Blog Features

Changing A Fandom

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Morning Folks! Today represents the first day of what will hopefully be 31 days of writing prompts to hopefully give you some ideas as we ease into this “low key” Blaugust event. As a result I have recruited a bunch of other bloggers to help me share the prompts with you, and since I made this thing up… I get the honor of kicking things off. For those who have not been following along at home, Blaugust is an event that we run every year where originally I challenged folks to write 31 posts in a single month. Given the times we are living in, we moved this original event up to April and had Blapril this year as a way of hopefully giving folks something else to think about while we were all in lockdown.

However now that we are finding ourselves still several months in living in lockdown mode, the greater community wanted to do something to mark the normal running of Blaugust. As a result each day a new blogger is going to share a prompt with you, and each day that blogger is going to lead you to the blog of the person who will post the next prompt in sequence. For more information you should really just check out my guide post. It should give you a better run down of exactly what is going to happen. If you want to participate, all you have to do is grab the prompts that interest you and write your own posts based on them. I technically wrote most of the prompts, but I threw them in a randomizer and assigned them out so that I didn’t exactly know which one I would be getting.

Blaugust Promptapalooza – Prompt 1

If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?

Blaugust as a whole started as a game blog thing, and over the years I have been trying to make tweaks to open it up to bloggers of other fandoms. However for me… my core fandom will likely always be gaming, more specifically video games. If you want even more specificity… then I am probably most attached to online gaming in the form of MMORPGs. So if I could change anything about gamer culture, it would be to make it a whole lot more inclusive. As a whole gamers can be a horrible toxic lot, and it is really hard to justify this to anyone looking from the outside in. That said there are also amazing pockets of pure joy that take place within gaming, and it is really hard to reconcile how both exist and can often times shift on a dime.

I think we have a few problems that escalate the issue. For starters, there is still a chunk of gaming that does not view themselves as being part of the mainstream. They define themselves as being a niche culture and fight hard to protect anything that tries to change that. This insular attitude tries to push anything out that might serve to endanger their “fun”. This has so many different representations but one of the biggest that you see is the “battle between like objects”. I legitimately randomly picked a screenshot, but it will serve as an illustration. This is The Division 2, it lives in the genre known as the looter shooter… and has major competition from Destiny 2 and Warframe each with their own very stratified communities.

In the case of all three games, they are more or less fighting over the same pool of players to some extent and this is absolutely felt by the player base. So instead of playing all three and determining which one fits the specific tastes of a player, you will see segments of these communities actively bashing the other two. You see a lot of reactionary posts on Reddit or YouTube videos talking about how this is the game you should be playing and cataloging all of the wrongs with the others within the peer group. I mean I feel like this comes from the very real fear that you need players in a game to keep it active and for it to survive, but unfortunately pushing other players away is not exactly a great way of accomplishing the goal of a thriving community.

Another type of exclusion that I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are.

For example I don’t play games these days to optimize my skill rotation or to be better than every other player. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my very real obligations and have a moment to chill out in a world where I feel powerful, and that does not have any of the stresses that my daily life does. I am a bad player, or at least I am in the eyes of those who feel like optimal play should be a requirement for entry. I am honestly a fairly decent player to be truthful, but I feel so much stress at the thought of doing anything with other players because I might run into someone who is going to get all up in my shit because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I realize this is mostly a mental block on my part, but it is one influenced by lots of real life experiences with very toxic players.

On this last point, gaming is very much still struggles with anything other a White CIS Male Hetero narrative. I am using this image as an example because you notice, whoever compiled this… did not include the Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale in this image. So much of the advertising around Mass Effect also focused on the male character arc, so much so that it feels like they are intending that to be the default state even though everything I have heard is that the female arc is just plain more enjoyable. Gaming struggles at representation in a way that is natural and organic and has this bad habit of tokenism.

