Your childhood is too fragile
The awfulness of this beast now makes him no less of an adorable kitten back then.
Being a fan of Transformers insulated me pretty well. I don’t mean a casual fan that didn’t realize the franchise had run pretty much continuously in one form or another since 1984, the generation that played with the toys as kids and then realized that Michael Bay was making a movie based on that franchise. I mean that I was a fan as soon as I was old enough to understand what the show was. I wrote a long string of fanfics about stuff during Beast Wars. I was a big fan.
So I sure as hell was disappointed when the film turned out to be a terrible cluster of explosions and bland, ignorable characters. But I also knew the difference between that and childhood ruination, which would be impossible without the aid of a multi-directional time machine.
I’m not saying that this franchise and the characters it contained were not childhood icons, because they totally were. I’m saying that the internet is full of people who have either never ended their childhoods or have some really weird ideas about how things happening now would affect their younger selves. If your childhood is being ruined by a modern remake of something you enjoyed when you were younger? Your childhood is way too fragile.
Game farts
Just because it was an easy way to print money once doesn’t mean it will be forever.
By most of the accounts I’ve read, H1Z1 is not a particularly fun game to play unless you like DayZ, in which case it’s still not a very fun game to play because it’s a weak copy of DayZ. Which in and of itself is fine. Sometimes a game just doesn’t turn out to be all that fun, you try it out and it turns out the idea didn’t gel well or it was too similar to its source or whatever.
What makes this seem odd to me is that the game is coming from Sony Online Entertainment, which as a studio does not exactly have a shallow bankroll. I’m not even talking about whether or not it’s a studio that can produce great games, I’m talking about the fact that as a studio it could afford to let this die on the vine.
I don’t want to say that the weirdest part of the past several years has been watching games move into earlier and earlier sales for “early access.” But what surprises me is that increasingly, it’s not the little indie studio that needs cash now before the workstations get repossessed. It’s the huge companies that can, legitimately, axe a project on the basis that it’s not very fun to play after all.
Telling Stories: Don’t be so hard on your character
Don’t be hard on your roleplaying characters.
I don’t mean this in the sense that you should give them all whatever they want and make their lives uninterrupted parades of joy, because that shit is boring. No one wants that. Your characters should constantly be facing hardship, struggling, getting knocked down and getting up again. In that sense, you should be brutal to your characters, relentlessly hard on them, unceasingly on-point about what they’re doing right or wrong.
No, what I mean is that you shouldn’t be so hard on the character you made. And yourself, by extension. Don’t berate yourself because your character isn’t as good as they could be, even if your original concept was as gut-shatteringly stupid as “Goku but in World of Warcraft.” Don’t beat yourself up over poor early roleplaying or changing your character over time or having to toss out some retcons here and there or any of the above.
Today and yesterday
Boy, this game was going to be super important and a long-runner until five seconds after it launched and no one cared.
Pop quiz, folks: who can tell me the five nominees and the winner of the 56th Academy Award for Best Picture? No using Google. These were the five best things to come out in the year of my birth, right?
I’m going to guess that you either failed that test or immediately said “this is stupid” and skipped on to the next line, both of which are completely legitimate things to do. Because if you can’t think of the answer… well, obviously the five would-be best movies of 1983 didn’t really stick in your memory, did they? They might have been important at the time, but they might not have lived up to the test of time.
I’m hard-pressed to tell you the best games of 2014, but I have no problem telling you a bunch of games that are still worth playing today with no regard for release date. And games have come and gone on that list over the years, because the truest test of quality is one you only see in hindsight. They’re what keeps being worthwhile years later, and sometimes it seems almost arbitrary what gets immortalized and what gets forgotten.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 