Isis gave up her long battle with health issues and left us last night.

She’d been unwell for a couple of years, really, but a few weeks ago she got really bad and I feared we were going to lose her. We made a vet appointment but by the time we got in to see him, she’d mostly recovered. Nevertheless the vet gave her a slow-release hormone shot and she sprang back, seemingly better than she’d been in months and months. We knew she was really old for a guinea pig and that we didn’t have much time left with her, but it was so great to see her cavorting like a young pig again.

Then yesterday afternoon I noticed she hadn’t eaten some treats I gave her. By evening her breathing had become very labored, as it had last month. She was still eating some but was becoming very selective. By the time I went to bed she was moving around again and I thought she was going to spring back, but this morning I was greeted by her still body rather than her usual strident demands for breakfast. It seems she went peacefully…she looked like she was sleeping.

On some level there’s a sense of relief. It’s so hard to tell how much discomfort a guinea pig is in, since they’re ‘prey animals’ and showing weakness is a good way to draw the attention of a predator. But I think she’d been pretty uncomfortable for a long while. She was slowly losing weight over the past few months in spite of eating plenty. I suspect her eyesight was going, too.

Her appreciation for pets and cuddles and scritches never left, though. Yesterday evening both Angela and I spent some quality ‘lap time’ with her (though in my case it was more like neck time… she’d crawled up and settled in on my shoulder with her little bum under my chin) and the last thing I did when I went to bed was give her a pet and I got a purr as a reward.

If you’ve never lived with a guinea pig all this fuss probably seems silly. I thought Angela was a bit bonkers when I first met her and she’d talk about Isis. Then I met her and my attitude changed and since then we’ve added two more members to our guinea pig family. Over the years as the vet bills ran into thousands of dollars friends would tell me “Just go buy another guinea pig!” and the pre-Isis me would’ve thought the same thing. But these creatures have strong personalities and are smarter than you might think. They are definitely not interchangeable.

So goodbye to Isis, or “Little bear” as I often called her. She’s somewhere in a better place where there’s plenty of fresh grass to eat and nothing looking to eat her. She’s probably already bossing other guinea pig spirits around, making things “just so” in the same way she managed to do that here with us.

Mimi and Mona are unsettled and a bit confused. When I came into the room this morning instead of the usual chorus of good morning purrs and soft wheeks, there was just silence. They knew something was wrong. Angela wanted to give them a chance to ‘say goodbye’ so we put them with Isis’s body. Mona just seemed perplexed but Mimi kept trying to prod or nip Isis awake. Heartbreaking.

If you have a pet of any kind, give him or her a hug for me today, will ya?

So E3 is here and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s my favorite holiday! (It is too a holiday, at least at my house!) I’ve been a gamer all my life, first kid’s board games, then paper and cardboard wargames, and then they went and invented personal computers and video game consoles and arcades and… damn! Amazing stuff.

I love games!

At the same time, I know people who hate games. They see them as mind-rotting wastes of time, or hopelessly geeky, or in some way harmful to our psyches. These people stay far away from games and when they do have something to say about games, it’s something negative. I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t agree with them, but they at least make sense.

But then there’s this huge group of people who play games, but hate them. E3 comes around and they immediately start responding to every piece of content with snark or condescension or disgust. They (apparently) hate everything they see. And yet they play games.

I just don’t get it. People with other interests don’t do this. Golfers don’t talk about how much golf sucks. Stamp collectors don’t think stamps are all lame. Yachtsmen don’t hate boats. Knitters don’t curse the existence of sheep. So why are so many gamers driven to talk disparagingly about their hobby?

For years, video and computer gaming was something that you did in private. For the most part, you wouldn’t share the fact that you were a gamer when you were at a dinner party or something. If you did you’d get some very curious looks, indeed. We weren’t exactly ashamed of being gamers, but we didn’t broadcast it either.

Sometimes I wonder if this snark-attitude is a remnant of those days? If we talk disparagingly about every new game we see, we think we’re somehow holding ourselves a little bit apart from that ‘gamer stigma’ and hope non-gamers will take us more seriously?

I just don’t understand it, and it disappoints me. I keep looking for kindred spirits to share the joy of gaming with, and I find very few. And there are times when I’m right down there being as snarky and condescending as everyone else; I don’t understand myself very well, either. Hopefully I’ll re-read this post when I’m in one of those snark phases and will be able to examine my motives then. Right now I can’t imagine what I’m thinking at times like those.

Games are just games. If they drive you to generate all kinds of negative energy about them, it’s probably time to take a step back and find something else to do with your free time. Something that will have a positive impact on your life. Hopefully I’ll take that advice to heart the next time I visit SnarkVille.

[At the time of this writing, GodFinger for iPhone/iPod Touch is available in some places but not others. You can find out if it's available at your app store here.]

GodFinger is an odd mash-up of casual game, Populous and a splash of social gaming. The idea here is that you rule over a small 2D world. Kind of a cute Flatland place. When you start the game you’ll find a fairly barren world with a few people wondering aimlessly, and clouds and sun drifting overhead. Your job is to bend the people to your will and modify the world to suit your whims.

