So in the desire to find old games that would run on this laptop, I realized I had never played Baldur’s Gate II: the Shadows of Amn. 

This is reputedly one of the greatest RPGs ever made for the PC, and all the modern classics of Mass Effect and Dragon Age made by Bioware more or less stemmed from this earlier creation. 

It’s been a long time since I played Baldur’s Gate so the story is basically completely fresh, but I realize early on that the game has great writing and atmosphere. 

They don’t really make isometric RPGs anymore. Everyone favours higher budget third person view RPGs (except for Blizzard’s nostalgic design of Diablo III), which I do enjoy. Once upon a time all RPGs were isometric views, and involved far more text description; these days games rely on their graphics to fill in that gap. 

But I really like that BG2 has text descriptions pop up as you enter a room, to describe them. It’s a small detail that makes me nostalgic for the old days of RPG writing. Planescape: Torment did something similar, and it makes me really want to get around to finishing that game. 

You know how old RPGs and old MMORPGs were all about the roleplaying experience? Not necessarily that you had to go deep into the roleplaying, but that it was about creating a character in an open ended world. 

When you open up an older RPG, and even of the early generation of MMOs, you had a lot of these character options. Technological (or budget) limitations didn’t necessarily give you a lot of graphical customization but you could write backstories, add all these little cosmetic bits to make your character yours. 

They don’t do that anymore. 

I haven’t played an RPG from the past few years or so, online or offline, which even gives you the basic little text window to write your own backstory. 

I recently digitally dusted off LOTRO, in my “after watching The Hobbit” mood and realized it had all these lovely, nifty little features to give depth to your character. But no one bothers with that anymore, it seems. It’s not important. 

Of course, the overall style has changed too. Older MMOs weren’t about the story, they were about the world. They relied on players to create their own stories and content, and just let the world be their sandbox. Newer MMOs sell themselves on the overall story, and in a way they tell you what your character is because they’re telling you what your role in the story is. 

I mean, remember Everquest? What was the story there? They gave you the world and let you get on with it. 

To be honest I really love the idea of these open worlds and user created content. It still happens in Eve Online, but sometimes I do get bored without a good central plot to move me forward. 

It’s just odd that no one’s tried to do both effectively. SWTOR is a nice game that’s very character focused but it largely tells you what your story is, despite the various choices you can make. Guild Wars 2 is a really fine product but only ever offers the illusion of personal choices because it’s clear how little they matter. 

Ah well, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something new that I haven’t tried which marries the two ideas of an open world and a character driven story well. 

So I love playing RPGs on the computer these days most especially because of modding content. People create their own stuff, and share it for others to use. They’ll customize armours, weapons, create whole stories, tweak animations to make them look better, retexture things, all kinds of really nifty stuff. 

Last night I thought “You know, I never finished Oblivion, i should play it” and while it was installing I checked out what mods were available. 

Nexusmods is a great site for community modding for several different games, and I like to go to them first, go through the categories and just go through the list of mods in order of their popularity in terms of cumulative downloads. 

And what I saw just made me really, really sad. 

There were pages, and pages, and pages of really skimpy armour based off of anime characters. 

I don’t mind the idea in principle, people can mod what they want, but not only does skimpy anime clothing completely seem out of place in a swords-and-magic Fantasy setting, they’re also always ridiculously skimpy. 

The fact that there are pages and pages of this, among the top downloads too, just… makes me really sad about the inability to immerse themselves and also the blatant misogyny. 

That and skimpy female armour makes no sense at all. As a modder, you can make good looking armour for females which is ALSO practical or makes sense in the setting. Those exist, but you have to dig rather deep into the pages to get there. 

So i was recently introduced to “Hey Ash What’cha Playin’?” which is a lovely… bunch of videos (don’t know whether to call it a series or a channel…) made by a brother and sister who grew up gaming and collaborate on videos about games. They’re short and hilarious and perfect for gamer humour. 

Ashly, the sister, also runs a Tumblr blog named “How games saved my life” which is full of “testimonials about the positive, life-changing power of video games.” 

I like this, because generally speaking video games get a bad reputation. In America they’re blamed for violent crime, for disconnection of children, for all kinds of things. In the realm of media and art games are commonly ranked deep below movies and books in terms of their intrinsic value as storytelling mediums, and that’s just unfair. 

So I applaud that her blog is full of stories from people about how certain games helped them through deep depression, or chemotherapy, or drug addiction, or abusive . 

I have been, I think, at least once in some form of depression. During it I gamed all the time, and read books, as an escape from all the problems knocking on my door. I’ve tried to come up with explanations for this, because in my parents’ simplistic understanding the games are all to blame and I don’t like this overly simplistic mindset. 

