A New Daily Grind, and Fitness Questing with Fitocracy.

Way back when I started falling into a routine based on habits and the goals I'd set for myself when I was out of work I talked a little bit about what a typical "day in the life" for me was like back here. Looking back on the last few weeks, as I do my best to adjust physically and mentally to a new daily grind, I've started to think about the differences and similarities between those schedules. I'll give a brief rundown on my new routine as a lead-in to talking about a website that has started to play a major part in helping me keep to a part of that schedule. (This post won't be entirely "OMG my daily rut is so interesting," so bear with me while I get it out and onto the page for a moment, and then I'll get into the details concerning Fitocracy.)

On a given day, I'm likely to wake up to two alarms, one on a clock radio and one on my phone, set for 4:59AM and 5:00AM, respectively. I manage to get out of bed before either triggers the first snooze alarm, most days at about 5:03. Then I start the morning routine, which is comprised of more ritual than most portions of the average Catholic Mass. Breakfast, e-mail and checking social networking sites, followed by a shower and getting dressed, at the approximate same times, clothes on by 6:00. I make my sack lunch for the day, pour a cup of coffee and allow myself time for some morning PC gaming until about 6:45 AM (this will drop back to about 6:25 when there is snow) and then I brush my teeth and get in the car. My commute is long, over an hour daily but with the help of my iPod and at least a few minutes daily of a vaguely amusing morning talk radio show, I manage.

My work day is highly structured as well, as work at a therapeutic day school must be. Every day, I clock in, get another cup of coffee and attend the morning meeting. I head to my classroom and prepare daily attendance and behavior tracking paperwork and wait for students to arrive. I'm going to vague it up a little here to avoid coming within even shouting range of confidentiality issues, but each day is broken up into standard high school periods including arrival/breakfast, Gym and Lunch. I can say that Gym and Lunch are together under the current schedule late enough in the day that by the time we survive the chaos of Physical Education, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Once the last student has left the building, I have enough time to finish any required paperwork before 3:00PM. The commute back is a solid 90 minutes or more on any given day unless I get really, really lucky with traffic.

Once I make it home, I have a little bit of time for decompression before dinner (working in writing a blog post where I can somewhere in here) and after dinner I need to get ready for either the night's Progression Raid in World of Warcraft or the trip to the YMCA for a workout. Either one of these activities takes me close enough to bedtime that maybe I can sneak in a few minutes of gaming before I have to sleep at 11:00PM to catch six hours of sleep before doing it all over again. This is, obviously, a far cry from what I'd adjusted to between the months of February and October of this year when I started this blog. I was used to sleeping when tired, eating when hungry, and being on the PC the rest of the time. The effects of that inactivity pushed my weight up higher than I like, which is the primary reason for gym workouts occupying three of the four nights I don't raid, giving me only Saturday nights free of commitment.

With all that, it is really, really easy to find excuses to skip the gym. I'm a master of that, as evidenced by the fact that I went to the gym all of a half dozen times in my entire term of unemployment. I allowed myself to get sidetracked by hobbies and, of course, any number of the various games I filled all that time with when not looking for work or blogging. The number of tagged articles with "video games" on them spell it out. I find myself too easily drawn into various games. Fortunately, I found a way to convert the addictive qualtities of questing, leveling and highly structured rewards found in the RPGs I play into a way to keep myself motivated in the gym. I'm playing another game. Fitocracy, as recently featured on Penny Arcade, combines the addictive qualities of social networking with the quests, achievements and levels of any MMORPG to focus the gamer's Obsessive/Compulsive qualities into a way to keep going to the gym.

The interface mostly looks like Facebook, or a similar social networking site, and there are plugins to link your Fitocracy account to both your Facebook and to your Twitter. You automatically follow the progress of whoever invited you, and you may choose to have the program find friends from your personal social networks. Excercise, record ytou workouts on the site and recieve experience points toward the next level. Bonus XP can be gained from completing quests which start out simple (do 20 crunches, or play sports for 30 mins) and get progressively harder. Quests also encourage the user to try excercises that they might not normally ever give a shot to in a normal workout, and the bonus experience is enough to maybe try a freeweight bench press instead of the standard half-hour or hour on the elliptical, bike or treadmill.

Your friends and members of groups you join can see your progress as you earn experience, levels and achievements, and give "props," which are essentially the same thing as upvotes on Reddit, likes on Facebook, +1s on Google+, etc. The site seems well laid out, though more variety in the specific types of exercises that can be tracked would be nice in some spots (There is, for example, an entry for "video game dancing" but nothing for, say, WiiFit, and many weight lifting exercises that use machines are absent.) The amount of experience required to gain the next level and the progressively more difficult quests do a good job of subtly encouraging more excercise, and I'll admit, I've gone out of my way to do a little extra on a non "Gym day" to knock out a quick quest for bonus experience. The amount of free content on the site is impressive, and if you want to support the developers, it is possible to subscribe to get access to titles and at least one bonus achievement when you become a "Fitocracy Hero." I'm only Level 3 at the moment, but I'm just getting started, and since I don't get to run back if I keel over, I'd like to be able to make it to endgame.

Blizzcon 2011: Demons and Costumes and (Panda) Bears, Oh, my!

So another annual convention from the developers of World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft is in the books, and there were a few highlights of interest to those of us who couldn't make the trek to the convention. There was the ever-popular costume contest, the announcement of the next WoW expansion, and a deal for people willing to sign up for a one-year "tour" for the popular MMORPG, that is seeing a decline in subscription numbers. Personally, I was excited by this year's announcements, and I'd like to talk a bit about them and address my feelings on the controversial elements, specifically about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. But before we get into any of that, let's take a look at the convention as a whole.

