PC Gaming

This piece is intended as a homage to games in general, a discussion of my experiences with gaming platforms, and a proclamation of my love for gaming, speaking as a rapacious appreciator of this wonderful interactive art form. This is not a controversial PC Vs. Consoles opinion piece. That would be an utter waste of time and energy. The main points I shall put forward are:

The best single-player games are timeless and yield inestimable value to appreciative gamers.
To enjoy today’s cutting-edge PC games as their designers intended is expensive.
Delaying your gratification a few years could save you a fortune. Patience is also, I’m reliably informed, a heavenly virtue. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having the money to spend on a killer gaming rig now…
Though you can enjoy PC gaming masterpieces such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth [2006] or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines [2004] today with a relatively inexpensive gaming machine.

It has been seven years since I owned a capable beast; that story is told elsewhere. High-end gaming PCs are like racehorses: even the finest are retired after only a handful of years. In the aughties, they were incredibly expensive both to buy and to maintain.

Costly, not just in money, but in time. You could spend £1,000 and a year later, your machine would struggle to play the latest games as they were intended to be seen. A three year-old powerhouse from 2003 would struggle to keep up with the games of 2006. Some expensive transplant surgery would be needed:

‘Let’s see. We’ll need a new Graphics Card, and ooo… a bit more RAM. Oh, that graphics card is going to need a bigger power supply, and then your motherboard will be the bottleneck. Hmm, the CPU you currently have is a different socket from the motherboard you plan on getting. The case is nice though; you can keep that.’

With consoles, like the Sony PlayStation 3 or the Microsoft Xbox 360, we have a platform that has a longer modern life, with the most recent (seventh) console generation set to last at least eight years with no mandatory hardware upgrades required. Excepting replacement of the whole console due to unfortunate but not uncommon catastrophic failure, the cost of maintenance in pounds and hours is negligible.

For me, this isn’t a case of owning a PC or a console. You can have a horse and pony, donkeys, chickens, turtles, and any other animal or beast. If you have the room for it, can afford it, and will give it the love, care and attention it deserves, then you should have it, else you should set it free. Having a loft full of aged animals [read - decrepit computer hardware] is maybe not good for you, or for them. Minimalism be damned; for posterity these cherished pieces still hold personal, sentimental value to the geeks who grew up with them. It is a love that cannot be emulated.

Albeit it can be emulated, some of the time. Getting a hold of the original joypad and via a USB adapter, most Windows and *nix systems support programs that allow nostalgic trips to the best old games, and classics missed first-time round.

A computer is required then, but how expensive does it need to be? Well, what are you going to use it for? Today’s cutting-edge games require today’s cutting-edge hardware (to be played as intended). Whereas games of five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago don’t. Highly capable hardware will set you back £700 to £3,000 (you could probably get something pretty amazing on the price/performance curve somewhere in-between).

Older games and games consoles can be had for a fraction of the price at wondrous flea markets like eBay. The point I’m getting to is this: what do today’s cutting-edge games offer that games of yesteryear do not? Apart from the obvious improved graphics, sound and scope, the main difference I feel in today’s best games is the influence and refinement from past effort. They are informed by their forebears. Only in the best examples the gameplay has evolved and past foibles and poor decisions mitigated; by standing on the shoulders of giants.

However, the excellence of new games does not preclude the timelessness of any past treasures. There are lifetimes of sublime gaming experiences to be had from the body of games that have already been released. Like other forms of entertainment, you will never have the time to enjoy them all. To pick wisely, there is a world of enlightened people who have enjoyed certain games a great deal, and felt compelled to reach out and tell others. For this Retro Gamer magazine is an ideal source of nostalgic ambience to read as you comb eBay and the like for old computer games and systems.

There are plenty of standalone masterpieces, and the timeless ones will always be available to us in the future. I knew this when I ducked out of the PC arms race in 2006, just as MMORPGs like EVE: Online and World of Warcraft were coming to the fore. Social online games such as these are outwith the scope of this piece though. Here I am a proponent only of offline gems such as the life-changing Final Fantasy VII.

