Old Work, Old Memories

Just a quick update.

Purely by chance, I happened upon an article I wrote for the Escapist back in 2009. It was my first ever feature article and I was so pleased to get the opportunity.  The article was called "Those Left Behind," and was the story of how I felt displaced by my wife's growing obsession with World of Warcraft.

I few months after that article was published, my wife - who is now my ex-wife - and I split up.  Reading back over that article, it seems utterly ridiculous that I was so blind-sided by the break up.  It was all there in black and white, but, as I'm fond of saying, it's hard to see the shape of something when you're in the middle of it.  (Seriously, that's something I actually say.)

The Unfriending

A couple of days ago, I was unfriended on Facebook.  This is not a unique occurrence; on more than one occasion I've been a casualty of someone clearing people they don't talk to very often out of their friends list.  It's never a big deal - hell, most of the time I don't even notice.  This one was different though, this time it's because someone decided they really, really didn't like me anymore.

A little backstory is order.  This person, who I shall refer to as "G," is an acquaintance from the amateur theatre group I belong to.  Quite by chance I learnt that his view of the world - and particularly of ethnic minorities -  falls somewhere "skewed" and "deeply paranoid." According to G, "tinted people" - yes, that was the expression he used - are taking over Britain, and something needs to be done before it is too late.  He also posited that the legal system of the UK was biased in favour of ethnic minorities and that judges would bend over backwards to let them off.  (It's worth mentioning that G was a police officer during the 70s, so he claims to have seen it first hand. albeit, 40 or so years ago.)

I've never been a police officer, and I'm not as old as G, but even so, his claims sounded a little far-fetched - which is a nice way of saying, "crazy and racist" - but not wanting to get into a argument with him (we were doing a volunteer shift on the theatre bar together at the time) I politely told him I disagreed with him, challenged him a little, but largely left the matter alone.

Kinda like I should have done when he started saying things about Diane Abbot.

If you don't know, Abbott is the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and has been since 1987.  She has a history of voting based on her beliefs rather than the party line.   She also recently made a couple of comments that got people rather steamed.  The first was this tweet: "white people love playing "divide and rule". We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism."  People were up in arms, making the case that had the race roles been reversed - ignoring for a moment that that wouldn't *quite* be the same thing - then we'd be after the unwitting tweeter's head. This is probably true, and there's no denying that Abbott could have phrased her remark better.  In fact, she probably should have done, considering that she is an MP, and therefore a public figure.

What the remark wasn't, however, was racist, particularly not when looked at in its proper context.  It was a reply to another tweet about black people feeling disenfranchised and disillusioned with their leaders, who, in the Tweeter's eyes, didn't properly represent their black constituents.  Her second comment, which suggested that black people find it hard to get taxis is again, not racist.  Uncomfortable to hear maybe, but not racist.

So, when G said that these comments were "blatantly" racist, I piped up an noted that they'd been taken out of context and she'd since apologised.  He responded saying that he supposed her comment about taxis had been taken out of context as well, to which I said no, but that is wasn't really a racist comment anyway.

And that, gentle reader, is where I should have left it.  Unfortunately for me, he replied with how he thought she had an agenda unbecoming to her position and posted a quote that Gordon Brown had made about a voter, calling her a bigot.  I knew what he was getting at, but I wanted to get a reaction out of him, to hear him express his views - which he is well aware are unpalatable to most people -  out loud in his own words.  So I asked him what he thought this agenda was, and pointed out that the quote he had used was not about Abbott at all, something that he hadn't mentioned in his own post.

I wanted to get a rise out of him, and boy did I succeed.  This is the response:

"I'm fully aware of that Logan - it was a simile and that you should think that I was not aware of whom this comment by Brown was made about is an insult to my intelligence. Her position is that of an MP - she is to serve the people, without bias, no matter what their colour, race, creed or religion. Her comments have been found to be deeply offensive by many people - whatever their colour, race, creed or religion. I find your obvious 'defense' of this woman to be offensive against my colour, race, creed and religion - does that make me a racist - or you? My suggestion to you is that you keep your obviously Labour-orientated nose out of my business and my freedom of speech! When you have grown up and realised just what this world is about then we may be able to have a sensible, adult, discussion - until then - go away!"

That's quite the rise.  For the record, I don't think I'm the racist, especially not if he's saying, as he seems to be saying, that he's upset that I sided with the blacks against the whites.  Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but that's what "I find your obvious 'defense' of this woman to be offensive against my colour, race, creed and religion - does that make me a racist - or you?" says to me.  Unfortunately, the impact of this rant was rather lost on me because he unfriended me before I had a chance to read it.  I only have it because I asked another friend to grab it for me so I could have a look.

