Just an update on my personal life during this joyous time of year!
Nothing crazy going on, just the usual round of viruses attacking my otherwise seemingly helpless immune system. Sure, I survive them and they don't really give me a lot of downtime, but don't i have a first line of defense or something? You'd think there would be a bunch of white blood cells wandering around on patrol in my bloodstream or something, but no, you'd be wrong. No, apparently they are all asleep in the barracks til the alarms go off and then they trudge out to do their work in the most lackluster fashion imaginable. If I was their boss I would fire them and get new white blood cells. Then again, maybe I am complaining too much, they usually get the job done eventually.
So both of my friends got married this year. The real-life ones, not counting the online ones or the ones actually related to me in some way. I find that strange for some reason, one i've known for about 23 years and the other I've known for ten, and i would have sworn both were going to be unhitched forever, for different reasons. But no! I was wrong. Then again, I was also wrong about Debra never finding out about Dexter being a serial killer on this past season of showtime's "Dexter," so I guess I can be wrong about things and not have it be unusual. Sorry if I spoiled that for anyone, but seriously!!! :-o OMFG as the teen girls would say.
One of my nephews recently told me I was out of touch with today's youth. I was not surprised by this in the least. I find it funny that he is not fond of justin bieber nor the twilight series of movies, yet he thinks he IS in touch with today's youth. Ah, kids! So eager to make fun of old people and totally unaware that they will be made fun of just as bad by anyone younger than they are. I think just by knowing what a justin bieber is and having an opinion on twilight, I am still in touch with today's youth. Of course, my opinions on both are completely negative, so I could be wrong.
But back to my friends. So, one of them moved to australia to hook up, and I am proud of him, I doubt I'd have had the balls to emigrate to another country for a piece of a... ah, a chance at a relationship, but eh, love does funny things to people. of course, I haven't heard from him in about a month now, and he's the type to send out emails once a week, so either his wife has changed him, or he's been eaten by a rampaging pack of funnel web spiders. I am sure they hunt in packs, I saw a documentary about that on the Syfy channel. So he's probably been entombed in webs, slowly being drained of all his life's blood as he silently screams and screams but is unable to make a sound due to the paralyzing effect of the venom, going slowly insane while he edges closer and closer to death. What a horrible way to go. Then again, he is married so I guess the same thing is happening to him even if there aren't any funnel web spiders involved. Poor bastard. :-(
So I'm doing my usual cheating thing while playing skyrim the other day, and my nephews drop over for the holidays, and they ask how badly I am cheating, so i tell them. Now, I never really understood why you'd ask someone a question if you didn't really want to know the answer, but nobody around here seems to understand this simple bit of logic, so they ask anyway. So after I tell them how badly I am cheating, they ask me "Why even bother to play the game?" Now there's a question I do not understand at all. I play the game to have fun? I mean, that's sort of why they call it a "game" and not "work." Obviously if it wasn't fun, it would be "work," but kids and/or people nowadays don't seem to grasp this simple principle. Or maybe they find work to be fun, and fun to be work? Who knows? I don't get it. But I will try and explain in more detail.
So your average RPG (role playing game) involves running all over the game world for quests, killing things, and if you die, you either reload the game from a previous save and try again, or do something else. Almost all of them involve leveling up your character from a puny weakling to a rampaging beast, tricked out with the meanest gear you can find. Now, here's my problem with the process, if you are going to be a rampaging beast anyway, why not start out that way? Why do all games have to start out with you being a weakling and everything else being stronger than you are until you reach their level of strength and you can finally take them down? Why play the game by everyone else's rules? Is it more fun for you to start out as a puny weakling and do hundreds of meaningless quests until you can match or overpower your enemies? Does that somehow feel more like real life to you? How often in real life are you allowed to reload from a previous save when you fail and die? And on the flip side of that coin, how does reloading a game a dozen times until you finally beat the boss monster, feel like an accomplishment to you? Is THAT more like real life? Do you also live your life the way everyone thinks you should, or do you try and do things differently? Even if you do, even if you are a milk-drinking little sheep in reality, why do so in a game, that has absolutely no effect on reality? Why not go a little crazy in the game, have some fun?
