Thoughts on Pixels - Grinding should be fun

Or how I learned to stop playing Oblivion and love gaming instead...

So, here it is: I stopped playing Oblivion six months ago. Martor is on ice, probably forever. Why is that? Allow me to explain and get into a broader topic on gaming in general: Grinding. The word itself implies something tedious and that opens up a lot of questions on why one would even want to play something that is based on grind. Follow me into a new article. Also, I'll write more regularly again, now that I'm back from Asia. I promise to all three of you who may or may not care. God this place has fallen apart after my mom died...

Aaaaanyways. Grinding. WTF? Aren't games supposed to be fun? Well I didn't really think about it for a long time. I had stopped playing Oblivion after day three of my experiment (which was like two months after day 1 but it was day three of actually playing) but I didn't really analyze why. I just didn't feel like playing it anymore. It felt horribly tedious. The magic was gone.

So, last month I started playing a new game, FTL. If you like space-exploration, roguelikes or having adventures in general, you should check out some Let's Plays on Youtube and then decide to buy it (or not, you boring, boring person!). I played it quite a bit and then, at one time upon re-starting, the usual hint at the bottom of the starting message told me that I should stay in what the game itself called 'the grinding sectors' for longer if possible as to gather resources for the later stages of the game while it was still somewhat harmless to do so. This got me thinking, because while I had done just that before already, having found out fast that getting to the end quickly is a recipe for getting overwhelmed real soon. But it never felt like a grind to me. Why? Because this was the meat of the game. It was fun. Why do we play games? Because they are fun, mostly. Well they may evoke other emotions (Silent Hill 2 certainly wasn't fun and Shadow of the Colossus made me feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders but I digress) but tedium shouldn't be one of them.

Dwarf Fortress Chronicles: The first six years

I've been playing Dwarf Fortress for a while now, slowly getting into the game, reading online guides, the wiki etc., battling the interface more than anything. I started out simple, with small fortresses and simple chains of productions, the dwarves only getting one or two different kinds of food, not producing my own weaponry etc. I cannot claim to have gotten too much deeper into the game but I slowly learn more and more game mechanics. This is my third attempt at a large and long-term game. The world is set to be full of goblins because in my first two attempts I never got an invasion besides the horrific and unstoppable attack by undead hordes (those of you who don't play DF may not realize that even blood and hair left in your kitchen will reanimate and kill your populace. And killing a zombie involves smashing every one of its fingers to paste...). This fortress was going to be different. Here come the first six years.

I had chosen the site of my fortress wisely. There were trees and a river, so I would have wood and fresh water. There were hills and mountains to make an easily accessible first level, digging out the first rooms of the fortress horizontally, to expand into the deep at a later state. My seven dwarves were well trained for the initial tasks a fortress would hold. When they arrived and got to work on their new homestead, the mood was cheerful and filled with hope.

The first things that were dug out were a work-area, a small underground farm, storage rooms and quarters. Then a dining hall. Then, with the first migrants arriving, expanding of living quarters. I soon had a well going food economy going, the dwarves were planting tasty Plumphelmets underground and wild strawberries, the seeds of which had been purchased from an elven caravan, above ground. There were three things the fortress would need before it could hope to survive actual attacks: A cistern to hold large amounts of water, so that a siege could be stopped at an outer wall, and a working militia to actually do the defending part.

Angry Birds rule the World

Yeah, I said it. A lot of gamers hate the game. I play it occasionally, whenever they update new maps and I'm sitting on the bus to work. Never really thought about it. But now that I'm travelling through Asia again (something I'm bound to do every once-in-a-while), I realize that I've been ignorant at the scale that this phenomenon of a game has around the planet. Let's talk about it.

When I first played Angry Birds, I was late to the party. That was summer last year, on the laptop of my in-laws in Mongolia. It was a PC version, localized and translated into Mongolian, something I found odd as most stuff with the exception of movies isn't translated into Mongolian, because it is a developing nation of only a few million, not really a large market to tap. Was that version fan-made? Possibly. It didn't matter all that much anyways, as I quickly found out: The game is designed to be playable by someone entirely illiterate, like young children or people who cannot even read Latin letters. The games cut-scenes and little cartoons explaining how different types of birds work like the comics that explained weapons in World War II to illiterate resistance fighters in the Pacific are simple and can be understood by at least 90% of human beings living on earth right now. It's brilliant in its simple elegance, really. Like gaming is a universal language or something poetic like that. That was what I thought last year.