So yay me, I win - I guess.  I got him mad and he posted a long huffy rant for all his Facebook friends to see.  Mission accomplished, right?  Well no, not really.  What have I actually achieved?  I've vindicated G's world view that there are liberal thought police, for one.  I've also precipitated a really awkward moment in the theatre if and when he and I are there at the same time.  Oh, and I managed to upset my girlfriend who was completely baffled as to why I was picking fights with people who weren't going to change their minds.

What I did was the equivalent of arguing about evolution with someone who is convinced that dinosaur skeletons are a test from God for the faithful.  That is not an argument you are going to win.  At best, the person you're talking to thinks you're deluded because you believe that giant lizards roamed the earth, and at worst they try to banish as the demon you very clearly are.

I will say this though, I have learnt at least one important lesson.  I really need to pick my battles better.  I am in no way sad that I have upset a paranoid, near-delusional, racist, but if I'm honest with myself - something I should strive to be a little bit more often - I've not really made the world a better place.  I whole-heartedly believe that people should think about issues of race and gender more often, and I think that now we've largely eliminated overt racism and sexism, we've got the much harder and less pleasant task of tackling the more subtle stuff.  That said, attacking people who, as I mentioned before, aren't going to change their mind, is a fool's errand.  It's like triage, you focus your attention on those you can actually help.

Playing to Win (When You Shouldn't)

RPGs are a team sport, as much as sitting round a table pretending to be wizards can be considered a sport.  But unlike something like hockey or football, it's not about one person beating everyone else, it's about everyone coming together to have a good time - a good time that may include beating the snot out of an Orc Chieftain or outwitting the Midnight Princess.   Yes, there are victories, but if the game's being played right, they're everyone's' victories.  That's the idea anyway; it all falls apart is when people start playing to win.

In an activity with as much scope and freedom as role-playing games, there's lots of different avenues for "victory."  Some people like to go on and on about how their bad ass magical dude, who can spit acid and destroy entire villages with their laser vision, would win in a fight against someone else's not-quite-so-bad-ass-and-slightly-more-rounded magical dude.  Indeed, some people build their characters expressly for that purpose so they can feel like the baddest motherfucker in the room, even if it is all just imaginary.  Others like to mess the group over in one way or another.  Sometimes it's just getting the party into trouble by being impulsive or reckless, while other times it's a case of one player actively trying to undermine the other players with intrigue and schemes.  Occasionally it all gets incredibly meta, and players try to win outside the game by  derailing it or making ridiculous characters just to piss off the GM.

(As someone who is quite easy to annoy, this has happened to me quite a bit, although I'm much better at knowing when someone is messing with me now.  Also, learning to say no is a vital skill.)

There's probably a ton of psychological facts that explain this behaviour, but as nice as it would be to know why one of my Shadowrun players thought an agoraphobic weakling with a potentially lethal allergy to sunlight was a good idea, I'd rather that he just stopped doing it.

It's even worse when the GM is playing to win.  When the GM does it, the players might as well pack up their dice and go home, because nothing they can is going to make a jot of difference.  Just as it is for players, there's lots of different avenues for GMs to mess with their players, with the added bonus - for the GM that is - that he or she will always win in the end.  If a GM wants your character dead, then he or she has countless ways in which to make it so.  I've played with GMs who have cheered when they score critical hits against their players.  Even as a joke, that's quite the dick move.

Possibly my least favourite expression of this - and this is a very personal thing, because there are people who really enjoy this kind of game - are the GMs who play "fair," by letting the dice fall where they may and not showing any favouritism towards the players over the imaginary monsters.  Personally, I think an RPG is better when the players win in the end.  That's not to say the GM should make things easy for his or her players - winning without a challenge is boring - but sometimes fudging a dice roll is the right way to go.  To put it another way: Lord of the Rings wouldn't have been a better story if Elrond had fluffed his healing check in Rivendell and doomed Frodo to life as a Ring-Wraith.

Poor Donna Noble...

I really hate the end of season four in the relaunched Doctor Who. Yes, I know I'm about three years too late, but I caught the episode "Turn Left" the other day, and it reminded me just how infuriating that season was.

What bothers me is the rough treatment that Donna Noble gets. Donna is easily one of the best companions the Doctor has ever had - at least in my limited experience - and at first glance, the writing staff seemed to know it too. “Turn Left” even says that she's the most important being in the universe. This comes after about half an hour of misery for the human race because Donna never saved the Doctor's life in "The Runaway Bride," meaning that he wasn't around to deal with all the other threats that attacked the Earth during season three. So yeah, Donna seems pretty important, especially considering that without the Doctor, the Dalek's plan to annihilate all non-Dalek life in the universe would have gone ahead without a hitch.

