“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.” ~ Charles Manson

I have made it four years without coming to the attention of the Crazy Cat Lady of SL, and I’ve always considered that an unexpected boon of providence. It continues to bewilder me why anyone gives her credibility or attention as she’s so obviously an irrelevant entity when measured by any objective standard, but one of the odd quirks of SL society is that you don’t have to have any sort of redeeming value to establish celebrity. This works both to the benefit and determent of our little ant farm. Sparkling, gold mines of people who are otherwise overlooked in the world come to our attention in magnificent ways. Unfortunately, on the other side of that coin, are the nutcases with megaphones who proclaim over and over “I will not be ignored” until you toss them a peanut and manage your way out of the park.

Naturally, anyone who has been in SL for any length of time is aware of her in a general sense and occasionally snippets of news filter in to me from friends who inadvertently step in crazy and get it on their shoes. So, tonight I had two phone conversations. I provide relevant excerpts, with approximated transcripts as best my memory can recall:

Grace: “…Oh, and by the way, the new FIC list is out.”
Salome: “What do you mean ‘out’?”
Grace: “Apparently she posts actual lists with names each year.”
Salome: “Seriously?”
Grace: “Yes, although there are multiple lists and which names apply to which list and what each list represents only makes sense, you know, to her.”
Salome: “Well, I would imagine her and the underpants gnomes.”
Grace: “I’m on one of the lists.”
Salome: “You?”
Grace: “Yes.”
Salome: “You’re FIC?”
Grace: “Yes.”
Salome: (giggles incoherently)
Grace: “That’s not the best part.”
Salome: (continues giggling)
Grace: “Stop. There’s more.”
Salome: (attempts to subdue giggling and fails miserably)
Grace: “Will you stop. Lyndon’s on it, too.”
Salome: (between giggles) “Only one Linden?”
Grace: “No. Lyndon.”
Salome: “Which Linden?”
Grace: “Lyndon. Lyndon Heart.”
Salome: “OUR Lyndon?”
Grace: “Yes.”
Salome: “Oh dear God.”
Grace: “What?”
Salome: “How on earth am I going to explain what FIC means to him? He still doesn’t understand what the PN is and they’ve griefed his concerts on repeated occasions.”
Grace: “Baby, it took you a week to explain to him how to change his pants.”
Salome: “I need Crazy Cat Lady flash cards.”
Grace: “Good luck with that.”

…Later that same night…

Salome: “You busy?”
Lyndon: “Sorta, but I’ve got a few, what’s up?”
Salome: “Um, okay.” (deep breath) “Do you know what FIC means?”
Lyndon: “Frick?”
Salome: “FIC. F - I - C.”
Lyndon: “No. Federal International…”
Salome: “No. No. No. Okay. Do you know who Prokofy Neva is?”
Lyndon: “Sounds familiar. Famous chess player or something, right?”
Salome: “No, honey.” (deep breath) “Okay. How do I explain this…do you know the crazy cat lady on the Simpsons?”
Lyndon: “Yes.”
Salome: “Okay, well this is the crazy cat lady of SL, except she pretends to be a boy and writes a unibomber manifesto style blog.”
Lyndon: (after a pause) “Okay.”
Salome: “Right, so she makes these lists of people and she calls it the FIC. It stands for Feted Inner Core.”
Lyndon: “Weren’t you in that?”
Salome: “No. That was Feted Inner Horde, my old WOW guild which is related but… we’re getting off topic. Anyway, she makes these lists.”
Lyndon: “Lists of FIC.”
Salome: “Yes. They are people she considers to be … you remember how Bush used to say ‘evil doers’?”
Lyndon: “Uh huh.”
Salome: “Okay, well this is crazy cat lady’s evil doers list.”
Lyndon: “And you’re on it?”
Salome: “No, honey. You are.”
Lyndon: “I am?”
Salome: “Yes. You and Grace both are.”
Lyndon: “Cool!”
Salome: “No, no, it’s not…”
Lyndon: “I’m going to get an eye patch! Can I wear an eye patch?”
Salome: “It’s not a pirate thing…it’s like…”
Lyndon: “I’m frick!”
Salome: “FIC.”
Lyndon: “Right, I’m FIC! I get to be bad!”
Salome: (sighs) “That’s right, honey. You’re bad.”
Lyndon: “Yay!”

If you know our boy and you’re reading this, you’re giggling incoherently about now. It would be baffling if it wasn’t so painfully obvious.

You see, my Gracie girl at least moves in circles where, though not elitist, could, from someone lacking 20/20 vision (or, you know, sanity) be viewed as such. To have Lyndon on the list, well, maybe, she just picks random names from those who stand near her at SLCCs. And, yes, the whole FIC thing is confusing to the point of no longer having meaning, but sadly, it does have meaning to her.

After the giggling, though, reflecting on this reveals the depressingly disturbing thing about not just the crazy cat lady, but that certain segment of the whole desperately-trying-to-remain-relevant ‘04 crew. Those who haven’t moved on and skilled up in the brave new world yet cling in their haunted Delta Dawn-esque way to the one thing that made them important. At this stage she’s obviously just throwing out names that look familiar, despite having no context of who most of them are.

