annathepiper | Entries tagged with gaming

… in no small part due to how I’m back in edit mode for Vengeance of the Hunter. But from what I’m hearing, first from Dara’s PAX report and then from rumblings around Twitter this morning, apparently Gabe opened his mouth again and highly unfortunate things fell out.

PAX has always been a bit of a problem for me. For one thing, hi, raging introvert girl here. So many people attend that thing that my tolerance for the crowds goes only so far if I’m there too. A couple of hours on the expo floor and eventually I get to a point of wanting to go all Invader Zim and stand up yelling STAND AWAY! YOU SMELL LIKE FEET! Which, y’know, not terribly productive.

There’s also the problem that I’ve never been a console gamer. There’s other types of gaming covered at PAX, sure–Big Fish has had a booth there the last couple of years, so casual games do have a presence. I’m given to understand we were hawking our forthcoming Zombie Zombie Zombie match 3 game, and yeah, I’ll be playing the hell out of that. But mostly, the whole event is filled with stuff I’ve never been particularly interested in. I quite enjoy watching Dara and Paul play various console games, and experiencing their stories vicariously–I really liked the storyline of the BioShock games, enough that I went and grabbed the tie-in novel just so I could read about the founding of Rapture. Portal and Portal II, also great fun to watch, and of course between Paul and Dara we’ve been HOUSE OF SKYRIM for a while now too. Also great fun to watch, if nothing else because Skyrim’s always struck me as a way fancier version of Nethack.

But. Looking from the outside in, and seeing repeated incidents of misogyny and queerphobia in gaming culture, I can’t help but get a big vibe of ‘yeah that? That’s not for me.’

I’ll be going to GeekGirlCon, though. And who knows? Maybe I’ll see something there that’ll change my mind about console gaming, even before Dara and Paul launch their campaign to try to pull me into Elder Scrolls Online next year.

ETA: First of the pertinent commentary links that have come across my radar: From Make Me a Sammich, who has generally Had Enough of This Shit

ETA #2: Elizabeth Sampat says Quit Going to PAX already, in no uncertain terms (Dara’s in the comments over there, too)

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

But. Looking from the outside in, and seeing repeated incidents of misogyny and queerphobia in gaming culture, I can’t help but get a big vibe of ‘yeah that? That’s not for me.’

ETA: First of the pertinent commentary links that have come across my radar: From Make Me a Sammich, who has generally Had Enough of This Shit

ETA #2: Elizabeth Sampat says Quit Going to PAX already, in no uncertain terms (Dara’s in the comments over there, too)

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Friday night: disappointing episode of BSG, as I have previously posted. But what I didn't post was that we also watched Lost, since we hadn't watched it when it actually aired last Wednesday. And that was a satisfying episode, to see the stakes escalated between the main cast and the Others. Yay, actual movement on the plot!

This past Saturday went pretty much entirely to a second round of Dogs in the Vineyard, with

risu running things for

solarbird,

kirbyk, and myself. This adventure was a touch more exciting, as we got concrete proof for our characters that Oh My Yes Demons Are Afoot in the Old West. Both my character and Kirby's got smacked around by one of these demons too. We gamed for about as long as we did the last time--but this time we started a lot earlier, around 2:30ish in the afternoon, so we finished up around 10ish or so and Kirby was able to head home at a sane hour.

We're probably not going to return to these characters any time soon, though. While I've been enjoying myself, Dara and Kirby are less enthused about the setting--and so we'll be looking into using the DitV mechanics for running a Firefly campaign. The whole system is very dice-heavy, sometimes dauntingly so, but we got better at it this time around. And that helped things go faster. Now I have to think about what sort of character type I want to play in the Firefly universe. Whee!

Sunday, as I have previously posted, went pretty much to football--the Pittsburgh/Denver game, and then Seattle/Carolina.

In and around all of this, I poked at my web site to try to review all the PHP code in it. Bits and pieces of it are slowly coming back online. I've locked the annathepiper.org URL so that unless you're me, you can't see the site yet. Hopefully I'll be able to remove that lock soon.

One amusing part of this is that now that all the major browsers are more CSS-compliant, I was able to yank out some of the Javascript hacks I've been using to do the flippy-blurb trick and can do it the easy way now for IE and Netscape and Opera and Firefox. Which is good. I'm trying to find ways to cut down the code overhead on the site in general. But just to verify that it worked, I made sure I had the most recent versions of Opera and Netscape on my system.

And while I was downloading Netscape, I was asked whether I wanted to install software from Netscape's "partners"--which meant Real. Which meant I was asked if I wanted to install RealPlayer--and RealArcade. The latter of which, for those of you playing along at home, is what I'm actually working on right now on my current contract. So I downloaded it, for giggles. It came with a free Solitaire game with ten flavors of Solitaire in it, one of which I remembered learning as a kid. So that was fun. And I blew way too much time playing it.

Now, the numbers for Lothlórien!

Monday miles: 3.45
Tuesday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 643.9
Miles out of Rivendell: 185.9
Miles to Lothlórien: 278.1

Friday night,

risu,

kirbyk,

solarbird, and I playtested Dogs in the Vineyard. This is highly remarkable because there hasn't been actual gaming at the Murkworks in a very long time. Dogs is an odd concept--alternate-history version of the Old West, and we're Mormons, specifically "Dogs", combination peacekeepers/mail deliverers/upholders of the Faith. Oh, and there are demons. Actual demons. Though some of our little trio believe more than others about whether the demons are real. ;) The fun part of this was that for me, anyway, Old West + religion + guns = Cort from The Quick and the Dead, so guess who I wound up basing my character on? For added giggles and grins, Dara decided to play a mutated version of Ellen, Sharon Stone's character from the same movie. (Only later, upon reading the notes at the back of the book about which Westerns were good to watch for atmosphere for the game, did I discover to my amusement that The Quick and the Dead was at the top of the list and that Ellen would in fact be a fine prototype character for a Dog. HAH.)

Anyway, our three young PCs went out on their very first circuit through the towns of the Faith, and we had a great time with it. It took a while to get things going, since we had to go through chargen and do all the background work to figure out what sort of people we were all playing, but once we got all that dealt with the actual adventure was fun. We broke up a marriage. We chased off a toady tax collector (and Dara's "Sister Kayleigh" shot a hole through his hat). We cast a demon out of a young girl, and escorted her back to the temple that had trained us since her family didn't seem happy to keep her.

The game is very dice-heavy, which was a bit of a switch for me since the last time I'd seriously played anything, we were very dice-light! But it also did a good job of integrating the dice rolls into the flow of the conflicts. Having a GM who has a great sense of Story and characterization helped too.

We liked it well enough that we totally lost track of time, winding up staying up until 4am. And we're going to take another crack at it in a few more weeks, too!