Teenage Spacekicks

At my Secondary School, for a few months at least, our teenaged politics was defined by who was kissing whom, who had insulted whom, and who was sending spaceships to defend or attack whom. My friends and I were all playing Planetarion, a browser-based massively multiplayer game of long-term space domination. Each player was given control of a planet and would strive to gain the most points by mining their asteroids, building ships and capturing enemy planets.

What allowed the game to consume us was the glacial pace it moved at. The world would update once every ‘tick’, where a tick was a single hour. When you did anything, you would be given an ETA: it will take this number of ticks for your ships to be constructed, it will take this number ticks for your ships to reach their target.

The delayed response between performing an action and seeing its conseqeunces meant there was room in between for nail-biting obsession. More importantly, it meant we could log on to the game in the school library, make a few discrete moves and log off again before any disapproving teacher could catch us.

Unfortunately, my friends and I were all young teenagers. It wasn’t like we needed an excuse for bickering or Machiavellian backstabbing, and Planetarion simply provided a platform for our worst compulsions. Plus, disclaimer: I was kind of a dick.

While I’d long forgotten the specifics of my old Planetarion games, a quick check of my hard drive revealed an MSN chatlog from the time.

Oh boy.

It seems my friends and I had just been sent a general message from the Minister of War (of, I guess, our coalition/group), saying that defences should always be provided to attacked comrades. However, after committing 500 ships to defending one friend, and sending a 1500 ship counter-attack against his enemy, two other friends needed defending. They were angry I wasn’t sending ships to help them, too. I’ve obscured the names that could be in any way identifiable, except for my own:

Graham says:

im defending [Friend] with 500 ships and attacking the guy thats attacking him with 1500 in the hope he’ll racall. this is what i was asked to do, wga

Graham says:

what more could i do??

Officially Well Known Again! says:

currently there is no orders in the gal

Graham says:

[Friend] asked me on icq to attack the guy and see if he recalls, and asked me to defend. so thats what im doing

Officially Well Known Again! says:

[Friend] says “Jump under the bus Smitz!”

Bye Smitz ure dead now!

That’s some real nice typing skills you’ve got there, “Smitz”. And does anyone know what “wga” means?

Graham says:

im not defending [Friend #2] or you because im worried about being attacked my self

Graham says:

my points went from 300 thousand to 1.1 million

Graham says:

i have the most roids in the galaxy and am second in points

Officially Well Known Again! says:

smitz thats is mince

I had forgotten that “mince” used to mean bad! Now it means I’m having delicious Bolognese for dinner. Conversely, I remember that the concern for my planet at the time was genuine, but trying to explain my tactics by bragging about how great I was probably wasn’t a great idea.

When bragging didn’t work, I tried name-calling, branding those complaining as “little shites.” The use of plural prompted requests for who the other shites were, but I refused to name names. There aren’t timestamps in the log, but I can only imagine this went on for hours. Until!

[Friend #2] has been added to the conversation.
[Friend #2] says:

why the fuck are u saying we’re all shite smitz?

My log ends here, but these choice extracts are meant to illustrate the type of conversations we’d have, where my friends and I would re-enact scenes of palace intrigue over badly spelt MSN chats.

I’ve been thinking about Planetarion recently because I’ve been playing Neptune’s Pride, a similar multiplayer game of space domination. Unlike Planetarion’s three-month long rounds featuring hundreds or thousands of players, the Neptune’s Pride match I’m playing has only eight.

I’m friends with almost all of those players, and since the match began, I’ve betrayed four of them. Similar to my Planetarion experience, our actions and plans within the game have been discussed at length via IM conversations. Many messages have also been sent through the in-game mail system, forming inevitably broken alliances.

But when we talk about the match online or in person, we do so unemotionally. Equally, when we each come to write about the match, in PC Gamer or on Rock Paper Shotgun or on our personal blogs, we’ll write with the understanding that it is a game, and we were role-playing, or simply playing, and that our actions weren’t personal.