Luckily you have a GodFinger! By touching and ‘charging’ a cloud or the sun, you can call down rain or sunshine. Doing so causes vegetation to sprout up and these little people to start worshipping you. You can also terraform the planet, raising and lowering land to form mountains and lakes. If you cause it to rain a lot in one area a jungle will slowly form. Avoid raining on an area, and apply plenty of sun, and soon you’ll have a desert. This is all mostly for fun, although if you create a lake your followers can fish out of it, and gain a trickle of energy that way.

All of these actions costs you mana, one of 3 resources. Mana recharges over time, and your mana pool increases as you level up. The mana limitation means GodFinger is a ‘short session’ game; the kind of thing you’ll play for a few minutes, several times a day. There is a totem on your world that you can order followers to worship at, and this will increase your mana recharge rate somewhat, but running out of Mana is the normal cause for a sesion to end.

The next resource is gold. You have a starting pool of gold which you’ll use to buy some buildings. Buying a building just lays a foundation; you then drop some followers onto it and they’ll complete the structure over time. In order to earn gold from the building, it’ll need workers (again, drop followers onto it) and some kind of power source. Power comes from sun, rain or lightning, and you call each of these down from the heavens, spending your mana to do so.

The last resource is Awe. You get this by spending real-world cash, or building it up via leveling and generally playing the game. I’ve yet to feel any need to buy Awe. You can spend Awe on gold, automatic building completion and other ‘miracles.’

So now you have some buildings staffed by followers and you’ve used your mana to power up the buildings. It’s time to sit back and relax for a while. The buildings will produce stacks of gold. Tap on these to collect them. Leave them laying around too long and they’ll rust away. As your followers work, they lose energy, and finally will just shut down from exhaustion.

As a mostly benevolent GodFinger, you can refresh your followers in several ways. You can build them tents to rest in. Tents require no power but take a while to work their magic. Alternatively you can build fountains for your followers to drink from. These need to be powered by rain, but they revive your followers much more swiftly. These little guys and gals love to drink, farting and belching constantly while they do so.

Almost everything you do in GodFinger earns you experience. Using a power, collecting gold, sometimes even from growing an unusual plant… experience comes in at a slow but steady pace. As you level up you unlock new & improved buildings, more potent powers, more followers and your world even grows.

As for the social aspect, if you have friends playing you can add their worlds to your universe. You can zoom out of your planet until you can see others. Interactions between friends’ planets are fairly spartan. You can “Enchant” one of their followers and once your friend accepts the enchantment you’ll get a trickle of gold from them. And once a day you can send a (pre-set) gift to a single friend. And that’s about the extent of the social stuff at this point. Basically if you don’t have any friends playing, don’t worry that you’re missing out.

GodFinger is free to play (aside from optionally purchasing Awe). I actually think the developers misjudged things here. There are a few inconspicuous ads in various parts of the game, and presumably they make some money from those, but I just see no reason to buy Awe, which I assume is intended to be the main revenue stream.

GodFinger is a lot of fun to play for a while. I’m currently level 26 (of 50) and sadly I’ve more or less run out of content. I have every building unlocked and I’ve got more gold than I know what to do with. As I keep leveling my powers will grow stronger but I’m not convinced I need them to be stronger.

I’d like to think the devs will keep adding content, but presumably that would depend on a solid revenue stream. Maybe I’m an anomaly and other people are buying lots of Awe. I hope so.

Still, free is free and it’s well worth a download, even if you ultimately decide it isn’t for you. Just messing around with your planet, creating floods and deserts and seeing what you can get to grow, can be fun.

Yesterday I was working on an ITWorld post about Netflix Streaming on the Wii. In describing the navigation of your queue I said “You can click on the arrows on each end of the nav bar…”

That sentence didn’t register until this morning when I was proofreading. Click on the arrows. Clicking, on a video game system. That’s new. Now granted, there’ve been torturous control systems in console games before where you’d move a cursor via analog stick and then press a controller button to ‘click’ on an on-screen button, but the experience has always been pretty awful. And plenty of Wii games (my favorite Wii games, in fact) use a point and click interface. But doing a non-gaming task on the Wii really made me aware that I was doing something different.

On a computer, of course, we click constantly; the entire modern computer interface is built around moving a cursor and clicking mouse buttons. But the Wii is the first console that’s successfully brought that metaphor onto game systems. Presumably Playstation Move will do this as well. But not Natal (see below).

And then there’s the iPad, which takes its UI from smartphones. On the iPad there’s no concept of a cursor. You can still ‘click’ things but the feeling is different from doing so with the mouse where you see the cursor. You can’t roll-over interface items to get helper pop-up texts or anything along those lines [no, I haven't used an iPad, I'm extrapolating from using smartphones]. On the Android platform, at least, there’s even a change in outcome depending on how long you click. There’s clicking and then there’s “long press” that will generate different results from the same icon/link/on-screen item.

