Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we sit down to record the first “Aggrochat Game Club show”-like experience that we have done in a really long time. A few weeks back a copy of Citizen Sleeper showed up in our steam libraries courtesy of Tam, and after several played it… we set forth to eventually have a single show where we talked about it at length. The major benefit of this is that for the most part, it is a relatively short game, and also has a wide myriad of possible outcomes. This led to some interestingly varied experiences including one where Bel just played the game wrong entirely and made it out on the other side with a good ending. This is a full spoiler show about Citizen Sleeper so I highly suggest if you have not played the game… that you might do so and come back later.
Good Morning Friends, this is going to be a bit of a weird post but it was spurred in my head by watching a long-form video essay last night, or more so listening to it… while I played a game. First off I feel like I need to begin with a number of disclaimers. This is a blog post from my specific perspective, which is inspired by watching a video from a wildly different perspective. My thoughts come from the place of being a white male gamer born in 1976, which creates specific biases and experiences. If you were not white and not male, you’re experience potentially felt different. The last thing I am trying to do here is sugarcoat an oppressive system or apply a coat of rose-tinted varnish.
Over the years though I have struggled a bit with the terms Geek and Gamer because as time has passed those terms mean far less than they once did as far as describing a particular experience. I am not saying this is a bad thing, and in truth, it is a very good thing because today geeks and gamers have way more opportunities and varied experiences than they ever did before. However it feels different and given that the video above comes from the perspective of someone on the cusp of the millennial and zoomer boundary, and mine comes from a decidedly “Gen X” background I still found the similar but different experiences interesting.
I think one of the pivotal defining aspects of growing up a geek in the 80s and 90s was how rare it was to find a geek property. Lady Hawke for example was effectively a romance movie, but given at the time it was so rare to have access to anything even vaguely fantasy-related… I am pretty certain that geeks of a specific age have watched this film more than once. I think the same is true for a lot of geek adjacent media that came out over the years, which lead to a sort of shared culture and experience brought on by scarcity. I remember being somewhat excited about the completely awful made-for-TV David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie… because it was Nick Fury… in a movie, something that I never thought I would actually see. My teen mind could not fathom ever getting the Marvel mega-franchise that has taken place over the last few decades.
There is a reason why geeks of a certain age revere certain franchises in the way that they do… because we had to exist on fumes for decades. I know I personally watched a ton of low-budget Horror films because they were exploring the sorts of themes I was interested in, which eldritch horrors coming to life to wreak havoc on the populace. The stuff of science fiction was pushed to sources of low repute, and I gobbled it up in desperation. Every so often we would get thrown a bone in the form of a movie like “The Crow” that drew its roots to comic books or otherwise geek media, but those were truly few and far between. This tapestry of desperation had led most of us to watch a lot of the same things and have a similar shared media landscape. If you lived in a small town like I did, it was escalated by the fact that media was hard to come by, which lead folks to dub off bootleg copies and spread them around among their friends.
The same was true on the video game side of this equation. Gamers of a certain age likely remember playing the gold box series of D&D games from SSI, or the completely nonsensically awful Nintendo Entertainment System ports of those games. I ravenously consumed Ultima, Final Fantasy, Drakkhen, and pretty much anything roleplaying adjacent I could get my hands on. I did not get access to a computer until 1991, but when I did I went through a whole renaissance of discovery of games I missed along the way. I remember the release of Wolfenstein 3D and it completely blew my mind, and when Doom came out… it was an almost life-changing experience.
I mean for decades we would have moments where geek and gamer culture would flirt with the mainstream, but never quite break through. The turning point for me was really when Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition was released and the entire D20 system. Living through this was weird because suddenly you saw gigantic kiosks of reasonably priced books everywhere. Prior to the launch of this system, you had to go to either a comic book store or a dedicated game store to get your pen and paper fix, but now in the middle of Barnes and Noble were aisles of prime real estate selling copies of the three core books for $15-20 each instead of the previous $40-50 each. Having survived the Satanic Panic, and the era of having to hide your roleplaying game books from parents… I was completely flabbergasted seeing these things not only in public but prominently advertised.
