Wot I'm Playing: Fluxx

In a mildly ironic turn of events I’m playing more games, especially MMOGs, than I have for a while, but finding less to write about. To steal the splendid imagery m’colleague uses, I’m sailing through the doldrums in a tarnished soup tureen (or perhaps on a raft consisting of several soup tureens lashed together, all that could be salvaged after the yacht Giddy Excitement foundered upon the rocks of Harsh Reality, though you have to wonder what all those tureens were doing on board in the first place; the crew must have really been into their soup, super tasty soup.) It’s not really with listlessness or a great sense of dissatisfaction, just a lack of the burning rage or excitement that usually fires the engines of bloggery. It’s also coming up to holiday season and the resultant drop-off in blogging, so to keep things ticking over I thought I’d borrow the idea of the Van Hemlock Podcast’s “What We’re Playing” segment, with an ingenious tweak of the title to cover the theft (though the criminal masterplan may have been slightly undermined by drawing attention to it just then).

To kick things off, a card game. I’ve generally missed out on the whole “German-style” board game movement, but we recently hit upon the cunning idea of relocating irregular pub gatherings to somebody’s house, allowing the hard drinking to be combined with game playing. Before delving right into Carcossonne or a 19-hour Talisman marathon, we beta-tested the concept with Rock Band and Zombie Fluxx, provided by Andy (purveyor of general splendidness including some rather excellent Warhammer miniature photos at Power Armoured Beard, where he’s also got a Fluxx reviewlet.) The basic rules are simple so a bunch of novices to be playing within minutes, but the point of Fluxx is that the basic rules don’t stay basic for very long as players put down cards that extend or replace previous rules and goals. A single game isn’t really enough to draw firm conclusions from, but the mutable rules are certainly interesting (something Tobold touches on from a MMOG perspective as he plays A Tale in the Desert). The changing goals make long-term strategy difficult, as cards that are essential to meet the conditions of one goal can become obstacles to meeting another, and even if the goal does stay the same for a while the action cards swiftly cause best laid schemes to gang aft agley. Playing with eight players as opposed to the suggested maximum of six probably ratcheted that chaos up a couple of notches too, even in the first turn we were drawing and playing various numbers of cards, Larry the zombie was shuffling around the table in different directions, everyone’s items got redistributed, and the goal had changed numerous times. It was rather chaotic, slightly confusing and heaps of fun, a great warm-up game. I’m rather tempted by Monty Python Fluxx now, especially as you can shuffle decks together to seek the Holy Grail during a Zombie Apocalypse.

For now I am in a holiday humour.

Hello! I’m not dead, last time I checked at least. Possibly verging on undead, but that’s what fresh air and exercise does to an avid MMO player don’t you know.

Yes I’m on holiday at the moment, and although I have plenty of spare time it’s being spent doing things other than playing MMOs, or thinking about writing about MMOs. Or thinking about writing about playing MMOs. Except for this post, which is currently in the midst of thinking about thinking about writing about thinking about playing MMOs.

Not to mention the fact that the MMO-verse at the moment is duller than a heavily tarnished soup tureen reading Pinter in the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android on the dark side of the moon.

But there’s the hype of course, which sparkles so bright and hard it makes a Twilight vampire look like damp clay mashed onto a rusting clothes dummy. As is generally the way in the MMO industry, only the hype is truly extraordinary, everything else is a paler shade of meh. Even better, the current massive wave of hype that is building is still out in the middle of the ocean – the coast isn’t even in site – so this wave isn’t set to break for months, or even years.

So what should we expect when this wave eventually reaches the beaches of release? We’ll see the developers hunched over their tiny sandcastles of software, then standing proud as they reach up to place the flag-like finishing touches to the topmost towers. We’ll see them look up from their work, hands-on-hips proud, see them turn, and we’ll watch their necks begin to arch impossibly backwards as they witness the tsunami of hope and expectation that has been built by the overeager publishers and marketeers in the meantime. We’ll watch their faces droop in cartoon horror as the surfeit of surf, deep leviathan of deeper lies, reaches its arching arm far over them in mock embrace, carrying, as it does, hordes of expectant players on its arched back. And when the hype wave finally extends too far, such that it shades the developer’s work in a portentous blanket of darkness, it will inevitably break, the sea-wall of hope shatters, and the whirling wash of trust, wish and desire will flip and somersault, twist and loop and spin in the riptide of reality. Churned into a singular murky mess the whole will be sucked out to sea by the powerful pull of vacuum born by the hype’s sudden death. Those few players who are left will huddle around the single comical clam shell of content that remains on the otherwise barren beach, and while they consider what they can do to make the most of this last remnant, relic of a breached covenant, the publisher will come along, snap the shell shut and throw it fitfully out to sea.

