video games

Saturday Simplification (2) Deep Six Gamer

Depth Year (noun) is a fixed period of time wherein no new experiences are sought. Rather, expanded value in the possessions and hobbies already under pursuit are pursued, those skills and experiences "deepened" through focused attention.

I came across the idea of a depth year in one of those moments of confluence where you hear about the same concept from two or three completely different sources almost simultaneously, in the same week or even the same day. A news article. A blog post. A podcast. A co-worker.

I don’t know if it’s widely considered ‘simple-life’ canon at this point, but personally I found the notion in fairly synchronous harmony with my own notions of incremental life simplification. A depth year takes away the burden of novelty. A depth year gives one permission to focus on finishing something rather than looking for a new challenge. A depth year replaces the stress of choice with the pursuit of enhancing experience from what we’ve already chosen.

Going in depth is a kind of meditative grounding on one’s life, and I thought I would dabble in that concept… but with my own twist, of course.

See, rather than declare that my whole everything-that-I-do life was going move into a phase of uniquely seeking more depth in the things I already have or the things already I do… in general… I thought I would pick out a few things that I know I’m not nearly deep enough about and focus on them. Week by week. Three, maybe four things.

Thus, this week: gaming.

…and instead of a whole year, something slightly more managable: six months.

I’m going deep on my video gaming for six months… which may sound ridiculous when the philosophy of the idea hinges on the notion of pursuing a cooking class that you’ve started or learning a new language or honing a skill with a musical instrument. I choose video games?

Yet, hear me out: the thing is that I find myself in possession of a fairly respectable video game collection. Last year I jumped on board with the whole Nintendo Switch wave, and I’ve been slowly acquiring new titles and new interests… even before I’ve got the full value from the last one I bought. I’m a 40+ year old dad, with limited time and a large budget. I tend to find that even against my own better judgement, what I lack in the time to play games I make up for in the novelty of new games. I buy something, play it a few weeks or a month, then move onto the next shiny thing. And then I feel guilty that I made it 30% … 40%… half way through that game and never picked it up again. It’s a mental weight. It is something that is supposed to bring me joy and fun and entertainment, but instead adds to the anxiety of my free time hours.

A depth year (or a depth six) isn’t so firmly defined that one must be piously serious about the outcome. For mine, I’m just going to put a hiatus on buying or downloading new video games. For six months, I’m only going to grind through the titles already in my possession, and maybe even beat a few of them.

It’s simple.

Mario Karting

In a perfect storm of video gaming, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch finally arrived in the mail on Monday and I found myself with an abundance of waiting-around-time to play it. Between waiting around at the dance studio for Claire’s class to end and then waiting around for Karin’s long-delayed flight from Toronto to land, I had enough time to log about four guilt-free hours on the new racer.

That said, I also learned it’s not a great idea to try and sight-read a new course you’ve never played in an online tournament two hours after your regular bedtime… but live and learn, huh?

Also, Claire turned out to be pretty darn good, even schooling me on one course. I’m going to have to up my game on this edition.

5 Reasons to Keep Gaming as You Age

It’s been two years since I wrote a week of lists, but I thought I would start this last four months of 2016 with revisit to that old meme. So, starting on the first, the eighth edition of the Week of Lists begins, called the “Turning 40ish Edition” with deep and engaging topics such as this one…

Ich bin ein gamer.

I game, therefore I am.

We’ve been defending something lately: in fact, someone asked me this just yesterday. “Why are so many people ‘your age’ playing Pokemon Go?” They asked me.

Uh… because we want to. Because it is nostalgia wrapped with a bow. Because it gets us out of the house. Because. Because. Because.

Because I play a lot of video games actually, but you only see me playing Pokemon Go since it’s played in public. And so what? I’m supposed to roll over and die and let all the kids have all the fun because I’m a… “grown up?”

No. And here’s why…

5. Gotta Be Keeping Up with the Young’uns

Not everyone reading this is a parent, but I am. My daughter loves video games. Plays them. Watches other people play them. Has even designed a couple of her own little games in Scratch. The Parenting Advice Community is divided on that: kids need to be outside and playing with real people. Kids should only have eighteen seconds of screen time per day. Kids will rot their minds by using technology. Oh… and the past called, and rock and roll would be the end of humanity, FM radio is destroying our youth, and those darn kids are being corrupted by billiards. Obviously I disagree. Her life is going to be shaped and defined by how comfortable she is with tech, gaming is the introduction, and I have the opportunity to be the tour guide. Better know my way around.

