McKinney Reviews: Firewatch, or as I like to call it "Only Forest Fires Can Prevent You"

When I first sat down to write this review, I found myself at a loss. Firewatch defies most expectations of what a game is supposed to be. There's no way to lose, the puzzles (such as they are) are very, very simple, and you have a map of your surroundings with you at all time so it's almost impossible to get lost. It's very, very close to what some on the internet have derisively named "walking simulators"; games where the player has nothing to do but walk through an (ideally beautiful, or at least visually-striking) area, poking objects in the environment to recieve a series of nuggets of exposition. And at first glance, it seems that's exactly what Firewatch is. I know, viscerally, that there's more to the game than that, but the appeal of the game is not one easily put into words. Still, putting things into words that aren't easily put into words is basically what I've built my life around, so here goes:

A Short Story: Kex's Blood Oath

So, as you may have noticed, the whole 2015 book challenge didn't really work out. Work has left me so emotionally and mentally drained that I haven't really been able to work up the motivation to track down all of the books I was going to read and write about. I HAVE been writing, though; whenever the mood strikes me I've sat down and written a bit, 300 words here, a few tweets-worth there, but nothing I really felt was good enough for this blog. (This is, after all, what I want to be able to point future employers to for samples of my work.) That is, until now. I'm actually pretty proud of this one; I banged it out in one marathon session, and it hasn't been edited at all. I might revise it at some point, or even make it into part of a larger whole, but for now I think it stands alright on its own. Enjoy!

Book Challenge 2015: World War Z

The first book I read this year could have fit several categories; I’ve owned it for over a year and hadn’t read it, it came with a recommendation from several friends, it’s been turned into an (execrable) movie, and with a bit of stretching it can be considered to be a collection of short stories. For the sake of simplicity (and because the other books-turned-hollywood-blockbuster-fodder I have access to are Twilight, Harry Potter, Eragon, or other overexposed or downright crappy titles) I elected to fill the Challenge’s #3 slot first.

McKinney's 2015 Reading Challenge - Master Page

So a few weeks ago I decided I’d try the 2015 Reading Challenge from Popsugar when it crossed my twitter feed. More out of lack of anything else important in my life than anything else, I decided to return to my oft-languishing blog and give my impressions of the books I was reading. As a result, I should be posting a new book review/overview every week or so this year. Wish me luck!

If you’re interested in keeping track of what book I read for what reason (and why would you be?) bookmark this page, which I’ll keep updated as I go.

A Brief(ish) Dissertation on Trevor Philips

Full Disclosure: I have not finished Grand Theft Auto 4 or 5, and likely never will. (My GTA IV disk is AWOL and GTA V stopped working so I deleted it from my hard drive) While they are impressive feats of engineering, they are deeply lacking in a vital quality: respect. Respect for the player, respect for the player’s time, and respect for their own internal consistency. Foremost in my thoughts is Trevor, the third of three protagonists to be unlocked and by far the darkest.

Destiny - The Bad Bits

Last time I told you all of the ways Destiny was the best game I’ve played all year, but now the time has come to tell you all about the many ways it ranks the worst.

Destiny - The Good Bits

So…Destiny. It’s a big game. Four planets, plus another area, with more promised in the future. Three Classes, with two Subclasses apiece. Procedurally-generated loot leading two dozens of variant weapons and armor pieces. It’s SO BIG, in fact, that I’m not going to try to review it in one unified article. I’m going to talk about the good parts of Destiny in today’s article (as the title might lead you to suspect) and the bad parts in the next (which should go live by the end of the week.)

Almost a review of Destiny...

This post was originally going to be my review, but then I hit this tangent and I wanted to get it out of the way before getting into the meat of the game. (Not to mention that I'm writing that review now and it's going to be pretty big, so I'll probably break it up into two or more posts.)  I only hint at the overall feeling I have toward the game, but that's what the proper review is for. Anywho, tangent!

I’ve never played a game quite like Destiny.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve played FPSs and MMORPGs before, and Destiny borrows liberally from both of those to make something new. What I mean is that Destiny is inherently conflicted in a way that I’ve never seen in a product THIS BIG. Activision, one of the largest (and most hated, but let’s not get into that now) game publishing companies in the world, teamed up with Bungie, creator of one of the most iconic video game franchises ever made. (If you don’t know which one, why the hell are you reading a blog post about a video game in the first place? Go play some games and come back later.) The hype machine was in full swing for this one; pretty much the only time you see ads for video games on TV is when the heavy hitters come out with something new they want everyone to see.

