Dan

It’s happening again, I can see it: The GAP. Days go by, no blog posts get written… I’ve been working on this one in fits and starts, and you will see why.

Imagine something like lycanthropy, but with video games. That’s right, people: I have a disease.

I’ve been into computer games since about the time our family bought our first computer, roughly 1994. It had an Intel 486 CPU at 33 MHz, four megs of RAM, and a 240-meg hard drive whose capacity we doubled with the DOS Doublespace tool, rendering disk access on that machine atrociously slow.

It didn’t really help, either, because pretty soon there was less than a floppy disk’s-worth free space on the drive, and I had to find a game to delete for every new one I wanted to install. For further context, I remember when Syndicate Wars came out, its install size (if you didn’t want to use the CD) was 240 MB - the size of my entire hard drive! I couldn’t fathom that.

The computer I’m writing this on could hold over fourteen-hundred copies of that game. I’ll come back to that some other time, though.

Part of the reason I loved the games being released for MS-DOS back in the mid-nineties was I had friends who loved them too, and that meant we could sit around the library in the ninth grade trading fictional war stories instead of working on our Language Arts assignments. Chris and I both have the same fond memories, since we usually played side-by-side at his (far superior) computer: of games like the original Command & Conquer, getting stuck in the infuriating Space Quest 6, experiencing a commando raid in one of the earliest CG-rendered cutscenes in U.S.S. Ticonderoga, overheating in Mechwarrior 2 because we couldn’t resist firing an alpha strike with six linked particle-projection cannons… and racing to see who could reach the end of Betrayal at Krondor first, earning that game the top spot on the list of video games we’ll discuss in exacting detail no less than fifteen years later.

Back then, as now, I had the bad habit of buying any game that seemed interesting, whether I’d end up playing it or not. So their CD-ROMs gathered dust for a long time before I broke into Ultima VIII: Pagan, Syndicate Plus, Master of Orion, and X-COM: UFO Defense. A lot of those games were too difficult for the young and impatient gamer that I was in grade school, and at times I wish I could go back and give them another try.

Thanks to software emulation, this is one wretched bloodthirst that I can indulge.

DOSBox is my go-to emulator when I feel the need to bust out a game that’s half as old as I am, and Boxer - available only for the Mac, sorry - is hands-down the best implementation of a DOSBox frontend I’ve ever seen or, indeed, can even imagine.

So when I began to idly remember X-Com: UFO Defense the other day, a complex, squad-based tactical strategy game that I could never get anywhere in when I first acquired it, I looked up a walkthrough and had my appetite whetted for a little classic time-wasting.

I’ve been hypothalamus-deep in base building, UFO-intercepting, plasma-weapon-researching, and sending fragile commandos to their untimely deaths at the hands of extraterrestrial murderers ever since.

This forks a couple of other discussions: about “obsolete” technology, and about (though the connection may not be obvious) ideas vs. their execution. I’ll get started on those posts ASAP…

Right after this turn.

What am I doing?

I’m “blogging”, you might tell me. I might then reasonably ask you what the fuck that means. It means I’m writing a post in my weblog, a new mechanism for interpersonal communication. When I say new, I mean it’s maybe ten years old, tops. Before that there were no blogs, was no such thing as blogging, yet blogs are almost the hoary old man of internet communication.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about Facebook and Twitter. And that’s good, because what I want to talk about here assumes that you know what they are. If not, well, ask the kids, gramps.

What I want to talk about is verbs. I’m blogging - that’s the thing I’m doing. But that thing, that verb, didn’t exist when I was in high school. I couldn’t have done that thing back then, couldn’t have blogged the way I could have walked, spat, eaten, or slept.

And in the last few years I’ve become able to do a bunch more things, too. I can Facebook, for instance.

The first time I heard “Facebook” used as a verb, I was standing in line at the Liquor Mart. The girl standing in front of me had realized that the girl standing in front of her was a long-lost friend and, long story short, she said that she would “Facebook [her friend]” when she got home.

At the time, this violent punch to the solar plexus of English caused me to bleed freely from my mouth and ears. But now I can hear about how people Facebooked - and can even Facebook myself - with only mild spasms.

As Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) once said: “verbing weirds language.” And I just couldn’t stand for it. But the reasoning that’s kept me warm and half-sane in the endless reaches of the night is that, eventually, the noun for any communication medium becomes the verb that describes its use.

I phone people all the time. Sometimes, I mail them (or, more accurately, they mail me bills and envelopes that read You have already been approved!) And, I imagine, one nineteenth-century gentleman might inform another that he telegraphed his bank as soon as he made the deposit. I mean, right? At some point, someone decided that “I sent a telegraph to” took way too long to say, and noun became verb. Right?

It’s the easiest thing in the world, the most natural, to assume that the foibles of your generation have never manifested themselves before. Oh, we’re the first generation to deal with accusations that violence in the popular media causes violence in the real world. It’s like slipping into a comfortable pair of slacks. But every generation does that, all the time, forever, and it’s stupid.

So it only seems reasonable to assume that verbing our methods of communication has always been the way of humankind. That it’s not just indicative of a seething void whose cold, cold black emptiness undulates nauseously just below the delicate surface of our collective consciousness.

