I’ve thought about this issue before — being that I’m a nerd and being that I like games, I’ve often wondered just what it is that makes me (and lots of nerds like me) obsess over the ins and outs of other universes and other realities. From chess to Mass Effect 2 (which I’m playing and enjoying lately) to Settlers of Catan to World of WarCraft, all games are really a set of rules. Some are more complicated than others (Civilization is obviously a very complicated game, while Bejeweled is not so much), but essentially they are an interactive set of rules — do something, and this consequence will arise.

That, I think, is both why I and other nerds enjoy games, where the rules are clearly documented, and especially computer games, where the rules are infallible (computers are notoriously stingy rulekeepers, as any programmer will tell you). Because in life, the rules dissolve into countless variants and shades of gray. Relationships are one Rubik’s Cube that I personally haven’t been able to crack. At least in a real Rubik’s Cube, when you turn the cube a certain way, the colors will always react the same. But in a real-life relationship, one word, one look, even one touch can mean many different things. There is no “exactly right” way to woo someone, because the rules are impossible to define and rarely enforced anyway. If there was an actual strategy to a successful relationship — if game theory really applied to human interaction — nerds would be the biggest “players” around.

That makes me sound like I’m a sociopath, and that I’d much rather deal with virtual worlds and characters than the real world and real people (which, to a certain extent, may be true, but I’m social enough, I get out out of the house when I can). But it is interesting to me that many of the things I appreciate about a good game are intrinsically different to what I encounter in the real world situations that I have trouble dealing with. Games create the structure of interactions with their rules and regulations, and without those rules in place, it’s hard for us nerdy folks to figure out what the “right” move actually is.

P.S. After I wrote this, I went to read the comments on that post, and the point was made that “Games have explicit rules and no real stakes. The ‘real’ social world has no rules and high stakes.” That’s an important point, and I humbly admit that it pretty much undoes my point above. For all of their rules and consequences, games have zero to no real world effect, and of course the real social world can make or break your relationships, your job, and your life. So if you get a choice of playing an inconsequential game that lets you experiment all you want, or a one-time-only practically random game that will affect your life forever, which would you choose to do? That kind of paints me as a coward, drawing away from the real world because I’m afraid of losing the more important social game, but so be it. It’s true.

I just want to put this somewhere, but not on Twitter because it is a HUGE SPOILER for the brilliant movie Inception that I saw a few weeks ago. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read this — you’re doing yourself a great disservice.

I’m serious — don’t think the movie is all hype and read this anyway. It really is that good, go see it.

Done? Okay. Here’s the real deal about Inception — I originally came up with this idea right after seeing the movie, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else yet, so I’m going to share it with you now.

Cobb’s “totem” isn’t the top. The top is his wife’s totem. Yes, he may have learned what the totem felt like somehow, and yes, he may have used it to incept his wife and make her believe that the world wasn’t real (and maybe it wasn’t — more on that in a second). But I don’t think he can just take her totem — because the totem is supposed to be something that only the dreamer can know about, it automatically wouldn’t work for him. She’d know just as much about it as he would.

I saw something online today that his wedding ring was his totem, and maybe that’s true — I haven’t done all of the research yet, but I don’t think it is his actual totem, just because that seems like Nolan would be hiding it a little too subtly. No, I think Nolan hid Cobb’s totem in plain sight.

So here’s my thought: Cobb’s totem … is his kids.

That’s why we don’t see their faces the whole time (because we can’t know what they look like), and that’s why they keep appearing in weird places, and that’s why he doesn’t want to look at them in the dream — if he looks at them and they’re not the same as his memory, that will tell him that he’s not where he belongs. And it’s why, at the end of the movie, he finally sees their faces, and recognizes them as his memories, and all is finally, finally right with the world.

Although I agree that it may not be — maybe, just as he stole his wife’s totem, she stole his. Either she realized that they were his totem, or just knew their children well enough to reproduce them. Either way, just because I do think the kids are his totem doesn’t mean I know for sure whether he’s dreaming at the end or not.

In fact, I’d probably argue that not even Nolan really “knows” if Cobb’s dreaming at the end or not according to the top. The whole time the movie was playing, I was worried that it would be all for nothing. The cliche twist ending of a movie about a dream within a dream within a dream is that even in the “real world,” they’re still dreaming. I could have told you that cliche even before the movie started. So the whole time they were running around the hotel and shooting people in the snow and running through the city, I kept thinking, “If this all turns out to be his dream, I’m going to be pissed. If Nolan does all of this, and it’s all just for a dream, what’s the point.”

And then, I got to the end, and the top spun around, and it shuttered and kept spinning, and ——

The screen went black, and with the rest of the theater, I gasped out loud. This cliche ending that I was suspecting the whole time had actually been turned on its head. The answer I thought I’d known all along had actually been taken away from me, and I imagined Nolan somewhere laughing manaically. “Oh, did you want to know the ending, Schramm? I thought it was all a cliche. I thought you didn’t care!”

So he got me with that one. But I think the ending is purposely ambivalent — the top does stutter at the end, so it’s possible that it will stop, and which means Cobb’s world is real, and he’ll live happily ever after, probably dreaming up wild cityscapes with Juno. But if the top doesn’t stop (and honestly, how would Nolan show that it doesn’t stop? If he wanted to show to the audience very clearly that the top keeps spinning, what would he do — have it sitting there for an hour before the screen went black?), then of course Cobb is still dreaming, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird theories about why that might be. Maybe he’s being incepted by someone else (which would explain why he’s spills his guts to Juno so easily, even when he can’t share his secrets with Joseph Gordon Levitt), maybe it’s a revenge thing by his wife, maybe he’s still in Limbo, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, none of that really matters — the point of the movie is that it works, completely, whether or not that top level world is real. It works according to its own internal, weird logic (that the subconscious attacks the intruder, that a kick will wake you up but not being thrown around in a car, that you can share minds with some kind of drug and unexplained machine, and so on). As complicated and as labyrinthine as it gets — get it, mazes? — it all works.

Plus, that hotel fight scene was really awesome. And that Juno is really cute.

I am not dead! But I have probably worked harder in the last few weeks than I’ve ever worked during the same time period before. I attended both WWDC and E3 in the last two weeks (and it looks like I might get to go to Comic-Con next month, which will be another dream come true, and will leave the Toyko Game Show as the last big show on my list to attend), and here are some good posts from all of that:

• I got to interview Warren Spector, gaming developer legend behind Deus Ex and Thief, about his new game Epic Mickey. What a smart guy, and what a dream job he’s landed working on this game.
• I got to meet up with the folks from Riot Games again — they’re quickly moving up the list of my favorite game developers, and I’m really enjoying jumping into some League of Legends matches lately.
• I played Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood again a few times, and still enjoy it a lot.
• I got to play the great Scott Pilgrim game, which is my second-most anticipated downloadable title this year, the first being Puzzle Quest 2.
• And I got to play Rock Band 3. In fact, let the story be told: I was in the second band in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game. I wanted to be in the first band in the world, and so after the presentation to the E3 judges a couple of weeks back, I unashamedly ran up to the stage and grabbed the lead guitar and lead vocals. We were just about to choose a song, making me the first lead guitar player in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game, when I heard a song start from the second demo setup in the back of the room. So I missed it by just a few seconds. But oh well — the game is brilliant, and I expect to play it even more than I’ve played Rock Band 2, which is a whole heck of a lot.

So that’s E3. Actually, a lot more stuff happened (I took some of the Joystiq staff out to an amazing curry place near my house in LA, and took the two guys from Massively.com out to Pink’s Hot Dogs, the legendary hot dog stand out here. I didn’t get in on any In n Out runs, but I can do that anytime myself these days, so it’s not so big a deal), but there’s so much I don’t have time to share it with you now. I’ll probably portion out all of the stories in the future. There was a particularly good story (Burrito of Fate-level, I might say) told by Joystiq’s own Justin McElroy that you should look forward to.

WWDC was in San Fran the week before, and not only did I have the best Chinese food I’ve ever had in my life (at a restaurant called Fang) and another Beard Papa creme puff, but I also wrote about:

This very fun game called Chopper 2.
• This cool game company called Imangi, a husband and wife team of developers, and their latest title.
• Square, a company that’s made a credit card reader for the iPhone. These guys are going to be billionaires, and they’re doing it by being legitimately good, or at least as good as you can get in the credit business. They’ve had some technical issues, but I believe they’ll work them out.
• An app by Kyle Kinkade called Bartleby’s Book of Buttons. The app immediately reminded me of the book from The Diamond Age, and I told Kinkade so, but he’d never actually read it. I told him to buy it in iBooks immediately and read it on the plane home, and unless he’s been lying to me, he’s really enjoyed it.

And a bunch of other things that you can find in the usual places. What fun, eh? It’s been interesting to say the least — met tons of people, heard tons of stories, and done a lot of what I think is hopefully insightful interviewing and writing. This week, I’m back home for a while, and I’m looking forward to things being calmer, but it won’t be long, I’m sure, before I’m itching for the road again. I really love covering stuff like this, and after all of the back and forth about moving to LA and taking on a whole new environment, things seem to really be paying off so far.

