Dot Fractured

Did you see what I did there?

I’ve been playing more League of Legends, and it has promised greater depth than originally thought. Conversations with my team usually went something like this:

“David, go top.”
“Okay.”

Now we can spent literally twenty minutes of before-game time planning our characters, item builds, strategies and leveling routes, but we are not, by any means, high-level players. It is quite scary at times, especially when you catch yourself spouting reams of terminology as you explain your build path and realise that none of this would make the slightest bit of sense to a bystander - I mean, even less than normal tech-speak. When I say I’m selling my Doran’s to get mana capacity in order to burst more DoT as Swain in mid, a fellow League player would nod sagely in comprehension, but somebody on the street would probably call an ambulance.

Actually, I’ve got that wrong. A fellow League player would not nod sagely, because apparently everybody knows that you keep Doran’s for as long as possible, you fucking noob.

Seriously, whatever virtue the game possesses, the community is a rage-fueled leviathan conjured out of your worst Youtube comment nightmares with trolls thrown in for good measure; an endless stream of illiterate fans arguing about how champion X is overpowered, X item is better than Y item, player X is terrible, player X is feeding, and so on. About the only thing you can’t be accused of is hacking, because there really aren’t any hacks and it only takes a report and a replay to get your summoner account banned.

In any case, it’s a much better experience played with friends, which is why people often form permanent teams of three to five players to get together and play more competitively. You are usually guaranteed to play better like this as well, with more cooperation and quicker responses. Friends are often more forgiving than total strangers as well, but be warned: Mess up badly enough, and I can assure you that tears will be shed.

Mostly this is because the stakes in a game of League of Legends are much, much higher than they are in most other games. A single mistake can leave you for dead, and a few dead champions either way can easily tip the game as the enemy gains ground towards your turrets and items bought with the gold of their kills. This isn’t like losing a game of Counter-Strike either - a match can easily last an hour, and in some cases, they have been known to go on for even longer, so putting in that much time and effort only to be defeated is a pretty big letdown. Even so, the flipside is equal in magnitude: A double kill, or triple kill, in League of Legends, brings on a kind of euphoria that I imagine can only normally be attained with experimental stimulants.

So, it’s still a really cool game and definitely worth your time if you have friends (or don’t want to make any). There’s just one last thing you might want to bear in mind…

Don’t know what I’d do without italics.

MMORPGs.

Ah, yes.

Social taboo has different levels for different positions, depending on what you admit. Nobody, of course, is as upstanding and saintly as they seem. Some might admit to cheap wine, or using Emacs. Sexual preferences and kinks are generally edging into the red zone.

Gaming genres have their own levels. Playing Call of Duty marks you out as a bit immature, playing Peggle means you probably don’t have a job, or you are six years old. But nothing causes quite as much of an uncomfortable stir as somebody piping up. “See you, everyone. There’s a raid in half an hour and my clan needs a good shaman.”

I would not go so far as to say that MMORPGs are universally shunned; fellow gamers are more forgiving, with the exception of the frat-boy fraternity. Nevertheless, it was with a certain amount of trepidation a few weeks ago when I stepped into the monolith itself: World of Warcraft. While other teenagers were sneaking bottles into houses under their jackets and smoking dubious weeds in cannibalised juice boxes, I was investing my time in a rather different kind of substance abuse.

Much like the examples listed above, it’s best taken lightly and with a group of friends. It can also be dangerously addictive in the wrong circumstances, but those circumstances are unlikely to come about while Minecraft and Counter-Strike still exist. It’s even fun to be a newbie and laugh at the obsessive players that spam the global chat with meaningless advertisements.

The problem, (which is the sheer reason this post is titled as it is) is that there is no role-playing in this role-playing game. Oh, sure, there are special servers, but they’re little more than the regular game with particular chat restrictions. As an avid textual role-player, it rather annoyed me to set off into the world, a troll magus on an epic journey, and get all my replies in poorly-worded pidgin. “Hail, fellow hordesman!” Feresk cries, waving down a passing blood elf. “Pray do tell, which way to Orgrimmar?”

LOL, dum noob

folo road

It’s not the players that ruin this either. MMORPGs are a game of numbers. You don’t equip the Hallowed Gauntlets of the Flameborn because of their heroic and awe-inspiring nature; you equip them because they give +12 fire resistance and a 5% crit strike bonus. Most players end up giving up on their character’s appearance in the pursuit of better numbers, and start looking like they’ve walked through Armour ‘R Us with an electromagnet.

