Tales of the Aggronaut

The Monkeysphere

February 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 44 – Tragic Relationships

As we were getting close to recording this weeks episode two things happened. Firstly we decided that it was probably better for all parties combined if we tried to record on Friday instead of Valentines day proper, that would leave the day open for any holiday plans that our cast might have. Secondly Kodra suggested that we try and record a Valentines episode talking about relationships in video games. At face value this seemed like a great idea, and generally speaking even if an idea is destined to fail… I am more than willing to try it. The problem is as we sat down to record, we quickly realized just how flawed and tragic most relationships in video games are. We can’t even make it past three relationships in the episode without hitting in the fact that man… video games are really bad at this.

The problem is that video games seem to be good at two emotions revenge fueled Rage, and utter soul crushing Sadness. We joked about indie games being hung up on sadness a few episodes ago when Tam kept giving each game Kodra talked a sadness score “Seven Sads out of Ten”. It seems as though we are not quite ready to talk about actual adult relationships that are productive and not abusive or hostile to the well being of the participants. I think the problem is more that we have not figured out how to do meaningful stories that are not relying on these elements as a way of moving the plot forward. After all if someone is happy with their life, chances are they are not going to go off and be and adventurer. In any case the episode ended up being pretty interesting to record in spite of itself.

The Monkeysphere

Yesterday Braxwolf wrote an interesting follow up to my post diving into my post and trying to explain some of his own thoughts. His post was awesome for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it gave me a real name to a theory that I have used for years. Once upon a time I was driving home and heard some researchers talking on NPR about the “monkeysphere” theory… well it turns out this is more properly known as the Dunbar number. Essentially it is the maximum number of people that we can care about at one time. The idea is that our brains are literally only capable of caring about a fixed number of people at any given time, so in order to start caring about someone knew… we have to punt someone out of the sphere. I’ve long thought about this and I think my zone of caring maybe works a little different than the extreme examples of these studies.

While I am not sure if my sphere is larger than most, but I think it is arranged in some distinct regions. I attempted to draw these out above, to make sense of them. If you take that 150 is the maximum number of people that you can care about at any time like the initial study I read, my numbers would break down to something like this. I generally have about 25 people that I would consider my inner circle, and these are folk that maintain their orbit relatively safely and I ultimately end up talking to them almost every single day. After that we fall into a close orbit zones of folks I would consider close friends, and among this group I would say there are about 50. From there you fall into what I refer to as the “hotswap” zone, to borrow a term from technology. This would be a field of 75 people that gets swapped in and out of the larger pool of every single person I have ever met.

Points of Data

Each person that I meet gets stored in my brain as a pattern of data… the closer I am to a person the more data points I remember. The odd thing is… when someone moves in and out of orbit I don’t delete that data. I can remember things about friends that I have not seen in years and may never actually cross paths with again. Essentially I feel like I have a fourth sphere that is made up of the thousands and thousands of people I have ever met in my life. At any time due to circumstance one of these people can come zooming into orbit and bump someone else out of that “hotswap” zone and I can functionally pick up where I left off, as though no time had passed. I realize that not everyone functions in this state of constantly looking for new interactions with people, and pulling them into their own personal gravity for as long as possible. But that is the way I work, as some sort of empathic computer looking for new inputs.

The biggest flaw in my system design however is the fact that there is no delete key. When a group of individuals break out of orbit attempting to shun me… there is no system available to write those individuals off as a “loss” and purge them from my memory. The sting of rejection will always be there, even after decades pass.. it can be summoned up on a whim with brilliant Technicolor realism. I can remember every disappointment, every failure, every time someone made fun of me. Which seems horrible until you realize that I can also remember every single positive event that has happened to me, each warm fuzzy felt and recalled at a moments notice. The problem is… this makes it extremely hard to ever truly forgive someone. I can reach a point of “being able to exist amicably” with someone, but I can never actually forget any of the transgressions… and in the back of my head will always end up holding a grudge. So having this deep empathic memory… is a double edged sword, but I would not change the way I function for anything.

More Than Pixels

February 14, 2015February 13, 2015 by Belghast

The People Who Get You

I love twitter because it speeds up the process of finding amazing people who "get me" and who at least on some level I think I "get them"

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) February 13, 2015

Yesterday was an exceptionally strange day on twitter, in that an extremely length discussion started from something that @AlternativeChat said, and then spawned a side conversation including myself, @Jaedia, @BraxWolf and @GGChestnut regarding the nature of twitter and online connections. The later conversation seemed to rope in at least half of my friends at one time or another. Ultimately it started with the tweets above, and then grew a life of its own. I come from a very small town. To illustrate my point, I graduated from a class of roughly sixty students. When you live in an environment like that, you ultimately develop friendships based around what was actually available. So while I had many friends growing up, I also had the constant feeling that very few people actually “got me” on any real fundamental level.

