CHOOSE WISELY

Clearly, with games as large and involved as they are now, us older folks must pick and choose what to play and when- very carefully or else end up with an incredible museum of untouched Relics. Unfortunately, the idealist in most of us is merely a high pitched 'urkelish'  voice that we stamp out so we can continue purchasing games well never-ever finish. Have any of you ever played a game for 10 minutes just because you bought it and, maybe, feel guilty for not ever experiencing someone else's hard work that you paid for?

These choices can become strangely overwhelming. Buying the thing is the easy part. Getting excited about playing them is also the easy part. Scheduling in the time is the quasi challenging adulty part i don't think ill ever fully master.  But choosing something from the expanding library, well, it can be a bit of a motherfucker. Just the other night i had a half bottle of Whisky and some designated game time. I was ready to zone out and play something for a few hours. That didn't happen. In fact not much happened at all. I got the 'fear' you see. The enormous amount of choice before me caused a mental 'GAME OVER' for me before i even picked something out to play. Distantly i  swear i heard a slide whistle being slowly drawn out foir me and my sad attempt. I went through the backlog out loud. By myself. Which i seem to do often now.

This would not make me a happy man

In this case, on this particular evening i chose non-wisely.

"Metal Gear!?- Yeah, i'm only 10 main missions in. I should catch up a bit..Quiets boobs are awesome. WTF was Kojima thinking?...maybe..."

"Witcher 3?!- SURE! wait....where was i? I'm only 25 hrs in, i should really put in some time here. Nurture it a bit. Give it some attention But then ill run out of money or my sword will break or ill get distracted and start doing shit in the forest.......aw fuck it."

"Dont Starve Together?!- TOTALLY! Such an adorably charming little game, and my Bro just put a new computer together maybe i should call him? "In an hour you can  play!? Sure ill just play something else while i wait....maybe."

"Heroes of the Storm!?- Haven't really go into this yet, I've heard great things, like its a lazy mans DOTA. Built by the actual company that inspired it. Cool, i have not the time nor the patience to DOTA. But wait maybe i should finish....."

"Wolfenstein- Its been a while hasn't it Wolfy? Now where was i here, almost at the end. Right. The hard part and the reason i let you sit on the shelf for too long. Kind of like..."

"Hotline Miami 2- Hrm. Well- i don't know if i'm up for a super unforgiving, intense game. But a friend suggested 'Pillars of Eternity.' Oh shit, 50 bucks! Man, well maybe...But thats another time sink. Oh my bro just got back to me. He can't play."

Aaaaaand now i'm lost and somehow very confused. 

So over about 2 hours i didn't play anything for a variety of different reasons. Something I've notice recently, and its not only to do with games, is the incredible, unfathomable amount of choices we have now for any given item. If your shopping for mustard and your indecisive i pity you. There's like 50 different kinds of mustard out there! Usually i notice my wife trying to make an entree choice at a restaurant. We no longer visit the cheesecake factory for this very reason. She'll spend most of our time there reading through the bible of food and choose nothing. Or choose something thats just 'ok' and spend her meal feeling disappointed that she's missing out on everything else. It's a sickness, you see.  A fear of missing out or 'FOMO' which is a real thing that tends to creep on me with online games. I guess I was so worried about missing out on one particular experience that i chose exactly nothing to play. Under acute circumstances this is was a profound wake up call. PICK A GAME AND SHUT THE FUCK UP TRISTAN.  

At any given time I have about 12 games i really want to play. I'll complete maybe 6 games a year. So mostly i'm biding  my time until the next great game with arbitrary titles i have very little interest in. Out of pure habit i suppose. Maybe my friends are playing something online so ill jump in just for the social aspect and get a few laughs out of it (which is vital). But time is a fickle bitch and the best revenge, seemingly, is to get vigilant and only choose the games we really are interested in.

