General Gaming Megathread: What are you playing?

In general, you play the role of Chief of one of the clans inhabiting a place called "Dragon Pass" (duh). It is a very detailed and complex game, in which everything affects everything. However, despite its complexity, it doesn't bore us with stats and numbers and micro-management, but is instead built in a way that forces us to use solely reason and role-playing to make our decisions.

Your goal is, of course, to survive, defend your clan against attacks from other clans or creatures of Chaos, increase your herd of animals, worship your patron gods, lead your people to prosperity and eventually even unite all the Clans and become King of Dragon Pass. This is achieved through Diplomacy, Trade, questing for treasure, raw violence, sacrifice to the Gods and other rituals.

The game contains hundreds of random events, all of them dynamic and accompanied by high-quality artwork and narration, in which the player is called to make a decision as Clan Leader and select the outcome he wishes in a variety of scenarios (from feuds inside the clan, like divorces or accusations of adultery, to dealing with magical creatures that appear in your land, pleasing the shamans of certain gods, dealing with friendly or rival clans etc).

The completely random appearance of these events, as well as the fact that every character in the game (from the Chieftains of the various Clans, to your Clan's Advisors and Warriors, all complete with their own unique personalities, ambitions and skills) is random-generated at the start of each game, make each new play-though quite unique.

The game's Setting is based on the world of Glorantha (the same as the tabletop game "Hero Quest"), which is very well-set, cohesive, atmospheric, and complete with its own Mythology, Legends, Pantheon, and traditions. That Lore plays quite an important part in the game, as the player should be called from time to time to perform a quest for one of the patron gods, which is in essence a ritualistic re-enactment of the deeds of the God, and reap the benefits or curses of his success or failures in these quests.


In short: It Kicks Ass.
 
That sounds great and judging by some of the screens those choices are indeed cool. Triceratops cavalry! :D
Will definitely give it a try sometime.
 
I actually played some Fallout today. Only for about an hour but it was fun. I hadn't touched the game for a couple of years. I might play a little more tomorrow.
 
I've played around a bit with Titan Quest and its expansion.

Games like these make me wonder why I play games, at all. They are almost designed to make you feel useless and thus usher in this inevitable 'oh my god, why am I doing this? There's so much better to do!'-realization moment. Not even am I hardly ever getting new or better loot after around level 30, not only is there never really any challenge, but neither is there any substantial story to make it better, and the gameplay is even more mind-numbing than Diablo II was. At least Diablo II had some sense of progression, some skills that required you to think once in a while. Multiplayer might be fun in Titan Quest, but it only prolongs it before you get the feeling that all you're doing is killing time.

And once I realize I've (yet again) been wasting my time with some idiotic artificial make-belief fantasy progress that doesn't even try to convince me that it's giving me progress, it all comes crashing down. Hey hurrah, I've just wasted 48 hours in two weeks, hours I could've used to write a paper, learn Latin, hell, read Cicero or even the Bible, at least it helps you understand what people talk about, unlike..heck, unlike any game I've ever played.

All games seem based around some sort of idyllic utopia where time does not exist and you can easily loose another 100 hours of your life without it bothering you, and without you, or your situation improving at all. What is it with games that the fun-factor has to be smeared out over a vast amount of hours? It's like low-intensity living, even watching a good TV series is more engaging and requires more of my mind. Gaming is equal to voluntarily acting like a vegetable.

Fuck it, I think I'll finally quit gaming. Sorry for the rant/breakdown. It's probably because I'm studying 60 hours a week right now, and it still isn't enough. It's just that playing a game is starting to feel overwhelmingly useless the more useful stuff you actually want to try and achieve... And damn, humans can achieve a bloody awful lot if they try.
 
Edmond Dantès said:
All games seem based around some sort of idyllic utopia where time does not exist and you can easily loose another 100 hours of your life without it bothering you, and without you, or your situation improving at all. What is it with games that the fun-factor has to be smeared out over a vast amount of hours? It's like low-intensity living, even watching a good TV series is more engaging and requires more of my mind. Gaming is equal to voluntarily acting like a vegetable.
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Oh, how I understand your breakdown. I've had this a few times. And I actually lost a full week (divided in a few week-ends) playing Fallout 3.
Lesson learned : don't play any mainstream post-modern game unless a very trustworthy friend of yours tell you so.
But don't forget you sometimes need to relax and actually be a vegetable. Or do stupid things. The trick is not to do it for too long, and to effectively find a "fun factor" sufficiently concentrated.

The only games I find worth my time are :
-Nervous strategy games where you can play a 15-30 minutes game and still enjoy the hell out of it. Spring is a very good open-source one.
-Old-School RPGs (Up to Vampires the masquerade, the last playable one for me), or Adventure games, or how to be a vegetable but be rewarded by a rich story and atmosphere.

In every of those cases, the addiction make it easy to spend more time on it than you intended first hand.