And then there’s multitouch, of course. The pinch to zoom function still feels awkward to me, but it feels like just the start of what’s possible. I have one app on the Android that does interesting things via tap-patterns. For example, if you tap-press (ie, a double tap where you ‘hold’ the second tap) you can then slide your finger left and right to zoom in and out. Really the possibilities are endless, though we’ll need some standards to evolve in order to be efficient (awkward though pinch to zoom is, it’s become a defacto standard that everyone understands).

I’m guessing the Natal experience will be closer to the iPad than to a PC. With the whole “body as controller” I can’t imagine MS putting a cursor on-screen, though maybe they will. (In some cases they may have to.) I think the strength of Natal will be more in ‘gesture controls’ rather than on-screen buttons to be pressed.

I don’t have a real point to this post, I’m just pondering… as game consoles become more generalized devices, they’re borrowing from other devices and/or evolving their UI. At the same time the iPad (and the Android tablets that are soon to come) are establishing a completely different paradigm.

So what does the future look like? Will the “mouse & pointer” combo become some quaint idea of yesteryear? Probably not. Touch interfaces are wonderful for devices that you hold in your lap or that lay flat on a low table, but as soon as you have a vertical service it’s been shown that fatigue sets in pretty quickly with touch interfaces. Any time you have to manipulate a device above heart level it becomes an issue over time. For a fast transaction like using an ATM machine you’d never notice this, but in an hour long touch-gaming session where you have to hold your arms up to manipulate the game, you’d definitely feel it. Lowering the screen, of course, leads to neck strain and back problems.

It’s an exciting time and I feel like computing/gaming/human-machine interfacing is poised on the cusp of a major upheaval; one which will lead to improvements in the way we manipulate these devices that we’re so enamored with.

Just in case you haven’t seen this… I think it’s pretty awesome.

I just finished my first play-through of Heavy Rain and wanted to capture some thoughts while they were still fresh in my mind.

My inner cynic really wants to tear the game apart. The controls are clunky in that survival-horror kind of way (not that the game is survival horror, mind you). Walking a character around can be really cumbersome, the mostly-fixed cameras (somethings you can pan a bit, and there’s always an alternate views) can make navigating even an open space tricky (particularly when the camera view changes unexpectedly, leading to disorientation) and OMG six-axis controls FTL. I hate it when a game makes me tilt, shake or yank my controller around. In general, the mechanics of the game are kind of janky.

And had I written about the game after the first 30 minutes I wouldn’t have had a thing good to say about it. And y’know, I still don’t have much good to say about Heavy Rain, the Game. But I *loved* Heavy Rain, the Experience.

Quantic Dream has really nailed graphical interactive fiction in this product. The varied pacing can frustrate you in a good way. The first hour or two is actually pretty slow but then there’s a payoff. And that happens throughout the game. Deep into the plotline you’ll have to do some really mundane action that’ll be ‘boring.’ That’s kind of unheard of in a game where the intensity generally ramps up from start to end. But in a movie or a book, having quiet times in between high action points is basic plot development 101, and it works well here.

There’s something about the way they make you hit QTEs that really makes the whole story compelling. For example, I tend to semi-recline a lot while I’m playing a video game. And I did so in some parts of Heavy Rain but when the tension mounted I had to sit up to be ready to shake my controller around. I know that sounds dumb and/or annoying but it really added to the feel of the game. I was leaning forward, attentive, a bit tense, waiting to do whatever I had to do, and that make the whole experience feel different.

So it’s definitely a game that’s worth a play-through. But what about replayability? I definitely plan to play through it again, though not right away. I’m both interested to see what will change if I make different decisions, but also hesitant about how engaged I’ll be by making them. In my first play through I made the decisions that I felt were correct. To go through again and make different ones might weaken my connection to the narrative in that I’m doing things I don’t really believe in. We’ll see what happens when the time comes. I won’t be replaying it soon. Like a book or a movie, I’ll put it on the shelf to enjoy again sometime in the future after my memory of events have faded a bit.

I got up at 7:30 am on a Sunday to jump back into Heavy Rain. I can’t remember the last time a product had engaged me on that level. And after I finished, I just had to sit and think about it for a while. I had to ponder what I’d just experienced. Again, that’s a rare feeling.

Heavy Rain isn’t perfect; there were some plot connections that didn’t make sense (a few times a character referred to another character that, insofar as I know, s/he’d never met…maybe a branch of storyline I somehow skipped?) and the controls were frustrating at times. If the story had been in a movie it wouldn’t have been *that* special (and in fact someone just snapped up the movie rights to the game). But your interaction with the story gives it more power than it would have as a passive experience. There are decisions you have to make that are…disturbing, and you don’t have a lot of time to make them.

In spite of the flaws, Quantic Dream has created something pretty special here. If you decide to play it, just go with it. Set your skepticism and cynicism aside and just experience the ride. I think you’ll really enjoy it. I know I did.