Oh, and while most of my E3 writing has already appeared on Joystiq (so go there if you want to know what I thought of what I played), here’s the top five games I played at E3:

Game of the Show is Enslaved. Great game — feels great, looks great, very well written, and even though I’ve only played it for a few minutes, I’m already in love with the characters and their relationship. I’ll admit, last year I was big on Brutal Legend, and that game disappointed to a certain extent. But I was also big on Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that game turned out to be great. I think Enslaved will be one of the best original titles of the year.

Rock Band 3, of course.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light — there were quite a few great co-op experiences in the show (Portal 2, was great, I hear), but this one was my favorite of the one I played. Lots of puzzles, not so hard that they’re unsolvable, but just hard and “teasy” enough that they get inside your head and you want to experiment with them and figure out a solution.

Puzzle Quest 2. They had to drag me away from that one. I thought it was coming out tomorrow on XBLA, but apparently I have to wait another week.

Scott Pilgrim. It just brims with retro goodness — I couldn’t stop smiling while I played it, and I had to really pay attention to try and keep up with all of the little references to both the comic book and just great old NES games. I’m a little disappointed there’s no online co-op (there is supposedly four-player offline, and online seems like a must), but otherwise the game is just amazing. Will probably be a day one PS3 purchase.

You are perhaps wondering why I haven’t posted here lately? My other blog posts, let me show you them.

I’ve been busy doing lots and lots of hands-on and interview work for Joystiq lately — E3 is in a few weeks, and so last week, the very talented and impressive Chris Grant (my boss, basically) came out to Los Angeles as a Game Critics’ Association judge to preview all of the big games, and he kindly let me tag along with him. As a result, I’ve gotten to play most of the big titles of the coming year, only I can’t really tell you about them until around June 15th, when the show actually starts. But I can tell you that they were mostly awesome. Especially this one I saw — oh man, if I hadn’t signed a little piece of paper making me promise not to tell you about it until they let me, you’d think it was awesome.

The embargo for a few has already come up, and here, in fact, they are:

• Before the E3 Judges week, I visited Activision’s HQ in Santa Monica (just minutes from my apartment!) to play Blur, and I liked it. It’s coming out this week, but as I said on Twitter, I’m not quite sure if I want to give Activision sixty dollars. If I could give the money straight to Bizarre Creations, I’d do it, but Activision has made some choices lately that I’m not all that into supporting. But the game’s good!
• I went to a Skate 3 event at beautiful Venice Beach and interviewed the game’s developer.
• I talked to the Audio Director on the upcoming Crackdown 2. We bonded over my Audio Production major in college.
• And thus began the pre-E3 events. First, I saw a presentation by the Art Director on Deus Ex 3. Game looks great, and man they thought a lot about how it should look.
• I interviewed Patrick Curry from Wideload Games, who I actually knew from Chicago (since their studios were one floor up from the PR agency I used to work at). Guilty Party was actually a lot of fun — if I regularly had people over to play video games, it would be a good time for sure.
• I didn’t write these, but I am mentioned in the hands-on of the Lara Croft downloadable game, and I asked a few of the questions in the interview. One of my favorite games of the show so far, providing some amazing co-op gameplay. The fact that it’s a downloadable title is just icing on the cake.
• I played Toy Story 3: The Video Game, and while it wasn’t something I’d buy, I’m sure there are plenty of people who were interested in knowing how it was.
• I got to see Enslaved for the first time, and it was awesome. This one should be big — the story and the characters really stand out already, and if it’s done correctly, I could definitely see it being a contender for game of the year.
• And I played Puzzle Quest 2, and had a long and really enjoyable conversation about game design with the game’s creator. Maybe it’s just me being egotistical, but I think we both really enjoyed the chat — he’s a really smart guy, and I’m a big fan of his game, so I think he was really excited to get and digest some direct feedback from someone who’s poured hours into his game. And I was excited to pick his brain a little bit, and find out some of the reasons behind the rules in the game I’ve played with for so long. If you liked Puzzle Quest, you will love PQ2, and if you didn’t play Puzzle Quest, seriously, go do it.

That’s it for now, but there will be lots more in the next few weeks. As for posting here, I will do it when I can — I meant to write up a big thing about the finale of Lost, but everyone is talking about it now, so that’s kind of passe. I’m also meant to be putting some time in on an actual book, seeing as I set a personal goal to start working on it during May. But I just haven’t had any extra time to write lately, much less put something original up over here. If I get the chance to do so, I will.

Let’s do this! Do you guys care about reading this at all? I don’t know how much attention this little deal is getting any more, and obviously I’m a little busy lately. If people want to read it, I’ll keep doing it, but given that there’s not much to pull me in until Cataclysm (at least), I don’t know if I’ll keep it up or not. Anyway, I have a little bit of time tonight, so on with the show:

• This is an amazing post — all 52 bosses in Wrath, rated from easiest to hardest. Very nice (and thorough!) overview of the whole expansion from a raiding perspective.
• Here’s Saate’s latest Word Jumble, and he gave me a shout out for my shout out. Which means this post is a shout out for a shouted out shout out, I guess. Just go do the jumble, it’s fun, and I guess the answer is about me. And you can win a Spectral Tiger for commenting on that post, so do go over and do it.
• There are rumblings that BRK is headed back to World of Warcraft, and/or that he’s already playing in the F&F Alpha of Cataclysm. Far be it from me to speculation on what BRK is up to. It would be nice to have him around the game again, although given the reasons why he stepped away, I’m sure it’s not a decision made lightly. But if he is planning on writing about WoW again, more power to him. I haven’t emailed him yet, but of course he’s welcome to come on Tipoaa with us any time.
• Advanced classes looks brilliant — great way to provide some variety without having to build out a whole full-fledged class. Oh wait, that’s not WoW. Never mind.
• Blizzard asked Boubouille to take the Cataclysm stuff down, and he did. Man, I could tell you stories — but I can’t. Suffice it to say that it’s almost always better, especially with stuff obtained like that, to just go ahead and take it down. As I said the other week, we’ll see it all eventually anyway, and there’s nothing you can do with information like that. Sure, you can drool over it, and pretend it’s important, but we should have learned by now that the graphics and stats don’t make the game, the actual gameplay does. As Bou says, it’s stupid to make a stand. Picking your battles is smart, especially when you’re covering a company like Blizzard, and that’s not the right battle to pick.
• There was some new profession information released this week (See? This is exactly the kind of information that was leaking out anyway, only it wasn’t official — Blizzard has definitely learned some lessons for this expansion release, I can tell), and most of it is pretty boring. I assume professions will be the same as in the past, which means that you’ll have to level them all the way up to make anything actually useful, thereby making a bunch of non-useful items on the way. I like the little stats that add to your real character power, but of course they can’t make those too powerful. Oh well. I don’t think crafting can be improved too much further in World of Warcraft — some other MMO (or even just a game — MW2 actually has a “crafting” system in the form of weapon mods and the “Bling” perk) will have to try and do it better.
• Scott’s book is on its way to me — I can’t wait to see it. Scott was the most regular and dedicated columnist that ever worked with me at WoW.com (they were all good, but Scott stood out, as did many other folks in other ways), and he is a very smart and very clear writer. I’ve never lead a guild (and I don’t plan to), but I’m so glad he was able to work out that book deal. And I’m told my name is in it — it’s actually extremely selfish of me to be excited about that, but I am anyway. Congrats Scott! Everybody go buy his book.
• Finally, did I link to this last week? I can’t remember. Even if I did, go look at it if you didn’t — interesting survey results. I’m not sure how applicable they are to the game as a whole, but the summary is at least some interesting reading about the sample size.

And that’s it. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you did read it — if people care, maybe I’ll keep it up. Heck maybe I’ll even post it on Wednesday! Go figure!

EA came up with an idiotic idea to raise a little money for server costs on their sports games: they’re going to charge $10 for a “one-time pass” into the multiplayer portions of the titles. People who buy the games new will get a one-use code that lets them in, but anyone buying the game used will have to pay an extra $10 on top of that for online gameplay.

EA’s case for this sounds somewhat legit: online costs have gone up, they’re doing things like constant team updates and regular online events in addition to regular online multiplayer, and they need some way to keep that going. Additionally, given that these sports games are released yearly, there’s a huge amount of back catalog used sales that they’re not making any money on, and charging for this pass is designed to let them do that. Plus, let’s be honest, they need the money. EA isn’t the company it once was, and games are more expensive than ever.

So why is this a bad idea?

It hurts used game buyers. Bare minimum, there’s a $10 fee that anyone who buys a used game has to play if they want in on the multiplayer, a feature that they used to get for free. And it’s not just Gamestop — if I trade games with my friends or pick them up on Craigslist, I have to pay that fee as well. I follow games, so I already know this fee is coming, but imagine the customers who have no idea about this change, pick up Tiger Woods from their friends for the $30 they have to spend on a game that month, and come home only to find that they can’t play a tournament online because they have to pay another ten bucks. That’s a bad customer experience, and especially if EA is talking about standard online features that most games these days come with, it’s a ripoff.