It would be wrong to say that gaming didn’t distract me, in a way, from dealing with things or handling my problems. I could have been doing things, though at the time I had no idea what to do or where to start. 

During that period of my life I never felt “low”, never felt utter despair, never went near considering suicide. I did my best to balance my life out, to make sure I was getting a balanced and affordable diet, that I went out and tried something new at least once a week. 

I have always, always, wanted some kind of explanation for my behaviour then, but it would be wrong again to say that it was isolated to that time alone. Every time i leave my parents to go somewhere else, I never want to stay in touch. When I went to Bangkok almost 2 years ago, I let them know I arrived safely, and from then on I cut myself off and felt free to spend 10 days taking advantage of the hostel’s good wireless to catch up on TV series. I had seen Bangkok enough already before, after all. 

Not games then, just escapism.ilies

One of the common complaints about movies based on books is in being disloyal to the books. 

People say “But they left out this chapter of the book!” or “They added this scene which wasn’t in the book!” People also say “This character isn’t accurately portrayed by this actor and that’s wrong on many levels!” 

I feel like this is interesting, because it shows a clear ignorance of the filmmaking process, which is in its own way interesting because, like I’ve discussed before, hiding the process protects a magical perspective for us. Not knowing how something works and being content with being dazzled is, in a way, our pursuit of magic. 

Sometimes things need to change to make a book into a movie, because they’re entirely different mediums. A film is highly visual, and can communicate things without having to tell you about them, and transcribing that visual non-verbal message from a verbose medium like a book is not particularly easy, and not necessarily a compelling message in film. In other words, sometimes what works in a book doesn’t work on film. 

Some books are created as adaptations or supplementary material to films. It’s a common statement that if the Star Wars prequels didn’t make sense to you, you should read the books “where it’s better explained.” This just sounds to me like a bad excuse for sub-par filmmaking. 

Similarly, video games can be art in the way they can emotionally affect us, but they too operate on a different level from film or books. The trend, from what I can tell, is to try and make video games more and more like slightly interactive movies, which can be compelling but lose the capacity of video games to involve the player personally in what is happening. 

It depends on the game, of course. But it’s easy to say that you don’t have to make a movie like a video game (which is what the Resident Evil movies do), and you don’t have to make a video game like a movie (like the more recent Call of Duty games). 

And it’s okay that they’re different. You can criticize them for unnecessary changes and the like, but the way some stories are told just depend on the medium in which they are told. Creators who respect that tend to create the better content. 

So I recently got back into SWTOR. Along with that came dabbling in GW2, and STO. CoH closed down late last year, which was pretty sad. All of it made me think. 

It’s hard not to compare these products, in any case. 

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My mom asked me this last night. 

So my exams are over, for now, and I wanted to take the opportunity to spend a bit of time with my parents. We caught up on the shows that we watch together, and now that I know her laptop can handle it, I really wanted to show them Assassin’s Creed 2, just because of how pretty it is, and how accurately they model the various cities of Renaissance Italy. 

Within about 5 minutes of my showing them Florence, my mom asks me that. 

She suggests that if I’m gaming, I can’t be as interested in studying, or building a future for myself, or getting a girlfriend. 

I don’t know, guys. I watched Avatar: the Last Airbender with my parents, a lovely animated show. I’ve watched all the Marvel movies with them, with their superheroes and all that. I play Wii with them, occasionally. I have my huge collection of comic books. My favouite author writes Fantasy set on a flat world on top of four elephants on top of a turtle flying through space. I watch Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Star Wars with my dad. My dad himself watches Stargate: SG1 marathons on the local SyFy, even if they’re in German. 

And yet, somehow, gaming is the geeky hobby that can’t. I can’t even show them a game which is, in my personal opinion, an expression of art through gaming. 

My parents both enjoy watching The Big Bang Theory. Ideally it should show them how geek culture is celebrated these days, but BBT does do its fair share of laughing *at* geek culture. There’s this underlying assumption that while geek is cool, it still has a hard time getting laid and still gets bullied. I don’t know if my mother is interpreting it that way, or if it’s just a sitcom to her and she just always thought this way. 

“Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura” was one of the greatest RPGs of the 90s, and yet little known. The story itself was so so, but the setting was amazing. 

It was set in a magical world that was undergoing an industrial revolution. A human adapted a dwarf design for a steam engine and changed the world. Elves, dependent on magic, retreated to their forests, orcs became subsistence miners and factory workers, an oppressed lower class. 