The video I linked above specifically pointed to The Guild as the origin of the rise of geek culture, but for me by the time that happened the ball had already been rolling. For the first time in my life, I felt truly seen as a geek and gamer. However, it also diluted the potency of what those things meant. For most of my life reading comics, playing video games, reading fantasy novels, and obsessing about science fiction branded me a member of an underclass. I don’t have quite as many harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of peers as some members of my generation do, but I did develop a hearty dislike towards the jock supermen that ran the defacto social structure. Suffice to say though that it was really fucking weird to see the things we practiced in the dark for fear of safety, being drug out into the light for all to see.
However, it also set up this weird dichotomy where if everyone was a geek and interested in geeky things… was anyone really a geek? There had almost developed a tribal language shared among geek culture as a sign that you were “among friends” and could loosen up and talk shop, and the signals started to get a bit confused. In the 90s if you saw someone wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt, you knew without a doubt that you had found a member of your tribe. If they had a D&D players handbook or a copy of Shadowrun tucked in their book bag… then you might have just met a brand new lifelong best friend. The shared social fabric was so strong in part because there was so little material for us to consume. Now that geek culture was blowing up… the shared narrative also disappeared and what geek meant to each person was wildly different.
It was admittedly a bit of an adjustment when I realized that this shared experience that I had and that my friends had… was not as “shared” as I thought it was. That this culture that I found safety in, was openly harmful to so many. As Geek culture became mainstream, it to some extent failed to realize that it was becoming mainstream. I know for me personally, growing up feeling like the underdog… made it really hard to reconcile that I was no longer the underdog and in fact held way more power than I ever realized I held. Some folks never got that memo or had that realization and started to weaponize this “sense of oppression” into an exceptionally toxic culture of gatekeeping. It was a ball rolling down the hill gaining momentum and reaching its horrific crescendo with GamerGate.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped “feeling seen” and started “feeling exploited”. It is weird how Funko Pops for me is the focal point of this shift. When they first came into existence I thought they were pretty cool. As a kid, I wanted nothing more than He-Man, GI Joe, and Star Wars to all be on the same scale and be interchangeable so that all of the geek properties that I loved could exist in the same universe. Funko did this and created a ubiquitous look and feel… and happened to gather up all of these properties that I loved. Then over time combined with the deluge of so many figures every single year… I noticed how mass-produced everything felt.
The video specifically calls out Loot Crate, but it is even more than that. Walmart has an entire aisle now with nothing but merchandise tailored towards geek properties. I remember my jaw dropping and hitting the floor the first time when I saw a Dungeons and Dragons boxed set in Target. “Geek” is now the new “Sports” memorabilia and you can get a triforce branded on any item you can imagine. Our passion for these properties we grew up with, and that were the source of deep emotional bonding moments… are now being churned out and mass produced. The industrial machine does what it always does and finds a way to market its products to every generation. We are in the era of video games and geekery, and as a result, everything is applied with a coat of nostalgia to sell to that specific sensibility.
The wake-up call though is this foundational identity that I have carried with me into my soon-to-be late forties… isn’t really a thing. I’ve branded myself a gamer and a geek, and I find myself increasingly questioning what those two titles even mean right now. At a point in the past, they did have specific meanings associated with it but are no longer quite the cultural monolith that I thought them to be. Every gamer and every geek now has wildly different experiences associated with those words. The truth is… I don’t want to rebel against that notion but instead, embrace it. It is maybe time for those labels to die. If everyone is a gamer and everyone is a geek, then no one is really either and we are just people doing the things we love. There should be more people happy to share the things that they love in life. Hopefully, in time the toxicity will also fade and we can be okay with just liking the things we like, and not caring what others think about them.
Good Morning Friends! I am about to take you down a rabbit hole, because yesterday without really meaning to… I absolutely dug one. I am not exactly sure what causes my brain to travel the pathways it does, but like so many things in my life, it started out simple enough.
I had seen some news scroll across my feed about Ashes of Creation and I logged into Kickstarter to try and remember during what phase of testing I would be getting access. For those who are curious, we are in Alpha 1 still and have Alpha 2 and two phases of closed beta before I get access. Granted I knew I was backing a slow-moving horse when I chipped money in to fund this project, but what I did not remember is that every single project has an estimated delivery date associated with it. These are wildly inaccurate, but it planted a seed in my brain as to exactly HOW wildly inaccurate they were.
