My Spring break was spent here at Midd working on projects and playing video games :D.

I continue to play League of Legends (couple games a day usually). Nothing new to talk about here.

The big news, though, was the release of Diablo 3’s new expansion Reaper of Souls. It was pretty hyped because this Reaper of Souls was the first big news in Diablo 3 since the games launch. A couple weeks before Reaper of Souls launched, Blizzard implemented a new Loot 2.0 system that guarantees a higher percentage of your loot drops to actually be relevant to your character (in vanilla Diablo 3, loot drops were literally random. You could get great gear or absolute crap that wasn’t even for your class at any time). Also, a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge change that came to Diablo 3 just before the RoS release was the REMOVAL OF THE AUCTION HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, to people who don’t know what the Auction House was, it was Blizzard’s in-game market for weapons, gear and gold. Players could grind for gear and then sell any gear they didn’t want on the Auction House (either for in-game gold OR if the item was really really really really good, you could sell it for REAL MONEY! :O :O :O). The Auction House was by far the worst part of vanilla Diablo 3. There was no reason to play the game because if you got stuck you could literally just pay to win the game by buying new/better gear. I, personally, hardly used the AH because I ended up quitting the game 2 months after its launch (after reaching level 60 and the end-game grind for pointless gear that you could just buy on the AH).

So, with the AH and Loot 2.0 changes just before the launch of a new expansion, Diablo 3 had gotten pretty hype again (2 years after launch…..). So, this break before the expansion dropped, I got back into the game and grinded out some gear that would make my realllllllly old character relevant in the meta again (the grind for gear now takes much less time than it did way back at launch, that’s for sure!). After beating through Act 5 (the expansion act), I’m still playing the game. Currently I’m leveling a new character called the Crusader to level 70 (the max level). I’m wondering if the game will eventually get to a grind and if I will get bored with it soon enough, because unfortunately RoS didn’t add any new content that has massive amounts of replay-ability; all you can do in-game still is replay the campaign over and over and hope to get better gear so you can do higher difficulty settings. But, the current consensus in the community is that there isn’t really a reason to play above Torment 2 or 3 (out of 6) because it takes so long to progress that, even though you are gaining more EXP and gold, your progression rate is so slow that you might as well play on a couple difficulties lower to be able to go faster (so you can kill more bosses to get more guaranteed legendary items).

Alas, we shall see if the game can keep me interested for long. I hope it does, but at the end of the day I don’t know how I’ll feel weeks/months from now. I’ve always got a excessively large Steam library to fall back on!

This documentary definitely provided the feels.

The film follows the production of 3 Indie Games and the lives of their developers: Super Meat Boy (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes), Braid (Jonathon Blow), and Fez (Phil Fish). I can’t even come up with words to describe the emotions I felt while watching Indie Game. As someone who aspires to enter the game industry, it was a great experience to be able to see into the lives and minds of the creators of some of the greatest games of all time. It was unreal how much I connected with everything that each developer was saying. To some viewers, I’m sure looking at these middle-aged guys put themselves through years of stress to “express themselves” in video games seems so odd or socially unacceptable, especially when there is no guarantee for profit in the long run. But, I look at them and say, “Wow, that’s me!”.

I’m your socially atypical kid whose ideal Saturday night is spent in my room playing video games. Do I take a lot of crap for it? Certainly. But, I keep doing it anyway because it is what I enjoy. It is extremely refreshing to see 4 guys just like me make it in the gaming world.

Something I always wonder (like many college students) is what I’m going to do with my life. I could practice my programming skills and apply for a job at some large AAA studio and make a consistently large amount of money writing boring code for a game that I have little influence over. I could also put myself through the same hell as the developers in Indie Game in order to create my own game where I am in control of everything. After watching Indie Game, I’ve definitely been swayed more towards the latter, even if it means a high-probability of failure and monetary strain. I found it so interesting in the film that all of the devs lived in such similar environments and were more stressed about the quality of their game than their quality of living. But, at the same time I could see myself in the same situation. I would be totally content with a little studio apartment as long as I had a computer, electricity, internet, and water (and essentials like food, etc…). I can’t help but wonder if this is a cultural thing (i.e. would all gamers think like this?) or if people like myself and the devs in Indie Game are a small minority even within the minority of gamers? I’m not entirely sure how to get an answer to that question other than go around asking everyone if they play games and if living like that would be acceptable…xD

One thing is for sure, I’m currently debating purchasing the special edition of Indie Game in order to see all of the extra interviews and the epilogue with Phil Fish.

I highly, highly, highly recommend watching Indie Game: The Movie, even if you have absolutely no interest in gaming at all, I still think it is a valuable insight into why gamers are the way they are.

