This morning you are getting a random image that I thought was pretty from Death Stranding, because this is going to be one of those depressing real life posts that I don’t end up syndicating very widely. This is the type of post that I am mostly writing for myself. I realize that won’t stop the comments checking up on me, and please know that I deeply appreciate it. I am doing okay, but the definition of what okay means changes on a daily basis. This morning I am struggling a bit because I did not get a good nights sleep. I alternated between anxiety attacks, not being able to get comfortable and not being able to regulate my temperature. As such I was up an awful lot of the night and when you tend to sleep about six hours that sorta adds up.
If you were following along on twitter, yesterday my wife got cut by a neighbors dog. The pupper was just trying to be friendly and jumped up on her, but all we can guess is like its dewclaw sliced a gash on her upper arm. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail because it was gruesome as it essentially tore through both the epidermis and dermis layers exposing the subcutaneous. This is the same dog that sliced open the back of my leg about six months ago, but nothing as severe as this. My wife is fine but required ten stitches and we had to deal with going to an emergency care place while under covid protocols.
A lot of my difficulty sleeping was out of fear of bumping her arm during the night and accidentally opening the stitches. These are the sort of things that I live in terror of. Like when I have been in the hospital I live in constant fear of pulling my IV line out. She ended up arranging the pillows in such a way as to prop her arm up, but trying to figure out a way to comfortably move around this in the bed was a challenge and as such I was up at midnight, one thirty, and three thirty with that last one struggling to get back to sleep at all. Today is one of those days where there is simply not enough caffeine in the world to bring me out of this stupor.
The injury was just the icing on what was a horrible horrible stress cake. I found out that morning that I have been in contact with three individuals that are either covid positive, or live in the same house as someone who is covid positive. In theory I kept at least a six foot distance the entire time around them, and had my mask on, but it is prompting a whole new level of anxiety. I’ve more or less lived like a hermit since this all started other than a few trips into work that I was pressured into. On some level I think I am unique equipped for the time we are living in, because I am pretty content not to leave the house for great periods of time. Five months however… is a bit much and it is starting to wear on me in ways that I don’t fully realize.
I feel like I am having this very slow motion break down as I lose bits of myself in the process. It is like falling down a hill, but at an almost imperceptible speed, with no real way of actually stopping the motions from happening. The thing is… I feel like EVERYONE is going through this same slow motion break down. Nobody is completely okay right now, and as a result it feels real weird to raise your hand and ask for help when everyone is struggling around you as well. Even if I did ask for help I am not even sure what that would look like, or what would make things better. It isn’t so much that there is anything missing in my life, other than the option to actually do something other than live in fear of the outside world.
There are times when I make one of these posts, and it isn’t so much that I am asking for help. I have a pretty solid social network of friends who check in on me on a regular basis. I make these posts when I am struggling because I want others to understand that it is okay to struggle. There are times when I seem like I have my shit together, but these peeling back the layers is to make sure everyone knows it is okay to feel helpless. I think what scares me the most is I am not sure what normal is going to be within the next year or two. I don’t know what society looks like after this. I realize we have struggled with this before, but the “spanish flu” was a three year long ordeal. Mentally I am trying to prepare myself for the fact that this is likely normal for the next few years.
I don’t have much to say that is meaningful. I just find it sometimes helpful to write one of these posts when I reach the point where my drug of chose doesn’t seem to be helping me cope. That drug of choice being gaming, and I use it as a way to help set straight my mind. However right now I have reached levels of stress that it isn’t even really helping. Everything just seems like “a lot” right now, and each week seems to bring something new to add onto the stack. Thanks for putting up with me as I go through whatever this is, and my hope that sharing the struggle occasionally helps someone else too.
