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The Completionist’s Woes

by Patrick Lindsey

The time is 3:42 AM.  Everyone else has long since gone to bed, and I’m alone in the living room.  I sit in the dark, the only illumination coming from the TV which lights up the room in an eerie blue flickering glow.  At some point I abandoned my comfortable perch on the couch and I now sit cross-legged on the floor mere feet in front of the TV.  My eyes are dry, and exhaustion forces me to fight to stay awake.  My brain hurts.  But I’m so damn close.  And I can’t stop.

Roughly 20 minutes later, (at least I think – the notion of “time” has little meaning in the stupor I’m in) it finally happens.  That one final, elusive hidden item has been found.  I should be elated.  I should feel a sense of accomplishment, or pride, as the last couple of weeks of hard work and dedication culminate in this one final task.  But any sense of personal gratification is turned sickeningly anti-climactic by the late hour and the mind-numbing repetition that has characterized the past few hours.  I don’t feel accomplished, or proud, or even happy.  All I feel is relief, like a soldier fighting a war for months straight who is finally told that they’re being moved off the front line and can take a damn nap for once.  All for one lousy achievement.

Those of you who after reading the above anecdote cringed in painful recognition, or hung your head in silent shame know exactly what I’m talking about.  Like me, you too are a completionist.  And it sucks.  See, completionists don’t just play games, they feel connected to them on a visceral, primal level.  They enter a gameworld and feel compelled to explore every inch of it, to do every possible thing that one can do within a game.  This is not a choice – it is a burden.  The completionist does not choose to play this way.  The completionist is physically and psychologically unable to not explore every cranny of a map, and talk to every single npc, no matter how obscure or irrelevant they may seem.  Not necessarily because there may be something of crucial importance, just because it’s there.  Leaving no virtual stone unturned takes on a whole new meaning for the completionist.

They’re the ones who have to pick up every single wayward rupee or ammo box, even if they have no more inventory space.  The thought of having less than a 100% completion rating fills them with anxiety and dread (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night can be completed up to 200.6%. Imagine what that did to me!).  They don’t play the game to play it, they play the game to conquer it.  They study it, they replay it, and they scour every available source to find out what they’re missing, so they can go back and do it all again.  There’s no place here for casually enjoying a game – every time a completionist plays, they are driven by a singular purpose, which is to max out that completion percentage.  Were you to ask, a completionist would tell you that he is driven – no, compelled – by some crazy sense of duty.  Whether that duty be to the developers, to make the most out of the game they have created, or to the gaming community, to be proven as the most hardcore, or even to oneself, motivated by some perverted sense of self-importance, this “duty” is nothing more than a misguided attempt to rationalize a completionist’s behavior and further fan the fires of his madness.

Hours spent: 20+ Pride won: immeasurable.

Just when we had started coming to terms with our own affliction, achievements had to be introduced to the equation.  See, while most people view achievements/trophies as cool little add ons that extend the life of their favorite games, to the completionist they are like a brand new opium den of obsessive-compulsiveness to explore – no true completionist can resist their siren song.  The blip of an achievement popping is like a morphine drip – the completionist needs to hear it, and will do any task, no matter how menial to get that extra gamerscore.  Achievements represent a new all-time low for the completionist.  For decades, completionists have been duty-bound to finish their games to the utmost degree of obsession.  In the age of achievements, completionists are now also duty-bound to finish their games in very specific (and largely unfun!) ways.  Achievements exercise a certain mind-control over completionists that may be difficult to understand for those who lack this particular affliction.  Achievements are the reason people do “Nightmare” difficulty runs armed with nothing but a pistol, restart levels time and again to ensure every kill is a headshot, complete missions without using any healing items, or scour an entire open world map to find every last eagle feather.  If achievements are the drug of gaming, then completionists are surely the crackwhores, degrading themselves by performing whatever task is demanded of them, for nothing more than a handful of gamerscore.

Gaze upon the face of the beast.

While this seems an existence surely confined to only the most depraved souls, completionism is far more common than most people are willing to admit.  If you worry that you or someone you know are suffering from even early stages of completionism, there are a couple early warning signs to be on the lookout for:

1)      You have ever played a game you would normally never even consider solely “for the achievements”, or bought DLC for a game just to max out the achievement list

2)      You will intentionally waste ammo in order to be able to pick up a stray ammo clip (interchangeable with things like health packs or other usable items)

3)      You finish all possible sidequests in a game before even beginning the main quest

4)       You have ever adapted your playstyle to specifically fit the requirement of one or more achievements

5)      You have spent hours performing the same task in the name of a “100% completion” achievement, worth 0 points (yes, some developers are sadistic enough to include these)

If the above list sets off any alarm bells for you, then I regret to inform you that you or a loved one may be a completionist.  There is no real cure or treatment yet, as completionism is believed to be deeply rooted in the gut or psyche of a gamer.  All I can offer are words of encouragement – may your completion percentage ever be on the rise, in the hope that one day you, and all the rest of us, can max out our games and finally start to play them.

The Legend of Zelda: Eternal Recurrence

By Eric Pederson

Some time ago I read a book titled “Philosophy and the Legend of Zelda: I Link Therefore I Am”. This book proposed a great deal of thought provoking questions, but I feel as though they touched one that has a deeper meaning than they were willing explore. You may not be aware of it, but there is a massive debate going on about The Legend of Zelda and whether or not there is a logical succession to the games. Some people argue that Link has experienced all of these adventures in one go at life, while others say that the Ocarina of Time actually creates a riff in time that allows two Links to be experiencing two different adventures at the same time; half as young Link and the other half as adult Link.

However you look at it, a series as prominent as Zelda seems to have an order to it, but Nintendo has never explicitly stated that any of Link’s adventures are even remotely connected, yet we as gamers are so inclined to impose our own thoughts upon the franchise. The story lines always seem to reference similar events that took place sometime in history and somehow a young boy named Link seems to get wrapped up saving some princess named Zelda. Is it all just a random coincidence or is Nintendo leaving it up to the gamers to discover the chronological order of the games? I have a new philosophy.

Every religion in the world centers on the ultimate question of ‘What exactly happens after death?’ For fear of pissing everyone off, I am going to avoid a lengthy diatribe about what I was raised with and what I believe, because frankly it doesn’t matter! What does matter is the ultimate question. Many answers have been proposed ranging from the pursuit of happiness, achieving inner piece, 42, and many more. One thing remains constant though;  many religions believe there is a place that the soul will eventually end up in for all eternity based on merits achieved in life or something to that extent. However, in 1891, while Americans were plowing through the industrial age, Frederick Nietzsche was expounding on his newest philosophy of life after death; Eternal Recurrence.

