Gaming without dependency

Been a while since I’ve posted here. Do I mention it or do I just move on, hammering away at the keys with purpose in some attempt to make up for it? Well I guess I kind of have by bringing it up, so yeah, woops, I’ll do my utmost to stop this happening again in the future. I guess the good thing about the rather sporadic nature of this blog is there’s no underlying theme, so excuse me whilst I veer wildly in a new direction.

There are a few things I like to do with my spare time. Obviously there’s writing, and with writing comes reading, because you can’t be a decent writer without being interested in reading. When I have the money and time I like to travel and make a fool of myself taking pictures of a little blue pig in places of interest. I like to cook when I can (a product of travelling, really) and I play music too, in fact the degree I’m studying is in music technology, but there’s one thing I’ve been doing longer than any of these: gaming, and video gaming in particular. I started young with a sega master system playing games like shinobi and the (really bad) master system version of sonic the hedgehog, and it just carried on from there, really (I should point out that despite my features making it seem otherwise I was born in the late 80’s, so I missed all the old British consoles like the Sinclair Spectrum and that era of gaming). Sonic was my hero as a kid, I played the games, watched the cartoons, read the comics, I’ve still got a Sonic teddy up on the top of my bookshelf. But that was back when games were simple things, and, more importantly, seen as the hobby of geeks or children. That isn’t to say those games are lesser, in fact I still play a lot of those mid-90’s games now.

These days, you could say the gaming industry is a little different. Major games can now cost millions to develop, the audience has exploded in size and we now see fewer and fewer decent games developed in the vein of Sonic the hedgehog and Super Mario. Games have grown up alongside us, they provide more now; more visual stimulation, better sound effects, better music, characters and plotlines we can absorb and relate to. The closest thing you can compare modern gaming and the gaming industry to is cinema. They’re the next step up, it’s active cinema: you are part of what’s happening on the screen, you have a say in how it goes, and it’s for that very reason that the gaming industry is worth billions. Like the movie industry though it has its flaws. The big-name developers with their monster budgets dominate the commercial scene and they’re unlikely to take big risks. They all have their own little niches but there’s more than a hint of mainstream games becoming a little formulaic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong in watching the last Rambo film even though a blind, deaf cat would know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s fun! There’s no problem with reading Stephen King*, but sometimes it’s nice to read Kafka, or Tolstoy.

And that’s where indie gaming comes in. With the power of modern PC’s and the knowledge of programming, games made by small groups of people are developing a thriving underground scene of unique games. Not having to meet sales targets or satisfy shareholders means the imagination of the developers can run wild. Like amateur and independent films, these games don’t always have the sharp production style and visual appeal of their mainstream counterparts but they can touch on themes and elements on gameplay that the big boys just wouldn’t attempt to. Here are a few I’ve come across recently. I should point out that I’m not going to deal with the indie games that are really big, like minecraft or terraria, rather I’m going to concentrate on the indie games that are more underground.

First off, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: Dwarf Fortress. DF is a game that is an oxymoron, essentially: it is infinitely complex, meticulously detailed, yet it looks like a game someone made in their basement in the 80’s. The objective of the main mode of the game is to build a fortress in the mountains for your dwarves and watch it grow, thrive, then fail and fall apart, and it will fail. The game’s unofficial motto is ‘losing is fun’ and you will lose a lot. A simple way of losing could be running out of food (and watching your dwarves resort to chasing after vermin in the fort in their last desperate throes) but there are all kinds of way for things to go downhill. Goblins could lay siege to your fortress or ambush your lumberjacks as they work away in the forests, or maybe there’s something darker and more evil in the very ground below you. Who knows! I really can’t say because every game is unique, and by that I mean completely unique. Before you can start playing the game needs to generate a world for your dwarves to live in. You set the parameters for this but no matter what you designate the game will create an entire planet, complete with a history of the world with historic figures, civilisations, ancient creatures and events which will all tie in to your own game as your masons carve images of famous battles into the walls and leatherworkers sew their images.

The welcome screen, setting a visual standard

The entrance to my current fortress, with a trade depot and ballista defences

Here’s the kicker though: you have to use your imagination. As I mentioned, this game looks like it was made in the 1980’s. It’s basic, crude even, compared to looking at ‘the matrix’ as, in time, a bunch of symbols begin to represent an entire world. You’ll find text descriptions of practically every character and item in your game, so it really is down to you and your imagination to make something of all this. I hear the whole imagination thing has worked out well for books down the years though, so don’t be scared away by this. You should also try and not be scared by the game’s infamous learning curve. There are plenty of tutorials out there in the blogosphere and on youtube that will help you find your feet, and once you’re making progress you’ll find yourself completely engrossed in one of the most incredible games ever created. Oh, did I say created? Even though the gameplay is ‘complete’ and you can play indefinitely, the game itself is only a third complete. When you grasp how big the game is now and imagine how it’s going to be when it’s more than twice as large you’ll see just why this game is the biggest thing in the underground gaming world. Oh, and this whole game is being programmed by one man on his own, funded purely by donations by people who’ve enjoyed the free-to-download game. No marketing, no need to pay any money to play the game at all, yet this game has raised enough in donations for Tarn, the programmer, to give up his job and work on this solely.

