Hardcore Scrabble

I tend toward perfectionism, I admit, and toward completionism.  These are (especially together) nearly as often failings as they are virtues.  Still, we all have our own issues and despite my drive toward achievement I tend to shy away from competitive games; I don't like to get into contests that I have no chance of winning.

It's not that I need to win all the time; rather, it's an awareness of my weaknesses.  I'm an overweight asthmatic with a bad knee; I wouldn't enter footrace unless I planned for some reason to place last.  I do enter trivia contests, because at least there I have a chance to rise or fall on my own merits.

This means there's a genre of gaming I tend not to tackle.  I stick to single-player games, whether narrative or competitive, or occasionally to cooperative multiplayer games.  I don't want to put myself in an us-vs-them situation either on my own merits or as the weakest link of a team.  Competition is, of course, easiest with the gaming partner who lives with you, but I'm particularly adverse to competing against my spouse.  It's a level of marital discord that I simply don't need.

But speaking of my spouse, thanks to deals on sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, we manage to get away once or twice a year on little, inexpensive-but-lovely B&B trips in the region.  (There are rather a lot of picturesque country getaways within a 3-hour drive of Washington, DC.)  We take these trips as a time to unplug, but sometimes find ourselves with some quiet afternoon or evening time to fill.

As it turns out, nearly every B&B on Earth seems to have a Scrabble set somewhere.

Not a euphemism: we play Scrabble on vacation.

 Here's the thing I like about playing Scrabble with my husband: we're both terrible at it.

I'm great at thinking of words, but without the right tiles in hand or the right spaces on the board on which to put them, it doesn't matter.  Meanwhile, his strategic sense is better than mine, but I have an unerring ability to steal exactly the letter he was going to build from on his next turn.

We're both awful.  And we're matched 2-2-1 over the last year's worth of trips, from Labor Day weekend 2010 to Labor Day weekend 2011.  And we both stay awful, and thus the games, while competitive, remain fun and not hostile.

Here's the thing about gaming: we really are all designed to overlearn the system.  It's just how games and players work: we look at a system and then we dismantle and master it.  And it's something each of us does methodically (though methods vary), up until the point where the pleasure wears off.

That "splort" is so damn satisfying.

When the pleasure wears off, some of us quit.  I don't tend to play Fruit Ninja much on my phone anymore, because I reached a mastery plateau: incremental increases in high score take far too much play time, and suck the fun out of the attempt, making it instead a grim, pulp-covered death march to the next "correct" move.  Others double down and find a new pleasure, in the competition itself.  When you've mastered the game, you no longer derive joy from your own high scores -- pssh, of course you're awesome! -- but from knowing your score beats others.

When the going gets tough, some of us go for a walk outside and some of us plan to become national champion.  It takes all sorts.

When we talk about "casual" gamers vs "core gamers," I don't actually think we mean the type of game each camp enjoys.  There are Boggle and Scrabble players who will absolutely school you, and who make it their mission to do so.  Somewhere out there, there's someone who's gotten a 100% and an Ace on every level of Peggle and Peggle Nights.  In EQ2, there are folks out there who are so hardcore into the crafting system (and just the crafting system) that they know more about it than the dev team does.  And no matter who you are, someone out there is way more into (and better at) Wii Tennis than you.  Meanwhile, there are folks who play Call of Duty once or twice a month for fun, gamers who pop into World of Warcraft occasionally just to chat with buddies, and players who don't care about their KTD ratio in Halo or Counter-Strike.

When we collectively talk about gamers and gaming, though, we tend to separate the "casual" and "core" gamers by their preferred genre.  There's a definite dismissive attitude ingrained in the culture: "Mom's not a real gamer, she just plays Facebook games."  And yet, what if she plays them consistantly, constantly, to a point of true mastery?  And of course, even a competitive PvP game isn't really good sport if girls are winning.

From my point of view, I think one of the biggest challenges we have in talking about gaming and gamer populations comes from our whole really being made of two halves.  This is where the constant (and somewhat exhasting) ludonarrative debate comes from, among critics and writers.  In short: when we talk about games, are we talking about their rules and forms of mastery, or about the stories they tell?  Both, or neither?

Seriously, more time on animation than on fighting.

On the one hand, we have a physical challenge, one that can be mastered and set aside.  But in our biggest games, the skill or reflex mastery comes paired with a narrative that has to run its course regardless of the player's level of accomplishment.  For the first half of Divinity II, the fights are too challenging; for the last third, they're far too easy.  When starting a Japanese-style party-based RPG like Chrono Cross, fights begin as an elaborate process that you can have difficulty learning -- but then, aside from bosses, descend into farce, taking up your time with repetitive intro and outro animations and fanfares.

A film director can and does control the pacing and delivery of the entirety of his product.  A game designer has more trouble with the pacing.  If a game is strictly, 100% linear with no deviations, it's a niche product: an interactive novel, or the game-film.  The tautness, delivery, and coherence of Heavy Rain varies depending how you play it.  One way it's a thriller; another way, it's slightly disconnected; a third way, it's a drama.  In the end, though, there are a total of four characters and 12 endings, and so David Cage and Quantic Dream are able to shape it to their whims.

There's only one way to play Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and only one way to play Uncharted.  But there are a dozen ways to play Mass Effect.  Can BioWare forsee that I'm going to go search every planet and complete every side quest in the galaxy?  Can they predict which one I will finally skip?

For me, of course, the answer is back up there in the first sentence: I tend toward completionism, and will perform, and try to master, every skill a game sets before me.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to start a New Game Plus in Bastion.  It has these proving grounds, you see...

All together, now...

