Oh, that's my game addiction...
I pride myself in being one of the rare "geeks" who doesn't wear black nor sports a ponytail, or spend hours on end discussing semaphores and logarithmic algorithms, or looking down on people who lack computer skills among other things associated with "geeks". If you don't know the words coming out of my mouth I'm more than happy to translate into common English. If there were a world where geeks and non-geeks lived in two different countries, I'd be the geek ambassador improving relations between the countries by calming the spirits of those irate non-geekish countrymen.
On the top of the list is video games. I used to play a lot of video games, and I have a 64-disk case full of games I once played in my olden days. At the beginning of college I was playing games like Starcraft, Diablo II, Need for Speed, Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege, Age of Empires, and Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Many of them dwindled over time and I found myself playing no games at all my senior year and very few during the first couple years after college.
Come late 2004 we all saw the release and soon the controversy over the now infamous World of Warcraft. Many of my friends and even my younger brother were instantly hooked into playing the game that costs them $12 per month. $144 per year. Not a bad price if you consider the cost of lunch every weekday. I decided to wait out the hype and conserve my money for more important things like replacing my vehicle. That was nearly 4 years ago and I still haven't replaced my truck. If I joined in, I'm certain the fate of my younger brother would be sealed wholly into that game. After watching my friends obsess and withdraw from social realms I vowed (albeit verbally and mentally) to never join the ranks of World of Warcraft. I still stick to that promise.
Watching your "WoW" friends come to social events and huddle into a small circle and discuss how they found some amazing item during a Raid in Black Fathom's Deep (or whatever those places are) brings you to the point of shunning. I admit I shun uber-geeks, as I call them, with their black shirts and black jeans and long hair and pale pasty skin. Anyone who absorbs themselves in a computer too long will gain these qualities that, to the outside world, make them seem like near-extinct primates, or jungle tribesmen who haven't the concept of a helicopter. I thought, and it's certainly true, that if I joined "WoW" I would likely become once again the outcasts of social circles like a few friends seemed to be. Even those friends of mine admit that they seem like idiots when they go to social events and talk about "WoW" only to return home (after leaving the event early) to "socialize" again in "WoW" until some early hour and get up again just to start the cycle over.
When I first watched them play, it was indeed a fascinating game. It was quite tempting to join in the game myself for quite some time as I found myself awake at late hours just sitting there watching my brother play. On a couple occasions I even tried it out using my brother's account. After playing, they'd ask me if I'd join in and I said I'd hold off. Believe me, the excuse of needing to buy a new car is the best thing ever. No one can deny that my truck, now with nearly 192k miles, really needs to be replaced not only for age reasons but for gas reasons. It's the perfect excuse, and when I buy a new car, I'll have to find a new excuse. Hopefully that will be a house/mortgage which will buy me 10 years of excuses.
Anyway, enough of the "WoW" rant and about all that. I digress. Come the advent of the "WoW" generation, I took a vow to never play the game ever and would rather die than join such a money pit. I vowed so solemnly that I took an opposite approach. I slowly reduced my game play until I spent more time on my computer programming and planning my way toward a more successful career and the little I did of gaming was playing solitaire or Sudoku. I never really got into Sudoku though, and thought the game to be a waste of time because of its simplicity; Ooh I can arranged increasingly fewer numbers in random order until all the rows and columns only have one of each number in them. I pretty much quit games entirely outside of real board games and even then I rarely play. When I did play, I opted for games that would improve my mental and reaction skills.
Despite all that, there are still some games to which I come back. Thief: The Dark Project is my all-time favorite, but it barely runs on a new computer anymore. It's an RPG about a thief who gets ensnared in some diabolically demonic scheme. Think of it as a game where you steal stuff for other people and you find out that your best client is actually some mutant psychopath bent on taking over the world using dark arts and your thieving skills to do his work. It involves hiding in shadows and avoiding zombies and later cutting down weird moving plant creatures. You start as a thief and become the savior of the world. When you're done, the game ends and you can move on to other things. I love the story so much and the gameplay was amazing, so I tend to replay every couple years.
