Year: 2008

Games have been in the news again lately :

“Compulsive Gamers Not Addicts”

Interesting story 🙂 And possibly a little more balance than games usually seem to get. There’s a few facets about gaming addiction that aren’t shared with the other types of addiction. Chemical addiction usually involves some kind of change to the metabolism that means the addict requires the substance they’ve come to rely on. Gambling addiction has the promise of big reward that often drives the addict into heavy loss.

Gaming can get people lost in a fantasy world and I’ve bounced off a few of the bad cases in my time in World of Warcraft. Not seen it so much in Eve. I’ve suffered from it in the past, where I’d prefer to play the games than to do my studies. So a person who should have walked a First with Hons got a 2.2 instead. As it happens, I’ve not been hurt too badly by that as I’m working for an organisation that lets me see cool stuff and I get the chance to have a natter with great people.

That’s good for the daytime but how about the evenings ? I currently live on my own, so most of my interaction with other people comes from the people at work. Apart from where the games come in … And this is where the addiction to Massive Multiplayer Online games trap a lot of people. They’ll be in the game partly to play it but mostly so they can be around other people. I’d quite happily say that a game like World of Warcraft isn’t worth playing unless you’re involved in an active group. And most of my breaks from WoW have been due to me not wanting to have anything to do with the community (this time it was boredom with the game – the VR people have always been great to know)

So – gaming addiction is a social thing. It doesn’t change your metabolism like all drugs will and it only costs the monthly subscription so you won’t lose your home on it. Unless you get lost in it so much that you forget to eat, sleep or get to work (it has happened). I think that’s where the addiction has me, I like to be around other people. But I think I manage to satisfy it by being addicted to the forums instead. And to a bit of blogging too 😉

There’s another aspect though to getting caught deeply by games and that’s the psychological aspect. This one is a lot more serious, as the real world gets displaced by the fantasy world. Getting that Purple Pointy Hat (there’s a Red Pointy Hat too) is the most important thing in their world. I liked getting the upgrades for my characters but never got too excited about it when someone else got them instead. It’s only a game.

Bit like last night, picking up the new ship in Eve I’d been waiting to be able to fly. Cost of 166 million and not too long after, saw one for about 155 million. Yeah, that sucks a bit but it’s not real money and not a real ship. It’s not like buying a heap of PC bits and then a week later seeing those bits £100 cheaper. It’s only a game.

Here’s another story partly about gaming :

Young unaware of junk food impact

Not sure if they’re aware that something similar went into one of the Grand Theft Auto games 🙂 If you had your character loaf about and eat burgers all day, he’d turn into a bloater. If you did gym time and had him eat properly, he’d go athletic, which had a genuine impact on how the character performed in game.

As addictions go, it’s not that bad. I may occasionally forget to have dinner (like last Saturday 🙂 but as I’m overweight that’s probably not a bad thing. Late nights too but I can keep the all nighters for the weekends 🙂 My addiction doesn’t cause me the amnesia of drink or the damage that drink can cause. I’m not chemically addicted to anything apart from maybe caffeine 🙂 And it doesn’t cost me nearly as much as narcotics would do. I don’t have to furtively sneak out to a smoking shelter like one or two of the people on the project do (most are open about it, others keep it secret)

Ok – on the cost thing, I’ve already got a couple of new games I don’t have the time to play and a couple more arrived last night. I blame Game for doing special offers 🙂 The cost aspect introduces an interesting angle on the games thing too – most of them involve resource management of some sort. You can’t buy the toys if you don’t have the money. So the games that involve a grind teach the player that hard work brings reward. Curious 😉

Time to get back to that other addiction – telly and music 🙂 And some really bad acting by the Star Trek people !

PS The new ship is called “Olga never gets laid”. Yep – mad moment 🙂 It’s in honour of Olga Kurylenko, who in her last three major blockbusters has been :
Stabbed in the neck with a sedative laden syringe by Agent 47 when she tried to jump him.
Ignored by the British secret agent most notorious for his womanising.
Kicked out of bed by Max Payne.
And after seeing her in all three of those – I don’t get it …

[chuckle] That’s just 226 out of almost 2000 tracks I have in my iTunes library 🙂 Had a good few slices of time spent feeding the laptop with cds to give it some more things to play.

Not heard of Era, will have to take a look there. Suzanne Vega’s another favourite, although it seems that our record shops don’t seem to want to sell me her newer albums … Amazon here we come 🙂

Add Suzzane Vega and Era to your list of ‘to listen to’. Era is similar to Enigma but much better in my opinion. Ms Vega is stunning with her lyrical acrobatics and guitar use.