Won’t be a long post this week, I have to get back to studying for a CS exam! D:

As far as gaming goes this week, I’ve mostly only played League (with the exception of beating Portal again for our class meeting this Monday).

I’ve been trying to play at least one game a day of League, which I’ve been holding to pretty well. I usually end up playing more on weekends than during the week (this past Friday I think I played 10 or 11 games). My account right now is level 20, which is when you can buy runes (added bonuses to your champion’s stats). I’ve played enough now that I’m no longer limited by the mechanics of the game; my fingers just do what I want them to do without me having to consciously think about it (at least with champions I’m comfortable with–haven’t been able to experience all 117 yet). I expect by the end of this semester I’ll have reached 30 and will be playing ranked.

I plan to start playing Metro: 2033 this week once I have midterms out of the way. Might stream or record the playthrough. We’ll see.

That’s all for this week. Back to studying 🙁

Joystick Warriors is a pseudo-new take on the common argument that violent video games make people violent. Being a video game player for quite a long time and being involved in the gaming community at large, you could definitely say it’s an argument I’m sick of hearing.

One thing that redeemed this documentary for me was a claim by a psychologist early on who said there is absolutely no evidence that violent video games make violent people. I was glad someone someone finally acknowledged that. It’s so disheartening to hear all these snippets on the news about some kid who murders half his high school and they put the blame on video games. As someone who plays violent video games, I can definitely confirm that there is a clear distinction between killing someone in a virtual environment and killing someone in “real life”. I put “real life” in quotes because it’s not as if killing someone in a video game means you aren’t killing something, it just doesn’t happen to be a physical human.

So, after hearing the psychologist’s claim, I thought this documentary might be about defending video games. Boy, oh boy, was I sorely mistaken! The topic smoothly transitioned to the ugly twin sister argument of desensitization. Something I did agree with from the documentary was a claim that in competitive games where killing is involved, the “players” that we kill become “objectives”; we don’t really equate killing with the mechanics of the game. But, the speakers in the documentary took this as “they are killing people and don’t even realize they are doing it!”. This is totally wrong. Players just separate playing to win a game and killing “real” people. Knowing the difference and being desensitized are completely different things. For example, Minecraft has a gamemode called “Hunger Games”. It is an adaptation of the game in Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games. The Minecraft version is an enjoyable, tense experience. If you were to put me in a “real-life” version of The Hunger Games?

I’ve probably killed somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of virtual-people. I certainly still feel emotions just at the thought of having to kill someone in “real life”, though.

To be totally honest, I feel like video games are thrown under the bus by a lot of society’s problems because they are the new “in” thing. Violence? Video games. Swearing and vulgarity? Video games. Poor grades in school? Video games. ADHD? Video games. The list goes on and on. Arturo said it well in his blog post, we have to be thinking about the age kids are when they start playing these games. If you are not old enough or mature enough or don’t have the self-discipline to make the distinction between the world of a video game and “real life”, then you probably shouldn’t be playing games that could influence you. But, nobody blames the parents for not knowing their kids well enough to make a good choice for them (if they aren’t old enough to make the decision for themselves). I’m not going to say that kids who are under 17 shouldn’t play M rated games; some games that are rated M have great stories and gameplay (and I played M rated games long before I was 17). I just think there are a lot more relevant factors causing all of these “problems” that video games just take the blame for.

Over the years, I’ve collected a rather large Steam library. Unfortunately, I haven’t played most of the games because they are RPGs that I want to get invested in, and with my schedule I can play a little bit here, a little bit there, but not usually for large chunks of time. Luckily, now I have a class that is making me play some of them!!!

Over the course of the semester, we are supposed to pick a game that (in theory) is diverse and non-repetitive and offers a variety of different types of gameplay. So, after looking over my Steam library, I think the game(s) I am going to choose to play over the semester (other than League of Legends and Planetside 2) are Dragon Age: Origins and Metro 2033 (and possibly Metro: Last Light, if I complete 2033).

Dragon Age: Origins is made by Bioware (the same company that produced Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic), so I am sure the game will be great (it has gotten very good reviews). But, like all Bioware games, the story is said to be massive (over 150 hours). I’m unsure if I can tackle a game like this during a semester while still having time for schoolwork yet also putting enough time into the game to get a good playthrough.

Metro 2033 (and Last Light) is a FPS RPG set in post-apocalyptic Russia. Like Dragon Age, the Metro series is reviewed very well. I think I might start by tackling Metro before Dragon Age simply because of time constraints. I’ll make more posts in the future once I start my playthroughs!