Monthly Archives: July 2008

Reviewlet: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

The general shorthand for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell seems to be “Harry Potter for adults”, but as the only common element is magic you might as well call it “the Paul Daniels Show in book format”. The immediate comparison that springs to mind for me is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), though that still doesn’t stretch much past that they’re both dense, weighty historically-set tomes. The Baroque Cycle is set in the 17th and early 18th century, has strong picaresque elements, and focuses on science and technology, whereas Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a Regency novel from a 19th century where magic exists.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is extensively footnoted with references to magical texts and happenings, which was initially slightly irritating and disruptive, but it builds such a cohesive, believable world that the magical becomes matter-of-fact, a natural part of things. Though the pace is measured, and at times there isn’t an awful lot happening, it doesn’t happen with such style that it carried me through. Not quite “I couldn’t put it down” (apart from anything else your arms need a rest now and again), but most enjoyable. Recommended, especially if you like Regency novels featuring magic.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Let’s see, other than spending copious amounts of time covered in poop and vomit (have I mentioned the baby at all?), what have I been up to that might be marginally more interesting to those of you who come to read this blog on occasion.

Well time really has been at a premium so MMOs were the first to suffer the +1 Pendulous Axe of Time Management. It’s hard to find an MMO that one can dip into and play with very little commitment; it’s not just the relatively small slices of time that I am afforded to play at the moment, where travelling time in some MMOs would consume ninety percent of my play experience, but also the fact that it’s very hard to just abandon an MMO at the drop of a demanding baby’s +2 Hat of Vocalised Attention Seeking. In a single player game it’s very easy to hit a pause button, press escape to pull-up the options menu (which I suppose is the modern game equivalent of the pause key), or to just abandon the game very quickly wherever your character currently stands, knowing that when you return they will be standing where you left them, perhaps picking their nose or tapping their foot impatiently, but otherwise unscathed. Not so in an MMO: if you leave your character for even a fraction of a second, turn your head to look at something on the television, say, or look briefly out of the window at all the young healthy people soaking up their daily dose of vitamin D, perhaps bend down to rub some life into the numb slabs of jelly that pass for one’s legs, or so much as blink for longer than the requisite human system requirement of four hundred milliseconds, and a thousand angry mobs will have rained down upon your character and have reduced them to zero health points before you can say “By Chronos’ hairy arse! I glanced away for no more than the duration of the blanking period of my monitor! It’s not even visible to the human eye for crying out loud!”.

Having said all that, I have been dipping into City of Villains on occasion, for a quick half hour blast here and there, generally teaming-up with Zoso and or Elf; I’ve created a new character on which I can experiment with the power-set proliferation that occurred in the I12 ‘Midnight Hour’ update, and being that my love for the Earth Control power-set is unhealthy, and in fact illegal in twelve American states, I decided to create an Earth/Thorns dominator, and thus the Iron Cactus was born. Part man. Part machine. Part succulent spiny plant.

I may have also rolled an Electric/Willpower Brute, a Dual Blade/Regen Scrapper and a Willpower/Super Strength tank, although I haven’t played any of those characters at all yet.

But I’m not an altoholic![1]

I’ve also dipped into Guild Wars on occasion, essentially because, like a saucepan of dark chocolate and cream melted over a stove, it’s very, uh, dip-inable. I have a dervish, Wur Lin (WUR LIN! Whirling! As in whirling derv… ok, I was slightly inebriated and it sounded clever at the time) a monk, Mun Ki, (MUN KI. Monkey! As in monk eee… er, eh?) and an assassin, Tri Badism (TRI BADISM. Tribadism! As in… Ah. Well. Look it up some time, ey? Possibly not from work. And not if you’re under 18). Anyhoo, I think that’s plenty enough evidence of my, to be expected, curious naming conventions for my many characters.

But I’m not an altoholic![2]

Guild Wars is terribly easy to just hop into and play a mission or two, with the option of being able to drop it in an instant should a delightful ickle pink bundle of rabid screaming poo projection require one’s immediate attention. Admittedly most of my characters are in the early teens of the level progression cap of twenty, and this essentially means that they’re hardly anywhere at all in terms of game progress, but as with my never having reached the level cap in City of Heroes/Villains, for me it’s a game about the play, rather than the progress.