Next up is something of an honourable mention, really, because it’s pretty hard to find these days. It was a labour of love over eight years by a team of programmers and artists who did it all for free (and released the game for free) only for them to receive threats of legal action and have to pull it within days of its launch. It’s called Streets of Rage Remake, and answers the cries of so many fans of the old sega game by combining all of the old games along with adding a few new features. You could use characters from one game (and a few of the boss characters) in the levels of another, new weapons and levels were designed and added, just simple, good old-school fun. Obviously though Sega weren’t too happy at the thought of people taking their property and redesigning parts of it and shut the whole thing down hastily, but if you do a little searching you just might be able to find someone hosting the zip file for download. You didn’t hear that from me, though.

Kicking ass and chewing bubblegum, except I'm all out of gum.

Last but not least is a game that I’ve only stumbled across recently by accident. It’s called project zomboid, and it’s a zombie survival game. Plenty of those around, sure, but not in the style of this game.

Raiding a grocery store

It’s viewed in a traditional 2D isometric style, but that’s not too uncommon for indie games. The big difference is this game takes much more inspiration from traditional zombie films than action games like left4dead. Like Dwarf Fortress, this is a game where you’re going to lose. The opening line of the game is ‘this is how you died’, it works around the concept of telling the story of your death rather than giving some glimmer of hope of somehow ‘winning’ the game. Just like in the flicks, if you get scratched by the zombies you might get away with it, but if you’re bitten that’s it, you’re infected and there’s no hope of a cure, so you might as well grab whatever weapon you have, step outside, and try to take as many of the bastards down with you. It’s vital that you find a building and fortify it, make it your safe house with barricaded doors and windows (because if the zombies can see inside they can see you). You’ll need to eat, which means leaving your ‘fort’ and raiding stores or houses, but you have to keep your wits about you and not make too much noise or you’ll attract the attention of the undead. A single zombie, you should be able to handle without any real trouble, but some zombies are slower than others, and the movements of one zombie can influence another. You might think you’ve sneaked away without event but you may wake up that night to hear a horde of 100+ zombies trying to break down your door.

Uh-Oh

Like Dwarf Fortress, Project Zomboid is a game still in progress but is very playable. Unlike DF, this game is using a unique funding arrangement that may become more and more common in indie gaming. Gamers buy a licence for Project Zomboid and receive a login. They can then download the unfinished game and use this login to play it, with the game being updated as time goes on. The price of the current version of the game is a very cheap £5 as a mark of appreciation for the commitment these early gamers are showing, but as time goes on this price will go up for new gamers (the final price hasn’t been announced). This is the biggest advantage of the indie scene: it’s a community. Project Zomboid has dedicated forums where indie gamers, whether they’ve paid into the game’s funding scheme or not, can talk about the game, what they like or don’t like, and what they’d like added to the game in the future. They have a say as to how this all works out and whilst there are always nay-sayers the general feeling is that of goodwill, especially evident after the PZ team’s office was burgled just recently. I think, rather than try and think of something sharp and thoughtful to end on, I’ll finish with a video. Keep in mind these guys raised more than double their donation target before the deadline; I think that speaks volumes for indie gaming as a whole.

*This is 100% OK to say because Stephen King himself says his books are just pulp fiction or as he put it ‘my books are the literary equivalent of a big mac’

Skinning Moles

Today’s been a productive day. I’ve prepared dinner, stuck it in the oven to slow-cook all afternoon, cleaned up the kitchen, sent some emails and organised my laundry. Now I’m sat here doing two things that I deeply love; watching rugby league and writing in my journal. The match is St Helens VS Wigan, one of the great derbies of the sport, and St Helens are having a new stadium constructed right now so they’re playing their home games in my home town, Widnes, and seeing it on TV again is making me homesick. Not terribly so, but a tiny bit. Widnes isn’t a big town, which makes it so strange to see it televised, and even though all you can really see are the stadium’s stands and a little house in the corner it feels good to see home turf again. Can’t wait watch a few matches in person again. I’d played rugby league as a kid but despite being a monster of a child, bumped up into the team a year older than me because I was so tall, I was never much good at it on account of being too soft; I’d slow down when I ran into people, for example. I didn’t grow up in a house where sports were on TV all that much and I never really took any up as a kid when I gave up playing rugby, but as I turned 18 I started watching sports more, and the sport I started out playing was the one I ended up liking the most.

