Random Dialogue

My 2006 -

• I opened MMOG Nation, a second blog where I can vent my MMO-related thoughts. It kinda just hangs there for much of the year, until it gets coupled with a regular column of the same name on the GameSetWatch site. Now I can use the blog as a sounding board for general ideas, and put more directed thoughts out there in a more public place. It’s probably the most satisfying thing, personally, I’ve done for myself in the past year.
• I transfered Randomdialogue.net from Blogger to WordPress. I haven’t looked back. WordPress is a joy to work with.
• I attended my second GDC, and had a much better time of it. I had the chance to meet up with a bunch of folks I’d only had the chance to email with in the past; I’m very much looking forward to March of this new year.
• I visited Boston for LinuxWorld. I met my coworkers for the first time. Still the first and only time I’ve seen Rob and the guys. Should probably make it a priority to see them more than once in 2007.
• I headed north to the Wildman Whitewater Ranch for Joe Rheaume’s Bachelor Party. I uhhh … probably wouldn’t have chosen this as an activity if I’d known how easy it is to die on the river. Just the same, I’m going to have memories from this for a good, long time. I hope Joe feels the same way.
• I was best man in the wedding of Abby Wanserski to Joe Rheaume. Beautiful day, beautiful ceremony, and another couple I’ve known for a hundred years throwing a rocking party.
• Katie and I returned to California for what was, essentially, our honeymoon. We had a couple of great days site-seeing in San Francisco, and then drove up the coast to Portland for the marriage of Kirstin and Matt Feldman. We relaxed, we saw a baseball game, we had delicious food … it was easily the best week of the year. It was hard sometimes, too, but that’s what made it worth doing.
• Katie and I moved to a new two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Madison. For the Christmas party we threw this past Wednesday, we finished putting up pictures and really got the place looking great. It’s so much nicer than the last place we were in, it’s hard thinking about the difference. We’re loving our accommodations.
• We went to GenCon. Again. I can’t really soft-peddle it: I didn’t have that great a time. Given the places I want to be this year, and the things I want to accomplish, I’m thinking I’m going to give it a pass this year.
• Katie and I celebrated our first Anniversary. Ding 1. I’m looking forward to the new talents at 10.
• I attended the Kohnke PR For Games Conference. If anything, it was more fun than GDC. It was certainly fun … not losing my camera, for example.
• I purchased a Wii after standing in line for six hours. Now that I know how hard it is to find Nintendo’s little machine, I’m totally glad I did it.

My 2007 -

• More Writing. I’m not going to die if I don’t have one feature a week, but that’s the goal.
• More Face-time. I want to get out to see my co-workers more. Ditto for the folks I work with in a larger context.
• As a follow-up to that: I will attend AGC this year. Come hell or high water.
• PAX, too, for that matter. Sounds like I’ll probably be going with friends, too. w00t.
• Passport. I don’t expect to get out of the country this year, but I’ve decided I want to be ready for it when I get the opportunity.
• Finish out the Shackled City campaign before Jeff and Viv’s kid makes his debut. This is a must. :)
• Be kinder to RD.net. I’ve been mentally quite brusque with this site of late, and he’s done nothing wrong at all. More writing, less bitching.

Hope everyone’s having a good last-day-of-2006. See you next year.

These aren’t things I expect to happen … these are things I want to happen, sometime.  The time for talking about the year to come is next week. Christmas is about good things happening for me, for everybody, and these are the things I would take as gifts quite happily. In no particular order:

• American troops out of Iraq.
• The end of Katharine’s headache.
• A “Hobbit” movie, and a Halo movie, directed by Peter Jackson.
• An ending to the Shackled City game that gives the players good memories.
• The launch of Spore, and a Mass Effect that meets expectations.
• The return of wide-spread stem cell research in the U.S.
• A general acceptance of the theory of evolution.
• A trip to Europe for myself and Katie.
• Improvement and acceptance of downloadable and episodic game content.
• A decent movie in theatres … anything, really.
• Inspiration in writing, and a steadiness to my words.
• New friends, new places, and a willingness to take on both with equal gusto.

Merry Christmas!