The basic principles of eternal recurrence state the following:

Time is infinite, but there is actually a finite amount of matter and space in the universe. This means that all the matter in the universe can only be arranged in a finite number of ways before something has to be repeated. Since time is infinite it is safe to assume that eventually, given enough time, certain permutations are going to repeat themselves and have already been repeated in the eternal past.

My 1st grade teacher was full of crap!

To ensure that everyone has a basic understanding of the concept of eternal recurrence I will give you an example. Say you wear a necklace, or for you men out there, a very manly bracelet or anklet, every single day and on that necklace are a bunch of different colored beads, no two colors being the same (red, green, blue, yellow, black, etc). Before you put the necklace on you take note of the specific order of the beads and make a note of it for the next day. The next day you rearrange the beads in a random order and so on each day. Since there is a limited amount of beads, but an infinite amount of time to rearrange them you are going to find that certain sequences are repeated.

If we take this concept and apply it to life we can assume that, throughout eternity, we have lived this life over and over and over again. We have the same experiences, the same thoughts, the same urges, and the same outcomes every single time we live. Hindu and Buddhist religions are abound with reincarnation beliefs where people are born again in an attempt to master emotions and desires and achieve Nirvana. However, the difference with eternal recurrence is that we are not born some time later in the future, we just wait until all the matter lines up perfectly again and we live the same life over again. Finally, eternal recurrence negates the notion of free will. We are destined to live the same life over and over, but thankfully the memory does not carry over from life to life. Therefore, we do not have any recollection of our previous lives and that keeps our experiences new and exciting for us.

Now what the hell does this all have to do with The Legend of Zelda? I’ll tell you! I say nuts to the whole ‘chronological order’ of games theory. I propose that Link is suffering from a bout of eternal recurrence, doomed to live his life again and again, saving Princess Zelda for the rest of eternity. Now, you may say that I am contradicting the theory of eternal recurrence in the fact that it states we live the same life over and over again and Link’s adventures are clearly very different. And with that you would be correct.

My issue with eternal recurrence in regard to Link is that humans have free will. We have the ability to make our own choices and react to situations in an almost spontaneous way. I believe that Link is stuck circling through time, but each and every time he comes back around, the circumstances are a bit different for him.

If you are of the whole evolution frame of mind then we can imagine that our world and the way it is now is the result of the permutation we are aware of. There is an almost infinite amount of alternate permutations where society may have acted differently and the results would vary. People may not make the exact same decision two times in a row and with enough people making different decisions throughout history we would end up with a vastly different looking world. Imagine the first European ship heading to Africa, getting there and saying, “WTF?! These people all wear diapers and throw sticks! Let’s leave them alone and come back in a few hundred years when they’ve developed aerosol deodorant and cars.” Africa would probably be one of the most civilized continents on the planet and we wouldn’t have ever had to suffer the slave trade. Or what if the people of Germany saw Hitler and said, “Yea, you’re fucking crazy. Get out of here.” No World War II and no holocaust. See what I mean? Everything could potentially be different!

Enter Link and the Legend of Zelda.

"I'm back! ...Again."

In order to prove that each game is simply an alternate permutation of Link’s eternal recurrence, we need to look at some glaring differences.

The first and most obvious difference is that of Link’s appearance. I believe this alone dispels the whole “chronological order” theory. Hardly any of the Links look exactly the same. Granted we can’t really tell a lot from the NES era, other than Link from the original is a hobgobblin blob of earth tone colors with green eyebrows while Link from Zelda 2 looks like a 6 foot, hurdle jumping hunch back. Once video games figured out how to actually make characters that looked ‘realistic’ we started to get a clearer idea of what Link really looked like. The SNES Link was similar to the NES Link except he had some sort of goofy purple hair twirl going on in the front reminiscent of the Fonz, except with a sword. It was at this point where he actually began to look somewhat human.

Eyyyy! I'm gonna stab you.

As the game progressed, we saw different variations of link, including the oddly Asian-childish looking Link from Windwaker.

I don’t believe that plastic surgery existed in Hyrule and even if it did, Link doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who is worried about vanity. Basically, it isn’t the ‘same’ Link we are following each time. I don’t want to say that it is an entirely different Link because then it would be a different game at the core. What I am saying is that each Link is merely the result of a different permutation of the world around him. Even the slightest change in the world’s history/development could lead to any number of the frequent inconsistencies we see.

The second most noticeable difference in the games is the world in which he lives. No two worlds are the exact same and therefore must be variations in how the matter was realigned in the universe. More on that in a minute.

Finally, I want to pound a couple more nails in the ‘chronological order’ coffin. At the beginning of each game Link seems to be entirely unaware of his ‘destiny’ or that he is the chosen one. Some Podunk little villager has to fill him in on his destiny and tell him to believe in himself or some garbage like that. We see it at the beginning of every Zelda game. Don’t you think that if this were the same dude having all these adventures, he’d know the drill by now? Unless Link is actually the guy from Memento, I don’t buy it.

"Hey listen, asshole! How many times have you done this before???"

Does it seem entirely possible that one person could have THAT many adventures in one life? Those who adhere to the ‘chronological order’ theory suggest that The Ocarina of Time, because of its multiple endings, actually explains how this could be. The Ocarina of Time creates a time split where we see Link as a child and then as an adult. That would mean that about half of the games are experienced as a child while the rest of them are experienced as an adult. Based solely upon visual appearance I would guess the age of Link for each of the games follows (in the order they were released):

• The Legend of Zelda (1987) (Radioactive toxic spill survivor. Maybe 13)
• The Adventure of Link (1988) (Emo Link in his mid 20’s)
• A Link to the Past (1992) (Angsty teen, 16ish)
• Link’s Awakening (1993) (Pirate Link, 19 (based on opening cut scene)
• Ocarina of Time (1998) (Prepubescent Link, 10 years old/ Adult Link, Mid 20’s)
• Majora’s Mask (2000)   (Post traumatic stress Link, 12)
• Oracle of Seasons (2001) (Love struck teen, 13)
• Oracle of Ages (2001) (Love struck teen , 13)
• Four Swords (2002) (Friends are more important than family Link, 14)
• The Wind Waker (2003) (Racially outcast Link, 10)
• Four Swords Adventures (2004) (friends are still more important than family Link, 15)
• The Minish Cap (2005) (Stoner Link, 18)
• Twilight Princess (2006) (Hipster Link, 24)
• Phantom Hourglass (2007) (Hobo Link, 14)

Now, if I were to organize them into some sort of chronological order based on age I come up with this:

• Ocarina of Time (1998) (Prepubescent Link, 10 / Adult Link, 25)
• The Wind Waker (2003) (Racially outcast pirate Link, 10)
• Majora’s Mask (2000)   (Post traumatic stress Link, 12)
• Oracle of Seasons (2001) (Puppy love Link, 13)
• Oracle of Ages (2001) (Love struck teen corpse/clone Link, 13)
• Phantom Hourglass (2007) (Treasure hunting mercenary Link, 13)
• Spirit Tracks (2009) (Hobo Link, 13)
• The Legend of Zelda (1987) (Radioactive toxic spill survivor Link, 14)
• Four Swords (2002) (Friends are more important than family Link, 14)
• Four Swords Adventures (2004) (You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my father Link, 15)
• A Link to the Past (1992) (Angsty teen, 16)
• The Minish Cap (2005) (Stoner Link, 18)
• Link’s Awakening (1993) (Spice trader Link, 19 (based on opening cut scene))
• The Adventure of Link (1988) (Emo Link, 22)
• Twilight Princess (2006) (Hipster Link, 24)
• Ocarina of Time (1998) (Prepubescent Link, 10 / Adult Link, 25)

If we try to organize the games according to his age, we are going to see a pretty even split (provided we assume he enters manhood at the age of 15, which is probably true because people without awesome technology usually die at a young age from something stupid like tuberculosis or the flu).