Warning: Not a game related post.

Today in the MMO blogging world a new event launched, the MMO Blog Alliance Charity Drive. I have issues with this.

But before I get to them, I do want to acknowledge that I feel like I know a few of the bloggers associated with this drive, and insofar as I do know them, I fervently believe that they’re people with good hearts who are trying to Do The Right Thing.

I just think this ‘drive’ is a mistake. Maybe my life is different from yours… but in the past I’ve donated to quite a few organizations, none of which want to let me go. It has gotten to the point where now, at this time of year, I start to drown under a deluge of requests for further support. The phone rings (in MA the “do not call” law doesn’t apply to non-profits) and the mail box fills up. Those are the personal requests. Outside every grocery store is someone (sometimes several someones) propositioning me with sad tales of people living a hard life who need my help. Soon Santa will be ringing his bell at the mall. Donation coin cups will be passed around the theater. Coin cups will be next to the register at the coffee shop. TV ads showing starving children, puppies, or children with puppies will pop up 4 times during every TV show. The Giving Tree will go up at work. Kids will knock on the door looking to raise money for some cause… in some cases these causes may even be legit.

In short, without being deaf, dumb and blind it is *impossible* not to know that there are needy people and good causes in the world, and I’m all for contributing to these causes if doing so feels right to you.

But the *last* thing I need is another vector for outstretched hands being shoved at me. Particularly a gaming blog. (And yes, I appreciate the irony of me writing this post on a gaming blog.)

Now I’ve been called “Scrooge” (in a kidding way) and ‘mean’ (in an apparently serious way) for this attitude already today. But y’know what? You don’t know me. You don’t know my past, or my habits. You’ll have to take on faith that fact that I contributed often in the past. Not as much these days, both due to my personal financial situation, and more so because of all the spam and the harassing phone calls that charities use. Calling me 3 times in a given week asking me for even more money is not a way to get me to continue contributing to a cause.

And when I have something spare to offer, I don’t need a random blogger (no matter how much I enjoy their insight into gaming) suggesting who I should donate to. Really, are there people out there saying “I’ve got $500 I want to donate but I have no idea who needs it.”? I can’t believe there are. Personally, my Q4 donations tend to go to fire departments (because my father was a volunteer fireman) and a charity that brings toys to kids in the hospital, because when I think Christmas I think kids and toys.

Now, you might suggest I’m over-reacting and to be perfectly honest I’d have a hard time arguing against that. What irked me most about the MBACD media blitz is that it was a media blitz. A bunch of MMO blogs I read all posted at the same time encouraging me to donate to those less fortunate. I likened it to getting 6 phone calls the same evening asking for donations… even if I was in favor of the cause, that’d be pretty irritating. Ferrel pointed out that not everyone is going to see multiple postings and he’s right.

But some of us will and, having no advance knowledge of this organization, it felt like a trap. We’ll lure you in with good talk about MMOs then suddenly hit you up for money!

Again, I absolutely understand that these people are well-meaning and trying to do some good (and of course won’t profit from this campaign in any way). I just don’t think most of us need another group of people urging us to donate, and when you push something on a person hard enough, the response will be pushing back. I suggest that people are getting so sick of being ‘urged to donate’ that they’ll stop donating out of spite. I’m personally getting close to that point myself.

Those of us who wish to donate will, no matter what we read in our RSS feeds. There’re plenty of big budget media campaigns making us aware of the need. Those of us who don’t, or can’t, donate, aren’t going to be swayed by a post on a friend’s blog, no matter how sincere the plea is.

Urging donations is getting close to talking politics (or religon) and I don’t think a gaming blog is the right place for any of these topics.

If you disagree…if you really do want to help and somehow have gotten this far in life without gaining awareness of the many good causes out there, then by all means please do read Ferrel’s post about the MBACD. He, and the blogs he link to, can offer you many suggestions for charities that could use your donation.

[Edit: Clipped a few rantie tangential paragraphs off the head of this post, as advised by my new BFF Brian (see comment #1) since they were really unrelated to the topic and in consideration of the rather solid conversation that has emerged in the comments. The removed 'graphs were just me grumping about the "Holiday Season" starting too early and the current political incorrectness of referring to "Christmas" rather than "The Holidays."]

So here we are, all snug in our beds (or soon to be) with visions of sugar-darkspawn stuck in our heads.

It’s Dragon Age Eve. Tomorrow we’ll come home from work, bare our teeth at the family to warn them off, and settle in to enjoy Dragon Age: Origins. (Of course some lucky SOBs are already playing…sounds like some retailers broke the street date.)

I realized yesterday… I hadn’t finished Uncharted 2 yet, and here comes Dragon Age. I meant to finish it. I’m really close to the end (I think/hope…it’s getting to where if it goes much longer it’ll feel like its dragging on); who knew it was going to get hard(ish)?

But really I blame Runic Games. Torchlight grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go all last week and into the weekend. And I’m still feeling the itch to play more.

