I… am a strange person.  To anyone who knows me, this is not new information, but for the rest of you, I want no ambiguity.  I’m an oddball, and I am reminded of this on a daily basis.  To illustrate this point, I present you with an e-mail exchange I had with the sales manager of the Warwick Seattle Hotel.  For those not in the know, the Warwick is an international chain of four and five star hotels that people of, shall we say some import stay at.  Exempli gratia: When the prince of Saudi Arabia is coming to town, this place is on his list.

Anyway, this communication began with a cold call he made to my office asking if we ever had any people coming to town that we would put up in a hotel.  After giggling a little bit, I told him that most people don’t think our office is nearly important enough to visit with any regularity, and even though I don’t actually know what we do with those few who visit, I very much doubt we provide them with anything more illustrious than a Motel 8.  Undaunted, he requested an e-mail address to send a flyer to and asked me to keep their establishment in my thoughts.  Now, my e-mail I could easily provide.  My thoughts, however, are limited.  So, after his e-mail arrived, I paid no more mind to it until about a week later, when I got this:

“Panda-

Great to speak with you last week on the phone.  Just checking to see if you received the e-mail that I sent to you with the attachments?  I just wanted to check and see if you have any questions or if you passed it to someone who might.  Hope all is well in your world.  Let me know if you and your company may have any future hotel needs.”

Now, I typically feel obligated to respond to these sorts of things out of some professional business reflex I’ve somehow picked up.  However, some other mysterious force requires me to respond to them like this:

“Yeah, um, I got the e-mail and all its accoutrements just dandy.  Everything looks rather posh and also rather outside my personal spending ability, not that that really matters.  I did notice the conspicuous absence of any numbers (as in, the bling) though I guess it’s not so posh to include those on a brochure.   It’s probably on my mind first and foremost given what I make here, not that it really matters.  Again.

That’s how well things go in my world.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like we have any questions about this sorta thing at the moment.  I don’t know how far off it is for the next person to come visit us, and I also don’t know how (or if) we accommodate them when they do, but I’ll see if anyone’s down with y’all th’next time it comes up.

- Panda “This Is Why I’m Not in Sales” Johnson”

Yeah.  See what I mean?

As you can tell, I am of two minds about this.  I can tell that I am being odd, and that this is more often than not an undesirable trait when in the realm of professionalism.  And yet, I also feel as though it is preferable to being drab and stodgy, as I imagine most e-mail communication with this particular fellow is.  My personal motivation is to be interesting and lively, but not rude or disrespectful.  I suspect that some believe that these are mutually-exclusive goals within this space, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to try to reconcile that perspective with my own anymore.  Put another way, I am someone who just refuses to be boring, and by extension, to be bored.

For the curious, his response to that was short and clearly uninterested in addressing my strange personality and vernacular.  And y’know what?  I’m totally cool with that.  My takeaway is that this is why he is the sales manager for a chain of expensive hotels and I am the guy who answers the phone all day at a small office staffed by quiet, mild, and otherwise normal people.  I wonder with what frequency my boss wonders how he ended up with me.

My experiences have led me to understand one thing for sure:  Culture and society is made up of an incredible hodgepodge of games that people must play in order to get what they want.  And I seem compelled, if not somehow required to play them wrong.

…why is that?

Part of it is personal amusement, I admit.  However, I think it has more to do with how I find the stoic adherence to routine and repetition to be the single biggest flaw with society’s complex interpersonal systems.  I also understand why it’s necessary, and therefore do not seek to disassemble the entire construct and reform it into something more agreeable to me.  Rather, I’m the guy pointing at the squeaking gears, echoing the sound it makes with my voice and looking around to see who smiles.

Very few do.

Wouldn’t you know it, all that inspired me thus was playing Age of Conan yesterday.  It began with a small thing, just the repeated requests from other players to have me group up with them as I went about doing my own thing.  Every time, without any real consideration, I would deny it, my gut saying “Why on earth would I want to do that?”  Upon reflection, this is a Strange reaction to have.  I mean, this is ostensibly what people play MMO games for.  Yet here I am, my immediate reaction firmly set to reject random offers to play in a group.