We’re not all just hopeless idiots, senselessly mangling the English language through ignorance and laziness, right?

Come to think of it, verbing doesn’t just affect the communications media. I Google things all the time. Hell, I even Eye-Em-Dee-Bee actors and directors, and that’s way harder to say.

Please tell me we’ve always done this. Could be that it’s more apparent in the modern day because so many of the tools and services we use are proper nouns. Google became the industry-leading search engine, so its name is synonymous with searching for things on the internet. Same deal with YouTube and showing all your friends that goddamn video with Andy Samberg and T-Pain on the boat. They’re the 21st-century version of how you say Kleenex when you mean “facial tissue” and rum ‘n’ Coke when you mean “rum and any syrupy, caramel-coloured, carbonated beverage”.

Twitter, as ambivalent as I am about belonging to another “friendship network” (I really think it’s of more value for connecting celebrities - at all levels of popularity - with their fans), is actually refreshing when it comes to verbosinization: making a post on the Twitter service is called “tweeting”, which, believe it or not, was already a verb - albeit one traditionally reserved for birds.

When you’re a hardcore English geek, it’s hard to accept that the language you adore can change, and that the forerunners of that evolution are the same goddamned wild animals that say things like “c u 2nite @ 8!!!” via the Short Message Service. But just as Trekkies must ultimately bow before their new master - that guy who made Lost - I must blog, Google, text, Facebook, IM (pronounced “im”), and YouTube… and love it.

And seriously, guys, that new Star Trek looks awesome.

Something about the lottery (the one where you win money, not the one where they kill you with rocks) is deeply depressing to me. It’s not just the futility - the whole “tax on people who don’t understand statistics” thing - though that’s a part of it. It has more to do with people’s attitudes.

I keep meeting people, people like me, in the same comfortable straits that I am, that consider the lottery a panacea. If only they could win the lottery, they say, they’d finally be able to enjoy their life. I’m not talking about sweatshop workers sewing four-hundred designer sweaters a day, or miners hacking at the walls in a cramped, dark, dangerous tunnel, but software developers. People who are, by any measure, pretty successful. Working jobs that frequently offer flexible hours and pay large amounts of money for interesting, creative work.

Shouldn’t that be enough to keep anyone happy?

The worst is when entire offices all pitch in a couple bucks to play the lottery every week. What does that say about the business as a whole, exactly, when all your employees are carrying around this silly little fantasy that they might someday be able to tell you to fuck off before they drive across town and trade their Honda in for a Mercedes SL600 AMG?

My first job out of school, things were going downhill for a while before I left. We had a little team of maybe half a dozen people, and we were good at our jobs, we knew it, but were constantly undercut and undervalued by management. So we started pitching in two bucks every week, so that when we’d all take off mid-afternoon to get coffee we could brag about what we’d do with our share of the millions.

But that was an act of desperation, wasn’t it? Not business as usual…

But it seems to happen in lots of offices. Your job sucks, I guess, and here’s the only way out you can imagine. Why don’t you find a better job? Why don’t you find something you’d do even if you won the lottery, something you’re passionate about, and try to make a living doing that?

Am I being intolerant?

Just because I believe in making my living doing something I truly want to do - and not just something at which I’m capable of performing - does that mean the same thing is the right, the proper and correct way, for everyone? Maybe that’s just a little bit self-righteous.

But the idea that work is something you just tolerate - for a third of your waking life - so that you can grope at your real passions with whatever energy you have left, that’s never sat well with me. So, alright, I also want something better to come along. You can either buy a ticket every week and hope for the entropy of the universe to deliver what you’re waiting for, or your can try to build it yourself. The latter is my lottery ticket.

I wasted all coherent thought on that last post, so please excuse the title of this one. But it seems to me that, as you’re typing up a post in Wordpress, you need to be careful when you hit the Blockquote button. If you hit the button and paste in some text - like the quote from Mark Waid’s article above (or below, I guess it depends in what temporal order you’re reading these) - and then you want to continue with your own text, there’s a problem.

How do you end the blockquote?

I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Clicking the button again didn’t deactivate Blockquote mode, and going into HTML view and force-ending the <blockquote> tag didn’t work, either.

The solution was to wipe out Mark’s text, paste it back in with normal formatting, write the paragraph following it, then go back and select his text and apply the BQ.

Is this weak sauce, or am I just missing something?

And why is it that every apartment I’ve ever lived in has included an upstairs neighbor that howls, or bellows, or does any ungodly thing other than be silent when it’s the middle of the night?

Enough! Save me, Wordpress. Only you can. To bed!

I’m not going to say it’s a good thing I was surfing instead of writing tonight, but this post by comic-industry veteran Mark Waid helped me clear out some mental baggage. Says Mark:

Anyway, I had six pages. About 28, 30 panels. And it took me longer to write the first half of that script than it has anything else to this day, because by the time you set up the problem (“We need a new coach!”), show how desperate the staff gets once the first few candidates prove unsatisfactory, ramp up the tension, and introduce the woman in the wheelchair, you’re already on page three. Of six.