Your character has the option to pursue a focus in either technology or magic, but cannot do both. A larger technological presence has a way of cancelling magic out, and technology malfunctions in areas of strong magic. Such is the case that in trains there is first class, second class, and the “mage’s coach.” Magical people have to ride in the crappy coach at the back, the furthest away from the engine to prevent it malfunctioning. 

Perhaps one of the most interesting side quests involves your research into the faded ruins of an old civilization, where you discover that the balance between magic and technology is actually cyclical: there are times of technological power, which turns to magical power, and so on. Like the rise and fall of empires. 

Along the way you meet orcs protesting against unfair working conditions, gnome entrepreneurs, feudal cities losing their competitiveness against industrial cities, and so on. It’s a fascinating setting. 

The main story itself sadly doesn’t entirely run along with this theme of circular rise and fall of magic and technology. It is a pretty standard fantasy story of good, evil and old secrets. 

But I still highly recommend it for fans of old school RPGs. 

Guild Wars 2: Thief Profession

I’m going to start first off by saying that this is by no means a min/max guide, or a suggestion that everyone should copy my style of gameplay for success. One of the beauties of Guild Wars 2 professions is that each one can fulfill different roles, so it’s really up to you, and I’m of the opinion that there is no real “best” setup. 

What I can say is that I personally had a steeper learning curve playing the Thief than the other classes I’ve tried. So maybe some initial tips for others could come in handy. I also have fun with mine, so maybe you will too. 

The Thief has a lot of different possible weapon combinations, so you’re going to want to try them out and find out what you like best, because each combination has different cool things that the others don’t. Given that you can switch between any two, I usually had Dual Daggers, and  Shortbow as secondary. I would solo with the daggers, but in any event or situation where I’m with other people I would switch to the Shortbow for more support skills. 

Dual daggers’ high rate of attack is useful when using the second heal skill, which heals you as you attack. Later in your higher traits you can add the ability to additionally heal when using weapon skills, so that keeps you upright. Dual daggers also has probably the best dodge skill, whose name I totally can’t remember right now, but ends with Blossom. This is an automatic dodge, high rate of fire attack (which heals too) AND puts you behind your target, which then gives you higher damage. 

Given that this skill uses a lot of Initiative, you’ll want to save it for charge attacks from your targets. This is particularly the case with Ettins, which have a PBAoE knockdown which is really annoying, but a well timed Blossom attack will not only keep you upright, but get you behind them for higher damage while they recover from the big attack. 

In a nutshell, this is one of those classes where watching your enemy closely is a huge advantage. It’s good to do this with most classes, but I think it’s essential for a Thief. Because you’re kind of squishy and usually close to danger, you need to know when to dodge, when to shadow step away, and when to daze in order to interrupt. 

One thing I did not know for the first 15 levels of my attempt to play a Thief was effective use of the Steal skill and stealthing. The Steal skill shadowsteps you towards your target, and steals a random skill. This can be one of the target’s skills, or a random generic one. About half of the skills you’ll end up stealing will be stealth skills, the other half different kinds of attacks. If you go into stealth, your 1 skill turns into a backstab (or equivalent for different weapons) and so it’s very much to your advantage to move around to the rear of your target for the higher critical. 

In addition, Steal refills your Initiative bar by several points, so it’s good to use it in the middle of a fight when your Initiative bar is low. 

.. And that’s all I can think of. I won’t recommend trait choices, because those are entirely geared towards your own playstyle. Some people like poisons, some people like shadow skills, but it’s really optional. Every time you upgrade to a different tier of traits, you reset your points anyway, so feel free to experiment. 

A lot of people don’t take games seriously as an artistic or storytelling medium. This is largely because of the weakness of the genre historically. Game designers aren’t writers, for one. 

This changed with the evolution of roleplaying games, but also more generally. In terms of art it can be a little difficult to classify what about any game makes it artistic, but then all of art is rather like that. 

If anything though, the lesson of the last 10 years or so has been that realism maybe an unrealistic thing to aspire towards. The human eye can detect fakeness even more acutely when it is trying too hard to be real. So designers have moved onto the idea that realistic visuals are less important than a consistent art style. 

I grew up in the old days of gaming when graphics were limited by technology, and so that as a result we had to fill in a lot of the gap with our imagination. To that effect, designers would write long ass backstories and descriptions of the setting in their manuals and supplementary stuff. Old RPGs used to have limited graphics but verbose and elaborate text descriptions of the setting and activity. 

As technology caught up, that’s been more difficult to fulfill, because people have short attention spans, and like to see and feel, rather than read and imagine. But it is rarely ever as good as the imagination might have conjured up. This is almost exactly the phenomenon of what happens when a book is made into a movie. 

