“I’m a free spirit. I don’t like to be tied down. What? You mean literally? Oh no… totally into that.” ~ Goblin Female, WOW

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain”
~ John & Paul

Salome’s Ode To Gaming Friendships and Virtual Places – Take 1

Having decided to give up on WOW and been through the detox phase with very little pang, it occurs to me that the only thing I’m really going to miss is a handful of friends — two in particular (it would be three, but I’m disqualifying one because she’s been stuck with me since high school and her friendship is not WOW-centered). My memories of these two people are heavily tinted in WOW-filtered colors. I’ll explore one later in a small rant on why I’m anti-guild. For now, I’ll focus on my “WOW best friend.”

People who do not spend a lot of time in virtuality tend to roll their eyes at the notion of friendships that develop based on a format, gaming or otherwise. The idea of a forum friend or gaming friend is less legitimate in their eyes. But, it’s really no different than a friendship that develops over shared work or living spaces. The chemistry of such friendships is always the same, physical or virtual. And, even the strongest of those friendships strain when the format is taken out of the equation. When leaving a job, for example, there are always promises to keep in touch, and often we do, but generally, we don’t. Even under the best circumstances, with effort on both sides, the relationship moves into an at-fingertips arrangement where lunches and meetings have to be scheduled and maintained; that casual familiarity of the everyday joke or encounter is removed. This is true with friends in virtual environments as well.

The randomness of how such people come into our lives, and the places that mark the important events in those relationships are just 1′s and 0′s lurking on a server somewhere. On some level we know that. But then randomness of how your dorm or cubicle mates get assigned are no less random. And a “home” is more than just stucco and cinder blocks with tar paper on top; the materials of construction do not equal “home.” Some would argue that houses and office buildings are more “real” because they are permanent, while virtual places can be destroyed in a few minutes. But anyone who has been through a natural disaster understands the foolishness of attaching permanency to physical objects as a measure of their value. Most things in life can be gone in the blink of an eye under certain circumstances. The concept that they could be lost, worn out, destroyed is what makes them all the more precious. A house can be set ablaze or foreclosed; a server can be wiped. Experience and memory are the real currency of how we assign value to the places that take up real estate in our emotional ether.

Everything beyond that is just paperwork and security measures.

The First Time I Saw Dun Modr

So, I was working up my first WOW character (human priest, of course) and even though I was in a guild, I was generally off by myself (later entry on guilds, I promise). As was my wont, I was leveling in an area about 2-5 levels higher than I should have been — my best guess is that I was between 25-27. WOW was new and shiny, I was coasting on newbie immersion and eager to see as much content as possible. I have no idea how I got to Menethil Harbor. Truthfully, everything from Fargodeep Mine to the Wetlands is a blur.

Dun Modr (Wait, Where Am I?)

At any rate, while dodging bluegill murlocs, black ooze, and mosshide gnoll-thingies I turned north up a road, entered Dun Modr and accepted The Dark Iron War quest which innocently ordered me to kill some evil dwarves. Sure, no problem.

Dark Iron War - How Hard Can This Be?

An hour (and multiple corpse runs later) I was making frequent use of four-letter words and considering giving up. The innocuous looking encampment is (or, at least, was) a devil of a place for level-appropriate characters. It’s packed tight, aggro ranges are wide and most of the mobs are linked in pulls of 2 or 3 so you can’t patiently single-kill your way through (the mid-to-low-level priest’s bread and butter method). I was getting my priest ass splattered all over the place. And I was getting grumpy in that “why am I paying money to bash my head into make believe walls” way.

I was about to die — again — when, from out of nowhere, there was a dwarf warrior beside me, tossing a group invite, which I hastily accepted. Sure, the stumpy little guy was a level below me and named after a Forgotten Realms sword, but he was warrior DPS and he killed the bad, bad dwarves that were chewing me up like it was free.

For those of you that don’t play WOW, a warrior-priest leveling team is (or, at least, was) better than peanut butter and jelly sammiches. Warriors wear a lot of armor, suck damage down like water and hold aggro (the algorithms that are used to determine which player a “monster” attacks) so a robe-wearing priest like moi can stand back and toss out heals at my leisure. With Aegis, we had 80% of the quest done in minutes. All we needed were the pesky Dark Iron Demolitionists. As it turned out, the five demolitionists were, however, a particular flavor of bitch. They were entrenched inside the tight-packed barracks buildings and there were only a scattering of them amid all the other mobs. To make matters more frustrating, they stood back and lobbed high-damage explosives while letting their little army of friends hack at you. It didn’t help that Aegis and I were under-leveled for the quest.

More four-letter words and corpse runs, only this time with a stumpy little dwarf in mail armor ghosting beside me.