Moving forward with this logic, spending a modest amount on a gaming PC, a current generation console, and older consoles today would allow all the treasures of the recent era all the way back to the dawn of the computing age to be played. This logic further permits that around £500 every four years would allow you to have amazing gaming experiences now, equivalent to spending £2,000 every year or two to stay on the bleeding edge of technology.

Most modern games are multi-platform and though the graphics may not be as good on the Xbox 360 as they are on a Water-cooled GTX 51200 3570k blue-LED Horsey i9, the experience and gameplay may be not be diminished at all by the inferior graphics. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Happy gaming.

#SpeakElcor

The Elcor (an elephant-like monotone talking species from the videogame series Mass Effect) prefix all verbal communications with an implied emotional tone, or a pseudo-emotive statement. This, @cactopops (on app.net) pointed out, is an incredibly effective way of conveying tone in text-based communication (without simplifying to emoji I might add). Prefixing tweets and app.net posts with an emotional perspective or statement hashtag would allow our tone to be more clearly encoded in our message.

There are further upsides to communicating this way. My favourite example is this. If you do not know what tone you are trying to encode, then what value does your message have? Do the words alone convey the tone (especially given the contraints of short-form writing)? As an excercise in emotional self-awareness, if you write the tone of your message first, that allows you to check yourself ~~before you wreck yourself~~ before you hit send or publish. Is emotion required? And will your message be positively or negatively charged?

Also, think of the trending and stats possibilities if there is a large uptake in communicating this way. Picture this…

#FishingForLuls (Moral Trolling)
#ProvokingForAngryReaction (Immoral Trolling)
#PointlessMiniPublicDiarising
#WithMuchAnger
#Thankfully
#Sincerely
#Cautiously
#Apologising
#Humbly

While researching this post (to see if this was an isolated phenomenon), I found another post, by Nick Sheridan: “Talk like an Elcor day: Walk with the aliens! Talk with the aliens! Grunt and squeak and squawk with the aliens!”, and many forums which have experimented with speaking like an Elcor.

In very short-form communication (think 140 – 265 characters) with strangers and accquaintances, what better way to communicate than like an Elcor?

2013 Resolutions

(Please feel free to share yours in the comments section of this post.)

It’s getting to that time of year where many of us will be in a post-Christmas, post-gluttonous, dazed shellshock. Where we turn our greedy eye from the pickings of Christmas’ carcass for a brief, weary stare into the near-future. For this post I give a tip of the Santa hat to Koralatov who led me to the Hacker News post on 2013 Learning that inspired me to write this.

These resolutions I am about to make; how can I stop myself forsaking them? How can they be achieved? Let’s move forward with the mindset that these resolutions are all centred around learning and developing new skills.

Forming a resolution

When setting any learning objectives I would recommend putting them to the test:

Why do you want to learn it? How will it benefit you, and what will you use your new skill for, e.g., to write a book, communicate with foreign friends, or type super-fast without having to backspace every few words to correct a spelling mistake.
How long will it take to learn?
When will you make the time to learn it?
These (one, two, and three) can be consolidated into the following question: Are your learning objectives all SMART, i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound [or variations thereof]?

If your early learning objectives can’t be made to at least survive the above probing, I would suggest they be reworked or binned. The fact that every resolution you publicly announce will remain a fairly permanent testament to your future integrity invites a haunting guilt (or potentially valuable lesson) if you fail; and a prideful joy if you succeed.

My 2013 Resolutions

As an example, my 2013 personal resolutions are published below, and I invite you to do the same in the comments of this post, bookmark it and visit any time to share your progress/completion. I will be posting my updates and linking back to this post.

For fun and to improve my computing skills: Learn how to use my Raspberry Pi effectively (learn linux), and put it to use at least once a month.
To communicate with my in-laws better: Learn enough Farsi (Modern Persian) to have a conversation and understand the meaning of overheard conversation.
To become a more effective typist: Learn to touch-type (for real) at least 70wpm with >95% accuracy by July 2013.
Become a better cook: Write down, practice and commit to memory at least 20 recipes that can make-up a staple repetoir.
To ultimately design and knit my own jumper: Learn the basics of knitting and knit at least five different items by June.
To ultimately make my own stoneware: Learn and practice ceramics. Buy all equipment by June to begin after knitting and finishing Project Management degree.