Edmond Dantès said:
Fuck it, I think I'll finally quit gaming. Sorry for the rant/breakdown. It's probably because I'm studying 60 hours a week right now, and it still isn't enough. It's just that playing a game is starting to feel overwhelmingly useless the more useful stuff you actually want to try and achieve... And damn, humans can achieve a bloody awful lot if they try.
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Yeah, there is so much things to achieve. Like, for example, make games. I've felt like this lately, in such an extent that I stopped playing games and watching movies for like three weeks. I've decided that instead of being the "dindon de la farce" and playing shitty games I hate, I'll do my part to help people develop their own games.
Because it depress me more and more to see all these people here with old-school ideas of how a game should be, whith no one to actually do something about it.
 
Edmond Dantès said:
Fuck it, I think I'll finally quit gaming. Sorry for the rant/breakdown. It's probably because I'm studying 60 hours a week right now, and it still isn't enough. It's just that playing a game is starting to feel overwhelmingly useless the more useful stuff you actually want to try and achieve... And damn, humans can achieve a bloody awful lot if they try.
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I've often felt that way as well, but just remember.

People who do indeed spend all their time working have problems. It's that with their entire life strictly controlled (as opposed to playing which is free-form) they start to suffer from serious stress. If untreated they'll suffer such mental physical health problems they'd be just as well off having not done more work, but then they'd also be happy.

Don't get me wrong though...I'm currently in college and actually should have graduated years ago had I not failed a few classes both of which I could have passed had I not done a few more hours of study a week.

Here's a compromise. Why not work one less day a week to use the time to study? Sure you'll have less money, but you'll save money by not having to re-take a class you might be almost failing now. You might even gain money with a scholarship.
 
Onozuka Komachi said:
Here's a compromise. Why not work one less day a week to use the time to study? Sure you'll have less money, but you'll save money by not having to re-take a class you might be almost failing now. You might even gain money with a scholarship.
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Euh, actually, I don't work, as such. Everything I do is pretty much study related. Money is a problem, but as long as I can stay alive, buy books, and study, I'm fine. I'm currently an Mphil history student and I'm pretty much planning to get a PhD after that, so I'm putting around 55-65 hours into my study every week. Apart from that I'm an editor and secretary of a small magazine, study some Latin courses at the side, and I'm in some commissions for university related stuff.

Funny thing is, I've still got free time. But what I don't understand is why I then go and play a game, thinking that this will have any positive effect on me. All Titan Quest did for me in the end, and all a lot of games do really, is a kind of time travel. You don't learn anything, you don't achieve anything, and the amount of enjoyment you receive is extremely low for the amount of time you put into it. Gaming comes close to traveling forward in time.

People who do indeed spend all their time working have problems. It's that with their entire life strictly controlled (as opposed to playing which is free-form) they start to suffer from serious stress. If untreated they'll suffer such mental physical health problems they'd be just as well off having not done more work, but then they'd also be happy.
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I keep hearing similar stuff, and there probably is a core of truth to it. The truth is that overworking is simply bad. But there's also something very wrong with it all.

I'm slowly starting to dismantle the imaginary boundary we in society seem to have made between what we classify as 'spare time' and what we call work. We seem to classify anything that isn't fun or requires an effort as work, and thus create this category 'work' wherein hard or mind-intensive things belong. On the other end of the spectrum is what is classified as 'play', which thus excludes anything study or work related, and is supposed to be 'fun'. Thus work is stigmatized as un-fun, rigid, hard, and sortof mandatory, whereas fun is the stuff you do if you don't work. So if you don't work, you can't or shouldn't do something work-related, because that's not what you're supposed to do 'for fun'. Essentially you end up with something as utterly useless as gaming being labeled 'fun', the most brain-dead activity becomes the one, by sake of it requiring absolutely no effort, that is most closely associated with a fun activity.

But work might actually consist of stuff people enjoy, at least if they had not called it work, if they had not learned that they aren't supposed to enjoy it. Compare it with education. Does any child in our society happily enjoy education? Hardly. It's mandatory, and whether you have or don't have an education beyond the bare necessities has little effect (a plumber earns more than most post-docs). Thus people don't enjoy it, because it requires effort, discipline, and shows rewards substantially more difficult to notice compared to the loot you get in a game or the enemy you shoot in an FPS. In Latin the word for school is the same as for play or a game (ludus). In a time when spare time meant you didn't have to work in agriculture, you went to learn things, which used to be considered fun and a privilege. Nowadays education is probably most appreciated in those countries where it actually still means an essential boundary between poverty and relative well-being.

What I'm trying to point out is that the differentiation between work and play is very much artificial, and depends a lot on a societies' definitions. It took me a lot of time to find out that I really enjoy writing academic articles, it took me even longer to admit to myself that I enjoy it. But I still play games once in a while. Whereas I might just as well run a few miles, read a (heck, fiction, or something fun) book, have a nice talk with a friend over a glass of whiskey, read a non-curricular history book or classic I've been aching to read. Those things are all more valuable than gaming. But they pretty much all require more effort than gaming. And fun is rated on a scale of effort, with what is most fun requiring the least effort, and least fun requiring much more effort. Gaming is pretty much the easy way out.

