explodedlibrary.info

alternate realities

[Photo credit: tfangel on flickr, Creative Commons License]

One of my hobbies outside of blogging is gaming. It goes way back for me, from ancient computer games like Wizardry and Ultima III to online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft (WoW). I have some ambivalence about the role of gaming in my life. It’s possible that if I didn’t spend time on gaming that I’d be a better person in some way - doing more creative writing, more blogging, getting more exercise, doing something amazing in the world. It’s also possible that if I didn’t do gaming, I’d just waste time on something else.

Then I think about the beginning of Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, one of my favourite poems.
“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
When I think about lines like this, I think that what’s important is passion, and we are fools to stifle this. And it doesn’t matter if other people approve or not.

So I’ve decided to accept gaming in my life, acknowledging its potential to consume too much of my free time and work to keep it under control and in balance.

The good thing about this is that leaves me open to experience some amazing games which can only be described as artistic. Do many people dispute that film and TV can be artistic media these days? It’s happening with games. Think movies with beautiful cinematography, compelling plots, well written and voiced characters, but with the innovation that they are also interactive, where you decide if your character will be hero or villain and what they do. It’s true there are a lot of crap games out there, just like there are crap films, TV shows, novels, blogs, paintings, plays, poems, you name it. The artistic spark is in this new media, and I think that it’s sad that so many people have decided games are just frivolous time wasters. Similar things were said about novels when they were new.

This blog is not going to morph into a gaming blog, but I have decided that it’s time to break down the barriers I’ve made which separate my gaming interests from my other interests.

I’ve been spending a bit of time on the Secret World lately. After playing games like World of Warcraft for years, it’s refreshing to play an MMO with a contemporary setting, with no Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and Trolls. Playing the Secret World is like being able to live in the Buffyverse or a gory zombie invasion. Although I have never been a big fan of games involving puzzles, I like how the Secret World has included some missions with puzzle elements. It creates a more diverse questing experience, and work well with the recurring themes of espionage and hidden knowledge.

I really like how the Secret World does factions. I was getting tired of the absolute factions which exist in WoW, where the Alliance and the Horde are at war with each other, and it’s impossible to meaningfully communicate with members of the opposing faction or enter their cities without being killed on sight. Factions in WoW have become an annoying zero sum game and it doesn’t help me that the most recent expansion, Mists of Pandaria, has a particular focus on the inter-faction conflict. Factions are less absolute in the Secret World. The choice is one of three secret societies, each with its own flavour. It’s possible to talk with members of the other factions, and even group up and run instances with them. Faction only really seems matter in the voluntary PVP battlegrounds.

The Secret World is not without its faults. I have not found its crafting system to be particularly fun or rewarding - maybe that will change as I progress further in the game. Several commentators have found its combat system unsatisfactory and difficult. As someone who has played WoW for several years and witnessed what happened to the game’s culture when everything was progressively made easier, I don’t mind the challenge of the Secret World’s combat system. I am not quite used to character progression that is without levels and clearly defined classes, but still appreciate that they’ve made a game which is quite different.

But I’m not in the mood for gaming tonight. For the first time in a while, I’m drawn to poetry.

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.

one of my favourite mods, Ultima V: Lazarus for Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege (2002) was an ok-ish game. I liked the free form class system - where characters would specialize according to the ways they used their abilities. The mule for carrying extra equipment and loot was an inspired invention. The music and the landscapes were well done, as were the goblins with machine guns and flamethrowers - except that there were too many of them. But it was ultimately a generic and repetitive hack and slash game with a threadbare plot.

But today I am extremely glad that I have a copy of it, because it enables me to play Ultima V: Lazarus (which I'll be referring to as just Lazarus), which recently been finished for the Mac.

The original Ultima V was published in 1988 on the Apple II. It was not good timing for a game's posterity, because at this time people were already replacing their Apple IIs and Commodore 64s for Macintoshes and PCs.

One of the developers of Lazarus explains the reason for re-making the game:

We're doing Ultima V specifically, rather than, say, IV or VI, for three basic reasons:

First, U5 is old enough that its technology is completely obsolete. Ultima VI-IX are still "playable" with today's computers, but V and those that came before it are very outdated.

Second, no one has ever created any patches or upgrades for it. Ultimas I, III, and IV have all at least been patched, if not completely remade.

Finally, I feel that Ultima V has the greatest potential for expansion of all the early Ultima games--its story is rich, its characters are interesting, and its environments are begging to be seen in modern graphics. [official u5lazarus.com web site, in the FAQ section]

Lazarus is actually a mod for the Dungeon Siege game. It's a very inspired combination - mixing a 2 dimensional turn-based game with well-written characters and a rich story into a 3D real-time game engine.

Lazarus is freeware, but a copy of Dungeon Siege (not Dungeon Siege 2) is needed to use the mod. It is definitely a labor of love. It must have been a massive job. I feel that it's unfortunate yet understandable that it took so long to finish, seeing that Dungeon Siege has been superseded and might not be so easy to find these days. I have only just started exploring this game, but have been impressed by the music and interactions between the different characters. It compares very favourably with modern games, and seems to have a maturity which many of them are lacking.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia entry on Ultima V: Lazarus
• Review of Lazarus
• Lazarus wiki

the view from the outside

I find this sort of thing fascinating. It's also nice to see librarians being praised in unlikely places.

Unexpected places to encounter Warcraft geekery: "I was doing some research in the Boston Public Library about management ethics, which at first doesn't sound like it's related to World of Warcraft. I found this book that looked interesting about how librarians were expected to relate to those 'scary' questions from people who want geek-related reading, such as sci-fi or fantasy. In the book was a 'quiz' that was meant to prove to the unsuspecting librarians that they knew more about geek-related subjects than they thought.

One of the questions was,

Harry Potter is a student at...
a. Harvard University (where he is studying for an MBA)
b. Hogwart's [sic] School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (where he is studying to be a wizard)
c. The Jedi Academy (where he is studying under Luke Skywalker)
d. Lordaeron University (where he is studying warcraft)

The random Warcraft reference just about killed me in the middle of the BPL. I may be the only person since the original author to have read that book and gotten that reference. Kudos to the author of 'Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader's Advisory' for being a Warcraft geek!"

(Via LiveJournal World of Warcraft community.)

Ultima III and Ultima IV

Why are retro classics like the early Ultima games popular? Is it just nostalgia - adults pining for what they enjoyed in childhood/adolescence? Is it because mobile phones, PDAs and mp3 players offer a similar a similar gaming environment to the Apple ][, Commodore 64 and TRS-80? Could it be that these some of early games compensated for their technological limits by having better gameplay? Or has this renaissance been caused by the strengthening of the open source movement?

If you're curious, try Lairware's remake of Ultima III (this particular version is for the Mac only). It's shareware. Registering it for $15 will let you finish the game, but you can waste days on this game before you get to that point. It's very polished.

There's also xu4, a freeware version of Ultima IV for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and other platforms. Ultima IV is a bigger and better game than Ultima III, one of the best games of all time, imho. xu4 is not yet playable to the end, but they're getting there. The personality quiz at the beginning of the game is reason enough to give it a try.

There are a lot more resources on retro-gaming, even other new versions of these games. Not to mention all the sites about running emulators of old operating systems on modern ones.