Don't Starve

Don't Starve is set to be released in a week.  This is strange because you've been able to buy it and play it for some time now.  I guess it's good of them, though, to call the initial release a beta.  It would have been nice if the recent Sim City release was called a beta considering that it didn't work.

For those of you who were Glitch fans, Don't Starve hits some similar notes.  The biggest difference is that there are bees and you get honey from their nests.  Well, I guess the biggest difference is that the game is unforgiving and intensely lethal.  And when you die instead of going to purgatory and returning you are simply dead.  You can start another game, that one is over.

The similarity is that Don't Starve is very much a game of exploration.  You click things to see what will happen and combine items to have interesting effects.  It's just that sometimes what happens is that you go to a screen that says, "You survived 0 days."

I think that death really helps the exploration part of the game, though.  When you explore it is exciting.  Finding out new things has a real cost.  The better you get at the game the less there is to find out but the most costly it is to try since you get to a point where you generally spend the first part of the game doing the same thing as last time.

I unlocked three characters, each of which has their own advantage.  One of them is immune to fire, one grows a beard, and one is visited by the ghost of her dead twin sister at night sometimes.  It is a game where these three advantages are relatively equal - though very different.

I haven't played in a week or two now, I think ultimately it may have been a passing phase.  But I did put in more than 50 hours of play and I think I'll go back to it in a while to see what has been added to the game in the release version.

I don't like to give advice about this sort of thing because I don't have any reason to think that you enjoy the same things about games as I do.  So instead of making a suggestion, I'll just say that I enjoyed playing the game without doing any external reading about it, just discovering everything on my own.  This is a game about a journey, not about a goal.  In the end, you are just going to die, might as well get the most out of the experiment.

Women in Gaming and Very Narrow Arguments

I read an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about why they intend to keep talking about sexism in gaming.  I don't normally read that site, so I can't tell you whether anything else they write is worth reading, but I understand that they write a lot about video games.

What I found particularly good about the article is that it ends with a list of arguments that you should not bother making if you don't like a gaming site talking about sexism.  The article points out that the majority of these arguments are crafted to attempt to sideline any useful discussion, or to call into question the validity of the discussion to begin with.

In particular, I was very happy to see, "People are exaggerating on both sides," on that list.  That's a good argument to be aware of because it comes up in arguments about all kinds of controversial subjects.  Someone trying to sound very smart or very grown-up says that the whole argument is nonsense because people only ever take extremist positions.  Of course in reality on any controversial subject the people who take extremist positions get too much attention and the people who are trying to talk things over and understand them get too little.  That doesn't mean that the latter group doesn't exist.

I did think that something was missing from the list, though.  Unfortunately when you are trying to defend your position from jerks it is often necessary to fill your argument with all kinds of acknowledgements and disclaimers so that you don't give them anything to hold on to.

If you make an argument that people don't like, what you'll hear back is that in  one sentence in one paragraph what you said wasn't exactly true.  Or that one analogy you made isn't really a strong analogy.  Or that one fact you sited is from a source of questionable reliability.

So the discussion of the actual issue - in this case that women in gaming are too often insulted, dismissed, valued for their appearance instead of their accomplishments, etc. - has to be sidelined by endless acknowledgement of obvious truths.  John Walker who wrote the piece even included the parenthetical comment, referring to how he has been abused for talking about sexism: "I’m not going to fret about saying, 'But of course not as bad as…', because of course it’s not as bad as…"

So even though he does not want to spend time talking acknowledging that we shouldn't get into a who-suffered-more contest, he basically has to give a nod to such contests in order to exclude himself from them.  If he were instead writing an article about oranges he would not have to specifically comment that he didn't want to make his article about which professional wrestler he liked best when he was a kid.  The article is full of this and so it ends up being fairly long-winded and cumbersome.  The very direct message of the article doesn't get much space.

But all of this elaboration and clarification end ups being ineffective.  He brings up a book that I think I would like to read entitled, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria."  He brings the book up specifically to borrow one analogy from the author of the book.  If the comments were enabled, one person would criticize him because "his analogy" (an analogy he didn't make between female gamers and black high school students) is flawed - girl gamers aren't segregated from guys - and another person would criticize him for comparing the abuse suffered by a group of attractive, white, middle- and upper- class women to the abuse suffered by blacks during segregation (the fact that the book is not about segregation, and that this is not an accurate description of the population of female gamers wouldn't matter).

There is always room to attack some narrow point, and those arguments always seem to derail the discussion.  So what I'd really like to add to the article is not another message to people making bad arguments, but a message to people who read them.  Whenever someone takes a long article or comment and argues with select sentences from it, the first thing you should ask yourself is not whether this person has a legitimate beef with those particular sentences, but whether it makes any difference to the overall point.  Rather than sidetracking the entire discussion into fact checking the seventh sentence of the third page, we could just say, "I'm not sure if you are right, but even if you are I don't see how it affects the overall point of the article."

Also, this article is another great reason to miss Glitch.  I don't think I was ever part of a discussion in Glitch, even on the forums, where I felt like someone was dismissed or belittled for being female.  I'm sure such discussions happened somewhere in Glitch, but in the forums for many games the only threads that _don't_ contain abuse against women are the ones in which everyone assumes that all speakers are male.

Going Crazy, Playing Diablo 3

Have you ever felt like your brain, in a desperate attempt to explode forth from your body, is going to smash into the front of your skull so hard that it will cause your back to snap and your entire body to fold up and implode in on itself leaving only a pale sphere hovering where your stomach used to be?

I've been playing Diablo 3 recently.  Diablo 3 is a fairly good game that was very nearly ruined by the auction house (the one for in-game currency, not the real money one) and the goal of incorporating competitive PvP.

The PvP thing is not mentioned as often as the auction house thing.  Something that is actually very disappointing about Diablo 3 is that there is almost nothing to analyze, numerically speaking.  More than any other game I've ever played it really highlights the tension between "balance" and fun.  By tension I mean that balance isn't fun at all.  Forget about balance, just make everything awesome.  Basically balance is only important for PvP.  When you play against a computer you can just set the difficult how you like it, or use console codes in single player mode if you really want to, or use mods.  Of course you can't do those things in Diablo 3.

People talk a lot about the auction house, but essentially the biggest problem it created is that the most efficient way to make your character more powerful is to log out for several months.  The endless recycling of items on the auction house means there is rapid deflation of prices on everything other than the very, very best gear.  Right now if you have a few hundred thousand gold you can buy yourself a set of equipment that will easily beat inferno difficulty, but months from now you'd be able to buy better things, and then even better months from that.  In fact, once you've levelled a character to 60 you can just never play again, knowing that you are improving your character about 80% to 85% as efficiently as you would if you were playing 10 to 20 hours a week.

The story also goes completely off the rails in act 2.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  Belial is the lord of lies, but the only thing he seems to be actually lying about is being good at lying.  In reality he is the lord of smashing you to bits with his gigantic arms.

Ultimately Diablo 3 should be seen as an exercise in living in the moment.  If you can manage to live in the moment then you have have fun as your cute little wizard drops meteors on hundreds and hundreds of zombies and demons.  But while you try to do that, your attention will be constantly tugged at by all of the facts about the past and the future that should add up to ruin your experience.

Because of the problems with the game I can't see myself going on with it much longer - I've played and quit before.  But I'm sure that even if I leave it behind again soon, a few patches from now I'll start another level 1 character and play for a while.  Go little wizard!