I think when i'm truly at my happiest with a game is when I've waited for a great one player experience to come out and just sit on the couch (still the best place to play games) and really tuck into it and see it through till the end; when the disk doesn't leave the console until its finished. All that's  important is that i get an enjoyable experience as a return for hours invested regardless of what could have been or what i could be playing instead.

I no longer find myself hunting for what i want to play. The more games we play the more defined our tastes become. That could be said for anything we spend quality time with. I know i love being scared, the methods may be cheap sometimes but i feel like i get my monies worth if my systolic blood pressure maintains a steady 150. I love a great story and atmosphere above all else. I'll dabble in online competitive gaming but i find i soon become frustrated and consumed with self doubt quite quickly. And the time involved to become better is just a chore for me now.  I gravitate towards a certain type of game, so i  read and research release dates for titles and publishers i respect and make very rudimentary plans about what order what game should be played in. If i have a choice of 5 games to play right now ill go straight for what i know and like vs something completely new. Which now that i think about it creates a very boring image of myself. 

First world problems right!? So choose wisely my friends, time is an diminishing investment. Don't settle for the mundane, be productive and challenge yourself until that next game you want comes out. Then call in sick, ignore your wife and have a drink, heck, have 2. 

PROFICIENCY SICKNESS

If we can all just admit this illness is effecting all of us in some way then we can begin the healing process...hopefully with hardcore drugs

Recess was over but this boy was not to be seen sitting in his usual place at the back of the class. He was sitting to be sure, but at hazardous altitude, stuck in a variety of different ways and at the mercy of his own tenacity. "I shouldn't have had that extra juice box" he thought as he built up the courage to extricate himself from this predicament. 

The statue was famous in grade school. We all called it the elephant; all cement grey and sort of the same shape but designed to be abstract. About 15 ft tall and half as wide. You were famous if you could climb to the top of it and sit in the place where the ear should have been, a god damn hero child. No easy feat by any means. It took months of practice and lazer focus; even then any witnessed failed attempts got you a schoolyard sentence of a few days of merciless ridicule.  

Yeah, I was a kid once. I wore my dirty pants and skinned knees as my badge of honor, like a prison tattoo on my face. I walked into that classroom bloody and accomplished with my head high and got detention. As I served my time that afternoon I had a moment to reflect on how I finally managed to mount the elephant. Were there different routes? Could I have done it in a complete recess period with no juice box? Could I have done it without fucking up my pants and having to use Marco Winkles stained gym shorts from lost and found?

See, Metal Gear is my elephant statue.I diagnosed myself with Acute Proficiency Sickness (A.P.S.) when Metal Gear Sold came out in 1998. In fact my APS ebbs and flows with the tide of every Metal Gear release, lying dormant and incubating for years until its inevitable return. I played the game, loved the game and watched the entire end credits out of respect and used the time to reflect on my seemingy flawless performance. The credits ended and I got my rating. "Capybara! The fuck?! Like a giant Guinea Pig? I guess somewhere during the play through I managed to tranquilize my own ego. I felt numb. I never got caught, nobody saw me. How many rations did I use again?  Maybe I shot a guard with a bullet instead of a tranquilizer but shit dude, that's war! What does Capibara even mean? I'm not fucking doing that again," he said as he promptly started a new game.

I didn't feel right. The second play through was brutal. I would do the beginning part where Snake has to sneak into the first facility to rescue the DARPA chief dozens of times. I would get caught, the alarm would go off- 'start' - 'restart mission.' If I got into the facility and someone heard me I would restart. Fuck, if I got to the DARPA chief and nothing happened I would still restart if it didn't feel perfect. Hobby turned to obsession very quickly. Back then you didn't really know how well you did until the end of the game. The internet was a novelty still in those days, back then determination and perseverance usually did the trick. Anytime I thought I heard a guard say something I would restart out of fear of lack of proficiency. See. I was sick. 