I wish that I talked more about gaming. Not wrote, mind you. I do enough of that, I think. No, I mean talk. Like, with people. This may have something to do with the fracturing and increasing insular nature of my friend-group, but I just don’t get the opportunity to talk games as much as I used to.

If I were talking to a friend, I’d bring up the game that caused me to take an early Christmas break this week: Oblivion. The full title is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and marks the fourth chapter in an ongoing series of games from Bethesda Softworks. None of them are directly story-related (though they all take place in the same world). Their real connection is in gameplay; specifically, an open-ended freeform type of play a lot of people think Grand Theft Auto III invented. Not so. I was enjoying it as far back as 1994, in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls: Arena. The Elder Scroll series are one of the pillars of American computer roleplaying games. Morrowind (the third game in the series), especially, is mentioned in the same breath as games from the Ultima and Baldur’s Gate series’. The completely open playing field means you can do pretty much whatever you want. Oblivion takes this to the furthest extreme, offering you the opportunity to be a hero, a villain, a thief, or a paladin. Or anything in between.

Oblivion has been on my mind lately, because it’s been getting tapped in a lot of ‘best of’ lists for this year. Despite having released waaaay back in March, it’s still on the minds of gamers both console and PC. In the ‘always now, never past’ world of games, that’s saying something. It’s just that good. In fact, Oblivion tops my list for best game of the year, right up there with Half-Life 2: Episode One. In fact, Oblivion is a great example of why I love gaming.

Earlier tonight, I sat down with my much-loved save. This particlar saved game does not include the end-game state; I beat the game all the way back in the spring, to get a sense of things for my review. But, I didn’t want that to be the way the story went for my particular character. I reverted to an earlier save and kept playing. By the time I’d stopped playing, sometime in April, I’d never actually gotten around to beating the game. I’d played over 65 hours with the character, but I’d yet to actually beat the game. I was just having too much fun. I was exploring dungeons, stealing stuff (lots and lots of stuff - 7589 things by the game’s count), doing quests for the citizenry, and generally giving people a reason to talk about the ‘Hero of Kvatch’.

All the talk about the game made me pick back up earlier this week, and for tonight I’d decided I would beat the game again. It took me a lot less time to do this go-round, and the end boss was actually cake for my super-leet thief-warrior. I came loaded for bear, but shouldn’t have worried. He went down like a chump. Even so … and even though I’d already beaten him once … it was a total blast. I celebrated my victory by buying the most expensive house in the game, a 25,000 gold piece mansion in the town of Skingrad. There are display cases in the house, and I set up little examples of my adventures to remind me of good times. Here, I put the armor from each of the major cities; taken from the fallen at the epic Battle of Bruma. There, I put the armor taken off of the fallen Jauffre and Baurus, good friends I’d known since I busted out of jail at the start of the game. In another, I put the staff and robe of the final boss as momentos. I dropped a glowing, humming Oblivion stone on my desk to act as a paperweight, and filled another display case with the hundreds of keys I’d stolen over my career. This is why games are cool. This is why gaming is cool. Jedi may not crave adventures and excitement, but gamers do. This is the real deal; I have the chotchkes to show for it.

As you can imagine, though, setting all this up (and that pesky killing the boss thing) takes quite a bit of time. I sat down at my desk around 9:30 or so, and when I stopped playing to help Katie with some wrapping I said to myself ‘Gosh, I hope it’s not 11:00 yet.’ The cruel, cruel clock said it was already 12:30. I’d spent three hours arranging digital fiddly bits inside the non-existent manor-house I own in a figment place. This sort of ‘gaming fugue’ doesn’t happen to me very often; I can’t let it, it’s a bad place to review a game from. Just the same, I had some things to get done in those three hours.

On the balance, I’m glad I’m a gamer. Sometimes … just sometimes, mind you … I wish games weren’t getting so good.

With the help of the always excellent Benjamin Davenport, I procured for our little home a tree this past Saturday. Knowing Katie’s enjoyment of the trimming process the fir remained ornament-free over the weekend, while she was out of town. I managed to have a semi-decent weekend by myself. Mostly, I played Viva Pinata. :)

We started putting the ornaments up late last night. On Mondays Katie gets home earlier than on other nights, but were were both pretty tired, and so didn’t get that much done before we turned in.