So yeah, backlog of great games piling it (let’s not forget Borderlands). I think Dragon Age will be my last purchase for a while. I need to get ahead of this wave!

This game will unlock in approximately 15 hours

Remember all those blog posts about grouping vs soloing and how those of us who soloed in MMOs should “go play a single player game”?

Well, I finally did that. Not by choice, but due to a lingering injury that made playing PC games painful. And at first it really sucked. I was really hooked on Fallen Earth at the time and ached to play it (pun intended) but just couldn’t manage more than 10 minutes before my arm felt like it was on fire.

So I turned to my consoles for solace, and played some pretty fun games. Need For Speed: Shift, Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legends, Uncharted 2 and Borderlands. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped missing MMOs; or at least, the missing eased somewhat.

And what happened next was interesting. I started to notice how much MMO players complain about MMOs. I’m not talking about a scientific poll or anything, but it seems like MMO players are a lot unhappier with their games than non-MMO players are. I find myself thinking “Why are you playing this game if it is making you so unhappy?” fairly often now, even while acknowledging that I was the same way, and probably will be again someday.

I don’t want to come across like the alcoholic who gets all holier-than-thou once he stops drinking, but it is peculiar. I guess it has a lot to do with the amount of time invested. When you’ve established a ‘home’ in an MMO and you have friends there, the benefit of your social network outweighs the detriment of the aspects of the game that bug you. Meanwhile the non-MMOers have significantly fewer ties to any given game (and often, thanks to Friend lists and social networking, they can take their friends with them to the next game without a lot of hassle).

I can’t decide if this social connection to a specific game is ‘good’ or not (though I’m pretty sure I’m in no position to make that determination for anyone but myself). I will tell you that being a non-MMO gamer is a helluva lot more expensive than being an MMO gamer!

What’s strangest of all is this lure of re-labeling myself ‘MMO gamer’ just to be ‘part of the group’ again. Even though I was one of those anti-social soloers, I did feel part of the uber-group that is the MMO playing community. I kind of miss feeling passionately about the cost of a retcon in Champions Online or the problem of Radiance in LOTRO or whether the scarecrows are working right in Fallen Earth…

Maybe that’s why I still have my accounts active. I’m not ready to cut that final string yet.

Full disclosure: I own a Sony PS3 (and an Xbox 360, and a Nintendo Wii, and a PC, and a Mac). Call me a fanboy if you will.

Today Syp put up a mocking post about Papa John’s Pizza getting a link on the PS3′s web browser’s default home page. He showed an ad for the service with the text:

Okay, this is sort of a redux of EverQuest 2’s infamous /pizza command, and it’s no less ridiculous than it was the first time. Who is so tethered to a game system and/or so ignorant of how a telephone works that they can’t order pizza without Sony’s assistance?

I’m trying to wrap my head around this comment. Syp doesn’t seem to object to people who are so tethered to their couch watching TV that they pick up a phone to order a pizza, or so tethered to a web browser on a PC that they order a pizza through it. But because the web browser happens to be on a device that plays games (y’know, like a PC does), then this becomes a ridiculous idea and anyone who uses it is ‘tethered to a game system and/or ignorant of how a phone works?’

Talk about hating with a very broad brush.

Or maybe he’s just hating because there’s an ad on the default home page?

Around our house, in addition to playing games on the PS3, watching blu-ray and dvd movies on the PS3, streaming video and music for our media server to the PS3, we also watch internet video on it (admittedly we did more of this before Hulu.com started blocking the PS3). So if we’re watching an episode of a show at NBC.Com and decide to order a pizza rather than cooking, we’re good if we get up and go to the PC in the other room and order it there, but if we open another window in the PS3′s browser and order it, we’re losers, apparently?

I avoid using the phone to order pizza because frankly there is often a language barrier between myself and the person on the other end of the line. When ordering online everything is clearly written/chosen from a menu. Credit card processed. It’s fast and accurate and I can even put the tip on the card, so all I need to do when the food is delivered is sign the credit card slip. I don’t see how its relevant what device the browser happens to be on… that’s the beauty of the web, isn’t it? That it’s more or less device agnostic?

Color me puzzled.

But I still love ya, Syp, even if you hate my beloved PS3!

I’m sick of being sequentially disappointed by MMO companies. From Funcom’s “Surprise, there’s no content past 20!” to Warhammer’s broken RvR and feeble PvE to Aion’s bizarre beta system and now to Cryptic’s “Did we say Sept 1? We mean until we decide to arbitrarily pull the plug.” to the issue going down between Atari and Turbine.

Not many of these companies really deserve our money these days. Not long ago I joined Syp in proclaiming with pride that I’m a Day 1 MMO player. I see now that by being that kind of player, I’m working to encourage these bad business practices. Half finished games, sketchy policies and a general contempt for the customer — these are the behaviors that get rewarded by our slavish devotion to getting in on the next big thing ASAP.