But here's the problem: If saving the Doctor's life makes Donna the most important being in the universe, then it's an accolade she shares with a lot of other people. There are nearly 800 episodes of Doctor Who and Donna is not the first person/robot/sentient plant to save the Doctor's life. Don't get me wrong, saving a Time Lord's life is nothing to be sneezed at, but “Turn Left” makes it abundantly clear that it's the Doctor, and not Donna, who's really important.

I'm probably being a little unfair here, as the "most important being in the universe" bit more properly refers to Donna at the end of the season, after she has become part Time Lord and uses her new-found abilities to defeat Davros and the Daleks, put the various stolen planets back where they should be, and save all of creation. But even that is a little bit sketchy when you really look at it. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the way the Doctor Donna thing comes about is one of the most ludicrous deus ex machinas I've ever seen, what makes Donna so important is not anything to do with her, but rather where she was standing. It's a case of her being in the right place at the right time, and had Martha or Jack or Sarah Jane been in Donna's place, the outcome would have been largely the same. Defeating the Daleks needed some of the Doctor's mojo, and it just so happened that this time it was Donna in the driving seat.

There's also the matter of the deeply unsatisfying - not to mention unsettling - way that season ended, with Doctor sealing away Donna's memory of their time together and forcing her to live the life she left behind in order to prevent her mind from burning out. A life, I might add, that she really didn't want to go back to. Watching her plead with the Doctor, begging him not to take her memories away was heart-breaking. David Tennant and Catherine Tate did a great job with that scene, but the fact that it exists at all has me scratching my head.

If the plan was to write Donna out of the series in a way that meant she could never come back, why not kill her? Why not have her give her life to save the entire universe, giving her a hero's death, rather than force her to live a miserable existence as someone she hates. Hell, why make her part Time Lord at all? Why not give her her moment in the sun, and let her succeed because she's Donna. Not because she saved the Doctor, and not because she became the Doctor, but because she thought of something that no one else did, or she could do something that no one else could.  Pretty much anything would have been better than the send off that she got.

Goodbye Donna, you deserved better.

50 Skyrim Nitpicks - Part One: People

So, Skyrim, huh?  People are tripping over themselves to give it Game of the Year awards, but let’s face it, there’s lots of things wrong with it.  For example:

1.      “You Talk Funny”

What’s going on with the accents in Skyrim?  I can forgive the fact some Nords sound sort of Scandinavian, others sound American, and one – and it does seem to just be the one – sounds Scottish.   What gets me is when members of the same family, who all grew up in the same town, have different accents.  Not just a little bit different either.  We’re not talking the difference between Brooklyn and a Queens accent here; it’smore like the difference between a Norwegian accent and Mickey Mouse’snemesis Pete.

(Mainly because that’sexactly what it is.  Jim Cummings, who has voiced Pete for nearly 20 years, provided additional voices for Skyrim.)

2.       “No! Look at Him, Damn It!”

I know I’m the main character, but that doesn’t mean you have to look at me even when you’re talking to someone else.  Seriously, quit it.  It’s creepy,

3.       “It Wasn’t That Big a Deal, Really”

Some people are really touched by favours you do them, and I mean reallytouched.  Faendal – or Sven,whichever floats your boat – in Riverwood will follow you into ruins and crypts and risk his life fighting unholy warriors from centuries past, all because you delivered – or didn’t deliver, again, whichever floats your boat – a letter toa girl he liked.  Sometimes, you don’teven have to help someone out.  There’s a guy near Riften stables who won’t shut up about how good a friend I’ve been to him: I beat him to within an inch of his life for a bet.

4.      “ExcuseMe...”

Lydia, oh my darling Lydia, you’re the bees knees and I’m glad you’re on the team, but for the love of Talos, would you stop blocking doorways?!  It’s not just Lydia, of course; companions seem to have this uncanny knack for getting in the way.  I shouldn’t have to lure my hireling into the room so I can get past them, and I  definitely shouldn't have to dragon shout them out of the way.

5.      “BeCareful!”

If there’s a pressure plate in a hallway, companions will step on it. A corridor could be a mile wide, and they’d still manage find the one part of the floor that causes poison darts to come out of the walls or spears to stab out of a doorway.  What’sworse is that they won’t just stand on it once;  they will stand on it over and over again until fate steps in and they can move on.  In one draugr-filled dungeon, Lydia stepped on a pressure play about a dozen times before the spiked gate it activated knocked her past it.  It’s even more pronounced –although, not entirely unhilarious - when you’re being accompanied by master thieves, who are supposed to be adept at avoiding traps. 