But this wasn’t the case when I was a teenager, and it isn’t how a lot of people experience gaming. The experiences I had in Planetarion would spill over into school the next day, and there would be further arguments, accusations, name-calling and eventual fuming silence. We’d fall out with one another regularly. The game wasn’t just play. It mattered to us in a real and powerful way.

I think this is something that’s mostly forgotten about in games writing: for a lot of the people who play games, there’s not much separation. The games get mixed up with the same insecurities and pettiness that exist in real life and the experience is emotionally heightened as a result. Planetarion is forever imprinted in my memory entirely because of these arguments, and despite the immaturity of fighting, it’s heartening to think of gaming as such a direct extension of real world relationships and emotions.

My school friendships ultimately survived Planetarion, but they were changed by the experience.

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February 7, 2010

The PC Gamer Village

Around Christmas I started to lose interest in Wurm Online. The PC Gamer village was well established, with little remaining undeveloped land, a complete system of roads and lights, and plentiful supplies of tools, materials and food. There was little more left to do but polish, tweak and gradually improve our surroundings and characters. That proved not to be enough to maintain my interest, and with the adventure, the excitement and the constant newness gone, I moved on to other games.

Getting to this stage took me probably a little over three months, but in that time I played the game for roughly 200 hours. Few gaming loves burn that brightly and quickly for me.

In that time, as a semi-work/mostly-spare-time project, I began the PC Gamer Wurm community website. A simple blog and forum where the PC Gamer Village – which had started without our guidance, it’s worth noting – could discuss the game. In four months the forum has reached 80,000 pageviews and 2700 posts. That’s not bad for a community of, at any one time, around 30 people, some of which never take part in anything outside the game.

After not touching or even thinking about the game for almost a month, I dropped in on the messageboard last night to see what people were doing. It turns out they are doing very well.

A village member called Jekev started a PCG Village Wiki, which people have been updating with information about their homes and themselves.

A village member called KGB has been mapping the village in Google Sketchup, with some great early results:

The screenshot that tops this post was taken by member Arkatufus and edited just slightly in Photoshop to make the game look better than it has any right to.

This is just the tip of what they’ve been doing. They’ve also been continuing to update the PCG_Wurm Twitter account to a gradually increasing audience, and the IRC room has a dozen or so regular visitors at this point. The forum contained pages and pages of new projects and friendly discussion when I returned to it.

Best of all though, they’re planning a move to the Premium servers after the game’s creator, Rolf, hinted at letting free and paying players exist side by side. Premium currently contains things the free Golden Valley doesn’t: PvP combat, vastly more challenging enemies, territorial deeds, stone houses, a higher skill cap. Those changes combine to turn the world into something far more dangerous.

Moving there would be an adventure, and exciting, and new, and already the forum discussions involve screenshots of prospective land and 3D maps proposing the new village’s structure.

The thought of starting fresh has re-energised my love for the game. Coupled with the wonderful things the community has been creating – on their own, unprompted, on a polite forum of human beings with next to no moderation – and I’m powerless to resist. I cannot stress enough how fantastic these people are.

I spent some time tonight making changes to the layout of the forums, splitting the previous mega-board into a few more managable subject-specific areas. I’ll spend some time soon jigging with the website, as well.

If you’re interested in checking in on the progress of the existing village, this board is the place to do it. For discussion of the coming switch to the Premium servers, check out here.

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February 4, 2010

My Nesting Instinct

I’m trying to be less controlled/obsessive about things I write here, as I think it’d be more useful as a loose notebook of ideas not yet fully-formed. And I’ll go less insane when updating it this way.

From Tom’s recent post about how to create a good open world:

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

There’s an area outside World of WarCraft’s Stormwind City called Elwynn Forest. I haven’t played the game in years, but I still remember the area. It’s beautiful, still and packed with tall trees. When I first visited it, I dearly wanted to stay there. To move in, build a hut, pitch a tent, make camp. A large part of my eventual dissastisfaction with World of WarCraft came from the inability to place meaningful roots anywhere in the game.