Today, we resolved to get the the tree filled out before she went to work at five. With more time spent on the ornaments, we came back to the same old ‘discussion’ we have every year. With the lights on the tree and that green/red plastic bin cracked open, one of the few points of friction we share comes to the surface. Basically, I think we have too many ornaments already, and Katie sees it as an obligation to put every single ornamentation we have on the tree.

This is a fundamental disconnect we share, and it highlights one of the basic differences in our character. It’s weird … we have so much oddly in common that the few points of friction we have seem oddly out of proportion. In the case of the ornaments, it’s a ‘new vs. old’ problem.

For a number of reasons, my childhood and formative years have mostly been left by the side of the road as I was growing up. Ornaments, pictures, toys, books … I don’t have a lot of artifacts of my past left over. As might be expected, my outlook on life and material goods reflects my upbringing. While I respect the longevity of structures and items, I don’t have an appreciation for permanence. The new is better than the old, why do things the old way if something better comes along, etc, etc.

Katie’s upbringing, on the other hand, has had a commendable continuity that (I’ll be honest) sometimes makes me jealous. Though she moved once or twice while she was growing up, the stuff of her childhood has survived more or less intact. She still has her trusted teddy bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy, that was given to her when she was born. Though she doesn’t exactly wear them anymore, she still has clothes from when she was just four or five years old. She has toys, pictures; we have a stack of DVDs that show her being a little primma donna on Christmas Day many years ago.

When I look at a Christmas tree, I see an aesthetic statement; it’s art for the sake of art. When Katie looks at a Christmas tree, it’s like a lot of things in her life: a living part of her history. Most of the ornaments on the tree are hers, highlighting her birth, moments from her youth, moments from her parents’ lives. We share several ornaments now, mostly from our marriage last year. They’re beautiful, and make me appreciate ornamentation in the way she does of things from her distant past. Even there, though, I find myself thinking “Will I still want all of these hanging on the tree 30 years from now?” My own ornaments are mostly recent acquisitions. Mom let me move on with two ornaments from being a baby; since then I’ve gotten a ‘Darth M&M’ from Katie’s folks, and a few ornaments from Katie: a pirate ship, a bag of polyhedral dice, a zebra. They’re all greatly appreciated (especially the pirate ship) … but why would I want the same things hanging from the tree 30 years from now?

The argument, such as it is, is almost comical now:

Michael: The tree is full already!
Katie: No its not, I see big holes. Besides, we need to use all of the ornaments!
Michael: But … why? Wouldn’t it be better to pick the ornaments we like and just put those up? It looks like a vertical yard sale with everything on the tree.
Katie: It’s important that we put everything up! They all have meaning!
Michael: Are we going to do this every year? If we put up every ornament we get, every year, the tree is going to fall over?
Katie: No its not!
Michael: Yes it is! Every year we get three or four ornaments. By my calculations, that means by the time we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary our tree will weigh about a metric ton!

And so it goes. We never really “get” anywhere with this argument, and I can’t say that I really enjoy playing out my little part of this farce. Just the same, I think it’s a good thing we go through this annual ritual. We’re very different people, in our own ways, and this is something I think it’s going to take us a long time to figure out. I certainly hope we do someday; why do things the way you always have, if there’s a better way to do it?

My review of Viva Pinata should go up this Monday … assuming that I can stop playing it.

ToDo -

• Work on the Domestic Pinatas
• Attract the Ducks, breed em’, feed em’ to the pretztails.
• Build a house for the snails, breed em’, feed em’ to the crows.
• Attract another aracknos, breed em’, feed em’ to the profitamoles. (Fed em’ to the Macacaroons instead)
• Get the daisy population back up to attrack flutterscotches. Breed em’, use a Red to convert a profitamole.
• Hire Diggerling, Weedling
• Breed the Macacaroons
• Finish Breeding the Crowlas
• Breed the Newtgats
• Breed the Mothdrops

I’ve played Sam and Max, Final Fantasy XII, Gears of War, a lot of Wii, Twilight Princess, and Neverwinter Nights 2.

I’ve talked about Ryzom, Tobold, Firefly, and Warhammer.

Otherwise, not much.