Even though I haven’t played in ages, D&D has always been a pretty important part of my life.  I played online in mIRC chat rooms and on various messageboards while I was in college, but it never felt the same.  I liked it, but it was like a grocery store cupcake compared to homemade–edible, but not nearly as good.

I remember that first character far better than the online ones in between.  Having her on paper made her more real, I think.  Her name was Nixie.  She was half aquatic-elf, which made perfect sense if you knew that her mother was a former pirate-turned-bounty-hunter who had attracted a male aquatic-elf patron.  He would follow the ship around and bring them good fortune.  When Nixie’s mother was knocked overboard in a heated battle, he saved her by taking her to one of those handy Enchanted Underwater Grottos of Safe Breathing.  When she got back to land, she was knocked up.  Nixie was the result.  She joined her mother on ship as soon as she was old enough, and was raised in armor and with a sword in her hand.  Nixie had silver hair, with one green eye and one blue eye.  If she sounds like something a fourteen-year-old would come up with, you would be correct.

Nixie was a fighter.  She started out with six hit points, leather armor, a short sword and a longbow.  She nearly died in her first fight because she had six goddamn hit points.  (She got better.)  On another occasion, she managed to critically miss the target and accidentally shoot herself with a bow and arrow for half of her total health.  She got into a lot of trouble, but she always managed to survive.

Playing yesterday brought back many of those memories, and helped to create new ones.  My boyfriend, younger brother, and younger brother’s girlfriend all joined me.  It was the first time any of them had played D&D, and they all loved it.  I think 4th Edition is a really solid system for first-timers and old-timers alike.  It took them a couple of rounds to get the hang of the combat system and then we were off and running.  (Or rolling, if you like the pun.)  Arrows were shot, spells were slung, swords were slashed and a good time was had by all.

And yes, it turned out I could throw a rock at the kobold.  And I killed it with said rock, too.  Yeah!  Suck it, kobolds!

Girl One:  So the second step is to pick some heroes for yourself, and they’re not supposed to be realistic heroes.  They can be anyone you choose.

Girl Two:  Oh?

Girl One:  So I picked Frederick Douglass, because I really admire him, and the Powerpuff Girls, because they’re awesome.

Girl Two:  Good choices!

Girl One:  Yeah, except the third step is to imagine your heroes having a conversation about you.

Girl Two:  *laughter*

Girl One:  Yeah, so one of my heroes is going to be all, “Emancipation!” and the others are going to be like, “PUPPIES!”

* * * * * * * * *

Conversation Two. “An Altercation I Had With A Drunk,” presented in D&D style.

You are standing on on a street corner under an awning to protect you from the rain.  You recently bid farewell to your adventuring knitting group.  As you wait there, you sense a presence behind you.  A Drunken Creep has walked up to you!  Roll for initiative!

You roll 18!  Drunken Creep rolls 22!  Drunken Creep attacks first!

Drunken Creep uses “Attempted Seduction!”  He rolls a 15 vs Reflex!

“You have the most beautiful butt I’ve ever seen.”

However, his Charisma Modifier is -5 due to his drunkeness and he slurs his words, making his actual attack roll only 10.  10 does not hit your Reflex!  It’s your turn to attack!  You unleash “Furious Guilt!”  You roll a natural 20!  Critical hit!

“What makes you think that’s an appropriate thing to say to me?”

Drunken Creep is stunned by your attack!  He apologizes, twice.  You use “Intimidating Glare!”  You roll a 19 vs Will.  You hit!  Drunken Creep is defeated and walks away in shame.

Out of initiative.

* * * * * * * * *

Third Conversation.  Chris vs. An Aggressive Panhandler.

Chris and I are waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change.   A man walks up to us and asks us if we can spare any change.  We apologize and say no, we don’t have any.  (This is the truth.  We really don’t carry cash, so anyone asking us for spare change is going to be pretty disappointed even if we do pull out our wallets.)  The man starts to walk away, then turns around and snarkily asks, “Well, even if you don’t have any change to spare, can you still give me some?”

Chris retorts, “I don’t have any change.  If I had any, I might have given it to you, but I wouldn’t now because you’re being pretty annoying.”