Another game I recently picked up on Dungeon Runners, an online MMO game which pokes fun at all the other MMOs that are out there (especially Diablo and World of Warcraft, games made by Blizzard who is their competitor). The reason I play Dungeon Runners is because it's free (or $5/mo if you want more features), and it's a game that's not addicting because the play-style is such that 15-minutes is enough to finish one board and quit for the day. It's practically advertised that way, and the game is entirely comical.
Lastly, I tend to come back to Diablo II every 4 years. The game is rather boring and repetitive if you don't want to die ever time you try to gain a level. I played Diablo 1 when it came out in 1997, and was instantly hooked on the medieval-style demon hunting which essentially makes up the entire game. It was also repetitive and sometimes boring. In both cases, the desire to gain levels and defeat demon monsters and find sweet loot in the dungeons and the thought that your winning meant that Satan's power in the world would be diminished. It was quite compelling, and you could avoid the argument that it was gory by saying that you were fighting against Satan's power. I'm sure many have had the same argument for certain movies. It was great, and the concept of a good goal kept all those hounds off the game-maker's back because it had purpose. If you took out the goal, it'd be GTA all over again only with hell-whores and blood on the walls and creatures the splattered when you killed them. The violence and blood in it is far worse than that of GTA, but in GTA you were stealing and killing and sexing up the city for no reason. In Diablo, you were killing and killing and killing and taking items off dead bodies and stopping hexing rituals and killing and fighting off Succubi from the depths of Hell and defeating Diablo. Did I mention killing?
So those are the few games I play on rare occasion. Sometimes I play Counter-Strike when the guys decide to have a lan party, but lately we've stopped having lan parties, and any time we try to have one it turns into a Super Smash Brothers game night or a movie night. I never liked lan games that much. It's entirely contest oriented. Whoever was best at steadying the mouse and reacting to enemies coming around the corner would win. Not my kind of game and I often would get so upset that I'd quit the game mid-stream and start playing anything but lan games (even to the point of solitaire). Yeah, so if you want to see what I'm like when I'm angry, take me to a large lan party and have everyone kill me for a few hours until my overall rank sits on the bottom of the pile. Don't mention it that way or you'll jinx any chance of me getting angry, but I will get angry and quit the game.
Now I still digress a bit. My original point is that I think I could very well be addicted to Diablo to some degree. I still love the game, but eventually I get so bored after playing it that I rest it for a while. It's like a cigars (not that I like cigars at all nor do I like smoking in general). I don't need to play every day all the time, but when I do play it has this sense of blissful enjoyment. The sounds and music and visuals and the story in the game are so well done that I can tolerate the boring side of it for weeks before I am totally tired of it. The game if made by anyone but Blizzard Entertainment would turn out like a waste of time after just the first day of play. Anyway, Diablo III was just announced, and I would guess a 2010 release time table, and it is again the same experience only with a deeper story, better visuals and likely very familiar joyful "shopping" sounds. If you don't know what I mean by "shopping" sounds, it's those dings and chimes that signify an achievement in a game. The same concept is used in shopping malls to get people to buy more, like the bell on a cash register. Additionally, the music has a depressing undertone to some degree; another concept used at malls to get people to stay.
At any rate, I will likely buy into Diablo once again. I'm only glad that the game has an ending to reach. That means I can play for a period of time and then quit and resume living. If they were to turn it in the direction of "WoW" with monthly fees and endless game play, some part of me will die inside as I will forgo ever paying monthly to waste my time in my basement. If I'm addicted in any way, it's an addiction to a good story with a sense of real progress. If the world isn't affected by the time I'm wasting in the game, then the game sucks.
So I expect to play the game and defeat Diablo once again in the realms of hell, and then I will return victoriously to a real social life and resume buying my party games for my Wii.