6.      “ThatLooks Uncomfortable.”

Guards, it seems,never take their helmets off.  Even when they sleep.  Man in the Iron Mask, eat your heart out.

7.      “I Thought You Already Knew...”

Some of the residents of Skyrim have a habit of asking you questions they should – in theory –already know the answer to.  For example,the blacksmith lady in Whiterun (I’m not great with names, sorry) will ask ifyou’ve met her father, who is the Jarl’s steward.  A fair question, you might think, but she’ll keep asking it after you’ve delivered a sword to him on her behalf and bought the empty house next to hers – a process that involves talking to none other than *drum roll* the Jarl’s steward. 

8.      “An Arrow in the Knee, Huh?”

The guards in Skyrim seem to share a single consciousness.  It’snot just the arrow in the knee thing – a line that crops up so often that it’sbecome a meme – there are loads of other things that every guard, in every hold,will come out with.    Basically, they’reeither a hive mind, or by some bizarre coincidence every guard in the province is a former adventurer with a bad knee and a cousin out fighting dragons.  Oh, a lot of them wonder if they might be Dragonborn, even those who know that it’s you.

9.      “Will You Just $&#@ing Walk?!”

Possibly the worst quest objectives you can have in Skyrim are those that read “Follow Captain NPC to Angry Badger Ravine,” or something similar. Not because they’re hard – they’re really not – but because if you follow too close, then the person you’re following will stop and throw out a line like:  “We can’t stop now, this is badger country.”    Yes,I’m aware of that Captain; that’s why I didn’t initiate a conversation.  In fact, I was moving faster than you, a fact that seems to have upset you.  If you don’t  want me to catch you up, you shouldn’t move so bloody slowly, should you?

10.   “We’ve Just Been There.”

Some NPCs seems to have a bit of a problem remembering where they are and what’s going on around them. 

“Hello my dear,” my wife Ysolde would say.  “Back from another adventure?” 

“Um, No,” I would reply. “I was upstairs.  Sleeping.  You just saw me come down the stairs.” 

I don’t think she heard me though; she was too busy sitting in the kitchen.

It’s not limited to spouses either; companions will sometimes suggest that we explore a cave thatwe’ve literally just left, or say they’ve never seen anything like the sight in front of them when you know damn well that they have.

Coming soon - Part Two:  Places

Today I Learned...

...Not to argue with people on YouTube.  This is something I already knew, but apparently needed to remind myself of.

I wanted to make a response to the guy whose video I linked to yesterday.  Sadly, the cameras I have here aren't really up to the task.  So instead, I left my points as a comment on the video itself.  As my comment - which was:

"I have two problems with this video, Firstly, that statistic you quote at the beginning is wrong. London's population is about 60% White British, and around 70% White overall. Secondly, while I'm not defending what happened at Dresden, calling it genocide is disingenuous. Even if you don't agree with the idea of a multicultural society, using such charged language would be unnecessary if your argument had more substance."

Now, I don't have a problem with people disagreeing with me, but if they are, I'd at least like them to make at least a token effort to get their facts right.  I had one guy tell me that white people were now the minority in Texas, when last year's census shows that 70% of the state's population is white, and another saying that according to "leading geneticists" 80% of could trace their ancestry back to the last Ice Age.  Naturally, there's no indication of who these geneticists are, and despite me asking for more information, it's not forthcoming.

*Long sigh*  I'm not actually surprised by this, but it's still irritating.

Viewing Kotaku Through a Different Lens

I'm finding Mattie Brice's recent guest editorial on Kotaku pretty informative for a couple of different reasons.  The article itself is a chance for us - and by us, I mean "mainstream gaming culture" - to get a look at ourselves from a perspective that we normally ignore.  As for the comments, well, the comments show why the article was necessary in the first place.

What I find really interesting is the number of people who say that Kotaku treats everyone as gamers first and foremost, seemingly ignoring the part of the article where Mattie points out that "gamer" is essentially shorthand for "straight white male who plays videogames."  It's very easy to say a group is inclusive when you're not the one being excluded.  I wish that mainstream gaming culture would stop and really think about its attitudes towards other people, especially those who are different from them.

In his TEDx talk, radio host and video blogger Jay Smooth said that too many people treat being "good" like it was a binary state:  You're either a good person or you're not, and there's nothing in between.  If gamers would just realise that being a good person is an ongoing process and some days they might have to work at it harder - or indeed, work at it at all - then perhaps articles like Mattie's wouldn't be necessary.