What makes City of Villains and Guild Wars so readily accessible to what I dub the Radical Casual player, the “It takes fanatical dedication to be this non-committal to a game” gamer? I think it’s a combination of things:

  • The short time it takes to travel anywhere. Both games have travel systems that mean you can get where you need to go, and be slaughtering your way through bags of XP in no time at all.
  • The short time it takes to make some progress. In both games, quests are readily available, relatively quick to complete, and generally not terribly complex. Yes, both games have deeper, longer, more complex missions at the higher levels, but they maintain this quick-access, easy goal, mission structure throughout a large portion of the levelling curve.
  • The time-minimal death penalty. Both games make it very quick and very easy to get yourself back into the fight, especially when you don’t have a rezzing character in the party. Both have penalties that could perhaps be considered more harsh than that in, say, WoW, because in WoW if you make the run to your corpse you suffer nothing but a little damage to your equipment which is easily repaired, but it is the length of that corpse run that hurts the Radical Casual player because it’s time wasted, and time is the defining limiting factor in their enjoyment of a game.

So that’s it for MMO, or MMO-like, games at the moment. As Zoso mentioned, many bloggers, of which we are no exception, seem to be experiencing the Anticipatocene era of the MMO timeline, sub-heading: “What We Do Whilst Waiting For WAR”.

My other gaming action in recent times has been Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a Final Fantasy-alike, with the various elements of a JPRG but with the rude, crude and not-for-the-prude humour that any fan of the online web comic would come to expect. With the speed of encounters, and the fact that they are not sprung on the player, but initiated by them at their choosing by walking into an area containing enemies, it’s again an ideal play style for those of us who have to regularly acknowledge a priority interrupt, we who experience random encounters of the tot kind. The game was entertaining enough to keep me playing until the end – the humour quite successfully treads that fine line of juvenile puerility without being obnoxious – but I found the combat mechanics a little frustrating, perhaps dull is the better description. I seemed to spend most combat encounters waiting for the most powerful combos to charge, and just blocking or healing damage the rest of the time, which essentially consists of pressing the spacebar a lot, or clicking a few menu options. I’m not sure if this is just indicative of the JRPG style of combat – it’s been a while since I last played Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger – but seeing as the combat constitutes the bulk of the game-play, I think there could have been a greater emphasis on tactical decisions, perhaps the Tactics style of play might have been more engaging. Nevertheless, the story was fun, the writing and art direction excellent, and the game-play was certainly not tortuous, indeed the idea of having mini-games to play through to get the maximum damage from your high-power combos was a nice touch. I’ll certainly be purchasing the next instalment when it arrives. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is available on Steam and also through PA’s Greenhouse.

In non-gaming related activities I’ve been trying to read when I can, which seems to be predominantly in those periods where one hand is occupied in holding a bottle to Mini-melmoth’s chasm-like, gorging mouth hole. I fair blasted my way through The Lies of Locke Lamora, an easy to read fantasy heist with likeable characters told through fluid, playful prose. Charles Stross’ Halting State got me through many a late night feeding session. It is, however – like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother – one of these near-future novels that rubs one’s nose in the techno-jargon of today, tweaked slightly in attempt to appear 1984-like in its predictive nature. Which, frankly, just annoys the hell-fired pants out of me, because it’s just a jarring interruption to show how clever and techno-savvy the author is, rather than a commentary on anything in particular. Constantly having your protagonists use ‘weird’ and ‘wonderful’ futuristic Google applications, by having them (in some sort of Star Trek parody) hax0r in an improbable fashion an application to produce an inverted BitTorrent flow through Google’s forward deflector shield, in order to undermine the authorities in that hip, cool and subversive manner that only asocial computer nerds can manage, is just tedious, frankly. If you want to see a near-enough-to-be-scary prediction of the future that was written in recent times (1984 is still the unassailable granddaddy, and the story that every author of this type of book should strive to achieve), then you read Gibson’s Neuromancer. No Google, no 5000 jiggerbyte iPods or Xbox 2020 editions, but it still predicts a future that we can overlay on our current reality, like a virtual map, and plot the route, as clear as the neon-bathed streets of a Chiba district at night, that humanity is taking.