It hurts new game buyers. Obviously used owners are the ones targeted by this fee, but if I buy a game new, it hurts me, too. The second I use the code I get with my new game, it’s worth at least $10 less than what it would have been. And if I happen to have two consoles in the house (maybe one for me and one for the girlfriend or my son), we have to pay an extra fee to go online with the same game. I was planning on buying Tiger Woods 2011 this year, to play it with my friend online. And now, I won’t: buying an EA game that requires this pass will cost me money later, and could cause headaches right now. What if my code doesn’t work? What if their servers go down? What am I getting for my money?

It’s desperate. EA needs to raise money? Fine, raise it on features that are new, not features that we’ve had for years. Come up with something worth charging for — Mass Effect 2 already did this (and it’s actually kept me from buying that game so far), and instead of marking it as a must-pay fee, they’ve turned it into a way to release new free content. Almost all of the DLC items so far have come out for free, making that $10 that I would pay with a used game actually worth something. But just charging $10 to play online, something that we’ve already had for years, is dumb.

And if EA needs to charge for money for the same thing because they’re not making enough on their yearly sports rehashes, maybe they should invest their money more wisely.

Does any of my complaining matter? Probably not — people who buy Madden new will still buy it new, and they’ll never see the $10 charge (they’ll just put in their pass and go). Sports is a weird genre in video games, too — for all I know, most of the people who buy used EA games never bother to play them online anyway, so maybe they won’t even bother paying the $10 fee even if they’re asked to. I’m sure there are guys who buy last year’s Madden who don’t ever bother to play it online, just want it for a few football parties with their friends at home.

In other words, this will probably work (and like Mass Effect 2, we’ll see it implemented on more EA titles, and even other companies’ games in the future). But as always, I’ll vote with my wallet — if you don’t think EA should pull stuff like this, you need to make the choice not to buy their games and not to give them money. Companies keep doing what sells, so if you’re angry about a decision made by a game company, you need to look at your library first and see how much of your money they’ve made. I’m not organizing a boycott or anything — you do what you want to do, and if this type of thing flies (ie, people pay the fees), it’ll keep showing up. But I pay money for games and deals I think are worth it, and this isn’t one of those.

I thought this was interesting — was organizing my music tonight, and took a look at my “Mike’s Top 200″ playlist in iTunes. I made it a while back — it takes the top 200 songs according to plays and puts them all in one playlist. Unfortunately, as far as I know, iTunes doesn’t register plays from a shared computer (which is actually how I listen to my music most of the time: I have the library saved on my Mac mini, and I use that as a kind of server, listening in via other iTunes installs around my house), but it does register plays on my iPhone and iPod, and that’s probably a good 60% of my listens anyway. So it’s a pretty good list of what I have been listening to. And I decided to sort the songs according to plays, and then list out the top 10 bands. Quite a few bands appear more than once, because I often just put albums on and listen to those all the way through, but I took the first 10 bands that showed up on the list in order. I got this:

1. The Shins
2. The Hush Sound
3. The National
4. Imogen Heap
5. The Mountain Goats
6. Vampire Weekend
7. Fountains of Wayne
8. Arcade Fire
9. Okkervil River
10. Rilo Kiley

Which is pretty darn trendy, if you ask me. It’s interesting, because when people ask me what my favorite music is, I usually tell them The Police, Cake, and Bad Religion — those are definitely the bands whose entire catalogs I enjoy and (at least I thought) that I most listen to. But this list is way different. In fact, while I do see three Cake songs in my top 200, I don’t see any Police or Bad Religion.

Timeframe is another factor — I wore out my old Bad Religion tapes, and I own Cake and The Police’s whole catalogs on CD, so this list is definitely an iTunes product. The earliest song I entered into my library on iTunes is back in September of ‘05, and I probably did do most of my listening of those other bands before then. Strangely, the latest song entered into my top 200 is Metric’s Gimme Sympathy, which I put in my library in April of 2009. And before that, I have to jump all the way back to December 2008 (when I put the Son Lux album in).

Of course, songs have to be in my library a while before I listen to them enough to make this top 200 list (in fact, I wonder what a top 500 list would look like … ). But it’s interesting to me that the actual stats about my listening are so different from what I expected them to be.

Here’s a rundown of what I’ve found interesting in the world of the World of Warcraft this week.

• Have I linked you to my interview on Rawrcast yet? We talk about WoW quite a bit on that one.
• Blizzard made the news today (Joystiq’s post is still upcoming) by talking about their RealID system and how it works with Facebook. This all seems like old news to me — I’ve seen this stuff in action in the StarCraft 2 beta, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s basically a Blizzard login that tracks what you’re doing in Blizzard’s games. EA’s done the same thing for years, and Steam has done it even before that, but of course this one will work across the realms of Warcraft, so that’s the biggest draw for people. I share concerns that a few others have voiced — obviously I won’t want everyone I know to know where I am all the time. But I trust, from my experience with StarCraft 2, that I’ll be able to turn it off whenever I want — if I don’t want to be disturbed for any reason, I don’t think I will.
• The Friends and Family alpha is officially underway, and even with the leaks (Deathwing’s model got leaked, and surprise, it looks exactly like what we saw in the trailer), I’m still not seeing anything super intriguing there. Blizzard is doing a little better job keeping things under wraps, so good for them, and they’re also sharing a little bit more with their Screenshots of the Day from Cataclysm, but none of that stuff really entrances me either. It looks like more WoW, which isn’t a bad thing — never a bad thing — but I’m far more excited about other titles this year than I am about Cataclysm so far. They’ve got plenty of time to build up the hype, and hopefully I will see something that really intrigues me, but so far, it looks like the same old game in a few new places.
• It’s probably no surprise, then, too, that I haven’t been playing much lately. But that’s not really because I’m disliking the game, it’s more of a factor of time. I still plan to slave away at Loremaster, and hopefully even get it on my Paladin before the expansion. We’ll see. I’m hoping to take some of the day off for my birthday tomorrow, and while my focus has been on FFXIII lately, WoW may get some playtime.
• Spinks has a good post about damage meters. I’ve never really been against damage meters — they do make things more fun as a DPS player, and even when I don’t top them (which is often), it’s helpful to see who is and look at their gear and rotations. But I guess they’re troublesome enough, with the bragging and comparing, that Blizzard doesn’t want to officially bring them into the game.
• Another Word Jumble. I think these things are great.
• Here’s something interesting: No more 10/25 man raid differences, basically. Raiding 25 will still give you more loot, but not any better, and no difference in respective difficulty. That is interesting, though I wonder why they’re even bothering with 25-man raids anyway — why not just go 10 normal or 10 heroic? Honestly, I don’t think this will change how the game is played much — people who have the 25-man groups will still raid 25-man, and they’ll just get the best items they can get. But I almost think this is Blizzard cutting back content — it takes a long time to design different items and different abilities and different difficulties. And if people aren’t using them (and you can get more money by selling virtual items, ahem), then why put the time in? I don’t see this change as driven by customers at all — rather, I think Blizzard is deciding to cut costs where they can, not because they’re losing money, but because they want to focus on other functions of the game.

Thanks for reading!

Update: And the floodgates, they open wide.

Hey there! You’re probably wondering why there haven’t been many posts here lately. I’ve been busy. In fact, let me show you:

• A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called 360iDev in San Jose. It was an iPhone developers’ conference, and among other things, I saw one of Apple’s engineers speak. I spent a lot of time there writing about that and the rest of the conference for TUAW.
• Last week, I went to a 3D Gaming Summit here in Los Angeles for Joystiq, and I even got to moderate a panel. Fun times.
• Last weekend, I flew out to Seattle, and visited the Voices that Matter iPhone deveopers’ conference for TUAW. Here’s a quick panel writeup that I did, and here’s a great story about a really smart kid who’s making amazing software.
• Earlier this week, I went to a game preview for Joystiq … that I can’t actually tell you about yet. I got to play an unreleased game, but the news is still under embargo, so we haven’t posted about it quite yet. But it was fun, and I got to take a quick trip down the coast here in California.
• And on Thursday, I visited the LA Games Summit at Hollywood’s beautiful Roosevelt Hotel (I’m told one of the rooms we were in was where the very first Academy Awards were held). I wrote about both Vivendi considering digital distribution for WoW (something I’ve thought about for a while), and a quick interview with Playdom’s CEO, along with a few other short tidbits from the industry summit.

So I’m glad to say that my plan, conceived all of those years ago, to come out to Los Angeles and hit the events scene is paying off big time. I’ve done a ton of event coverage already this year, and it’s only May. And it helps a lot that I really enjoy going out to events and doing interviews and meeting people — it’s a lot of work, but it’s also a very concentrated writing experience, and I love doing that.

I will definitely write here when I can, and when I’ve got something to say. But that’s why things have slowed down here again: just because, as is usually the case, I’m busy elsewhere.

Hey, you didn’t expect to see this podcast again, did you? I’m still doing it, when I have the time. This one’s rough, I think, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.