And I’m personally sick of most bloggers, too. There are a few really top notch blogs out there, but most of them (including this one!) are just soapboxes for whomever is writing them. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. I’m just sick of devoting my time to reading them. Or less venomously, I don’t feel like my life is enriched in any way by reading them, and that there are more productive ways I can put my time to use.

And many bloggers are pompous, pig-headed and arrogant. I’m sure they don’t see themselves that way. And I’m sure they DO see ME that way. Again, I’m not setting myself apart by saying I’m in any way better than the rest. Most of us are just tooting our own horns out here and I’m worst of the bunch in a lot of ways. Much too often I find that I feel ashamed of how steadfastly I’ve clung to a position I’ve taken, without being willing to be gracious enough to accept there’s another way of looking at things.

On the other hand, I’ve found that many bloggers seize on any concession as a point of weakness and just press harder. Whomever backs down in the slightest from their point of view loses.

Surf around and look at some blogs, and particularly the comments. What draws comments? Controversy. Arguing. Bickering. The Blog-scape has become like one giant gaming forum with everyone shouting as loud as they can and no one really listening to what anyone else is saying. Sure, we’ll read a post and riff on it to move forward our own agenda on the topic at hand, but there’s very, very little honest, open-minded dialog going on. No one ever convinces anyone else of anything. We have our opinions, our opinions are the only right ones, and anyone with a differing opinion is just someone to be shouted down, in the form of leaving more comments than the other guy can.

It’s pointless. It’s destructive. And I’m done with it.

I’m shutting down Dragonchasers, temporarily at least. Until I can come back refreshed and recharged. And I’m culling my RSS feed to a bare minimum. There are bloggers out there who I consider friends, and them I’ll keep reading, just because I want to keep in touch with them in some way. And there are bloggers out there who are just smart, talented writers, and I’ll read them from time to time just because reading them *does* enrich my life.

But beyond that, I’m going to try to reroute all the time I spend reading blogs and bickering in comments and worrying about what the next half-finished game to launch will be, into some more productive activity. Something I can feel good about at the end of the day. Even if that something is as simple as spending time talking to loved ones, or taking a walk under the stars.

So to the friends I’ve made, I say “Thank you for being such awesome people.” And to everyone else, so long for now. Try to be nicer to each other. Try to really listen to what the next guy is saying, and open yourself to the possibility that we all don’t see things the same way, and just maybe you can learn something from the person on the other side of your next debate.

Someone (Werit) asked me today if Sacred 2 had slipped down my play list.

It has not. My entire playlist has slipped down. Due to poor planning on the part of upper management at my job, the past few weeks have been rather hellish insofar as having to work a lot of extra hours, extra stress, and so forth. I haven’t been playing anything, aside from some LOTRO, and that I play as a kind of reward. Y’know “OK, I’ll write the data validation scripts for this page, then I’ll kill 10 bog-lurkers, then start the next set of scripts.” (I chose LOTRO because I needed some coin to pay my in-game rent.)

The silver lining is that I’ve killed the 180 bog-lurkers required to complete the deed in the Lone Lands!

But in spite of what XFire says, I sure didn’t play LOTRO for 14 hours this past week. Much of that time was me logged in, the game running in the background waiting for the next ‘reward’ of killing 10 more lurkers.

This week is E3, and I’m stoked to follow it virtually. After that madness ends (G4TV is showing something like 22 hours of coverage and I intend to watch all of that, plus countless web videos and blog posts) I hope to go back to Sacred 2, probably starting over with a character I can take more seriously than the sexpot Seraphim.

Hmm, wait, that’s not right either. My boss finished Infamous and is going to lend it to me, so I’ll be playing through that first, and THEN going back to Sacred 2.

Bottom line, I didn’t lose interest in Sacred 2…I just got pulled away from it.

So as I alluded to in my last post, the end of Spring holiday held its share of disappointments (I’m talking about Rune Factory Frontier here).

First, there was a festival celebrating the opening of the beach, which shook everything up. Lute wasn’t in his normal spot, and by the time I found out where he was (near the church, apparently) it was too late and he’d gone home. So my big forge room remains empty for another week.

Second, Day 30 was actually the first day of Summer, not the last day of Spring, so I lost some crops as they withered to dead grass.

Third, there was a contest at the festival, which I participated in…and failed at, much to the amusement of all the available young ladies present. *sigh*

But life goes on! This week, and today is Wednesday or Thursday of Week 1 of Summer in Rune Factory Frontier land, I’ve already expanded the kitchen area, and I’ve *already* harvested a crop of onions. How so fast?

The power of Runeys. I haven’t mentioned Runeys yet because I’m still figuring them out. Runeys are these kind of spirit things that float around in the world, and if you have a balanced Runey population, your land will become prosperous and things will grow more quickly. You collect Runeys via the (wait for it) Collector (hmm, or is it called a Gatherer?) which feels like a Ghostbuster Ectoplasmic Vacuum kind of thing. So I collected a bunch and set them free around my farm and now I can harvest animal fodder every day, and my onions went from seed to harvest in less than a week. Yay!