Take that, TB! Booyah!

Let’s just assume for a minute that Einstein was full of shit and time travel IS possible. That would allow us to have The Ocarina of time at the beginning AND the end of the Zelda series, but what blows my mind is that Link has several different adventures going at the same time, or within the same year! The Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker seem to be taking place at the same time, yet The Wind Waker world is entirely submerged in water and the Link from Ocarina of Time is stuck in the middle of the forest picking his ass. I’ll give you that. Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons probably took place at the same time, but Link probably conjured up a corpse and gave it a green outfit to get a bit of help. But the really strange fact is that while he is time traveling and pissing everyone off by going from winter to summer and back to winter, he is chugging around on a damn train in Spirit Tracks AND sailing around the ocean on a freak’n boat! It doesn’t add up!

OMFG! The Industrial Age is so much cooler!

Link also seems to follow the typical tradition of teenagers and flow through multiple different personalities before ultimately becoming a semi-well-adjusted post-emo adult. However, he seems to go through WAY too many to be believable, especially given that he apparently doesn’t have any friends to influence his decisions. His emo days are preceded by days filled with thievery and ‘shroom hits. Link’s done it all.

It’s clearly impossible for Link to have done all of this in one lifetime, especially since he can’t remember anything at the start of the next adventure. He even has to relearn the most basic of skills at the beginning of each adventure! How stupid is he, really? You defeat the world’s deadliest threat with the Master Sword in multiple adventures, but you can’t remember for the life of you how to swing a sword??? And why aren’t you wearing a helmet?? How about all the cool items he collects? Those seem like something that would come in handy later in life. I could understand tossing them aside after the first adventure because after all, saving the world really only happens once in a lifetime. But you’d think that after the 7^th or 8^th adventure you’d hold on to them just in case. Nope. Not Link! Adventure over? Toss that shit in the garbage!

So, is it possible that Link did everything in one lifetime? Yes. Is it plausible? Not at all. Link must surely be suffering from a bad case of eternal recurrence, which relegates him, with alternate permutations of his surroundings, to reliving his life over and over throughout the endless expanse of time. With each new life, he is presented with the alterations of that particular universe and must deal with them accordingly, thus a new game. The only games that can possibly be argued to have occurred in the same lifetime are The Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, as well as The Wind Waker and The Phantom Hourglass. Everything else must be from a different life.

Manual Missing: Oh Well?

By Tom Ragan

Now, I understand this is horribly specific  – an entire article on the included instruction manual from a retail game, but hear me out – I’m musing! Also, it’s a small piece of relevance towards the movement in how we consume interactive media nowadays, so ‘nyuhhh!’ (Yes, growing old but never growing up).

Who here has taken the map from a GTA game out of the game box and secured it to their wall? Guilty. Who here remembers when manuals were used to help prevent piracy? Guilty. Who here wrote passwords in the ‘notes’ section of manuals? One of you did, there’s blue ink all over my pre-owned original copy of Crash Bandicoot and now it’s worthless, you bastard.

Piracy control via the manual, integrated into the narrative.

Anyway, my point is that manuals used to do more than just tell epilepsy sufferers that they should take caution. I guess you could say they did more than just ‘instruct’. They used to provide some prologue, back-story; heck some of them even had mini graphic novels inside. Now I’m flicking through my manuals and they’re about as intuitive as a set of IKEA instructions, it’s all the boring health and safety stuff, company information, the controls etc. It basically houses everything you can already learn from a ‘tutorial’ mode that most games have built-in nowadays. I wasn’t looking through Scene It: Box Office Smash, by the way – I’m talking Gears of War, Splinter Cell: Conviction, you know, action-adventure games with both linear and non-linear narrative structures.
So, is there any need for the manual anymore? There hasn’t been one occasion since I’ve owned my Xbox 360 whereby I’ve needed it, which is sad in a way; a waste. I mean, remember ‘Metal Gear Solid’ on the PS1, when President Baker tells you that Meryl’s frequency is ‘on the back of the CD case’? Genius. When the real world crosses over into the virtual, let’s face it – it’s awesome.

What CD Case? No! Stop disconnecting me from the game world! Jokes, Ill save you. Wait...

Now I remember as a kid, I’d buy a game and on the way home I’d read the manual. There was always some background information on the story and this in turn would start off my gaming experience, it sounds crazy, but certainly at a young age – it helped fuel the imagination even more. Reading does that, you know.

I’m going to be quite boring here and get a little academic – I’m sorry, but it fits what I’m saying quite well. Andrew Darley, a lecturer in Critical and Theoretical studies states in his book ‘Visual Digital Culture’:

“In the literature that accompanies games, whatever is being related or explained is kept to the absolute minimum and expression is as simple as possible. The aim is to relate essential points about how to play the game and about the ‘environment’ one will find oneself in.”

Though this was written in 2004, it does still apply today – but it’s that last bit that recent manuals are lacking more often. Sure, I still find out how to play, what the CD-Key is and sometimes there’s brief information on the environment, but I don’t know about the characters I’m controlling or the characters in the environment that are key to the story. Surely I’m going to be too busy generally being awesome in the game, feeding on high-resolution visuals and explosive action to read loads of information on-screen – so these intricate details should really be in the manual.

Wait, I’m not going to deny that the gaming aesthetic usually overwrites the literature in a booklet. I mean, once the game is loaded and underway, the background information that’s been read usually becomes very insignificant. It seems fair however to include all of this extra info in the booklet anyway, it bulks the game out, can sometimes enhance the gaming experience (particularly for role-playing games), can add another dimension to the gameplay and it’s another way to keep people buying physical copies of games rather than purchasing digital downloads – but that’s an entirely different debate altogether.

Maps, cards, game memorabilia, reasons to use the manual whilst in-game are all things that could be included along with a brief story and description of characters. Those who like owning tangible fan art and memorabilia should be blessed with such things. Come on, the whole ‘how to play’ thing is dead, it’s all either on the disc via .pdf or on the game in a tutorial mode.