(Screenshot from the World of Warcraft wikia).

In any game that creates a convincing world, I want to nest. It’s rare that games let me do that, instead favouring progress and movement. There are obvious reasons: staying still is boring, no? Well, no. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress all prove otherwise, but also largely jettison the environmental exploration of a first or third-person action game. I want both. I just want my progress and exploration to be grounded and given meaning by a consistent and reflective central home.

There are great examples of this in other mediums. In comics, Batman ventures out into Gotham to fight crimes and then returns to Wayne Manor and the Batcave below. Each is a symbol filled with memorabilia commemorating his own life: a giant penny, a playing card, Jason Todd’s old Robin suit, Batman’s car.

Television does it, too, in part out of the financial necessity to build fixed sets. Buffy’s house, the library, the magic shop, all carry emotional significance. In fact, step back to the mythological underpinnings of vampires: they can’t enter your home unless you invite them. Homes have meaning.

Open world games in general demand a base of operations to make sense. I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a sleepless, foodless hero who fights with pause night and day, but I don’t like the disconnect of being a permanent tourist moving Jason Bourne-like through an emotionless landscape. I don’t want to always be gripped by a sense of otherness. I want to connect with my environment and imbue a part of it with meaning.

Frustratingly, this seems like such an obvious, natural desire. I spent endless hours as a kid using chairs, pillows and duvets to build forts, or finding clearings amongst trees and bushes into which to project personal, private hide-outs. Still, even those open world games that give you a base, like FarCry 2′s save houses or Grand Theft Auto’s apartments, don’t let you make them home.

This is why I connect so immediately with Wurm Online. It’s an MMO almost entirely about settling down. The world provides resources (trees, iron, fish) and obstacles (goblins, bears) and you have to survive and flourish amongst it all. The only way to do that is to set up camp: a place to store your items, a place to cook your food, a place in which you’re safe, and in the premium servers, a place to defend. A home!

After building my house in Wurm, fixing it up real nice, I eventually let it decay. I’d dug a cave underneath the house and decided to live in there instead.


(Screenshot from the Half-Life wikia.)

I remember Black Mesa East in Half-Life 2. Your first objective in the game is to get there, and after battling your way out of the hostile, dangerous City 17, you arrive to a haven of friends. You are welcomed with open arms by people who seem to know you and love you. It’s tragic when you an attack forces you to leave. It’s supposed to be tragic – that’s another reason why games could benefit from having more homes – but I can’t help but wishing I’d had more time there.

I want the Half-Life game where you’re not a constantly chased Christ-figure, but simply an ordinary member of the resistance. You perform your work within an oppressed city via a series of safe houses, lashing out at the Combine forces with strategic attacks, but always returning to a hide-out of friends.


(Screenshot from the Lord of the Rings wikia.)

Two final things: I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t annoyed by the long, 30-minute coda at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, where Frodo and Sam return the Shire. I had just spent ten fucking hours over three years watching them venture across Middle Earth for the sake of their home. I was glad to spend time with them when they got back there, because it gave the journey further context and meaning.

Dwarf Fortress does almost everything I want wonderfully, except it’s an inaccessible jumble of letters. Still: you build a home, and that home changes to reflect the events that happen as you play. If your dwarves are attacked and gored by angry, rampaging elephants, then they will carve the walls of their home with giant, blood-smeared elephant effigies.

That’s all I really want.

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January 29, 2010

10 Things I Did This Year

In no particular order:

1. Went to the Cologne Games Convention. Had almost 40 meetings in three days. Wore wedding shoes the whole time and bled till my socks were stuck to my feet like a second skin. I turned up late a lot.

2. Was promoted to Section Editor of PC Gamer, after three years as Disc Editor. Continued to make the coverdisc anyway. In fact, made the PC Zone coverdisc for a while, too.