Well, that's just one of my theories I'm planning to work out some day. : )

(I still love a game like Dwarf Fortress though. The depths and creativity people can unleash in a game like that is insane. And I don't regret playing stuff like Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I'd just wish games would make more of an effort to really be enjoyable I guess, and make less of an effort to simply cost time. But then again, you can't demand from people to have to make an effort while playing a game can you, at least not if you're aiming for the big market, cause then people might see your 'game' as something resembling work. So it has to be easy, and reward you continuously, while only asking that commodity people seem to have far too much of: time. Thus, games like a (single player) MMORPG)
 
One way of seeing the problem : a big part of the job/studies opportunities generated by our society, are actually and really, boring or uninteresting things to do for most people. Thus an inevitable distinction between what we must do but not particularly enjoy, and what we find more stimulating. Some of these words may have something to do with it : rationalization, bureaucratization, business administration, corporate hierarchy and management. From top to bottom, crappy job opportunities.

And honestly, I don't really understand how you can frankly enjoy every single act you are brought to do in your everyday life. Manual work ? Calculus ? Economical planning ? Cleaning your house ? Building a mansion ? Planning a building ? Filling senseless forms ? Making an Excel table about a meaningless piece of information ?
Do you really find everything in life interesting enough to not make a distinction between what you consider a hassle, and what you enjoy ?

Anyway, beside this, I'm still forced to agree that to many people see any creation or thinking effort as a hassle. And the game industry is effectively an alarmous evidence of this diagnostic.
 
Just played trough Mirrors Edge (PC) and i quite liked it. Better than i expected for sure, though very short.

I played it in normal mode and it took me just two sitdowns with the game and it was done, so maybe not really worth full price, and i cant really see any replay value in it.

Best parts were propably when advancing wasnt , marked by red and thus took some time to think and worst parts were shooting sequenses(which were quite short and thus didnt really start to annoy)

I noticed around halfway through the game that i started to automaticly check my surroundigs in new areas and searching for ways out if swat team would have come suddenly swarming in.

I found the story to be quite unsuprising and uninspiring but it was enough to keep everything rolling. This also applies to characters.

I liked how the game looked and especially how it sounded. If there is to be sequal im intrested how things are going to advance from here (gameplay wise)
 
Edmond Dantès said:
I'm slowly starting to dismantle the imaginary boundary we in society seem to have made between what we classify as 'spare time' and what we call work. We seem to classify anything that isn't fun or requires an effort as work, and thus create this category 'work' wherein hard or mind-intensive things belong. On the other end of the spectrum is what is classified as 'play', which thus excludes anything study or work related, and is supposed to be 'fun'. Thus work is stigmatized as un-fun, rigid, hard, and sortof mandatory, whereas fun is the stuff you do if you don't work. So if you don't work, you can't or shouldn't do something work-related, because that's not what you're supposed to do 'for fun'. Essentially you end up with something as utterly useless as gaming being labeled 'fun', the most brain-dead activity becomes the one, by sake of it requiring absolutely no effort, that is most closely associated with a fun activity.

But work might actually consist of stuff people enjoy, at least if they had not called it work, if they had not learned that they aren't supposed to enjoy it. Compare it with education. Does any child in our society happily enjoy education? Hardly. It's mandatory, and whether you have or don't have an education beyond the bare necessities has little effect (a plumber earns more than most post-docs). Thus people don't enjoy it, because it requires effort, discipline, and shows rewards substantially more difficult to notice compared to the loot you get in a game or the enemy you shoot in an FPS. In Latin the word for school is the same as for play or a game (ludus). In a time when spare time meant you didn't have to work in agriculture, you went to learn things, which used to be considered fun and a privilege. Nowadays education is probably most appreciated in those countries where it actually still means an essential boundary between poverty and relative well-being.

What I'm trying to point out is that the differentiation between work and play is very much artificial, and depends a lot on a societies' definitions. It took me a lot of time to find out that I really enjoy writing academic articles, it took me even longer to admit to myself that I enjoy it. But I still play games once in a while. Whereas I might just as well run a few miles, read a (heck, fiction, or something fun) book, have a nice talk with a friend over a glass of whiskey, read a non-curricular history book or classic I've been aching to read. Those things are all more valuable than gaming. But they pretty much all require more effort than gaming. And fun is rated on a scale of effort, with what is most fun requiring the least effort, and least fun requiring much more effort. Gaming is pretty much the easy way out.
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Ya know I've always thought such things myself, but never bothered to tell anyone. :shock:

I have noticed in times when I've had all "work" and no "play" that I start "enjoying" my work. Instead of looking forward to having more time to play in a day I start hoping I get more work accomplished in the less time to feel the joy of productivity.

I've often wondered if I could or should give up all pleasures and focus only on work letting my joy of labor replace my fun from play. Unfortunately I've probably spent too long having a significant play-time to live with a new regime.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller
 
Don't need no steam. Still need a GaySpyID, tho'. Playing it at the moment, although not today :(
 
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