Station23

 There is a social media craze right now started by Sean McCoy dubbed Dungeon23. Dungeon23 is a framework for creating a megadungeon. You write up one room a day with the idea of having a completed level each month. At the end you have a 365 room dungeon.

Zappcon 2015 - Part 3

I took a while to type this up. Firstly, I could not hold my head upright without assistance for a couple of days after the con and was peck typing. It had nothing to do with the hold up on me assigning words to my feelings, but my throat was also a little raw as I spoke more last weekend than I do over the entirety of some months. TOTALLY. WORTH. IT. I also did not know what to blog about as there was just so much. Not everything was sunshine and puppies, but nothing kept me from coming back day two on less than three hours of sleep after more than a gallon of mixed local beers jostling around in my tummy either.

Assimilation of a Subculture

It might not seem like it to a reader of my blog or to some of my acquaintances I have met through gaming, but I become tongue tied when it comes to the topic of gaming with people I do not already know also partake in a related aspect of the various gaming hobbies. Gaming was something I was raised to be ashamed of. It does not help when a very vocal minority actively seeks to prove every bad thing that has ever been said about games and the people that play them. Like any other group of people, it is those furthest removed from reality that grab the most attention from outsiders.

My first brush with Dungeons & Dragons was secretive. I knew beyond any doubt as a young lad that Dungeons & Dragons was not only wrong, but downright evil. Still, it had a certain appeal to it. I would sell off parts of my school lunch to other kids for pocket change. I saved the money for a few months and bought the Rules Cyclopedia from another kid. I read and reread that book over and over and over again and again and again over a period of years. I knew every rule inside and out by virtue of pure repetition.

I had to hide the book from my family. It became akin to a sacred tome I had to protect. This was not easy as I was searched semi-regularly and under different circumstances. I would return home from school some days to find I had to clean my room because it was torn apart in a search. That book was the one thing that could have possibly ever been found in these searches, and I was damned if I was going to allow that to happen.

When one spends more than a decade feeling like an outsider and keeping something a secret, it becomes difficult to share that secret with others not already in on the secret. It's a little embarrassing actually how things come flooding out when you feel you can talk about the secret. I can gush over various games for hours when I find a fellow gamer. My natural reaction around people I do not already know game is still to clam up and keep games to myself.

I grew up to play a few different types of games. I have played some console games although console gaming is one of the gaming hobbies I am less familiar with. I own a few hundred video games for the personal computer. I play a few different miniature games. Some of the earliest posts on this blog were for a Facebook game. I like Magic the Gathering, but do not have the income to keep up with the game and support my other hobbies. My current favourite card game is Sentinels of the Multiverse. Board games are awesome. There are more types of board games than I can keep up with let alone individual board games. I have written my own MUD once upon a time. Role playing is awesome and something I am almost always up for.

The social stigmas are much different about gaming of all sorts than they were when I was growing up. For one thing, there are more gamers than people that do not game. Whether it be card games, board games, role playing games, party games, video games, or what have you, people are downright hungry for both interactive media and the social interaction available through gaming. There is also a greater diversity in the ethnic background and the sex of people that game now compared to my youth. Increased diversity in the gaming audience leads to increased diversity in game developers as well. Increased diversity in game developers means increased diversity in gaming experiences available to the consumer which feeds into increasing the diversity of the audience again.

Recently there have been many articles such as "The End of Gamers" or "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over." I think such titles state the reverse of what is happening in an attempt to draw attention. Many of the articles I have read have either tried to embrace a minority by declaring no one outside of that minority a gamer, or tried to distance themselves from a minority by declaring that they are not part of gamer culture even though they partake in gaming and enjoy the history while sharing aspects extracted from games socially.

The label of gamer may come to lose all meaning, but it is only because we are approaching a point where it would be easier to have a term for people that do not play games of some sort than to have a tag for people that do. To quote Syndrome from the Invincibles, "And when everyone's super, (evil chuckle) no one will be." We live in a time when there are gamers raised by gamers that are raising gamers.

Gamers, like many people that were once considered outsiders, are now part of the mainstream. There are some gamers that are desperately attempting to hold on to their outlier status. They typical methods for accomplishing this include driving other people away, defining what is not a real game, or burying themselves in some niche within the various gaming hobbies. If somebody enjoys a different type of game or even game experience within the same games as them then they might declare that person to not be a real gamer. The further away the type of gaming moves from their niche, the easier it is for them to label somebody as anything but a gamer. The less like them a person is, the greater the chance that person is to be a 'Fake Gamer'.

