Processing Loss

This is Allie. She has been my baby girl since shortly after we got her. I can’t tell you exactly how long we have had her because it legitimately seems like forever and wildly predates the time when I was keeping track of things through the blog. Best as we can tell she was somewhere between 13 and 16 years old because as a feral rescue, we have no real clue how old she was when we adopted her. She had a bit of a rocky start in our lives because we thought she was fighting some sort of kennel cough. The entire time we had her she would go into these sneezing fits, which we eventually came to realize were just brought on by allergies.

However this meant that we kept her isolated up in my wife’s office for a good chunk of time after we first got her. During this time I spent an awful lot of my free time hanging out in the office and just spending time with her so she wouldn’t be lonely. As a result we developed a pretty strong bond that continued on throughout her entire life. She had been sick for the last few years, realizing she had a thyroid condition too late to really be able to do much to fix it other than offer palliative care. Even when I knew she was not feeling amazing, she never stopped wanting to be on top of whatever I happened to be doing.

Long ago I had to learn how to play on my laptop while she was draped across me like a seat belt. We were legitimately surprised she made it through last winter, so as we entered this winter we were on constant watch. There were so many times she would be sleeping somewhere curled up and I would have to check on her to make sure she was okay. She remained “my” sweet and loving Allie right up until the end. Roughly and hour before recording the podcast last week, she had a massive seizure and within the span of ten minutes she was gone. My wife held her wrapped up in a towel as she passed.

I’ve not really been able to talk about this, because I am still processing. I knew it was coming which has helped, and Allie was a shadow of her former active self which has also helped me to realize it needed to happen. However no matter how much rationalize it… she was still my baby girl and one of the most loving cats that I have ever known. Talking about this sort of thing tends to spawn a deluge of support, and I am not sure if that helps. I mean I know you all at this point and I know you have my back, but I think this is just the sort of wound that needs to scab over a bit before I can move on with my life. The two remaining girls are adjusting and it has sort of reset the balance within the house causing a momentary truce which has helped.

It is also within this raw state that I am trying to process the news about the death of Brad McQuaid. I don’t have any personal stories about him, because I was just another player in a sea of players. However Everquest was a very important and foundational game for me, and with it came the legend of Brad McQuaid and the Vision. I also played quite a bit of Vanguard and was ultimately going to play some Pantheon. On some level I think Brad had this idea in his head that he never could quite reach and each time he set out with a game he failed somehow to render it quite the way he could see it in his minds eye. On many levels Vanguard felt like a higher fidelity version of Everquest and similarly so Pantheon was shaping to be the same higher fidelity version of Vanguard.

I am not sure if my life supports the style of play that these games were trying to present. However I still have a good respect for the ideas behind it. Brad was one of those folks that I looked up to and wanted to be when I was still entertaining the concept of making a break from corporate development and going into games. I am not even sure if he was a personal hero of mine, but he was definitely someone I kept tabs on each time he did anything. The world is going to feel smaller without him out there somewhere chipping away at trying to finally render this vision he had, in the same clarity he seemingly saw it in his minds eye.

On that note I am going to wrap up the post. I am knocked off balance right now between the sequence of events. I am sure I will be back to my normal self over the coming weeks, but for now I am just processing everything.

I Still Don’t Get Stadia

Yesterday I said there are times when I am an old man yelling at the clouds and to be warned this is going to be one of those times. Yesterday Stadia “launched” and by launched I mean a handful of people who pre-ordered on day one managed to get equipment shipped to them in time. I remember getting caught up in the whirl of the Stadia announcements and wound up putting in a preorder because I was curious exactly what this new era would bring. However as more details leaked out about the experience and how it would function I suddenly became significantly less interested and put in a cancellation of my day one preorder.

How Stadia works currently is that you need to have ordered the $130 hardware bundle that includes a special chromecast and a special controller. This gives you access to Stadia as a platform and gives you Destiny 2 bundled in as software. After that you end up purchasing the games on the Google Stadia storefront like you would purchase any other game. Above is a list of the games available at launch and the prices associated with them screen captured from an Android Police article. The prices are not horrible but they also are not exactly amazing given that most of the games on that list are pretty old at this point.