 Metal Gear Solid V came out Tuesday and I've been playing it as often as my adult life will allow.  When your wife catches you gaming when you know you should be doing some adult shit and you keep playing, that's when you know you’ve relapsed hard. I was completely invested after the hospital sequence. It all came back to me at once though after the first main mission was complete. I got a B grade. Grrrrr. My sweaty thumb hovered over the redo mission option and I'm ashamed to say I pressed it. What would a Capybara do? I did it again and got an A...sadly. Still not good enough. So I sat there in my man cave and had a bit of an epiphany. It's never good enough, it's not Metal Gears fault  and hiding under a cardboard box wont solve this.

The Metal Gear Solid series raised me in a way. I'm quite meticulous with tasks in my life, I tend to take missions like going to the grocery store as a challenge. All items acquired rank S achieved! (You're not even playing the entire game! - J.) And I always crawl to pickup claymores on my way to work. And I always save my cardboard boxes just in case.  No matter how I played the game I felt compelled to proficiency at the cost of enjoyment. Other games have captured the same spirit, the Hitman series comes to mind, but none of those games captured me at such an early age. 

That margin between enjoyment and a challenge can be so muddled that even the mighty Capybara could lie to itself. The other day as I stared at my mission stats screen at the end of a relatively difficult mission I caught myself laughing out loud. At the top left of the screen I saw a ‘restart mission’ penalty. We are now penalized for restarting a mission. A Metal Gear Miracle.

My Christmas came in September this year and it took a few sit downs until it dawned on me. In MGSV the main missions are ranked but all the side missions are not. Kojima you dawg you! You beautiful Daimond Dog. So now, finally, I can blow shit up, run around pumping 80's tunes through my Walkman? Call an airstrike on a fool just because I feel he’s in my way? And I'm not graded? Thank you! A thousand times thank you. That mechanic alone was all I needed to get healthy again. 

I think what compelled me to play better was a feeling that the game was watching me play. Judging me. And I liked the game so I felt I had to do well to prove something to the game but also myself. I believe all we're really searching for is some sort of affirmation for our accomplishments, in any possible fucking way we can get it. I’ll settle for a Capybara any day.

MGS series creator Hideo Kojima shows a rare instance of human affection for creative partner Guillermo del Toro.

Throwback Thursday: The Secret of Monkey Island

Welcome to the first edition of Throwback Thursday,  where we cherry-pick our very earliest gaming memories for the sweet, sweet nostalgia.

The earliest memories I can recall of playing a video-game must have been around 1994 -- a combination of The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, 3-D Dinosaur Adventure, and The Seventh Guest. I was four years old at the time and mostly illiterate, but I do remember clicking through these intricate adventures just for the thrill of some kind of reaction or change from the game. I vaguely recall we had a console or two in the house by that time, but my brothers were usually using them, so I resorted to bothering my parents to boot up these weird PC games for me.

Since Myst and Seventh Guest had this habit of scaring the living shit out of me from one second to the next (the first person perspective - particularly in dark and abandoned buildings - creeps out children, go figure!) and the beloved 3-D Dinosaur Adventure barely constituted a game,  I didn't spend nearly as much time with them as with Monkey Island. That game charmed me in a way that has followed me ever since, as much in terms of gaming education as in terms of humor and wit.

Even though the CD version with soundtrack came out in '92 we still had the game on floppydisk and the startup screen would play the wicked reggae theme music through the soundcard, rather than as a .wav file through the external speakers. If this doesn't tingle your spine then you must not have one:

So that plays. And then you're this dorky guy in a white shirt talking to some old dude by a fire. At the bottom of the screen there's a bunch of green verbs, next to your inventory in purple, and your cursor is a flashing white crosshair. By clicking on parts of the screen, your character (Guybrush Threepwood) will move there; by clicking the green verbs before clicking on the play area, your character will attempt to do the verb to that thing.

My first videogame hero was a coward, layabout, liar, cheat, thief, critic, and certified insult-swordsman.