Gamer culture will still continue. The history of games will still be there. We will continue to build on that culture as we move forward. There are more people included within the game culture bubble now. Hopefully, as more people pick up games we will continue to see a wider array of games for us to experience. Gaming as a whole is no longer a niche subculture. Yes, there are many types of games that still are, but they bleed into Western culture even if many people are not aware of the nooks and crannies where those games live.

I view gaming and those that partake in gaming in a generally positive light. I have seen a lot of good come from gaming. This is not to say that people that play games are better people than those that do not. Gaming provides a platform of common interest that I have seen many people utilize to build communities and to help others. There are many charitable events held every year that are tied directly to gaming in one form or another. This is not to suggest that negativity is not present. It very much is. It is thankfully a minority of gamers, but it is a very vocal and brazen minority.

I would like to apologize to anyone I ever made uncomfortable or caused them to feel unwelcome when it comes to gaming of any sort. I personally am still adjusting to the current times when society at large considers it okay to enjoy gaming. I am so accustomed to living in the corner that I am hesitant to venture further into the room where the rest of the gamers are mingling and helping to introduce others to gaming. The corner might be cramped, but I know this corner. The corner is safe. The rest of the room, or people coming into my corner brings the unknown. Fear travels hand in hand with the unknown. This fear is a silly thing. I am working on conquering that fear, but I am not there yet.

That One Time I Spotted a Paint Huffer

Imagine coming home in the afternoon. One of your neighbors is sprawled out on their porch with a can of spray paint in one hand, two more on the ground next to them, and a box about a foot and a half from their face. What would you do? In this situation, most neighbors went on their way never saying anything. Nobody ever did say anything to the man laid out on his porch, but one did report that there was somebody huffing paint on their porch in front of God and everybody. That neighbor demanded the management of the complex serve an eviction notice immediately. The manager sent someone around to check. Sure enough, there I was fanning a box where the inside was painted black with three cans of paint sitting next to me.

As some of my posts can attest to, I will occasionally paint miniatures. Part of that process for me involves spraying primer at the start of a project, or applying varnish at the end. As this blog can also attest to, I am physically disabled. I am unable to sit up on my own.

That day I had crawled out of my sliding glass door onto my porch which is open on three sides because it offers ventilation where I do not have that luxury indoors. Because of my physical limitations I was using one arm to prop myself up, and the other arm to alternate between spraying the models, fanning the models, flipping the models, and turning the box. The box in question this time was actually the Savage Orcs unit box sitting inside a shallow box that used to hold packs of ramen noodles. The clearance between the top of the box the models were sitting on and the sides of the ramen box was less than three inches. It's nothing fancy, but it keeps the paint off of the porch without having to go through the trouble of laying out a sheet or spreading papers.

Most of the time my face was probably about a foot and a half to two feet away from the box. There were moments I was shoving my face right in there to get a good look at how the models were being covered with the primer. I was also experimenting with priming in black then using a brown spray paint to create an undertone over the entirety of those models. It did not work for me as the spray paint was too smooth for my purposes, but that was the explanation for one of the spray bottles. I always take out at least one can of either grae or white with me when priming black as well in case I decide at the last minute I want to preshade without having to crawl all the way back to my room then to the porch again.

I am not mad or upset the neighbor did this. It makes perfect sense to me how someone could perceive my actions as an attempt to get high. I do the same thing. One of the things I do on this blog is share my opinions. I take the information I have available to me and offer my viewpoint. It is extremely rare to have all information on a subject. Even if I did, my opinions are not facts. I realize this even though it does not always occur to me to state this each time I share an opinion. My opinions are my attempt to make sense of the pieces I do have at hand. I try to find more pieces when I realize I am missing pieces. I also like to share those pieces as my understanding changes with them. I try not to make demands or assume I know what is going on based on my perceptions, but my opinions are formed by them.

I am sharing the story to illustrate how we interpret what reality presents us with. Not once did any of the neighbors who passed by my porch inquire as to what I was doing. Neither did the person the office send by to see what I was doing. In fact, none of the people that passed me as I laid on the porch with my head shoved in a box of fresh paint uttered a single word to me. They saw what was in front of them and applied common sense in order to determine what the reality of the situation was.

I Do Love the CoX

Some of the pictures in this post are a little on the large size in full resolution. I am too lazy to change them. Also, all of the art was done by myself once upon a time and are of characters created by other players. The screenshots are of a couple of my characters.

