Tag Archives: meta

The Android's Repair Shop (Meta-blog)

20,000 Views!

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Just noticed that we topped 20K page views a very short while ago, which is convenient because neither Pike nor I have the first freaking clue for a blog topic today so I’ll just take this opportunity to profusely thank all our readers and commenters! You guys are quite wonderful and it is altogether too satisfying to watch those little numbers of page views and subscribers rise, and to get emails notifying me of comments made on my posts etc.

So yes, thank you very much, from both of us!

I didn't know what image to use so I used Pinkie Pie as a human not knowing what to do about my not knowing what to do and oh no I've gone cross-eyed

I suppose it is expected that I at least mention videogames on our My Little Pony image blog, yes? Well, I’ve been playing a ton of SimCity 4 the last few days and I had an interesting experience. Last night when I was finishing it up I looked around what I had wrought and thought “Yeah, that’s okay.” This morning when I went back to it, I thought “Oh wow, I am some sort of urban designing genius, this looks great!” I wonder what caused this discrepancy? Do you guys find you can feel differently about stuff like that if you give it some time, or are you more likely to feel it’s worse than you originally thought, as I generally am? Also if anyone’s interested I might provide a few screenshots as I go along! Not now though. Because I have none to hand and the game takes forever to load when your mod folder is three times the size of the game itself.

Also playing through Human Revolution, which is brilliant, and waiting for Dead Island, which sadly doesn’t look like it’s going to be the horrorfest I originally hoped for but does nevertheless have the potential, I think, to be an enjoyable zombie-slaying romp. And there’s always Project Zomboid for real zombie survival stuff!

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Thoughts on “The Gaming Community”

18 Comments

Games are ubiquitous. I don’t know if they’ve quite eclipsed movies and TV as the world’s entertainment medium of choice but they’re certainly close. Pretty much everyone plays games, to a greater or lesser extent.

Which is why I think it’s slightly unusual that a.) people tend to refer to “the gaming community” as a whole, and b.) tend to position it as something weird/edgy/underground/geeky/pick your adjective.

Now don’t get me wrong– gaming communities exist. Obviously. These, however, tend to be focused on a game or series, a genre, or a company. Or they’re centered around some other sort of common ground: a blogosphere, an idea, or what-have-you.

These communities have one base thing in common– a passion for games– but after that, you’re dealing with a very wide range of individual people with differences in opinion, taste, and so forth. And I think that sometimes, everyone forgets this. Players forget this. Companies forget this. The “non-gaming world” (as it exists) forgets this.

Just as one can’t make sweeping generalizations about any group of people, one cannot make sweeping generalizations about “gamers”. For example, not all gamers like DLC and microtransactions– but not all gamers hate those, either. Some like them a great deal. Some have complex opinions on them.

Likewise, not all gamers play Call of Duty or WoW or TF2, but some do. Not all gamers dress up and go to cons, but some do. Not all gamers think Portal jokes are still funny, but some do.

And now the obligatory pony image.

When you have a group of people that is this diverse in tastes and interests, you’re going to have a lot of differences in both opinion and background. And that’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, stereotypes exist, and so depending on who you ask, “gamers” all do this or “gamers” all want that. Even we, as game players, are guilty of making these generalizations sometimes. It’s okay, it’s a part of human nature. But I think the world as a whole would do well to try to remember that it’s a bit more complicated than that.

…anyways, not sure where I was going with that. I just thought it might be an interesting subject to toss around. I will tell you one thing that all these different communities have in common, though: friendships (and more) are forged in them. Heck, Mister Adequate and I met on a video game forum seven years ago, which explains how a couple of kids on opposite sides of the pond got together in the first place.

And that’s pretty fantastic.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Playtime Confessions!

4 Comments

Yesterday I officially joined the 300 club in Civ IV.

This isn't counting about a dozen hours of vanilla Civ IV before jumping up to BtS, nor is it counting about a dozen hours of a particular mod that Steam wouldn't track properly.

Ahh, it feels good. I love statistics like this. I love them to the point that I have been known to buy games on Steam that I already own just so it can start tracking my playtime. (It’s like Gaben really knows how to reel us obsessive-compulsives geekwads in!)

A few other games I played a lot tracked your time as well. I was really close to 300 hours in FF Tactics Advance. I’m also relatively sure I was close to it in my original Pokemon Red file, before it was inadvertently deleted.

Of course, MMOs deserve to be in a tier all to themselves when it comes to playtime. If I recall correctly, before quitting, I’d clocked up about 220 days played in WoW across all of my characters.

That's well over 5000 hours!

I think over half of it was spent on my main, Tawyn the Night Elf Hunter. As time went on and Blizzard bumped experience rates and made questing and LFG more streamlined, and as I got more experienced at the game myself, I’d spend less time on an individual character. For example, I think my resto druid had a mere 12 days or something similarly miniscule for her /played, despite the fact that I got her to (then) endgame and was raiding with her for a little while.

So yeah, I doubt any other single game I’ve ever played could come close to what I dumped into WoW. Like I said, MMOs deserve their own tier in this “game”.

And I still wish I could see an accurate playtime counter for everything I’ve ever played. That would be fascinating.

Okay, lay it on me. What are your most played games, gentle readers?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

When Too Much is Too Much

12 Comments

The other day I was having a discussion with someone on a forum about video game addiction and how one might be able to discern the difference between being “addicted” and merely playing a lot. This is the way I put it:

I’m pretty sure there was a period in my life where I could have called myself legitimately addicted to WoW. The reason I feel that I was addicted was that a.) I seriously was not ever thinking about anything else, and b.) if I didn’t play WoW for at least a few hours a day I would go to bed feeling distressed and unfulfilled.

I feel that this was different from your typical, average “I want to play a lot of videogames” mentality that I’ve always possessed. Sure, I’ve been madly in love with games before– I still get that way– and “ONE MORE TURN” syndrome is certainly not something I am unfamiliar with. :P But if it skews your worldview to the point that it occupies every waking thought for months on end and you plan your entire life around it and you play even if you don’t feel like it because it drives you to fits if you don’t, then you might have an issue.

It was weird to look back on that period of my life and admit to myself that I probably could have fallen under the category of being addicted to a game. Fortunately, however, I didn’t have it nearly as bad as some other people do, and I was able to move on from it.

This is a bit of a tricky subject to talk about, though, whichever way you slice it. Certainly not all MMO players are addicted, and even among those who could probably be classed as such, not all are having their life seriously impaired by it. Without really starting to dig into a very deep subject, I feel that “healthy addiction” isn’t entirely impossible here.

I also think that, as avid game players, we frequently have a knee-jerk “BUT I’M NOT LIKE THAT” response when this sort of thing is brought up, lest our hobby be looked down upon more than it already frequently is.

…but on the other hand, it’s probably something to keep in the back of your mind as a valid phenomena and one that you or someone you know might be familiar with. One can become addicted to anything, and games are not an exception.

The funny thing is that, for me anyway, I don’t look back at my WoW-playing-time as something that took time away from the rest of my “life”. Rather, it was something that took time away from dozens of other games that I could have been playing. Variety is, as they say, the spice of life.

And so I turn the floor over to you, readers! Ever been where I’ve been?