Refusing to be defeated, we found a demolitionist in one of the barracks that was less populated and opted to wait out respawns and kill him over and over. We cleared all the mobs down to the bottom level where we found a handy little alcove to sit and wait for respawn so we could kill them one at a time as they reappeared. I don’t remember how long it took. Long enough for us to rattle off conversation tidbits with enough sarcasm and personal exchange to realize we enjoyed the company. We’d also exhausted all the /flirt and /joke options for our races. One of them for the human female was (I kid you not) “I need a hero” and one of which for the dwarf male was “I like my beer like I like my women: stout and bitter.” These sound bites would later become in-jokes between us.

By the time we finished The Dark Iron War and a handful of other nearby quests, we’d made friends, added one another to friends’ lists, yadda yadda. I sent him some potions. We suffered the abject horror that was completing Stranglethorn Vale (the WOW camaraderie equal of doing a tour in ‘Nam together). He left his crappy guild for my crappy guild and we alienated the other members together. Years of friendship followed and continue.

Whenever one of us would work up an alt, we’d always call or IM the other when it was time to do Dun Modr. “I need a hero” and “hey, short and bitter, get over here” were used in tells from server to server and faction to faction. Just so we could stand in the aforementioned alcove and jump up and down a few times while tossing /joke and /flirt emotes back and forth.

I cannot tell you how the poor fellow suffered. He leveled with me possessed of a patience that would make saints stand there and say “How the fuck does he do that?” He had to deal with things like:

1. I am a compulsive harvester and I will aggro an entire zone of mobs just to get that flower over there which I don’t even really need. He still has nightmares about killing packs of bats in Eastern Plaguelands because I saw a Plaguebloom node or two.
2. I cannot make two targeted jumps in succession with the WOW interface. (A fact that became painfully clear when we ran Blackfathom Deeps a few days later. He waited patiently while I fell, swam back, fell, swam back, fell… all the while ignoring the bitching and moaning of the other people we were grouped with.) You remember that early part of Tomb Raider 1 where you have to do the running jumps from pillar to pillar over the gator-infested water, timing it to miss the flames that shoot up? That took me DAYS.
3. He had to double back to get me when I inevitably got lost in anything remotely resembling a cave (actually, he learned to never run out of my sight so he didn’t have to waste time doubling back).
4. When we were using the “avoid Mazthoril cave” exploit to turn in for our Drakefire Amulets and he made it on the first try, he sat there and waited and waited and waited while I fell and retried and fell and retried and fell and healed and then remounted and retried.
5. Every time we had to run UBRS or LBRS, he went to get a drink while I missed the jump onto the frakkin’ balcony twenty times and ran back up the stupid rock into the alcove and…fell (I still maintain it’s just too damn dark in there to see the jump).

He never raised his voice. He never got all condescending and hissed and talked to me like an idiot. He knew that just because I couldn’t judge a jump didn’t mean I was stupid and it didn’t mean I couldn’t play my class. It just meant I sucked at jumping. Although on the screen it makes you look and feel like an idiot. A really, really lot.

In all fairness, he did get to mow down every mob without ever having to pause. And he knew that if I lost every other member of a party or died myself, he was likely going to be standing when the smoke cleared (my rule: when things get ugly, the tank lives, everyone else can wait for rez, corpse run, and/or suck it). This was back when priests were useful and hadn’t been busted down to second-class healers. Plus, while we were leveling he was fury. So we pretty much owned anything that looked at us funny, even when they were a few levels above us.

Aegis is one of those people who’s just instinctively good at gaming. He doesn’t have to learn it or work it like I do. He sees something once and knows how to do it forever. He knows where to go, what order to kill, where to stand, and what to ignore. He’s also evil and speaks my brand of sarcasm. When people would ask me why I so “shy” and didn’t get involved in guild events, I’d answer “I’m not shy, I just hate most people.” He was the only one in vent that knew I wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t a whiny little kid who thought his name was tattooed on my ass just because we gamed together and when someone was a dick about something he didn’t play the old boy’s club “let me take care of this” card. He just sat back quietly and let me demo the jerk if I wanted to. Occasionally he might toss out a “Dude, I really wouldn’t say that to her…” warning, but that was more for the protection of the noob trying to flex nuts at me.

I can honestly say that the biggest thing I’m going to miss about WOW, without question, is the realization that I’ll never again get a random tell that says “hey – short and bitter – get over here and help me with Dun Modr.” I even had to apply my lame video capture skills before I canceled my account so that I could go and nab a shot of the infamous alcove (after helping a random noob complete their quest).