And while the resultant solution (and lesson) is no doubt obvious to the experienced among you, it was only when I sweated my way into it that I realized one of the most fundamental rules of comics storytelling: start the story as late as possible.

I like to write short, and one of the reasons is all that extra stuff bores me. If Julia has a big job interview tomorrow morning, and in my head I’m thinking “okay, I need to write her getting up, being anxious, trying to figure out what to wear… blah blah blah waiting room blah ten-year-old copy of MacLean’s magazine blah okay now she’s in Mr. Warthrop’s office.”, that’s when I get blocked.

Lately I’ve been revisiting an old habit: I’ll start a short story, it looks promising, and then… I stop writing it. Instead, I just outline one of the other ideas I have every ten minutes. I do that because outlining is easy and writing the bits in between the points on your outline is the hard part. It’s, you know, the part that takes work. But Mark states the solution.

Don’t write the boring parts.

Face it, if a passage is boring to you, the writer, you can’t imagine a cool way to have Julia pick the shoes and skirt and blouse and jacket she’s going to wear to her interview… well, it won’t be interesting to your readers, either. Why have it in there at all? Our brains are, if nothing else, machines for filling in the cracks. Allude to Julia’s feet, sore even after twenty minutes sitting down in the waiting room, and we can all figure out for ourselves that she put on the wrong pair of shoes that morning.

About the latest short story, I realized I’d had an idea of what the next thing that happened was, and I wasn’t interested in it, so I wasn’t writing it. Instead, why don’t I just start as late into the scene as possible - in this case, the next scene. Show Julia at the end of her first day on the job, snooping in her boss’s files. Unless something important happened during the job interview - and it’s always possible to fill those details in later, if necessary - just let the reader imagine the boring parts.

Thanks, Mark. If it weren’t two in the morning, I’d get to work at once…

Tomorrow, then.

Here’s a tip for playing Twilight Imperium:

Start at noon. Especially if you’re playing with seven people.

As I will reveal in subsequent posts, I love fabulously-complex strategy board games. I have a small group of friends in which we collect them - I’m not talking about Snakes & Ladders or Monopoly, I’m talking about the kind of games you’ll find on boardgamegeek.com.

We tend to fit games into tiers, based on complexity. Settlers of Catan is on a lower tier, being simple enough that you could teach it to the average (non-complex-systems-devouring-geek) person pretty quickly. Twilight Imperium, on the other hand, is at the top of the list: I have yet to encounter a more-complicated game, both in terms of pieces and information to track, and the number of concepts involved.

This is space conquest with diplomacy, trade, warfare, and objectives - both public and secret - that move you closer to victory. Basically like playing Master of Orion on a table.

Let me put this in perspective:

We began at four-thirty this afternoon. We called the game at midnight. That’s about 7.5 hours. The game ends when a player earns ten victory points, and when we quit the lead player had five. So the game could have gone to 10-12 hours, easily.

Hence why I say start at noon. I was eager to keep the game going, but even I was done once the clock struck midnight.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t in a position to win, either (unless perhaps we did have another five hours to go). I was playing a militaristic race, and making peace with my neighbors turned out to be a mistake - I should have slaughtered them right away, because by the time I had the military force to strike further across the board, I was too far behind for it to win me the game.

But enough about me. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed while playing these complex games:

The difficult part of playing a complicated game with five or more people, one of those games where a lot of thought, choice, and strategy go into each player’s turn, is that the period between each of your turns is so long that all but the most-focused players’ minds wander. You end up with half the players chattering while one person is cogitating, and those people end up uncertain about how the game’s state has changed, and as a result the game takes even longer.

I encounter this in Dungeons & Dragons, too. Especially when battles wear into an hour or longer, people stop paying attention to turns other than their own, and it makes team cohesion pretty difficult. I’m not sure what the answer is, but we did note one interesting exception:

Arkham Horror. This is a rare game that’s completely co-operative: it’s every player together versus the game itself, and either we all win, or we all lose (and are devoured, along with the city of Arkham, by sanity-shattering horrors from beyond space and time). In Arkham, everybody advises each other on what to do on their turn, and strategies are devised as a group. To put it another way, every player’s turn is, to some extent, your turn also - it’s hard to stop paying attention. This means that, even though the game can run up to six hours, it doesn’t seem to drag as much (or at least not as quickly) as games where you’re waiting fifteen minutes for a chance to act.

More on games later. Probably on Good Friday, when I get to take off my Dungeon Master hat and roll some twenties….

Dammit, I’m doing it again: Every time I’ve started a blog, I post a couple of times and then… nothing. And every time I start again, I say this time it will be different.

Well, this time I mean it. I’m planting my battle standard, motherfuckers, and in the name of Write Something Every Day I am going to find something to blog about at least five times a week.

It might be the cool idea I have for the D&D character I’m rolling (Dwarven Warlord, baby), or a thought about writing, or a bit of flash fiction, an amusing haiku, or some kind of half-baked analysis of my own inscrutable inner workings, but it will be something.

Let a new age begin, then, in this place, here. A new age for all of us: an age of hope.