Digitally Disillusioned

For a while now, popular board and card games have been showing up on Xbox Live Arcade. Setters of Catan was first, but Carcasonne, Lost Cities, and now Wits and Wagers have followed suit. This is bringing a new kind of gaming to the masses that throng to Xbox live. Or, at least its trying. I’ve purchased each and every one of these games and have found a constant theme: nobody is playing them.

I don’t mean nobody in the absolute sense, but I do mean it in the sense of every time I try to go online to play with the matchmaking service I find no opponents. Or, at best, one opponent. One opponent who will stick around for one game and refuses to chat. Awesome.

Wits and Wagers is the latest game to hit the platform, having been released this last Wednesday. And now, on a a lazy Saturday night, I’ve spent 15 minutes unable to find an opponent. Am I wrong to imagine that this would be a peak period of activity? Do I need to be looking to get my game on Thursday morning instead? Unfortunately I don’t know many people with Xboxes, and all the individuals on my friends list would rather be playing Grand Theft Auto 4.

Even more unfortunate is my inability to stop buying these games because I am desperate for this to be awesome yet now, for the fourth time, I am totally disappointed.

While it has been of tremendous influence in my life I’ve made efforts to downplay my move to Bioware and my switch to video game QA from web development. I think my most measures I have been modest in my expressing the details of the transition online. But I want to share something with you that speaks to why I wanted to switch specifically to a story driven company. But first, do you have 15 minutes? If you don’t come back when you do. I can wait.

I love stories. I think stories are an integral piece of how we relate to each other, and how we learn to understand ourselves. Since interactive entertainment is poised to move into new frontiers of story telling I am excited to be able to participate in what is still, by comparable measures, a story telling platform in its infancy.

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This guy takes his walking very, very seriously.

Today, en route to the local off-leash park, I encountered at long last visible evidence of my new nemesis: snow mold. With our excessive snow falls and frequent melts apparently the conditions are ripe for a lawn condition I’d never ever heard…of…er…wait a minute…

Excuse me.

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If April showers bring May flowers, what the hell are we going to end up with after this?

Disclaimer: actual weather is not exactly as shown it just feels that bad. 

I just remembered that I took this and forgot to share it with the world. This is what happens when a wet early spring snow meets Schnauzer fur. They spend the next 45 minutes licking at it and getting the furniture wet, but its still hilarious.

(Youtube embed, so Facebook readers need to click to view original item.)

Something I’ve wanted to do ever since that first time I thought about starting a blog - I was in the middle of a threesome - was to maintain a backlog. What is a backlog? It is a list of the media I intend to consume in the near future including books, movies, video games, and whatever else I want to talk about. Consuming ideas - which is what media contains - should spur conversation, or at the very least do so more than my continued whinging and complaining.

So, hot off a trip to the bookstore, lets take a look at what is in my bag as onto the backlog it goes now that His Dark Materials is finished, entirely underwhelming third book and all.

jPod, by Douglas Coupland

I got this book because it uses video game development as a theme, and thats one of those things that at the moment I’ll indulge most anything in. A flip through revealed some interesting typographic games which can be interesting if not abused (I am looking at you House of Leaves you stupid arbitrarily dense oh-I-am-so-clever book of stupidity). I certainly did not buy this book because I enjoyed his previous writing because oh boy I did not. I actually kind of hated it. It will be fun to see if I can finish this.

Head First PMP, Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman

Because I’m going to finish what I started even though Agile Development is so much better for software.

I Don’t Believe in Athiests by Chris Hedges 

This guy was on The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright and man did he say some smart things that were correctly critical of the secular left which I otherwise adore. His book was really overpriced but I want to read more of his ideas, I hope he doesn’t let me down.

God bless you internet.

And I swear it has only gotten worse since I wrote the post earlier this week.