Having said all that, Halting State isn’t a bad book, other than for that minor personal nitpick, which probably nobody else shares. Oh, and it mentions Scotland far too often to be subtle, often enough to be blatantly jarring after a while. Yes, we get it, you’re Scottish, and a big fan of Scotland and you believe in it as a nation, and you probably hate the English, and all that, so it’s not the UK, because that would include the English and they don’t deserve any advertising unless it’s in a bad light, such as a Hollywood villain. So it’s a story about how the Scottish police were called into investigate a Scottish crime in the heart of Scotland’s Scottish hi-tech infrastructure, or Scotlandstructure, as they call it in the Scottish suburbs of Scotland’s Scotlandscape. There’s a subtle subliminal message in there, but I’m just not quite getting it.

In other news, Mrs Melmoth and I are taking Mini-melmoth to Scotland on vacation this year. No idea why, it just seemed like a good idea.

[1]May be a lie. Regulations and guarantees apply. This statement does not affect your statutory rights.

[2]Yeah, ok, it’s a lie.

A Series Of Unlikely Explanations

So my theory, which is mine (and not Anne Elk’s) is that people tend to try an MMOG (maybe from peer pressure, maybe a dealerpublisher offers a free trial, maybe they see MMOG use glamorised on TV), then either hate it and get put off them for life, or become hooked, play that game for a long time, finally get bored, then flit around from other MMOG to other MMOG, trying to recapture that first hit but never quite finding it again.

It’s that old, old story of boy meets MMOG, boy falls in love with MMOG, boy plays MMOG unceasingly to a frankly unhealthy degree for many months, boy starts to tire of MMOG and starts looking around at other MMOGs, boy furtively subscribes to other MMOG (while still logging in to the first from time to time) and secretly enjoys it more, boy unsubscribes from first MMOG, boy suddenly finds the second MMOG isn’t so different from the first after all and rapidly tires, boy moves on from MMOG to MMOG never recapturing that original feeling and realises that first MMOG was his True MMOG, boy returns to that first MMOG but finds it’s moved on, expansions have been released, rules have changed and it’s not the MMOG he remembers, boy is spurned by first MMOG, boy is disconsolately on the verge of abandoning MMOGs for good when, in a hugely emotional finale, a “Classic” expansion is released for that first MMOG returning things to the way they were and boy and MMOG ride off into the sunset to live Happily Ever After.

(Richard Curtis can acquire the rights to Four MMOGs And A Classic Expansion Pack for a small fee.)

(And we’ll ignore the bit after the final credits roll where boy gets bored with the classic expansion pack after a week.)

I got prompted to thinking about it after unsubscribing from Age of Conan and going back to City of Heroes, so I scribbled down my MMOGing history, as per the previous post, and it did seem to suggest an ever-shortening MMOG attention span. Can anything recapture those first joyful stumbling moments getting to grips with a totally new idea, that all those people running around are *actually* *people*, fumbling with strange concepts like “aggro”, that moment when you realise that “grats” is actually a contraction of “congratulations” rather than some derivation of “gratitude” and the party chat around the time people levelled suddenly makes a whole lot more sense? Once you fire up a game, cast a jaded glance at the interface and say “there’s the health bar, there’s the mana bar, there’s my hotbar of abilities, she’s the tank, I’m the healer, he’s the DPS, those are mobile bags of XP and loot, let’s gain some levels”, is there any going back?

So I thought I’d see if other people followed a similar pattern, thanks very much for the responses. I can now confidently conclude, through the Power of Statistics, “yes and no”. (Well, I say “confidently”, based on the sample size and estimated population of players the confidence interval is approximately… erm… 0.00034%, but never mind.) Guido and Elf have a similar trajectory so far (which isn’t guaranteed to continue), but Melmoth, Stargazer and Jon vary significantly.