“stiffest person bopping away” made me giggle uncontrollably – what does that say about me?

hehehehehe

I love many of your choices – Snow Patrol is wonderful as is Cold Play

and of course you’ve got some great classics in there.

Sir Paul said he needed to change the lyrics to ‘when I’m 64’ – he never expected to get this old 😉

Been having a bit of an iTunes Marathon lately … The online game Eve is good for that because it doesn’t take much focus for the game, which leaves plenty for listening to music.

I blame my sister of course, she’s been trying to get me interested in new music by different artists. So it’s taken me a week so far and I’ve only got 38 tracks to go of the new bunch collected when I was up at my mum’s and dad’s place for birthday weekend. Out of 226 🙂

What’s sparked off this entry though is an oldie … When I’m Sixty Four just came over the party shuffle (from the Sgt Pepper album) and it’s still as fun a song now as it ever was. So what’s new in the collection and what do I think of it ?

Gorillaz – Demon Days. Not sure about this one. It’s a tad … different. Could take a bit of getting used to and Different can be Very Good. Too much of the same gets boring after a while.

Snow Patrol – Final Straw. Interesting. Some good tracks here and this should be a good one to listen to as an album instead of as individual tracks. That’s how I check out the new stuff, I’ll listen to each track, rate it and then I’ll add it to the shuffle a while later so I can listen to them as an album.

Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Not heard much like the lead singer’s voice here. Huge amount of character gets injected into every song. I’ve not listened to much of this album yet but I get the feeling I may be hunting down a few more Arctic Monkeys albums soon …

Portishead – Dummy. Another highly unusual group performing music that’s diametrically opposite to Standard Pop Group 101 (I avoid x-factor and chart radio like the plague). Looking forward to this one as an album, although I think it needs laptop hooked to decent speakers to do it justice.

Peter Gabriel – Security. His 1st and 3rd albums were largely amazing, as was So. But he’s also done some stinkers in his time and I wasn’t impressed with this one either. Better than his 2nd and 4th attempts, which is sadly about the nicest thing I can say about it.

Enigma – MCMXC AD. I’d got their Cross of Changes album already but haven’t had that much luck tracking this one down at an acceptable price. Which is a shame because there’s some very sexy music here. (This is the Gregorian Chant music from a decade or two ago)

Coldplay – this is another group I’ll be looking to hunt down more of 🙂 I’d describe it as “Lazy”, which also translates into slow and relaxing. Think these albums will be getting more than their fair share of the party shuffle.

Gloria Estefan – ok, this blog entry was partly inspired by the post about Cheryl the dancer on Dianne’s blog (see link in blogroll – Forks Off The Moment). If I called Enigma sexy singing above, this is lapdancing. Fun party music, guaranteed to get the stiffest person bopping away. Will have to look up how Gloria Estefan is getting on nowadays, she suffered a road accident that fractured vertebrae her back, which needed to be fused. Within a year she was back on the road on tour (more here). A Gloria Estefan track is almost guaranteed to get me singing along and that’s the only recommendation that really counts 🙂

Joan Baez – Noel. Ok, this one’s not from my sister, it’s one of my mum’s favourites. It appeals to the purist in me because there’s some of the most pure vocals around on show here. My laptop can just about handle it but this is another one where I think I’ll have to hook up the better speakers to do it justice.

Talking Heads – True Stories. This one’s been lurking at mum’s and dad’s for years now and it’s one of the few of my cd’s I hadn’t been taking around the country with me. Which is a shame because it’s another fun listen. More fun than Stop Making Sense, although it’s a little too long ago now since I’ve watched the movies for Stop Making Sense and True Stories.

The Beatles – Sgt Pepper. Classic Album, full of traditional Beatles character. I have the 1 album too but the sad thing about greatest hits albums is that a) they miss great songs that I like more than what hit the greatest hits and b) they lose the character that a true album has.
(little addon – I hear there’s an issue with getting Beatles songs over iTunes … The Beatles tracks I have in my library are imports from cds 🙂

Robbie Williams – Greatest Hits. Some amazing songs here. Robbie Williams has always had an outstanding voice, in whatever mode he’s chosen to sing. Whether that be pop, ballad or sixties swing. Will have to queue up Angels, Road to Mandalay and Rock DJ for the party shuffle.

Currently on the shuffle is You Give Love A Bad Name from Bon Jovi before we (spookily for the weather and one of the jobs I need to do soon) get to Here I Stand And Face The Rain by a-Ha.

PS Will also hunting Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow sometime. Just to see if their other music is as good as That Don’t Impress Me Much and All I Wanna Do.