3. Went with Lisa to America, my first time there. Spent five days in Chicago eating room service, then took a two and a half day train journey across country to spend a further five days in San Francisco. Saw the Colorado rockies, the Nevada desert, snow in Utah and cornfields in Iowa. Saw a Nun holding a devil-baby with an erect cock in San Francisco, and lots of screaming shirtless people. Loved all of it.

4. Wrote my first cover feature for PC Gamer: an eight page preview on Command & Conquer 4. Did it twice more.

5. Apologies for the namedropping, but an enormously fun part of my job that I only began this past year is meeting and interviewing interesting people. In 2009 I met Jeff Minter, Chet Faliszek, Dave Jones, Ed Stern, Peter Moore, Ray Muzyka and Michael Simpson. I pissed off only some of them, as far as I know.

6. Wrote two things I’m still mostly happy with now: a preview feature on APB and a review of The Sims 3. Both are available online, but are best read in the magazine with the original screenshots and formatting.

7. Was promoted to Deputy Editor of PC Gamer. Stopped making the coverdisc. Did some things well, other things poorly. Commissioned, edited, wrote, called, called again, called a third time, emailed, and shied away from too many things. Loved all of it.

8. Started a website dedicated to the PC Gamer community in Wurm Online, a massively multiplayer game set in a fantasy version of the New World: lots of resources, lots of threats, and unspoiled land waiting to be developed. Sat back and watched as the community wrote entertaining blog posts, designed maps, made mock newspapers and formed a friendly messageboard. Played Wurm Online myself for hundreds of hours, helping to dig tunnels, build houses, plant trees and construct paths. Right-clicked a lot. Ended the year by giving up my own house and moving into a cave. If ever I needed an example to explain why I write more about PC gaming than console gaming, this is what I’d use.

9. Loved Spelunky more than any other game this year, though frustratingly failed in my attempt to capture why.

10. Wrote my first comic script. Astral Airlines currently has four drawn pages available online. Just these few taught me a lot, the main thing being: WRITE MORE COMICS.

Which is part of the plan for 2010. Happy New Year, everyone.

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December 31, 2009

Noein

Its director compares Noein to Stand By Me, which initially seems absurd. Watch the below video—the opening two minutes and thirty seconds of the first episode—and you’ll see why. High above a desert, men fly and do battle with an enormous, invading creature that’s just burst through the atmosphere.

I love this action sequence because it seems so artfully designed. The creature, with its clasped hands and many faces, looks like a kind of eastern statue. Its human opponents fire magic from their hands by squeezing it painfully through their bulging wrists. The animation throughout the show makes use of occasional 3D, but at one point in this opening fight a character is so pained he devolves screaming into his pencil sketch form.

By the end of the first episode, that Stand By Me comparison makes more sense. The show follows Haruka and her group of friends, including two boys—the anxious Yu, with whom she considers running away from home, and the laid-back Isami—and two girls—the tomboyish Ai and the superstitious Miho. They each come from slightly broken homes, and the first episode involves their adventure to a nearby graveyard to search for ghosts.

Where it diverges from Stand By Me is, obviously, in the heavy fantasy elements. At the graveyard, the group encounter those flying men from the introduction. It takes around six or seven episodes before anything even begins making sense, but the explanations eventually involve alternate dimensions, the Many-Worlds and Copehnagen interpretations of quantum mechanics, and Haruka’s significance as something called the Dragon Torque.

For all the originality in its concept design, Noein is by far the most traditional of all the animé I’ve watched thus far. But it falls within a group of stories—those that juxtapose fantasy and mundane reality—that I find irresistible. The most fun of these are the Kids With Special Powers Attend Special School For Kids With Special Powers, which Noein is not, but it’s close enough to get its hooks into me anyway.

We’re bringing our own further juxtaposition, Lisa and I, by alternating episodes of this and Death Note. For an idea of the contrast: Noein puts the fantasy aside for an episode called “Friendship,” about a lost phone charm, which we watched immediately before an episode of Death Note in which Light spent its entire length attempting to murder a female widow in cold blood.

Next post will be about games, I swear.

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September 6, 2009
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