What very often happens as a result of this, is that a game will create a marvelous setting, with depth, character, culture and realism. But in that setting it will tell a merely mediocre story. Or just as often it can happen that a good story will be told badly because of the limitations of the writers and the structure of a game. 

This is the case with Guild Wars and its sequel. Both have amazing settings that I find rich, complex and interesting. Their stories themselves are okay, but their storytelling isn’t that great. The first Guild Wars suffered from typical problems, like some bad voice acting. 

But the second suffers from being too tied into game mechanics to feel like a real story. 

It’s really easy to get excited early on, because your character creation process gives you all these options to customize your own backstory. And that’s cool. Except that the options you choose not only make your story rather blatantly obvious, but they’re also over with relatively quickly. 

For example, if you create a human character you get to choose your social background: noble, commoner or street rat. This story is over in your first 10 levels. You also get to choose some kind of background history: wanted to join the circus, never found your sister’s body, don’t know who your parents were. This is over by level 20. Neither of these stories affect your later path, neither are they are important once that story is over. It makes no difference. 

This is a great example of what could have been a good story, and that these story aspects could have been spread through your entire story, but instead were tied down by game mechanics. 

Later on the game gives you the illusion of choice. You join a special organization, and someone asks you an apparently personal question regarding your fears. You have three options, and each of them blatantly tell you what the plot for the next 10 levels is going to be. So it’s not really interesting. 

There are also character deaths during your story, but you generally don’t get to know them well enough to really feel the pinch when they die, and whatever you choose this character or their equivalent in other story choices all die at the same time, so… it really loses its impact. 

One other problem is that they have cutscenes. These are generally alright when it’s just a conversation. But if you have large, dramatic events happening around you, suddenly being cut to a background with two character just standing and talking, it loses that sense of atmosphere and immersion. You don’t get any dialogue choices during these cutscenes, so you end up feeling like it’s not your character anymore, that it’s a very scripted affair. 

I still hasten to point out that despite all this, GW2 has an amazing setting. The world, the different races, the cities, their cultures, all of that are a wonderful kaleidoscope of creativity. They are believable, interesting, and get you involved. But if anything the main story itself is just lacking. 

One thing I have noticed in my behaviour, though I noticed this some time ago, is that when I game I eat less but when I watch things I love to snack. 

It’s explained pretty simply with a convincing hypothesis: When I’m gaming I’m fully occupied, but when I’m watching something I still feel the need for something to do while I’m watching. 

This is slightly ironic because when it comes to some things I’m the kind of person who likes to devote my full attention towards watching something. I cannot watch something I love while multitasking. 

On the other hand, I can still watch things… while eating. Even when I’m not hungry. 

I don’t do this when I game for a few distinct reasons. 

1. My hands are usually occupied which makes simultaneous eating impractical, and therefore something to do very quickly and sparingly.
2. My brain is immersed and therefore not easily distracted by thoughts of food, not as easily as it is when simply watching something.
3. Usually if I’m immersed I don’t really want to leave my seat. Speaking as someone who really can game non-stop for hours, getting up to cook is time that I’m not spending in-game. 

This really came to a head late last year after I got into the SWTOR beta and later got the game itself. MMOs, especially ones with subscription fees, give you a sense that time not spent levelling or experiencing content is potentially wasted time and money. If you’re paying $15 per month just for access, you want to milk that $15 for all it’s worth. If you’re poor, like I usually am when I get in a gaming binge, you’re conscious that every month might well be the last month, so you really want to get your time in before you’re cut off. 

All this sums up to mean that when I stay up late watching things, I tend to want to snack. I can pause a movie, go get something, come back, and munch while watching. 

I can’t do this in a game. You can’t pause an online game either (a concept my mother still doesn’t understand). And so really, you start learning just how long you can game without eating. 

When I was deep into SWTOR I was in Malaysia, still backpacking/bumming. Without SWTOR I spent more time outside, usually trying out the excellent food in Penang in the large quantities made possible by low costs of food there. I got some exercise from going out a lot, but I also ate a lot. By the time I got SWTOR I was lower on cash, and suddenly highly committed to an online digital environment for a subscription fee. 

So I would seriously live on a few sandwiches a day, all day. I’d go out once in a few days to grab supplies, and that would be that. I always made sure I had fresh veggies for my sandwiches and after a while tended to buy tuna for health/convenience/cost instead of other stuff. 

The very nice thing about GW2 is that it has no subscription fee, so there is no monetary or time-limit pressure. But nevertheless, I find it a highly immersing world that has me pretty engaged… so I don’t snack. 

And that is why I think gaming is a healthier geek habit than movie/TV watching. You’re still sitting on your ass, but at least this way you’re not eating as much. 