There was a trailer for Watchman before Max Payne – looks amazing 🙂

And if they continue the form from Iron Man, the second Iron Man film and The Avengers should be outstanding too 🙂

The Day The Earth Stood Still could be interesting, although I wouldn’t mind seeing the first one again so I can compare.

I can totally imagine you sitting with my honey and discussing movies lol. He’s a movie buff as well as a trained Lighting Technician on set.

There’s not a whole lot out there right now that catches my interest any though. My partner is impatiently waiting for the release of Watchman. I think it takes him back to his younger days and he’s excited to see what they’ve done with the movie. I just hope he’s not going to be disappointed lol.

Watched Max Payne tonight – it’s another movie made out of a game …

The evening started in Preview Bar & Grill, a restaurant close to the cinema. They’re always worth going to but tonight, even at about 5.30, it was empty ! There was us Crazies plus about 1 or 2 other groups. Bar man was so bored he was polishing glasses.

It was the same thing in the cinema too, which is surprising seeing as there’s a few high profile films out there at the moment. No-one there ! Max Payne had about 10 people in a cavern of a cinema. Ok, it’s not Wednesday where there’s a 2 for 1 deal going and it’s not a Friday night or a weekend but empty cinema ? Felt weird. Maybe it was a little early to get the people in.

Anyway, how was Max Payne ? I think I’d describe it as “better than Wanted”, “Punisher with the charm removed” or “wannabe Sin City without the credibility”. A shame, cos the game was supposed to be really good (it’s a first person shooter and one I missed out on). There’s a few game tie ins done, some are much better than others. I enjoy watching the Tomb Raider films for more than Angelina Jolie, because they’re good fun to watch. Resident Evil is another “good” film tie in, it’s scary as well as a gripping action film. Will be having another Resident Evil night sometime I think.

Hitman’s another good film-game tie in, because it retains a sense of style along with its very dark humour. Again, that’s a game I’ve never played too. The film-game tie ins sometimes work well but often you’ll get a Max Payne or real stinkers like the Dungeons and Dragons movies.

Ah well – some films are good, some films are poor. Some films are so bad they’re actually highly amusing. But I wouldn’t count Max Payne as one of those. Right – I’m almost all out of snacks, so it’s time to pick up some munchies so I can stare at them while watching the Ice Road Truckers in 30 minutes 🙂

Time to close with weird thing of the day. Normal History channel is giving the Blue Screen Of No Signal. History +1 hour channel is giving a crystal clear picture. They’re only 1 separate on the box ! My mind is boggling …

Been having one of those weeks where I feel like I’ve been doing loads but when I look back, I wonder what’s actually been done …

Friday was fun, the cakes and donuts were very well received. And a few people from the team that’s been combined with ours said hello too. It’s a little strange with the other team, they’ve been attached to our group without really that much integration going on between us. Even though we sit next to each other now, there’s still a bit of distance there.

Good weekend too, we didn’t manage to burn out my dad’s router but we probably came close 🙂 Heh – not really, we got him a Linksys router just over a year ago and it’s proven bombproof ever since. I’ll buy one when I finally get sick of the Philips router I use here. I regularly need to reset my router because it has a habit of blocking me from accessing the net. In comparison, the Linksys has only had problems once in over a year, when it managed to go back to factory default. Apart from that, it’s faultless.

I bought myself a few goodies for my birthday too, 2 games and 1 series of Blakes Seven. I’ve had a look at the 2 games (Fallout 3 and the new WoW expansion) but not really felt that interested in getting in too deep with them. It’s not that I’m taking a dislike to them, more that I’m struggling to get the energy or interest to play games at the moment. That’ll pass when I get a good rest in 🙂

So why the “Feral Thinking” ? And what is that ? You know when you have a problem and whatever you try to fix it only leads to more confusion ? Been getting that over the past day or so. When I get that, I tend to get locked up in trying to bend the problem back to how it should be. Got one of those at the moment and most of today has been spent figuring out firstly what the problem is and how to fix it. It’s not a huge problem, just some numbers that have been mixed up.

I’ll sort it, even if I have to start from the beginning. And the problem is only in the worksheet I use like a scratchpad anyway, so no big deal if I have to rip it up and start again. I would like to figure out exactly why the numbers are different, although I get the feeling it’s a combination of Excel and our work’s network playing games on me. That happens too at our place, data integrity is not what you would call “perfect”, although we can usually catch issues before it becomes critical.

Currently chilling out to a bit of retro(ish!) TV with Star Trek TNG and will probably give one of the games a bit of attention afterwards. And listen to some more of the 220 odd more tracks I collected for iTunes at the weekend 🙂 10 more to hit 2000 in the library.

Very interesting.