At the end of the day, it’s fun. You can forget everything, because it’s a massive world, wonderfully fleshed out, and fun to play, which is more than a good enough reason for me. And as Sir Thomas Beecham said, you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.

Okay, so I’m seven years too late. Deal with it.

Recently, seeking to escape the black pit of the first-person shooter gaming community (and hopefully meet some people with a sense of humour) I have been on something of a journey around other genres, with mixed success. While rediscovering a passionate love for the arcade games of yore, I have simultaneously found that I am utterly useless at Western RPGs and utterly bored by Japanese RPGs. Horror games are fine, but only if you are properly vulnerable, and sandboxes are a joy as long as there’s stuff to blow up. However, one genre that I have always chased, like a hopeless romantic, has been RTS; Real Time Strategy.

I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps, always having intellectual aspirations, I feel that by the ‘strategy’ element I ought to have some affinity with it. Unfortunately, my few forays into it have largely been crushing defeats that ruined my youthful vigour, and up until recently, I have only logged onto Starcraft II when I feel entirely capable - even wanting - of being tortured and humiliated.

Naturally, this does not happen very often.

However, RTS was recently re-introduced into my life via League of Legends, which is placed under the label of ‘Action RTS’. This seems like something of a double definition, since the ‘Real Time’ aspect of ‘Real Time Strategy’ seems to imply action, but let’s ignore that for now and concentrate on what this delightful little sub-genre does.

Essentially, in League of Legends, which is a distant freeware cousin of DotA, you control only one character (with a few exceptions) which is a ‘champion’, and aid the flow of battle among the numerous and clearly inferior AI-controlled ‘minions’. Naturally the minions (and the defensive towers they strive to destroy) aren’t really your focus - after all, there are enemy champions out there, and they really want you dead so they can smash up your toys in peace.

Although at first glance it might resemble a minigame, ripped from some distant RPG, complexity quickly rises from the deceptively simple gameplay. Most of this stems from the number of unique champions, each one with their own abilities and weaknesses to learn, lest you suddenly find that the innocent-looking chap running towards you is about to seriously ruin your shit. On top of that, the way that team strategies run together and the number of quick decisions that need to be made mean that pretty soon, you’ll be conversing proper RTS strategy, along with proper RTS curse words. You know the ones.

The characters themselves are… interesting. As per usual for non-gritty gaming fantasy, all the female characters have amazing cleavage, something they’re certainly not shy to hide, but apart from that the creative process really shines through, especially with the back-stories. From Jax, a gung-ho weapons master forced by the League to fight using a lamp-post, all the way to Nocturne, a nightmare of the summoners that was given mortal shape, and again onwards to Veigar, an iron-fisted dark mage that would be ruler of the world, were it not for his small stature, they’re all nicely varied: Serious warriors to wizards, maniacs, magical creatures, demons, inventors, and golems. And one weapons master holding a spiky lamp-post.

I would recommend it to you, my precious readers, as a demonstration of how the RTS genre is growing up, but if Reddit is anything to go by, you would rather be woodenly sitting in front of a train. In case that awful pun passed you by, I am, of course, referring to this bizarre and rather sudden craze of ‘planking’. In my continued study of humanity and its continuous attempts to confound all logic, I feel I ought to take a look at it.

So, planking. You pretend to be a plank. That is literally the extent of it. Five-thousand years of civilisation have lead to a society where people impersonate industrial building materials. On its own I could pass it off as an oddity, but it is becoming worryingly popular, and apparently somebody has already been killed while doing it. The idea is that planking is done in as dangerous a place as possible, thus somehow validating your stupidity by compounding it with a lack of safety observation and posting pictures to the internet. People have been photographed planking on railway lines, electric fences, motorways, building sites, sandstone cliffs, and, for the poor chap who died, on a balcony. I mean, what a way to go - falling and realising that you’ve just killed yourself pretending to be a plank, for a few seconds of Facebook fame.

I suppose the good news is that police here in Oz are now cracking down on it, but I fear this will lead to a number of ugly cases in which people defend their rights to act like a lump of wood in X place, or defining what position X must be assumed before you are a plank, or some such rubbish.

I loathe to say this - as it seems to be commonly spouted by the kind of nasal, soulless intelligentsia-supremacists that I wish to avoid becoming - but at the very least, it’s a healthy sweep around the gene pool.

If you deny that Minecraft is an incredibly addictive game, then you are wrong. However, I suspect that if you do, then you are clearly too stubborn to listen to the evidence around you, so this is not for you. Please go and play… whatever it is people play these days when they’re not playing Minecraft. I guess that’s Call of Duty or something.