Outside of the WoW-Universe, there were a couple of major announcements with the debut of the trailer for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and the release of Blizzard DOTA. The Starcraft trailer gives us a bit of a teaser for next year's expansion, showing that even though Sarah Kerrigan has been rescued and looks human again, all is not well with the former Queen of Blades. We get a preview of a bunch of new units and a brief look at the continuation of the story from Wings of Liberty, with a gorgeous trailer rendered using in-game technology. On the DOTA front, it is exciting to see the original Action/RPG/Realtime Strategy mod Defense of the Ancients get an officially supported release, with many of Blizzard's greatest characters as champions. The original DOTA spawned a subgenre of games including League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, and it'll be great to see the original game return with updated graphics and gameplay, and with Blizzard's official blessing and support.

This year's costume contest continues the tradition of moving away from "sexiest costume wins" and rewarding amazing craftsmanship. The top three this year included a great-looking Deathwing in human form, a decent representation of a WoW Paladin with Ashbringer, and the grand prize winner, one of the best costumes I've ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie. The costume, a note-perfect representation of a Starcraft Adjutant android was worn by Avery Faith of Los Angeles, CA. The combination of technical excellence in the fabrication of the costume pieces with the simultaneously creepy and beautiful aesthetic makes the piece something that really needs to be seen to be believed. (Which is why I picture it below.)

There wasn't a lot more that could be said about Diablo 3, aside from a new teaser trailer, since we've already seen a glut of preview videos and the news that it won't come out until 2012 broke before the convention. However, there was one thing they could do to make Diablo 3 news my personal favorite bit of the con. They made it free. Of course, there are strings attached to the deal. With the imminent release of Bioware's Star Wars MMORPG and some frustration with current raiding content, World of Warcraft is losing subscribers. The solution? Offer a free copy of Diablo 3 to anyone willing to commit to a 1-year subscription to WoW. The offer also comes with an automatic beta invite for the next WoW expansion and an exclusive in-game mount. For me, it was a no-brainer, since I hadn't planned on canceling my subscription this year anyway, and I was a guaranteed sale for Diablo 3, so reducing that game to my favorite price was a bonus.

Then we have the next WoW expansion, raising the level cap to 90, introducing a new zone, a new playable race and a new base class. Mists of Pandaria will be centered on the forgotten home of the reclusive masters of brewing strong spirits and practicing asian-style martial arts, the Pandaren. The race will be available to be played by either Horde or Alliance, and will have a strong connection to the new base class, the Monk. The developers are changing up the formula a bit, focusing on the conflict between Alliance and Horde instead of a single "last boss" like the last three expansions. The Pandaren will be drawn into the conflict, creating a brutal civil war in a land that once knew only peace and meditation, with the "main villain" as war itself. The announcement of a battle minigame system for non-combat pets, along with the "cutesy" look for the Pandaren has the neckbeards of the internet lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks, declaring WoW forever ruined.

...Really? We have talking walrus-men, cow-men, bird-men, fish-men, but pandas are somehow crossing the line? I get that none of those races has be the central character for an entire expansion, but people have been begging for Pandaren since the beginning of World of Warcraft. The accusations that the next expansion is "Kung-Fu Panda and Pokemon," and therefore is designed with small children in mind insults the intelligence of the average gamer. Pandaren have been present in the Warcraft lore for sixteen years, long before there was a Kung-Fu Panda, and gamers were outraged that they weren't a new race way back when The Burning Crusade was first released. I'm completely willing to check out the next expansion (and with my guaranteed beta access, I certainly will) before I declare it to be childish and stupid. If the game becomes something I no longer want to play, I'll stop. I don't see the point in being insulting and jumping to conclusions on the basis of a few videos and some sketchy details, however.

Music and Video Games - Stuff I'd have never heard if I wasn't a gamer.

When it comes to music, I like a pretty wide variety of different things, but I don't spend a whole lot of time listening to the radio or watching music channels on TV (not that most of those ever have any music anymore.) As the content of this blog would suggest, I spend quite a bit of my time playing games. Going through the contents of my iPod, I realized that the source of a lot of my favorite music is something I liked when hearing in in a video game once, and then I looked up the artist and purchased albums or individual tracks. As soundtracks for geeky films and TV can only provide so much in terms of exposure to new music, and tabletop roleplaying and fantasy novels don't (typically) have a soundtrack at all, I'm glad to have so many artists that I was introduced to primarily through PC and console games. I'd like to run down a few of those now.

Artist/Song: Bang Camaro - “Push Push” (Lady Lightning)

Game: Guitar Hero 2

"Trogdor" was another great bonus song from that game, but I was already aware of it at the time.

I was first working at a video game store when I encountered the Guitar Hero games, and I was terrible at them. When Guitar Hero 2 was released, our store got a preview copy with a few songs for the in-store demo station. In times when business was slow, I played the hell out of those few songs, and ended up pre-ordering and purchasing the full game when it released for the Xbox 360. I carved through the catalogue of songs in that game bit by bit, unlocking all the bonus songs and being able to play almost every song on Hard. One of the more fun ones to learn was the Arena-rock styled song from Bang Camaro. I don't play much guitar hero these days, but I still listen to that song now and again.

Artist/Song: Louis Armstrong - “A Kiss to Build a Dream On...”

Game: Fallout 2

I'd heard of Satchmo before Fallout, of course, but in the same way I'd heard of Jelly Roll Morton, Bing Crosby, and other artists who I could name but didn't really “listen to.” The amazing opening for this game impressed me so much that not only did I reload it many times to watch again, but I eventually picked up a CD of Louis Armstrong's recordings from the Decca sessions. This CD is representative of a lot of the commonly recognized “greatest hits,” and though I've ripped it to individual MP3s by now, I can say that the gravelly voice and amazing trumpet skills of this musical titan are a major part of any shuffle rotation.