Ooh, and by the way, games on the Wii have never felt geeky to me. Think of it like Apple Mac versus Microsoft Windows. Wii is the hipster version of computer games. In some sense, Wii/Xbox/Playstation games are called "video games" for that reason. Windows/Mac/Linux games are called "computer games" and people who play them obsessively are geeky and sometimes wear black and grow out their hair and a beard if they can sport it.
On the top of the list is video games. I used to play a lot of video games, and I have a 64-disk case full of games I once played in my olden days. At the beginning of college I was playing games like Starcraft, Diablo II, Need for Speed, Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege, Age of Empires, and Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Many of them dwindled over time and I found myself playing no games at all my senior year and very few during the first couple years after college.
Come late 2004 we all saw the release and soon the controversy over the now infamous World of Warcraft. Many of my friends and even my younger brother were instantly hooked into playing the game that costs them $12 per month. $144 per year. Not a bad price if you consider the cost of lunch every weekday. I decided to wait out the hype and conserve my money for more important things like replacing my vehicle. That was nearly 4 years ago and I still haven't replaced my truck. If I joined in, I'm certain the fate of my younger brother would be sealed wholly into that game. After watching my friends obsess and withdraw from social realms I vowed (albeit verbally and mentally) to never join the ranks of World of Warcraft. I still stick to that promise.
Watching your "WoW" friends come to social events and huddle into a small circle and discuss how they found some amazing item during a Raid in Black Fathom's Deep (or whatever those places are) brings you to the point of shunning. I admit I shun uber-geeks, as I call them, with their black shirts and black jeans and long hair and pale pasty skin. Anyone who absorbs themselves in a computer too long will gain these qualities that, to the outside world, make them seem like near-extinct primates, or jungle tribesmen who haven't the concept of a helicopter. I thought, and it's certainly true, that if I joined "WoW" I would likely become once again the outcasts of social circles like a few friends seemed to be. Even those friends of mine admit that they seem like idiots when they go to social events and talk about "WoW" only to return home (after leaving the event early) to "socialize" again in "WoW" until some early hour and get up again just to start the cycle over.
When I first watched them play, it was indeed a fascinating game. It was quite tempting to join in the game myself for quite some time as I found myself awake at late hours just sitting there watching my brother play. On a couple occasions I even tried it out using my brother's account. After playing, they'd ask me if I'd join in and I said I'd hold off. Believe me, the excuse of needing to buy a new car is the best thing ever. No one can deny that my truck, now with nearly 192k miles, really needs to be replaced not only for age reasons but for gas reasons. It's the perfect excuse, and when I buy a new car, I'll have to find a new excuse. Hopefully that will be a house/mortgage which will buy me 10 years of excuses.
Anyway, enough of the "WoW" rant and about all that. I digress. Come the advent of the "WoW" generation, I took a vow to never play the game ever and would rather die than join such a money pit. I vowed so solemnly that I took an opposite approach. I slowly reduced my game play until I spent more time on my computer programming and planning my way toward a more successful career and the little I did of gaming was playing solitaire or Sudoku. I never really got into Sudoku though, and thought the game to be a waste of time because of its simplicity; Ooh I can arranged increasingly fewer numbers in random order until all the rows and columns only have one of each number in them. I pretty much quit games entirely outside of real board games and even then I rarely play. When I did play, I opted for games that would improve my mental and reaction skills.
Despite all that, there are still some games to which I come back. Thief: The Dark Project is my all-time favorite, but it barely runs on a new computer anymore. It's an RPG about a thief who gets ensnared in some diabolically demonic scheme. Think of it as a game where you steal stuff for other people and you find out that your best client is actually some mutant psychopath bent on taking over the world using dark arts and your thieving skills to do his work. It involves hiding in shadows and avoiding zombies and later cutting down weird moving plant creatures. You start as a thief and become the savior of the world. When you're done, the game ends and you can move on to other things. I love the story so much and the gameplay was amazing, so I tend to replay every couple years.
