No one wants to hear about your D&D character

This weekend I finished Oblivion. Well, I didn't really finish it. I finished the main storyline.

And the Mages' Guild storyline.

And the Knights of the Nine storyline.

And I think that's enough.

I've finished many other stories while traveling through Cyrodiil. I've solved problems large and small. I've met vampires and kings, bandits and prostitutes, beggars and ghosts. There's a lot there. I could start a different character and play the game over, avoiding everything I've done, playing a different way, and still see all new content. With my current character could rise to the head of the fighter's guild (I'm already over halfway there), the King's Armorers are making me a set of kickass plate mail (and they don't do that for just anyone) that won't be ready for another two weeks of gametime. Hell, there's an expansion out.

I've been playing Oblivion as my "main game" since September. Sure, I've had forays into Defcon, A Force More Powerful, City of Heroes, Wii Sports, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Rayman and the Raving Rabbids, and a whole raft of DS games, but they were either taking time away from Oblivion or played simply because I couldn't be at my home computer. That's eight months of serious gaming. Good times.


But for the last month or so it hasn't really been a challenge. My guy is too uber for any monster to pose a serious threat. I ran through the quests to see the stories, not really playing the game as I had been playing it. It was never a question of whether I could do the quest, it was only how long it would take. My character had outlevelled the world, and it was time to finish up and move on to something else.

So on Sunday morning I sat down to finish the main storyline and call it. I finished the quest, and the next thing I know the Chancellor is telling me my armor will be ready in two weeks. Okay, well, may as well wrap up the mages' guild storyline. So I did, but there was still a week and a half to go. Well, might as well go tell the other Knights of the Nine that I had all the holy relics and we can now go take on that Big Bad. So I did. Still a week before the armor's ready, and what if it's not as good as the armor I have? After all, the armor I'm wearing is a holy relic (and part of an add-on), so it should be better than mere royal armor. Should I go on and finish the fighters' guild storyline?

And then I noticed it was getting dark. Shit. Oblivion takes another day.

I went to the Arch-Mage's Sanctuary (now mine), took one last look around, and shut it down.

That's the weird thing about Oblivion. Normally in an RPG, when you finish the main quest, you get a cutscene, you've saved the world, and yay, your life here in this world is over, watch the credits, see who made the game, and see some bloopery stuff as a reward for sitting through the credits (Warcraft III is great for this). In Oblivion the world of Cyrodiil just keeps going. Sure you're now champion of the realm, but you can just add that to the list of your accomplishments and go see who else needs help.


You have to decide to leave. You have to decide everyday to do something else, because it's still there, you can go back. You can pick up where you left off. There are no guildmates to say, "Where have you been? Why did you leave?" They don't know you've been gone. Their world is in stasis.

Jesus, I'm way overthinking this.

Anyway, it's a little depressing to have to leave Oblivion instead of being given a pat on the back and kicked out. I'm used to getting kicked out of my gameworlds. That's why I avoided MMO's for so long-- I like games that end. I like to say, "I finished -----."

So did I finish Oblivion? People tell me that the assassins' guild storyline is the best part, and I didn't touch it. Other people tell me the same thing about the thieves' guild. I know I'm finished with Oblivion for the time being. I've got to work on the backlog.

But I'll probably be back. Shivering Isles, y'know.

On Context

This is quite possibly the silliest game ever. It's a little flash game where the words "candidate01" through "candidate05" come floating out from the center. The player controls a crosshairs and must locate and click on as many candidate02's as he can in one minute. The best I've ever done is 24 zaps in the minute. One person online claims to have gotten over 100, but I think he's lying as I don't see how that's possible given the speed of the words and the number that pop out in a minute.

Reason dictates that I should play this for about five minutes and be done with it forever, yet I keep going back to it. Why? Because I want to prevent an election from being rigged.

You see, this little game is part of an alternate reality game surrounding the Heroes TV show. The show hasn't been on TV for over a month, but the internet has been alive with a conspiracy. One of the heroes is running for congress, and we've (that is, those of us dealing with the ARG) found out that the villain has rigged this election. Everytime we zap one of those candidate02's, we're getting rid of a fake vote. If everyone manages to zap enough (and we have no idea how many are enough) then we will change the outcome of the election.

So I click and click, and after every session, I enter my email so I'll get credit for the 20 or so votes that I've zapped. I want to change the world. I want to be a hero. In the larger context, zapping those votes means I can.

On the other hand, I worry. There's no proof that I'm actually getting rid of bad votes. I could be helping rig the election. I don't zap votes for "Petrelli," I zap "candidate02." Who is he? I don't know. So while I've been told that I'm fighting for the good guys, there are too many layers of abstraction for me to be sure.

This game is remarkably similar to one of the first videogames ever invented for the home TV. On Ralph Baer's brown box, you could set up a game where one player controlled a red box, and the other player controlled a white box. The white player chased the red player around (using early joysticks) and tried to catch him. The game was over when you got caught, then you would switch.

35 years later we're still playing the same game.

De Blob

So over the weekend I finally played a little game from the Independent Games Festival called De Blob. This was the entry from the Hogeschool van de Kunsten in Utrecht, Netherlands in the student competition. It's a great little game where you play an alien blob that rolls around absorbing people of different colors, changing colors yourself, and painting buildings whatever color you happen to be at the moment. You start with an entirely gray city, and end in a riot of colors. There are specific targets to hit, and coins stashed in out of the way places that you can collect. It's half Katamari-Damacy and half Marble Madness.

It's gorgeous and addicting, yet unpolished. There is no readme.txt to explain the big picture. I wanted to finish the first city and continue to the next, but I had to go find the website again (I downloaded this a couple of weeks ago) to find out that there was only one level. There's a simple arcade scoring system that I don't care a fig about. I'm not going to do it for points, I want some "You've won!" reward. There's a rudimentary story of the Blob's spaceship crashing into the city and MIB's trying to track him down. Despite that, the game never ends. I confess I didn't collect all the coins, but I did paint the entire city, hitting all the target buildings, and there was no win condition.

The reward is just as important as the obstacle. Peggle knows this. When you finish a level there are fireworks, Ode to Joy plays, and you get a slow motion closeup of the last peg you hit. I giggle everytime I see it because it's so over the top.

I was playing De Blob on the laptop in the lobby of the show this weekend and attracted a gaggle of kids looking over my shoulder. They all wanted it. Good. It's a worthy game with a very simple mechanic. Hopefully someone will hire the team of students responsible for De Blob and expand it into a full game. Until then, I have one city to paint over and over again. Maybe I'll finally get all the coins.

And another one...

So here's Yet Another Blog. I'm starting this during my most busy time, figuring that if I can get a post a day out when I'm really busy, it'll be cake when I'm not. It could just be another blog with two posts and then nothing forevermore.

I will try.

The idea is that I feel in between academia and industry, in between drama and games, in between scholarship and creation. I am not a delicate flower, I'm just hoping to get some writing done, with maybe some links and pictures too.

So here we go...