It isn’t common lately that I am “pushed” to write. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but I am often quite content just sitting around and wasting my time. Lately, however, the issue of story in games has been knocking at my door. So why don’t I go ahead and jump on in?

I finished Mass Effect a while back. I most definitely enjoyed the game. I was a fan of the story and the methods in which it was told. It was because I enjoyed the storytelling that one specific example of “bleugh” jumped out at me.
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Mirrored from: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?printable=true

It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment.

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I spend days in thought

Then hours in writing

Still more days in waiting.

And finally I had created

That which I needed

To prove your shortcomings.

And as I reread it

To affirm and to edit

I found my own failures

staring back at me.

Outside of a few graphic design classes, I’ve never really used an Apple OS. From what I understand, it makes things very, very simple. I imagine the “goal” people at Microsoft had in mind when they set out to make certain “enhanced usability” tools for their operating systems was to match the Apple OS usability. “People say our OS sucks compared to Apple’s,” the Microsoft execs would say, “you, guy who has been working on windows his entire life and never taken a software usability course, fix it!” What we ended up getting were things that touted themselves as usable and helpful, but that didn’t quite work, and were *so* usable that you couldn’t turn them off if you wanted to.

In Vista this means that when I was searching my music folder for something I ended up getting 0 results for something I knew I owned. I clicked advanced search and saw that by default I wasn’t searching anything that wasn’t indexed. Indexing was a system hog in XP so I had turned it off in Vista. “Ok,” I told myself, “I give, I’ll try turning on indexing.” And so I tried. But when I try to turn it on I just get an error for every single file that it’s trying to index, stating “access denied.” When I hit “cancel,” Windows then hilariously thinks indexing is turned on.

So far the one thing Vista has done that has impressed me is make it so then I hit F2 to rename a file, it doesn’t include the extension by default. That’s it. That’s the only thing.

A short while ago I posted something I had written a long while ago. It went like this: “people who think might makes right are pretty much assholes.”

Since then, I’ve had an opportunity to call myself an asshole for doing just that.

When it comes to PvP, I thought of myself as a “nice guy.” I don’t attack other players unprovoked. I thought this meant my philosophy was, “don’t be a dick.” But that explanation didn’t quite cover my actions. You see, while I am definitely not a dick “because I can,” I most certainly AM a dick to people who choose to be a dick to me first. If you kill me for no reason, I absolutely will retaliate. If you kill me while I’m doing an escort quest or fighting mobs or weakened for some reason, I will retaliate three three fold. I happen to be a class that is especially suited for world PvP retaliation, and I happen to be a HUGE dick when I think people deserve it.

I was participating in a “Fishing Contest” that takes place in the game world. Winning the contest nets you a neat fishing pole (which I already have) or a neat trinket (which I don’t need). I wasn’t there to win. I was there because I wanted one of the rare fish you could only catch during the contest. I happen to know that this contest is generally ruthless, so I tried to fish off the beaten path. It didn’t work. A particularly well-geared shaman found me and started attacking me. I attacked back. I came to realize he had pretty nearly infinite mana, and my mediocre dps and inability to interrupt his heals sufficiently meant that I wasn’t going to be able to kill him. That’s fine, I told myself, as I swam to my escape. As I swam back to that area, however, I found him standing by the fishing pool but not fishing. He was “spotting” for his friend, who came up a bit later. His friend was trying to win the contest, and he aimed to help his friend win by attacking any other person fishing they came across. Well, that didn’t sit right with me, so I decided to do something about it. I decided that this guy would not successfully help his friend win the fishing contest. How did I do that? By casting a stun spell on his friend (which interrupted his fishing) and then swimming away (preventing them from following and killing me). I did this over and over for the next 20 minutes until someone else won the contest and these two left.

They messed with the wrong druid, ya know?

I’m a self righteous dick. I decide that you won’t win the fishing contest and then make it so; not because I am skilled enough to take on two people who outgear me, but because my class just happens to have the skills that make it possible for me to pull it off.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit recently and I can’t justify it as anything other than that “asshole philosophy” I mentioned earlier. No, I don’t apply the philosophy to people who don’t “deserve it” in my opinion (well… unless they’re friends with someone who does deserve it I guess), but I sure take advantage of such a philosophy whenever I get the chance. It’s sort of the basic reason I have fun on a PvP server, I like the feeling of power that comes along with punishing someone who I think is a jerk. It’s probably very similar to the feeling of power those jerks get when killing someone who is low on life fighting 3 mobs.

Sure I consider myself better than them, but we run on the same juice. Philosophically I’d say my original “don’t be a dick” philosophy still stands, it just has the rather “Punisher-esque” caveat that if someone is a dick to me or my friends, then I will turn their philosophy against them. I’m like a gentle giant who turns into a douche when you are mean :D