The journal is something I started 3 years ago. When I first went away on my travels I was given a journal as a gift from some friends on my very last night in the UK. A yellow paperback book with ruled paper, I shoved it into my backpack when I got home along with a cheap ballpoint pen, not having much time before I had to rest up before my flight. I hadn’t considered doing any kind of diarising before but as I thought about the book it made complete sense to record my summer abroad. Those first few days after arriving at summer camp were so overwhelming, everything being brand new, that I didn’t even pick the book up, it was only after a few days in when I found a little time to myself that I was able to start writing down my thoughts. My writing was awful; hastily written phrases with no description or sentence structure. Even my handwriting was markedly poor and oversized because I’d spent little time holding a pen in the years since I’d left sixth form. As the time at camp went along they both started to improve a little, but the real difference came after I’d left, and I was travelling. With the extra time to myself and having this real feeling of being out on my own adventure, I took to writing much more. It’s amazing when I look at this journal now to see how the writing looked on the very first page compared to the last – I never actually wrote about the final day when I flew back home so it’s the final day of fun in Boston, saying goodbye to people and the like. The journal wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it was my first real foray into writing so it wasn’t too creative or well done, there are big stretches where I’d just forget to write and miss days on end, and (probably the thing I regret the most) rather than dating each entry I’d mark them by counting how many days I’d been out there, so now, looking back, I have to do some mental gymnastics to figure out when exactly I’d written it.

I get home, and I give it up. What’s the point of keeping a journal back home after all? It’s not like I’m doing anything exciting if I’m just sat around at home. I picked up a shitty job at a supermarket to pull me through ‘til next summer, when I was going to go back to camp and then go to Canada after that, try and get a job there and stay as long as I could. In late spring, as the build up to the summer began again, I decided it was time to pick up pen and paper once more, so I went out and bought a journal myself; a large ruled moleskine notebook. Such a great book! I fell in love with them straight away, and they’ve been my journal book of choice ever since. I noted all the things I did before I went back across the pond; the trip to London for my visa, the goodbyes and fears, then the time I spent in Boston before going to camp, the day-to-day routine of camp. The journal double up as a scrapbook; as I’d gone along and found little things I’d taped them into the journal, things like tickets from gigs and my flights, a map of Boston’s mass transit system, etc. And then, suddenly, it just stopped. I can’t explain why but it came to a shuddering halt, and never started up again. Those experiences in Canada, the leaving of camp, it was never written down (though blogged about a little). I never threw the books away, but I didn’t pick them back up, I just brought them home with me and put them in my bookshelf.

After the mess of an experience I had in Canada I went to university, and about 5 months into that I decided to unearth that journal once more and start writing again. I was writing regularly with my studies now, after all, picking it up again would be easy, and I’ve finally kept it going. It’s now been 18 months solid of journaling my experiences. Spending an academic year abroad has probably made it easier because it’s packed with so many new experiences, but even without that I feel like I’m writing solidly, confidently, and enjoying it. I finished off that old journal and started a new one, a moleskine again but a smaller one, better suited to travel, that I finished in the space of 8 months. I read recently that the act of keeping a journal is an act of producing legacy, that though our day-to-day lives may not seem all that interesting to us right now, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren would find them fascinating in the same way we’d find a journal a relative had written in the late 1800’s absolutely enthralling. Whether I keep it up for years to come or it starts to come to an end when I’m finished with my degree, keeping a journal is one of the things I’m going to be really glad I did for years to come.

Three of my journals - one for the past, the present, and the future. The plain one on the left is the journal I started when I came to Plattsburgh last August, and finished it this March. The pac man journal in the middle is my current journal, it's about half-full by now, and the one on the right is a spare for me to use when I travel next (I have a larger spare journal that I'm going to use while I'm at home)

Solitaire with a blue pig

The sun is here, the weather’s warm, and I’m a lot more relaxed than I was this time last month. I’m spending my days cooking and cleaning, being the little housewife that no man wants to admit to being whilst finding ways to coexist with a cat that hates me with every cruel atom of its soul. And it’s not that bad, really; it’s a very simple life leaving me with lots of time to stay in touch with people and write, play music, and read. I’m completely broke, which is a downer on things, but it’s not the end of the world, and I’m still enjoying myself regardless of my poverty, it’s nice to slow down a little and relax. So here I am, sat at my laptop listening to a radio tribute to Gil Scott-Heron, who died just last week. He’s been a huge influence on me, and I’m forever grateful that I got the chance to go and see him perform last year in Manchester. They’re playing what’s probably Gil’s most famous song: ‘The Bottle’, all about alcohol addiction, Gil being someone who suffered from various addictions through his whole life. A blessing of mine is I’ve always been aware that I have an addictive personality and so I’ve known to avoid certain things that friends of mine may or may not have experimented with. That being said, I can still end up hooked on the dumbest of things, such as playing solitaire.