This of course led to me pulling a google sheet, logging the projected dates for all twenty-five software projects that I have backed since the launch of Kickstarter. After that, I spent the next hour googling to find release dates that map up to each product giving me the above table. I guess I should talk a bit about my methodology because I was trying to keep things simple I logged the month and year for each project and then did some “datediff” math to figure out how many months late a given project was when it released. There were a few projects that have never been released, and for those, I have currently plugged in June 2022 even though I know it is equally wildly inaccurate. Of those projects, one had an updated release date so I used that instead. I get that my methodology is not perfect but this is just to create some general trends that we can talk about.
Abandonware
Riding the way of “pretty Minecraft” games was TUG, an open-world survival builder MMORPG by Nerd Kingdom. TUG stood for The Untitled Game, and honestly, it looked really interesting to me because at the time it was trying to do something that nobody had really pulled off. In the years to follow the launch of this project, however, it has been done over and over again and pulled off successfully. To date, this project is 89 months late based on the original estimate, and the last update to the Kickstarter was in March of 2017. We know this is a dead project but no one has been willing likely for legal reasons to actually just come out and say it. In the comments, you can even see someone going as far as trying to start a class action lawsuit against the company. I gambled some money and I lost, and I am largely okay with that.
Best In Class
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mages of Mystralia from Borealys Games that not only met the original Kickstarter delivery estimate but beat it by one month. Granted this is maybe not the fairest example because before the Kickstarter launched, I had already played a very polished demo of the game at Pax South. However, I feel like they need to get credit here for beating the Kickstarter estimation game and actually being able to deliver on a project ahead of time. I also feel like we need to give credit to the mobile game Cockatilt and The Wonderful 101 Remastered which were both released within a month of the original estimate which would simply account for the natural shift in a schedule.
The Worst Offenders
Of the games that have actually been released, the worst offender in the delay is Crowfall. This is not shocking given that MMORPGs notoriously take about twice as long to produce as the original estimates. By the time Crowfall was officially released in 2021 it was 55 months later than the first estimate, so just over 4 and a half years late. Granted there is part of me that would prefer that the game still is in testing so that maybe it could turn into a game that I was actually interested in playing. It was a game with some interesting concepts that coalesced into something that I was wholly uninterested in and I am not sure I have logged into the final released version. That is part of the risk of backing a project that is only funded on some pretty prose and a few bits of concept art.
The Full List
I realize that I posted an image of a spreadsheet, but for sake of those with “old eyes” like myself, I am going to actually share the information in text form. Here is the full list of the twenty-five projects I have backed throughout the years sorted ascending based on “months late”. If you are so inclined I have shared the raw spreadsheet here.
Mages of Mystralia – 1 Month Early
Cockatilt – 1 Month Late
The Wonderful 101: Remastered – 1 Month Late
Ravaged – 3 Months Late
Warmachine Tactics – 3 Months Late
Hamsterdam – 5 Months Late
Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance – 5 Months Late – Projected Release Date
TemTem – 6 Months Late
Sunless Skies – 8 Months Late
Wasteland 2 – 9 Months Late
Divinity: Original Sin 2 – 9 Months Late
Amplitude – 10 Months Late
Battle Chasers: Nightwar – 10 Months Late
Battletech – 11 Months Late
Dead State – 12 Months Late
Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey – 19 Months Late
InSomnia the Ark – 22 Months Late
Boyfriend Dungeon – 25 Months Late
Torment: Tides of Numenera – 26 Months Late
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 27 Months Late
HEX TCG MMO – 30 Months Late – Now Defunct but did release
Ashes of Creation – 42 Months Late so far – No Release Date
Crowfall – 55 Months Late
Curse of the Deadwood – 66 Months Late – No Release Date
TUG – 89 Months Late – No Release Date – No Updates since 2017
The Kickstarter Gamble
I think one of the challenges with Kickstarter is the interface and the way that the project pages are designed to make it seem like you are purchasing a product. In actuality, you are gambling on an idea that someone out there has, and hoping that maybe just maybe it comes to fruition. You are investing in the future of a product, and like with all investments… sometimes things go off the rails completely and you lose all of your money. For the most part, I have done pretty well thus far with my video game Kickstarter, though the long-tailed nature of them has led me to plunk my money on the line far less often than I did in those heady early days.
