Reflecting On My 'StarCraft Holiday'

A Reflection On My 'StarCraft Holiday'

Before I say anything the least related to the topic detailed above, I would like to provide some commentary on FaceBook's recent 'Ticker' innovation, using a popular, contemporary (redundancy makes me all happy inside, as you no doubt gather) medium of satire:

Hell, maybe they took it away now, but I think it was a pretty good meme nonetheless.

And that, dear Martin (Martin is the name I have assigned for my hypothetical reader, for those who didn't see my last post), is all I'm going to say on the matter.

Anyways! From here on in I'm going to be taking the type of egocentric view typical of pretty much ever other blog in the world ever, and discussing what I referred to above as my StarCraft 2 holiday.

Before that, however, we need to establish two truths pretty fundamental to any of this making sense; the first is that I play StarCraft 2 (the multiplayer, that is – the singleplayer isn't quite as demanding) and the second I sort of already spoiled – StarCraft 2 is a pretty demanding game. That is, if you consider sitting at your computer for 20-30 minutes on end with enough adrenaline to kill a horse pumping through your veins and your fingers moving around faster than a cold-turkey crack addict trying to overcome the safety lid keeping him from his next fix, while your brain does roughly the same amount of work which goes into a quantum-theory thesis in the space of about three seconds.

To translate that out of the metaphor for you, and ground it in a bit of reality, StarCraft is demanding in that you are constantly active both mentally and in terms of simply playing the damned game fast – in an average game at the moment, I am pressing and/or clicking around 100-110 buttons every minute. Beyond that, you become emotionally involved in every game – like I in the previous paragraph, adrenaline pumps madly and by the time you come out at the end of a game, you are either at the height of euphoria or burning with rage and ready to beat the living fecal matter out of your desk (or screen, or mouse, or keyboard, depending on what the case may be), because that bastard deserved it!

I'm not even kidding here. There's a twenty-three page thread on TeamLiquid (a StarCraft forum) with pictures like this one, detailing the aftermath of StarCraft rage. Click here to go to it:

So anyway, the point I'm making here is that StarCraft is (or, at least, in the majority of cases becomes) an extremely stressful game.

Usually, however, it doesn't really get to me. I'm the sort of person who doesn't stress or anger easily, and am generally a pretty good loser on top of that – “give respect where respect is due” is usually my motto when it comes to losses... but more on that in a later post.

As I'm sure you all know, however, usually isn't all the time (I know, right!? It's pretty crazy...), and Sunday the 14th of August (two weeks ago today) certainly wasn't a usual case.

You see, I lost. Quite a bit. Eight games in a row, to be exact. What made it worse was that almost every single one of those eight games I had lost because of moments retardedness so awe-inspiring in nature that were we living back in the Middles Ages dizzle (dizzle being the hip way of day or time period, of course), I would probably have approached a bard, minstrel or similar maker of (then) contemporary music and presented to them the idea of taking my tale and creating a ballad of epic scale and proportion, to be passed down through the generations until someone accidentally set the sheet music alight or got hit with a sneaky case of amnesia.

But I digress.

I remember the moments after my eighth consecutive loss quite clearly: Overcome by a zealous hatred of my own incompetency and the sheer overpoweredness of Protoss (a race in StarCraft), I struck a mighty blow to my desk with my fist, in an attempt to vent my rage. As it turned out, the desk was just as solid as it looked, and with that in mind and throbbing knuckles on (in?) hand, I did what any man of noble stature who found himself in my position would do: I ragequit. Because ragequit is a verb.

For two whole weeks, I avoided StarCraft the same way a washed-up rock-star with heroin shoved up his rectum avoids sniffer-dogs at airport security. Well, perhaps not exactly the same way, but you get my drift.

Instead of playing StarCraft, I invested my time in other things – Metro 2033 (a post on which is imminent), the demo for Might & Magic Heroes 6 (another post on which is also imminent) and other so-called 'real-life' things like guitar. I even tried that 'human interaction' nonsense once or twice (trust me, it's overrated). For the first time in a long, long time I played games simply to enjoy them, without stressing over whether I was winning or losing or my ladder ranking or any of that other nonsense.

And I loved it.