4. I Need A Break More Than A Lot of People

Do I need even to explain this? Games are mindless and fun. Work & life are draining and stressful. Do the math.

3. Play (Probably) Keeps Your Mind Agile

Your brain is like a muscle: routine exercise keeps it strong and fit. But how do you exercise your brain? By thinking, solving complex puzzles, following engaging narratives, parsing through intricate problems, and forcing your grey matter to perform complex fine-motor skills: umm… gaming, anyone?

2. Games are Better Than Ever

I’m as nostalgic for some PokeMarioZeldaFinalFanaxxon as the next guy my age, but have you played some of the amazing stuff out there: I’m not even talking graphics here. I’ll admit, my mind is blown by the scale of some of the games that have a backbone built on procedurally generated content. We used to get excited about a few new levels, well, because I can’t even tell you how many times I played the first three screens of Donkey Kong as a ten year old. But then look at a game like No Man’s Sky: it’s a bit repetitive I hear, but to fully explore the entire game would take EVERYONE playing together five BILLION years.

Like… holy — KABLOWIE! *Mind Blown… This is the golden age folks, why would I quit just when things are getting awesome?

1. It’s a Generational Thing Not an Age Thing

Which brings me right back to that question: “Why are so many people ‘your age’ playing Pokemon Go?” Because, it’s not that this group of people that we call “old people” don’t play video games… it’s that the people we think of as “old people” never played video games. Not now, and not when they were young either… because there were no video games. Video games are not for kids: they were adopted by kids, thirty years ago, and those kids are now me and my generation. We play games. That’s what we do. Why would we stop just when we can actually afford to do it right.

Into the ‘Thon

I gave Claire a peek behind the curtain of the geek culture in which she has been dabbling — nay, immersing herself — lately.

It’s no secret that the girl is big-time into gaming. She’s virtually an expert in Minecraft, can name at least fifty Pokemon by sight, and has become a devotee of the laundry list of YouTubers whom she follows with religious-like devotion through the television screen.

She’s a blossoming geek, to be sure. (Much to her dad’s delight!) So I rolled up my sleeves and did the necessary dad-duty, and took her to a nerd convention over the weekend.

Animethon 23 was hosted in town at a local college campus, thousands of cos-playing animation and video game fans descending upon the downtown core to buy, sell, parade, pose and share their love of anime-inspired art.

We were lined up to register and some guy approached me, asked if we were going to buy tickets, and then handed me his pass. No, he didn’t steal it: he was done. No, he didn’t want any money for it: just show your kid some cool stuff. Free entry! Well… free-ish. I was a little more generous than I might have been when we hit the vendor stalls because I hadn’t actually paid the admission price. By the end of our adventure Claire had scored some Pokemon merch, and we bought a couple Miyazaki-film-inspired art prints from a local artist. It all came out in the wash, I suppose.

Over the four hours Claire ogled the hoards of fantastic costumes. She thumbed through racks of toys and be-logoed clothing. She pointed and pawed. She admired rows of artists selling their work. She struggled to pick a single thing to buy from the hundreds that she wanted. She got into her geeky groove… and it was pretty cool.

Armada (17.2) Pop Culture to the Rescue

Twenty-Fifteen: I’m doing something I’d been putting off for far too long. I’ve gotten serious about reading, again. I’ve dusted off my paperbacks and charged up my Kindle. It has been a year to take the time to feed my poor television-adled brain with a selection of healthy, nourishing fiction. So, read on, little brain. Read on. We’ve been going Book to the Future!

I loved Ready Player One. I mean, it kinda blew my mind. Not because it was a work of literary genius, but simply because it never occurred to me that (a) the era in which I grew up could be cool and (b) someone would write a virtual reality science fiction thriller that would turn the knowledge of the popular culture of my youth into the crux upon which the freedom of the free world ultimate hinged. KA-POW!

Ernest Cline’s newest novel “Armada” tries to recapture that vibe. So it’s good. Fast paced. Engaging enough and light enough to keep you reading for a few solid hours. And while it’s so not a sequel, it seems like Cline is pulling his worked-for-him-once formula from that same bag of tricks and trying for a second home run. I’m not good at sports analogies, so let’s just push this one a little further and say “it’s a solid hit” –like a three-base run– but probably not out of the park.

My Verdict

In finished “Armada” over a few short days, mostly ploughing through the first half over vacation and then burning through the rest in the weekend after coming home from a relaxing road trip. It was a good summer read: after the weight of my last book, “The Grapes of Wrath” I was looking for something light and fun and Cline delivered.

