Penny Arcade

The communities of DOTA, HoN, and LoL are notorious, even among gamer communities, for being noxious hellholes.  It’s rare that I actually run afoul of these beasts; usually, they’re content to shiver and gasp in their rotting stumps.  Every now and then, though, they do emerge, and I remember: oh, yes.  You senseless things.  Again!

Obviously you have a lot of larvae just learning to be human beings, and I can recognize their wretched, sightless writhings.  But it’s simply a fact that this game is more stressful than other games.  Part of it is almost certainly because the stakes are higher.  On average, a round of League of Legends might be five or six times longer than a round of CoD.  You can only waste a stranger’s time so long before they begin to resent it, and in an environment where there’s little to no repercussions to transgressive behavior there is a high likelihood that you will be transgressed at some point.  I’m not saying it’s an awesome thing to do, just that it is done, and to gird yourself accordingly.

We’re playing LoL, but it doesn’t particularly matter which one you play - games of this unique genre gumbo necessarily have broad concepts in common, and I’m starting to find it problematic.  I don’t even mean in a bad way, I mean that when my time becomes my own, I don’t want to play anything else.  I can summarize why - imagine that these items occupy a set of expanding, concentric rings.

1) Custom Jargon (lane, bot, fed, etc.)

2) Tactical gameplay moment to moment

3) Choice-studded Power Progression Arc

4) Intrinsic/Extrinsic novelty based on party composition (“Deckbuilding”)

5) Persistence

It’s actually interfering with my ability to do my job.  You can see Gabriel as Wukong in panel one and Tycho as Leona (The Radiant Dawn!) in panel two.  For a sidecar of interesting trivia, take a look at how two games - League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, in this case - approached the exact same archetype from a gameplay perspective.

I have a special note for Omeganauts, and those who follow the Omegathon as it winds its way through PAX:  here are the games you’ll be playing to win a big pile of money and a rad trip to a cool place.

Round 1, 20 to 16 - Double Dash on Gamecube.
Round 2, 16 to 12 – Bananagrams
Round 3, 12 to 8 - Lumines Live! on Xbox 360
Round 4, 8 to 4 - Dance Central 2, Xbox 360
Round 5, 4 to 2 - Portal 2 (Console)

There; that ought to terrify them.

(CW)TB out.

(instrumental)

Its been a long time coming but we have finally launched our new comic The Trenches. This comic is a collaboration between Tycho and I along with Scott Kurtz. Scott and I created the the characters and the look of the strip and he is handling the artwork for the actual comics. The three of us are writing it together and having a blast. The Trenches is much different from Penny Arcade in that it is has what the ladies call “continuity”.

The Trenches focuses on Isaac and his life as a game tester. As the comic goes on you’ll get introduced to his friends and the hell that can be QA. The comic will be updated every Tuesday and Thursday. Along with each new strip we will also be featuring a story from an actual tester about their experiences in the industry. So if you have your own horror story that you’d like to share (anonymously of course) you can hit this page and get it off your chest.

Its been awesome working with Scott on this project and I could not be more proud of the final result. I know it’s early but I promise we’ve got a lot of great characters and fun stuff planned. I hope you’ll keep checking in with The Trenches on Tuesdays and Thursdays as we introduce you to this world we’ve had so much fun building.

-Gabe out

I know you don’t come to this website for news about my spawn but I can’t help but share this. My eldest son Gabe is almost seven years old now. He is fixated on a few different things. Lego, Minecraft, Adventure Time, and (God help me) iCarly. Gabe plays Minecraft every single day and that’s no joke. For a while I thought maybe I should be limiting his time because that’s what parents do right? They limit “time”. Then I started looking at the shit my son was doing in this game and I could not ask him to stop.

He is building and solving problems in ways that frankly I think are far beyond his years but maybe that’s just becasue I’m his Dad. Either way I think the “game” has been incredibly good for him. He’s learned spelling by making his own signs, some pretty complex math from using his furnace and smelting, How to think of something and then figure out how to build that thing, and then just basic computer skills and the concept of mouse look+WASD.

His fascination with Minecraft has lead him to ask me the other day if there was “something you could look at that would show you how to make things in minecraft.” Up until just the other day he had been discovering all the recipes on his own. He figured out boats, buckets, doors,armor and a ton of other stuff just from trial and fucking error. So I showed him the Minecraft Wiki and its recipe list. I thought his little brain was going to explode when he saw that you could make a bed. After that I noticed him typing minecraft into YouTube and I got a little scared. My baby boy was using the god-damned Internet. Jesus only knows what sick shit he would find out there. As it turned out he found people showing off their Minecraft creations and giving tours of their worlds. This blew him away!

Cut to this afternoon when I get a text with a picture from my wife Kara. “Your son made a “tripod” for his iPhone so he could make a movie of himself playing Minecraft.

We gave Gabe one of our old phones a while back. It is essentially a fancy iPod Touch now but it has a camera and its got a bunch of his favorite games on it. So he built a stand out of Lego to hold the phone while he played. My guess is that when I get home tonight I’ll be helping him put his little movie on the Internet. All of a sudden the web seems like an incredibly scary place.

-Gabe out