Month: April 2015

Foundation of Folks

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Statistics Funk

One of the problems with creating content is every now and then you will have something that you are very proud of, but the community doesn’t seem to be all that interested in.  That is not to say that I am not proud of most of the things I am involved in.  I love what this blog has become, and I love AggroChat…   but that seems to be less about me and more about the group dynamic that we have assembled.  However I feel like “Bel Folks Stuff” was one of those projects that I poured more of myself into than most.  The idea was that I would grab interesting people and have natural conversations with them where we discussed whatever happened to be on their mind.  I feel like for the most part that mission has succeeded, and I am very proud of the six episodes we have so far.  In the episodes I have talked with:

  1. Gypsy Syl
  2. Rowanblaze and Sctrz
  3. Alternative Chat
  4. Petter Mårtensson
  5. Qelric
  6. Liore

Unfortunately after the release of the latest episode I did that thing you are never supposed to do… I did a deep dive into the statistics.  In many ways this secondary podcast has been a labor of love, and right now it gets several orders of magnitude fewer listeners than AggroChat.  So I question…  what I did wrong with it?  Maybe I have simply done a poor job of advertising it?  It isn’t part of The Gaming and Entertainment Network so that right there is one strike against it.  I release them with questionable regularity, which is another strike against it.  I also question whether or not it was a good idea to treat it as separate from the other things that I do.  I have wondered for awhile if I should have just released it as part of the AggroChat content stream.. as a sort of bonus episode or something.  In any case… since looking at the stats I am exceedingly bummed about the limited audience.  Maybe there just is not the appetite for listening to gamers rattle on?  Anyways… this isn’t going to necessarily stop me from making more but I also feel like my guests have been awesome in their willingness to do the show…  when there really isn’t much benefit from it.

Foundation of Folks

For some time now, I’ve had various people tell me that I use exercise any connections I have within the games industry to turn the “Folks” podcast into an industry interview show.  I suppose I could do that, but the problem is I am afraid that would fundamentally change the nature of the show.  It might be idealistic, but I wanted to create a show without pretense about its purpose.  I wanted to have people on and just talk, and whatever topics we happened to cover naturally is what we would end up talking about.  If I have people on the show that are known for this or that, there is the pressure to ask them about what they are famous for.  By the same token, I would feel obligated to give them time to plug whatever hot project they happen to be working on.  At that point we have a traditional interview show and not what I was hoping for.  Maybe it is strange but I was hoping to have authentic conversation with a bunch of people, and almost forget for a time that we were recording the conversation.

I guess I question if I could talk “industry” folks into that sort of notion.  So far the people I have had on the show I have a deep connection with already.  These are people that I have gamed with, blogged with, or exchanged more tweets than I can count.  Right now it feels like I am just having a conversation with a friend.  I worry that I cannot keep up that dynamic with people I am not quite so personally invested in.  Then there is the problem of how would I even sell this notion to someone, when I obviously cannot guarantee much in the way of listeners.  That is the obvious sell for most big podcasts… is “talk to me and I can give you X number of ears”.  I don’t have that going for me on any level.  So yeah right now I am in this existential funk about “Bel Folks Stuff” and even though I love doing it… I am questioning if it is worth the scheduling headaches and the extra work on my part to keep it up.  I want to keep it up, but damn…  just bummed.

Second Static

ffxiv 2015-04-05 19-27-29-95 Last night when I got home… I was wallowing in my frustration over the podcast…  so much so that I forgot that last night was to be the inaugural running of the second static group within the Free Company.  The guild has been insane, and we are apparently so active and so prevalent that we jumped from 16th to 6th in the FFXIV free company activity standings.  I will say for some time there has not been a single city I have been in that I did not at least bump into one person with the [GREY] tag.  In order to help get the second static off the ground, myself and Kodra has offered to fill in as whatever role they needed us in.  I ended up main tanking to Damai’s off tank as we managed to work through several content items.  So while I started the evening in a bit of a malaise I finished it pumped about the prospects of having two active static teams within our free company.

We started off with Garuda Extreme, which I know very well…  just not well enough to explain adequately apparently.  This always seems to be a thing for me… I can do something, but I can’t necessarily tell you how to do it.  For awhile we tried using the Duty Finder to fill our missing slots, but honestly had significantly more luck creating a party in the Party Finder.  We met a few nice people on the server as well.  We managed to clear Turn 1 and Turn 4 of Binding Coil of Bahamut as well.  I was pleased that we one shot 4, since I remember having a significant amount of trouble with it initially when Ashgar and I tanked it.  To add to the confusion for the sake of this arrangement… the roles were flipped from what I am most used to.  The positive is… I feel like I could actually farm four over and over in an attempt to get my bear mount.  I need to figure out which piece of high allagan I am missing so I can focus down those.  I would really love to wear that full set of gear.  Anyways the end of the evening was definitely better than the day, so I am thankful that I have such an awesome group of people to spend my game time with.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Foundation of Folks

Playing Games I Don’t Like

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I got a few comments after the Citizens of Earth Aggrochat episode about my ability to play a game I didn’t like to completion.