• When you listen to music, your brain is actually making a series of predictions. And when your predictions are wrong, then it gets interesting.
• Fiction is more persuasive than non-fiction, and we’re still guessing why.
• Easy = true. I didn’t do a great job of explaining this one, but just read the article. Fascinating stuff in there.
• Slime mold studied by researchers is developing in the exact same pattern as the Japanese rail system.
• Disney parks are fun, but what about the lines? Disney’s trying to come up with a new way to make you wait without making it feel like you’re waiting.

Hopefully something in there catches your fancy. Thanks for listening!

 

 The Modern World, episode 13 [40:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Yeah, it’s actually Thursday, but I’ve been super busy the past few weeks (and that’s not going to change, as I’m about to head out of town again this weekend). But just in case you want to know what I think of the World of Warcraft, I hate to disappoint you, so here’s a late Warcraft Wednesday for you.

• Warcraft Word Jumble, and it’s even interactive! I would not be opposed to seeing Warcraft-related versions of common party and newspaper games. It would even be wild to see them in the game — isn’t it about time Blizzard added a little bit more interactivity to quests and games rather than just the click-this-item, run here gameplay?
• Brigwyn has me a little worried with all of this finality — hopefully he’ll still keep up the site as always. But it was nice to be mentioned in such a flattering way. And you can listen in to their podcast to hear me rant and rave about the sparkle pony.
• Larisa, intelligently as always, puts into words what I’ve basically been saying for years. I don’t guess at what Blizzard is thinking any more, just because none of their actions as regards their community have made any sense for a long time. And I don’t give them free advice about how to deal with that community, either, though I’ve definitely got plenty sitting around my huge head. Anytime they want to call me up to consult for their community team, I’ll be here. Meanwhile, however, never in the history of selling products has one company accomplished so much by doing so little. It speaks to the power of their game design talent that even as they shut doors and ignore their biggest core fans, people still can’t donate enough attention and time (and let’s be honest, money) to their games.
• In-game, I’ve actually been playing quite a bit (on the few days I’ve had recently where I’m not working from when I wake up to when I go to sleep). All I’ve been doing is running quests with my Paladin — he finally built his epic flying mount, and next I’m planning to get to da choppah. I need money, which is coming pretty quickly from the quests, and I need to level my Engineering a few more points, which should come pretty easily with all of the various ore I’ve stockpiled while questing around. After that, I’m seriously considering going for Loremaster, but I figured that I’d start in Northrend — I haven’t even cleared Icecrown yet, so first things first. If I finish all the quests in one zone, I’ll move to another, and if I clear out Northrend, then I’ll start questing in the older expansions. You may argue that I should do the older realms first, since Cataclysm will replace all of those quests, but I’m not in a hurry — I’m willing to wait and see what happens there. If they do replace all of those quests, then at least I’ll be doing new ones.
• These are cute. I feel like I should probably get some art of my characters done sometime here — I don’t want something so cookie-cutter or space-taking as a FigurePrint, but it would be cool to have a custom drawing or even painting of a few of my favorite characters to put on the wall. Of course, if I ever end up marrying somebody, it’ll probably just sit in the closet, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to look at it for now.
• And finally, I don’t remember if I linked this here or not, but just in case you missed it, I was also on this Group Quest podcast the other week. I don’t rant about the sparkle pony, but I do hopefully provide some entertaining insight on the game at large and Cataclysm’s class changes specifically. Enjoy!

And that’s it for now. This site is one of my favorite sites to work on, but it’s also kind of the inverse of whatever I’m doing in real life — when things are slow out on the other blogs, I write a lot here, and when things are busy out there, I almost never have time to write here. So even if you don’t see posts from me here regularly, you can at least know that somewhere, I’m out there, writing like a madman.

Unfortunately, the Cubs season has been one long run of disappointment so far, and things don’t seem to be looking up at all. Fans of the Cubs at this point are basically just hoping it doesn’t hurt too much — we’re mostly putting our arms up and asking for it not to be right in the face if possible.

But I have gleamed something worthwhile from this baseball season so far, and that is a growing deeper appreciation for the game itself. Last year, I followed a bunch of Cubs tweeters, and while they gave me a lot of fun and good insight on my team, I didn’t get much news from the rest of the league. So this season I pulled up what I thought were a few good league-wide baseball blogs, and they’ve been extremely interesting reading even outside of the Cubs’ disappointing gameplay. I’ve learned fun things about numbers from all over the league, whether baseball is actually running out of records to break, Jackie Robinson day (call me dumb, but I didn’t know such a thing existed — how awesome), heard a great story from a Philly blogger about catching a foul ball for his kid, and gotten to watch a mascot fall off of a dugout overhead. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt at all.

Sports, to me, have always seemed pretty impenetrable — I never really had the time or interest to follow anything specifically, and the traditional sports talk (in which a bunch of dudes throw around names and numbers while subtly competing with each other about who knows the best or who can be the most dismissive) has never appealed to me much. But what I’m finding in exploring the bigger world of baseball this year, especially on these blogs, is not only a real sense of community (which is to be expected — what else is the Internet but a series of communications inside various communities), but a real intelligence and wit shining on through. Sports media tends towards the elite — even something like Sportscenter, shown at bars and gyms all over the country, has to keep the names and references coming to keep “real” sports fans hooked. But these blogs that I’m reading about baseball, especially the best of them, offer up no such walls or hurdles. Haven’t heard of the players they’re joking about? They link off their names, so you can go see them online, where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Don’t know what RISP or OBP are? They explain it, they link it, and they give a little insight along with the opinion.

For the most part (having followed Cubs bloggers and twitterers for over a year now, I do go a little deeper on the Cubs side, so there are a few bloggers I read who aren’t so accessible), the tone is jovial, and inclusive, and fun. And that’s really refreshing — even if my Cubs don’t win, I can jump into the baseball section of my RSS reader and hear a good baseball story or learn something interesting about a game that went down last night.

I like it. I don’t know if it’s just the way baseball is right now (it seems like as sports go, this one is pretty popular), or if the Internet really has made more of these connections and story-sharing circles possible, or, more likely, some combination of those two. But I’m surprisingly myself with how interested I’ve become not only in my own team, but the sport in general.

Not that it’s helped me — I downloaded the MLB 10 The Show demo the other day, and just got crushed (I’m looking around for a softball league or something like that — maybe I’ll do better in real life). But it has made a terrible Cubs season more fun so far.

Employee 1: Hey so I had an idea last night.

Employee 2: Oh yeah? What’s that?

E1: You know all of these little minipets we’ve got laying around from the card game?

E2: Oh sure. My friend in character design worked hard on one of those. He was angry when he found out it wouldn’t be used.

E1: Well I’ve been playing Farmville, and I had a thought. What if we just, you know, sold them?

E2: Sold them? What, you mean like for gold?

E1: No, I mean… like… for money.

E2: Wait, real money? Are you nuts?

E1: Not a lot of money! Just a little money. They’re just sitting on our art database, it’s not like they’re getting used any more since the TCG went bottoms up, right? We might as well liquidate them off.

E2: But that seems, like, wrong. It’s a game. You’re supposed to play and earn stuff, not just buy stuff.

E1: Well you won’t need to earn these, it’ll just be a fun thing. We’ll sell them for like ten bucks. They’re just pets — nobody will buy them anyway. We’ll probably get thanked for helping clean out inventory before the expansion.

E2: I guess we did just create that online store and the online identity thing — all we’d have to do is create a SKU and then mail them out in-game. But pets for real money, doesn’t that seem kind of… skeevy?

E1: Bah, no one will care. People who want real pets will still earn them, these will just be one of however many thousand we’ve got. A fun little thrill for just ten bucks.

E2: Five bucks?

E1: Ten bucks seems good to me.

E2: …

E1: Ten bucks, and on one we’ll give half the profits to charity.

E2: …

E1: Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll make money for the company?

E2: Fine. But if the bosses find out, it’ll be your fault.

***

Boss 1 and boss 2 break in the door.

Boss 1: Who’s in charge here?

E1: (was sleeping) Huh? Wha?

E2: Holy crap! If anything went wrong, he did it.

E1: All right, fine. I’m in charge. What do you want?

B1: Why is all of this money being deposited into our online store account?

E1: Wait, which account is that?

E2: Is that…? Oh crap, I knew it. I told you! I told you this would screw us over!

E1: Ok, listen, I can explain. This is just a little thing we tried, I can turn it off.

B1: Listen. You two are just menial employees here, and this company has grown very big in the past few years — there are all kinds of people wandering the halls whose faces I don’t even bother to try and recognize any more. All I want to know is: One, what have you done to get all of this money in our account?

E1: It was just a –

B1: Two, is it legal?

E1: Look, we’ll fix —

B2: And three, how can we get more of it?

E2: Look, this is all just a misunderstanding. We had this little idea to get rid of some old designs we had that we weren’t going to use, and it just got out of hand. Wait, did you just ask how you can get more of it?

B2: Son, I know you’re probably some kind of “video hypercoder” and that you didn’t go to business school, or probably any school at all, given the way you smell. But this building you’re in is a business, and the goal of a business is to make money. So either tell us what you did right now, or you won’t be making any money here ever again.