The last point becomes important when you consider how this has been marketed. This is being directed at those who already consider themselves mainstream or early adopter gamers. These are the same people who probably already have a handful of consoles capable of running all of these games save Gylt the sole platform exclusive, and in many cases also have a gaming PC that can similarly run the majority of these games. So again I find myself just not getting this. Stadia feels like a gimmick more than a legitimate way of providing access to something you didn’t already have access to. Stadia being a storefront and not a subscription service granting you access to all of these games makes even less sense.

The nail in the coffin for me however was when I realized that Stadia was being treated as a 4th platform and not simply co-opting the audience of an existing one. The game that comes free with the bundle is Destiny 2 and it requires access to a bunch of other players to be able to play it effectively. Sure Cross Save seemingly works perfectly fine on the Stadia platform, but you are limited to queuing with other Stadia users, which is a pretty tiny pool of players at the moment. If you wanted to play with your friends, you would in theory then need to somehow convince all of them to swap away from whatever their current platform of choice is over to Stadia. A lot of players just uprooted themselves from the consoles to the superior PC experience, and I can’t see anyone that did that willing to downgrade their experience to a streaming one.

The best article that I have read so far is one put out by the Verge. However pretty much every article or video that I have consumed over the last day and some change comes up with the same conclusion. Stadia works but there are compromises made to play a game on the platform. These compromises include a tangible amount of input lag and degraded image quality while playing the game. The Verge article that I linked has a good image slider showing the same scene on Xbox One X and Stadia in EDZ area of Destiny 2. Is it good enough to get in some gaming on the go? Absolutely. Is it going to feel like a console or PC gaming replacement? Probably not.

I think the biggest confusion for me is that being a 4th platform makes no sense for the long term longevity of the platform. Additionally it makes no sense to market this platform towards already indoctrinated gamers. I have said this before, Stadia absolutely makes sense in its free version that won’t launch until 2020, where you can simply buy a game and play it on either a mobile device or through a Chromecast without the need to buy any additional hardware. That lets people who might want to dabble in serious gaming do so without the initial upfront costs. What doesn’t make sense is selling this as “gaming without the console” when the only way to get access to it currently is to essentially buy a “console” in the form of a dedicated version of the Chromecast and a dedicated controller.

The other aspect that I don’t want to get into fully is the fact that Stadia has already missed the market. XCloud is currently in preview mode and offers support for playing around 50 games on mobile devices as part of the Xbox Game Pass service. It really is the “Netflix for games” and there has been a renewed push of trying to improve the Playstation Now platform as well. These are both platforms that have dedicated player bases and won’t essentially be isolating you into a multiplayer wasteland. Steam similarly is ramping up to make its own push into cloud gaming and there are already great PC based services like Parsec. My fear with this platform is it is going to go the way of Google Glass or god forbid Reader and be yet another product that Google has abandoned.

Self Maintenance Mode

There is a prompt over on twitter that I responded to both as a joke and semi-seriously, and I have to say it makes me feel extremely old. If you look through the thread you see a lot of individuals with massive changes that they have gone through during the previous decade. Me… I have more or less been in maintenance mode. For me all of those big changes in my life happened last decade during the years of 2000 and 2010, but even then… you probably need to bump down to at least 1994 to start the clock of major changes given that’s when I graduated from High School and started a series of rapid events.

It is also making me realize that I have lived a really freaking charmed life. I more or less didn’t severely fuck up my life at any point and have to rebuild from scratch. I went to High School, went to a weird sequence of schools that eventually added up to being a 4 year College degree, and then upon exiting nailed a job as a developer right out of the gate. I didn’t spend time languishing in the service industry or working a sequence of dead end jobs waiting for my break. I just exited out one door and entered another. I’ve never really left the path that was the most obvious one laid out in front of me.

It does at least on some level make me wonder if I failed to grasp the point of life. Did I just take the easiest sequence of options and not really try at all? There is a version of me that probably has no clue how I got to this point in my life. That version wanted to go into video game development, which I pretty early decided was an unrealistic goal. I always sorta figured it was the equivalent of a kid who likes Football wanting to play for a professional team. I was nowhere good enough to make the cut so I sort of self censored myself and went for the more realistic options where were web development and eventually the comfortable life of a corporate developer.