Artist/Song: Alizée “J'en ai Marre”

Game: World of Warcraft

Yep, that is a specific dance move from a specific singer.

Funny thing about this one is, I didn't encounter French Pop star Alizée through her music, at least not initially. As people (or at least, most guys) who have played WoW for any significant length of time would likely recognize, the French pop singer is the inspiration for the female Night Elf dancing animation. In one of the many videos showing the WoW dances and their real-world counterparts side-by-side, I noticed this one and curiosity sent me to Google to find out who she was and what her music sounded like. Surprisingly, I found a few songs I liked quite a bit without any videos of her dancing required, even though I don't speak French near well enough to understand them.

Artist/Song: Poets of the Fall - “War” and “Poet and the Muse” (as Old Gods of Asgard)

Game: Alan Wake

I've mentioned these guys before. Since encountering their music in Alan Wake, the Finnish rock band Poets of the Fall has become one of my very favorite bands of all time. I haven't been to a concert in years, but if these guys have a tour that takes them anywhere near Chicago, I may have to clear my schedule and score tickets. They appear throughout the game both as themselves, and performing two songs as the fictional Nordic Metal Band from the 1970s called Old Gods of Asgard. (Video above is an "Old Gods" power ballad.)  Most of their stuff sounds like a blend between Jethro Tull and Queensryche, clean vocals and dark undertones in the music. Outside of the songs from the games, I am a huge fan of both the newest album, Twilight Theater, and Carnival of Rust from 2006. They also wrote and performed the closing credits to Max Payne 2.

Artist/Song: Jonathan Coulton - “Still Alive”

Game: Portal

Even people who have never tried Portal have likely heard the closing credits song over and over again. The clever lyrics, darkly humorous and in keeping with the tone of the game itself plus the incredibly catchy tune got many geeks to play the song to death and memorize all the words. Mr. Coulton wrote the song, but didn't perform it himself. A little digging online reveals a career built on funny songs with geeky themes, from Zombie Office Workers trying calmly to draft a memo to get the humans to let them in (RE: Your Brains,) to a young nerd who dreams of the day in the future when he can become a cyborg supervillain with a lab in space, because he is humiliated by a girl he likes now (Future Soon.) I've heard most of his albums, and the songs are catchy, well performed and genuinely funny throughout, so long as your sense of humor is twisted.

There are scores of songs from the music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero that I left off, mainly because most of my favorites from that genre are tunes I already knew about before the games featuring them. Also worth a brief mention is the track from Portal 2, “Exile Vilify” by The National. I played that song again and again to the point of my wife yelling at me right after hearing it. More than one of the Skateboarding games on consoles have had songs on their soundtracks that I've since tracked down, and the Grand Theft Auto series has great music on the various in-game radio stations as well.

World of Warcraft Patch 4.2 – Rage of the Firelands

I've had a little bit of time to appreciate the material presented in the new content patch for World of Warcraft, and I think I'm ready to discuss a little bit about it. The release of a patch like this presents more content, new bosses, many of them are what would be a pricey bit of DLC or even a whole new expansion if released as part of many single-player or other non-MMO games. The story, for those who pay attention to it (as I do) is advanced with new cutscenes and quests, and a new Tier of raid content is introduced. The Tier 12 Raid picks up where the quests in Mount Hyjal left off, with Ragnaros the Firelord gathering his strength for another assault on Azeroth, and the war to enter the Firelands themselves to stop his return.

This patch brings back a lot of concepts not seen since the Vanilla WoW raid Molten Core, which also had Ragnaros as a final boss, and of course, flame and lava as the theme. Beyond those mostly cosmetic differences, this new content reminds me most of the Burning Crusade patch that introduced the Sunwell raid instance and the Isle that contained it. Both are lore-heavy, feature a new zone with an ongoing military conflict that is advanced through daily quests, and a wide-open raid instance that feels less confining than the traditional “Dungeon Rooms” of most raids. The patch also brings difficulty modifications (“nerfs”) to older raid content to enhance accessibility for more casual players, and introduces a new Legendary Weapon, a staff designed for DPS casters.

I like the new content overall, but currently I have mixed feelings about the environment that is currently present in WoW, and some of the burden of my lessened interest in certain aspects of the game falls at the feet of this patch. I feel that some elements were designed precisely as they should be for where Cataclysm is in its lifecycle as an expansion, but other aspects of this patch in particular feel somehow like

The Good:

The quests and raid encounters are rich with lore, tying into the Cataclysm plot well without having Deathwing turn up to cackle and twirl his evil mustache the way Arthas seemed to in every content patch in Wrath. The daily quests are combined with the phasing mechanic, which means the more you work personally on contributing to the war against the firelands, the more progress you will see. NPCs from many other quests and raids turn up to aid in the fight, I've seen Hemet Nesingwary, Argent Confessor Paletress and even Mankrik fighting alongside heroes in the war, it is nice to see these characters as people and citizens in a living world, rather than mannequins who stand around waiting to hand out quests or be killed in their own personal areas.

Fans of this guy will find a lot to love about 4.2.

The rewards for completing dailies and earning reputation are good, and the crafted items are some of the best I've seen in any patch since WoW launched. This means that good gear is attainable, but reasonable levels of effort are required, as even the crafted gear requires items that drop from raid bosses. The availability of epic gear is structured nicely for this stage of the game, with returning or new players able to play catch-up, but without it being so trivially easy that people who played since launch have grounds for serious complaint. (This, of course, won't stop many of them, but such is life.)

The Bad:

I personally enjoy raid encounters that ramp the difficulty up a bit, but some of the balancing between 10man and 25man raid bosses seems “off.” In certain encounters, the 10-man version is challenging but killable after a few night's practice, but the 25 man version seems insurmountably frustrating, with a single mistake by one raider to end the encounter with a wipe. This may be by design on its own, but it has some potentially unintended consequences.