E1: Look, we sold a few pets. That’s all. We had them designed, they didn’t take any time, we just figured we’d put a store up and sell them. It wasn’t a big deal, and it’s over — we’re really sorry. We’ll refund the money and we’ll give the pet out to everyone in the game.

B1: Give the pet out? Why?

E2: People weren’t happy about it — they don’t want us selling pixels for real money. The game is about making your character better, not buying things with real money to make it better. People don’t like it, we’ll end it, we’re sorry.

B2: Wait, people aren’t happy because they didn’t get anything real? But they still paid?

E1: A lot of people paid, actually. Like, a whole lot of people.

B1: And they each paid $10? Do we have anything real to sell?

E2: Well we’ve got these plushies sitting around — we usually sell those during the big convention every year. I guess maybe we could put those on the site and include these with it.

B2: Do it. We’ll check back in after it goes live.

E1: Wait, you don’t want to fire us?

B1: Fire you? You just earned us more money in one day than we spent making the last content patch, and the online store is still going gangbusters. If we’d known we could do this three years ago, we could have given an expansion away for free!

E2: Wait, really? But it’s not fair. These pets aren’t worth $10 — they’re not even worth $5. We’ve been giving them away for years! At least when people buy an expansion, they’re buying actual content, an actual experience that they wouldn’t have otherwise. These are just pixels.

B2: Son, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. I know these things are just pixels in your crazy video machines. But if people are willing to pay ten bucks to see pixels, then you take their money and smile when you say thank you.

E2: But that doesn’t seem —

B1: Look, do it. Put the pets up, add the plushies with it, and let’s see how those do.

E1: What should we sell them for? We sell the convention ones for $40, but that’s a special event, and there’s no pets with those.

B1: What do they cost to make?

E2: We got a bulk deal for next year — they’re each a couple bucks to make. They come out of China somewhere. The people who played them probably come home and spend the money we paid them on our games.

B1: Sell them with the pets for $20.

B2: $25.

Boss 1 and 2 look at each other. They both laugh.

B1 and 2: $24.99.

They laugh again as they walk out of the room together.

***

B1: Ok, we’re back. How did the pets with the plushies do?

E1: Umm…

B2: Spit it out, son!

E2: Look, they didn’t do quite as well as the other pets.

B1: What? But they were worth more! They were real items — I thought that’s what these people wanted.

E1: Well we thought that, too. But then we talked to some players, and they said that they didn’t really want a plushie sitting around their house. And they didn’t really want to give their address and wait for it to be mailed, and wonder if it would show up or not.

E2: And some of them said that they didn’t actually want the plushie anyway.

B1: Wait, they didn’t want the plushie? I thought they wanted something real.

E1: That’s what they said. But they don’t actually want the plushie specifically. Digital is just easier, they said.

E2: Don’t get us wrong, we sold plenty. Just not quite as many as the in-game pets by themselves.

B2: Do we have anything else to sell?

E2: What? No, it was just the plushies. We’ve got t-shirts and stuff, but we have other companies to sell those for us.

B2: Nothing? What about this art vault you got? Anything in there?

E2: Well yeah, we have another little pet in there — we were thinking about giving it away on a test realm or something.

B1: That’s good. That’ll do.

B2: Sure, that’s good, too. But do you have anything bigger?

E1: Bigger?

E2: We did make this one thing, but that’s not really…

B1: What is it?

E1: There’s this horse. It was supposed to drop from a boss on one of the instances, but he wasn’t the last boss of the expansion, and we figured we’d want to save the coolest mount until the last boss. So we just kind of put him away for a while — we were thinking of using the horse next expansion, maybe in another realm or something.

E2: Yeah, but we can’t use that horse. I mean — I wasn’t really comfortable with the pets, but the mount? That thing is a game changer — people won’t have to buy a mount ever again if they get one of those. Plus, this whole thing is wrong anyway — it’s all gotten out of hand. There are people that do this, companies that take money like this, but not us. We sell experiences, not designs. We make games, not virtual item stores.

B2: We make money, son. This mount — can you put it up on the store? Like by itself, without a plushie?

E1: Sure, wouldn’t be hard. The code’s all there.

B1: And people would want it? Like there’s not anything else like it in the game?

E1: Well, the model is in the game, but not the textures or anything. Yeah, I think people would want it. I mean, I wasn’t even really sure people would spend money on those pets, but they did, right?

B2: They certainly did. Do it. Put the mount up.

E1: What should we charge for it?

B1 and B2 smile.

B1: Same as the plushies. $24.99.

B2: Wait. $25. Take a penny, take a penny, right? (smiles)

E2: You can’t be serious, though! Just a cosmetic mount for twenty-five dollars? There are really incredible full games that cost less than that! You’re talking about a situation where people might actually give us thousands of dollars for this thing. I mean I don’t think it’ll go this high, but we might get a million dollars from people, just for this mount. $25 is two months worth of the subscription, if you go with a longer plan. If half of our user base buys this thing, we’ll earn more on the mount than on the actual game this month! I thought we were a game company here — I signed up to be a game designer.

B2: I told you, son. We’re a business. We make money. It’s tax day — they’re all getting their refunds, they can pay. Put the mount up.

E1: Will do.

B1: We’ll see what it does. If you’re right, and nobody buys it, lesson learned. We’ll go back to making our games, and we won’t ever bother with just selling pixels for many, many times over what they cost us to make. Like he said, something’s only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If this mount isn’t worth $25, then nobody will pay for it.

E2: But what if people do? I mean, I don’t think anyone’s crazy enough to spend $25 on a virtual item — it’s a cosmetic change in a five-year old game. And once we announce the new MMO in the next year, no one’s going to be interested in this game any more, anyway.

B2: The new MMO! I forgot! Oh man, I can’t wait to see what we can do selling items in that.

E2: Ugh, thank goodness I’m not on that team. But here’s what really scares me: what if this mount thing works? What if it sells? This company got huge because we worked really hard and made really great games — the only reason you can even pull off a scam like those pets is because of the hard work people did years ago, not just on this game, but on all of the great ones before it. Because of the solid, polished, impressive work that that small team of folks did years ago, our company is a behemoth today with thousands of employees globally, and we have an extremely dedicated userbase that dwarfs almost everyone else in the industry. And you’re going to use all of that good will and all of that love we’ve earned to charge people $25 for a bunch of pixels that look like a pony? That’s what really scares me. What if they pay?

B2: Son, if they pay, then we will have ourselves one very successful business. [Laughs]

B1: [Laughs]

They both exit the room and walk down the hall lined with posters of classic PC games, laughing all the way.

Sorry — I’ve been away covering a conference all this week, and I still have a stack of work to do from that, plus I took the wrong path and ended up driving about ten hours across Southern California today. It was pretty and all, but I’m exhausted. So while there’s lots of cool WoW stuff going on, I just don’t have the brain bandwidth to write about any of it today.

But I will post this oldie but goodie, one of my favorite Spiff videos. WW will be back next week.

I wrote this sonnet about Lost for a longer joke I was going to do about me selling some poetry to try and raise money for an iPad. But the joke wasn’t that good, and I really shouldn’t be begging for money here. I should probably stop whining about how much the iPad costs and just buy it.

But anyway, here is a sonnet in (somewhat — I think I missed a few places) iambic pentameter from the point-of-view of Sun on Lost:

As I, upon this wind-swept island wait
For him, my rough-classed strong Korean man,
I wonder if he’s reached some ill-sung fate,
Or gotten lost in time, just like that Dan.

I’ve lied and threatened, known my share of sin,
But I returned here, searching for my Jin.

For some reason I’ve been awfully busy lately, so I haven’t had much time to write here, much less play World of Warcraft (and unfortunately, this probably won’t change — next week I’ll be out of town for a conference, and then the week after I’m hosting a panel, and then in May I have another big project to work on). But I did want to do this week’s Warcraft Wednesday for you, so here it is. Probably smaller than usual, but maybe something’s better than nothing.