The last few weeks have been a bit hard, and I have noticed I have been grumpier than usual. So I decided that I should probably channel that grump into something useful. In gaming there are a bunch of things that bug me, and that really limited to a specific game. Sure there are games that trigger these things, and I am likely going to use those as examples, but a lot of these complaints fall into larger groupings. This morning I am going to explore some of these things that I think the game world would be better off if “fixed”
Lack of Cross Saves
This one has been bothering me a lot lately, because I have been spending an awful lot of time playing Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch from bed. It bugs me to no end that my Switch account has no relation back to my Battle.Net account. However this isn’t limited to Diablo because when I was playing Minecraft Dungeons the same frustrations applied and in that case it made even less sense given that all platforms have to log in with the same Microsoft account. Right now Bungie is the shining beacon with Destiny 2 and allowing me to choose between playing a separate character on each platform or binding them all together into a single save. I want this functionality to exist across the board, because I don’t mind paying for multiple clients especially when I get to carry my same characters with me.
Lack of Cross Play
This is another big one for me, and is the beginning of what is going to be at theme. I hate artificial boundaries, and I want every game to offer cross platform play. Your gaming platform of choice should be that and I should be able to group together freely with my friends regardless if they are playing via Steam, Origin, the Epic Games Store or any of the consoles like PlayStation, Xbox or Switch. Games feel better when you have the ability to play with whoever you want to. The same goes for MMORPGs where we have made strides over the last decade but really there are still a large number of artificial boundaries… I am looking at you FFXIV and your data centers.
Regional Play Walls
Now we have one that is big for me and Blizzard products. I hate that my EU friends are walled off on an island that I can’t interact with unless I specifically switch over to a EU based Battle.net account. This should be fixed and this is a broken system. The internet is a giant melting pot and as a result has given me access to a ton of players that I probably never would have developed close ties to without it. However it is way more likely for me to want to hang out with friends from Ireland than those from Idaho. Truth be told I am not sure if I actually know anyone in Idaho, but that is not the point. Let me hang with my friends folks regardless of what Region we happen to play in. Sure I realize that it is going to be a less than optimal experience at times, but if I have friends that need to finish some achievement I should be able to pop over and help them out.
The Horrible Faction Wall
This is going to mostly be a World of Warcraft thing, but it goes true for any game that creates an artificial barrier that cleaves in half the player base. The Alliance and Horde wall needs to fall and we as player should be able to group freely with our friends on either side of the divide. Additionally the game as a whole should maybe adopt a better theme than constant racism and genocide, but that is a completely different discussion for a different day. One of the best things that Rift ever did was drop the barrier between the Guardian and Defiant players with their “Faction as Fiction” patch. This is desperately needed in World of Warcraft and maybe stop forcing the divisive Red vs Blue narrative while we are at it.
Physical Transmog Systems
Now lets switch over to a problem that is most represented by Final Fantasy XIV but goes for any game with a similar system. I hate having to keep track of physical items that I am only holding onto for cosmetic purposes. All this does is serve to bloat our banks as well as the amount of items that you are having to store for a specific character. Each one of those items has a full array of stats associated with it and is effectively a unique copy that is being stored, where you could simply give us a system that allows us to flag our account with a specific appearance storing significantly less data. It would be better even if this just happened automagically like it does in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft when we bind an item with an appearance that we didn’t already have. Please fix this Squeenix… and if you are building a similar game out there remember that cosmetics are super important to the overall enjoyment of a game.
Gender Locked Classes
This is a trope that is rife within a lot of the South Korean or Chinese MMORPGs, but it drives me up a wall. If you are going to add classes to your game, make sure that they can be played by either gender. Black Desert Online has effectively been walking this back by creating different versions for each gender, but having that line drawn in the sand is still horrible. Better yet I sorta wish that games didn’t have hard gender choices but instead a character creation system that allowed you to create your character in any way you saw fit and assign whatever attributes you wanted. That however is a battle for the future, and for now I just want games to stop releasing Male only or Female only content. This also is a problem with cosmetics in FFXIV, and it drove me nuts for years that as a Male character I couldn’t have bunny ears.
Lack of Beard Options
This is really a personal thing for me, and I am not sure how many players are impacted by it… but I cannot get into a character that doesn’t have reasonable beard options. This has been a big barrier for me and a lot of the Korean, Chinese or some Japanese MMORPGs because in many cases I have to deal with the meager offerings that are given to me. The best game of all time is probably Warhammer Online because it is the only one that offered wonderful ladybeards on the Dwarves, and you are darn tootin I took advantage of this on one of my characters. The reason why I play an Exo in Destiny 2 is because I could not create a Human with a beard, and for my Warlock and Hunter I just gave up and made female characters.
