Your MOTHER'S a gamer!

Oh wait, I mean my mother.  Silly me!

My mom and I get along quite well, really.  I don't call enough, of course.  (Who ever does?)

But she and I live on different technological planets.  I'm constantly on AIM, on GChat, on Twitter and sometimes (rarely) even on Facebook.  I blog and I game and I carry an Android, a Kindle, and a DS in my purse.  I've been using computers fluently since I was four and we had a Commodore 64-compatible Atari computer in the house, and I've spent the 21st century upgrading and building my own gaming PCs.

Mom technically has an e-mail account.  (I know because I helped her create it.)  I'm not sure she knows how to use it.  She could, of course, but mainly, she just strongly prefers not to.  Tech is not her thing -- and that's cool.

But she had some brain & neurological problems in 2009 and 2010.  During her recovery, doctors told her and my dad that she needed to keep her brain active.  I remembered a nun study from when I took neuroanatomy (half of AP Psych) back in high school many years ago, and the studies about how crosswords, other puzzle games, and indeed even video games had helped senior citizens (which mom is not yet, for the record) age in a more neurologically healthy way.

So of course, I did what any gamer would: I thought, "Mom needs Brain Age."

After running the idea past my dad, I got mom a DSi XL for Christmas last year, and my husband went in with me on getting her Brain Age and a cartridge full of crossword and word-search sorts of games.  I wanted to ease her into it; the DSi menu is actually a lot more confusing than the DS Lite menu that the two of us were used to.  But the bigger screen and easier-to-hold stylus were necessities.

I gave it to her feeling mildly nervous, and half expecting that, come late 2011, I might find myself the owner of a gently and seldom used burgundy DSi XL.  But we showed her how to use it, and gave her the games, and stood back.

"Your mother spent half the night playing Brain Age," my dad informed me a couple of mornings later.  I grinned.  "Glad she's getting some use out of it."

M and I had a pile of DS games with us, as we'd had plenty of time to kill in our 16 hours of round-trip Amtrak time.  (Well, the trip home ended up being more like 13 hellish hours all by itself, but that's a different story.)  I had Professor Layton and the Unwound Future in my bag, and I handed it to mom when she expressed curiosity in other games.

90 minutes later, she brought it back, expressing exasperation -- not frustration with an inability to play the game, but clear annoyance with writing and game design functions.  Annoyances that I share.  (There's a reason I pick up my Professor Layton games for $10 or less these days.)  After she left the room, I turned to M and wondered, "...is my mom... becoming... a gamer?"

Christmas was five months ago, and Mother's Day is this weekend.  Dad's told me mom could really use more DS games and so I just sent her Brain Age 2 and Plants vs Zombies.  (I hope the PvZ DS port is good -- I've apparently put 55 hours into it on Steam but I don't know first-hand how it handles for portables and just grabbed it on spec.)  She's still asking after Professor Layton so when M and I head up for a long weekend in June, I plan to bring her our copies, as well as the first one or two Phoenix Wright games to try.

I really shouldn't be surprised.  My mom can school anyone at cribbage and until I was almost 17 she could almost always beat me at Boggle.  Games are for everyone.  Mom'll probably want to kill me when dad prints this post out for her and she finds out I've turned her into a gamer.  But they're good games and it's for a good reason.

I promise, mom: I'll never try to drag you into Portal or EQII.  We all have our limits.  But yours are way beyond where I foolishly thought they were.  Happy Mother's Day.  :)

[Edit, 05/08/2011: I called my mother yesterday and she says she's completely hooked on Plants vs Zombies and her brain's only been eaten twice.  Success!]

What I Can't Let Go...

So we all have our faults, right?  Sure.  Right.

If there is a set of something in a game, I must complete it.  I'm kind of weird about symmetry and completion.  So if there's a seven-piece armor set and I stumble across two pieces, I must go find the other five.  Even if this armor set is not one I'm going to wear because it's not as good as my other one.

I'm not a player who must get every single trophy in the game, or every achievement, and I'm certainly not a min/max "best of anything" type of player.  But if there's a numbered, completed set to be had -- or worse, a map to be uncovered! -- then I'll be out there getting every part until it's complete.

The worst system out there for encouraging this problematic trait?  The Nintendo DS.

First there was Animal Crossing.  I didn't really see the point and I wouldn't have bought it for myself, but I was working for GameStop at the time and loads of customers came in for it.  And I was dating a guy who liked to buy two of every game, especially games with a multiplayer component, so that we could both do it.  So I ended up with a copy of the game.

And I made my little town, and I wandered my little red-haired bobblehead around it, and I caught some fish and bugs and dug up some shells.  And I discovered the museum.  A building in the middle of my town that was designed to hold exactly one of everything the town had to offer.

And that's how I was found in bed at my parents' house on Christmas Eve, with my DS on under the covers, at 2:45 a.m., gleefully becoming the owner of a coelacanth.  While in my mid-20s.

Eventually, I let Animal Crossing go.  I think there are still two or three bugs missing from my collection and perhaps a fish or two, but my house is full of pests and my town long since full of weeds growing as if in ruins.  But I still commute to work, and for a shocking percentage of 2008, I commuted with The World Ends With You.

How shocking a percentage?  212 hours and counting.