The fact is that it has swept the internet like no other game; not since the infamous spread of World of Warcraft has a titled been gifted with the prized “One more time, oh look at that, it’s three in the morning again.” reward. I can recall my own beginnings - from the early days of Creative mode, buying the early Alpha and building small, inconsequential houses and castles, to the bigger and more ambitious projects, then finally to the Linux Outlaws server, and constructions of mind-boggling scale and brilliance.

But why? When you look at the monotony of mining and construction, not to mention the eye-melting sharp lines of the graphics, it seems hard to believe Minecraft’s inherent popularity. What really makes it so great? I was thinking this myself for some time, and I think I’ve isolated a few reasons.

1. Creativity + Limits

Games which exercise creativity always enjoy shining - but brief - moments in the spotlight - there’s a small bit of our brain, I have no doubt, that revels in making things. Some people write books, or make Lego replicas of the Firefly cast, or put together model helicopters. Others can be found in a lonely corner of a Minecraft server, making pixel art, fortresses, mechanisms, and so on.

But this on its own wasn’t really enough to catapult Minecraft into the millions. The original Creative mode was nice, but it wasn’t a sensation; once you’d gotten over the terraforming novelty, it pretty quickly became a dull drive, filled with roving gangs of trolls and arguments over map space. No, what really set Minecraft on its way was the addition of difficulty.

All of a sudden, it was a real upward slog; you couldn’t summon up a hundred blocks of stone in an instant, oh no - you had to mine the bloody things yourself! And mind the monsters that come out at night, ‘cause they’ll shoot you with arrows and then gib your corpse. You’ll need an axe for those trees! And a pick for the rocks! Now build up a house! Find some more blocks!

The upshot all of a sudden was that effort went into peoples’ creations, which made all the difference: The appreciation that you hold for what you make is in direct proportion to the amount of work you actually put into it - if you can create, on demand, a scale model of the Combine Citadel out of solid obsidian, then nobody is really going to care because anybody could have done it with five minutes’ work and a bit of imagination; on the other hand, if you did it in Minecraft SMP then it would surely acquire some hefty appreciation, owing to the amount of time you must have spent mining the materials required. Minecraft surely knows this, which is surely also the reason it makes mining a difficult and dangerous task - because the shining mineral rewards took so much work to acquire.

2. Constantly added content

It doesn’t matter how amazing a game is on release, its popularity shall wane as all avenues of possible usage are explored. There are two ways, if you are a developer, to ensure people keep playing: a) add mod support, or b) add content yourself. Mojang already does b), and a) was inevitable, albeit difficult for the community to implement. Look over the Minecraft forums, and you will notice a shocking proliferation of user-made content. Simple things like texture packs, ranging right up to new blocks, physics modifiers, items, weapons, generators, mappers, hacks, animals, monsters, custom clients… the list goes on and on. There’s even a Portal gun. Eventually Mojang releases their own official content, which of course gets incorporated into the game by default, and recently they’ve even been taking ideas from the community. Nice work, guys - make like Valve and start hiring modders.

Anyway, because of this, new avenues of gameplay are always opening up. A single new block can open up possibilities for months, especially if it affects game physics like the upcoming piston. Even if you grow bored of the vanilla game, the sheer number of mods means that you’ll never run out of new things to try - assuming you can get them to work! (*cough* official mod support coming soon apparently)
And if you get bored of all that, you can just watch the Yogscast. Gods bless ‘em.

3. The Dark Side

Playing a sandbox is all very well, but this is still a game - it needs the element of danger. Without the possibility of failure, any kind of success is somewhat diminished. And so, one of the first things that came from the Indev versions of Minecraft was a health bar, and some monsters. We know them now, lovably: Creepers, spiders, skeletons, zombies, ghasts and slimes. When night falls, or when you enter the darkness, they’ll be waiting there for you, and it’s fear of them that really jump-starts the urge to build bigger and better; you’ll start off making a little shack, or a hole in the ground, maybe with some torches and a bed if you’re lucky, but it’s not much fun to hide from spiders in, there’s no storage space and the toilet stinks, so you upgrade and build a bigger house with separate rooms and some nice paintings, but the creepers are still at the door. You’re sick of coming home after a day in the mines and finding the wall in pieces, so you save up your precious stone and build a big fortress, but even when you’re mostly safe, you’re still hooked on the idea of bigger and better…

Oh, and don’t think that putting the game on ‘peaceful’ solves all this. Mining in the wrong place will still leave you with a faceful of lava, and falling off cliffs can really hurt. Honestly, without the prospect of failure, there’s really no drive to succeed.