Anyone who’s ever owned a Windows computer will have played around with the little free games that come with it. I could never get to grips with minesweeper but I played a lot of solitaire and ended up getting really good at it. It got to a point where if I was sat at my computer at any moment of absent-mindedness I’d instinctively start up a solitaire game and start shifting cards around with haste. I wasn’t enjoying it, or even playing, it had become a reflex and a pursuit of improving on my prior top score, probably what it’s like playing video games in Korea. Exam season at university broke that cycle, finally, with final essays and revision taking much higher priority, and these days I’ll play a game every now and then but I’ve all but lost interest. Recently, however, with the spare time I’ve had on my hands, I’ve taken to playing solitaire with real cards on a table to pass the time.

Whilst it’s not an addiction, writing for my other blog, Bluepig, has become a big element of my life. Some people spend their entire lives trying to get the pink elephant off their backs; I’m usually trying to find ways to keep the blue pig on mine. At times it feels as though there’s nothing more difficult that keeping a blog running with a good dose of regularity, taking the things you see and do day-to-day, converting it into interesting prose, and doing this often enough that you can post something once a week – every Friday on Bluepig. Never been easy but two years down the line I’ve never seriously thought about just giving it up and closing the blog down for good. It’s like keeping a journal; if you do it long enough you don’t have to force yourself to write in it, the journal will make you write instead.

Bluepig’s diversified a little recently, and I think it’s done the blog a lot of good. One post I’ve been considering writing in this pattern of variation is a post about just that – how I make my posts. I decided to make it on here instead though, I haven’t posted on here since I left Plattsburgh and it seems right to write about it on here rather than the blog in question. So as I shuffle my deck and lay out another solitaire game, let’s take a look at the process of writing up a post for the Bluepig.

Though in recent times I’ve become a devoted convert to the school of solid pre-planning and note-taking, drafting and editing, when writing for Bluepig I don’t tend to do much of these things. The main focus of the blog is the photography and the writing is supplementary; it’s more often than not about filling in the gaps. If I’m out getting pictures for a post, though, I’ll often bullet point a basic structure for a post in a little notebook if I stop off somewhere for coffee. In the past I’ve used whatever cheap notepads I can get my hands on but in the last 4 months I’ve gathered a bunch of these miniature composition books, which are really cheap and have pages that tear out easily, so I’ve stuck with them. If I’m writing a larger post, such as the two-parters I did in Ottawa and Quebec City, I’ll make a checklist of things I want to get pictures of in my notebook.

Originally, when I’d write a post I’d write it straight into BlogSpot, but now I use a word processor instead. It serves a double purpose; I find it easier to review and compose when writing on a word processor, and it also means I can save copies of my writing to my hard drive, so that if anything ever happened to my blog or BlogSpot as a whole I’ll always have my work. Whether people read my work or not, I’d like to keep a hold of it.

The camera that does all of the work. It’s a Kodak EasyShare C9, nothing fancy but it does the job and the battery life is pretty good. A nicer camera may produce better quality pictures but for these small, user-friendly cameras this one works great (there’s not much difference between them all really), and an SLR would be too unwieldy because all of my photos have to be taken one-handed, the other holding the pig of course. Sometimes it gives me grief with its auto-focus but I’ve never gone somewhere and not been able to get the pictures I’ve wanted. Before I got this camera I used my camera-phone instead (a Sony-Ericcson something or other, I don’t have it to hand), which really did produce lesser quality pictures but it also produced some really great shots, too.

And finally, the subject of all the attention, the pig himself. He’s about 3 inches long and an inch and a half tall, not big at all which makes him portable enough to take him to the places I want to and get the shots needed for the blog. He’s actually a stress toy, though I’m very protective of people actually squeezing him for fear of his head coming off or something like that. I was given him by my auntie for reasons unknown to me; he’s a promotional stress toy for ‘NiQuitin CQ’ a company that sell nicotine patches. I don’t smoke and I never have, so I’ve no idea why it ended up with me, but I’m not complaining. When a friend asked if I’d take a photograph of them away with me and take pictures of said photo in famous places I realised that I could instead take the pig, and make a blog out of it, which is how it all began. I wrote some entry posts to have a little of a foundation before telling people about the blog, then started writing seriously in my build-up to going to summer camp in 2009, the first real post of travel being my trip to London to get my visa for camp. That was all the way back in May 2009, and now, 2 years down the line, I’m still going, and writing more than ever.