There were preorders, more than any other game this year.  There were preorder bonuses, like the ability to dye your little robot buddy and speeder bike red. (Presumably because Gamestop -with its clean-cut red-white-black color scheme- was involved.) And of course there were the usual cries of corruption, with the release tied to the activation of servers in such a way that the game would not run until the day of its launch, making it impossible to give a full review before millions of players threw down $60 or more on it. It reminds me of a movie that a producer knows isn’t any good not getting a press screening so the reviews don’t scare discerning moviegoers away.

If it were any other game, by any other developer (My low opinion of Activision notwithstanding) I’d be crying foul like anyone else. But here’s the thing: Destiny doesn’t need “protection” from the free press. If anything, I wish more people knew this thing existed, and was on the previous generation of consoles (which is where I, an impoverished peasant, am probably playing it as you read this.) so they could play WITH me. It’s a game with a lot of content and a lot of intermeshed systems, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re better experienced with friends. My next post is going to be something of a holistic review of the game as I’ve experienced it; I aim not to tell you whether it’s a good game and fun to play (spoiler: it REALLY is) but WHY it is. (I'd meant for this post to be that review, but it sort of got away from that.)

Moldy bread, linguistics, and you.

So I was looking at bread last night (I have WILD NIGHTS) and I thought to myself: “Why do we say bread ‘goes moldy’ if it doesn’t go anywhere?” After I finished giggling at my inane banter I gave the matter some more serious thought. I hypothesized that we developed these ways of talking about food during a period after the food in question was invented (DUH) but before the process of spoilage was commonly understood. Ancient precursors to scientists observed a loaf of bread harboring colonies of mold, or raw meat being seeded with maggots and starting to rot and assumed that what they observed was simply a natural part of the life-cycle of meat and bread; the theory of Spontaneous Generation was born, and the lingo of the now-defunct theory made it into the common lexicon. (Or more likely, people with no knowledge of theories, science, or hygiene left their banana bread out too long and decided the bread killed Mildred after she ate it, and that it was part of the natural life cycle of banana bread to turn green and poisonous.)

This little thought exercise serves no purpose, I just thought it was neat the way commonly-accepted beliefs from the past can shape the way we talk about things today; we say bread has “gone moldy” even though we now know that the bread is being consumed by tiny organisms that only become visible on the macro scale long after they’ve set up shop. If asked, you might say that you talk about it that way because “it’s more natural to say it that way.” But it’s only natural to say things like that because they’re entrenched in our culture, and linguistic drift can only change so much.

I just wrote 300 words on linguistics and banana bread; I think it’s time to go to sleep now.

Why "The Fastest Man On No Legs" Scares the Crap Out of Me

I don’t really care about sports. Let’s get that out of the way right now. I have respect for most athletes (the ones that don’t do notably bad things, at least) because of the time they put in and the lengths they often go to for their chosen sport, but I have no real interest in playing them, nor do I care who is currently doing the best at them. As a result, the Olympics mostly passed me by without a second thought. Sure, America’s swimming and gymnastics teams did fantastically, but we’re one of the wealthiest nations on Earth; of course our athletes are going to be among the best. The one story that really did jump out at me was that of Oscar Pistorius, a South African sprinter who made it into the semifinals and then finished that semifinal dead last. Why did he jump out at me? Because he was born with no legs.

D&D Post Op: Design Philosophies (Or: Can Someone Come Up With A Better Name For These?)

So in my last post (which no one who values their free time has any business reading) I examined these editions of D&D from a purely mechanical standpoint. I made that obnoxiously long post so I could make this one and have something to cite. This is largely hypothetical, as I didn’t really follow the development cycle of either edition of the game and am not particularly inclined to research them too thoroughly. I don’t want to talk about what the designers SAID they were aiming for, I want to talk about what they actually DID aim for.