Its common knowledge that GoW doesnt have the best story, can literature help?

Perhaps games are more like films now: cinematic with a brief synopsis on the reverse. You just sit back and consume. I just want to be extra excited and pumped before I slip Gears of War 3 into my 360. Hear my cries Epic Games/Microsoft, feed me a story with action, guns, noise and team play – just don’t forget the words I need to further captivate me, make more use of the manual or I’ll bin it (maybe).

This Game Sucks: Marvel vs Capcom 3

(A Note from the Nefarious Megacomputer: ‘This Game Sucks’ is the newest weekly feature on Pixels or Death.  Its purpose is simple, a primal sort of thing. These writers might seem like church-going nancyboys during the week, happy little campers, the kind of guys you want to settle down with. And in Adam’s case, the kind of guy who spends in his Friday nights watching Lifetime and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Everyone needs a good cry!

What?

Anyway, these dudes are pissed. Shit sucks sometimes. Its title is self-explanatory.)

By Patrick Lindsey

The morning of February 15 was an exciting one for me.  I had been waiting for this day for almost a year, since the announcemet trailer hit the web on April 19, 2010.  Now it was time.  After 10 years of waiting, I was ready to dive into Marvel vs Capcom 3.

I had taken the day off work, and headed down to EB early in order to maximize my playing time.  That first day, I must have played for 5 or 6 hours.  All my favorite characters had returned, like Captain America and Iron Man, and even some new ones that I was really excited for, like Amaterasu, Deadpool and Thor.  Everything seemed just how I remembered it.

Then I took the game online, and a few short days later the honeymoon was over.  See, Marvel vs Capcom 2, while a great fighting game, was still riddled with balance issues and little exploits that people had inevitably figured out after ten years.  Things like infinite combos and overpowered characters weighed down what was otherwise a great experience (anyone who’s faced a Magneto/Storm/Sentinel team knows exactly what I’m talking about).  But now that Capcom has had ten years to study the game and how it plays, both at the casual and tournament level, surely they’d know which of the most glaring issues need fixing.

Except not.  Either through ignorant oversight, or some misguided desire to preserve the “integrity” of MvC2 for the hardcore fans who have waited for it for ten years, Capcom ported the game with some of its most broken mechanics and characters.  And if you can even imagine this, made them worse.  I shouldn’t have to say this, but infinite combos are a bad thing.  Any time I can get thrown around like a rag doll, and literally not be able to do anything except watch as the other character tosses me around like an Orca playing with a baby seal, it’s objectively un-fun.  Towards the end of MvC2’s lifespan, some of the higher level players had figured out a bunch of exploits and frame glitches that allowed them to do things like infinites and stupid juggling combos.  Instead of fixing what was widely regarded as broken mechanics, Capcom actually made it easier to do these things; things like ground and wall bounces  were built right into the game, to actually encourage excessively long (and unbreakable!) combo strings.

This is by far the biggest problem with the game’s online – it rewards unfun gameplay.  Sure, I could take the time to take a character into training mode, spend the countless hours learning his combos, and grow in skill that way, but why would I when I can mash out projectile spam with Sentinel for a much easier win?  Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but fighting games are supposed to require time and dedication.  Sweat, a few tears (shed privately, of course), blood (don’t ask) – these are the demands of the fighting game.  But in return you are rewarded with the sweet sounds of victory as you stand over your vanquished opponent, having genuinely outplayed him as the better man.  This game tries to present that feeling, but when the layers are pulled back you realize that it’s just the illusion of depth, with no rewarding framework underneath to hold it all up.

Get used to this happening. A lot.

It is painfully obvious after spending even minimal time with the game that Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a classic “rush job”, and I don’t mean that thing you pay $15 for in a seedy hotel in Mexico.  Although I’m sure the feeling of emptiness you experience afterwards is very similar.

But I digress.

No, I mean that MvC3 was slammed out after a far-too-short development period, comprised of the absolute bare-bones minimum that Capcom could include and still have the decency to call it a “game.”  Booting up the game for the first time, you’ll see an arcade mode, an online mode, and a training mode.

That’s it.

No adventure modes, time attacks, survival modes – nothing beyond “single player” or “multiplayer.”  Once you get tired of the incredibly unbalanced online (and believe me, you will), this means that all there’s left for you to do is play through the arcade mode.  Though there’s a final boss fight, there’s no real story to speak of.  There are ending “cinematics” for each character, though these are presented as a series of still images with a couple lines of dialogue – they couldn’t even spring for a couple seconds of cutscenes to reward a successful arcade run.  The only other option is training.  Each character has a “mission mode”, which is a sequence of 10 moves and combos of increasing difficulty for you to practice.  This sounds like a good way to learn the game, but the game still fails to actually explain the mechanics necessary to make a lot of the combos work (don’t know what an OTG attack is?  Well mission mode sure isn’t going to tell you!).

Also conspicuously absent is any form of spectator mode.  In an age where “community” is the word of the day in video games, Capcom seems to have totally missed the memo.  Sure, you can create lobbies of up to 8 players, but only the 2 fighting will be able to see anything.  For everyone else, it’s a painful wait at the lobby screen, with decreasing health bars the only indication as to what’s happening in the match.  With a full lobby of 8, this can work out to a very long, boring experience, like listening to bowling on the radio.  Cries for rectification of what seems so obviously to be an oversight have been ignored by Capcom.  Instead of including spectator mode as priority #1, Capcom have filled the void by releasing pointless DLC offerings (like Shadow Mode or Event Mode), which offer nothing to the game experience and are clearly (and insultingly) filler.

The most insulting thing about this game is that it comes right on the heels of Super Street Fighter IV, which is arguably one of the most complete fighting game packages to date.  SSF4 has an entire replay system, where you can create replay lobbies, watch replays by character, and upload your own favorite battles and share them with your friends – we couldn’t have seen even a simplified version of this in MvC3?  Comparing the 2 side-by-side is like comparing an Olympic sprinter to a retarded robot with no arms or legs – there is clearly no contest, and the fact that Capcom tried to pull the wool over our eyes by implying that Marvel 3 can compete with SSF4’s quality in any way is a slap in the face.

Want to watch a fight? Too bad. You get this instead.

Don’t be fooled by the marketing – this was not a game “ten years in the making”.  This is a franchise that was not expected to be resurrected, but was quickly hashed out to capitalize on the success of Street Fighter 4 and Tatsunoku vs Capcom (a far superior fighter – and it’s on the freaking Wii for God’s sake!).  While Capcom claims that their goal was to introduce new fans to this [once] great franchise, it’s clear that they were really only hoping to appease long-time tournament players – arguably the source of the majority of this game’s sales, in an attempt to prop this game up as prime tourney fare for the next ten years.  Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a bastardization of the depth and intricacy of its predecessor, merely mimicking its look and feel.  But when you strip away the layers (precious few as they are), you’ll quickly see that it’s just the illusion of depth, supported by little more than Capcom’s hasty desire to turn a quick buck.