What do you think he's been doing since Molten Core? Leveling up, same as you.

New raid gear can be obtained by killing bosses, earning reputation with the new faction, and using valor points. A side effect of 10-man raids being so much easier than 25-man raids is that if you are in a guild that wants to raid 25s, capping your valor points weekly is a brutal grind through old content. You might get a few hundred here and there for a boss kill, but you'll be spending many, many hours in heroic dungeons to rack up a few more valor points so that the week doesn't feel wasted. Personally, that grind sometimes makes it so I'd rather do something else, anything other than logging on to WoW.

The Ugly:

Players have developed some really bad habits since Wrath of the Lich King was released, and echoes of some of the development calls made in the name of greater content accessibility are still being felt. I'm all for WoW no longer only being playable at a certain level by elitist players and 95% of the subscriber base being locked out of content forever is a BAD THING. That said, when things are made easier, there is a certain class of player that isn't used to things being hard, and when presented with a challenge, they whine.

So you say the Legendary Staff of Dragons is actually powered by Noob Tears and Butthurt?

Nowhere else is the “whiner” factor more apparent than in any discussion regarding the new Legendary Item. Legendary Weapons aren't supposed to be something that eventually everyone in a guild gets. With a heroic amount of effort an cooperation, top guilds can expect to have one or two of these items in their entire raiding roster. New players (or those who learned the worst possible lessons from Wrath) aren't used to being challenged for the best gear. They only need to wait long enough, and it'll practically jump into their inventories. This isn't the case for the staff Dragonwrath, which is desired by every Mage, Warlock, Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman and Boomkin Druid in the game.

The proliferation of the classes who might desire the item and the difficulty in obtaining even one for a whole guild is something that I am sure will create a lot of tension in many raiding guilds, and people will be kicked out of or quit guilds over it. This is the sort of weapon that characters will wait 5+ years to even be included in the game, and knowing they'll never get one upsets many, many people. (Hell, I'm 2^nd in line for one in my guild and I might never see it completed.)

Miscellany, and Overall:

The art style of the new items is cool, consistent with the theme, and overall the content feels very well put together, but the complaining that tiny spoonfuls of content are being stretched out over progressively longer periods of real time gains strength with every new patch, and cut features. I think that by the end of this expansion, people will be pleased with the way content was stretched out over the lifecycle of the product, for for now, we hear a new 5-man has been cancelled and we're disappointed and angry. We complain that encounters are too hard, but we called the game a “joke” back in Wrath for being too easy.

I like what I see in the Firelands, I just wish the grind of it all didn't feed the whiny, complainy voice inside me that wants to agree with all the gamers whose complaints I find annoying.  Sometimes, when faced with running another random dungeon, I'd just rather go play something else, and I wish that weren't so.  

Virtual Currencies – From WoW Gold to Bitcoin, with a stop in Second Life.

It is difficult to talk about currency in any form these days without the whole topic getting muddled and mired into politics. The economics surrounding the behavior of companies and governments and the attendant problems and crises are on everyone's minds, and they extend in particular to this blog. (After all, if not for unemployment, I'd just be the “Geek.”) However, there's one place where we don't have to worry about taxes, inflation, volatility of currency, government regulations, interest rates and the global banking community. The internet. Sure, there are a few places that you might have to pay sales tax online depending on where you live, and if you make money online you're probably taxed on that, but our day-to-day transactions online, whether they are in gold pieces in an MMORPG or credits on any number of websites... surely those are free from the standard economic worries and the politics that come with them. Or are they?

So I have to fill out form 1099-WOW and append it... can I claim my non-combat
pets as dependents?

There has been a bit in the news recently about a virtual currency that on its surface doesn't have much in common with a gold piece picked up from the purse of a dead virtual orc. Bitcoin has surfaced in reports several times in the last week with the United States Congress taking an interest in the system in light of its connection to buying and selling drugs, and a user recently reported that a hacker compromised a system he was storing bitcoins on to the tune of $500,000USD gone in a flash. The interest in the virtual currency has gotten a lot of attention, with attention comes people doing research, getting excited and participating, which increased the value of the coins in the system. Though highly volatile, each bitcoin is currently (as of June 2011) worth about twenty dollars in US currency. The upward trend attracts speculators, which drives the value up further.

So what is it and how does it work? Each bitcoin is a piece of code with encryption designed to prevent counterfeiting or duplication or other fraud, including transfer fraud. The verification of transactions using coins are distributed across the peer-to-peer network, making all transfers of coins public and verifiable, but the addresses of the people making the transactions secure and private. Without a centralized authority, currency goes from one person's hands to another without fees or regulations, and no government or bank can devalue the currency by injecting more into the system to create inflation. Libertarians, cryptology geeks, conspiracy theorists and criminals love the idea. It is like a digital version of briefcases full of cash. Governments and bankers aren't so keen on it. Individual coins are created by “mining” where the computing power to create the blocks of code in a new coin are purchased from any user running the mining program, rewarding the miner with a brand new coin after a lot of work on a powerful PC. Each coin takes exponentially longer to create than the last, so the amount of new coins entering the system is controlled and stable.

There aren't a lot of places to spend these coins for real world goods, at least not yet. There are virtual currency exchanges set up to turn regular money into bitcoins and vice-versa, and websites that allow purchases to be made using them. The anonymous and secure nature of the coins means that some are used to buy illegal goods online, such as the Silk Road marketplace that sells illegal drugs online, or for money laundering. Currency proponents insist that legitimate uses outnumber illegal uses for bitcoins, and they are no different from cash in what they can be used for or by whom. Governments, especially in the United States don't like currencies involved in untracable, untaxable transactions, and the future of the currency may well rest in its decentralized, peer-to-peer system's ability to resist governmental interference. (If the same strategy that makes it nearly impossible to stamp out piracy in P2P is effective in this, things could get interesting.)