Oh what? Look, I’m on holiday and it’s currently raining outside, so I thought you should suffer water-based misery too.

See you anon.

Only your friends steal your books

Amazon have announced that they’re going to be selling Kindles properly in the UK (as opposed to the half-arsed “International” version), and at £109 for WiFi-only and £149 for a 3G version I’m quite tempted. My Android phone generally takes care of internet on the move, but for an extra £40 and no monthly fee a Kindle could be handy backup for very basic mail/blog checking on its stripped-down browser, the longer battery life being particularly useful as the phone really needs charging every day. (iPads are very shiny, but at least £400 more plus data charges…)

Course there’s reading books as well, that being the main purpose and all, and as I’m getting ready for a holiday and contemplating cutting down on spare pants to squeeze a few more books into a suitcase, the ability to have a library in a pocket is rather attractive (especially for everyone else I’m going on holiday with). One of the problems is starting a collection from scratch; there are clear parallels in books and music, with ebook readers for MP3 players, but where you could rip your existing CD collection to MP3s (not strictly legally, though most people do it anyway) there’s no equivalent for books that I’m aware of apart from chopping one into individual pages and shoving it through a scanner with a sheet feeder and oh-so-reliable OCR software (“It was the beset of Timmeys, it was the war St. of T1 mess, it was the age O twistom, it was the a Geoff goulash”). There’s always Project Gutenberg for stacks of free classics, and a few more recent works available under Creative Commons and similar licenses, but it would be nifty if dead tree editions of books contained a code that could be used to also get an electronic version.

All will come out in the washing.

“Hi honey, I’m at a bit of a loose end, anything I can do to help?”

“Ooo yes, if you don’t mind, could you pop these socks in the wash for me? That’d be a huge help.”

“Sure thing.”

———————–

“I popped those socks in the wash like you asked.”

“Thank you! Here, you can choose between this lipstick and this biscuit as a reward for you efforts.”

“I, uh, don’t really wear lipstick. The biscuit?”

“There you go!”

“Um, thanks. *cronch* *cronch* Anything else I can help with?”

“Actually yes, could you pop this t-shirt in the wash for me?”

“In the… but I was just… socks… you just… didn’t you just? Fine, I’ll pop it in the wash.”

———————–

“Right, I managed to get the t-shirt in the wash with the socks, but mind yourself when you go out to the laundry room as there’s a fair bit of water on the floor now.”

“Aww, you’re a sweetie. Would you like another biscuit, these eyelash curlers or this bra?”

“Well I can’t use the bra, not sure I’d really use the eyelash curlers, guess I’ll have another biscuit. Thanks.”

“Great! Seeing as I’ve got you here, I need a favour.”

“Of course, no problem.”

“Could you go to the washing machine and put this large jumper in the wash? You’ll need to be careful though, the jumper will be much more difficult to wash than the socks or the t-shirt, here take this fabric softener to help you.”

“Oh come on… I mean…. Right. Fine. Look, before I go, is there anything else that needs to go in the wash?”

“No, that’s it for now. Thanks!”

“Fair enough.”

———————–

“Ok, I got the jumper in the wash. The socks and t-shirt fell out on the floor when I opened the washing machine door and got dirty though, so I had to put those in the wash again.”

“You’re a star, thanks ever so much! Here’s a copy of Sex in the City on DVD for taking the time to help.”

“I can’t stand that film. Here, can I give it back to you in exchange for another biscuit?”

“Sure! Oh, while you’re standing there, would you mind doing me a favour?”

“I’m not going to the washing machine…”

“Hah hah, no no, don’t be silly. Could you take this pin and pop it in my sewing box upstairs?”

“*sigh* Whereabouts upstairs?”

“I don’t know exactly, but here’s a structural plan of the house and I’ve circled the room where it was last seen. And I need you to do it in the next two minutes!”

———————–

“Still here? Something up?”

“You have a box of one hundred and fifty pins on the worktop behind you.”

“One hundred and forty nine, now, actually. So?”

“Are you sure you just want me to take this one pin all the way upstairs? Just this one?”

“Yes. Just the one. Why?”

“It’s just that I notice you have a box of a hundred and fifty biscuits on the worktop counter too.”

“Ooo, better hurry up, time’s almost up, and then you won’t get your bis…secret reward!”

Thought for the day.

Reading Ysh’s thoughts on the social considerations of soloing, duoing and grouping in MMOs, and having recently had cause to muse about such a situation myself, I pondered on the subject some more, and during that time the question I had the most fun and difficulty answering was this:

Could I happily duo with myself in an MMO?