Mechanically, the game is a matter of collecting and combining inventory items, as well as negotiating dialogue trees with other characters, in order to solve puzzles which advance the story. The overarching plot sounds typical: an undead dread pirate kidnaps the governor-princess of Melee Island, and the boy who loves her must come to her rescue. But the adventures in the game itself are way more hilarious and involve rubber-chickens, a no-handed two-hooked failed hotelier; resolving a crew mutiny with an explosive Grog of breath mints, gunpowder, and fine wine; and navigating the bowels of hell by threatening a sentient skull for directions through threats and insults. See...hilarious! The Secret of Monkey Island is above all a highly successful work of comedy, similar to the best part of an evening of improv theatre, motivating you to play just for the reward of further jokes and oddities.

Of course all this high-brow humour was lost on me as a child.  I would literally click around until the screen changed and consider that a success. I actually got pretty far through trial-and-error, attempting to use each action and item on each interactable thing until something happened. Today i tried to use my cucumber on a locked door. This diligent trial-and-error method would develop into a core gaming skill - particularly well-demonstrated in the Monkey Island series, where puzzles are often so quirky and obscure that you'd have no other way of solving them.

I do remember coming back to it a bit later and was able to more fully explore the game, though much of the comedy continued to go way over my head. Very similar to my love of The Simpsons as a child. I would even call Secret of Monkey Island, The Simpsons of PC Gaming.

As I child I was half-oblivious, half too-blown-away-by-meta-humour-to-understand, to this blatantly parodic tie-in.

• Each is one of the earliest examples in its medium (cartoons and PC games) to demonstrate entertainment value to adults over children. 
• Intelligent writing - taxes humor, breaking the fourth wall, the hilarity of harsh realities - the strength of Simpsons & Monkey Island's humor lies in the overlap between wisdom and absurdity.
• Both are supported by a large cast of likable characters.
• Both are led by stupid, mostly useless, yet still lovable, protagonists
• Both have stuck with me as a sort of concrete for the foundation of my humor today.

  I've come back time and again to both these series as my brain has 'matured,' and while each series has strained a bit under the weight of forced continuation, I have deeply enjoyed coming back to these familiar stories and unraveling the deeper stuff going on under the surface.

But that insult fighting though. I remember re-enacting the first scene with the swashbuckler on the schoolground at recess. Clang, clang, clang "My handkerchief will wipe up your blood!'  Clang, clang, clang "So you got that job as a janitor after all?'  Just the idea of that is still fantastic and so innovative. I remember taking a trip to mexico and was on the beach one clear night staring out into the water at a small island. I had one of those real life ---> videogame flash backs, you know what im talking about and remembered this image. Still, whenever i think of videogames i only see the word as synonymous with the Monkey island start screen.

CANADIAN LOVE FOR TURBO KID!

It's an extremely rare affair (great name for a band btw) that anything decent or worth mentioning in film-land should come out of Canada. Sure we invented Basketball, the walkie-talkie, amplitude modulation, the fog horn, Hockey and coincidentally the Jock Strap. But its seldom heard that we would have the wits about us to produce a film that we might actually  be proud of. An NO, the guy who made 'Hobo with a Shotgun' had nothing to do with this one. Its from  first time director/ writers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. The trailer is spot on, as so many trailers are no these days. It gives you just enough and leaves you wanting more. It's an art form all on its own and is executed perfectly here. A catchy 80's synth  soundtrack by LE MATOS punctuates a serious low budget Grindhouse  feel. The Villain you may recognize as the one and only Michael Ironside who had some interesting things to say about the Turbo Kid movie. If it gets the seal of approval from old Mike ya know its quality!

An exerpt from a 'Den Geek' interview with Michael Ironside

"So I read the script. I liked it a lot. I get about three or four jobs offered to me a week. Most of them are not very well written, and maybe half of them are not even financed, but if they have my name on it, then maybe they can get in the door somewhere and get financed. This one was different. I choose now based on the writing, first. Then, on the personalities of the storytellers, and then whether or not they are flexible enough to take input, because that was their first feature film, and I had done about 240 films, you know, at that time. I’m not bragging. I like to work."