I think that with all the stress and obsession over self-betterment it becomes very easy to forget the reason one actually plays games in the first place – to have fun. I suppose that for others it may be different, in that they play to improve and hopefully make something of their gaming abilities, but given that I've come back to StarCraft after a two week period of down-time playing exactly as well as I was and feeling better about it, I really do question whether or not putting yourself through hell really is the most effective training method.

I am back in business (StarCraft business, that is), however, and I must say that I'm loving it and moreover that I'm excited to improve my play – not because I hate the fact that my play sucks at the moment, but because I'm genuinely enjoying the game once again, and I really think that that aspect is an extremely important one.

Anyways, that's all I'm going to say for now. Rock on.

Duncan
Out

The Nerd Stereotype: Enough is Enough

Whazzap kiddies! Sorry it's been so long since my last post, I really need to get my ass back into gear. Work just doesn't stop. Well, that's a bit of a lie, I've been playing the Heroes of Might and Magic VI Demo... but more on that a bit later!

Before I actually get started, I'd just like to make you guys aware of the Reader's Digress initiative over at eGamer. Basically what happens is we publish a compilation of shortish articles (+- 500 words) which are submitted by both the authors and by the readers in one compact, newspaper-esque publication. Why am I telling you this?

Well, if you want to rant about or comment on ANYTHING (literally), here's your chance. Just type up whatever you want to write about, send it in to digress @ egamer.co.za (without the spaces) and you may well be featured in our next edition!

But, without further adieu, let me get down to what I really want to talk about...


For centuries, just like the ogres of The Kingdom of Far Far Away (that's a Shrek reference, just by the way) have been - to name but a few examples - harassed and mildly inconvenienced by pitchfork-and-torch-wielding mobs of villagers who have nothing better to do in their free time, we as the noble gamers of the world have been proclaimed heathens and thusly burnt at the stake by over-zealous menopausal female columnists and, indeed, ostracised and socially persecuted by our peer groups and society in general.

Granted, there may have been some exaggeration and dramatic hyperbole in the above paragraph, but the crux of the issue I’m poking at remains the same:

Haven’t we as gamers, as nerds, endured enough by now?

In an age where society is finally starting to view gaming as a mainstream, generally accepted pastime, where the nonsense attacks on gaming in general which I’ve been talking about in my columns for the past few weeks are finally being treated the way they ought to be (which is to say, with a firm, heavy-handed pimp-slap), one would think we could put all of this nonsense around the stereotype of ‘nerd’ behind us.

Make no mistake, I’m not taking this as an opportunity to cry because people call me a nerd - I welcome and flaunt the title, flying our nerd flag as high as humanly possible, with great gusto and aplomb – but what I do want to do is take this opportunity to comment on just how pointless and unnecessary I find it.

You see, I find that the sort of thinking which premises or underlies a stereotypical view of nerd doesn’t really follow a logical course depending on the arguments for or against gaming; rather, it is born of the view that “What I do is cool, therefore if what you do isn’t what I do, it’s stupid.”

And that, my dear reader (I think I named you Martin in an earlier column), is simply not cool.

An example which illustrates the flaw in this sort of mentality quite nicely comes, ironically, from a recent LAN competition in America – MLG Anaehim.

During the awards ceremony for the Halo Championship, the winning clan (whose name eludes me) was booed off the stage while receiving their awards. By the StarCraft 2 fans. Purely on the surface, that sounds like a blatantly immature and stupid act, which would only serve to create divisions instead of unity in the gaming community. But that isn’t even taking into account how damn well Halo clan Whatsitsface did at the tournament – I can’t give you exact stats, but I’m pretty damn sure they won every single map they played. And they only lost one at the previous tournament as well.

In the Halo community, that’s freaking unheard of.

And these gods-incarnate of the Halo world, who have risen beyond the heights of all the mortal men who have dared to go before them, get booed off the stage? That is just not right.

As Day[9] (a legendary StaCraft 2 commentator, for those who don’t know) said in a Podcast after the event, it is symptomatic of a pretty flawed ideology.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of people bashing other peoples interests because they aren’t in line with their own, we could engage positively over our interests with one another – letting the jock explain to you why he loves getting up at five o’clock every morning and to go and train for his ‘polo (bru), and then him listening to you while you explain why so few experiences in the world can match the sheer epicosity (now officially trademarked as a Duncanism) of blowing a zombie’s face off with a double-barrelled shotgun.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that if we could swallow our pride and stick our prejudices where the son don’t shine (an airlocked chest, or the Mariana Trench, or whatever), then maybe existence could be more pleasant for all parties involved.