Without giving too much away, here’s the gist of the plot: teenager learns that his favorite video game is actually a military training simulator for an impending alien invasion, is whisked away by a secret government organization, and through an extensive knowledge of classic rock, late 20th century science fiction, and of course video games saves the world.

“Armada” knows it owes homage to similarly plotted stories, like “Enders Game” and “The Last Starfighter” and tips its hat through character exposition to the same. But Cline has extended the trope a little further, added a broken father-son relationship (that may slip through the healing process a little too smoothly given the context) and mixes in a few extra hints of angsty-slash-horny teenage relationship monologuing that makes this modern update a little more aligned with a casual read than the weighty, timeless epics it’s both emulating and quoting.

But it was a lot of fun, and if you loved “Ready Player One”, you’ll probably like this follow up just fine.

Armada (17.1) Holiday Invasion

Twenty-Fifteen: I’m doing something I’d been putting off for far too long. I’ve gotten serious about reading, again. I’ve dusted off my paperbacks and charged up my Kindle. It has been a year to take the time to feed my poor television-adled brain with a selection of healthy, nourishing fiction. So, read on, little brain. Read on. We’ve been going Book to the Future!

I’m back from vacation and while part of me thought it would be an easy thing to do a family road trip AND keep up my blogging, reading, and other social media checklists, it certainly was not. I DID manage to finish one book and I also DID manage to start a new one. I DID NOT write about that, nor let anyone besides my Kindle know I was was reading the newest Ernest Cline novel called “Armada” and so far nothing at all like “Ready Player One” except for the abundance of 80s popular culture references.

Unlike most kick-off posts in this series, I have actually read quite a bit of this book. In fact, I’m about a third of the way through which is both surprising (because I haven’t actually found that much time in the last week to actually read) and not surprising (since it’s a pretty easy read so far.)

The story so far: generic latchkey high school kid who likes video games and pines to figure out some of the story around his father’s untimely demise. I’ll save the rest for when you read it.

And since I’m back from vacation, that’s about what I’m going to go back to doing right now.

Watching : A Gamer Kid

June continues! And onward we push through those thirty posts that I’ve been writing every year this month. For the fifth year in a row I’m back to a month of daily blogging: each day a new post on a new topic, but on the same blog-per-day topic as last year, creating another set of Those 30 Posts in June. Today, that post just happens to be about something that I am:

Watching… A Gamer Kid

Even though we’ve been making an active effort to limit her screen time, she still gets some clock cycles here and there to watch and/or play what she wants. More often than not, this continues to be Minecraft.

And she’s getting pretty good.

But the biggest problem is that when she’s playing, I don’t get to. I get to watch. In fact, I have to watch. I’m begged to watch: “Hey dad… dad? Dad, I want to show you something. Hey dad, look at this. Dad, come here for a minute I want to show you what I made. Dad. Dad look. You gotta see this, dad. Dad, isn’t this awesome? Look at this. Dad. Dad!”

Yes… yes, it’s wonderful.

Are fans complicit in the crimes of famous people?

topic 00043
a mash-up of crime & fandom

I’m never been much of a fan of professional sports, so I don’t get many do-the-right-thing points for claiming my reason for ignoring the recent Super Bowl had anything to do with the increasing moral greyness of the NFL. Both a string of high profile cases of spousal abuse and various accusations of cheating at various levels were well enough publicized that even a guy who usually ignores the media whenever it alludes to anything involving a ball has heard about them.

If I were a fan, I don’t know that I’d let a few so-called “bad apples” spoil the metaphorical bunch, but I’m not… so I can do little more than stand on the sidelines and jeer at a system I neither participate in nor really deeply understand.

This doesn’t mean the modern incarnation of something like the NFL –with their existential excesses, overpriced tickets, and seeming flouting of laws the rest of us are obligated to follow– can’t serve as a great example of the blind eye we too often turn towards the systems and ideas we adore when they do something very wrong… criminal even.

( keep reading … )

I Can’t Quit You, Skyrim

I found myself playing Skyrim again on the weekend. (I’d blame my daughter whose cross-country-skiing-induced tantrum resulted in a two-hour time-out in her room, and left me on idle-and-frustrated guard duty… but I won’t. Any excuse, really.) I jumped back into my PS3 saved game, which apparently had been sitting ignored for roughly a full year between plays resulting in the observations that (a) I was sorely out of practice and (b) the skills I had nurtured in this particular play-through we deeply dependent on practice and I was essentially left starting from scratch. That’s okay, though… I still love you Skyrim.