Another reference point, this week footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started circulating showing two male warriors “embracing”. I’ve seen a lot of backlash over this, including one twitter threading going on about how “no one asked for this” and to “leave politics out of video games”. The thing is… so many have begged for more casual and natural representation of something other than the hetero-normative over the course of the last few decades. The fact it still invokes an outrage is the sign of how desperately we need it woven into the tapestry of our stories. In gaming there is such a long way to go before there is a clear “default” path and a clear “other” path.

All of these things are about less gate keeping in video games, and more inclusion of different viewpoints. The players need to evolve, but at the same time the games need to keep pushing us to evolve. It is important that we focus on what we enjoy, and less on what games are doing to make sure others are enjoying themselves as well. One of the other important points of view that I have reached over the years, is that it is okay if you decide a game “just isn’t for you”. You don’t have to play everything, and god knows with as much content as being released each year there is no way you will ever be able to in the first place. I would love us to reach a point where we can just be happy that nice things exist for other people even if we don’t want to partake of them ourselves.

The Next Blogger

Tomorrow you will be able to find the next prompt in Blaugust Promptapalooza over at Azerothian Life. This is a really great blog by @Dragonray and focuses primarily on her adventures in the World of Warcraft. There is often times a side focus on glorious transmoggy goodness that I definitely appreciate. We all know that is the TRUE end game of MMORPGs, and I personally end up transferring gold over to alts just so I can afford to keep up appearances. So check Azerothian Life out tomorrow to continue this “blog crawl”

Blaugust Promptapalooza Guide

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Good morning everyone! We are nearing the beginning of August and with that comes the beginning of a Blaugust event. This year has not exactly gone as planned and in an attempt to raise spirits back in April, we celebrated what is traditionally the “Blaugust” event. However there had been some rumblings within the community of wanting to do something in August. It was too soon to do a proper “thirty one days of posting challenge”, but we still wanted to do something to mark the traditional time period.

What we are doing instead is something that I am calling “Promptapalooza” and it is effectively a blogging relay. I’ve gathered up a number of volunteers and each day during the event a new blogger will be sharing a prompt with the community and writing about it. For everyone participating in the festivities, be it a prompt bearer or just a content creator watching from the sidelines, this should in theory give us thirty one days worth of prompts to hopefully inspire some interesting topics. Most of the prompts are designed to be fairly general since as we expand our community it is less specifically “gaming focused”.

Participant Blogs and Dates

To kick things off here is a list of the various “Prompt Bearers” and their blogs, along with the days that they will be posting a prompt. For those who want to cheat, you can see the full list of participants along with tentative topics here, but be warned some of these topics may change as we get closer to the actual date of posting. The idea being that this event will also serve as a “parade of homes” as we call it here, as each new post will identify who will be posting the next days prompt.

How This Works

Since I apparently have a knack for over complicating things, the way this is going to work has changed a little bit after some discussion with the Blaugust community as a whole. Here is an attempt at a straight forward rundown of how the process is going to go, and here is also hoping that we manage to pull this off without someone getting confused along the way.

  • On the date specified above, a given content creator is going to share a prompt with the community.
    • The content of the post is in theory going to address that specific prompt.
    • Content creators have been assigned a prompt, but also have been given leverage to swap these out as they see fit.
      • Side note: Prompt bearers, please let me know if you plan on swapping topics so I can keep the master list updated. Any topics that are getting swapped out are listed down below as “spares”.
  • Near the bottom of a days post, the content creator will share the name and site link for the next content creator in sequence. This will lead the community to where they can find the next days prompt.
  • Everyone “playing along at home” should receive thirty one days worth of fresh prompts to pick and choose which ones they wish to create content based on.
  • The process should also shine the light on the various prompt bearers sites and hopefully drive traffic to them for participating.
  • When a prompt based topic is shared, please use the Hashtag #Blaugust2020 in order to increase visibility and allow folks to find them easily.

A Low Key Drop In Blaugust

My hope is that this spurs some conversation and inspires folks to write about some of these topics. I greatly appreciate all of the individual content creators who have signed up for this process. I realize it was a bit contorted to get off the ground, but I extremely thankful for all of the support. It has been the strangest year on the books and with it we have each had to adjust to a bunch of challenges along the way. The goal with the “promptapalooza” is to create something that folks will feel fine dropping in and out of as they see topics that inspire them.