Runeys appear over mature croplands, apparently… but they also eat each other, so there’s some kind of balancing thing going on that I haven’t fussed over much yet.

However inside dungeons, instead of Runeys appearing from mature crops, you get these Rune Point Stone things that replenish your supply of Rune Points. I’ve got 2 patches of strawberries growing on Whale Island’s dungeon, so I pop over there, harvest berries, top off my Rune Points and I’m good to go for a while longer. More work!

Anyway, we’ll see how things go during the next holiday; hopefully Lute will be back and I can get both a better Forging Station and better Kitchen Equipment. We’ll see if the money holds out.

So far this week, not much dungeon diving. I did tame a new monster: an ant… so now I have a sheep (I can harvest wool from him) a cow (milk), a squirrel, (who runs around my farmland harvesting ‘wild’ weeds, which can be valuable), a goblin, (who harvests veggies), and the ant will be my combat partner, at least for now (He can harvest veggies too, if need be). These monster pets aren’t particularly efficient yet but I’m hoping they get better with practice. For now they just save me some time, but I still have to do some collecting/harvesting myself.

And finally, the purpose of this post. If you have a Wii, and my inane blatherings about this title have piqued your interest, Amazon has it on sale (today only, I believe) for $29.98. It lists for $50, but I think I paid about $40 at Best Buy a couple weeks ago.

I found a great website devoted to these games: http://www.ranchstory.co.uk/?games/Rune_Factory_Frontier. Gamefaqs has a lot of info too, and honestly for Gamefaqs, the community is decent, but I prefer visiting ‘indie’ websites when I am able to.

I didn’t really make a Decision to stop playing MMOs. It just kind of happened, mostly due to an economic crunch that has since eased. I keep thinking “Now I can afford a sub again!” and Angela would love me to rejoin her and our friends in EQ2, and I keep saying I will… but I don’t.

I missed MMOs for a few weeks, but then I started feeling a kind of lightness of being. Like some weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It has taken me a while to figure out what’s going on, and I think it has a lot to do with the out-of-game cost of playing an MMO, namely keeping up to date on changes and feeling a vague pressure to ‘keep up’ (or ahead) of the curve, or even just feeling like “I’m paying for it, I should play it.” At least I think that’s what’s going on. I’m still not 100% sure.

Maybe I was burnt out without realizing it, and this feeling is just the burnout lifting? Whatever it is, it feels good, like a long-standing care has been lifted.

But what’s even stranger is the social impact this has had on my life. Now keep in mind I’m a die-hard solo player in MMOs; one of those people that is often told he should be playing a single player game since they’re much better than playing an MMO solo.

First of all, they aren’t better. Not for me. I keep starting single player RPGs and finding them unfulfilling. Even critically acclaimed games like Fallout 3 just feel empty and dead. I haven’t gotten very far in Fallout 3, just in Megaton, but when I hit that town and all I see are NPCs following their pre-programmed wander routes, it just feels lonely and pointless in a way that MMOs never do, even when I’m not talking to or interacting with other players. Other players add life to the experience, even without direct interaction. Single player RPGS just aren’t as compelling. (Though I loved Fable 2, but I think the difference was that I was also playing an MMO at the time, so I had that ‘living world’ itch being scratched elsewhere.)

Anyway, back to the social impact. My RSS feed is filled with MMO bloggers. Lots of them have been writing long, well-considered posts about MMO design, how to move the state of the games forward, what’s broken and how to fix it. Really thought-provoking stuff.

And I just don’t care.

And that makes me really sad, because a mere few weeks ago I was enjoying the hell out of debating these points with these smart people. And now, I just find I have nothing to add to the conversation, and even find myself sometimes thinking these people are wasting their energy in debating this stuff. Huh? Where are THOSE thoughts coming from? I *love* being an armchair game designer! Anyway, this all leads to my standing on the sidelines watching, and I no longer feel like part of the community of MMO bloggers. That carries a great sense of loss.

And, as an add-on to that, I’m not posting a lot here, either. Now a big part of that is the blogging gig at ITWorld. My ‘word bag’ has only so many words in it every day, and I’m finding it’s pretty low on words by the time I get done a day at work, a day of twittering, and written a blog post or two (9 posts in the past week over there). My ‘hour bag’ runs low, too. I’ve been meaning to write this post for several days but just don’t find both available time and available energy intersecting conveniently.

On the bright side of all this, I’m re-discovering the joys of (non-rpg) single player games. I’ve been playing the hell out of this little “Aquia” game on the new DSiWare platform, and am finding Rune Factory Frontier (the latest “Harvest Moon” game for the Wii) to be incredibly compelling.

I think I need to just follow my muse and morph Dragonchasers into a single player gaming blog for a while. I’m not sure what that will do to the audience…will having ‘off-topic’ posts drive away people who would stay subscribed to a quiet RSS feed? I guess I’ll find out. I mean I’ve always been a little bit ‘all over the place’ with my book reviews and the odd “check out these neat thing” posts, but Dragonchasers never really took off until I really started focusing on MMOs.