It’s funny for a few minutes, like watching a very drunk person try to make it up a flight of stairs. Except then the humanity in you starts to worry that they’re going to fall and crack their head open, and you feel seedy for even watching. No matter how vile their behavior was in the bar, or how much of their beer they sloshed on your friends, you feel gross just watching them continue to make fools of themselves and you wonder why someone — anyone — isn’t around to help them.

“We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.” ~ Peter Brooks

In writing up entries about Aion, I’ve begun to realize that I didn’t take near enough screen caps to show my work on all the stuff I want to blog. Still, I think I’ve got enough to provide little samples here and there. In this entry I’d like to talk about an aspect of play that has generally underwhelmed me in the MMO genre and that’s game immersion.

One of the things about Aion that impressed me during my brief tour was the relationship your character has with the environment. There are lots of details both subtle and deliberate that I believe will make this an MMO that actually encourages role play for those who seek it. But, even if you’re not looking to RP, NC Soft is doing a lot of things right to immerse you in your character. They seem to have hit a golden ticket combination of SL vanity appeasement, WOW easy mode interface, EQ2 ability sophistication, and FF graphics and detail all merged in with a new, but traditional-style lore. You quickly feel tethered to your character and it helps a player to settle into enjoying play (remember enjoyment — it’s that stuff we used to do before rep grinds and fighting over mats).

One small, but charming example of this immersion is the fact that your character takes cues from the weather.

Aion - Bad Weater Solved By Leaf Umbrella

Above, you’ll notice my girl is holding a little leaf umbrella to keep the rain off her. How. Cute. Is. That.

Another such detail is that fact that I encountered quests that were actually realm time-of-day dependent. In one such quest, a soldier that had fallen hopelessly in love with a wood nymph asked me to steal her dress so that he could have a token of her to keep for himself (boys). He explained that she bathed by the light of the moon in a nearby pond. When I sought her during a day cycle, the nymph wasn’t there, but after returning in night cycle — sure enough she was there and her dress was laying across a rock near the pond. While too many of these style quests could get annoying and prohibitive to leveling, I thought it was a very nice touch.

Of course, the nymph was a ?? level mob who spotted me stealing her dress after I’d snagged it into my inventory and promptly fired a nymph cap into my priestly ass, resulting in the first of my two deaths (both of which took place at level 6).

Aion - Fewer Deaths

This brings me to the next interesting thing about Aion — death is inconvenient and kinda traumatic. One of my biggest meh’s about WOW is the frequency and ease with which your character dies. There really isn’t any value placed on surviving because dying is easy (a little costly at high levels, but still not that bad) and doesn’t really incur much hardship beyond the occasional longish corpse run.

In Aion, death incurs a fairly distressing spirit defeat sequence (as seen above) which I had to shake my head after because I was so immersed in play when it happened. Both times I died were unexpected and they taught me valuable lessons; I didn’t repeat the mistakes that led to me being all dead-like. The first lesson was that fucking with higher level mobs is going to get your butt kicked a lot faster than in WOW, and the second was that you’d better not get into managing multiple mobs unless you know exactly what you’re doing. After taking those two wisdoms to heart, I didn’t die again on my way to 14. I’m pretty sure my first character in WOW died once a level at least, if not multiple times per level.

Additionally, unless you’ve got a rezzer with you, you do not ghost from a graveyard back to your body: you rez at the last place you bound your soul to — and that could be way back in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky even though you’re currently questing in Alaska. Then you’re going to have to pay a soul healer to restore your XP. It’s a pain in the posterior. However, it does two things right. First, it encourages good play and skill advancement by motivating you not to die. Second, it again encourages the immersion bond between you and your character.

Even though I could go on and on about this, I’ll end with just one more example of the immersion techniques the game uses. This one is simple, but powerful considering the level of character customization offered by the platform. The cinematic sequences and cut scenes mostly feature your character in the action. First in flashbacks and later in ceremonies. On my way to level 14, I encountered about a half-dozen of these, including some that didn’t feature my character, but were merely instructive to show me glimpses of quest areas I would soon be encountering. This frequent use of cut sequences feels like a luxury in itself, but seeing my own character as part of many of them was an unexpected (and very effective) treat.

Just a few yummy samples:

Aion - Cinematic Sample 1

Aion - Cinematic Sample 2

Aion - Cinematic Sample 3

Aion - Cinematic Sample 4

Aion - Cinematic Sample 5

“The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.” ~ Lafayette Ronald Hubbard

While sending off an innocent tweet to a friend, I briefly wanted to make sure I wasn’t misusing the word communicative in place of commutative, so I hopped onto dictionary.com to verify proper word usage (yes, I’m just that prissy).

The sponsored results for communicative were as follows:

Dictionary.com's Sponsored Results For Communicative

After blinking twice, I bwaaahhhaaaa-ed and looked up commutative:

Dictionary.com's Results For Commutative

And, just for kicks, I tried communicate:

Dictionary.com's Sponsored Results For Commutative

I refreshed all the entries several times and came to the same conclusion: if you need clarification about communication, Xenu wants you. However, if you know math, he wants you…not so much.