• I can confirm that the Cataclysm beta is about to start. I don’t know if I’ll get an invite (or if I even want one — I usually like to avoid PTR/beta realms and actually experience things on the live realms), but either way, I’d say we’re about four or five months out from the release. That puts Cataclysm out sometime in August/September, which seems about right. It’s possible that they could go a little earlier, as we already know that lots and lots of work has been done on the expansion, not to mention that Blizzard has gotten better and better, I think, at testing and releasing content. Plus, I was just thinking about this the other day: with the exception of a few people and a few Blizzard higher-ups, this is a very different team from the people that actually launched the game and even that first expansion. The workflow has probably changed quite a bit since the days of Burning Crusade and even Wrath. Still, we’re at least closer than ever, and from what I’ve seen, there will be zero NDA, so we’ll likely see a flood of screenshots and movies and information come right out of the beta as soon as it opens.
• I’ll tell you something else that’s probably close: An Armory iPad app. I’m a little surprised that there’s not one already, but then again, Blizzard would want to test the app before they release it, and they’re probably not grossing enough in the store for Apple to justify giving them a test unit early. But I’ll bet you money that there are plenty of iPads sitting around the Blizzard offices during the day, and that very soon, we’ll see a release from them in the store. An authenticator doesn’t really seem right — more likely it’ll be an updated Armory app.
• There’s a lot of class information dropping this week, but honestly, that doesn’t bring much more than a yawn from me. Not sure why — it could be because I haven’t seen Hunter changes yet, or maybe it’s because I’m most looking forward to content, not class changes. New class abilities won’t surprise me any more — I don’t care if Hunters can spawn copies of their pets or Shaman have a more steady mana output, yadda yadda yadda. What matters most to me is what Deathwing does to the Old World, and if Blizzard can make a five-year-old game feel new again. When they plan to release that information on the forums, let me know.
• Hey, happy birthday Warcraft Pets! Notable for being probably the most visible member of the community that’s actually acknowledged by Blizzard, so kudos for that (oh yeah, and for having a great site of course :) ). Slightly related to vanity pets: I am a little ashamed to say that I got taken in by El’s April Fool’s joke about the Aquarium for in-game fishing. At first, I was like, “Oh man Blizzard is going way too Farmville,” and then I was like, “Whoah, actually this is pretty cool,” and then (about 3/4ths of the way down the page) I realized it was April 1st and El was having a go. But still, I have to admit that I was kind of sold on it. Not into the microtransactions, mind you (never into the microtransactions), but the idea of a serious system behind vanity pets? That’s intriguing.
• Cool wallpaper. Cool icons.
• Great post by Larisa about BlizzCon. It is an excellent event — at this point, even if Blizzard wasn’t announcing games or showing off new titles, everyone would want to just get together anyway and have a good time for a weekend. Too bad Larisa can’t go, but yes, I agree, it is a pain to come all the way across the country (or in her case, the world), pay for hotel and food, and try to nab a ticket to get into a limited show. On the other hand, if it was easier or cheaper to come, I don’t think it’d be the same event. Same deal with PAX — the fact that it is such a targeted and focused group is kind of what makes it so special. A tightly knit virtual community brought to life.
• I twittered about this, but I’ll say it again: goodbye and thanks, Eyonix. For some reason, the CMs never seemed to like my corner of the community (actually, I think I know why, but it’s a misunderstanding that never got corrected), but I appreciate their work, both as a writer and a fan. Hope we get to see him somewhere else (and when we do, hope we realize that he’s Eyonix — kind of weird that CMs of his stature are still going by aliases).

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything witty to say tonight, but instead I’ll share Hunch’s Twitter predictor with you. Hunch is a site that I mentioned a while back on The Modern World (which I should really do a new episode of at some point…) that is designed to crowdsource decisional questions — answer things like “What should I eat for dinner?” by seeing what people before you in the same situation chose.

They’ve hooked their system up to Twitter, and if you type in your username (it’s safe, they won’t steal your account or anything), they’ll check out your followers (and maybe your tweet text, but I’m not sure about that I just saw on the bottom of their page that they don’t — it’s only follower information), and then they’ll try to predict how you’ll answer a series of questions. In other words, they’ll ask if you are good at computers, and if you have a lot of techies in your “circle,” it’ll guess that you are.

I ran through the quiz twice (once with my username, and once by putting in someone else’s twitter username — shh, don’t tell them), and it’s pretty interesting. While they make some pretty broad strokes (“Are you a liberal or conservative?”), there are some interesting questions in there (“Are you more extroverted or introverted?” and “Do you consider yourself traditional or original and inventive?”). And more often than not, Hunch did indeed guess correctly about me, though there was the occasional secret (how could they know that I secretly prefer chick lit over sci fi?) about me that they didn’t guess correctly.

And of course, as you answer, the survey updates itself, so that at this point, they’re hitting correct on most of their answers. It’s just a cute online test to most of us, but I’ll tell you who’d really be interested in this information: Advertisers. Twitter follower information is publicly available (at least it is for me — private accounts may not be), and if an advertiser plugged my information into a service like Hunch, they’d have a pretty good idea, even without getting my consent, about the kinds of things I like to spend money on and the kinds of things I am interested in. That’s the real secret of Hunch’s database: the more of this kind of stuff advertisers know about you, the more they can get you to agree with.

Is Hunch selling this information? I don’t think so, but there’s nothing to stop them, and in fact Twitter might even want to pick them up (and/or is probably running something like this already), since they’re rolling out their advertising plans soon. But in the meantime, it just shows you how much information about you is encoded into these social networks you join and frequent. There’s a whole library of information that can be learned about you and who you are simply by seeing who you’re connected to and how.

I used to actually be very into the whole April Fool’s thing. When I was a kid, I tried to convince my parents that our TV had been stolen. I woke up very early in the morning, unplugged our family television and all of its various wires from its stand in the family room, and carried it by myself (I’d like to think I was 8 or 9 when I did this, but it was probably closer to 13, which makes it more embarrassing) into the living room, where I hid it under a blanket. When my parents finally got up and I walked in to act all surprised and wonder very loudly why someone would steal our TV, they just shook their heads and wondered what was wrong with me. The joke didn’t go over very well (and, I can now see with my older and more comedically-experienced eyes, for good reason). I returned the TV quietly only a little while later, without incident.

I like the idea of April Fool’s — that anything can happen, and that something surprising and unexpected might be right around the corner. But over the years, and especially with the rise of the Internet, where it’s extremely easy to make things up and spread the word about them very quickly and without a lot of recourse, April Fool’s doesn’t always fall into that same sense of wonder and trickery. Sometimes, it’s just an outright and awkward lie — as all the game journalists I’m following on Twitter have said, this day can be hell for fact-checking, especially when you’re covering sites that aren’t good at being just subtle and witty enough to make it a joke rather than a fabrication or a trick. And this year, even the jokes have gotten a “meh” reaction from me. I think XKCD pulled off the only real April Fool’s Day prank that I liked this year, which was a fully-working command-line interface for the webcomic site. Even the one joke I tried this year, talking about Farmville rather than Warcraft yesterday, got a pretty “meh” reaction from me, and no reaction from anyone reading it.

I’m not sure if there’s something actually wrong here, or if this needs to be fixed at all. Ideally, we’ll get to a point where everyone is tired of the fabricating and the meh jokes, and sites on the Internet will only post really interesting and entertaining funny things on April 1st. That’s started to happen a little bit — it used to be that everybody switched places or went crazy on April 1, and compared to a few years ago, today’s events have been pretty sedate.

But I wouldn’t mind going the other direction — maybe it’s so easy to spread and share information nowadays, and the Internet is already such a silly place, that we don’t even need April 1st any more. Maybe it’s just not worth bothering with. Are we even getting anything out of it? Are there any pranks or jokes that were really worth reading or putting the time into today? ThinkGeek probably had some of the most worthwhile stuff, but that stuff is so smart that like many ThinkGeek April 1st gags in the past, they’ll probably have someone actually make it. And Bioware is actually selling DLC for April 1st. Yes the items are joke-y, but what’s really funny about that?

The best April Fool’s prank I ever pulled was also when I was a kid, and also on my parents (you can probably see why I admire them so much, considering how many annoying shenanigans I tortured them with). One April 1st, I woke early (again, most of my plans involved waking up early), and changed every clock in the house that I could to an hour forward. My dad usually woke up at 5:30, and I set his clock so that it would actually go off at 4:30 (when it was set to 5:30). I changed the kitchen clock that he always checked, and my brother and sister’s clocks as well. The only clock that I couldn’t change was the one in his car, and I figured that as soon as he got into the car and turned the key, the dashboard clock would light up and he’d know something was wrong.

And lo and behold, it worked. At 4:30 he rose and showered as he did every day, ate his cereal breakfast and read the paper while packing his lunch (my Mom also got up and chatted with him as he packed), and headed out to the car a full hour before he was supposed to be at work. I wandered out of my room innocently, and just as my Mom asked why I was up so early, my Dad came back in from the car. “What time do you have?” he asked. “I think there’s something wrong with the clocks. Why’s it still dark outside?”

I remember him being confused, and again, my parents getting that look on their faces as I explained my subterfuge like a minature, chubby supervillian. But in the end, my Dad got the joke, and even moreso, I think he appreciated that he didn’t have to be at work for another hour. He sat back down at the kitchen table with my mother and I, and we talked and laughed for another forty-five minutes, extra time I’d secretly earned us with my prank.

I guess, for reasons like that, we might as well keep trying to fool each other, even if most of the jokes don’t quite hit their target exactly. Maybe it’s worth it for the occasional one that does.

But if not, I’m fine with International Talk Like a Pirate Day taking over for the silly holiday every year. I think I like that one a little better anyway, matey.

And now it’s time once again for FarmVille Wednesday, in which I talk what’s interested me in the past week of my favoritest MMO ever, FARMVILLE. Omg I love clicking.

