RPS Feature
Gamers Should Be Heard And Not Seen
It’s mid-May and it’s raining outside. Someone I can’t see is making me laugh. These omens suggest that it is time to return to my Idle Musing column. Something else inspired this, too, which was last week’s Planetside 2 Call To Arms. I had intended to film the whole thing and then chop it up for YouTube commentary, but once I was on the Mumble voice server, I found myself running a platoon. Then I found myself marvelling at the effort the RPS guys had put in to the organisation of allowing players to communicate. There were dedicated radio operators in each squad. And then I was thinking about voice comms. And not doing any filming at all.
I suddenly realised how voice communications had invisibly underpinned a decade of the most incredible gaming experiences. This is a missive to their importance, the joy they brought.
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RPS Feature
If Only We Could Eat All The Monsters
Occasionally – just occasionally, mind – games choose to add some of our real-world bodily functions to the characters we control in them. Hunger, thirst, even nausea and sewage creation. For some reason, this is peculiarly satisfying, and as such is almost always popular with players: as most strongly evidenced by the popularity of The Sims, with its filling bladders and exponential human smelliness. But it is not just in the human-petting genre that we find such earthy processes: from Stalker’s insatiable hunger for bread and sausages to San Andreas’ hilarious obesity problem, games occasionally deign to amuse us with the things that we wrestle with every day.
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RPS Feature
The Action Before The Action
In the real world I am not much of a tinkerer. I can fix a few bits and pieces on a car, and build a PC, but when it comes to actual tweaking and tinkering, figuring out what I can be boosted, what can be overclocked, and what must be tuned, my talents – and my ambitions – are fairly limited. Not so in the gaming world, of course, where I have spent thousands of hours plugging objects into equipment slots and pulling them out again, just to watch the variables shift up and down. Watching the numbers change, it seems, is sometimes enough.
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RPS Feature
Glitch Me Happy
However hard games try to create worlds, they remain artifice. They are stage sets. Painted boxes. And when you step outside them, you get to see how unreal that game world actually is. This, from time to time, can be a wonderful thing. Let’s raise a glass to the strange lands that lie outside the game you were meant to see, that glitchy empire of the game outside the game.
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RPS Feature
That Tiny Carton Of Milk
Remember the bit in Fight Club where Ed Norton is sitting on a plane and he explains to the guy sitting next to him his theory of “single-serving friends”? Well, something similar is true in multiplayer games.
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RPS Feature
AFK In The Stars
Many games feature invisibility in some form. An excellent moment I recall from my days in World Of Warcraft was necking an invisibility potion to run past a load of mobs I couldn’t fight, while my rogue friend stealthed his way through. (If only that game had more such emergent highs.) Anyway, the Invisible Bastard joy I want to talk about is probably only applicable to Eve Online, although I’d love to know about any parallels in other games. It’s a thing that stood out for me over the years and something I loved, because it spoke of persistence, human psychology, the value of patience and the delight in being a big meany. I would leave my laptop logged into Eve, with a character cloaked in various star systems, and do nothing, for weeks.
Why would I do that?
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