 Turbo Kid was released yesterday in theaters to a limited release. From there website you can buy the movie or rent it. The 'buy now' icon doesn't seem to work so you can go to vimeo and buy it from there right here. IT'S TURBO TIME!

GAMING IRL

Robbie's article got me thinking about gaming IRL - which is to say, the overlap between our persistent real-lives, and the pursuit of gaming as a past-time. As I've said before, I think gaming demands a lot more infrastructure - in terms of technology, mental resources, and time - than the other widely consumed media, and as such, it naturally has a particularly intrusive relationship with our everyday lives. Recently I had an insight about my gaming hobby-turned-habit and did something I haven't done in a surprisingly long time: I stopped gaming for a few days, and my return to gaming since then has been vibrant, positive, and newly enriched.

In the spring of 2013, a few friends convinced me to try the free-to-play MOBA game League of Legends. Unlike me, they'd played Dota back when it was still a mod in Warcraft 3, a game unplayable for me, given my daily commitment to World of Warcraft at the time (Blizzard is watching you; Blizzard loves you). I remember vividly my first encounter with MOBA following the tutorial. I subscribed to Riot's LOL channel, and unlocked a free cosmetic skin for this stupid minotaur character called Alistar. My first game was on Twisted Treeline, an atypical 3v3 map, and my first impression was total confusion. Where is my guy? Where did my cursor go? What does that guy do? Why can't I move? Am I dead? Oh, I'm dead. However I knew there was a structure underneath this chaos and I wanted to understand it, turn it to my advantage somehow. I started grinding out late nights and brewing up obscure strategies with friends. I curated a collection of characters - you only have access to the ones you purchase either with Monopoly money or credit card - and devoted long hours to researching the current strategic trends in between my university classes. I was happy to put up money for a game that was free-to-play in the first place. In a sense, I owed it to them - and there were so many cool and powerful characters to get to know. Eventually I joined Ranked matchmaking, the League among Leagues, and spent months oscillating up slightly and then down slightly at a just-below-mediocre skill level (I think I was Silver IV). Regardless of my failure to significantly progress, I played fervently whenever it was possible.

I think it was around October of that year that I hit a stagnant point with my interest in League. Riot loves to release overpriced, overpowered characters in order to push sales, only to neuter that character as soon as the next flavour of the month arrives. Most changes to the game seemed arbitrary, motivated more by Riot's fiscal dependence on their only product than on creating a Good Game. Across the various forums I trawled, I saw constant reference to Valve's Dota 2 which had recently entered open beta. Everything I heard about Dota 2 - the free access to the full character arsenal; the darker, mature visuals; the powerful abilities and impactful gameplay - made me feel like a kid with a Sony Discman walking past the apple store. I had found the master race. It was blatantly obvious which was the better product; and it was merely my investment in this pile of CDs (read: purchased League characters) which discouraged me from making the transition. I downloaded the also-free Dota 2, and within a month I had uninstalled League of Legends entirely. It became clear to me very, very quickly that, compared against League, Dota 2 had a deep design and respect for its players that had put me off of the former. 

In Dota 2, I could talk to my teammates on microphone in-game. I could customize my characters' appearance. I could play all the characters without buying them, and watch replays of my own games to observe my mistakes. Everything that i struggled to actualize in League of Legends, I was able to do in Dota 2. But what I found out later was that both games were preventing me from actualizing much more important things in my life.

See the big red dot on Feb 8/15? That's me not getting the message 12 times in a row.