Lack of Account Wide Storage
I believe that you bank space should be plentiful, expandable and at least some of it should be account wide. This exists in some games but it absolutely should be a thing in more of them. I should be able to swap and materials freely between my characters, and better yet there should be a separate material storage available to them all. More games need to approach things from an account level giving players deep and meaningful reason to have multiple characters without creating the feeling that they are always on the wrong character at the wrong time.
Lack of Account Based Skills and Currencies
Once again adding to the whole discussion of feeling like you are on the wrong character at the wrong time… I wish any sort of currencies that are accrued for doing “things” were done so an an account wide level. So if your friends need you to be raiding on your main, but you really want to be gearing your alt… you could earn the currency on one character and spend it on another. In a similar note I wish things that are long grinds were attached at an account level as well. Tradeskills for example, I wish tradeskills were a thing that just existed and once unlocked and fully leveled could be used by any character on your account. There are plenty of ways to make this work from a lore perspective, but the convenience added of never not being on your gemcrafter or your enchanter would be phenomenal… or always being able to pick that herb or mine that node.
So now that I have aired my grievances with you… what are some of the things that drive you up a wall about games in general or that you would change? Drop me a note below, or feel free to wreck my opinions listed above.
A few days ago I was involved in a side discussion, when a friend of mine posted a tweet about creatives and the expectations that we place upon them. You can view the entire thread here if you so choose, but since then I have been mulling over some of the ideas. We find ourselves in this weird time where for so many of us our primary contact with other human beings is through our computer and the internet in general. Because of this often times a lot of lines blur in more significant ways than would normally be the case.
There is concept I was introduced to awhile back called a “Parasocial Relationship”. Pulled from the Wiki article, here is a brief description.
The terms parasocial interactions and parasocial relationships were coined by anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl in 1956, laying the foundation for the topic within the field of communication studies. Originating from psychology, parasocial phenomena comes from a wide range of scientific backgrounds and methodological approaches. The study of parasocial relationships has increased with the growth of mass and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, particularly by those investigating advertising effectiveness and journalism. Horton and Wohl have stated that television personas offer the media user a sense of intimacy and have influence over them by using their appearance and gesture in a way that is seen as being engaging, directly addressing the audience, and conversing with them in a friendly and personal manner. By viewing media personas regularly and feeling a sense of trust with the persona, parasocial relationships offer the media user a continuous relationship that intensifies.
One of the challenges at hand I believe is that we are not wired as human beings to deal with people that we become invested in on the internet as being different from those who we might become connected to in person. This has been a significant challenge for me personally over the years because I grew up during the early age of the internet. I met my wife through an IRC Channel and even though we grew up thirty minutes apart, we were introduced by someone living in Belgium. I’ve developed life long friendships with so many people that I have played games with and more than one of them have become employees.
At the very beginning of this post I referred to Eve as one of my friends. We have been “friendly” for years and were originally connected through mutual friends on Google Plus. While we somewhat frequently interact online, I cannot with any certainty assume that she also considers me to be a friend. This is where our brains come into the equation, because there is a feeling of personal investment in the interaction. The interaction seems no different than that of someone you have known for years and are hanging out on a Zoom call with, than a long sequence of random hit and miss communications. So the challenge is that a false sense of intimacy can develop, and I don’t mean that word in the romantic sense.
In the case of this blog, you as my readers know a lot about my life. However the details that have been shared with you have been filtered carefully to sift out any information that I feel might be harmful to share. As a result if you mostly know me through this blog you have a specific image of me that I have more or less cultivated throughout the years. The challenge is in many cases this is a one sided conversation that we are having. I am writing into the void targeting no one specifically and it is up to personal interpretation how my words are taken. Based on your own personal experience something I might say might land with specificity that was never directly intended.
This is Simone Giertz, and she is a YouTuber that makes a lot of really interesting creations. If you have not seen any of her content then you absolutely should because she builds a lot of interesting machines. I’ve been watching her content for several years at this point and the way in which she delivers it is extremely personal. When I first started watching her she lived in a house boat, and over the course of the years I have been privy to a sequence of events in her life. The problem is… I don’t know Simone Giertz and she most definitely does not know me. The human brain however has a hard time of interpreting this data, and regardless of intent I care about her existence as a human being. So when shared her battle with cancer, my brain interpreted that stimulus as though a friend had cancer.
