Telling Stories: Sexuality without the skeevies

I’ve said before that sexuality is part of roleplaying, because it is. It’s part of the human condition, it’s a valid thing to explore in roleplaying, and it’s going to happen anyway. But there’s a line between involving sexuality in your roleplaying and making it the sort of involvement that makes everyone around you look at you with narrowed eyes and intense discomfort.

This has come up a fair bit in the Final Fantasy XIV community of late, for kind of disturbing reasons that serve as an excellent highlight of the issue. Because there’s a race of adults that are clearly meant to look like human toddlers… who are also very definitely sexually mature. Which raises a lot of uncomfortable questions about the characters being played in the real world by adult humans.

Fantasy is, of course, fantasy. But it’s useful to understand how fantasy lines up with and can be influenced by reality, and to understand why one might make the other far more uncomfortable. It’s important to have sexuality as a component in roleplaying, but it’s also important to do so in such a way that no one gets disturbed by it.

04/02/2015

in Craziness, Fandom, Gaming Culture
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April foolishness

Which one contains the real news story?

I’m writing this before my favorite holiday on the Internet has happened, but you’ll be reading it afterwards. Yes, Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year by far, but my favorite time to be online is April Fools’ Day. I absolutely adore seeing people be creative with elaborate, amusing, and entirely absurd jokes centered around games, online culture, and our general tendency to take everything far more seriously than is entirely healthy.

I especially like all of the various gags put forth by MMO companies, but you probably would guess that.

Oddly, I also see a lot of people posting about how much they hate the day, which strikes me as counterproductive. Literally all of the skills you acquire on April 1st are applicable to the online environment year-round. Part of the fun of the day, I find, is the fact that almost everything you’ll see online is explicitly a joke… but it’s never a joke you can just outright ignore, because it has elements of truth. It forces you to do a critical reading of everything you see, which is something you should be doing anyhow.

03/30/2015

Demo Driver 8: Just Get Through

Assume everything on every map will kill you.

In the oldest days of video games, this is what it was all about. We didn’t get an introduction to what we were doing. There were no explanations. If you were very lucky, there was an ending screen or two that tied everything that you had done into some sort of overarching narrative. More often than not, though, what you had was games clearly from the same food group as Just Get Through, challenges without context.

This is made somewhat more forgivable when you consider that the game is a one-person effort, and even more so when you admit, however grudgingly, that the game does a more than halfway decent job of living up to the spirit of what made older games fun without being tied into nostalgia or the trappings of the games. You start out by spawning in the middle of a cavern network with no real indications of what you should be doing, and no answers are forthcoming. All you can do is try to find the next portal. Or die along the road.

Eventually, you will die along the road.

03/29/2015

in Gaming, Gaming Culture, Single-Player Games, Story
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Fundred percent completion

That can't be the whole reason, in other words.

I’ll probably keep playing this game for a long time, even if I don’t have any more objectives to chase therein.

I remember when I stopped caring about getting 100% completion in a game, and I remember the game. It was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and after having done the hard work necessary for 100% in both of the previous games, what stopped me this time was nothing like a challenge too difficult or a mission too irritating. No, it was a bug.

San Andreas consisted of three cities – Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas, functional stand-ins for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, respectively. Each one had little tokens you had to pick up throughout the city for 100% completion; so far, so good. San Fierro asked players to take snapshots with the camera to imitate the standard San Francisco tourist. Only one little problem emerged – I snapped one of the pictures, and it marked as cleared, but the completion wasn’t noted by the game.

Getting the shot opportunity back was impossible. Going back to an earlier save was impossible. Just like that, the game had rendered 100% unreachable no matter what I did. And I was angry at the time… but then I realized that the game had kind of given me a blessing by freeing me from crap I didn’t really want to do in the first place.

03/28/2015