2013 Resolutions Gantt Chart (Milestone and Summary View)

Ontological and Corporeal Lassitude

Actually, an iPad mini would fit quite well into my life.

Case Study: Bed, lying down. My iPhone 5 is a tad small and tall for Comixology (currently entombing Terry Moore’s Echo). Reading in bed —lying down— the iPad 2 is a bit unwieldy and the MacBook, while it is by no means a scorching hot, nor does it sound like a cheap and nasty leaf blower coughing up a reeking oily lung; it does get heavy. I would worry about dropping it on myself as I fall asleep, or worse; it sliding off my corporeal lassitude, over a teflonic cotton sea, and Baam! Onto the floor. Hurruck, churns a great few empathic readers’ stomachs.

It is hard to subscribe rigidly to only one philosophy when you read into ontology, epistemology, axiology and consider the different stances and branches you can grip. Stepping outside your comfort zone and the seemingly frictionless network of deeply carved, raw and tender pathways in your mind.

Instead, give these bleeding, searing trails a rest. Let healing take place from a remove. Enlarging the horizon of possible, allowable thoughts from new and alien perspectives is uncomfortable. You hate something because you cannot access it in your mind, and you cannot make the journey to reconcile this. You have no capacity to even release that there exists another way. Or do you? Screeching in.

Scar tissue forms when tender roots are spreading beyond a link to the past. Tender roots are fragile. Nurtured by a thirst for knowledge, an open-minded curiosity towards appraising many approaches, and the will to suffer the fresh pain of living in these roots as they die or thrive in the battle against the concrete that is our own stubborn preconceptions and limitations; breaking through a new plane to breed seeds of hope. Pollinating, only then, gnarled trees of hard-won experiences; together, not alone. Vulnerable still to diseases and abuses from proximal beings and poisonous feedings.

Now I think about it again. An iPhone is just dandy dander. Compressed like carbon in the fabrication of artificial diamonds. No, that’s not right. Dander with a latent film of smug yuppie pore excreta, smearing and swirling invisible, till the lights go down.

But in fact, I wrote and edited (thirty/seventy split) all this while lying in bed, tapping my thumbs onto a foil of glass, the busiest section four postage stamps wide, two tall, and promising to realise all dreams, with so much potential, until next year’s new model steals eyeballs and bile again.

Field Notes: Stationers or Publishers?

I like Field Notes writing materials. This Chicago based company manufacture excellent pocket-size notepads (memo books). I have subscribed to their quarterly colors series for 2012, which promises unique, limited-edition variations of their classic 3½ × 5½ memo books.

And I certainly haven’t been disappointed in that regard. But what I saw when I opened my latest delivery got me unduly excited. What I thought was a larger notebook bundled with six green, brown, and white memo books; well, it was not a larger notebook.

It was a book, already filled with words inside. A book for reading; not for writing. A book to be consumed, not to be used for creation. Imagine the disappointment and confusion. Why?

Guess what; I didn’t ask Field Notes Brand to curate for me. I do not wish them to consider my taste in reading material. I have not given my permission or requested to be part of a machine marketing and promoting their new publishing arm.

What I am interested in, and definitely signed up for, is themed varations of their classic memo books. What I do expect is their craftsmanship and taste to go into making exquisitely American notepads.

Don’t send me books to read. For me, that is a waste of so much good paper, dispatched to an audience who did not expect and will likely not appreciate that you have pre-filled their notebooks with words, leaving no space for theirs. You are more than welcome to send an email about your new publishing arm, even a slip of paper with my latest package wouldn’t have gone amiss. But a whole book? Why?

Please Field Notes Brand, stick to sending your excellent memo books for me to scribble in, take notes with, and write in.