 According to Dotabuff Plus, a third-party personal stats tracker for Dota 2, I played Dota nearly every day between December 18th 2013 to August 2nd 2015.  That added up to about 1800 hours over 20 months, averaging 3 hours a day for over a year and a half. These statistics include the rare 2- or 3-day interruption of a broken keyboard or internet failure, and a few 2-3 week vacations in 2014. Throughout this time I continued to "attend" university classes, "maintain" a relationship with my significant other, and work in kitchens. My attachment to these competitive battle arena games led my fourth year of university to be my worst by far - I got a 51 in a 400-level class out of sympathy, and the final required course for my program is still ungraded as I could never work up the nerve to submit my final project. MOBA games compelled me to become markedly more anxious and irritable in my relationship with my girlfriend and my family; whether winning or losing, I would leave every match or string of matches with that intense, twitchy anime thing on my brow. It was not a good time and I was oblivious to that.

You see, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with playing any sort of game (except maybe clicker games but... those aren't even games, dude). In fact I think it's fully possible to game every day in a healthy manner. Games are awesome virtual realities which allow us to explore patterns and possibilities at no risk to our real lives and identities. While I was engaged with Dota 2 and similar games, I became, for a time, more studious, constructive, and diligent than I am with most other activities in my life. I very closely analyzed replays of my own gameplay to correct my mistakes. I'd schedule my life around daily practice in order to improve; if I got home too sleepy, I'd set an alarm a few hours before work so I could get some training in at my peak alertness in the early morning. I would get friends together at the internet cafe and captain our drafts in a way that maximized everyone's strengths. But that impressive discipline faded with the summertime and my relationship with the game slid into habit. Eventually it just became something I thought I was supposed to do, rather than something I really wanted. I stopped improving because I stopped working so hard at it; yet I continued in wanting to improve and so was continually frustrated and disappointed.

For most of the second year of my time in Dota 2 I was playing on my girlfriend's gaming laptop she had gotten for free. This obviously lead to some conflicts between my desire (need?) to play and her own use of her computer, so I started my first-ever PC build. I scouted out good deals and assembled the machine one piece at a time -- all motivated by the desire to play Dota 2 on my own time, and my own terms. In July of this year I completed my rig, complete with headset, wired mouse, mechanical keyboard... but when I returned to playing Dota 2, something had changed. The basic frustration which filled me in the course of a game was much easier for me to see, for some reason. Something had to give, eventually. I think investing in the gaming rig pushed my addiction to its breaking point. It was probably the largest sacrifice I'd made to facilitate my access to Dota 2 and maybe with that, I finally realized it was something that just... wasn't all that worth it to me. 

I quit playing Dota 2 for three weeks this month. That sounds pathetic. But it's been liberating. My life's improved in every field since letting go of my attachment to this one, admittedly amazing, game. I've finally been exploring the dingier corners of my Steam library and really enjoying myself. Some friends got me into Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's much-simpler and much-sweeter reclamation of the free-to-play battle arena genre. It is similar to Dota 2, but it's overall much less serious. I don't get that anime thingy on my head playing it with my friends anymore. If Dota 2 was a pack of smokes a day, then Heroes of the Storm is the gum-chewing habit I've replaced it with: perhaps not entirely healthy, and certainly not free of the habit, but a whole helluva lot healthier than before.

This goes way beyond gaming for fun. Evil Geniuses take home the Aegis trophy at TI5.

The main rift between Dota 2 and HotS or even LoL, is that Dota 2 is not, first and foremost, an actual game. I mean, it looks and quacks like a game. It would be ridiculous to say it isn't a game at all. But it's been built and maintained to be a fair, and competitive, activity. Indeed Dota is designed as a sport more than anything. And HotS is a game. Doing Dota properly is more similar to working a job, a career, than unwinding with some chaotic fun; or at least that's what it was for me. 

One of my friends who still plays Dota occasionally invited my to come play a few days ago. I cleared my mind and thought for a second, and you know what? I did want to play. We queued up and expected the worst... but everything went fine. We laughed at the trolls together, we set up insane ganks together. We were playing as friends, for fun, with no delusions about high achievement or selfish comparison. We had an adventure together that left me feeling happy once I, uh, re-entered my flesh body. And that's exactly what gaming IRL should be.