After thinking about this, it’s no wonder that people love Notch - he could have exploited this at so many opportunities, from monthly subscriptions to online stores, (as in the April Fools joke) but he hasn’t, probably because the money from all the grateful buyers is more than enough but also, more likely, because he’s a really cool guy. With an awesome beard.

Being still in high school, I am occasionally set free from educational restraints and given a fortnight of recuperation. This is never enough, but given how much of a lazy bastard I am, it’s probably just as well it isn’t longer. Anyway, I shall be absent for a week due to family issues, chiefly an auntie’s wedding. Hopefully the internet… wait, what? The spell checker wants me to capitalise ‘internet’. 

Where was I? Oh yes, life. Some friends and I are planning a co-operative puzzles-based Source mod, to be built at some point in the near future. So far it’s nothing more than a bit of a design brief, but heck, why not be optimistic? The only problem is that we have a bit of a Magicka obsession at the moment, and almost every idea we come up with somehow replicates that, specifically the ‘element combination’ mechanic. Despite a great deal of discussion on the art style, nobody’s actually drawn anything either, and I think that we might have totally different ideas despite coming to the same conclusion.

I have a feeling this is not going to end well. Especially since it is being named ‘Cozzle’.

Oh yes, and there is less than a week left before Portal 2 comes out. What can I say that has not already been said? The first one was the test; the first tentative steps into a world without black-comedy puzzlers, and this one is the fully-fledged game. All twelve hours of it, plus co-op. To say I am ‘eagerly anticipating’ it is a truly massive understatement.

It’s just a shame I’ll have to play it on Windows. Wine/Steam has yet to work under Crunchbang, thanks to some port forwarding issues :(

So, having run Crunchbang for almost a week, I decided that the current Conky setup wasn’t quite what I would like it to be, and promptly tried to edit it.

Oh, how I tried. I scoured the drive for config files, created all manner of .conkyrc documents, messed around in the terminal and triple-checked the instructions. Unfortunately, it was only after a brief conversation on identica that I realised .conkyrc was a hidden file.

Ctrl-H

God damn it.

Oh yes, and in other news, @andyc (of identica fame) pointed out to me that I was using the same Tumblr theme as ‘This Is Not A Podcast’. I’m going to reiterate again - this was a coincidence, or an amalgamation of subliminal messages, something like that. I just like minimalist themes, mmkay? And they released their Awkward Second Episode today, so go listen to it. Enjoy the discomfort.

So, I have migrated to Tumblr. And my old Wordpress blog was crap, so please don’t bother looking at it. You’ll just find a load of adolescent hypocrisy and gaming-related rubbish, which is probably what this will eventually end up being as well.

The difference is, of course, that it will be marginally more mature.

I was a little discouraged, at least initially, by Tumblr’s Web 2.0 aura, which reeks of photo sharing and shiny buttons, but it’s a nice and stable platform and the dashboard sort of works, although I’m still not buying this method of uploading. Pictures? Video? Who the heck just uploads a video with no explanation anyway? And if you can embed one in a textual post, why bother at all?

I should probably investigate that more closely, but in the mean time…

Crunchbang.

I don’t know what to say, really. I’ve been running it for a few days and there’s something about it that draws me quite unlike any other distro that I’ve experienced so far. The UI is a novel idea that actually works quite well, though the buttons feel a bit small at times on a 1920x1080 resolution. The documentation and setup process both feel very personal and community-built, unlike larger distros like Mint, which act more like uppity Windows competitors wearing their best suits.

As a Linux newbie (guilty as charged) I have to admit it isn’t quite as easy to use as, say, Ubuntu; I haven’t quite managed to get FGLRX working with any kind of rendering, the sound output is nearly nonexistent, and a lot of utilities that I was quite fond of seem to have disappeared altogether.
Somehow I’m prepared to forgive it, though. It certainly feels lightweight - one of the major features, if you’ll believe their website - and after dealing with bloatware for some time, I still revel in menus that open the moment I click on them. Chromium as the default browser, I think, is a bold move, and the rest of the distro comes packed with some pretty neat software and libraries.

Looking back at this summary, I suppose overall I like it. The media issues are a bit of a pain, but it certainly feels like the kind of distro I’d been looking for - fast, reliable, a nice balance of features, and with a very, very nice interface.

Now, I have to go write an angry letter to ATI.