4 of My Favourite Games Featuring Zombies

This is a post from the seventh edition of my (mostly irregular) Week of Lists where I bring you seven list-type posts, one per day starting on Saturday, October 25th and ending on Halloween, leaping from the darkest corners of your internetz and scaring you into mild confusion. Stay tuned!

As if you didn’t already know it, but the undead are everywhere… at least in video games, they are.

There are many reasons we (as a society of pop culture enthusiasts) have fallen into our love-hate relationship with zombies, reasons ranging from our dark and idle fascinations as a society with apocalypse, disease and dying … to more political urgencies linked to that feeling of mindless, follower-sheep-like chaos that emerges when we feel powerless and controlled by a faceless, heartless, corporate govern– ahem… well, I don’t know much about that.

But I think my fall-back understanding of this fascination is simply this: that bashing zombies, in a multicultural world where video games are sold to an international and diverse audience, has become the most politically correct enemy we can conceive. Simultaneously, they are all of us and none of us… the weakest become the strongest… the hunted become the hunters. If you happen to be a zombie it’s all at once everyone’s fault and yet only-your-very-own albatross to carry.

Thus, zombies are cropping up in video games everywhere, and in games that span genres and platforms too many to name. But here are…

4 of My Favourite Games Featuring Zombies

2014-09-08_000491. The Zombie as Target Practice Trope

For example… Everything that moves in Left 4 Dead Series

When you read the title of this article I can almost guarantee that most of you were thinking this version of the zombie. And so, of course, I didn’t want to leave it out of my list.

Our “super awesome game” nights –where we gamer-dads convene our increasingly inconsistent meetings in a round of zombie-bashing mayhem– these events just wouldn’t be the same if not for the target-practice style zombie rootin-tootin-shootin of the kind of franchise that leans on this trope. Armed with nothing more than a humble arsenal of impractical assault-class weapons and seemingly unlimited ammunition, players of target practice zombie games mow down wave after wave of the undead, usually attacking with ferocity of a wild, rabid animal. These are the pitiless and un-pitiable hoards for which there is no escape but pure existential-threatening warfare.

You just don’t let the kids watch.

lechuk2. The Zombie as Bad Guy Trope

For example… Captain LeChuck from Monkey Island Series

And yet, there was a simpler time when the zombie-brain relationship wasn’t one that involved one eating the other. There have, in fact, been times when the undead both possessed and used the (rotting) meat computers in their skulls as something more than alternate food sources and homing devices to detect the living.

The angry zombie, returned from the dead with a seething heart set on vengeance concept always makes for a fun adventure. It is the cold, calculating logic of an enemy who cannot be killed (at least not in conventional ways) pitted against the protagonist player who neither wants to join the baddies on the wrong side of the River Styx nor fail in their video game mission.

ztime.png3. The Zombie as Cameo Trope

For example… Zombie Time in Pixel People

Okay, so the light-hearted, cartoon-esque app game I’ve been playing this week on my iPhone may or may not fit into the big leagues of the other games on this list, but it represents a trope I’ve noticed popping up in games all over the place… Pixel People being the latest example: zombie cameos.

Cameos. As in… oh look, suddenly there are zombies in this game. Oh… but… why?

And as kitsch as it first appears, I take it as a good sign that the game developers don’t take themselves or their game oh-too-seriously when all the pixelated residents of your fake little cartoon world randomly become the undead for fifteen minutes.

(And I mean that in a good way.)

zom4. The Zombie as Noise in the Dark Trope

For example… Zombies in Minecraft

Of course, the zombie that need not even show his face is that groaning noise beyond the cobblestone wall.

Does it matter that zombies in Minecraft are actually zombies? Does it fit otherwise into the zombie paradigm built up in modern popular culture? Do Minecraft zombies even make sense?

No… not entirely, but they scare us because of the other three games I just mentioned above. And the first time you heard that groan in the darkness it wasn’t you thinking of the two-punch-and-your-down wimp of a zombie you later became very familiar with whilst stacking grey cubes in the vastness of your procedural landscape, it was those other three kinds… and not exactly knowing if they were smart, angry, or just silly-cute. Until you knew for sure, they were just a noise in the dark.

And maybe you peed a little. But you paused your pick-ax and then you dug a little more carefully.