Once again:

DISCLAIMER 2.0: I’m not unbiased in this; I prefer 4th edition to 3.5 for reasons I SWEAR I’ll elucidate by the end of this piece, but I’m not going to let my opinions color my commentary at all if I can help it.

D&D Post-Op: 3.5 and 4th

Finally. Almost a full year since this blog was first established, and I’m just now getting to the subject I was going to tackle day 1. I need to step it up around here. Anywho, in this post I’m going to do an autopsy on two editions of D&D that have officially ended their runs. (Yes, 4^th edition is soon to be a thing of the past, since since 5th Edition is now in development.) The transition from the former to the latter was one of the most acrimonious in RPG history, to the point where it adversely affected the sales of 4th. The 4^th Ed Essentials line was, in part, an attempt to recapture some lost players by rolling back several of the changes made in 4^th. Not popular stuff.

SUPER-MEGA-DISCLAIMER: I am personally a fan of 4^th edition over 3.5. I’ll end this piece with my explanation for why, but I’ll do my best to avoid letting that bias interfere with the examination itself.

This first part will examine the two systems from a mechanical standpoint, comparing the rules of the two systems to see the kind of games they build. To prevent ruining the nice formatting, I've implemented a handy dandy jump-off below:

Asexuality and the Pedant (Or, lookit me bein all pretentious and crap)

An average night of me trawling the internet:

Me: Hmm, I wonder what’s on 9gag tonight?

9gag: Hey, let’s taunt McKinney with a blatantly-incorrect representation of his sexuality and provoke him into writing a boring blog post about it on his boring blog.

So here we are.

As the title of the post states, I am asexual. I experience no desire to have sex with anyone, regardless of their appearance, gender, personality, or philosophy. You’d think this would be an easy concept to grasp, but you’d be wrong. I’ll be using this post to clear up a few common misconceptions about asexuality, because I’m sure everyone will enjoy that.

The post (and woefully-misinformed fb commentary) in question

And the rant: an asexual relationship is NOT the same thing as being “friendzoned” The very concept of the friendzone is founded on butthurt men and women on the internet not grasping that not everyone everywhere who wants to be on friendly terms with them also wants to sleep with them. Asexuality is not about love or an inability thereof. If someone is asexual it can mean a variety of things but generally means they simply have no desire to have sex.

The simplest way to explain it is in terms of a linear scale: In a similar manner to the way Kinsey described the spectrum of human sexuality (from purely heterosexual to purely homosexual) the scale can be expanded into two dimensions to account for the spectrum of hypersexuality to asexuality. This does not cover the entire breadth of what asexuality is to different people, however. For some/most people (indeed, when one immerses oneself in so-called “non-standard sexualities” as I have, it’s easy to forget that I’m talking about a relatively small fraction of the population here.) their desire to be romantically involved with their gender-of-choice is intimately tied to their desire for sexual intercourse with them. For many (though by no means all) asexuals, this tie is still present, so a lack of sexual drive results in a lack of romantic drive. For others, this tie is negligible if even present at all, which leads to a more active romantic life. And there are certainly some who don’t even think about dating in those mechanistic terms! Thus, our newly-2D Kinsey scale (Kinsey Scatter Plot?) must necessarily be expanded to include a 3^rd axis: romanticism.

Moreover:

Sex is NOT the universal end-goal for relationships. One can have a wonderful, fulfilling relationship with another person without ever being physically intimate with them in any way. Love is an emotion; what people do in their romantic unions is as unique to them as the couple itself. I’d certainly like to think that if I can maintain a relationship for over a year, then my non-sexual relationship is a bit more emotionally-founded than Joe Blow’s one-night-stand. Dating is like a huge, many-layered cake; some people like the top layer, others like the bottom (Insert dom/sub joke here) and others like different layers in between. Making the assumption our unfortunate example has (that if a guy likes a girl and isn’t boning her six ways to Sunday) belies a sad lack of emotional depth. They assume that the dating cake only has one layer. And a one-layer cake is still going to be delicious, but it’d be remiss of me not to at least understand what the other layers have going on.