That’s why this game sucks.

An MMO Anarcho-Primitivist Manifesto

By Adam Harshberger

Frodo and Sam didn’t have a fucking wiki. Odysseus never needed a strategy guide, and Luke Skywalker never stopped to calculate his stats. I have decided that I won’t either.

I am the John Zerzan of a thousand digital worlds; a naturalist, Thoreau and Whitman all at once.

Or, I suppose, I’m just a gamer of who is sick of the wonder being sucked out of MMORPGs. The massively multiplayer genre has held me captive for years, ever since I was a young boy. I spent my youth stumbling around Ultima Online and getting PKed in Everquest. Something about online roleplaying games really captures my imagination; in my youth, my naive brain imagined MMORPGs as something much more grandiose, much more adventurous, something more, well, fun.

Instead of great adventures, all I got was silly exercises in my repetition and efficiency – and I’m sick of it. I am swearing an oath, taking up a new dogma. No more will I care about the efficiency of my build! I will wear whatever gear I want! Stat points will be allocated where ever I please. I will wander the countryside, explore the darkest dungeons, experience points and levels be damned. My days of deriving joy from better gear or higher HP totals are gone.

It is a sad state of affairs, really, that MMORPGs have been reduced to mechanical, almost bureaucratic things. Running from glowing yellow exclamation point to glowing yellow exclamation point is not the grand adventure I had in mind. ALT+TABing like a madman between a Wiki page and my on-going quest was not in the equation. It doesn’t feel right, and if you think efficiency and repetition are the two things MMORPGs should derive meaning from, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.

So what, then, should an Anarcho-Primitivist strive for in his MMO experience? What do we play for, if not levels and gear? We play for fun, for the the sense of adventure. You probably know this scenario:

The Tale of Murdug Muthruak

Murdug Muthruak, your avatar -you, essentially – is out on a quest to, I don’t know, kill ten rats or something. The little buggers are all around you, and there’s 12 other players with names like ‘Jesuschrist’ and ‘KloudStrife’ next to you, all killing rats. You stare down your steely-gray opponents and begin to slaughter them. The number on the tracker ticks up slowly, and you groan at the thought of killing four more of these damnable things. Suddenly, you notice something looming on the horizon. A cave, perhaps – and, bored by the rats, you venture inside.

There are no quests to be had in this cave – but it draws you in nonetheless. You stumble further in, in search of loot, or booty, or a good fight. After a 10 minutes of trekking through this cave, you meet a terrible ogre. This ogre is angry, and Murdug Muthruak meets his doom. You respawn, feeling a little shamed. “Dammit,” you cry. “I just wasted ten minutes on a stupid, misguided field trip! I should have just keep killing those rats – I could have experiences points!”

FUCK THAT

I know you’re here to read about video games, but let me tell you a little bit about life. It’s boring and full of shit you don’t really want to do. It’s all rats and no caves. That being said, playing a game and worrying about progress and efficiency and goddamn rats is insane. We need to be worried about fun and adventure, not endless grinding.

Developers seem to be noticing this trend – games like Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic are promising better stories and better characters and all sorts of stuff. Games like WURM and EVE have been bucking this theme-park approach to MMOs for years – but all this gives us is a few (relatively) obscure examples and some far off promises. We all know that if there is one breed of people not to trust, it is MMORPG developers. I have no doubts that games like GW2 will make advances for the genre, but I worry it may be too little, too late. Story is great, but MMORPGs should leave that to the players – they should be giving players the tools to make their own stories, a lush and living world to explore. We can make our own yellow exclamation points.

It is my fear that MMO stories are going to become something like, “Hey, remember that time me, you and that one NPC did that instance against the NPC’s nemesis, and fought the boss at the end eight times to get the sickest sword possible?” That is not what we want from the genre. In my utopian world, an ideal MMORPG conversation would go like this, “Hey, remember that time me, you and Ed went up the mountain to pick some alchemy ingredients? Yeah, and we found that tower, with the wizard? That was nuts. I can’t believe we actually managed to kill him, let alone raid his whole armory – but I’m still pissed at Ed for murdering us both to hold the keep as his own!”

I suppose I’m asking a lot – it will be a long time before my hopes for the MMO can be realized. Until then, though, I have my anarchism to satiate me. It is easy, as I’ve written before, to get caught up in the ‘achieving’ part of MMORPGs, to fly through the world and barely look around. Too much tourism destroys your EXP per hour.  A weird build makes you a gimp party member – but from now on, I’ve decided to say, ‘Who cares?’. And I beg you, dear reader, to do the same. Just because most people play MMORPGs in this weird, bastardized fashion doesn’t mean we, the true adventurers have to! So I’m begging you, join the movement. Forget the wiki and the god awful grind. Hopefully, I’ll see you – or your corpse – in a cave sometime soon.

Demon’s Souls: A Return to Gaming’s (Brutal) Roots

By  Eric Pederson

When Demon’s Souls released in February of 2009 it was all but entirely glazed over. The game landed on store shelves and people had barely any knowledge of what the games was, due to a blatant lack of media coverage. However, walking down the game aisle and glazing over Demon’s Souls, only to find out it is among the best games available on the PS3 is like being asked out by the fat chick with acne and cankles in high school only to find out she is now the playmate of the month. Demon’s Souls sat on the shelf and gave every other game around it the middle finger while doing their girlfriends. There is a fine line between confident and cocky and Demon’s Souls takes a crap all over that line. This game is from the land of the rising sun. Nothing bad ever comes from there.

Except for this.

Demon’s Souls is that kid in high school that hangs out with the popular kids and helps start trends only to declare them uncool. Nobody knows why he’s cool; all they know is that they want to be like him, and if they don’t, they’re in denial and are probably a loser anyway.

Here are some nuggets of brilliance that we can take away from Demon’s Souls.

Fuck strategy guides

It seems like every single game that is released has some sort of strategy guide to go along with it. It’s usually just a massive book 1/3 the price of the game that ultimately ends up sitting on the floor in the corner where the cat pisses. Most of the crap covered in the strategy guides is already being beaten over our heads in the game by some lame ass tutorial attempting to pass as a relevant point in the game. Some may cry foul and scream that “strategy guides give us secrets and maps and junk.” I’ll give you that much, I guess. Maps for certain games can contain decent information, but some games just flat out don’t need a map. One such game that comes to mind is Final Fantasy XIII. Mind you, I LOVE… no LURVE Final Fantasy, but after playing through the game and flipping through the strategy guide a few times for some relevant information, I decided to create my own strategy that would cost a lot less and be a bit easier to use. It would look something like this:

The game doesn’t need a strategy guide! It’s practically an on rails RPG. It’s Time Crisis with hot chicks, androgynous men, and a better story.