• Spring fever is underway! Everyone’s collecting eggs for their spring basket in hopes of picking up a chick or something else that’s cool from a Mystery Egg. I don’t have too many friends, so I’m still stuck at “Empty,” but I’m hoping to do a lot better on this run than I did on the St. Patrick’s Day event where you had to try and earn gold from everyone. I’m totally going for that Mystery Egg!
• But I’m not nearly as excited about Spring as I am about the three features it seems like they’ve been teasing forever on the login screen — pets, co-op farming, and the farmer’s marketplace. All three of those got a little more outlined in Monday’s official podcast. FarmVille is already kind of co-op in a way, but I think bringing in a little more meaningful interaction will really push the game up to the next level in terms of fun (which means, it’ll actually be a little fun). Especially when you look at what Ngmoco is doing with We Rule (players in that game can actually own businesses and sell orders off to their friends), FarmVille could use a little more direct interactivity to counterweigh all of the clicking.
• Personally, I’ve just restarted in terms of what I’m growing. For a long time, I figured that since I was always near a computer, I should go short term, big profit, and I planted a lot of strawberries and soybeans. But lately, I feel like it’s more worth it to go in on the long term, and decided to do some mass-planting of longer crops like artichokes (and even pineapples, just for the heck of it). After the last harvest, however, I think I’m going to remake the farm — I’ve got a sizeable pocket build up at this point, and I think I might redesign my farm. The original design focused a lot on personal choices (like spelling out crops in the shape of my name), but I think in the future, I might go a little more traditional, which should make it easier for me to go through and harvest quickly.
• You may have heard that a European councilman lost his job due to playing FarmVille too much during council meetings. I’ll take the same line I always have on this one: if playing FarmVille too much is costing you your job, it’s time to stop playing FarmVille. After all, how else will you make some real money which you can then pour back into the game as FarmVille bucks? It’s very, very important to keep your job going — even if you have to let those crops wither occasionally, a steady paycheck, which you can then directly turn over to Zynga, is extremely important. Family relationships on the other hand, not so much. Your Shamrock Sheep will always love you — can you say the same about your wife? Didn’t think so.
• I’ve seen some cool crafts lately, too: While this FarmVille kitty is probably a little too girly for me, I really like this black sheep and this pig sculpture (the second especially considering my pig-purchasing spree last week). But my favorite is this moo art — I’d like to hang that on my wall.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week — hopefully by then my Horse Stable will be built, and I can tell you all about how I did it!

I’m about to sit down and watch one of my favorite TV shows, 24, which last week Fox confirmed was going to be done for at the end of this season.

I’m actually ok with the decision — I still love the show, but I think both the show and its main character (Jack Bauer, who will be up there with Batman as one of my favorite fictional characters of all time) have done pretty much all they can. For all of the political bluster and hype (the show made a few headlines for Jack’s tendency to torture terrorists for information, at a time when torturing terrorists became frighteningly close to, if not actually, legal), the core of the show is really a Greek tragedy, and I think that the story is about wrapped up anyway.

Perhaps I should explain.

If you’ve never seen the show, I highly recommend you at least watch season one. Fans of the show each have their own favorite seasons — season two is mostly singled out as the worst season (one of the characters went on the run against cougars in an infamously bad attempt to spice up the suspense), and I personally like season five a lot — but season one, pretty much everyone agrees, is the quintessential 24 story. Jack Bauer is working at CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) when he and his family are taken off guard one evening, and he has 24 hours to fight terrorists and save the world.

The basic premise of the show is that Jack Bauer is the most awesome counter-terrorism agent of all time. Nothing kills him, nothing stops him, and even though again and again and again and again, he’s forced to do the impossible with no time and no tools at his disposal, he usually pulls it off. And the creators of 24 are very good (and to their credit, have been very good the whole time) at ratcheting up that suspense, sometimes in multiple stories. The show itself takes place in real-time — each episode is an hour of the story, and each season is 24 hours — and it’s that ticking clock that really ties everything together. Sometimes the premise pushes things into the silly, like when it takes Jack Bauer 10 minutes to drive across Los Angeles (I’ve lived here for almost eight months now, and sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to go across my street), or when characters continually get thrown into situations just to keep the plot moving. Another common joke among fans is what Jack Bauer must think by now, having gone through eight different days at different times of his life, all of them packed to the brim with much more than any actual living human being could handle. This is a guy who doesn’t even work for CTU any more, and yet gets tortured at six in the morning, finds the time to live through a nuclear blast at 5pm, and then wins a fistfight against an agency mole at midnight. He gets in shootouts hourly at this point — he’s a hero.

And yet he’s a flawed hero, because, without spoiling the story, his crazy life has cost him. Jack’s tried to quit his job multiple times, and yet each season, something finds a way to pull him back into the action. His family and his relationships have suffered — if the person he’s dating hasn’t turned out to be a mole or a plant, then their sibling or parents usually are, or their son gets into trouble with someone who is.

And it’s wearing on him — in the promo for this last season, he jokes with his granddaughter that “you’re supposed to call me Grandpa.” And indeed, as season eight has pushed on, signs keep appearing that Jack is past his prime. Oh, he’s still superhuman — he still takes down terrorists with ease, and he’s still always, always right about that suitcase being a bomb, or that person lying, or the terrorists playing two parties off against each other.

But while the early secondary characters in the series were usually incompetent or traitorous, they’re now starting to be right as well. Not in the always-right way that Jack is (like Batman, he never, ever goes the weak route or bothers to compromise), but in a way that they’re kind of right, too. Things in Jack’s world are changing, and the real tragedy of 24, the real finale, may be that for all of Jack’s hard work and suffering and sacrifice, he may not have changed the world at all.

Of course, I don’t know how the show will actually end. In a way, though I will be sad that there’s not a new 24 on every week during the seasons, I’m kind of glad to see them call it quits. Every story needs a worthwhile ending, and I expect a good one from 24. Jack needs to finally, once and for all, have saved the world. There’s a rumor that he’ll die, and there’s even a rumor that they’ll do a movie (though I actually hope that doesn’t happen — not only are they suggesting that they won’t do it in real-time, which seems blasphemous for 24, but don’t we all remember the mess that Serenity was? That show really needed to go on, and yet the movie was still a mistake. I did like the TV movie that 24 put together, but it was really just another episode, not what they’re talking about in terms of a movie).

But no matter what, Jack’s story deserves an ending. I have my doubts that it’ll be happy — this show never really ends on a good note for the characters involved, even if the 24 universe (which is actually a few years ahead of ours, thus explaining some of the surveillance technology that we don’t happen to have in general usage yet) is still intact and running. So end away, 24. And no matter how many more members of CTU turn out to be moles, or how many times Jack gets shot in the arm and lifts something an hour later without wincing, I’ll still be watching.

As with that, I’m off to watch the show. Forgive me for hurrying — we’re running out of time!

Update: Just saw this week’s show (and the promo at the end for next week) — they are already pushing the finale hard. I can’t wait. I’m not sure how much of the show has actually been shot so far (I seem to recall they shoot about six weeks ahead, which means the last four will have been done with the knowledge that the show is ending), but I reckon it’ll be a nice finale. Not quite as epic as Lost, but I’m looking forward to it.

Sorry guys — had a long day and I need to play some video games, so rather than writing something here, I’m off to play Final Fantasy XIII.

I’m about three hours in — I like it so far, but it is kind of a bummer how much they streamlined it. I haven’t gotten all of the different strategy parts (like paradigms) “unlocked” yet, so I’m not really feeling the whole depth of the game. Still, I like it — all of the naysayers are right about some of the things they’re saying, but they forget one thing: it’s Final Fantasy. I haven’t played a Final Fantasy game since X, so it’s been years since I saw that gloved hand in the menus and heard and seen a JRPG like this one.

In fact, the J may be the most important part of how this game is being received — it’s a very, very Japanese game, and it’s always been a pretty Japanese series. Back when Final Fantasy VII ruled the world, Japan was the center of video games — they were turning out the brightest and the best, Sony sold the most popular console around, and the most popular American developers were still making games for the PC. Nowadays, though — well, Nintendo actually sells the most popular console. But the most popular games are created and sold by American developers, and Japan is sort of playing catch-up behind some really interesting game ideas from American design schools and European game designers.

It’s weird to think of Final Fantasy as an underdog, but it kind of is — the JRPG is almost an extinct animal at this point, and clearly Square Enix feels they have to streamline to reach a mass audience. The irony, of course, is that they probably don’t. Video gaming might need to progress, with motion controllers and 3D and so on, to make more money, but JRPGs really don’t. People are more than happy to play the same old 100-hour ATB games that they’ve always played, given that they’re created with love and care. Sooner or later, I hope some upstart developer comes along and realizes that. I think the next big Final Fantasy-style game won’t even be called Final Fantasy.

And look, you got me to write something anyway. I’m off to play.

PS. Lightning is a badass. I wonder if she’s a mom, because, y’know, “moms are tough.” Also, this is great.

Time once again for Warcraft Wednesday, a weekly recounting of what I’ve found interesting in the World of Warcraft this past week.