I guess the most important thing one should take from this is: love who you want to love, in the way and circumstances you want to love them. Just don’t trash talk other people’s relationship paradigms without learning anything about them. You know who else does stuff like that? Homophobes. And homophobia is not welcome here. And another thing, asexual relationships are not the same thing as friendzoning, and the friendzone isn’t even a thing, and- *is shot*

Well I guess the friendzone rant will have to wait for another night. I hope that this is at least slightly coherent, dear reader. Until next time!

the "I" in iPod

A lot of literature has been produced on why my generation is so spoiled. Some blame so-called helicopter parents, hovering over their children, obliterating anything that could challenge or hurt them. Others blame media schilling the message of specialism, or snowflake syndrome. I blame music. Specifically, mp3 players. It’s hard not to feel like you’re going someplace important when you’re listening to this while walking there:

On the flip side, few things can exacerbate a feeling of isolation like listening to a playlist full of this for hours on endless repeat:



And with an mp3 player, you can listen to that as much as you want, whenever. You’re in control of the music and no one can make you change it, as long as you’ve got some headphones. Your will is all that matters. The preceding generations had to wait for songs they liked to play on the radio, find a way to record them, or buy their cassette tapes. (and on long car rides it was all down to what the people in the front seat of the car wanted to listen to) The generations that came before THEM had to hope they had friends who could play music or hope for the money to buy a phonograph and records. We are the first generation to grow up with the power to choose the soundtrack of our lives for ourselves. More to the point, we are the first generation that -for good or ill- has the opportunity to truly lose itself (and thereby its perspective of the rest of the world) in its music.

I remember when the Edition Wars split the Skies

Dungeons & Dragons has been around for 38 years. This is a LONG time. It’s older than me, almost all of my friends, and some of their parents. It’s outlasted wars and whole political administrations. It’s stayed fairly popular through media firestorms, scandals, changing fads (anyone want to reminisce about 90’s fashion?) and a whole host of cultural changes that have swept away hordes of other pop-cultural milestones. It’s here to stay. But just as it is unusual in its tenacity, it has its own set of problems. It’s true that most of these problems are common to roleplaying games, but as D&D is by far the most popular and well-known system these unique challenges are most strongly apparent among its dedicated community.

            Foremost of these challenges is the concept of an “Edition War”. Every decade or so, TSR (now incorporated into Wizards of the Coast, itself a subsidiary of Hasbro) would revamp the ruleset, fixing a number of fans’ longstanding gripes with the current rules, and invariably creating a new set of gripes once the fans had a chance to kick the new rules for a while. This also had the happy-for-TSR side effect of rendering a great deal of the books these gamers invested in obsolete. As with any large group of people, audiences inevitably split when faced with the possibility of change. Some groups chose to stick with the system they’d grown comfortable with, while others would try the new version and see if it worked better for them.

            Remember how I said D&D was a long-runner, lo a whole paragraph ago? Well, D&D is officially on its 4^th Edition, but by my count it’s at least had 11 revisions over the years. (And that doesn’t include 5^th Edition, in development as I write this!) That’s a LOT of disagreements. To this day you’re likely to find people still running adventures and whole campaigns in the old 1974 rules, for a variety of reasons. Each new edition has had to balance the inevitable splitting of the fanbase that exists with drawing in new players. The more the edition skewed toward courting one group, the more the other shied away. Case in point: the transition from 3.5 edition to 4^th. (Hah! So even by the system’s own count there are at least 5!)

 For the record, the D&D releases have been tied to the following edition changes, in order:

·      Dungeons & Dragons (classic, purely a child of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, inspired by the Chainmail fantasy combat system) (1974)

·      D&D Basic Set 1^st Revision (1977)

·      Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977. Yes, I know. There was a split in rules-heaviness.)

·      D&D Basic Set 2^nd Revision (1981)

·      D&D Basic Set 3^rd Revision (1983. This was to be the last Basic set. The Basic Sets were discontinued after this stopped selling well, the devs reasoning that there was no reason to split the fanbase further. Predictably, the later editions split the fanbase even more.)

·      AD&D 2^nd Edition (1989)

·      D&D Rules Cyclopedia (1991)

·      D&D 3^rd Edition (2000, also the first edition published and developed by WotC rather than TSR, which was acquired and discontinued in 1997)

·      D&D 3.5 (2003. A more incremental update, a far cry from the radical changes made before and since, and the most significant base-breaker in D&D history, until…

·      4^th Edition, the (current) most controversial RPG system on the planet. (2008) This was followed up in 2010 with the beginning of D&D 4E Essentials, which was part simplification and part attempt to draw in older players who might have abandoned 4^th edition over the radical changes.