I didn’t like the things I was supposed to like, and didn’t react the way to stimulus that I was supposed to react. But in that situation you make the best friends you have available to yourself and make due. It was not really until I stepped foot onto the internet and moved to college that I started to meet people I felt a deeper connection with. There were in fact people out there whose life did not revolve around the football game, and did not think the pinnacle of their existence was getting drunk at a broken down picnic area beside a creek imaginatively referred to as “tables”. I’ve lived much of my life with this sense that the world wanted me to play a role that didn’t quite fit. When I leave the house, it is as though I am putting on my “man suit” and trying to be the person that the world just assumes that I am. I like video games, if I watch television I am generally watching cartoons, and I deeply care about what is going on in the world of Lego this season. I am not “normal”.

More Than Pixels

Since I did not exactly have a lot of examples of people that I could relate to in the flesh, I cherished the few individuals that I did find a connection with. So when I interact with someone, I try and approach it as though I could be meeting a brand new life long friend. I got into a discussion during the day with Brax about how he feels that physical relationships are just different than digital ones. Ultimately I feel like it is only different if you are making it different. I guess maybe I come from a different place on this than most people. I would not know my very awesome wife were it not for the fact that we were both IRC junkies back during the dawn of the internet. We became friends when we were introduced by a mutual friend living in Belgium, and later found out we grew up thirty minutes apart. So when I think about my own beginnings, I find it impossible not to think about the person behind the screen when I interact with anyone.

I realize that just because I feel this way about the people I surround myself with, that it isn’t automatically a two way street. For many of the people that follow me on Twitter, read my blog or listen to my podcasts… I am in fact just a collection of pixels assembled on their screen that they happen to find appealing. There is nothing that I can do or will ever be able to do to bridge that gap. However I do find that there are people out there that I make a real and genuine connection with, and ultimately cherish them for their willingness to care about individuals that in the strictest sense they have no obligation to. I’ve often said it is the way you treat the people you don’t have to be nice to, that is what reflects your personal character the most. When you interact with someone online, you are seeing the real person… the one that is buried deep inside. We are all either inherently the villain trying to cause strife, or the hero attempting to right it.

Sharing Myself

One of the conscious decisions I made a few years ago was that I would be open to my readers. For the first several years of my blog I didn’t really talk about myself at all. I would keep my posts limited to strictly the facts about the game I happened to be playing, but ultimately I am more than just the games I play. I knew if I was going to manage to blog on a daily basis, I had to allow myself to talk about all of the things that were important to me. So each morning I open my door and invite strangers into my world. I walk this fine line however because I still cling to the relative anonymity of a “handle”. My goal is to tell real stories, but just leave out the names, places and finest levels of details. As a result I think you end up with a greater truth than had I said everything, because I have boiled whatever I happen to be talking about to the essentials that matter, leaving out the strictest minutiae. To quote Dragnet “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent”.

Brax asked me if I found keeping up this personal aspect difficult as I continue to widen this circle of people I interact with. On some level I would say that yeah, it becomes much harder to keep your finger on everything that is going on. That said I have developed a realization that I will never be able to read every tweet or blog post or keep tabs on every person in my life. The interaction aspect isn’t that hard because each day I am just being me. Once upon a time my guildies used to refer to a persona I would adopt as “Rockstar Bel”, in that I would wear this mask of a person that amplified all the characteristics that I wished I was. Over time, and developing a certain level of confidence I have started to actually be this amped up version of myself. Which goes back to the statement I made earlier… when you encounter someone online, you get the see the person they really are, the person they have a potential in becoming. I think slowly, bit by bit I am becoming that person that I always wished I was, the one that actually believed I could accomplish interesting things. Maybe some day I will get there, but in the mean time I am going to keep sharing the ride with anyone who is willing to join me.

Best Games I’m Not Playing

February 13, 2015 by Belghast

This mornings post is going to be a bit of a departure from my normal routine in that I am going to talk about some of the games that I really enjoy, but am not playing for one reason or another. I guess with the recent news about Daybreak, it highlights the fact that there are so many games we hold dear… but aren’t actually actively supporting by playing them. As such here goes my attempt to write a post about the three best games I am not playing.