Man, I took my hippie pills this morning. No euphemism intended.

Duncan
Out

PS: Greg published new posts! Clickity here to see them!

Hard Reset: This Ought To Be Interesting

Those of you who don't yet know what Hard Reset is, educate yourselves by clicking here.

When I first heard mention of Hard Reset, I must say I was more than a little intrigued. A PC exclusive? Being released in the same year it was announced? With no multiplayer?(!) To quote my fellow eGamer writer, Alessandro, “Hard Reset must think it is from the 1990′s or something.” Best of all, there are (as yet) no announcements regarding any sort of retarded DRM function to screw legitimate buyers over while the hackers frolic in the comparative joys of convenience and illegality.

In short, it seems like Hard Reset’s developers may well have their heads screwed on right. While I am not quite optimistic enough to hold thumbs about the prospective awesomeness of this game just yet in terms of actually delivering to the market what they bloody well want (see: announcement of no LAN support a month before the release of Call of Duty 6), I am excited nonetheless to see how well this game does.

On paper, it seems to be set up to be a pirate’s playground: lawless oceans inhabited by numerous boats full of bountiful booty lack of annoying DRM (as yet), no multiplayer (and, as such, no incentive to buy the game legitimately in order to connect online) and it is coming out as a PC exclusive. Need I say more?

On the other hand, this seems to be the first game in a while to (as I said earlier) really care about delivering an experience which their market can enjoy — an emphasis on visuals for the Graphics Whores, greater environmental interaction and destructibility, story-focused, quality-focused singleplayer campaign… I could go on, but you get the idea. If you want to find out more on all of this specific nonsense, check out this article.

Given these two aspects, Hard Reset seems to be a game which, upon its release, is going to do one of two things...

Thing 1: Get pirated to Jupiter and back, make an enormous loss, fail horribly, and get laughed at by all the consoletards (and Activision) because it dared to stick its neck out, only to have it chopped off. Viciously. With some sort of blunt implement. Probably a spoon or something.

Thing 2: Be (as Borat would say) great success. The PC market receives it with favour, no one decides to pirate it out of spite (as some have with titles such as Modern Warfare 2, where their most beloved elements, such as LAN support and the lean function, were removed) and it does pretty damn well… regardless of piracy.

I would say whether Hard Reset tends towards my oh-so-elaborately titled Thing 1 or Thing 2 is actually pretty damn important for us as the PC community and market.

You see, if Hard Reset just gets pirated a lot, makes an enormous loss and has to run home crying to its publisher, it would simply act as more ammunition in the metaphorical clip of those developers such as Activision (and, with the recent announcement of the DRM of Diablo 3, Blizzard too), who disregard the wants of their market under the justification of DRM or more general piracy prevention. Which is not that cool.

BUT! If Hard Reset doesn’t epic fail into the ground, does well and is well received by the community then we as the PC community don’t just receive a clip, it would be pretty full of ammunition as well.

Why?

Well, if a game which is almost ideally disposed to being pirated to ridiculous heights manages to succeed regardless of piracy, developers using the excuse of piracy to remove things like LAN play are going to have far less ground to stand on. We are going to be able to call them out on their decisions and maybe, just maybe, see a bit of positively inclined changed from our perspective.

Only time will tell, however, and with the release of Hard Reset due for sometime this year, the best thing we can do as the upstanding PC gaming community is to indoctrinate all of the pirates we know into actually purchasing the damn game. If that doesn’t happen, beat them to death with a blunt object. Preferably a chair in this case.

For legal reasons, however, you didn’t hear that last part from me.

The Abridged Version of the Way Forward for This Blog

So, I said in my previous post that I was going to be making a post soon with the intent of outlining my general vision for this blog. That idea died with the realisation that 'visions' and knit picky things like 'definition' (if you got the joke there, you're awesome :D) boring. So, instead of giving you an extremely long-winded, self-important and more than a little TL;DR version of my vision for this blog, I'm going to be presenting you kids with the abridged version instead.

So, here goes.

Ultimately, this blog aims to be a place where I can express two of the things I love most in the world: gaming and writing. Some of the pieces I do will be in-depth analyses of certain topics, others will be more general opinion columns, others will simply be my commentary on random stuff I see in the gaming industry and yet others will document my day-to-day thoughts about gaming.

