Tamrielo

I talked quite a bit yesterday about PAX as an experience, but I didn’t really talk much about what I saw and did at the show.

I should probably preface all of this by talking about how I go through PAX. I tend to play very few games at the show– I’ll watch screens on a lot of them and sometimes talk to the folks at the booth, but mostly what I do is bookmark games I’m interested in and move on. Part of this is that I don’t really want to know too much about a game before I play it, so I can get the full experience without preconceived notions. I do this elsewhere, too. As soon as I see a trailer or an announcement of a game I know I want, I bookmark it and stop reading anything about it. It’s been great for keeping hype under control, and I enjoy those games a lot more than I did when I devoured every bit of info I could find and created a grand vision of the perfect game in my head.

As a result, at PAX I tend to skim games I already know I want to play. Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, Dreadnought, Battleborn, Gigantic, FFXV, Fallout 3, Dishonored 2, and quite a few others had a pretty significant presence, but I already knew I wanted to play them so I checked out the booths and moved on. I’m going to play them, I don’t need to see more. What I wanted to do was spend more time with games I’d either never heard of or wasn’t convinced I’d be interested in.

Here’s a quick rundown of the games I spent a bit of time with, what I thought of them, and which of the two categories they fell into:

Sword Coast Legends: I didn’t get to play this one, because the line was insane, but it’s one of the games I’ve been the most interested in messing around with. I love the idea of a game with a bunch of players and a DM, where it actually works well for the DM to create and manipulate content as you play; it’s a really neat idea that I’d like to see succeed. The concept looks great, but I don’t know how the game itself is. Still, almost certainly picking this up unless some serious red flags crop up.

FFXIV: Not a new game, but the first time I’ve been at a convention that had a Battle Challenge. Kodra, Ashgar, Paragon (GIntrospection) and I managed to get in line for it on Friday and take on Ravana. It’s the only game I waited more than five minutes to play and it was a ton of fun. The four of us were grouped with four very new players– one who’d gotten a character up to level 30, months back, and three who’d never played the game before. We managed to win, and it was great coordinating with new folks and making sure they got a win (and a cool shirt, too!)

The Magic Circle: I’ve been following this game for a while now, and hadn’t realized it’d launched. At some point soon I’m going to boot it up and give it a shot, because I think the premise is interesting and I haven’t played a super meta game lately. The idea is that you play a character in a video game that’s been in development hell for twenty years, and you fight your way through old junk code and scrapped ideas and bugs as well as pulling from other games that the company has developed to find your way to freedom.

Shadowrun: Catalyst: This is the Shadowrun board game that I’ve heard about, and Kodra, Ashgar and I got to play a demo of it. It’s a cooperative deckbuilding game where you fight Shadowrun-style enemies and get new gear, levels, etc. It’s very reminiscent of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, just set in the Shadowrun universe with a greater emphasis on teamwork rather than exploration. I liked the demo we played a lot, and I’m interested in seeing what else the game has to offer.

The Black Watchmen: The ARG leading up to the Secret World’s launch was incredibly fun, and one of the big groups that featured heavily was called The Black Watchmen. The idea’s since spun off into its own game with similar themes, as an episodic game with fiendish puzzles to solve as a group and a compelling overarching plot. There’s a very real chance I’m going to make it the Aggrochat Game of the Month next time I have the chance, and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll at least see if I can’t talk Kodra into giving it a shot with me.

That Dragon, Cancer: Fourteen sads out of ten, and I just played what they had at the booth. This is an incredibly compelling game that I’m honestly not in a good enough place emotionally to be able to handle, but I’m really glad exists. This kind of thing is Kodra’s bread and butter, and I’m certain we’ll hear him cheerfully describe how brutally it inflicted its misery on him. Also would be a good candidate for Aggrochat GOTM except I wouldn’t be able to play it and I suspect the rest of the crew would be depressed by it. Still, for as much as I’ve commented on games needing more emotions than just “angry” and “sad”, I think this one is a good thing to have tugging at the heartstrings and making you think.