There are two major trends happening in connectivity, it seems.  One is for reducing the actual "multiplayer" part of the MMO.  There are a lot of very single-player online worlds out there right now; the amount of solo linearity in a number of MMOs chased up with systems that actually reduce the number of humans needed to play (as in Star Trek Online's ability to populate your away team with AI individuals) is starting to add up into a confusing trend.

Confusing, but not necessarily of concern.  Unlike EA essentially saying that all games should and will be online multiplayer games.

Obviously, I'm big on single-player gaming.  The tags over there on the right alone show that I've put more time into Bioshock and the Fallout games this year than is probably healthy, in addition to the pile of DS and adventure games I've gone through (and obsessed over).  I do not particularly think that the introduction of other people into my favorite titles would improve the experience.  Actually, a commenter at Kotaku summed it up beautifully:

Invite a friend to comment

This just in: Random House are changing their focus to books you can only read while some idiot reads over your shoulder, whilst swearing, pointing out obvious plot developments and occasionally teabagging the user.

Their spokesperson was quoted as saying "Communal interaction is where the innovation, and action, is at."

Rumours abound the firm are also researching the development of a proprietary e-reader device that will only function whilst connected to a headset, through which a thirteen year-old American will continually, aggressively question your sexuality.

Realistically, I don't think single-player narrative gaming is ever completely going away.  But the introduction of massive online, networked gaming has created a definite casualty.  I've started to write before about the home co-op multiplayer experience recently.  I have noticed that I am hardly the only gamer lamenting the lack of decent single-sofa co-op titles these days.  There are many that are appropriate for younger children, and many that are appropriate for groups or parties, but very few that suit a pair of people who don't want to compete with each other directly (as in the case of married gamer couples, for starters).  And I've also mentioned my personal views on competitive games.

But after we finished the Uncharted games, the wave of Christmas sales and deals came upon us, and we ended up with a copy of the LittleBigPlanet Game of the Year edition for about $16.  Now this is true co-op gaming!

I don't think either of us have the patience and dedication right now to go about creating levels, but between the ones in the game and the sheer number available from the community, it's got plenty to entertain us.  It's accessible and non-competitive.  And it's cute.

In fact, all of the co-op multiplayer offline games I've played in many years have been "cute."  There's the Lego franchise -- Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, take your pick -- and there's LittleBigPlanet, and there's... well, I don't know.  In time (Valve Time) there will be an element of Portal 2, but that's online and involves multiple Steam accounts.

So I guess my non-competitive self will keep handing off the controller with my husband and other gaming partners for quite some time to come, every time I get tired of cute and kid-friendly titles.

Girls don't suck at consoles; *I* suck at consoles.

So, my husband and I play games together.  It's a good way to be a gamer.  At any given time, we'll each have a "me" game (or two, sometimes a handheld as well as a PC / console title) and a running "us" game that we play together.

Our most recent "us" game was Syberia, which I'd played before but never to the end, and we've started on Syberia II.  (And I'll be writing about the character arc of Kate Walker soon, after I see where it finishes.)  But in-between, the gods of GameFly sent us Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and as I am unable to resist an Indiana-Jones-style adventure, it went from "his" game to "our" game right quick.  And by "our" game, I mean, "he played it, and I made fun of everything and also occasionally spotted snipers for him."

See, here's the thing.  Most modern offline games (particularly in the genres we enjoy) are not multiplayer in any sense (and if they do have a multiplayer mode, it's online and large).  So a dedicated gaming team finds creative ways to share the play.  With the God of War titles, our co-op strategy has me roaming through corridors killin' stuff and pullin' levers to see what happens, and has him doing boss fights and timed events.  Why do we land on this particular division of labor?

(This is not why we land on this division of labor.)

My major failing as a console gamer is that I was not, in fact, a console-using gamer until late 2008.  I'm a PC gamer.  My parents couldn't and then wouldn't buy me an NES when I was a kid, so I didn't even beat Super Mario Brothers until I was 13 and bought a used one from a friend for $25 worth of my babysitting money.  But we had a computer in the house since 1985, and from mazes to math games to Tetris, I was hooked.  I methodically played through the adventure games of the 1990s and loved them, then started downloading text adventures through AOL and seeing what that had all been about.

So, the good news is that after the first year of us having a PS3 in the house, I managed to get the hang of both walking AND running using analog sticks.  Later came jumping, when the two of us methodically played our way through the entire Metal Gear Solid series, with him on the controller and me providing the Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary.  In MGS2, he repeatedly kept (unintentionally) throwing Raiden into a chasm, and smartass me took the controller and cleared the jump on my first try.  Sure, we were robbed of the joy of throwing Raiden into a chasm, but I had just had my first successful PlayStation controller experience.

And then somehow, later, we ended up playing God of War (all of them).  So how did my husband end up responsible for all the QuickTime events?

Well.  Here's our living room TV:

Nice TV.  Husband was going through the special features of Uncharted at the time.  But wait -- what's that right above the TV?

This is the open-book monument to my shame.  Because in my head, the square is on top, and the circle is god-knows-where, and by the time I've figured it out, the event is over, the boss has eaten me, and I have to start all over again with that damn sea serpent.

So.  We each play to our strengths!  I can solve puzzles, I can mash buttons, he can tolerate endless dialogue, and he... knows which button x is.

I swear, I'll get there someday.

Maybe.

Or maybe I'll just be using WASD to get through my next game.  Yeah, that sounds like a better plan.

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And finally: between the time I started this post and finally remembered to take the SD card out of my camera and finish it, a pair of Gamasutra articles have come to my attention.  Playing games with your significant other and its part two are an interesting look at partners' gaming.  And I also enjoyed this post at Spectacle Rock, from earlier this year, lamenting the lack of good couples' co-op titles.