What this means is that I'm going to be posting more often (hopefully 2/3 times per week, time permitting), and that most of my posts won't be as long as my columns have been. Except for, you know, the columns.

I'd really like this blog to become a place where I can engage with my audience on the levels of both criticism in terms of my writing itself and in terms of the actual subject matter I put forward. As such, please feel free to comment your hearts out, debate, criticise, compliment, or just comment - all is welcome and appreciated.

I would naturally also love it if this blog became more well-read, as it would mean I would both be able to engage and share my views with a wider audience and be able to justify spending more time on getting posts up. So, if you like what you read, tell your friends! And make sure that they tell their friends! Preferably on pain of death or something, but if you have what you believe to be more effective persuasion techniques, feel free to try them out.

Basically, I'm going to be posting more, so hopefully when all of you faithfuls who have my blog bookmarked in your questions check anxiously for an update, you'll actually find one. Rock on.

One last request - the site I'm currently writing for, eGamer, has just implemented Google AdSense, in the hopes of generating enough cashola to both remunerate their writers for the hard work they put in (at the moment we are all volunteers who receive no such recompense), and create opportunity for the site to develop. So, when you load up eGamer every day to check what's what in the world of gaming (if you don't already, please do. It would be most appreciated), feel free to open a few of the ads you see in new tabs, to do your little bit to fuel our initiative. :)

That's about all I have to say; this post intended mainly to get me back into the routine of posting, to let ya'll know what I'm intending in terms of this blog, and to implore you to both refer to eGamer for all your gaming needs and fool Google into thinking you care about our ads every now and then.

For those of you who don't know the URL, you can click here to go to eGamer.

Thanks!

Duncan
Out

Does Gaming Perpetuate Antisocial Behaviour? [Column]

Hey guys - sorry I haven't managed to get a post up since my last column. Life's been really hectic what with my long weekend being taken up by Debating Provincials and what not. But! I hope to have my post on my overall vision for this blog up by the end of this weekend. Heaven help us all.... anyways! Here's my next column, due to go live tomorrow, part of my mini-series on dealing with attacks on gaming. Hope you guys enjoy, please do comment with feedback and opinions!

Column starts here


Now that I have been graced with the honour of my very own soap box to shout nonsense from for a little while now, I would like to keep this theme of dealing with attacks on gaming by taking a swipe at one criticism of gaming advocated by the parental advisory committees and menopausal female columnists I mentioned in my previous column which irks me in particular – that is, the attack on gaming for its alleged antisocial nature.

You probably noticed how I prefixed my topic rather pompously with the word ‘alleged’. This is for the simple reason that I find most of the attacks in this regard to be so weak that I shudder at even the thought of affording them the status of a legitimate attack… ultimately, I just don’t think that they hold water. Or any other liquid for that matter, regardless of viscosity. The amount of rebuttal on this issue is enormous, and I’m not going to go into much detail concerning most of it, as I’m sure the majority of it is as much a knee-jerk reaction for you as for me. As gamers seeking to defend our beloved past time, we simply need to point to the hugely social focus of events like LANs, the communities of friends which we develop by playing games (specifically multiplayer games) and so on and so forth to debunk these rather emotionally founded attacks. I personally have made and maintained a number of solid friendships which I would never have had the opportunity to be in were it not for our shared hobby (of gaming, that is). In fact, now that I think about it, I am really unable to think of someone I know who is antisocial because of games – if anything, the opposite is true because of the influence games have in their lives. Granted, I may not know them because of their antisocial behavior, but in this case I’m talking largely about people I know from school. If you disagree or know to the contrary, please do comment, as gathering some casual data on this especially would be something I would find quite interesting.

Let us take this a step further, however, and make some slightly more in depth analysis on the matter.