This, I have realized, is because I play MMOs when I want to play by myself.  When I click that icon on my desktop, my head is in a “please leave me alone” space.  That is also a handy explanation for why I enjoy Age of Conan to the incredible degree that I do — there is an entire single-player game complimenting the traditional MMO experience that tells your character’s history and ongoing storyline.  A band-aid on the issue of MMO storytelling, granted, but I still find it quite effective at doing what other MMOs don’t even try.  Personally, it’s exactly what I want out of this game space: MMO mechanics and longevity wrapped in an environment that I can play in completely by myself.

The more I considered it, I came to realize that the converse of this personal phenomenon is also true.  I think playing single-player games, especially those with complex story arcs and dense gameplay, is much more fulfilling with others present.  However the logistics work out, the experience (dare I say “emergent game-playing”?) is unlike anything that an intentionally multiplayer game has ever given me.  I wish I knew of one, or had an idea on how to make one, or even just how to convey how much it would mean to me to have something something deliberately designed to be that way.  Perhaps I am alone in this feeling, and such a thing should therefore never exist.  And y’know what?  I’m totally cool with that.

The point with all this is, admittedly, a selfish one.  I wish to understand myself, why I’m constantly asking questions that no one else asks, only to get answers that no one else seems to care about.  Working this out here has, at least, illuminated one corner of a very broad, dark picture.  So, score one for me.  As for you, well…  I have to ask — have you smiled yet?

Anyone who follows the game industry and reads as much about it as I do should be able to see a popular trend amongst “indie” sites like Joystiq and Kotaku.  They pride themselves on a snarky tone and juvenile “humor” which seems to consist mostly of lame strikethrough text jokes.  Bloggers, lazy that they are (and given the frequency with which I update this site, I am including myself with) go with the simple and the easy.  They’ve all come to the conclusion that the best way to be noticeable is to write spiteful and nasty things about every topic as often as possible.  This morning, after reading a particular article I’ll reference later, it occurred to me that this is a pretty lousy state to be in.  Frankly, I’m ashamed it took me so long just to think about it and it’s been begging the question to me ever since — why is it so hard to find some joy in my favorite hobby?

Part of it is the reality.  There’s a lot of suck in games these days.  And, when I spend my time and money on something that sucks, I want to get back at it somehow.  Since I can’t go slap around some programmer, I’ll summon my best hate-demon and unleash 500 words of bile all over what wasted my freakin’ time.  And y’know what?  That’s a little too much fun.  It’s a trap, something that can cause me to think that it’s the best way to handle everything I see.  Eventually, I envision getting to a point where that’s all I do until I turn myself into an internet pariah.

Why is it becoming so prevalent?  Maybe it’s something cultural, like how we’re conditioned to be nice to everyone so going against the norm sets off a primal rebellion nerve, which both feels good and gives you cred with the kids, as it were.  Maybe it’s that some people believe all enthusiasm and positive buzz is evidence of fanboyism and scrutinize it to death, yet those same readers will accept the same writer saying the opposite in a blink.  Whether it’s in a sarcastic review on Kotaku, or in one of Ben Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation videos, or even just the number of hits on 1/10 reviews on GameSpot, it’s clear that people love themselves some hate.

This article on Rock Paper Shotgun is what I was referring to earlier, specifically where Kieron Gillen talks about how anger is essentially an infantile reaction to something we don’t like, which eventually turns into (or grows up to become) bitterness.  Whether you agree, or even whether you draw any value statements from it at all, I think it’s hard to argue that there aren’t a lot of pissed off people who have been angrily writing about games for far too long these days.  That in turn made me realize just how many of my reactions to games are negative, and how that really isn’t how I’d like to feel about something I spend so much time on… and profess to love, besides.

My immediate response to this realization is one I’ve been banging on about for quite some time — I’ve already played a game that I consider to be the ultimate, quintessential gaming experience, and it will therefore take an awesome effort to surpass it, assuming it ever happens.  Unfortunately, the economic reality and expanding demographics of video game players are forcing developers to make games designed to appease only our most fundamental entertainment triggers.  Put another way, the games that most people will buy will consist of burly men blowing up a ton of shit on their Xbox 360s.  Given the ridiculous cost these days of making a game that people will care about or even notice, I completely understand why the bet being made by investors is not to bet at all.  “Play it safe,” I hear.  “Don’t take any more risks than you have to,” they say.  The result is becoming clear:  As my mum puts it, “a whole lot of shooty-shooty bang-bang.”