Demon’s Souls looked this trend of creating strategy guides in the eye and told it to piss off. The only official guide in existence for this game came with the damn near impossible to find “Deluxe Edition” of the game. I was able to get my hands on a copy of the book and this is what I found written on every page:

That’s right. This game insulted me for even attempting to find a guide. Well played Demon’s Souls. Well played. However, all hope is not lost. A group of losers ‘dedicated gamers’ created a Wiki page that will attempt to save you from getting your ass handed to you on a plate full of asses. It’s a tough game, deal with it.

Risk vs.Reward?

If I had to guess what was plastered all over the room of the developers during production of this it would have to be,

“We don’t reward success, we PUNISH failure!”

This game is so damn hard that it’s almost painful. I remember thinking to myself as I was walking through the ‘tutorial’, ‘Oh, this won’t be so bad. It’s a bit dark, however.’ And then walking into what I assumed was the introduction to a boss battle and getting bitch slapped across the room before I even had time to say ‘shit!’

There is not a single easy thing about this game. Everything is based on risk and let me tell you something, there is hardly any reward. The only reward is that you get to continue playing the game. However, your slightest mistake and indiscretion will be dealt with swiftly and severely. Often times the punishment will result in a critical game changing event that alters the outcome and permanently closes certain sections of the game until your next play through, which, subsequently, is HARDER! To make matters worse, this game employs an instant auto save process that is constantly running. If you turn your system off and back on, you will return to the exact same spot you left off, give or take a few inches.

The game is, as the name implies, based around collecting the souls of demons and using them to level up. At times you will be carrying astronomical amounts of these souls around with no means of returning to the NEXUS to cash them in. The tension is beyond belief, but it is usually interrupted by some asshole skeleton shoving his sword up your poop chute. When you die, you return to soul form (if you weren’t already in it) which has some majorly negative impacts. Dieing doesn’t just mean an slight inconvenience of having to repeat a few things over before you get back to where you were. Dieing is so unpleasant and frustrating that I spent most of the game in soul form just to avoid the possibility of being mercilessly punished for my failures. When you die, all the souls you were carrying fall into a messy pile on the floor for you to fight your way back to in order to re-obtain. However, if you die on your return trip to pick up the pile, they disappear forever. Trust me , it sucks big time losing 2 million souls in one shot because you tripped and fell over the handrail. Believe it or not, that isn’t the worst part of death.

Double penetration.

The game revolves around soul tendency and world tendency, which people claim to understand, but it’s all a load of horse puckey. Nobody knows how the hell these work, but we DO know is that when you die in body form, it PLUMMETS your world/soul tendency toward dark and once it goes down, it can NEVER be brought back up, EVER! Mind you, many major events and unlocks require perfect white soul tendency to acquire, so don’t die. If you do, you better be damn quick to unplug your system before it auto saves. Trust me it works.

Save Points:

As I mentioned already, Demon’s Souls employs a damn near instant auto save process to ensure that absolute punishment is doled out as quickly as possible. You die, you’re screwed. You drop your weapon over the edge, you’re screwed. Basically, by playing this game, you’re screwed!

There is an upshot to this type of system. If you are done playing, simply turn your system off and return to that exact spot later. None of this traipsing around the countryside looking for a shiny crystal to have a nerdgasm over before you can call it quits for the night.

Other games need to employ this feature, perhaps with the same brutality.

Impossible Bosses

You have NO idea when the boss battles are going to occur in the game, so there is no way to prepare yourself for them. They are some of gaming’s most intimidating moments and leave you shitting your pants. Your first reaction will be one of the following:

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

“What the hell is that thing?”

“Oh fuck this!”

Actually, now that I think about it, all 3 of those usually apply to every boss, in that order.

A two story ass kicking, punishment doling machine.

Each boss will more than likely take you a multitude of anger inducing tries before you even discover the trick to beating it. The Tower Knight is only the second boss in the game and ranks in the top 3 hardest bosses in the game! There is one boss, the Man Eater that got me so pissed off that I actually spent more time trying to find a way to avoid fighting the boss through cheats and glitches than I did actually fighting it. And I found one! Stand in the doorway and shoot arrows at the fucker until he is almost dead. Then go out and give him a taste of your fun pole.

If youre not cheating, youre not trying hard enough.

The above trick also works for the Old King Allant who sucks just as much as man eater. Bring a lot of arrows! These bosses are hard as shit and that’s good. There is some inherent nature to wanting to beat the boss, knowing that there is absolutely no reward for doing so!

Multiple Ways to Play:

Sue me; I am going to compare this game to the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. In its time, that game was the hardest thing on the market, much like Demon’s Souls. However, the games share another similarity; they have no absolute definite way to be played. Much like the original legend of Zelda, Demon’s souls starts off and lets you go wherever the hell you damn well please. Just know that you will probably get your balls rocked in some of the worlds early on. Either way, you can go wherever you want, and complete the game in whatever order you want. Unfortunately, most of the paths lead to one thing in Demon’s Souls.

Games these days cater too much to the growing sense of entitlement in our great nation’s youth. ‘We deserve things and we deserve to have them now.’ We need to return to the roots of gaming, when games were hard as shit simply because they were games. Look at Battletoads! Nobody has actually completed that god forsaken final hoverboard level without some sort of cheat; and if they have, they are full of shit. Games are too easy these days and Demon’s Souls reminds us how spoiled we have gotten. Luckily, Demon’s Souls is a blast from the past that reminds what life used to be like in the ‘80’s when games took you by the ankles and dragged you through a patch of hypodermic needle covered cacti before turning around and doing it over again while pouring salt on your wounds.

Things suck, deal with it.

Wanted: Arcade Rejuvenation!

By Tom Ragan

The arcades were great places to go as a kid, brief short-lived pleasures were only a few coin drops away and the physiological immersions of turning a steering wheel, randomly bashing over-sized coloured buttons, firing a gun or kicking a ball against a back board were both enjoyable and satisfying with friends.

However, this is something I rarely experienced throughout my childhood. Here in the UK arcades are quite hard to come by unless in you’re living in big cities or seaside towns, and those that you do find are often run-down, forgotten and usually in rough areas – why? It’s because we’re bringing the physiological experiences into our homes, isn’t it? Or is it because playing ‘Sega Rally’ from 1996 is getting a little tiresome now? Is it because arcades seem to be mostly filled with gambling, con-making machines, you know, the ones that scare the kids away with their random lights, bells and whistles – promising unrealistic cash prizes; ultimately lacking in any kind of quality but that which leaves you a little bit poorer.