The problem with comfort is that it can be a prison cell. I’ve reached a point in my life where it would be very difficult to make a serious change because it would ultimately come with some pretty dire financial ramifications. I flirted with writing piecemeal articles for pay and quickly realized that you have to work a hell of a lot harder doing that to cobble together something resembling a living. Yeah I could make it work probably, but as it stands my salary is what subsidizes my wife’s “teaching habit” so that isn’t really an option. Same goes with making a leap into some sort of game development, because I would ultimately be starting back over at square one.

I am jealous of the folks who have had the strength to burn down one life in order to build a new one that better suits them. I don’t think I have that in me, and the truth is I am actually happy in the life that I did build by following whatever path was laid out before me. Sure there are frustrations and when those mount it makes me wonder what life might have been had I made a few tweaks here or there to the plan. I think this questioning if I made the right choices however is what helps to fuel my sense of impostor syndrome. I feel like I just sort of accidentally ended up in the position that I am in and that I didn’t necessarily “earn” anything that I have.

I realize this is a weird downer of a blog piece, but I sat down and it just sort started pouring out of my fingertips. The truth is I have been having this conversation with you in one form or another for the last decade given that this blog was started in 2009. I’ve also been active on Twitter and built a sort of extended family there for the entirety of this decade as well. I’ve played so many games and through them gathered up a bunch of people that have followed me in the various bits of nonsense I have managed to get up to… and they have became another family as well. Then there is the AggroChat crew which really is closer than most of my family. I hate the term “blessed” because it seems so damned trite at this point… but I am not even sure what other word I could use to represent the same concept.

I am exceptionally lucky to be here sharing everything with you, and when I feel down and like nuking everything I have built from orbit… it is that realization that slowly moves me back from the ledge. Thanks for being with me for the last decade, and thanks for caring enough to talk me through the issues that I occasionally have. I’m not super close with my natural family, but over the last several decades I have managed to build a brand new one and I think that is probably my big accomplishment for these past ten years. I love you fine assortment of folks. Now I am going to stop writing before I somehow ruin the moment.

Hearthstone Incident

The last few days I have teetered back and forth on whether or not I really wanted to make a post on this.  I ask you to read this in its entirety before passing judgement on me personally. There is a fine line to walk between sounding like a corporate apologist and sounding like a xenophobe.  Please note I am by no means an expert in foreign affairs but I do try my best to be a student of current events and of history. I feel like I need to preface this with a brief history lesson.  On Midnight of July 1st in 1997 Hong Kong as a territory moved from British Rule to being governed by the mainland of China. There are numerous sources of information about this change if you are interested.

As part of the agreements from this hand over was the establishment of the Hong Kong Basic Law, that was intended to allow for business to continue as normal in that territory, and for the residents to maintain its legislation as part of a special administrative region (SAR).  This was supposed to extend for a period of 50 years to allow for a peaceful transition from living under the British Commonwealth to whatever the new system of government would be. The ideal being that the citizens of Hong Kong in this SAR would maintain a certain degree of self rule along with the promise of universal suffrage and the ability to elect their own officials.

Certain aspects of this Basic Law never quite were implemented and in the 22 years since the handover of power, a number of these rights have been sufficiently diluted.  This all leads to the situation we have today where protesters have been active on the streets of Hong Kong since March.  Initially this was a protest seeking the withdrawal of an extradition law that would potentially open up Hong Kong residents to the jurisdiction of the Chinese mainland.  As the protests have gone on they have morphed into a huge ball of issues from police brutality to the restoration of some of those rights that have been eroded, to more recently a demand of full universal suffrage.

Now moving forward we have the current situation.  On October 6th during an official Blizzard Hearthstone Grandmasters series stream the player “Blitzchung” aka Ng Wai Chung gave a statement over the broadcast in support of the Hong Kong protestors.  The exact statement translated was “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our age!”. During this the streamers seemingly knew it was coming and ducked down beneath their desks while he was saying it, and immediately went to commercial after that.  