Zombies in Hamburg: A little thought experiment part 2

In the last post I started the little Gedankenspiel on how a supernatural reanimation of corpses to zombies here in my home-city of Hamburg would play out, which can be useful as a backdrop for a role-playing campaign. Let's keep this show going by moving on to the next stage of the infestation of the now spreading Z and the finally reacting government agencies from outside the city.


So, let's see of things are going to turn out...

Zombies in Hamburg: A little thought experiment part 1

A few years ago, I hosted an roleplaying one-shot session for a few friends of mine with a simple conceit: You're playing realistic characters in a zombie apocalypse here in our home city of Hamburg, Germany. The second largest city in the country, we have the Bernhardt-Nocht-Institute for tropical diseases so there we would have the cause for the zombie-outbreak. I excessively used google maps and our own knowledge of the city for the campaign, which had three random survivors simply trying to reach the central police station from a southern part of the city, having to cross the port and the river in the process.

Now if you're going to play in the current day, why not take a place everyone at the table knows and can relate to? Where all you need maps-wise is available on line? Exactly. This has lead me to a new thought experiment though: How would a zombie-infestation in my city actually turn out? Let's find out!

Another Artemis Play Session

So, the bi-weekly bunch of Artemis-players met up again the other week to play the game once again. And we decided to get the difficulty to max. Well we did have a Dreadnought. And basically expected to die. What followed was some of the most epic and intense role-playing/video-gaming experiences I have ever had...

So difficulty ten. Space to "interesting" (as "very interesting" tends to litter enough black holes and mine-fields as to seriously obstruct the AI invasion). We in the mightiest of the ships that players can have, the intimidating Dreadnought-class. We had enough people for all stations. And I was the captain. I didn't really expect us to get far. Difficulty 8 had killed us quickly enough before. It was just a matter of doing things with our backs against the wall.

We came into the battle guns/nuclear torpedoes blazing, quickly wiping out the first few of the vast waves of enemy ships. Docking with one of the stations, we re-supplied. Looking at the incredible number of enemy fleets on the long-range scanner, I decided that we couldn't defend all of the stations and would concentrate on one of them, in order to keep things going for as long as possible. Having stocked up on ammunition and fuel, we engaged the nearest waves of enemy ships.

The first one went well, as we used ECMs to take out shields and then followed up with nukes, pelting the flottilla with heavy fire-power until it was over. The second wave got us without heavy weaponry though and the station was too close to the battle to be docked with. Well, the Dreadnaught does have its main beam weapon, a powerful ray-cannon taking out smaller ships with ease. At this point we had a wholly different problem: We were running out of energy. To conserve fuel, I ordered the shield shut down and all sytems lowered as far as possible and then drag the ship back to the station. That was when the Bird of Prey Skaraan Enforcer uncloaked and opened fire.

Pen & Paper: Some actual play part 2

The party is still split, with one of them stuck in the city in the middle of riots protesting the recend draft for the civil war that is about to ravage the Empire again. Our main host of characters couldn't care less though, as they are stuck with their leader badly wounded in an improvised shelter in the mountains and a group of elite head-hunters with them, suspecting that it is indeed them they're looking for...

The session starts off with a rainstorm pelting down on the mountain-shelter the group has built for themselves (one of them is a carpenter so they're good at things like that). The group-internal animosities have somewhat cooled down and the team of mercs is out hunting so the players decide it's time to talk through what to do about the whole situation. There is a lot of arguing back and forth whom to put the blame on that kids death on once the mercs come back. Should they sacrifice the badly wounded group leader? Should they blame the actual killer, their scout who is currently gone with most of the groups money to get help? Will he even return and come back for them or will he simply spend the money and make himself a nice life for a few months?