It’s something I honed while working as a game designer– forcing myself to play something I don’t think I like lets me turn on the analysis and really look at what’s bothering me about it. In game design, feedback of “this sucks” or “I don’t like X” is effectively worthless feedback; it pretty much gets ignored by default (other than, occasionally, “we need to change this”) because it doesn’t offer any useful information.

On the other hand, feedback that’s specific and focused gives a team a lot to work with, and lets us make informed changes based on things people don’t like. Spending a lot of time in that environment leads you to change the way you present your own feedback– “I didn’t enjoy this” stops being something you say, and instead “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do here”, or “this segment is too easy” or “this NPC’s dialogue doesn’t make sense” all provide comments that offer something useful to work from.

That being said, feedback is important. In college, I had a PSP that was gathering dust, hadn’t been used in years and wasn’t about to see any use. Someone on the college mailing list wanted a PSP really badly, and was willing to trade a brand new Xbox 360 for it, along with a couple of games. I was, at this point, deep in my “PC Master Race” mindset, but it wasn’t like I was using the PSP and I thought it would be cool to have a shiny new console, if only so my roommate and visitors could use it. I basically decided to swap something I didn’t care about for something new and shiny.

The games that came with it were Forza and Gears of War, the two (at the time) most stereotypical possible games to have for the console. Being a broke college student, I couldn’t afford any others, so it was those or nothing. I booted up Gears of War, figuring I’d hate it and that I could maybe trade it in. What I found instead was a game that did some things I’d never seen before (this was the dawn of the cover shooter, so it wasn’t old hat yet) and provided me challenges that I wasn’t getting on the PC side of things. It was different, and totally out of my usual wheelhouse, but I found some interesting things in there nevertheless.

The cover was nonsense to me, the epitome of meathead space marine nonsense that I thought myself intellectually superior to. It was an arrogance I had to choke back down later, because I genuinely enjoyed myself.

Since then, I make it a point to put time into games I don’t think I’ll like. While I was working in the industry, I was a lot better at this, just because I made sure I kept up on every single major release. Now I’m slightly less invested, though I still play the really big-ticket games (haven’t played Bloodborne yet, though).

It’s showed me stuff that I never expected to like, and has informed my design choices, seeing what works and what doesn’t in different games. There’s some stuff you can do in a first-person military shooter that you just can’t in your standard fantasy MMO, and those things are worth experiencing. I force myself to play some games all the way through because I’ve found that even the biggest travesties of video games have some redeeming moment somewhere that’s worth seeing.

Games are diverse and a lot of fun. Try a game you might never have touched before– try a game in a genre you’d never have touched before. You might be surprised, and if you find an unexpected gem of a genre, you might suddenly realize there’re a whole bunch of games you can play that you’d never have considered before.



Source: Digital Initiative
Playing Games I Don’t Like

Pillars of Eternity, again

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Short post today, I’ve got a lot of work to do.

I promised I’d return to Pillars of Eternity, and I have. I spent a bit of time in it this weekend and got through the first bit of tutorial. It’s a game that will probably be good, but still hasn’t quite hooked me. Wrong game at the wrong time for me.

What I can say is that the storytelling is already quite good, much as I expected from Obsidian. The actual gameplay is a bit slow, with a lot of time spent watching my characters run from place to place. Movement isn’t interesting outside of combat, so it winds up being a lot of clicking and a lot of awkwardly moving the camera around.

I realize these are standard features of the genre, but they’re grating on me as I try to play, which is why I think it’s a game I’ll need to come back to later, when I’m in the right mood for it. It does feel like a really good classic PC RPG, though.

EDIT: Sorry this post is late. I hit the wrong day for it to publish! D:



Source: Digital Initiative
Pillars of Eternity, again

Bel Folks Stuff #6 – A Good Friday with Liore

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I had these grand ideas about having two episodes during the month of March to make up for the fact that I missed a February episode.  That never quite worked out.  I had a handful of people that I had talked to but scheduling never quite worked out since I try really hard to squeeze these episodes in whenever my wife is otherwise busy.  With the weekly schedule of AggroChat and the various guest spots I end up getting called on to do, it means she is having to bend her time around me quite often, that I try my best not to make this podcast also do that.  As such I tend to schedule people on a whim, and I am super thankful that the amazing Liore was amicable about that sort of timing.  I literally talked to her Thursday to see if she was available, and we recorded on the afternoon of Good Friday since we were both off work.

Liore and I have known each other for what feels like forever.  She’s been in my guilds, I’ve been in her guilds… and for a period of time in Rift we raided together multiple times a week.  During all of this time we have forged an unconventional friendship.  It feels like we end up on opposite ends of so many discussions, but at the end of the day we do so with the greatest of respect for the other.  During this podcast we talk about all sorts of things, but one thing in particular we highlight because we found it extremely humorous.  Both of us have been getting commentary from the community about a supposedly rivalry between the two of us since we do similar columns now for gaming websites that are technically in competition with each other.  I had a blast spending the afternoon talking with Liore, and had I allowed myself to do so I could have easily spent another full hour chatting away.  I always love it when the conversation flows naturally.

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