Essentially like I said before I think we were not wired to exist in this weird awkward middle ground. We are pretty good at distinguishing fiction from reality when dealing with a movie, or at least most people are. We are also pretty good at understanding what the social norms are when dealing with a person we know in real life and are sitting across the table from. What is progressively more confusing is this middle ground where we have been granted access to someone else’s life, without them ever having or even desiring any access to ours. I think we are still in the process of building the emotional and mental templates for how exactly this sort of interaction is supposed to work.
I think this reaction becomes all the more blurry when you encounter something like Twitch. With YouTube you are given a neatly edited view of someone else. It might feel intimate but there is the understanding but it is easier to tell that something is being produced and as such filtered for your viewing into short tight chunks of content. In the case of streaming however you spend a significant amount of time just hanging out with another human being while being shown a view of their world. You are given a chat box that allows you to have input into the experience making it feel two sided.
The problem of course however is that streaming is a performative act, and that effectively the person on the other side of the connection is putting on a show. However the successful streamers seem to be the ones that can sell the illusion of friendship. That is not to say that friendships do not develop over hours of shared interaction, but it is not exactly a level playing field. Those watching the stream have way more data about the person streaming than the other way around. I personally find Twitch to be a real challenge because I am not really invested in the act of watching someone else do something. As a result I only tend to watch the streams of those I already consider to be friends.
And with that once again we come full circle. A lot of those folks that I consider to be “friends” and people that I met through the larger twitter gaming community. Like I said above, that I have no proof that any of them consider me to be their friend, and as such I do my best to temper my own expectations of any form of reciprocation of those interactions. Our brains are really bad at this, and when it goes really bad it can lead to toxicity or even worse. I feel like a lot of the challenges that we have going forward is figuring out how to clearly outline what is and is not socially acceptable behavior in these middle spaces.
So many of the really horrible interactions I have seen between fans of something and the creators of that thing I think can more or less be chocked up to a parasocial relationship going wrong. If you have built up in your head that there is an intimacy there between you and a creator that never actually exists, it is a very short trip to real feelings of betrayal when this fictitious person you have created does something that you were not expecting. Please do not mistake me as giving folks an excuse for treating creatives horribly, but a lot of my dissection of this issue comes from a few situations I have dealt with in the past.
I’ve been on the creator side of a few one-sided relationships. I’ve had folks attribute the wrong things to my interactions online, or feel like they know me better than they actually did. Some years back I wrote about the concept of the “Monkeysphere” or the Dunbar Number theory stating that there is a maximum number of people you can possibly care about at any given time. I try my best to approach every interaction as though they might be a brand new life long friend. I’m recycling an illustration that I created for that article, but effectively at any given time there are orbits around me, and the closer to the center you get the more you actually know of me and hopefully the more I know about you.
Most interactions I have online are in the red and orange zones. Effectively this a group of people that I would consider to be “Past Acquaintances” and “Active Acquaintances”. It can take years for someone to migrate inwards for example there are folks like Scopique that I have interacted with for over a decade, and they are by nature probably going to rank a little further in on the bullseye than someone I just met recently. It takes a really long time for someone to make it to the close friend group and very few will ever reach the inner rings of people that I consider to be my actual close confidants. The thing is… I am by no means unique in this approach and I think more or less everyone has a version of this.
I think where things get really confusing again is that our brains are not great at interpreting stimulus. If you have someone who is on twitter and doesn’t follow that many people, each individual voice makes up more of their virtual world than someone like me that follows several thousand people. It is real easy to misinterpret this connection as having more importance than it actually is. Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and and even the comments section on this blog give you a level of access to another person that did not exist prior to the social media age. This access is real easy to mistake as a bidirectional connection.