Okay maybe not healthier. But I lost weight. To some people that’s the same thing, it’s not really, but in my case at the time (and usually) it was. And indeed, currently is. 

Let me introduce you to Logan Thackeray. 

Logan is one of the central human characters in the online RPG “Guild Wars 2.” In a way, he’s probably one of the more important characters in general, specifically because of a decision he made. His story is detailed in the rather badly written “Edge of Destiny” novel. 

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greta939:

The Guild

What makes The Guild fantastic for us online gamers is the way Felicia manages to accurately capture personality aspects we become familiar with from the people we meet online in MMOs. 

Codex (Felicia Day) is the shy underachieving gamer girl who retreats into online gaming due to lack of success or achievement in both her professional and personal life. 

Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh) is socially repressed by his mother, and retreats into online gaming as a social escape mechanism. He takes online flirtation very seriously, and has amazing online stalking skills. 

Clara (Robin Thorsen) is the housewife who games while the husband is out at work. The joke is that being so committed to online gaming makes one picture, at the other end of the computer, someone leaving the kids to do whatever. 

Vork (Jeff Lewis) is the Guild Leader who takes it very, very seriously, drawing up rules, regulations, contracts, and everything. He takes it so seriously that he makes real life sacrifices in order to maintain his commitment to the online Guild. 

Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda) is apparently based on someone Felicia raided with in WoW. This person was apparently a very nice, very pretty Asian woman who, while leading WoW raids, was really, really aggressive. This is how you inevitably have to become to keep these raids organized. 

Bladezz (Vincent Caso) is like just about every under-18 gamer anyone has ever gamed with. They talk like know-it-alls and smart-asses, and yet are still children. “Awesome, a guys night out! I’ll get my mom to drop me off!”

I have to say that the flash game “Marvel: Avengers Alliance”, accessible through Facebook and the Playdom website (the developer), is a real guilty pleasure. 

As it is I despise most Facebook games, since I’ve been a longtime gamer and Facebook games are the equivalent of pointless tasteless fast food to what I consider the fine dining of interactive entertainment. 

But MAA is a little different, in that it’s actually well made and requires more thought than, say, Farmville. It licenses Marvel’s characters and portrays them quite well, using decent art and taking a lot of nice content from the source material. I find the Marvel XP database to be oddly addicting, just because the extra written information and material is actually well thought out. 

Besides, the gameplay requires a lot more thought than your average FB flash game. You think tactically, and so it ends up playing a lot more like a traditional Final Fantasy game. Mostly, indeed, for free. 

Sometimes you have to pick and choose aspects of a story to value. 

I have played quite a few story-centric games, and some of them have had lacklustre stories, and some of them have had mindblowingly good ones. But a story told through a game is very different from one told through a book or a film. 

For a lot of games, this is a limitation. They design levels, and just write a story to suit those levels. 

What made the Call of Duty games good, and successful, were that they tended to be highly but well scripted. They made you feel like you were a part of bigger events, and pushed you along a linear path and let you experience it. This was most famously pulled off in the first Modern Warfare game, when a nuclear bomb goes off and your character doesn’t survive. Lots of people apparently kept trying it again, thinking there had to be a way out, but there wasn’t. 

The story itself for MW wasn’t the best I’d seen. It was something typically Tom Clancy, like all these games are, but the use of the first person perspective as a storytelling tool was inventive. 

As far as RPGs go, Bethesda and Bioware are the current kings of the genre. Bethesda specializes in large, open-ended worlds with endless small stories and lots of possible things for you to do besides the big plot. Bioware specializes in character-focused plot and ethical choices with consequences. Both typically have excellent voice acting talent and depict vibrant, living worlds. 

In all of these, in a big way, the story wouldn’t be possible to be told in a film or a book. You can only best experience it from the interactive world of a game. 

I’m playing Guild Wars 2 now. Its story follows that of the first Guild Wars. In a fit of hype I picked up a novel written as a prequel to GW2, “Edge of Destiny.”

It was not well written. Sorry guys. 

The thing is that the themes present both in the book and following in the game are more interesting. The characters are interesting, but not well portrayed in the book. In the book they feel somewhat flat and uninteresting. They’re given a bit more life in the game, but what’s similarly important is that the world talks about them. And that builds up the background that makes them interesting. 

Nevertheless, it’s not the deepest fantasy story I’ve ever experienced. It doesn’t have particularly deep themes. It is limited by the fact that it is a game, and so it focuses on fantasy heroics and good versus evil. But it is enhanced because it is a game, by providing a living, breathing world to experience. 

In the end you kind of have to sift through extraneous fluff to find what makes a story worthwhile.