Now keep in mind, the same nephews asking me these inane questions are the same ones who don't bother to pay for games, they just pirate them. Now, if you want to cheat a gaming company that installs useless DRM that just screws over the paying customers and still manages to make a 500% profit on every game they sell, I don't have a problem with it. Pirate away! Somehow those lawyered-up corporate pricks will manage to tell their insurance companies that the $50 they lost from you is actually costing them 5 billion, and then spend a half billion on advertising and lobbyists to get harsher laws passed that will allow them to charge even higher prices for games so they can make even more money.
But if I don't have an issue with people pirating games in real life, why have an issue with me being a pirate in a game? Makes no sense to me at all. Yet these same people will run quest after endless quest, doing the same things over and over, and reloading a game a dozen times, and call that fun? How does that make sense? Sounds more like work to me. I mean, when I HAD a job, I pretty much did the same thing... a bunch of useless tasks, the same ones over and over, at the behest of nameless and faceless NPC's (non-player-characters, or in this case, bosses, I think I am going to start calling every boss I ever have an NPC just to separate them from the real people, lol). Sounds just like work to me. Maybe that's why people pirate games so badly nowadays, because the games are so much like real work that people just can't bring themselves to pay for them?
So here's how I play a game. I start out as a god. Something jumps out of nowhere at me, it finds it can't hurt me very much, if at all. I leisurely choose what method to use to slaughter it, then either cut it in half or blast it to bits. The bloodier the better. Someone sends me on a quest, I either teleport there instantly (if possible) or kill everything easily on my way to get there. I kill the boss on the first try. if i ever choose to reload from a previous save, it's to try something completely different because i think it will be more fun, not to have the same fight with the boss monster over and over again. I do not mine for resources. I do not kill 100 ostriches to get enough ostrich feathers so i can have an ostrich feather cape that makes me look pretty. If I want to look pretty, i use cheat codes and give myself an ostrich-feather cape. I do not chop wood to sell it for gold. I give myself as much gold as I need to buy whatever I want, whenever I want to buy it. I explore, I watch the story unfold, I do random things as the whim takes me, I watch the cute little monsters attempt to defeat me and fail. I laugh, as a god should, at their pathetic attempts. Then I blast them out of existence and admire the simple beauty of a winter's storm as I ponder what I want to do next.
Now doesn't that sound more fun than mining iron for hours so you can make a sword so you can fight a giant halfway across the world so you can fail and reload your game a dozen times? I think so. And you want to chop wood to make money in a game? Pfft. Do that in the real world and see how much money you make. I've never particularly found the usual drudgery of the real world particularly enjoyable, so why would it be more fun in a game? Hell, you usually get PAID to do drudgery in the real world, with REAL money. I mean, shit, if I got paid real money to do drudge work in a game, it MIGHT be worth it, but I don't live in china, so that's not an option for me.
Now I guess everyone is different, and if you like working your ass off in a game to get an ostrich feather cape so you can look pretty, and you want to pay a monthly fee for that, well, hey that's your business. But when did we start letting gaming companies get away with making games more like work than fun, and have us still paying for them? I mean, I just don't get people who will spend all day in an office, slaving away at pointless, meaningless tasks and earning a day's pay for it and call that "work," and then come home, spend another eight hours playing World of Warcraft, mining iron to make a sword so they can sell it to get some in-game gold so they can buy a weapon to accomplish a quest that involves killing a thousand rats in a dungeon somewhere on the other side of god-knows-where, all while paying out the money that they earned that day for the privilege, and they call that "fun?"
Sounds like the only real difference is that one you get paid, and the other you pay for. (shrugs) I've heard games and play are supposed to teach you how to overcome real life situations, but seriously? How is this teaching anyone anything they can possibly use in real life? If at first you don't succeed, ragequit life and try again later? Don't fight an ogre unless you can reload your life from a previous save? Life's full of NPC bosses who are going to tell you to do meaningless tasks over and over again for no real benefit to you, but that helps them a lot? I think if everyone doesn't know that last one by now, they never will.
Oh well. Other than my rant, everything is going fine so far for the holidays. We're actually two days ahead of schedule this year. I personally am shocked. That the tree is all ornamented before xmas eve just blows my mind. I wasn't sure what to do with the extra time, so I watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation again. Best holiday movie ever, forget that miracle on 34th street or it's a wonderful life crap. If Christmas Vacation isn't more like your real life than either of those movies, I'll eat my own edible chocolate g-string underwear!
Happy Holidays, Merry Xmas, and Happy New Year to all, and to all a good night!
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