The worst thing about all this is that part of it is my fault.  I’m spoiled rotten!  AAA games look amazing, but are often just a pretty shell on a very mediocre experience.  The games that are really doing something innovative almost always have a junky feel to them.  It’s so hard for me to play a game whose style is fresh and exciting when it has poorly-designed menus, lame music and sound effects, or archaic graphics.  A recent example: I’ve heard some positive things about Culpa Innata and always wanted to give it a shot since I really enjoy adventure games.  I picked it up during the Steam holiday sale for less than ten bucks and decided to sit down with it last week.  The first thing I did was check the graphics options, and there are only two — “Resolution: High/Low” and “Antialiasing: On/Off”.  And just what is “high resolution”?  1024×768.  Eesh.  And then seeing the janky characters, wonky animations, static backgrounds and wooden voice acting just in the opening cutscene?  Even the first two minutes couldn’t keep my interest.  Even if it does something amazing (which I’ve been assured it does) I may never see it, and only for bad reasons.

What it comes down to is this:  I need to do a “reboot” of my thinking, my standards, and my perspective just to see the good things again.  While I realize that very bad games are out there, and can even deserve the things people say about them, there really is more to gaming than that.  It is so important to have some balance in the things you say, as that directly influences how you think.  Without balance, you’re just a bitter old man yelling about the proverbial kids on the lawn.  Having come this far, I think I know the answer to that question I asked myself this morning.  Despite the masses screaming for nothing but sequels, insisting that Halo is the finest thing in all Creation, stealing games with a self-entitled smirk on their faces, I truly believe that there is still something to like.  I only wish the folks at Joystiq would do the same.

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ports

When I was in second grade, every Tuesday some of the kids (including myself) would be whisked out of school an hour early to go to the church next door for something called “The Good News Club.”  I don’t know how this ever got approved as an official school event because it was an hour of listening to adults tell us about the Bible and Christianity.  Now, I haven’t turned out even remotely religious, so why am I thinking about this now?  Well, because one day I was asked something by one of the hosts and my answer to it, I’ve realized, helps explain something that I’ve always found strange about myself.

The subject that day was “Heaven”, and the person doing the presentation asked all the kids what they thought heaven would be like.  Most of the kids said things that I expected to hear — never getting old, having tons of toys or candy, not having to listen to their parents anymore, and that sort of thing.  When it came to my turn, I realized I didn’t have to try to come up with an answer as I usually did.  I told them that my idea of heaven would be a place where I could watch a movie or read a book as many times as I wanted, and each time would be as memorable and enjoyable as the first.  I recall a lot of strange looks from my peers, probably because I described reading in the context of desirable.  Go figure.

Fast-forward to today, and just looking around my room I’ve realized how often I find myself buying the same game multiple times for different platforms.  Any time this is brought up to me, it’s as a negative.  “You shouldn’t pay more than the bare minimum for something” at best or “You’re a consumer whore” at worst.  Hey, on some level, I understand.  Many ports are the exact same game as before with only a change in interface or screen to differentiate them.  Others, like console-to-PC ports, can suffer from horrible consolitis with horrible control schemes and screwed up (or dumbed-down) graphics.  And still, I keep coming back.

Part of it has always been curiosity — I love digging into the minutiae of things, to see how they change the controls, the balance, the levels, or anything at all.  Even little things, like how the way armor negated damage in Doom 3 for the Xbox was changed from the PC version, can be exciting.  But that can’t be it, right?  Seriously, I do this too often and substantial changes are too few and far between to keep me going for just that reason.  It wasn’t until I decided to examine this strange habit of mine that I started to think back to my idea of the perfect place, where it’s possible to have or feel anything… even being able to experience something as though it were the first time, every time.

Ports are my way of grasping that impossibility, and the most amazing thing about it is that it’s almost completely successful.  Somehow, just a little change in the interface or playing it on a different screen is enough to fool my brain into thinking that I’m doing something I haven’t done before.  The experience works on two levels, the part that is acknowledging what differences there are and the part that remembers how good it was the first time.  If I handle things just right, I can keep myself from remembering too much and lose myself in the experience, just like I did the first time.  And when it works, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling something like… magic.