But, see, there are 304 pins to be had in the game.  And first I realized I'd blundered into 100 of them.  And then I realized I'd blundered into almost 150 of them.  And, well, right now I have 296...

Not-so-weekly Playlist

Quick post-mortems on the games I've been playing lately:

1.) Puzzle Quest 2 (DS): Either they made this game way too easy, or I am the best Puzzle Quest player ever to be born.  And I don't flatter myself to think it's the latter.  I set the game to "hard" and on my first storyline playthrough, didn't lose a single fight.  Not a one.  Admittedly, this may be because I picked Barbarian, and because I knew how best to combo some spells from a long-in-remission addiction to the first game, but...

I did create a second character, Assassin class, and she's lost two fights in the under-10 game, so there's something to it.  Maybe it's just horribly unbalanced?  Other than that, though, I've enjoyed it.  I miss some of the features of the first (sacking cities, money from cities, consistent foes after completing the story) but overall it's not a bad game.

2.) Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (PC): When the acting makes you long to have Tim Curry's southern accent back, or when every. single. sentence out of any character's mouth is instant MST3K fodder... well.  I love me some old-school adventure games and this is a definite great example of the FMV era of the mid and late 1990s, but it's a profoundly silly game and it wants to be serious.  As I said, accurately, on Twitter... #gaygermanoperawerewolfvoodooking

 3.) Divinity II: Ego Draconis (PC): I wrote before about how much this game hooked me.  And it did.  Except the end-game stage is flat-out awful.  Just like in the first game, an 80% awesome title falls flat when you cross the Line Of No Return.  Also, it's the buggiest thing I've bought in 15 years.  Twice I had to go back to an hours-old save to recoup after game-halting bugs, and once I had to send my save file to Larian for them to fix it for me.  Not.  Cool.  Even worse?  I hear they have a patch ready to go for most of these bugs but have been withholding it in North America until their DLC launches in October.  Their excuse is that they're not allowed to release too many patches for a 360 product (and this was a dual-platform release).  I'm actually quite pissed off at Larian over this one.  Translation errors and small bugs I can handle.  But game-stopping errors?  Multiple times in multiple locations across the game?  Lrn 2 QA, dammit.

Look at me! I'm awesome!

I've been playing Puzzle Quest 2 on my DS.  (And I never thought I'd say this about anything, but actually I wish it were harder and more difficult.)  And I rocked a completely awesome combination of spells, luck, and strategy, and in a single turn did over 100 damage to my opponent.

And the thought I had was, "Damn.  I kind of wish we had a 360, because I want everyone to know!"

I am not a competitive gamer, I'm really not.  I tend to prefer single-player games or, barring that, cooperative multiplayer.  If I absolutely must go head to head with someone, I prefer it to be anonymously or pseudonymously online.  Why?  Because I really, really hate losing to people I know -- and I also hate winning over my friends and spouse.

But even I understand the full appeal of achievements systems, and why XBox Live,Steam, the PlayStation Network, and Windows Live all have them: because if a totally badass event happens alone, at home, and no-one sees it... did it ever really happen?

There's a phenomenon I've touched on before, where all gaming to an extent becomes narrative gaming.  Tetris may not have a story, but we tell stories about our own experiences playing it.  "I totally hit level 9 and then, like BAM!  The blue piece I needed!"  And in this sense, we gamers are no different from people out there playing soccer, or watching football, or going fishing, or driving to work.  We assemble stories around us.  But instead of a photo of us holding up a 5' long fish, we have virtual achievements and scroll through pages of pixellated trophies.

Alas, I, on my DS at home, get no trophy.  But believe me, y'all: it was this big!

Multi-Genre Gamer

Talking with a friend today made me think about this a little.

Some people are very dedicated to a genre of gaming. Everyone knows someone who's got every Madden ever released, or who salivates for Square-Enix. Me... I'm not like that.

I've played and enjoyed some shooters, RPGs, puzzle games, old-school adventure games, new adventure games, MMOs, PS3 games, stealth games, board / card game adaptations, PC games, DS games... I've enjoyed "girly" games (a description for another time) and explosively violent games. I like God of War and Metal Gear Solid and Phoenix Wright and Monkey Island and a whole bunch of other titles and franchises.

Honestly, from my admittedly brief (~ 8 months) run as a GameStop employee, and my not-so-brief (~ 20-year) history as a gamer, I think it's useful to see the whole range. No-one's going to enjoy playing everything; I certainly don't. But it's brilliant to see genres kind of cross-pollinate. A game like Fallout 3 draws from the RPG, the FPS, and even at times the old adventure game. And then there are the more indie / avant-garde titles available as downloadable short-form games: Flower, World of Goo, and Braid among them. Those games tend to meld, reinvent, or avoid genre entirely.

I never thought anyone would see me playing a survival horror game, and then I turned out to kick ass at Resident Evil 4 when my ex-boyfriend left the controller unguarded for a while. There wasn't a Japanese RPG on Earth that could captivate me, but then Chrono Trigger and The World Ends with You (both on DS) managed to grab me in for at least 50 hours each.

So I doubt I'll ever enjoy a Final Fantasy game... but once upon a time, I'd never enjoy an FPS, either... and then there was BioShock. Never say never.