Another game I recently picked up on Dungeon Runners, an online MMO game which pokes fun at all the other MMOs that are out there (especially Diablo and World of Warcraft, games made by Blizzard who is their competitor). The reason I play Dungeon Runners is because it's free (or $5/mo if you want more features), and it's a game that's not addicting because the play-style is such that 15-minutes is enough to finish one board and quit for the day. It's practically advertised that way, and the game is entirely comical.
Lastly, I tend to come back to Diablo II every 4 years. The game is rather boring and repetitive if you don't want to die ever time you try to gain a level. I played Diablo 1 when it came out in 1997, and was instantly hooked on the medieval-style demon hunting which essentially makes up the entire game. It was also repetitive and sometimes boring. In both cases, the desire to gain levels and defeat demon monsters and find sweet loot in the dungeons and the thought that your winning meant that Satan's power in the world would be diminished. It was quite compelling, and you could avoid the argument that it was gory by saying that you were fighting against Satan's power. I'm sure many have had the same argument for certain movies. It was great, and the concept of a good goal kept all those hounds off the game-maker's back because it had purpose. If you took out the goal, it'd be GTA all over again only with hell-whores and blood on the walls and creatures the splattered when you killed them. The violence and blood in it is far worse than that of GTA, but in GTA you were stealing and killing and sexing up the city for no reason. In Diablo, you were killing and killing and killing and taking items off dead bodies and stopping hexing rituals and killing and fighting off Succubi from the depths of Hell and defeating Diablo. Did I mention killing?
So those are the few games I play on rare occasion. Sometimes I play Counter-Strike when the guys decide to have a lan party, but lately we've stopped having lan parties, and any time we try to have one it turns into a Super Smash Brothers game night or a movie night. I never liked lan games that much. It's entirely contest oriented. Whoever was best at steadying the mouse and reacting to enemies coming around the corner would win. Not my kind of game and I often would get so upset that I'd quit the game mid-stream and start playing anything but lan games (even to the point of solitaire). Yeah, so if you want to see what I'm like when I'm angry, take me to a large lan party and have everyone kill me for a few hours until my overall rank sits on the bottom of the pile. Don't mention it that way or you'll jinx any chance of me getting angry, but I will get angry and quit the game.
Now I still digress a bit. My original point is that I think I could very well be addicted to Diablo to some degree. I still love the game, but eventually I get so bored after playing it that I rest it for a while. It's like a cigars (not that I like cigars at all nor do I like smoking in general). I don't need to play every day all the time, but when I do play it has this sense of blissful enjoyment. The sounds and music and visuals and the story in the game are so well done that I can tolerate the boring side of it for weeks before I am totally tired of it. The game if made by anyone but Blizzard Entertainment would turn out like a waste of time after just the first day of play. Anyway, Diablo III was just announced, and I would guess a 2010 release time table, and it is again the same experience only with a deeper story, better visuals and likely very familiar joyful "shopping" sounds. If you don't know what I mean by "shopping" sounds, it's those dings and chimes that signify an achievement in a game. The same concept is used in shopping malls to get people to buy more, like the bell on a cash register. Additionally, the music has a depressing undertone to some degree; another concept used at malls to get people to stay.
At any rate, I will likely buy into Diablo once again. I'm only glad that the game has an ending to reach. That means I can play for a period of time and then quit and resume living. If they were to turn it in the direction of "WoW" with monthly fees and endless game play, some part of me will die inside as I will forgo ever paying monthly to waste my time in my basement. If I'm addicted in any way, it's an addiction to a good story with a sense of real progress. If the world isn't affected by the time I'm wasting in the game, then the game sucks.
So I expect to play the game and defeat Diablo once again in the realms of hell, and then I will return victoriously to a real social life and resume buying my party games for my Wii.
Ooh, and by the way, games on the Wii have never felt geeky to me. Think of it like Apple Mac versus Microsoft Windows. Wii is the hipster version of computer games. In some sense, Wii/Xbox/Playstation games are called "video games" for that reason. Windows/Mac/Linux games are called "computer games" and people who play them obsessively are geeky and sometimes wear black and grow out their hair and a beard if they can sport it.