Social physiological immersion didn’t start with the Nintendo Wii, but the console certainly consumerized the use of controlling what is on screen with one’s limbs and executing numerous awkward physical positions. What with the technological advancements of Xbox’s Kinect sensor and Playstation’s ‘Move’ – is the arcade experience now just totally screwed, dated and, er, dead?

How long till these start disappearing?

I have finally moved to a place where an arcade is just a stones throw away, yes, Sega Rally is still there, Daytona USA, Time Crisis 2 and Virtua Cop are also amongst the other relics sitting on the 1970’s red patterned carpet. The arcade experience is rushed, and as I said, short-lived, so an extensive narrative is out of the question, as are complex controls – but is it not time to have more 4-player arcade experiences like Wii Sports, and isn’t it perhaps time we saw Kinect technology too? Am I being impatient, are we not going to see this in arcades for quite some time? Is the only way I can experience greater physiological immersion right now is to buy a £150-200 Xbox and then a £130 sensor, only to find I don’t have the space for it in my student bedroom? Many kids certainly can’t afford these high-value consoles and most kids go to arcades with friends, usually in a big group, so there really should be more physically immersive social experiences for these people – it would make gaming much more engaging and also good for those not playing, to watch. Gaming then becomes a spectacle as well, and as a result, more audiences with varied cognitive capacities will willingly participate.

It’s sad that the arcade is in a bit of a rut right now, and it would be also sad to abolish these classic retro arcade games completely. Though at the same time, we can only hope that as gaming has become more widely experienced amongst the different audiences and genders, that we can start to look forward to some fresh technologies, new games, something just a little bit quirky and different to get us back in the arcades – to make arcades more interesting, modern, less seedy and more fun for all.

So, arcade coin-op experiences, technologically  - start playing catch-up, we don’t want to lose you for good! Screw Xbox Live Arcade – when I’m in my bedroom, I build a character, I explore, I take my time. Arcade games are for the arcades, a high-score board for an arcade game in my home that reads ’1.Tom 2. Tom 3. Tom’, is lame. Setting high-scores online isn’t cool either, seriously, nobody knows or gives a crap who ‘x_z3pp!_x’ or ‘m0nkeY911′ is. The guy setting a score online for ‘most wins in a row on Street Fighter 2′ also may as well be a computer controlled bot, mister anonymous.

In arcades – I am still happy to use the change in my pocket to conveniently play games I couldn’t easily play in the same way in my own home, immerse myself through greater physiological and social experiences and stand at the now retro ‘Tekken 3′ machine, defeating everybody in the arcade with Paul Phoenix and proudly exclaiming ‘Who’s next?!’ whilst scribbling ‘TomR’ in the number 1 spot soon afterwards for all to see, to feel that brief moment of real supremacy I could never really acquire online.

We Don’t Serve Your Kind: Commerce and Prejudice in Cyrodiil

(Editor’s Note: Pixel or Death’s resident warrior-poet Patrick Lindsey has been assigned a most arduous task from the nefarious mega-computer that doles out our writing assignments: he’s going embedded in Cyrodiil. In the body of an orc, you know, some funky James Cameron shit. Here’s what his carrier pigeon brought in this week.)

Well, a lot has certainly happened in the past week, what with all the questing and adventuring I’ve been doing, and even a little exploring and seeking as well. Yes, it’s time once more for…

Week 1
Orcs in the City

When last we left off, I had resolved to head for Imperial City on an epic quest to find…a shop, so I could heal myself.  Let’s just say – my character, being an Orc, has certain… inadequacies that prevent him from being able to cast spells with any sort of consistency (and certainly not on command).  It’s a common problem – I’m told 1 in every 5 men are afflicted with this, but I can still lead a normal life.  Shut up, I don’t want to talk about this anymore and I’m getting off topic.  The point is that I need to heal myself Ye Olde Fashioned Way, with potions.  To market, to market.

Ok, so I didn’t go directly to market.  I raided the dungeon first (like that’s a big surprise).  I broke roleplay a tiny bit and healed up by “waiting” before heading in, but I’ll work it into the lore somehow…let’s see…ah yes.

“Muglak reflected, and having spent 9 hours sitting in the same spot thinking about how stupid it was to attack a group of bandits with crappy low-tier equipment, he achieved enlightenment to such a degree that his wounds knit themselves together.”

There. Moving on.

The dungeon yielded some equipment, but the real significance of this dungeon was that it was the source of my first death, at the hands of a zombie of all things.  If it was possible for me to have lost more respect for Orcs, it happened then – felled by a rotting one-armed zombie, swiging a warhammer around like a drunken fratboy at Medieval Times.  In my defense, I was weakened from fighting even more ubiquitous bandits inside the dungeon.  And the wait-to-heal trick doesn’t work when enemies are nearby, presumably because nobody would want their meditation interrupted by the moans of the undead.

After clearing the dungeon, I shuffled my zombified body all the way to the Imperial City market to sell some crap, and buy some other crap.  Now let me tell you – Orcs are well-built for many tasks.  They excel at smashing people to steal their gear.  They are even quite good at lugging all of said gear to any center of civilization in order to turn a quick buck.  They are not so good, however, at capitalizing on business opportunities and maximizing their profits from selling all this gear.  I walked into an armorer’s shop with weapons and armor totaling somewhere around 300 gold pieces (not a bad haul right out of the gate).  Instead of taking my initial offer, he made me a counter-offer – something to the effect of “I’d love to pay you market value for this stuff, but I think instead I’ll give you 40% and some encouraging words.”  Since there was no “give middle finger” option in the dialogue menu, I chose the next best thing, which was of course to agree with his ‘bargain.’  The art of the haggle, it seems, is lost on the Orc.  Especially a zombie Orc.

In need of a big weapon to overcompensate for my overwhelming feeling of inadequacy in all other parts of my life, I headed for the “big fucking weapons” shop, which as luck would have it is run by an Orc, one Urbul gro-Orkulg.  Perfect, I thought.  This man is an advocate for Orc Awareness everywhere – a lowly Orc who has made a name for himself in the big city as the successful proprietor of a thriving business.  Surely he will recognize my plight and help me cope by offering me a discount on his wares.  And he did, in fact, make me an offer I couldn’t refuse – I pay him an additional 60% markup, and he throws in…absolutely nothing.  Bastard.  So much for solidarity.

Urbul gro-Orkulg...freaking Uncle Tom.

Having just been thoroughly cleaned out, I decided to try my hand at making some cash at the arena (fighting things, remember?).  I was able to win a handful of fights, but barely.  The need to find a more efficient way of healing is now glaringly obvious, as I can only drink 4 potions at a time before apparently I get the hiccups or something and decide that gastronomical comfort is more important than, you know, not having my head cleaved in by a crazy gladiator with a bowl cut and a claymore.  My new task is to effectively level up my intelligence so I can increase my mana pool and actually be able to use some of these nifty spells I’m carrying around with me, thus breaking the fight-wait-etc cycle.  Of course, being an Orc, I have a LONG way to go when it comes to levelling intelligence, and that of course means one thing: the dreaded grind.