Hob: The next big thing by the Torchlight team, Hob is a metroidvania-style platformer where you play as a robot thing with a grappling hook wandering around gorgeous weird magi-tech ruins and probably other places. It still needs work, but it’s one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Ultimate Chicken Horse: This weird little game is probably my best in show, just for being pure, simple fun. It’s a co-op-etitive platformer in the now-standard Nintendo style, the one where you want to stab your friends to death at the end. It’s an incredibly simple premise: you and up to three other players are put into a mostly blank platforming level with a start and a finish. You can’t get from the start to the finish, but at the start of each round you open a party box where people get to pick objects to place in the level. At first, these are platforms, boxes, things to jump on and otherwise help you get to the finish. Whoever gets to the finish gets a point. If everyone (or no one) gets to the finish, no one gets any points. You’ll play the same level multiple times, until someone’s gotten three points, and as the rounds go on the objects become less helpful and more harmful, spike traps, projectiles, slippery ice, glue, all things to make it harder to get to the finish. As you place traps, you’re betting that you’re a better platformer than everyone else and that they’ll fall into your clever traps, so you’ll be the only one to get points. It’s a delightful party game and the most surprising and fun game I saw at the show.

I am, at this point, utterly exhausted. My sleep schedule is heavily late-night shifted, and I’ve been getting up a solid four hours before I usually do all weekend, but not managing to get to sleep any sooner. I’m good at putting a functional face on it for a while, but I could feel it slipping today. I’m going to sleep for a while.

If I didn’t catch you at PAX, I hope you had a great time, and I’m sorry I missed you!

PAX East has always been a high-energy, high-stress convention for me. There are so many people I want to catch up with, especially this year, and never enough time to give people the time I feel they deserve. Especially this year, where I feel like I dropped the ball on catching up with everyone, I’m sorry if I missed you.

This year is the first time I’ve been to PAX Prime (I still prefer to think of it as PAX West), and I wasn’t sure what it would be like going to PAX in a city I live in. It’s very tempting to get a hotel room near the convention center in the future, despite living not far away, because parking is serious business. I pretty much have to show up as the show opens in order to have a hope of parking, and I can’t be as lax about wandering to parties and so forth. My days have to be a lot more planned, especially when I’m there with other folks, because transportation is a thing.

On the other hand, having Kodra and Ashgar at the show was great. I’ve been slowly re-acclimating to games over the last year– I hadn’t realized how stressful video games had become for me, and how thoroughly I’d detached from them. While actively working in the industry, I’d considered it a part of the job to be as caught up as possible on the games that were coming out. I would buy and play through four or five complete games a month, from stuff I really loved to stuff I didn’t care for but I knew was relevant to truly awful games that might have a nugget of a good idea in there somewhere.

It was exhausting, and when I left the industry to focus on my Master’s degree, I gave myself permission to play only the games I REALLY felt like playing, and I found myself barely playing anything. I went from playing games 30-40 hours a week to going entire weeks without booting up a video game, or barely clocking an hour or two of raid time in FFXIV. Years of forcing myself to play everything has made me really good at being patient with entertainment media, but really hurt my enjoyment of video games as a whole. Letting myself play only what I really felt like meant that, for a while, I played nothing and loved it, and I’m slowly getting myself back into games that I like.

I’m trying to avoid feeling obligated to play things, even though I am. I still feel like I don’t log enough time in FFXIV for my guild, and it was a struggle to play through everything surrounding this month’s Aggrochat Game Of The Month, which contributed to putting less FFXIV time in. Still, I’m letting myself only play what I feel like playing for the most part, and as a result I’m enjoying what I do play that much more. I’ve also discovered an upside to my tolerance for forcing my way through things– when faced with a slow-starting game or show, I have the patience to get through the rocky beginnings to get to the better stuff.

Back to PAX, though. I haven’t been to a PAX in two years, and the last one I was at I was working for a big chunk of it– fun, but exhausting. I don’t feel like I belong at PAX anymore– not because the show isn’t welcoming (I’ve had some fantastic ad-hoc conversations with various people throughout the weekend), but because I’m a lot different than I was the last time I was at PAX. I don’t have the boundless font of energy for the show, and I’m a lot pickier and better-informed about the games I want to play. I’ve never been much for playing games at the show, but I was able to make a circuit of the expo hall in about two hours and see everything I was interested in seeing, making a little note of a number of games to keep an eye on.

I remember being energized at previous shows, and being excited to spend a bunch of time at various booths, trying various games, and going to a bunch of parties and events and whatnot. I don’t have that same drive this time. I’m tired of the show fairly quickly, and I don’t have much of anything I particularly want to do there. I feel like I’m doing something wrong, or that something’s wrong with me, particularly since my companions are FAR more excited and driven to be at the show than I am. I worry that I’m bringing down their weekend, because I don’t have the same threshold for it as they do, and even though I’m pushing myself to the limit of what I can manage, I feel like I’m still dragging them away.