This isn't the first time that a virtual currency has attracted the interest of powerful people who would really prefer you use the currencies they, not coincidentally, already have a lot of. The online game Second Life and its currency, the Linden Dollar gained a lot of attention from around 2004-2007 based on the idea that the currency could be traded for “real” money through a currency exchange using PayPal, and businesses could be run in-game to earn more Linden Dollars, including trading in real estate in-game and playing the currency market as a speculator. The fact that the company that ran Second Life explicitly retained ownership of all these credits and they acted as a combination central bank and clearinghouse for all exchanges and markets drew criticism concerning whether or not these Linden Dollars were currency at all. With regard to taxation, European users were charged the VAT (Value Added Tax) on certain Second Life transactions, including some dealing only in Linden Dollars.

I messed with Second Life for a while, off and on. A lot of it looks like the Sims, with a lot
more elves, catgirls, winged angels and porn. Hard to describe.

With the established value of virtual currency as something that can bring real, non-internet wealth, thinking about taxation and tracking of income is changing. Many online gamers know about the “gold farmers” who play MMORPGs to earn virtual currency for sale in online semi-legal or illegal transactions. In China, where many of these operations were run, the issues concerning running many virtual black markets up to and including theft of in game currency and property made it to real-world court systems. In 2009, China limited transactions concerning virtual currencies and how they could and could not be used to interact with “real money trading.” South Korea has ruled virtual currency the same as any other currency, and taxation on virtual goods as a policy is being floated throughout Asia.

New Class - Certified Public Accountant.

Are we inevitably heading towards a world with some sort of taxation on the transfer of digital goods and whenever gold pieces, credits, or coins change hands? Some economists say that we are, and there is no reason why we shouldn't. I wonder about the possibilities inherent in having to report gaming income, or on the flip side, being able to pay bills and buy groceries with currency I got by blowing up monsters in a fantasy world. Will I be able to write off repair costs for broken armor? Will we see prosecution for ninja looters, indictments for insider traders on the Auction House? When do the walls between the game world and the real world come down, and when does reasonable economic policy cross that line into the absurd? I expect many attorneys will make a lot of money answering these questions, and I further assert that they won't be taking their fees in gold pieces, Linden Dollars or Bitcoins.

Monday Potpourri, or How I Spent My Geeky Weekend.

Today's post may be a little more unfocused than my usual articles. I have a lot to talk about today, and about the only theme I can come up that links the varied topics is that they are all about things that happened this weekend. A few events relevant to this blog happened in the course of a few days, I had the opportunity to follow up on and am prepared to revisit two topics I've covered before, and I got to experience a major world news event through a uniquely geeky lens.

Throwing chronology completely to the wind, I'll start with one of the very last things that happened this weekend. Weeks before the first episode came out, I wrote a bit on HBO's Game of Thrones, and how excited I was about it. Right before bed last night, I caught the third episode and I'm about due for an update on how I feel about the show. There is a LOT of material to cover to tell the story laid out in the first book, and so far, I feel the show is doing a good job of telling the story without losing too much of the detail that gives the world its depth and unique feel. Many favorite characters have been presented at this point, and the casting choices have been uniformly good. Any changes from the books have been tiny things, needed to improve the flow of story, and I think the show is comprehensible to people who haven't already spent years discussing the books.

Arya Stark learning "dancing" from Master Syrio Forel. Great casting.

I've also had a full week, and much of the weekend to try out the new content I touched on in World of Warcraft, the “update” of classic raid dungeons initially designed for between 10 and 25 players, re-imagined as longer than usual 5 man adventures. Zul'Aman is virtually unchanged from its initial release aside from the same monsters being tuned a bit for fighting groups of 5 level 85 characters as opposed to 10 level 70s. Still frustrating in the same places, still easy in the same spots. More interesting to me is Zul'Gurub, which kept the original environments, but completely rethought the monsters and bosses, including a clever encounter that is only accessible if someone in the group has sufficient archaeology skill to mess with a cache of cursed artifacts. Both of these new 5-man dungeons are like running 2 heroic dungeons back to back, all gear drops are purple (Epic) quality and they take, typically 2-3 hours to finish unless you have a very good group that knows all the fights already. We got to figure out the bosses in ZG for ourselves, no guides or YouTube strategy videos to help us along, and that was great fun, and a refreshing change of pace.

One of the Tiki-themed Minibosses in Zul'Gurub.

On to blog business, this weekend, two things of note happened, my post “Can't Stick The Landing – RPGs and Poor Endings” was a featured article in this month's Carnival of Video Game Bloggers here at GamingMyWay, and I got another award! This site received the “Stylish Blogger Award” from The Angry Lurker, many thanks to him, and this is another “with rules attached” award, so here they are.

Now the rules of this award are to:

1. A thank you and link back to the nominating blog.
2. Share seven things about yourself.
3. Pass this award on to 10 or so other deserving blogs.
4. Let them know of your nominating them for the award.
   
   

Rather than fill the rest of this post with links to blogs, I'm going to comply with rule 3 in my own way. Throughout the coming weeks, one or two at a time I'll add my nominations. A lot of my favorite blogs already have this award, so I'll get the time I need to figure out who to pass it on to (no begging in emails or comments please) and the deserving sites won't get lost in a long list.

As for seven facts about myself... Well, here goes.

