proven wrong while his supporting cast is constantly proven right is trying. Having that same character constantly proven wrong while making perfectly reasonable, even well thought-out and logical decisions is especially troublesome. Of course, the show is still in its infancy. The equivalence of a single season has passed (maybe even less...Young Justice is up to episode 23 and it's still technically in season one, Thundercats only has 16 episodes to its name) and I'm sure, especially given the events of the last two episodes, Lion-o will continue to grow. There wouldn't be much to entice us if he was introduced at the apex of his character development...but for my part, I don't see him making a lot of "mistakes." I see the wrong actions being rewarded while the right ones being discouraged.

Maybe I'm not quite sure what I'm saying. I do feel like I'm rambling a bit, but I do know this: it's trying to see the main character always proven wrong, even when making the right decisions, while his supporting cast always seem to know what's best. Far from the writers making me grow more fond of the supporting cast, this just makes them feel like insufferable know-it-alls and Lion-o more like an unfortunate child who may never get a chance to grow.