As it happens I’d been looking at my list again, and my longest subscriptions, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, are the two games where, at various points, I’ve hooked up with other people, either small groups of friends or guilds that really worked. The rest I either played solo, or found guilds via forums/in-game chat/random blind invite that never quite clicked (the latter cases not being terribly surprising, it’s not a good sign if a guild’s prime criteria for membership is “standing within sight of somebody with invite privileges”, but sometimes you have to give it a shot for a laugh). Maybe it’s not the game so much as the people? I should’ve asked people to list whether they were in regular groups or guilds for the games they’d played.

And then I thought: people, that’s a social thing, Socialiser… Bartle type. Your play style must affect how long you spend in a game; if primarily an Explorer, it depends how large (and varied) the game world is, if an Achiever, how long it takes to the level cap (if such a thing exists) and what avenues for advancement there are after that, if a Socialiser or Killer, it’s all about the people (to talk to/mercilessly slaughter, delete as appropriate). I should’ve asked people to list their Bartle type as well (or an even more in-depth assessment of motivation).

And *then* I thought: that’s not entirely incompatible with Theory Mark I. I might’ve been lucky and started with a game that happened to suit my playing style to start with, or maybe that first game shaped my expectations for everything that followed? I could be particularly impressionable, though. What we need is government funded study of a large group of people who have never played an MMOG, put them through an in-depth assessment of motivation of why they might want to play an MMOG, start them up in a variety of games, then test them again after six months to see if their results change.

And then I thought I’d been thinking altogether too much and I should leave this stuff to psychologists or possibly psychiatrists, so I played a bit of Guitar Hero instead. Oh, is there concrete all around, or is it in my head? Guitar solo!

BabeWii.

Theoretically speaking, if a certain someone had calculated that they could strap a Wiimote to their infant child and, in the process of jiggling said child around for hours on end in order to soothe, calm and ultimately send them to sleep, they could at the same time complete Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Lost Winds and perhaps even Mario Kart Wii, at what point would Social Services become involved?

What MMOGs have you played?

A question for you, faithful reader, as a bit of data gathering to test a theory: what MMOGs have you played (in approximate chronological order, if it’s not too much trouble), and how long did you play them for (very roughly)? If you started with Meridian 59 and/or Ultima Online and have played everything since, feel free to go with edited highlights.

As a starter for ten, my MMOGing goes something like:

City of Heroes – 48 months and counting[1]
World of Warcraft – 14 months[2]
Auto Assault – 3 months[3]
Guild Wars – 2 months[4]
Dungeons and Dragons Online – 1 month
EVE (trial) – 14 days
Second Life – couple of days
Lord of the Rings Online – 2 months
Star Wars Galaxies (trial) – 10 days
Tabula Rasa (beta) – couple of days
Pirates of the Burning Sea (beta) – couple of days
Hellgate: London – 1 month
Age of Conan – 1 month

[1] Two main stints, first for the original release in 2004, then City of Villains in 2005-6
[2] Two main stints, first for the original release in 2005, then The Burning Crusade in 2007
[3] Technically was released after Guild Wars and DDO, but I’d been in beta and and off for about a year before that
[4] Total time spent on a couple of attempts at the original campaign then one of the expansions at various points over a few years

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Another quick post, this time to highlight Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, for which the marketing machine seems to be building up a head of steam, the first trailer having been released recently.

The blurb:

During the WGA strike Joss Whedon started writing a three part musical series for the internet. Each of the three episodes will be approximately ten minutes each.

Co-writers for the internet feature are Joss’ brothers Zack and Jed and Jed’s Fiancé Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing and shooting have been completed and the series is now in post-production.

“It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” says Whedon.

“Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will star Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny and a cast of dozens.

Neil Patrick Harris looks most excellent as Dr Horrible, and you can only expect great things from any collaboration involving Nathan Fillion, Joss Whedon and Felicia Day.

Kiasa approved, be sure to check it out.

Thought for the day.

The first MMO that can maintain, throughout the length of its levelling curve, the joy, excitement, wonder and unadulterated fun found in those first ten levels of today’s MMOs, will dominate the market forever.

And it will probably also destabilise the world economy as the entire planetary workforce pulls a year-long skive. If that starts to happen I can only recommend one thing: shares in a major blog or forum hosting company. For if there’s one truism in MMO life, it’s that players will always need a place to pontificate.