1. I grew up in a particularly dangerous neighborhood, the only Irish-American kid in an area that became a gang-controlled barrio just outside Chicago.
2. I was the initial designer of the Town Project in the RPGA's Living Greyhawk Campaign, which allowed players to write, develop and spend in-game resources on the management of their D&D character's home towns and villages in a global campaign. The towns could build structures to defend themselves, harvest resources and grow population, adding a lot of “Civilization/SimCity” elements to a shared-world campaign.
3. While working in the hobby game industry, I also pursued a performing career, working as a concert tenor, improv comedian and actor.
4. The band I've seen more often in concert than any other is They Might Be Giants.
5. I've taken classes in and since forgotten how to speak or read almost anything in the following languages: Spanish, French, German, Russian and Japanese.
6. I didn't have a driver's license until I was 21, and took the test to get one my 2^nd time ever behind the wheel. (Nearly passed, nailed it on the next try.)
7. I've been to the mayan ruins of Chichen Itza four times, and got to see the Throne of the Red Jaguar inside the central chamber of El Castillo.

El Castillo, the famous temple to Kukulcan in Chichen Itza.

Last, but not least, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the announcement last night of the confirmed death of Osama bin Laden in an American operation. My wife and I were online in our Sunday night raid, working on killing Heroic Maloriak with our WoW guild when the news broke. We have several active duty military personnel in the game who claimed to have known already, but were under strict orders to keep quiet on the subject until DNA testing confirmed the news. We alt-tabbed from game to news sites and social media outlets for details or confirmation that the news wasn't a hoax in between boss attempts. Eventually, the news became so distracting that we broke for the night so all the players could watch the televised speech.  Rather than cynically insist that this news changes nothing, or hop up and down chanting “USA, USA!” I find my reaction rather more complex, but a blog I read this morning put it more succinctly than I feel I could. That link is here.  

Happy Patch Day. World of Warcraft v4.1

Patch Day.

There isn't a WoW gamer out there who doesn't cringe at those two little words. It isn't that we aren't looking forward to shiny new content. Most of use have exhaustively read the patch notes, are excited or angry about changes to the abilities of our favorite characters, and already know the names and locations of any new monsters or coveted gear weeks in advance of a new content patch release. Heck, more than a few of us may have loaded up the World of Warcraft Public Test Realm and seen the changes in-action (and helped debug them.) Most of us look forward to the next content patch.

If I bought the wife this shirt, she might wear it, but I'd be in trouble first.

There is a downside. Since I know not all of my readers play World of Warcraft, the reasons why patch day is so simultaneously exciting and frustrating might require a little more information. The World of Warcraft “week” is effectively Tuesday to Monday, that is to say that there are a whole lot of things you can only do once a week, and these all reset each Tuesday. The difficult bosses that a guild wants to kill many, many times to get equipment for all of its members in “raid” dungeons stay dead once killed for the rest of that week. Everything resets (unless you change a setting because you don't want it to) on Tuesday. Weekly server maintenance, which can range in scope from a 20 minute rolling server restart to a 20 hour extended maintenance ordeal, happens on Tuesday.

The trolls, featured in this week's new patch.

Those extended maintenance days happen infrequently, but there is one day that you can just about guarantee an extended maintenance. Patch day. Also, the stress once the servers come back online of the majority of subscribers all trying to log on at once frequently crashes them immediately. Everyone is prepared to see the new content and complain about being bored for the entire downtime instead of going outside or spending time with friends and family, they all tend to come into the game where they last logged out. These servers are capable of handling many, many players at once. They just don't handle most of the userbase popping into one of the major cities simultaneously very well.

I think the most accurate metaphor I can craft about a WoW gamer's mixed feelings on Patch Day is one of a very special Holiday. Imagine that Christmas, instead of being a specific time each year, was announced to children a few weeks before. Furthermore, on Christmas Day, not only can these children not play with the new toys, they are not allowed to play with ANY toys for most of the day. And when gift unwrapping starts, there is a very good chance that just as the paper starts to come off the first package, everything will stop suddenly and without warning and you'll have to wait for a few more hours. Oh, and for a few days, not only your new toys, but suddenly some of your old ones won't work quite right. Then the crying starts.

Yeah. Kinda like this.

I hope my fellow gamers will forgive my metaphor comparing us the children, as the “Video Games are not just for kids” thing is one of my hot-buttons too. I use the metaphor because patch day does sort of feel like a geek cultural holiday, just not one that we experience with the attendant stress and responsibilities of being an adult on Christmas or Thanksgiving. I'd also probably feel worse about the comparison if it wasn't for all the tantrums I see in forums every single patch day. This particular subject, and how we express our feelings about it as a group, is perhaps not the best place to make our stand on proving how mature gamers are as a subculture.

This particular content patch, in addition to all of the tweaks and normal changes to races, classes and quests (the “buffs” and “nerfs”) we have a lore-supported advancement of the troll race's story. At the start of this expansion, trolls got an expansion to their lore, as the Darkspear Clan (the playable trolls) participated in the retaking of the Echo Isles from the Witch Doctor Zalazane, one of their own who betrayed them. This line of quests allowed players (Horde only, of course) to participate in the founding of Sen'jin Village, a new starting area for Troll characters. Many of the characters who participated in the Echo Isles event are returning once more for the relaunch of two classic raid instances re-imagined and redesigned at 5-man dungeons. This event was big enough to warrant a cinematic trailer for the patch.

A lot of more cynical players will cite this as the continued recycling of old content at the expense of new design and development. I've heard many times when old environments that no one looks at anymore getting new life how lazy it is of the developers. Personally, I don't care for that argument. I'd rather have something new that did take a little less manpower to prepare get a little polish and then get rolled out while they work on refining and improving the legitimately completely new content coming down the pipe. It won't be too much longer before we see the release of the Firelands raid that will finally cap off the Mount Hyjal zone plot that ended with “and then he got away.”

I'll be turning up tonight, seeing the servers crash and things not working as intended. Actually, now that I think about it, the troll is the PERFECT mascot for patch day.

MMORPGs, from Adventure to World of Warcraft. A brief historical summary.