Everquest II

Like so many former Everquest junkies, I am in love with the setting of Norrath. I love its cities, and races and the aspect that I enjoyed the most playing EQ2 was how often times you would just see glimpses of the world that came before this one. The folks behind the zones in Norrath 2.0 were exceptionally good at tugging on your nostalgia at just the right moment, while at the same time making something entirely new. More than anything I think it was the scale of this game that made me fall in love with it. I did not play it at launch, but a few months into World of Warcraft I took a break and joined my friends who did. The world felt so much larger than anything I was seeing in Azeroth, and this sense of amazement through scale never really faded. It felt so much more like a living breathing world. This game also gave me one of my favorite playable races in any game… the Ratonga. While often goofy comic relief I enjoyed roaming the world as my little rat shadow knight.

The problem is that each time I play Everquest II, I ultimately leave due to the same problem. I absolutely hate the combat system with its largely unintelligible stat increases, alternative advancement point minutiae and what feels like three hundred different attack buttons… that are largely indistinguishable. The funny thing is playing my Shadow Knight was a key sequence of about twenty five attacks… and still to this day I can reinstall the game and play it entirely through muscle memory. For me it is the gaming equivalent of chicken fried steak… that comfort food you return to over and over even though it is largely uninspired. The problem is… I will always return to it eventually. It has my favorite world in any game, so full of life and mystery. I just wish I could transplant that world into a game I enjoy on a technical level.

Rift

Rift was the game that pulled me away from World of Warcraft by giving me every single thing I ever said I wanted in a video game. I spent a good amount of time playing Rift at launch and since release it is a rarity that I do not have an active account. The problem is… I am not playing it. This game is one that I want to love so badly, and I wished and tried so many times to transplant my WoW family into. Rift is a game made up of extremely well crafted systems that are honed to lightning precision… but have been assembled in the wrong order. That is the best possible analogy that I can give you. Have you ever walked into a house and felt that something was just off, and then spent the rest of your time in it trying to figure out exactly what it was? There is something wrong with Rift, and I cannot figure out what is missing.

I have heard the complaint that “Rift has no soul” and as much as I have rebelled against that notion… maybe that statement is right. There is some spark that ties everything together that is missing in this game. I will always keep returning to it, because there are lots of well crafted components that make up this game, but the overarching game itself lacks something. With the Nightmare Tides expansion I came back and started playing more regularly, but it was not long before I realized that all I had been actually doing was logging in to play the minions mini-game. Even now talking about this game I am getting the desire to pop my head back in, because it is like this puzzle I cannot quite solve. I want to know why it doesn’t work, but never actually find the answer. What I do know however is it is a game supported by a lot of awesome people, and while I am trying to figure it out… I absolutely do not mind funding their efforts.

The Secret World

When The Secret World was released, I thought that it was absolutely going to be the game I could settle in for the long haul. I believe it in so much that I spent the almost two hundred dollars to purchase a “Lifetime” membership, after having missed out on that same opportunity for Lord of the Rings Online. The experience of leveling through this game and completing all of the content was absolutely amazing. It still has some of the most thoughtful and interesting quest lines I have experienced in any game. The thing that broke myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew was the fact that behind the Gatekeeper encounter there loomed a giant wall. When we began nightmare content, we came to the realization quickly that we were essentially “playing the game wrong”. The answer to beating the content was for us to change our specs to something that the content wanted us to be. Doing this would have destroyed the magic of the game, the fact that we could craft the characters we always wanted to play.

All of this said, it is still a game I think upon fondly, and still consider the lifetime membership some of the best money I have ever spent. Content is released in “Issues” and while purchasing one of these gives you the main story quest… there is also a substantial amount of minor content that goes in with each of them. Games are notoriously bad about pointing out things that have changed in the world, and The Secret World is no exception. I find it a mentally daunting task to not only try and remember how to play my character each time I return, but also try and figure out what is actually new. The fact that you can repeat almost every quest in the game only serves to make this more maddening. The answer of course is to claw your way through copious patch notes to figure out what new elements were added, but instead… I simply don’t play apart from logging in every now and then to buy a cool new outfit with my monthly allotment of in game store currency.

Fondly Remembered Loves

There you go, this morning in honor of Valentines Day I give you the games I love but am not actually playing. I feel like all gamers have these games in their history. I am curious what some of yours are. Leave me a comment letting me know what game or games out there are you still smitten by but just not playing anymore.

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.