Just to put this in context, I despise grinding.  I find it one of the single most irritating and poorly conceived mechanics of the genre.  That’s not to say that I dislike battling and levelling and XP gain, but to have to level by repeating menial and objectively unfun tasks so many times that the video game starts to feel like work and work starts to feel like a welcome break from the video game – that’s just wrong.  But, though it may be an evil, it Is still a necessary one, and in this case at least it looks like there’s no other choice for me.  I need that mana, which means I need the intelligence points, which means I need to skill grind.  Fortunately, in Oblivion the blow of grinding has been softened a bit, as I can level skills by using them as I do other things that I actually want to do (no random battles for me!).  In this case, I need intelligence, which means alchemy grinding.

It was at this point I realized I was carrying around 30 pounds worth of freaking ingredients in my inventory.  Everything from pumpkins to rat meat, I had just been snatching them up as I went along.  This was actually fortuitous, as it prevented me from having to go out and literally pick vegetables, which at this stage would have been the straw that broke the Orc’s back and I would have surely said “fuck it” and thrown in the towell.  As it was, I was able to crank out a good amount of potions which had 2 effects: levelling up my alchemy and, by extension, intelligence, and giving me lots of potions that I could sell to make some cash.  Back to the market I went, since I’m apparently a glutton for punishment.  I was able to sell around 25 potions, for a whopping grand total of approximately 70 gold pieces.

At least I have a free bed to sleep in as a reward for saving a town from being permanantly invisible at the hands of an errant wizard (don’t ask).  Aside from now being able to level up for free (as opposed to having to pay for a bed every time I want to level up), they’re pretty much the only people I’ve encountered so far who don’t greet me by saying things like “Oh, it’s you” or “Make this quick, Orc.”  I’m assuming my chilly reception has something to do with the fact that I’ve been recently turned into a zombie.  It makes me feel a bit better than knowing they just hate me for being an Orc.

To be continued…

Fearful Symmetry: A Vana’diel Travelogue #3 – The Life and Death of a Linkshell

By Adam Harshberger

(A note before we begin: Fearful Symmetry is a column written on an extremely sporadic basis. It details my adventures in the cruel, sick, twisted world of Final Fantasy XI. There were two installments before this, and if you’re some kind of completionist weirdo – or just intrigued, I guess – you can find those here.)

My linkshell, I fear, is going the way of the dinosaur. A linkshell, if you’re uninitiated, is the Final Fantasy XI equivalent of a guild. And, again, for the uninitiated, the dinosaur is dead. My linkshell is dying.  It’s not an easy fact own up to, and I’m not particularly happy about it.

 

See!? It's in the logo. COMPANIONS!

The guild, to me, is the most crucial aspect of the MMORPG. Maybe it has something to do with my deeply rooted Final Fantasy fetish, but the most appealing aspect of online gaming has always been the promise of epic, totally gnarly adventures with the digital avatars of my companions. Now, I can ramble on for days about how the MMORPG betrayed what I first thought it would be – and well, I sort of did – but what is important here is that a strong, close-knit guild is the closest to that the current crop of MMOs can give me. A good guild is crucial to my enjoyment of a game. I don’t pay 15 bucks a month to be a loner.

The oncoming demise stings particularly painfully because I helped build this linkshell from the ground-up. It was just my room-mate and I, in the beginning (he stopped playing now). We were young, idealistic. This was 4 months ago. We founded our linkshell and picked out the almost-puke-green color of the pearl in the dead of the night. We envisioned it as a meeting place for new players; it’s no secret that being a virgin to FFXI absolutely sucks, and if these newbies don’t meet some similarly weak and needy players quick, the game will eat their soul and they’ll become vapid husks or, even worse, they’ll just quit. So we geared our guild towards new and returning players, as that was what we were ourselves. I was returning from something like a 3 year break and he hadn’t been gone much less than that, either. We needed some companions!

And companions we found. I hit the message boards, chatted people up in the Dunes. He sat in Jeuno and shouted. There were so many people like us! Freshly reactivated, a little dazed, but eager to jump back into that delicious grind or gather up that antiquated but still lucrative artifact armor. Things were good for a while. We would have occasional dips in membership, but some organized recruiting drives could always fix that. We partied together; watched levels fly upwards, gave each other some company on those long nights spent farming. What was originally a half-baked, sleepless idea had grown into something awesome.

It was a really rewarding experience. The creation of this linkshell was the first time I had attempting anything like that in any game. It felt really good to bring people together and enjoy FFXI. Other MMOs I had tried, I realize now, always fell flat because I didn’t have a guild – I didn’t have my rag-tag group of confederates. Lone ranger in an MMORPG is not the way for me.  I’m a social creature, apparently.

 

I guess I can always hang out with Ifrit.

So how did it die? I don’t know. Real life caught up with us, as it inevitably does. There are, on occasion, more important things than Final Fantasy. Population just dropped. Some of us still hang around, but the days of having to actually scroll down through the member list are gone. It’s sad. I lack the heart to rebuild it again. The remnants and I are holding on as long as we can, but it’s only a matter of time before everyone’s gone and I either become a hermit or follow them to another, stranger, foreign linkshell.

This whole thing serves as a reminder of sorts. The allure and power of MMORPGs comes from the interaction with other people. I don’t want to be mean or condescending, but I can’t help be speculate that those who play MMORPGs in a more solo-oriented fashion are missing the point. There is a lot to these games and the social interactions that happen in them, and just because we are wearing virtual armor and casting virtual spells doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. It has to mean something that my fondest gaming memory, my most meaningful experience while playing a video game was constructing a guild, right?

I hope that the guild survives. It would be thrilling to log on and find the member list fully populated once again. It’s not a necessity, I guess – I’ll still play XI even without my trusty stable of war-buddies. When I started Fearful Symmetry, I talked a lot about how fucking difficult and asinine FFXI can be – and I still think that. The underlying subtext of my previous (which admittedly is only like 2,000 words.. BUT STILL!) writings on the game seems to ask over and over “Why the hell do I like this game?” I think that I found the answer. It’s the people.

The same can be said about any MMORPG. Lets be honest, none of them are particularly fun or inventive. Their gameplay is trite and dull compared to modern juggernauts as Assassin’s Creed or Mario Galaxy. They all, in some cases more than others, demand time and patience and probably a good deal of fury from their players. So why do we flock to them with such fervor and gusto? There can only be one answer: the players we play with and the relationships with forge with them. In an age where MMORPGs are becoming more and more solo-oriented, let us hope that developers don’t forget that. After all: THAT FIFTEEN BUCKS DON’T COME EASY!