I've mentioned several times before that I play World of Warcraft, but I haven't really gone into specifics, the hows and the whys. As a gamer, I grew up on tabletop RPGs, arcade games and the NES. Hobby gaming including wargames with miniatures and boardgames, PC Gaming from those early Sierra adventures to Dragon Age 2 and console gaming from the NES to the Xbox 360 have always occupied a lot of my leisure time. With the exception of Dungeons and Dragons, it is unlikely that any single game from any of those categories has taken a greater portion of that time than World of Warcraft. Before I can answer the questions of How, specifically I play, and what about WoW appeals to me as a gamer, I'd like to provide some background on it, and the genre it currently dominates.

Ah, Gold Box. We were so happy to have graphics, most of us didn't notice these were actually pretty dull.

Playing as a knight, wizard or elf in a dungeon on a computer was one of the very first things anyone ever tried to do with one that wasn't science, business or military-related (as far back as 1975, with “Adventure”.) From early text and ASCII adventures (the roguelikes) on through digital D&D from Pool of Radiance through Baldur's Gate and beyond, the single player dungeon crawl has always been popular. The multiplayer experience, trying to get something like the home D&D session on the computer was perhaps not in the specific design objectives of these titles, but it existed in the imaginations of many of those who played them.

Enter Ultima Online. There were few graphical games of its kind when UO first released, Meridian 59 in 1996, and earlier offerings on proprietary networks like CompuServe, GEnie, AOL and The Sierra Network. Many gamers interested in the concept of a persistent online fantasy world signed up for Ultima Online when it launched in 1997, partially on the strength of the Ultima license, which was one of the traditional PC RPG franchises at the time. People loved, and hated it. UO got to go first, and made mistakes other games would later learn from. Rampant player vs player murder and theft, since all items could be taken from a dead character... it was just more profitable to engage in antisocial play. Player housing sprouted up across the land, with wealthy players using cheaper houses as artificial fences to keep others out of large sections of the world. The economy was broken, people used the in-game macro system to automatically gain levels and skills others worked for, and rampant cheating or bug exploits made the game a huge mess. But it was a start.

Classic Moment. Player Killing and Theft were so out of control, this shows the moment that Lord British, leader of the world of Ultima, being played by the company president, was PK'ed during his speech... with a stolen scroll.

Many other MMORPGs launched in the wake of Ultima Online, most notably the Korean game Lineage, Asheron's Call and EverQuest. Many of these games adopted features that persist even into modern MMOs, and as popularity grew, the opinions of roleplaying gamers started to diverge. The novelty wore off for some and negative opinions grew into backlash against the genre, while other found that this emerging style of gameplay was precisely what they were looking for. Each world developed mostly in its own direction, with a few common features and assumptions in most of the new games being released, most of these solutions to actual or perceived problems with UO and other early games in the genre.

A few standouts in an era mostly dominated by EverQuest include Dark Age of Camelot, Final Fantasy XI, and Runescape. Dark Age of Camelot continued the process of refining the systems and gameplay elements of earlier games, and introducing faction-based world PvP combat. This innovation balanced somewhat the desire of players to have the risk associated with non-consensual PvP and its attendant thrill against antisocial grief play that can drive new players from a game. Final Fantasy XI took the popular Japanese console RPG into the world of the MMORPG with players from around the world able to play on PC, PlayStation 2, and later Xbox360. Runescape launched as a free-to-play, browser based MMORPG with optional content available for a small fee. This attracted many gamers who wanted to play this sort of game, but who refused to pay a monthly fee for the privilege.

This box brought more controversy to my gaming groups than anything since Magic Cards at the table.

The modern era of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game really started in November of 2004. World of Warcraft launched with a successful and familiar franchise from its Real Time Strategy Warcraft series, having learned from a lot of the games that came before it, and is still the undisputed heavyweight in the genre. WoW started with a design goal of examining every feature common to any MMORPG that came before and evaluating it. If a feature was popular and enjoyed by most players, a way to highlight or enhance that feature was implemented, Such as action bars and chat windows a la EverQuest, or faction based PvP from Dark Age of Camelot. If a feature or assumption was disliked by players, it was eliminated and replaced with something else. Most early MMOs started players in a field killing rats or bunnies, and these “newbie zones” didn't do much to make a new player feel heroic. WoW discarded the “fight rats and rabbits” trope, and focused on early content as an introduction to basics of the setting and a larger story. Continual adaptations from this philosophy, with gradual graphical improvements to make the game look and feel modern without becoming unplayable on the average subscriber's system has kept WoW on top for the last 6+ years.

Still on top... for now.

In a future article, I'll talk about my experience in particular with World of Warcraft, from beta tester before its release, to casual player, guild member, hardcore raider, guild officer and guild master of a successful mid/top-tier raiding guild. I understand the perspective of the gamer who hates this game, and in the years I've been playing... I've been there. My wife and I still play together as officers in the guild I once led, pushing along with a team to defeat the most difficult bosses in-game, but most of our involvement is now down to between four and five hours three or four nights a week. It is a hobby, and one that has proven to be a less expensive way to spend time as a couple than many others we could choose.

Yo! Nerd Raps! No, really.

 I've talked a little before about my taste in music, but despite the wide variety, I'd still classify more than half of it as what someone would call “mainstream”. Most of the off the path stuff is one or two bands or even just a couple songs in a style that you won't find on any radio station. There's one huge exception to all that, however. Nerdcore hip-hop, also called nerdcore rap.

I went through a time in my life where I pretty much looked down on rappers as musical artists, and I think a lot of that came from a dissatisfaction with the variety of themes used in the songs, and my lack of ability to really connect with a lot of it. Now, as an adult, I've learned to appreciate rap music as a medium, and though I prefer “Old School” to newer stuff, I sometimes even hear something new out of the rap world that I think is really cool. There's still that lingering something, though... so many songs about how much money someone has, casual sex and drug use or drug selling. There can be (and have been) great songs about those topics, but... really? Is that it?