The VOD of this stream was scrubbed and various copies of it have been taken down from YouTube.  Who knows how long the above video will be available but at the time of writing this represents a copy of the sequence.  Following the event Blizzard used a section of the official Hearthstone Grandmaster Competition rules to claw back any earnings from the player that had yet to be collected, and also as a result both of the commentators were fired. Shortly after this, Blizz posted the above questionable response on the official Chinese language only Weibo account.

During a stream on Tuesday night, three collegiate competitors from American University in Washington D.C. held up a sign in solidarity.  The sign above simply says “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz”, and extremely rapidly the camera was cut away from that match leading to some very nervous discussion from the commentators.  Once again the stream has been scrubbed from the official twitch account and is only available through third party sources on YouTube. Most recently as I sit here tonight and write this, signs are pointing that Blizzard is taking action to try and disable players from deleting their account data in protest.

The situation keeps escalating and we still have yet to see a reasonable response from Blizzard on this.  The problem that I keep struggling with is that I can absolutely see how we end up in a situation like this.  The entertainment industry and video games specifically have an addiction to Chinese investment. This situation is escalated by the fact that many Chinese companies have been earning wealth at a frightening pace and have little to no legitimate places to invest that money in mainland China.  

The main way of ensuring wealth for the long term has been in real estate, and there are legitimately ghost towns full of high rise buildings and apartments that will likely never seen tenants.  Those who have the means have been parking that money in as many foreign investments as they can, which only serves to further the “Belt and Road” initiative of the Chinese government.  Along with actual tangible infrastructure, a lot of this money is funneling into supporting video game companies.

One of the first responses that I saw yesterday was from the Destiny community, giving a sign of relief that they are thankful for the move to Steam and away from the Battle.net launcher.  However Bungie has also accepted a large investment from NetEase the same Chinese company that is collaborating with Blizzard on Diablo Immortal. The truth is there really isn’t a large games company on the market right now that does not have at least some significant investment from a company that hails from mainland China.

Perfect World, Tencent and NetEase are massive players in a lot of competing game markets.  What is probably more concerning is that I have watched over the last two days and the coverage by the enthusiast press seems fairly anemic at best, and non-existent at worst.  I am seeing a constantly flow of this on my social feeds, but generally speaking the articles have covered only the strict facts with little to no condemnation of the actions. The same entities that have been pouring money into game studios, also represent a significant share of the advertisers willing to take out those massive full page ads.

To deal with one of these Chinese companies is to at least in some way deal with the politics of the Chinese government.  On some level every modern game sold in the Chinese region has made some measure of concessions to appease or placate. This can be something like referring to Taiwan as Chinese Taipei to keep from offending the “One-China Policy”, or it could be removing all bones from games and replacing them with fleshy patches like is in the case of the Chinese World of Warcraft client.  Offending the government means that more than likely your games will be pulled from that region and eventually the source of investment money begins drying up.

All of this said… I absolutely understand why Blizzard did what it did.  It was a knee jerk reaction and in doing so they misjudged how much gamers would care about it.  I can understand why something happens and still consider it to be the wrong call. As I said before there is an addiction to Chinese investment in the entertainment industry.  It isn’t a Video Game problem, but one significantly larger. Ultimately these companies are going to have to make a decision as to whether or not their own corporate values are worth sullying to keep the cash flowing.  They are also going to have to decide just how many existing customers they can alienate in the process.

As I said at the beginning of this, I have been on the fence about how to react to this.  As the day went on today and more examples of this nonsense started flowing out, my mind was made up for me.  Unfortunately my subscription recently renewed so any protest I might make is going to seem a bit weak considering I just paid for 6 months of World of Warcraft subscription last week.  I am also not going to delete my account, because that seems a little extreme at this point because I would only be hurting myself in the process. I am however going to halt progress in World of Warcraft Classic and going to similarly stop writing about it. Equally for the time being I am going to stop buying anything Blizzard related.

The parting thought that I want to leave you with however is that this was a decision made at a corporate level more than likely by investor relations flacks.  The line of business employees just want to keep doing what they love and keep making video games. Please don’t take your anger towards the actions of Blizzard and project it on their employees.  They are good people and do not deserve the shit storm of hatred that is about to be heaped upon them. Be kind and gentle and find ways to express your displeasure in a sane and rational manner. I fully support the boycott of Blizzard products, just don’t make the lives of these good people trying their best to support you into hell.