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

I went to see Inception recently; reviews were almost universally positive (including, most crucially, from Mark Kermode), there were many glowing tweets about it, but I came out feeling a bit dissatisfied. It was definitely a good film with visually stunning sequences, combining pacey action with a lot more depth than the average summer blockbuster, but didn’t quite have that extra something that would have elevated it to the point where the only way of encapsulating a response to it in a textual format would be “ZOMGZ!!!1!1!!!”

It might not help that for the first ten minutes of the film I thought Leonardo DiCaprio had a weirdly Oedipal thing going on, calling his wife “ma”, but it turned out her name was Mal. Mostly, though, I think it was just that after such a big build-up, very little could live up to those expectations. By way of contrast a new series, Sherlock, started on the BBC, and knowing nothing more about it than it was a modern updating of Sherlock Holmes I really enjoyed the first episode. Course it’s hard to tell how much is the film or programme itself and how much is the associated expectations, but I’m fairly sure had I gone to see Inception totally cold there wouldn’t be that niggling hint of dissatisfaction. It’s a bit like how if somebody gave you £10 you’d be totally happy (if slightly puzzled as to why someone’s just handing out money), but if it was a coin toss and they said “heads I give you £10, tails I give you £50” and it came down heads, the pleasure at getting £10 would be offset slightly by a feeling that you’ve somehow missed out (plus even more puzzlement at why someone is handing out money in a weirdly random fashion).

From a marketing perspective, though, you have to at least get people aware your film exists, and then interested enough to see it in a crowded market, and on the balance sheet one sale with a slight sense of disappointment is preferable to no sale because your film sounded a bit rubbish, hence quotes on posters like “Hilarious! The funniest comedy of all time ever! I ruptured my spleen in nine places from laughing so much!” as opposed to “Y’know, it’s all right, if you haven’t got anything better to do give it a go, it’s moderately amusing in a couple of places.”

That’s why I’m not eagerly devouring every scrap of information about Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic or other forthcoming MMOGs. I’m not going out of my way to avoid news, I’ll skim headlines as they crop up in Google Reader (I was pleased to see an announcement about space combat in The Old Republic, that was my favourite bit of Star Wars Galaxies for the few weeks I tried it), but with the fluid nature of game development, where features can be added, removed or changed at almost any point, there’s no sense in getting too excited months or years before vague release dates which have a habit of getting delayed anyway. I generally find that applying a light dusting of cynicism to pre-release hype and being pleasantly surprised by a game to be more satisfying than buying into THE MOST ASTOUNDING GAMING EVENT IN HISTORY and finding it’s a Yet Another Diku-esque Grind.

Plus you get to say “I told you so” a lot more…

MMO Curio.

From Warhammer Online I present to you the Average Frock of Volition. One of the seven Ancient Artifacts of Mediocrity, the Average Frock of Volition is conspicuous by its unremarkable appearance, an appearance so incredibly unremarkable as to be quite remarkable.

As can be seen from the stats of the item, the Average Frock of Volition is also known by its less common name: the Rubbish Frock of Volition; being that volition means ‘the act of willing, choosing, or resolving; exercise of willing; the power of willing; will’, the careful observer will note that the Frock of Liar Liar Pants on Fire has no Willpower stat on it at all, but instead has a considerable boost to Toughness. Now call me Susan if you must, but I don’t remember many Jane Austen characters who wore frocks that boosted their physical damage resistance; they had frocks that boosted Charisma, certainly, and frocks that bestowed dual air bags and emergency floatation devices, but there was very little in the way of frockage designed to arrest axe attacks.

There is, however, one theory on why an Average Frock of Volition would exist:

“Sigmar save us, it’s Deathspasm Spineflenser the Fleshmoulinex and Souleater, Great Champion of Khorne!”

“That’s bad right? That sounds like it could be bad.”

“It’s worse than bad!”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“And he’s wearing an Average Frock of Volition!”

“Bu.. but, that frock has no Willpower boost on it at all. I mean, the name implies that it should at least…”

“It’s the power of Chaos! Don’t let it break your mind!”

“T-Toughness? It has Toughness as a stat? But it’s a mediocre frock! It has passable lace cuffs, and is made from run of the mill taffeta! IT HAS VERY UNREMARKABLE RUFFLES AND RUCHING! Arrggghh my miiiiiiiiiinnnnnd!”

Such is the power of the Average Frock of Volition.

Next week on MMO Curio we examine a pair of Ok I Suppose Pantaloons of Vivification, which as the name suggests quite wrongly, provide a minor boost to the wearer’s Ballistic skill.