LeVar Burton for example is one of my childhood heroes. I have tweeted at him before and he has even favorited one or two of my comments. I should not under any circumstances assume that it means that he knows who the fuck I am. I am one of 1.9 million people that follow him, but the danger stands when someone takes that brief interaction as meaning something significantly more. I am firmly convinced that so many of these bad interactions that we see between fans and “celebrities” are brought on by the imbalance of the parasocial relationship. The challenge at hand however is that I don’t really have an answer of how to fix the system
We were not wired for this sort of connectivity. All of the software in our brains was designed for face to face communication. This is in part why it is so damned hard to read intent correctly when all we have are written words on a page between us and another human being. However the internet has presented us with this era of very intimate seeming and completely one sided connections. Yet at the same time we have been sold on this notion that engagement with audiences is extremely important to make sure you are selling that illusion of a personal connection so that we care about the people behind the products we are being asked to consume. In many ways it is a deeply concerning and dangerous thing to ask.
I think I have more or less reached the end of this ramble. I am not sure if anything that I said made sense but I wanted to throw these thoughts out there. Since I had hosting issues this morning I decided to jot all of this down over my lunch break. I would very much love to read your thoughts in my comments, because it is a discussion I am interested in continuing.
Yesterday was a bit of a rough day, and as a result I poured myself into a very familiar pattern that was Diablo 3. I started the evening in deep turtle mode and then eventually added Grace in the hopes of getting her one of the pieces she was lacking, the Stone Gauntlets. These had dropped probably 30 times for me and I had sharded all but the best ones. Thankfully it was on the second or third rift that a pair dropped and also at some point during the evening I got my Compass Rose, which was the last piece I “needed” for the Immortal Kings Set dungeon.
The funniest part about that is that I ultimately did not end up using the travelers set, because I was struggling with cooldowns. I swapped in my ancient primal flavour of time and the ring of the zodiac I had been using, as well as rolling cooldown reduction on every piece that could support it. I managed to get my cooldown to somewhere in the 50% range and after that the set dungeon was a cake walk. Various guides had said this was the easiest of the Barbarian dungeons and I can believe it. Essentially it just requires you to have Wrath of the Beserker form active. The cooldown reduction allowed me to have this up way more often, and some careful pulling meant that I managed to knock out a few elites during each activation.
The funny thing with set dungeons is that when I ultimately set my mind to do them I ultimately finish them. However they tend to be the thing that I wait until the absolute last minute in a season to do. There is just something about being both on a timer and having to do a bunch of gimmicks that sets my brain into panic mode. There are stories as to why I am the way I am with being on a timer that I won’t go into again, but suffice to say if you tell me I am being times I will do 300% worse. If you quietly time me while I complete something that I think I am just under normal conditions, I do as well as I ever do. So basically I have to trick myself into not really paying attention to the timer, which is exceptionally hard.
At this point in the season I am down to just needing three conquests. In season 21 I have the following to choose from:
Curses! – on Torment X get 350+ kills during a cursed chest event
Sprinter – Complete the entire Diablo 3 campaign mode at level 70 in less than an hour
Avarice – Get a 50 million gold streak in some place other than The Vault
Thrill – Complete a Greater Rift 45 without wearing any set gear
Speed Demon – Beat a Torment X Nephalem Rift in less than two minutes
The ones that involve completing something within a time limit would probably be doable but my anxiety would be at a 45 out of 10 the entire time. Curses is pretty straight forward and we have managed to accomplish this on several seasons so that is a no-brainer. Avarice is similarly a no-brainer and I have even written how to go about accomplishing that in the past. That leaves the only one I have not actually accomplished before being Thrill, where you have to complete a GR45 which I believe is Torment X equivalent without wearing any set gear.
Right now I have been playing with a bunch of options, but in reality the true limiter is that I have not spent time leveling my Legacy of Dreams gem at all. This gem effectively makes each legendary you have equipped work a lot more damage, and after level 25 this goes doubly true for ancients. I want to get this up to around 30 and then give it a shot. I’ve found a bunch of build options for this, and tried an earthquake build last night that I did not love. I figure I will swap over to a Hammer of the Ancients build and give that a shot this evening after have I poured some levels into the gem. After that I just need to find a time and some people to do Curses and finally spend a weekend grinding for bounty chests. Given that I can do T16 pretty easily will need seven rounds of bounties. This will give me the fuel to knock out the final goal… which is to cube 40 items… and I am already at 20.