Then the light changed, and we went on our way.  The moral of the story is that aggressive panhandlers don’t even get hypothetical spare change, so…  Er…  Don’t be an aggressive panhandler, I guess.

I realize that at this point I am probably one of the few people in the world who still cares/cared about avoiding spoilers for Bioshock, but I feel the need to put that spoiler space there anyway.

I finished Bioshock last night.  I didn’t actually intend to beat the game, though I knew I was getting pretty close.  (Which is almost exactly what happened when I beat Mass Effect, actually…)  I just picked up the controller for a couple hours of gaming and when those hours were over, the game was over as well.

Beating a game is a weird experience for me, possible because I don’t do it very often.  Whenever I finish a game, I’m left with a sense of elation and sadness at the same time.  I feel almost…  Empty.  It’s like Christmas afternoon.  The thing that I’ve been looking forward to and working toward for so long is finally over, and now I don’t know what to do with my time.  Bioshock was a very awesome, creepy, well-written experience that I don’t get to look forward to anymore, and that’s a sad feeling.

As for the game itself, I don’t feel the need to review it in a whole lot of depth since I’m way behind the times and plenty of other people have done that, but I am going to talk about the effect it had on me.  First of all, I really wasn’t sure how far I’d get through it to begin with.  I’m not a shooter player.  I have terrible aim, to be quite honest, and my reflexes are not the most amazing.  Bishock handled that well by letting me beat people with a wrench to start out with, something that I can do all day long.  Then it let me electrocute them and hit them with the wrench.  Then it let me light them on fire, or freeze them, or shoot bees out of my hand at them.  (As a beekeeper’s daughter, I quite enjoyed that last one.)  There were times when I found myself getting a little sick of running and shooting at things, and those were times when the game had me do something else for a little while to keep me interested.  And the story!  Finding little tidbits of Rapture’s past on recordings was addictive.  I know I didn’t get all the tapes, but the tapes I did find made the whole world more tragic one tape at a time.  A woman comes down to find a better life for her daughter, only to have her daughter taken away and turned into a Little Sister.  A physician seeks to help people and has his mind twisted by the very substance that allowed him such new surgical techniques.  Rapture was a city founded on selfish, flawed ideals from the start, but that wasn’t the fault of the people who came seeking a dream and found a nightmare.  Oh, no, that was all Andrew Ryan’s fault.

One of the things I found impressive was how thoroughly the game made me hate Ryan.  By the time I got to the confrontation with him, I desperately wanted to kick his teeth in.  He was a selfish, evil man who cared more about his Objectivist ideals than the suffering of the people in his city.  I was…  Disappointed that I didn’t get to beat the shit out of him on my terms.  I hated him so much it was almost frustrating to find I’d been manipulated.  (I mean, I didn’t have a choice inside the strictures of the game design, but it was still jarring.)  I was still pretty satisfied with the result, but not nearly as satisfied as I was after I beat Fontaine.

Oh, Fontaine.  Honestly, if you hadn’t tried to kill me  immediately after I killed Ryan for you, I’d have been happy to leave Rapture with no real hard feelings.  But you just had to go and betray me, after all the work I did…  So I had to come kick your face in with Tenenbaum’s help.  Oh, sure, you tried to convince me that she’d betray me just like you did…  But really.  She’s the only character who hadn’t tried to kill me yet, and was in fact actively helpful.  Honestly, I expected that she’d betray me at some point (and was pleasantly surprised when she did not) but I figured it was smarter to stick with the person that wasn’t actively trying to kill me than to trust the person who was.  Silly Fontaine.  When the Little Sisters swarmed you at the end, I actually yelled at them to kick your ass for me.

Speaking of the Little Sisters, I saved them.  Every last one.  And can I just give props to the developers for showing them graduating from college in the ending montage?  A lot of media makes getting married and having kids the end-all and be-all of happiness and success for women, and I was thrilled to see getting a higher education included in that ending.  Yes, I notice these things because I am a dork.  College graduates, represent!

To sum up, Bioshock is awesome.  I am very glad I played it, and I’ll pick up the sequel as well.  You know.  Eventually.  Probably two years after everyone else has already played it.