Now, some counter-rebuttal to what I have proposed would be to say that while the majority of gamers may not be subject to the perpetuation of antisociality (we can just pretend like that is actually a word) as a result of gaming, there are still those who do. To that ends, we would probably be painted a picture of the stereotypical antisocial gamer – alone in their room with discarded pizza boxes forming a makeshift barricade around their swivel chair and nought to illuminate their cave but the dim glow of the computer screen shining upon this poor nerd’s pale face. This scene certainly does present us with a problem, a problem which most would feel something should certainly be done about –however, to paint video games as the cause of this problem would be a classic example of a causation-correlation fallacy… Or, in the English that most normal people speak, video games would be blamed for a problem which they are not, in fact the root cause of. Now, let’s set about exploring that. Imagine, for a moment, a world where video games do not exist (heaven forbid!). The assumption made by many of gaming’s critics in this regard is that without video games to perpetuate antisocial behavior, the child or individual concerned would instead have grown up to be a regular hipster about town.

In the interests of logic and reason, I cry nay! The problem with this argument is that it assumes an alternate outcome under a certain set of preconditions – the problem is that were these preconditions to be met, that outcome would not be achieved. If video games had never entered their lives, these people would have remained just as socially awkward (if not more so) as if they had grown up with video games.

Why?

Because people do not go so far down that road without something else being wrong in the first place. The difference in this situation would be that they would have grown up without video games as a mechanism to help them escape the reality of being part of a peer group to which you do not truly belong, and having to suffer through the torment which often accompanies such a situation. In fact, even in this most extreme case, video games are still incur benefits and not harms, as they give this woefully socially inadequate person something to be good at. This in turn spawns benefits in the form of things like self-belief and self-confidence, which make one more likely to be successful at social interaction anyway. Ironically, these people would be even more confident in themselves if video gaming’s critics were less vocal than they were in undermining video gaming as a hobby, because they would not only see themselves as good at something, but something which matters to a far fairer extent. But I digress.

More than that, however, I would go so far as to say that gaming actually creates social benefits in that it makes people who, without video games, would probably just hole up in their man-caves all day (like the one described above) and read, or plot their gun-toting revenge on society, or whatever, more likely to be socially active.

Why?

Because it creates a middle-ground on which people can interact and form friendships. Socially awkward person A and socially awkward person B, with video games, are now able to form a friendship because of a shared passion, where previously one did not and would not have existed.

So, what we’ve seen so far is that in cases such as woefully socially inadequate WoW-addicts, video games are first of all not to blame and, second of all, actually create a mechanism through which they are able to restore some semblance of their self-belief and deal with the issues facing them. Which beats the living fecal matter out of just lying around being depressed. Not only that, but video games actually benefit people who would otherwise have been marginalized by their peer groups in that they create a middle-ground on which they are able to use their shared interests to make friends, which perpetuates social activity.

So, even in the most extreme and passionately touted cases argued against video games, the arguments don’t stand.

What I’d also say is that I’m actually being far too nice here, in that I’m giving these arguments a chance at all. The reality of the situation is that they are straight up, plain and fundamentally incorrect. While antisocial stereotypes may exist around games and those who play them, that doesn’t mean they’re right, or that we should entertain them. Gamers aren’t some backwardly developed, alternate species or something. They’re people. They have friends, they enjoy social interaction. The only difference between them and jocks is that instead of discussing rugby they discuss Call of Duty.

In reality gaming is a catalyst for social behavior. Groups of friends use it to pass the time, have a laugh while doing so and make more friends. Those who take gaming more seriously than others still develop groups of friends with whom they play and practice. To use myself as a pretty hardcore StarCraft 2 player for an example, I stay at home on Friday nights instead of going to movies, because I don’t enjoy crowds and I find that sort of social interaction fickle and tedious. Instead, I play StarCraft with my four or five odd friends who play as well, and I can honestly say that it is because of StarCraft that they rank among the closest friends I have.

In short, to say that in the majority of cases gaming perpetuates antisocial behavior is just retarded.

I’ll stop my ranting there, before it gets too ragetastic.

At the end of the day, both the gamers and the anti-gaming activists want the same thing – to help that poor kid in the basement. We simply see our games as a means to an end, or a coping mechanism, while they see our games as the cause of the issue – which, as I have already mentioned, is not the case.

In conclusion, I would in fact say that gaming has given many, many people who were not that great at sports, or socially inadequate, or whatever the case may be the opportunity to form friendships and social relationships on the middle ground which it creates. The unfortunate reality is that too many people will only how great an asset video games can be in bridging social divides once gaming becomes more generally socially accepted than it is now, by older generations as well as younger.


Column ends here

Hope you enjoyed it, commentary/criticism is always welcome!

Duncan
Out