I honestly wonder how much has actually changed. Thinking back, I’ve often ducked out and decompressed on my own in the hotel room, or wandered around solo for a time at other shows (something I haven’t done much of this year). In writing this, I’m coming to realize that PAX has always been a show about people for me, about catching up with friends I don’t often get to see. It’s not the games, it’s the friends. I’ve gotten to spend the weekend with two of my closest friends, and that has been fantastic, with or without PAX itself.

I’m now four weeks into mostly-self-taught Japanese. I’ve managed to get a few lessons with a tutor, who has been incredibly helpful and has pushed me farther than I thought I’d be able to go a lot faster than I expected. I’ve learned a lot about the process along the way, and can critique my own approach a bit.

The first thing I did was start working on the kana, essentially teaching myself to read and write in Japanese, at least the basic characters. Part of this was that it was a lightweight thing for me to be able to do, a bit of memorization and a bit of playing with phone apps before bed. It took me about two weeks to learn hiragana at a relatively sedate pace, and about five days to get katakana once I had a system. For anyone trying to do this, start with the apps; they’ll get you used to the shapes and the sounds nice and gently, but push yourself quickly to write the alphabets from memory as soon as you can. Part of the reason it took me so much longer to memorize the hiragana was because I wasn’t pushing myself to commit them to memory; the apps make you pick from multiple choice rather than writing them out yourself.

As odd a choice as it was to begin with the kana, it helped a lot to create a solid foundation for everything else. Genki (my textbook) uses a lot of kana even early on, and it helps to be able to read and write it without using romaji (roman alphabet) as a go-between. I’m not fast at reading kana, but I can do it now. There’s a bit of a weird side effect that happened to me, though. I’m able to read a lot of things without having any comprehension at all, which is a bizarre experience.

The next thing I started working on was going from the start of Genki and going through the chapters. The book is laid out very well, and I did a bit of dabbling in some basic greetings and some relatively straightforward sentence construction. One of the things I’ve picked up very quickly is that I absolutely cannot think in English while working on Japanese, and I think that’s one of the things that makes it seem like a very difficult language to learn. I have to separate myself from my desire to make English sentences to translate and just think in abstract concepts. In retrospect, I think this is something that’s caused me a lot of trouble in learning Spanish. A lot of Romantic and Germanic languages have very familiar structures to an English speaker, and you can often feasibly just come up with a sentence in English and replace a lot of the words with the appropriate words in, say, Spanish, and more or less get your meaning across.

Separating myself from trying to form coherent English sentences to translate into Japanese helped the learning process a lot. Japanese is a very structured, orderly language in a lot of ways, and I find that sentence construction makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. My tutor moved extremely quickly to particles in sentences, which are markers that indicate what the word or phrase preceding it is doing in the sentence. There isn’t an English equivalent, but it makes me think of sorting flags in file structures. Forcing myself to separate from English sentence construction made these a lot easier to understand and work with.

Getting a tutor early on was really helpful for me. Even just the three or four sessions I’m going to be able to have with her will give me a solid footing to keep teaching myself. I’m almost at the point where I can hold some very rudimentary conversations, I just lack the vocabulary for it. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is use my knowledge of English to evaluate the kinds of conversations I have most frequently, to get an idea of what the most useful things to learn in Japanese would be if I’m looking to reach a conversational level quickly. It’s given me an opportunity to think about how I communicate with other people and the kinds of things I say.

I’ve reached the point now where I can watch or read something in Japanese and I’m having constant flickers of comprehension. I recognize sentences or words and while I can’t quite get enough context to figure out what’s being said, I can make sense of how the sentence is constructed. I don’t know who is being talked about, what they’re doing, or where, but I know that someone is being talked about and that they’re doing something in a particular place. It’s a structure that lets me start asking the right questions– if I recognize 私 (watashi, “I”) and the particle の (no, indicating a possessive or apposition), followed by a word I don’t know, I still know that the speaker is talking about something they own, or something close to them.

It means that when I’m listening to spoken Japanese, I can start to make out the shape of what’s being said, even if I don’t know the specifics. It’s honestly really exciting to have those little flickers of recognition; it makes me want to push harder and learn faster. My biggest hangup right now is vocabulary; I just need to take in thirty-five thousand words or so to catch up with my English. No problem…