That’s just how I roll.

We traipsed around the house that morning, giggling with excitement.  I trailed behind my brothers, still with no idea what we were finding but just as excited as they were.  Each new piece came with another clue directing us to the location of the next.  Eventually, we sat in the living room, all the pieces collected and the gift revealed.

It was a Nintendo Entertainment System.  It came with Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros.  It was blocky and gray, hardly the most visually exciting gift to look at, but from the reaction of my brothers I knew it was going to be something totally amazing.  (And possibly involving unicorns.)  I had no idea at that point that the NES was going to play a role in determining the direction of my life.  It was the first droplet to fall, the beginning of what would eventually become a trickle, then a stream, then a river.

The only game I actually played on that console was Duck Hunt, and I cheated by sitting less than six inches away from the TV and just blasted everything that moved.  To this day, I’ve never beaten the first level in Super Mario Bros.  I watched my brothers, though, and I was entranced.  I can remember the sound of Yoshi eating a turtle and it’s like someone’s playing the game right next to me.  Those blips and bloops had a kind of charm to them, and they’re as much a part of my childhood as our dog Sparkles and my school friends and the books I read.  They were the catalyst, and my current career is the result.

It wasn’t a direct path, of course.  More on that later.

*I looked up when the NES bundle with SMB and Duck Hunt came out.  It was 1988, so the youngest I could have possibly been was 3.  That sounds about right.

SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!

That something was W00tstock.  W00tstock v2.0, if you want to be specific.  As the show opened, Wil Wheaton informed us that the show was still in Beta, and that if we found any bugs we should log them in the Bugzilla.  (This was probably more funny to me than it was to Chris.  Ahhh, developer jokes.)  It was three hours of hilarity.  Pure geeky hilarity.  It’s a bit difficult to describe the show.  It wasn’t a concert, it wasn’t stand-up comedy, and it wasn’t a play.  It was more of a variety show.  An incredibly esoteric variety show.  Trust me, while it was very awesome (and if you are a geek, you should go right now and try to request a show for your area), it is not something to which you should bring a non-geek friend or guest.  They’d certainly find some of it quite entertaining, but most of the humor would be lost on the geek-adjacent.

An example:

If there’s another show where you get to see two women playing Conjunction Junction on one ukulele, backed up by Jason Finn of the Presidents of the United States of America and featuring Wil Wheaton, I’ve certainly never heard of it.  (And if you know of it, please!  Tell me what the show is!  I want to see it!)

In addition to things like the above, we also were treated to a (not entirely SFW) Reading of the Book of Enforcement by Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse.  Septo wields the banhammer over at Microsoft, and we should all take a moment to be thankful that he exists.

I laughed so hard I nearly cried.

In summation:  W00tstock is amazing.  Seriously awesome.  Well worth seeing.  If you live in Chicago or Minneapolis, you still have time to get tickets for those shows!  And you should!

1.  Normal people think you’re crazy for doing either.

With video games, people think you’re crazy for wasting your time doing something meant for kids.  With knitting, people think you’re crazy for making something you could buy in a store.  Either way, you’re the crazy one for doing something you enjoy, instead of whatever other people are doing.

2.  They both sound like complete gibberish to people who don’t understand them.

This is a quote from one of my posts about Mass Effect:

The pathing is nice as well, which is something that is usually the bane of my existence in games with companion AI characters.  They stay out of my way and rarely trap me in a corner, and when they do I can order them to move.  The only problem is that my giant tank teammate has a tendency to bogart the cover when we’re all behind a big crate.

This is a completely different language from what most people use.  Do you think my mom would understand what that meant?  Would your mom?  (Maybe.  I don’t know your mom.)

This is a quote from the description of the sock pattern I wrote and published:

Knee high, with a flap heel and calf gussets that flow naturally out of the lace pattern, these socks were worked from the toe-up two at a time on a circular needle using Magic Loop. This pattern assumes knowledge of Magic Loop, short rows, the KFB increase and m1 increases, and basic lace.

Do you understand what that meant?