We’ll get into just WHY 4^th was so controversial in my next post in this series, which will compare it with and contrast it against the edition that came before it.

MANLY PRODUCTS

(OHAI. So, this was supposed to go up almost six months ago, but I couldn't figure out how to make video embedding work. So I left it alone for a while, and then the semester happened. Anywho, pretend you're reading this in the tail end of Fall 2011. I've found that listening to someone yammer about the Mayan Apocalypse helps.)

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I, as many who know me have likely guessed, am not a large person, and thus not MANLY. I cannot bench-press cars, crush steel chains in my teeth, set off chemical-weapon sensors with my body odor or any other such MANLY things. I love to dance, my taste in movies tends toward the nerdy and in some cases slightly girly (I liked the Princess Diaries, ok?), and I play roleplaying games with other sissy, unMANLY nerds all the time.

For the longest time, I was fairly convinced that no company had any idea how to advertise to a guy like me. Every commercial I saw aimed at my sex was trying to convince me that it would make me irresistible to women. If I didn't know better, I'd think that congress passed a law (As if!) banning products for men that weren't aphrodisiacs for use on their women. (Because the women in these commercials are "their women." They belong to the men in these commercials by dint of their owning the product being advertised.) This seems disingenuous to me. Women (and men, for that matter) aren't going to suddenly swarm you and give you lots of sex just because you used Axe. (Just the opposite, I've found.) I was lost, adrift, un-advertised-to. Then came The Old Spice Guy:



THAT is how you advertise to men. He's so masculine it's almost parodic, but the video is so ridiculous that you know OSG's in on the joke. He's also (importantly) classy, and shows he knows how to treat a woman right. The message this commercial sends is that this is a product used by men of class, and not just MEN. For a while, it seemed as if advertising was taking a turn for the better (or at least less annoying) even if ad companies took the wrong message from the OSG campaign's success. Namely, that clever, handsome guys speaking directly at the screen make all ads better. (There were HOTEL COMMERCIALS using this gimmick for a while!) Hell, even the Old Spice ads with Terry Crews were funny in a bizarre, slightly disturbing way. And then this happened:



Some numbskull ad agent saw how ridiculous manliness was selling a product aimed at dudes, and decided to aim a FRIGGING DIET SODA ad at what he thought was that audience. However, there's a very important difference between the guys that buy Old Spice to smell nice and please their ladyfriends (Note, I'm not getting paid to endorse OS, so I won't endorse them. I will, however, say that I have had THREE girlfriends since I started using it. Take that for what you will.) and the lunkheads who go along with this soda commercial: OSG is aimed squarely at classy dudes who want to smell nice for themselves and/or their S.O. This Dr Pepper commercial is aimed at guys who apparently still think girls have cooties. This particular ad misses the point of Old Spice's ad campaign completely by being so thickheadedly MANLY that it borders on offensive, and the others in that series aren't much better.

Come on, advertisers. If you want me to buy your product, try not to make me think you see me as a testosterone-poisoned Neanderthal. Flattery breeds loyalty. This primitive caveman view of masculinity is NOT FLATTERING.

Welcome to my domain

Come in, come in. Put up your feet and rest a while. I’m McKinney and I’ll be your host for as long as you want to stay.

Some of you (Oh, who am I kidding. No one who doesn’t know me will be visiting this blog for a LONG time yet.) may know me in real life, and if you do you know I’ve got opinions on a whole load of crap. This blog is going to be my platform by which I share them. I’m not going to be posting pictures of kitties in hats and bowties, or just mindlessly sharing YTMNDs every day. (Just every other day) I won’t lie, I’m a huge nerd so most of this site’s posts are going to be game-related, whether video games, RPGs, or board games. Of course, if I come across something REALLY cool, I may just violate the BAT honor code and show it to you anyway.

So, what’s first on my list? What flamewar-inducing topic shall I cover first? Something divisive, something that destroys friendships and sunders gaming groups…

I’ve got it: Dungeons & Dragons 4^th Edition.