As always the discord is open for discussion as we go through this event, and my “inbox” is always open to questions. I will be trying to keep this post with clarifications if they are needed. I hope this goes well and as always I greatly appreciate all of the help that I get from our broader community. Without you all out there cheering me on, there would not be a Blaugust.

Humans are Not Well Balanced

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For years I have complained about doing escort missions in MMORPGs. They generally involve taking some hapless character along a fixed path as they aggro every single thing in sight. I have long wished I could literally just pick the NPC up and carry them along to the goal to hopefully get it over with quicker. I’ve now played Death Stranding and can without a doubt tell you that having to carry an NPC to the destination is not better, and also apparently humans are really hard to balance on your back. You might be wondering also how in the hell did we get into this situation and I will explain.

One of the things that porters occasionally carry is the bodies of the dead to the nearest incinerator to prevent a “void out” when they go necrotic as they attempt to pass over to the other side. You have to understand that the world of Death Stranding is extremely dangerous and unforgiving, and most of the individuals in this world live in a bunker or vault and have never gone outside for any length of time. So there have been a few cases where some NPC needs to move to another location and asks you to carry them on your back like you would a body. In this case I had to carry a fairly important story NPC effectively the entire length of what was the currently discovered world at the time. It took a good chunk of last night and the entire time I was having to adjust for her listing to one side or the other.

In this case it was an NPC that I have come to really like over the course of our interactions, so as a result I felt like I needed to be super careful as we traversed the landscape. Every time she would shift on my back I felt bad that I was not more careful transporting my “cargo”. Another thing that I love about this game is the random holograms that players have access to, which ultimately break up the wastes. It was really cool to see a Tallneck looming out over the horizon, because it is literally the same size as one in Horizon Zero Dawn making for this massive hologram. I’ve seen a few other HZD cross overs, so I am guessing this is all due to the fact that both games use the same engine, so Kojima more than likely spent a lot of time working with the Guerilla Games team.

If I am correct, I think I am at roughly the halfway point of the game. My goal is to try and finish things up to a reasonable level of satisfaction before the launch of Horizon Zero Dawn on August 7th. That gives me roughly 15 days worth of play time to push across the finish line. I feel like this is a game that I most definitely want to finish, especially given that there is supposedly a 15th chapter that is open ended allowing you to play around in the final state of the world. I always hate it when the continued play option for a game is to effectively “roll back” the world to the moments before the final conflict. Those are the games that I often times never quite finish because I know poking around in the world after that will feel fairly unsatisfying.

On the me front, I am doing better. Taking yesterday off was a pretty good idea even though I hate not actually blogging for a given day. You need to give yourself room to make these decisions every now and then, because in my case it gave me another day to clear my headspace a bit. My wife is healing nicely from the accident, and me… yesterday day was really bad but I am dealing with it. It is like every so often I kinda have to mentally bandage myself up a bit. I have all of today and half a day tomorrow and then it is my weekend which should help a bit. As always thanks for the kind words I received, they do help and they do mean a lot but I mostly share my struggle for anyone out there who might also be struggling.

So I did not get 31 people for the promptapalooza, but I have decided I am going to try and make it work nonetheless. I got pretty close and as a result I will just stub in myself for several days in order to make it work. Tomorrow afternoon since I am off work I will be pulling it all together, creating the list of prompts, the tentative posting calendar, and contacting everyone to try and link topic prompts to people. This is way less lead time than I would have liked, but I should have been more vocal about it. I’ve been in a really bad headspace this month so trying to deal with this has added a lot of stress to my plate as well. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, check out this original post that sorta outlines the idea. There is still time to sign up.

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

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I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.

It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.

Diablo III – PC and Switch

Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

Guild Wars 2 – PC

So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.

Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC

I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.

Torchlight III – PC

I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.

World of Warcraft – Retail – PC

World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch

Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.

Atom RPG – PC

You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.

Wolcen – PC

I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.