3.  They both sometimes require grinding.

You know what grinding is in a video game: doing the same thing over and over again to gain equipment or experience in order to progress.  You know what I had to do to knit this sweater?

One.  Single.  Stitch.  Over and over and over and over, to gain length on the sweater pieces so I could progress toward having a finished sweater.  If that’s not grinding, I’m not sure what is.

4.  They both have annoying fanboys.

If you think that the arguments between xBox fanboys and Sony fanboys are bad, trust me.  They’ve got nothing on the manmade fibers vs natural fibers debate.

5.  Despite the fanboys, it’s pretty awesome when a big group of them get together.

PAX is a video game and geek culture convention.  It’s a big celebration of what makes all of us dorks, and that brings us together.

In 2009, a couple of very awesome knitters named Tina Newton and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee created Sock Summit.  It was a three-day convention just about knitting socks.  There were 1800 registered attendees, which doesn’t sound like a lot…  But 30,000 people tried to register for it.  They crashed the registration servers.  I wasn’t able to attend, sadly, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and they’re back for 2011.

When people who have a shared interest are able to share it in person, it’s almost always a magical occasion.  I am psyched for PAX this year.

Hopefully this time I won’t catch Swine Flu.

This actually has me thinking, though.  In D&D, if you go gallivanting off into the snowy mountains without the proper gear, the DM will let your ass freeze to death.  If you don’t have food and water, and remember to eat it, you will starve.  There are many, many ways to screw yourself over in D&D, which will hopefully learn you a lesson about preparing properly.  Are there any video games with the same consequences?  I’ve played Planescape: Torment, which is based heavily in D&D for its rule system, but you still never have to eat, or worry about the cold or the heat.  I’d be interested in playing a game where the environmental effects atually effect the environment.  The ground is slippery when it rains, icy when it snows.  One where the player would actually have to pay attention to her surroundings in order to stay healthy and hale.

However, such a game would probably be a pain in the ass to make, so I’m not holding my breath.  Just shivering.  Always shivering.

The thing is, sometimes as a gamer, you don’t want innovative.  You don’t want something that breaks new and strange ground.  Sometimes you just want to sit down with a game type you love, understand, and enjoy playing.  It’s comfortable and fun and recognizable.  I call this Mac and Cheese gaming.  Let me explain.

Food can be an amazing thing that exposes you to new cultures and flavors.  It can combine flavors in new and interesting ways.  It can be prepared in an incredibly variety of fashions.  Food can make you glad to be alive or make you kinda wish you were dead.  But sometimes, for all the marvelous, amazing, fancy things that can be done with food…  Sometimes you just want to sit down with a bowl of mac and cheese.  Good, creamy, rich mac and cheese.  Now, you don’t want bad mac and cheese.  You want the pasta to be cooked just al dente, and the cheese sauce should be the right consistency, not too thick or too thin.  There should be just enough cheese in the sauce that it has a cheesy richness, but not so much that the sauce breaks or get grainy.  Mac and cheese, cooked just right, is a wonderful thing.

When I sit down to play some Zelda, I want some Mac and Cheese gaming.  Is Twilight Princess amazingly innovative or mind-blowing?  No.  But it is delicious, and it’s just right for me.

… shit, now I want mac and cheese and we have no pasta.  Thanks a lot, blog.  I blame you for this.

Games start with a GDD, or Game Design Document.  Games that do not start with a GDD are pretty much doomed to fail, because they will have no concrete guidance on what game they are making.  The GDD contains story and character information, but it also contains much more than that.  A GDD will describe what genre the game falls into.  It will describe gameplay decisions and the consequences of those decisions.  It will describe character movement, enemy types, weapons, and puzzles.  It will contain descriptions of the levels, and the actions the player will need to perform in order to progress through said levels.  A GDD is the game, albeit in a 2-d, non-interactive form.

GDDs are important for both the developer and the publisher.  They’re used to pitch games to publishers, so both parties understand exactly what kind of game is being discussed.  The GDD will of course be amended and altered over the course of the project, but it’s still a very vital starting point.

The GDD for Grim Fandango can actually be downloaded in PDF form from here.  It’s worth a read for aspiring designers.