No. That's not it.

I gotta get a copy of this. Waiting on Netflix to hook a geek up.

Off the charts and off the beaten path, there's a movement. It isn't anywhere near mainstream, but there are a lot of fans and some really, really good artists working in it. I'm talking about nerdcore. Rapping about old computer games, programming concepts and webcomics, rhymes with references to Star Wars and Nintendo, beats backed by 8-bit chip synth. Now this, this is something I can relate to. Not only that, but it is different. Rap could use some different.

A lot of the tracks are funny, almost all are clever, so the first reaction is typically “So... this is some kind of parody, right?” The idea that people could be doing this kind of music about these kinds of things is ridiculous, who would listen to it? Well, I would, for one. You can look at the YouTube comments for pretty much any nerdcore video, and see comments reflecting the same kind of intolerance and small-mindedness now that what we think of as mainstream rap got a lot of when it first dropped.

Not the kind of rapper who makes you think "street".

Some of the first and biggest nerdcore stars still command tiny audiences as compared to what you'd see in traditional rap or rock fanbases, but they are prolific in this scene. The accepted first use of the term “nerdcore” came from MC Frontalot, who has been plugged by Penny Arcade, covered by other artists and has a movie, Nerdcore Rising, about his tour. Another bigger name is mc chris. He is best known for his track “Fett's Vette”, rapped from the perspective of Boba Fett himself, and his work with Aqua Teen Hunger Force as “MC Pee Pants” and other incarnations of the same character.

I'll at some point likely return to a host of nerdcore artists for individual artist profiles, for the two I mention above as well as some lesser-known talents. MC Lars and YTCRACKER are, in my mind, two of the other “bigger names”, and there's a whole mid-tier set of artists including Nursehella, Beefy, Optimus Rhyme and Jesse Dangerously. A lot of these artists are working hard in a scene that is barely recognized as legitimate, but their fans appreciate them anyway. More than a few of them are featured in the documentary Nerdcore For Life, which was released last year. (Poster is, of course, the image at the start of this article.)

Nerdcore start mc chris in his animated glory.

Rhymes about how you don't get laid because you can't talk to girls? Frontalot did it. A track about how an attractive woman can throw a Vampire LARP into chaos? MC Diabeats did that. World of Warcraft? Oh, yeah, plenty of rappers make music about nearly nothing else, but I favor Fatty (who might be unique in the rap game as a lesbian geek rapping about video games.) There is a lot more to the medium than money, misogyny, guns and drugs. A whole lot more.  

I Pity The Fool.

 There's a reason that I've been making assurances for two whole days about the lack of a “gag post” for today's entry. Geeks and geek websites LOVE April Fool's day. Technology sites, gaming websites, webcomics, all love to come up with a phony image, new product/feature announcement or other humorous changes to their day-to-day web presence.

Social media is no exception, as YouTube gets in on the gag themselves, and your friends on Facebook, Twitter followers and other similar sites are likely to make phony updates to snare people who are both gullible and don't own a calendar. Don't get me wrong, I like these a lot, but some years, it feels like certain sites are trying too hard.

Mushroom Kingdom Hearts? Gmail Motion? Seven Dead in Protests in Syria? Wait... that last one wasn't funny.

I'm going to link to a lot of the sites I'm talking about, but April Fool's jokes are frequently posted for a day, and then removed from the web, so if you come across this article on April 2^nd or later, keep in mind that some of the links won't lead to anything funny. The usual suspects have turned out their annual April Fool's gags, and for me, two of the biggest and best have always been the World of Warcraft official Website, and ThinkGeek, the online shop for many, many assorted geeky products.

WoW has had some really good jokes over the years, announcing fake races like the Alliance Wisp, who is basically a sentient ball of light, and the Horde Ogre-Mage, who has two heads and is controlled by you and a randomly selected second player at the same time. This year, so far, we've seen three “announcements”, the first of which is most effective (and annoying) if viewed first.

• “Crabby”, a googly-eyed “Dungeon Helper” that pops up randomly on your screen to offer tips and advice is a great parody of Microsoft's “clippy”, the annoying paperclip assistant.
• The further announcement of the Tomb of Immortal Darkness dungeon, the gag being that you can't actually see anything (it is too dark), and “new gear” to give you tools to deal with the lack of light like a pet bat with a sonar ability, are almost as good.
• The fake “patch notes” for the next patch are potentially the funniest, but you'd only get the joke if you already play the game.

Oh, Crabby. Damn thing actually Rickrolled me with a link to Rebecca Black's "Friday."

Thinkgeek has announced a long list of new products for this year, from the fairly innocuous Star Wars Lightsaber popsicle, Angry Birds Pork Rinds, to the less believable “Original Shirt Plate” or Official Playmobil Apple Store Playset... and the big one, the USB Minecraft Nether Portal. These last two are the best of the joke products, in my opinion, and the concept and photography on both are examples of why I turn up on Thinkgeek once a year.

• The Apple Store Playset has a small Genius Bar, miniature Apple employees selling tiny iPods, iPads and iPhones, and a Keynote theater where Steve Jobs can announce new products, using a REAL iPhone as a screen for his presentation. Of course, there are optional add-ons (sold seperately.)
• The USB Minecraft Nether Portal features a desktop version of the square gateway to a blocky version of hell, where documents can be “filed where they belong” after being pushed through the mystic portal to the land of lava and zombie pigmen.

Who could forget the classic ThinkGeek Unicorn Meat? This year's entries are less likely to provoke threats of legal action.

There are countless pages of geeky April Fool's Day pranks out there this year, but these were some of the best, in my opinion. Were there any particularly awesome ones, from this year or years past that were your favorites? Discuss.