Every day brings new adventure, though. Doing the ITWorld Blog has felt incredibly rewarding and is, I think, helping me to slowly get my writing chops back. And the money from it is what ended the financial crunch I referenced above, so both artistically and fiscally, I’m very, very grateful that gig fell in my lap. Maybe some day I can transition to writing full time. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

PS Props to anyone who got the B5 reference in the title of this post. Vorlons FTW!

BullCopra decided I was scrap-worthy! Huzzah!

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

I’m pretty sure that Copra and I have very different definitions of the word brilliant, since I generally feel like I’m flailing around like a noob on these pages. But thanks, Copra!!

So here’re the memeRules:

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Rule 1, check.

Rule 2:

Actually before I get to Rule 2, let me preface this list. I know for some people getting meme’d is like being sent a chain letter. But I love the spirit of this meme, and I’m picking 7 bloggers that really have affected me in positive ways. I hope no one feels a sense of obligation from being on this list. Forward the meme or don’t; it doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is I get a chance to call attention to some very cool people.

1. Stargrace at MMOQuests, because she’s always celebrating the fun that comes out of the games we play. I’ve gone on more vicarious adventures with her than with anyone else.
2. Tipa at West Karana. She’s done a lot for the blog-o-sphere, but I’m including her this time for the work she did on the XFire WordPress Plug-In that I’m running over on the right.
3. Angela at G33kG0dd3ss for having the hardest-to-type blog name of them all, and because she did the design for Dragonchasers. And she puts up with me every day. I have no idea how.
4. Wiqd at iMMOvation, because he makes me think a lot about the games we play, and tends to spin it all in a pretty positive light. Reading him tends to be very relaxing and thought-provoking at the same time, which is (IMO) quite a feat.
5. Tesh at Tish Tosh Tesh for constantly challenging me. We often don’t see eye-to-eye, but I always feel like I’ve improved myself a wee bit after we debate a topic.
6. Ysharros at Stylish Corpse. This one is a bit of a ‘cheat’ because Copra already tagged her, but she invites us in time after time for long, rambling discussions that she starts and then guide the conversation as the day passes. She just has a knack for picking topics that folks can build a conversation around.
7. DM Osbon from Construed, for his infectious enthusiasm from both games and (sometimes more importantly) other pop culture. It’s good to be reminded that there’s more to life than computer games: there’s comics and movies!

Rule #3

Finding 10 things about me that anyone would find remotely interesting will be a challenge.

1. I’ve been involved in online communities since the 1980′s. My first gig was as an assistant sysop for Scorpia (older gamers may remember her from the pages of Computer Gaming World) on GEnie. It wasn’t a paid gig, but she did send us a Holiday Bonus. She signed her checks “Scorpia.”
2. I was an Associate Editor of Strategy Plus Magazine for a few years. My beat was strategy and wargames.
3. I once spent a very pleasant day at Derek Smart’s house in Miami, looking at Battlecruiser and thinking it was awesome. And it was, when Smart was at the controls. He was a charming host and it was a really enjoyable time. (For those who don’t get the reference, Smart is infamous for taking part in online flame wars about his game.)
4. I took part in a focus group for the crafting aspects of LOTRO. If you hate how crafting works in that game, I have to take a very very very tiny bit of responsibility for it.
5. My first MMO (although it wasn’t call that at the time) was Megawars III on CompuServe. I spent $300/month on access fees (they cut you off at $300) and another $150 or so/month on phone charges.
6. Even though I’m a pasty-faced geek now, there was a time when I was a total beach bum. I grew up in The Hamptons and worked nights. Every day was spent lounging at the ocean, soaking up the sun and body surfing.
7. My first Virtual Reality experience was Dactyl Nightmare. I happened to be in an arcade when they were setting it up, and the tech just let me hang out in it for about 25 minutes, noodling around while he got everything in order. After taking off the head-mounted-display, I proclaimed it Electronic LSD and predicted it would take the world by storm. It didn’t.
8. I ghostwrote a chapter of a book called “Secrets of the Videogame Masters” by Clayton Walnum. My chapters was a walk-through of Bionic Commando for the NES. I was 28 at the time and had chicken pox as I was playing through the game. I think it was the only thing that kept me sane from that ITCHING!
9. The first computer I used was actually a paper-teletype machine with an acoustic coupler.  You had to call up the PDP-10 at Stony Brook University, listen for the *screeech* that told you the PDP was talking, then shove the headset of the phone into a couple of rubber cups on the back of the teletype. Programs were store on paper tape with holes punched out. Getting your program ‘roll’ squished often meant re-keying.
10. I dated a pretty serious activist in my youth. That led me to being at the big No Nukes Rally in Battery Park, Manhatten, in 1979, and I marched in Washington DC against registering for Selective Service  after the USSR invaded Afghanistan that same year. I was something of a hippy back then. I think maybe I still am.

Whew. I think my job here is done…