Hex Girl

City of Heroes/Villains, or CoX as we called it once upon a time before ban warnings made that acronym unusable on the forums, was a game that practically consumed my life. The vast majority of the people in my life are either people I have met in the game, through groups associated with the game, or were introduced through people I met because of CoX. If you were to go through my list of Facebook friends, the largest group would be those I know because of this game with a distant second being people I went to school with followed by people that play Marvel games on Facebook, family, and then those I have met locally since moving to Fresno, CA twelve years ago.

Flux

Let's go back to January 2004. My school funding had fallen through in spite of my being disabled and on the Dean's List. I had no job at the time because I was on disability and unable to get around on my own so was taking online classes in hopes I could find some work to do from home. My disability was getting worse so I actually saw my academic career failing as both a blessing and a curse at the time. I am fairly certain now that I would not have been able to keep up, but I did have a strong start and nothing in my academic records at the time showed I was incapable of doing the work online.

Caesura

I was building a super hero themed MUD at the time. It was a project between semesters that I could construct over time and possibly use as hands on experience in game design and team management. I did not want a MUSH or a MUX or a MOO. I wanted a game where people could craft their own powers from hard coded bits instead of by simply describing what a power did every time it was used.

So I was working on some code when a friend asked me yet again over ICQ (digitized smoke signals) if I had tried World of Warcraft yet. I responded that I did not have the time, but promised I would get a copy. I then proceeded to spend the next couple of weeks hunting down a copy of World of Warcraft as it was apparently sold out everywhere.

 

I was in a local Walmart that February on another failed attempt to track down a copy of the elusive World of Warcraft. Sitting there on the shelf was a collector's edition copy of City of Heroes. Basically this meant a copy of the game with an included Heroclix figure, black and white comic book, a real manual, and in game glowing pink slide run power. Throw in the fact they were offering a free monthly comic with the subscription back then and I was sold. I told myself I was getting it for research purposes to make certain my MUD was not doing anything too closely related, but the real reason is I have been a comic book fan since before the time I was permitted to be a comic book fan.

Fraggle

For the next two years I did not buy another video game, miniature, or role playing product. I did not go to the theatre. I saved a metric bankton of money. My acrylic paints literally went to brick form in this time as I did not touch them and they were mostly the Citadel black flip top paints that never sealed properly. I continued to play CoX for many more years after that, but during those two years I played nothing else.

Yes, the game was fun, but it was the connections that kept me going. Even when I was not playing the game I would log into either the game or the forums to talk with people. I met so many wonderful people and the various little communities were vibrant with lives of their own.

Scurvy Dog and Scurvy Princess

CoX shut down in November of 2012. I do miss it even though I was not playing it much at the end. There are people still trying to resurrect it, recreate it, or build a spiritual successor. Some celebrities stepped forward publicly as having played the game in hopes that their influence might help the game remain open. Mercedes Lackey was particularly visible during this time, although she was far from being alone amongst all the voices.

I did join in the torch holding ceremonies at the end. The community I used to be a part of embraced me once again for a short time as I was again a part of it. This was a community that in the end came together not to protest the closure, but to remember what the game meant to them. It was our vigil for the end of our home and community. I do not hate NCSoft for their decision to close CoX. Neither do I understand it, but they did give us a few months to say goodbye.

Irresistible Force

Many people that played the game still share screenshots they had taken. Some of them seem to have hard drives full of screenshots. Going through my collection of pictures, I have one screenshot of my level fifty from the character select screen, a few of the second character I made for the game (the first was deleted early on), and a smattering of shots of other characters. I have some CoX art I have drawn, but most of it is of other people's characters. I am happy I took the time to make something for friends, but kind of wish I had taken the time to record some of my own memories as that is all they are now. Memories.

So what brought on this bout of nostalgia? There are screenshots and talk about the game shared to my Facebook feed practically every day. No, the trigger for this post was a spammer selling sunglasses that tagged a friend of mine I met in game.

Alt for Irresistible Force

This friend was shot in the back multiple times in 2011. As far as I am aware the police still do not know who shot him nor why. His family never attempted to take down his Facebook page and leave it there for those of use who knew him online. Some of my other friends have met him in person. Muad Dib could be an angry, yet passionate person that would speak up for anybody or against anything if he felt the need. We butted heads sometimes as we could both let passion blind us at times, but he had a good heart. Heck, he was practically all heart, both the good and the bad. He never tried to hide who he was when online and always, and I mean always spoke his mind.