The first project I ever funded was Wasteland 2 in 2012, and the last project that I funded was Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance in 2022. The last one I am not even sure I am that interested in the game, but wanting to help support more Fallen London nonsense to exist in the world because it is a phenomenal setting. Granted my sample size is small with only twenty-five games backed over a ten-year span, but there is definitely a trend toward games coming in late. Given that the average on my list was just shy of twenty months late, and the median was ten months late… you really need to take that estimated delivery date as the complete nonsense that it really is. If you are backing a Kickstarter you are gambling on the future of a franchise and the hope that maybe just maybe someday you will get to play it.
Does this impact my likelihood to back a game on Kickstarter? Somewhat to be honest, but I had already reached that conclusion before looking at the data. The types of Kickstarters that I now back are less about me wanting the product and more about me wanting to help support and fund the product. For example, I thought Boyfriend Dungeon was a worthy cause and was a game that should exist in the world, and even though I have yet to play it… I was more than happy to plunk some money on the line knowing at some point I would walk away with a discount copy of the game. Other games like Crowfall or Ashes of Creation were essentially just me getting a cheap copy of the game and a space in line for the alpha/beta process if they turned out to be phenomenal. There are folks who have an ax to grind with how inaccurate these estimates end up being, but I am not one of them. I just abused it for a blog post.
This is likely a post that very few people will care about, but I am making it nonetheless. Some years back I completely reworked the way my menu structure functioned, and among several tweaks was adding the “Game Tools” menu. Something you need to know about me is that I do not use bookmarks, and instead largely rely on the browser remembering sites I hit frequently when I start typing the name into the search bar. The end result is that I have near total recall while actively playing a game, but rapidly forget what sites I had been using when I go on one of my long breaks from a specific title. I wanted a way of keeping track of these resources that I regularly use while playing games that I often cycle back and forth between. The added benefit of the Game Tools menu is that it allowed me to easily share those same resources with anyone else interested in playing the game.
WordPress has this really neat functionality to nigh infinitely nest menus under one another, and I thought this to be a really cool way of creating a structure for links. The only problem here is that once a menu gets too large it becomes ridiculously cumbersome to manage. As a result any time I changed anything it would seemingly take a progressively longer amount of time to actually save the edit. I’ve even had the save fail completely and cause it to lose an entire submenu in the structure. This only served to cause me to not really want to touch the links at all and leave them more or less in an “as is” state. None of this made me happy, and like so many things in my life, I eventually reach a critical breaking point that brings me to action.
So instead of trying to come up with a clever way of handling this, I am legitimately rolling back to one of the earliest constructs of the internet… a static page. Right now I am in the process of converting all of the nested menu structures into a single landing page. This does a few things that are beneficial, namely, it reduces menu bloat but also serves to give me a place to make some commentary about each resource. At the time of writing this Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy V, New World, and Diablo 3 have been converted to this new structure. The rest will follow as I have time to take my contorted menu structure and rework it into something that makes sense in page form. I’m attempting group links a bit more than I have in the menu, but each game page is ending up a little bit different. I might roll some additional information on each page, like where you can actually find me in that game and maybe a link to that category of posts on the blog.
This is just one of several changes that have been a long time coming. Another thing that is really bothering me right now is the sidebar so I figure once I sort out my menus, that is probably going to be my next renovation. I’ve been consistently blogging on the same website for over thirteen years now, and I feel like I need to uproot a few things and move them around a bit. I still largely like the central column with sidebar format, because that is ultimately what feels the most blog-like for me personally. I’ve always felt like blogs are best experienced in the structural context of the chosen layout of the author, but I have to admit some of the more pictorial tumblr/instagram style formats drive me up a wall.
Again I am not sure anyone cares because I am not entirely certain anyone has actually used that “Game Tools” menu to access the resources contained within. However, I use it… and it will make things a little less fiddly to update.
