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Dark Souls 2

Dark Souls 2 is out and I'm hoping to have my hands on it in the next day or two. I didn't consider it till today but I might bring back the Dark Souls Diary for this sequel. The diary was a series of blogs I wrote documenting memorable areas and battles during my first playthrough of the original Dark Souls.

The point of the diary has always been to convince people to give the Souls' series a chance by dispelling myths about their nature, discussing their design, and the roles of death and player learning. I also try to do it with a tenuous sense of humor wherein I laugh at my deaths and failures, but ultimately explore my victories and elaborate on the tremendous sense of accomplishment the games give to players who are tenacious and willing to learn from their mistakes.

CoD, the effects of stress, & shooting avatars with real-life counterparts

In a rare development, I ended up playing a bunch of CoD online the past few days, and the stress of it hasn't been terribly healthy for me personally. I only play multiplayer a few times a year and mostly in Team Fortress 2, so this is uncommon. Spelunky may be partly to blame because it has trained me to appreciate games that generally play fast, have quick deaths, and quickly get you back into the game.

I started from scratch and made it to level 72 in the last few days in MW3 (I've found there's still at least 20k+ people in that community online daily). I kept playing because of the tight controls, fast play, and quick respawning, but unlike Spelunky or TF2 I actually get mad after so much CoD. For the first 50 or so levels I was genuinely into the modes and the thrill of winning, but once I reached a certain point it's become an addiction to the grind of upgrading, and the thrill of victory is gone, and the novelty of the modes is worn out. I've actually been getting mad and feeling less positive because I believe the stresses are having an impact on me.

Being a twitch shooter I end up holding the controller tighter, and compounded with long sessions my hands end up twitchy after I'm done playing. I get headaches, and feel sour emotionally because victories feel more like I weathered a tornado, so it's less joy and more relief that it's over and I'm closer to leveling up. There's also the racist contextual aspect of the play where you're only ever a white dude killing a darker dude, or visa versa. It's uncomfortably topical, and ultimately uninteresting. I appreciate violent games and play a lot of shooters. I also, hypocritically, am perfectly okay with killing Nazis and Japanese Imperial Army soldiers in World War 2 shooters despite the fact that they are humans just like the African Militias in MW3. I think a lot of that must have to do with the generation gap and the insensitivity that it likely leads to.

Shooters that try to tell a story and build a context that's based on real people and factions have a situation they run into where this is a shooter and you need to shoot at people who have real-life counterparts, and give you a reason to feel justified doing so. I don't think there's ever a good reason to when you're dealing with games that have real people and factions. Games are fantasy and trying to inject that kind of reality either makes it gross or ineffectual. Zombie games work for most people because zombies are seen as animals and not people. Games where you're fighting robots, mutants, or old fashioned monsters have the same effect where you don't have to think hard about why you're killing. Putting an African, Iranian, Russian, German, or Japanese in front of you and saying it's okay to kill them should probably feel gross or ineffectual (maybe a better word would be un-convincing) no matter what the motive in the plot is, right?

Anyway, CoD is a fun tight game in a boring, uncomfortably topical, and racist context that's much closer to my generation, so it eventually wears on me emotionally, and the nature of the play wears me down physically after a while. It makes me want to try Titanfall and Destiny. Same general type of tight games but with big sci-fi settings, more options for movement and verticality, and much more old-school silly fun instead of harcore 21st century American military festishism. CoD possibly taught the industry a lot of lessons that were good and bad, but in the new generation of shooters I'm seeing people who might be taking lessons learned from 7th gen shooters and injecting more fantasy fun and hopefully inclusiveness to their design. If it turns out to be true and becomes a trend, I could be happy with a trend like that.

Violent games and violent play don't turn people into killers, but there are definitely certain types of play and contexts of play that can put great stress on people, and stress can affect people in a lot of negative ways.

Upcoming events

Like I mentioned in my last update I'll be going to Westwood to sit-in on a 2D graphics programming class to see what the environment is like, ask a lot of questions, and see what I think. The sit-in is this coming Wednesday on the 19th. I'm pretty sure I'm going to enroll in the university and start their game development program but I still have questions to ask and things to plan with them. I'm already trying to thinking up ideas for small games I could try and develop for projects and side-projects eventually once I'm deep enough into the programming classes.

The next update I do will be some time after that so you can expect to hear about Dark Souls 2 proper and how that sit-in at the college went. Hold onto your butts.