The Secret World of Dwarfs

You are probably aware of the Secret World's Beta Weekend last weekend. Since we're a pseudo gaming blog, I figured it was time to share my experience with the beta, since, you know, I have been giving Guild Wars 2 such good press. Since they say: "You are free to tell anyone about what you experience in this Beta Weekend. We encourage you to spread the word and take both screenshots and video," let's get some screenshots and tell you some things.

More on Demise of Guys

For background, go read here. Over at Ann Althouse's blog, they were discussing this article. The author says: "I can’t argue with (Zimbardo's Demise of Guys), especially in younger men. However, these behaviors are symptoms of something deeper." Guess what? You can argue with it! In fact, it behooves you to critically analyze it and see if the argument holds. This article, itself, has some serious issues with internal consistency. I noticed I had a gender in gaming label, so, let's take some time to examine this and see where the problems are in the reasoning.

Society lets Charrlie see himself in the game.

Some More On Writing

This piece got recommended to me via a few places. I'm going to be honest. Like the "you're not special" speech bouncing around the Internet (that I haven't listened to), I don't understand why this is news to people. Doing almost anything well is hard, and most anything worth doing is hard. Likewise, most skills are hard to monetize (especially hard ones you are not good at!)

I have not published any fiction. I've had a few nerd things published in a niche, minor website, At the time, it was solely out of boredom, and, my God, was that really 2004? I write articles for my job, and I write here and my page of fiction fiction a day. I have done non-fiction editing (but not writing) from before I had a regular job. So, I'm not exactly an inexperienced writer, but I'm also certainly not writing for Forbes. For proof? I wrote unexperienced before red squiggly told me I was wrong.

He Walked Out The Door (and Out of the Story)

So, as I am doing my page of fiction a day, I reached the point where we stop teasing that something bad is going to happen and disaster strikes. This is pretty good; we thinned our cast during the initial rush of zombies. So, I took a headcount afterwards to make sure I knew what was happening next, since I try to plan things. That's when I realized: "Hey, did I ever bring so-and-so back from the bar after the hero saw him leave the hotel?"

Then I scrolled up and did some reading. Nope. Five or six pages ago this minor character asked if the hero wanted to join him for drinks, then walked out the front door. He never came back, because I did not do my pre-writing and plan out my sequence of events. Technically, according to my rules, I'm not supposed to backtrack and re-edit or re-write sections, though I break that rule all the time.

Also, I liked the current flow of events as it was, and I did not want to add another scene to drag everything down. I notice that with all my fiction a day pieces. They are just incredibly slow! What a useless scene is this: Guy comes back, says: "Yeah, things are going to heck out there. Glad I'm back!" Everyone acts nervous for a page.

So, let's turn this fiction lemon into fictional lemonade. I dislike the amount of closure some stories give anyway, with every character's fate tied up in a nice neat little bow. Sometimes, characters should just disappear without any fanfare or explanation. So, it is on purpose now. Isn't it great when mistakes are useful? Look! I'm following my rules (and it is only partially motivated by laziness!)

Writing Comics Is Hard!

I read the Fawkes one-shot, which you can tell from its release date means that, as usual, I am behind. (I give it an A+, but one thing was weird. I thought Bruiser was a healer and that Fawkes was a sword user of some sort? Maybe they all have multiple characters, or maybe they re-rolled when Riley joined to accommodate her character choice? Anyway, when that is the only nit that I pick, you're doing pretty good.)

Anyway, whenever I read a comic book, especially one I like, I always want to try my hand at it, then I remember, I suck at it. I've mentioned before that I think writing comics is harder than writing actual, paginated fiction.

Don't Buy Buggy Products

You know what I hate? I hate double clicking the InstallCoolNewGame.exe or Setup.exe whatever, letting the little progress bar fill up, then immediately crashing to desktop. I should not need to make a Computer Use check to get into your game. The barriers to entry for any product should be insanely low. Minutes to learn, a life time to master, is good design ethos. Minutes to learn, hours to troubleshoot is more a slap in the face.

Remember the Dragon Age: Origins release? How cool was that opening video? Once you got to see it, I mean. Not when the sound and video skipped, looped and crashed for reasons that required a patch.  The worst part though is that it is a pretty decent game. But, somehow, no one in their QA world tried to, you know, run the game to see if it did not work. They will tell you that PCs are hard to design for because you have any variety of conflicts that could crop up; this is something I can understand. I am sympathetic towards that plight. But, guess what? You design games. It behooves you to cross your Ts and dot your Is.

Specific Trope That Annoys Me

I'm working on a short story for my page of fiction a day. As I write it, I'm trying to stay away from certain tropes that annoy me. One trope that annoys me in particular is one that is almost everywhere, relating to party balance. Fiction tends toward a well balanced group of people, a complementary team, even if the situation is such that this should not happen organically.