My Oldest Character

It got me to thinking about other friends that I only met through the game or forums that left us before the game itself ended. I do not know how many people actually remember Malibu Sally, and most seem to hate her, but that bitch sure knew how to have some fun. Ascendant is another that is no longer with us. I never met Coyote as he was a member of the community before my time, but I did have the good fortune to meet his brother who only joined the community after hearing about the tribute to his brother in game.

My Level Fifty

It is all a bitter reminder that life is too short. I need to get out there and find new communities. I need to make some new friends. I need to live a little again. Thank you random sunglasses spammer for making me angry enough to wake up and think about life again.

Gender Swapping

There is a lot of discussion concerning people playing genders other than their own in games. Particularly video games when the player's own gender is available to them. It is a topic I have considered touching on in the past.

A recent article by Angela Murray on Gnome Stew about playing alternate genders in pen and paper roleplaying games made some good points and helped tip me over to typing out a blog post. I think her article raises some nice talking points especially concerning expectiations from others concerning playing a different gender in relation to playing other differences from those of the player. I won't touch on most of what she covered as I feel her article is worth a read, but I will brush against a couple of points she makes.

As far as pen and paper games go, I am more likely to play my own gender. I have played females and both are enjoyable. I would say the ratio of my male to female characters is somewhere around seven out of ten of them being male. The opposite is true in video games. The majority of my characters in video games are female. The ratio is higher than nine out of ten. In City of Heroes for instance I had over ninety characters (I deleted way more) and four of them were males. Even in Lord of the Rings Online my favourite Dwarf was named Deborah. For those unfamiliar with the game, there is no option for female Dwarves.

There are many flippant reasons people give. I for example oftentimes tell people it is cheaper than an operation. It still surprises me when some people that know me think I am being serious.

Many men joke around and say they play females in video games because it provides a better view. In some cases this is actually true. Females tend to be less broad so take up less screen realestate which is also one of the two reasons I tend to prefer shorter characters as well. Run animations being the other as characters tend to cover the same distance at the same speed and the taller they are the more it looks like they are running in slow motion, but that is a separate topic. My point here is there are advantages to being able to see around your character. I do not have a widescreen monitor, so the less space a character takes on my monitor the better.

Screen space is not my primary reason however. The evidence can be seen from when I was playing MUDs on a regular basis. I was closer to a fifty/fifty mix of active characters then. I did however spend more time playing the female characters.

When I play a character in any game, either in person or a digital format, I feel the need to act as the character would. People might start to begin to think of me as my character or my character as me. I am my own person separate from my characters, and they are their own individuals separate from me.

I find this separation is easier to do when face to face. Those games tend to last a few hours once or possibly twice a week at most. Those players get to see me outside of the character. It is easier to see where the character I play ends and I begin. There is a time when you are definitely in character, and there are times when you definitely are not. There is also time to interact with others under both circumstances.

This is harder for me when playing video games. People can easily spend twenty or more hours a week playing an MMO. That time is spent running around in the game in the skin of a character with no time spent for most people to get an opportunity to see you outside of your character(s). There is a huge difference between playing a character a few hours a week and getting to know the people behind the character ourside of the game itself, and playing a character in the same environment day in and day out. It is difficult to swing in and out of character when the situation does not shift between being in and out of character.

Because of this I feel I have to always be on when playing a male in a video game. There is this constant need on my part to play male characters so extreme there is no way other people could think that is how someone really is. My males in video games tend to become so extreme as to never be believable. I can not let off the throttle unless there is a chance for pure out of character interaction. This can be quite tiring both for myself and others.

I can relax and be myself when playing a female however because that level of separation does exist. It is generally easier for others to separate their concept of the character from their concept of the player when the gender is swapped in a video game. Sure, I have to remind people from time to time that I am male in order to keep that separation going in their mind, but it is easier to be myself and not have people think me and my character are the same person. Sometimes this is as simple as switching pronouns when acting as my character or speaking as myself. Other times it requires me to straight up tell someone again and again. I will sometimes forget to give reminders and it can become rather awkward because people will associate me with the character where with tabletop gaming it is more likely to have people associate the character with me. Even with reminders I still experience reactions in games when playing a female character that I have not as a male character, and never in a tabletop game, but I still get to be myself.

I am sorry there is no short, simple explanation outside of "I am more comfortable playing a female." That answer is very easy to interpret in termss other than how I mean it so is not the short answer I like to give so you get this novel instead.