The Shelf Of Shame

As gamer larva, we generally have more time than money.  When the world was new and I had an NES as my primary console (the 2600 had been mothballed for a couple years at that point), evenings, weekends and school breaks were devoted to my chosen religion.  I can remember an entire spring break lost to Dragon Warrior III (a day killing classic if there ever was one) and more nights than I care to admit squeezing every last bit out of questionable releases like Legacy of the Wizard (the less said about it, the better).   Sixty bucks is a hell of a lot of money for a ten year old today, just think about how much it was back when it was uphill both ways. In the snow.

It didn't really matter if it was good or bad.  You kind of just dealt with what you had, because you couldn't afford anything else.  Allowances, birthdays and Christmases were carefully allocated resources.  Trading and rentals mitigated a lot of this ration-state I was borne of, but by large, I made do.

As I grew older, games took up less of my free time, and less of my time became free.  I was working a part time job, looking for ways to get turned down by girls (or at least, being told by them that I'd make some other girl very lucky some day),  and generally, being a delinquent.

By the time I got my first real grown up job and  real source of income, I was working 13 hour days, 6 days a week testing games and what time I got off, I didn't want to spend playing them.  Dark days indeed.

Round about the same time, Sony had instituted it's Greatest Hits collection.  Best sellers that had been on the market for at least a year, were repackaged at a mere 20 dollars.  Nintendo and Microsoft followed suit a few years later.  Good games had gotten cheaper, and more of them were being made.

These days, Wal-mart will slap an $18.93 sticker on any game that's been hanging around for over six months.  Costco seems to have some kind of overstock buying deal with at least one outlet, because their prices are the same.  And Steam sales.  And free-to-play.  And iOS.  Hell, Sony is giving away 24 games a year for the price of their online service!

Yikes.

My backlog is literally as long as my arm (that's what she said), and the tide shows no sign of turning anytime soon. Games that take longer than 100  hours don't help either (Thank you Roslyn and Jess, respectively).

After coming back from PAX this year, I'd resolved to work through the pile, gradually.  Starting with Twilight Princess, which had been in that sub-set of shame known as "started but not completed", and moving through Metroid Prime 3, I'm making gradual progress.  But what IS progress?  Do I have to finish the game?  Do I have to 100% complete it?  What's the minimum time that I have to spend on it?  What about roguelikes or traditional style arcade games that have no end?

In the end, there's no satisfactory answer to any of these questions.  You simply have to pick your battles and be a part of the conversations you want to be included in.  You can spend all your time getting good at DOTA 2 or League Of Legends, or you can sit back and watch streamers play without ever booting up a game yourself.

Or you can move out into the woods and become a farmer (with an incredibly supportive wife).

Next week, we're starting Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!  Guess Ni No Kuni is going back on the shelf...

Influences

Pokemon has affected my life outside of gaming more than any one other IP.

At the core, it is a very basic JRPG, but it was engaging, simple to learn, and portable.  Combined with themes of sportsmanship, friendship, and teamwork (and a half hour daily commercial, trading card game, and near infinite line of merchandise), these three elements made it popular not only with it's "target" demographic of young children, but with players of all ages.  Ostensibly, the game is about being the very best: mastering the typing chart, collecting the gym badges, defeating the Elite Four, and eventually becoming the League Champion.  However, the true secret to its success was in the marketing tag line's appeal to gamer lizard brains everywhere: "Gotta Catch'em All."

Collecting is kind of what nerds do.  It's taught to us from an early age, you have to get all the power-ups, all the pieces of the triforce, and in Pokemon, every monster.  But you cant.  At least, not by yourself.  That was hard for me to come to grips with, because after elementary school, I didn't meet a whole lot of gamers. 

I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a bit.  In my elementary school, after the NES came out, kids would gather at recess and lunch to talk about games.  Advice, rumours, and war stories were how we spent the majority of our time. ("No seriously, Samus is a girl!"  "No way!").  This was a painfully short period of my life.  High school came and it seemed that everyone else "grew up" and stopped playing games.  All of a sudden, sports and girls became more important, and games weren't even for nerds, they were for kids.  University was more of the same, except the range of acceptable activities broadened to include drinking, writing bad poetry, being into bands you've never heard of, anything but videogames.

When I started working at EA, I was suddenly surrounded by people who could discuss genre and design and it was a revelation, but even in the largest studio in Vancouver, I couldn't find anyone  who was willing to trade Pokemon with me.  I was forced to go to Pokemon TCG events full of kids as young as 5 to find partners... and being in my mid-twenties, I kind of stuck out.  Parents got it, though.  A lot of them played, too, so they understood the compulsion was as sinister as my intentions got.  I wasn't trying to kidnap their kids, just the kids' poke-thralls.  I still remember the day I got Mew at Metrotown, surrounded by a sea of waist high trainers and their incredibly patient guardians.

A wise man once told me, "You will never get rich trying to get money, you have to have other people get money for you."  And while I haven't figured out the trick of having people get money for me, one day I got wise and founded Vancouver Gamers Group.

For the first few months, it was just me.  I sat at the food court with my DS, playing games for four hours at a time by myself every Friday night.  Weird, right?  As time wore on, people slowly started finding the group.  The first big boost to membership came on the release of Dragon Quest IX, another "single" player game with deep social hooks. Over time, people came and went, but a core group eventually formed, and I kept seeing the same faces week after week.  Eventually, without really meaning to, I found myself at the center of a community.

I would go to my desk job during the week and be surrounded by people who didn't really understand my hobby (and a lot of who would disregard it, and me, as being childish), but when I went to the meetups, all of a sudden, I was with peers. Every month or so, Ellen and I would host a party at our place, and twice a year, there would be an open house.  The last one we had, it was standing room only, and we counted in excess of eighty people.  All for the love of games.

In the five years since I started the group, I have made some of the best friends in my life.  But I still haven't caught them all.

Here goes nothing

When you’re a kid, the generic question that most adults will ask you is “what do you want to do when you grow up?”  This question always baffled me.  I had no idea, and I still don’t.  The life plan was: go to school, get good grades, go to university, get a job, get married, have kids.  That’s what you do.  Ignoring the larger problems with this kind of pre-planned life, adults seemed to want to get me to fixate on the “get a job” part of that plan.  What kind of job would you get? What are you going to be?  What will you make of yourself?

Ugh.

For a large part of the population, work is something you do to pay the bills and make it so that you can do the things you want to do.  There are, of course, people whose employment either fulfils them or suits some need or aptitude that they have, and they are the lucky few.  But no kid ever says “I want to be a Mortgage Broker when I grow up!”  

So I went to school to study Literature, because it was what I loved.  I learned to read critically, and write essays, and by the time I finished, that love was ground to a fine powder under the weight of 3500 pages a semester.  I ended up not reading another novel for over a decade.  After graduation, I got a job in the games industry because it was what I loved.  I worked on some of the worst and best games I’ve ever played and by the time I was “laid off,” it was years before I could play anything without mentally logging bugs and design issues.

The rest of my employment history isn’t important.  I waited tables for years, and was good at it, I worked for a bank and was good at that, too.  But I wanted to do those two things that I used to love, write and play games.  

So let's try that for a while.