When I cleaned out my bank vaults, one of the handful of things that I couldn’t bring myself to vendor was a stack of six Crimson Lotus — items that would show up randomly in my mail whenever he had a quest in Alterac Mountains or Desolace and one dropped. Why? Because no one thought much about them, you couldn’t buy them, and other than the token gesture between us they were worthless to the naked eye. Just like the places and experiences that people in virtual environments trade every day.

Crimson Lotus

And when you find a friend who gets that and knows how to express it, that’s the kind of thing you’re gonna miss. Just like a badly textured alcove made up of 1s and 0s.

“I hate Thunder Bluff! You can’t find a good burger anywhere.” ~ Blood Elf Female, World of Warcraft

I’m leaving WOW.

This may sound like a frivolous statement because people say these things all the time (and because it’s a game, so who cares, right?). They announce grand departures on forums. They rage and quit guilds on the spot. They declare the things they’re giving up in moments of empowerment and then go slinking back when the buzz wears off.

I’m not one of those people. For one thing, generally, when I leave any sort of environment of which I am merely a member without authority, I do it without comment. Being “done” for me is generally an act of personal choice, not a gesture to discern who will try and woo me back. I can count on one hand the number of times I have openly declared I was leaving something, and I haven’t ever returned to any of them. I either knew I was done, or that my personal ethics would make it impossible to return. When I have felt the need to announce a departure, it’s generally been to make a statement about something I felt needed expressing or simply to let familiar denizens of a communal space know how to reach me outside the format without sending a gazillion private messages, or to explain why I was surrendering the responsibility of a role tethered to the format I was departing. IRL, when leaving a consulting job I’d have a brief gathering with my people before departing; there is merit in rituals like exit meetings that I consider separate from drama tactics, but that may be my open personal justification system in play.

I’ve spent years in the WOW format (I tried it in early 2005, but quit soon after, rejoining “for real” in May, 2006) — so there is history, and it feels wrong to leave without saying something somewhere. Or maybe I’m just feeling a fondness of memory. Either way, don’t follow the jump if you’re likely to be bored with such humdrummery.

(more…)

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ~ Ayn Rand

Anyone who’s clocked time playing Civ will enjoy this:

I haven’t yet been able to get and play Civ 5 although some of the changes look cool. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly stemming from the fact that Civ was the game JTL and I played most.

One of my favorite playing with JTL memories involves Civ 4. I was always chugging for cultural victory while he was bombing everything that dared look twice at his border. Although we generally played as a team, we had a sort of competition to see if I could win with culture faster than he could win by military means. Once, I convinced him to play a game based on culture wins only (no war) and was explaining all the little tricks I employed to edge up culture gains. As anyone knows, this involves lots and lots of spreading religions. He became exasperated with the fail rate on missionaries and began to growl about how if RL missionaries had been so incompetent the world would be a much better place. Then he began loudly berating his computer with exclamations like: “Damn you, Christianity, how can you not spread in Atlanta!” and “I’m telling Buddha on you” and “Get your Hindu ass over there and convert already!” By the time it was all over, I was in giggling fits.

The next day, I got this email, with an attachment:

1. go to http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/downloads.htm and download the v1.61 patch
2. install the patch.
3. start civ, fix all your options (for me at least, it reset my sound and graphics options). you may also want to turn on the new (?) “show city radius” graphics option. it makes it easier to tell what tiles are already used by cities, when you have a settler selected. If you get a flash of a screen which says something like “Your mods are not correctly installed”, don’t panic — I think that’s complaining about the files we modified by replacing rather than using this new override mechanism. we can and should fix that sometime, but it seems to work just fine as-is
4. exit civ
5. go to your “My Documents” folder and make sure you have a “My Games” directory, and inside of that a “Sid Meier’s Civilizcation 4″ directory, and inside of that a “CustomAssets” directory. If not, stop here and call me
6. save the attached file CvGameCoreDLL.dll in that CustomAssets directory
7. optional, but I think you’ll like the small changes: save the attached file CvReligionScreen.py in the CustomAssets\python\screens directory
8. restart civ; marvel at your hopefully all-powerful missionaries and the only slightly-different but oh-so-much-better f7 screen
9. marvel at my awesomeness

After that, missionaries had a 100% conversion rate — a change which I squeed over, but which he said made him feel “dirty in the bad way.” This is a frequent saying that started between he and I and has been part of my personal vernacular ever since.

The f7 screen shows all your civilization’s cities and which religions are at play in each. It mostly lines up so you can peg what a city might be missing at a glance, except that when a city founds a religion, it puts that religion out of order. This was unacceptable. Things have to laid out properly or OCD brains go haywire, as anyone who reads XKCD knows. If I told you the number of things he coded around just to make margins line up…

He never did get around to the Flying Spaghetti Monster patch.

I miss you, still, dear friend.