• I’ve actually been playing the game more lately — as you may have heard (both here and on Tipoaa), I have come up with a goal to works towards in the game, and that’s got me going. I’m going to become a Guardian of Cenarius, which will require me to grind out two reputations. I’m more than halfway through Revered on Cenarion Circle after just a few days of grinding on Encrypted Twilight Texts, and I am pretty sure that I won’t have too big a problem with Cenarion Expedition rep either (though I haven’t really researched it fully yet — I seem to recall it requires running Steam Vaults a lot, which is something I’ve already done quite a bit of). This title will be a big achievement for me, though — this character, my Hunter, has always been on Cenarius even when I’ve played other servers, so to have it pick up the Guardian of Cenarius title is pretty meaningful. Should be fun.
• After that, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I did notice while playing this week that I’d somehow picked up enough money to get epic flying for my Pally, so I bought that last night. He’s riding around on a regular Flying Machine right now, but I brought up Engineering specifically so he could make both the epic flying machine and the motorcycle, so I’ll probably have him do both of those. By then, Cataclysm will have likely reared its ugly head in some way. If that doesn’t get me interested in the game, maybe then I’ll finally call it quits.
• Speaking of calling it quits, Brigwyn has. And even though he’s happy about it, it’s just another closing. Sure, there are new folks coming up in the community, and people are still blogging about the game, but I think it’s safe to say that World of Warcraft has officially peaked. There’s still a chance that Cataclysm brings back a big audience, but I really, really doubt that anything else with the name “World of Warcraft” on it will entice as many people as it has in the past — even if the Cataclysm content is the best they’ve ever done, there are some people who won’t even bother just because they’re done with the game. We’ll see — I could eat my words on that if Blizzard puts out a press release boasting 12 million players a month after Cataclysm, and I have no doubt that the expansion will top PC sales charts, but I think we’ve entered the late afternoon of this current day in Azeroth.
• I will admit I was wrong about something else: looks like a brand new company is taking over the WoW TCG. I did say a little while back that I didn’t think Blizzard would pursue anything new with the TCG, but of course I didn’t know there was going to be a TCG company run by ex-Blizzard guys. We’ll have to see how that works out — they do say that everything that’s currently in print is coming back out, but what’s more interesting will be to see what kinds of changes they make. I assume that whatever Cryptozoic does going forward will be exactly what Blizzard wished Upper Deck had done from the beginning. On a unrelated note, Blizzard Entertainment’s logo looks almost exactly like Cryptozoic Entertainment’s logo. Just saying.
• Haiku is overdone on the Internet these days, but I really liked these Hunter Pet Haiku.
• I agree — changing out these tokens was (and will be — I have other characters to do it on) a pain. Blizzard should have done it automatically — “We’ve exchanged your tokens for X honor” or whatever the actual exchange rate is.
• This is interesting. I keep hearing about people who are playing the AH like crazy lately, but every time I sit down to do it, I just lose interest. It’s not that it’s hard — all you have to do is foresee which items will or are doing well, and then make sure you’re on top of that market. But I just can’t get into it for some reason. Maybe I’m just not that into numbers. I’d almost rather go out into the world and get some really pricey ore to sell rather than sit on the AH and track prices for the same amount of time.
• Finally THIS IS ADORABLE.

That’s it for now. Off to grind some rep. And actually, I just realized that I haven’t gotten my Pug yet. I thought I’d run enough instances, too… Hmmm.

Everyone and their brother is doing Formspring, but I don’t need no stinking social networking wannabe to answer questions people have about me. I just ask people to send questions to me on Twitter or Facebook and then I answer them here. Easy as pie.

Not a ton of questions tonight, which is fine — I have to go watch Lost in just a bit.

@preden2 asks, “If you could get ANY guest for a Tipoaa show, who would you choose?”

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately — I think we have a pretty nice opportunity on the new podcast to bring some really interesting people on from all walks of life, but on the other hand, the show is really a lot of inside jokes between Turpster and I, so it wouldn’t really be right to invite somebody like Greg Grunberg on (he and I are Twitter buddies, you know) and then laugh about fahjords and “how’s it going chat channel.” Given that those things are funny, of course, but it’s a fine line.

So I don’t know. Turpster and I will definitely invite on our buddies, and I’m hoping to bring in some new voices — some people we know who don’t necessarily play WoW, but would be really funny on a podcast. You’ll see — I guarantee we’ll have some new folks on very soon.

As for a pie in the sky kind of thing, I’d love to have someone like Patton Oswalt or Kristen Bell on — someone who’s really legitimately talented and funny. But I think the size and form of the show as it is right now (which is the way we want it, really) wouldn’t attract someone like that. Unless we happen to have some connection to them somehow. You never know — I’m meeting all sorts of people here in LA. In six months, maybe I will have Patton Oswalt’s number.

Speaking of talented, @maryvarn asks, “Nintendo 3DS: Gimmicky or Awesome?”

I’m happy to say that I got to break the news last night about Nintendo’s new handheld console on Joystiq — at the time, I was worried out of my mind that it was a hoax or a joke or that it was actually an old rumor or something, but no, turns out that they really did announce a new handheld, due out by this time next year, that will allow for 3D gaming without any sort of special glasses. There’s a few funny things here — first, I think it’s hilarious that they have announced a new version of the console just days before the DSi XL is set to release in the states — that’s like Apple announcing an iPad 2 right now before the first iPad actually gets to stores. Either Nintendo is really worried about the DSi XL (and want to make sure that low sales don’t freak out their investors), or they’re not worried at all, and expect that people will buy it anyway, even though it’ll be obsolete in less than a year.

But about the console itself, I think it’s closer to awesome than gimmicky. Obviously I haven’t seen it yet (there are no official pictures out there), and we have no idea what kinds of games will be on it. We don’t even really know what the technology is — will it be some sort of head-tracking software running through the camera that changes the screen based on where your head is, or will it be this “parallax” technology that pushes two different views to different areas in front of the screen? Or will it just be an accelerometer that changes the view based on how it’s tilted? We have no idea.

So there’s always the chance that Nintendo could jump the gun and screw it up (Virtual Boy), but I don’t think they will — remember than when the DS came out, everyone thought it was gimmicky, and now it’s the biggest handheld around. And remember that when the Wii came out, everyone thought it was a joke, and now Microsoft and Sony are scrambling to release motion controls. In other words, I wouldn’t bet against Nintendo — they’re a company that knows their trends, and it certainly seems like 3D is where gaming (and most of multimedia) is going. Plus, they’re exactly right — the most frustrating thing about 3D is the stupid glasses, so if they can come up with a working solution to do respectable 3D without glasses, and tie it into a Mario or a Zelda game or two, they’ll make their money back and then some.

Personally, I tend to skip every other generation of Nintendo’s handhelds — I bought a Game Boy, skipped the Color, bought the Advance, skipped the SP, bought the original DS Phat, skipped the Lite, and bought a DSi. I probably won’t count the XL, so I might skip the 3DS, but we’ll see — again, if Nintendo releases a beautiful Mario game tied to glasses-less 3D, I don’t know that I could really resist.

And speaking of Mario, @mockford wants to know: “I’m playing Super Mario Galaxy. When you did it, did you go back through as Luigi? I’m not there yet, but thinking about it. :)”

Wait, you can play SMG as Luigi? I thought that was a myth!

Holy crap you can!

I guess you need to collect all of the stars, which I don’t think I ever did. Right now I’m playing God of War III, and Final Fantasy XIII is supposed to show up sometime this week. After that, I’ve promised a friend that I will play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 with him, and then I think I need to go back and play through Uncharted 2 and Mass Effect 2. But if I get bored sometime during all of that, I’ll pull SMG out again and try to get to Luigi as a playable character.

Oh, and I’m back playing WoW again — I’m working on the Guardian of Cenarius title. Because I needed something to work on, and I need a cool title, and I happen to be playing on the Cenarius server.

Finally, @Ziphz asks the most disturbing question: “If turpster was a woman would you date him?”

Ah, no. A female Turpster wouldn’t be my type (although I do like an English accent), and plus, s/he’d be in England, and I’m not down for a long distance thing. Plus, you know, that smell.

Although if Turpster was a woman, I bet our podcast would be more popular. Two dudes chasing after Swedish ladies can probably only go so far on the Internet.

I’ve been playing God of War III. It looks good and all, and it’s a good game, but man, I’m having trouble lining up some of the combos in the right places. Oh, and Kratos is kind of a jerk.

P.S. I wrote this thinking it would be funny and then after I finished it, it wasn’t. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s not funny, or because I’ve just had it in my head too long. Either way, here you go. Not everything I do is as funny as I think it should be.

Kratos walks up the mountain, scowling angrily.

Hestia: Kratos, thank goodness you’re here! Poseidon is going nuts — you’ve got to stop him!

Poseidon: You’ll never be able to stop me, Kratos! The might of Olympus is all-powerful!

Kratos: We’ll see about that. I will have my revenge! (kills Poseidon)

Hestia: Thanks, Kratos! I appreciate it. Oh no, look out! It’s Apollo!

Apollo: You are mine now, Kratos! Your quest ends here!

Kratos: (kills Apollo)

Hestia: Whew, that was a close one. Thanks again, Kratos. So, uh, what do you think we should —

Kratos: (kills Hestia)

Hades: So, Kratos, I see you are short on loyalty. But I have a deal you won’t be able to turn away from. What would you say to —

Kratos: (kills Hades)

Dionysus: Don’t kill me, Kratos! I see now that the gods were wrong! We were wrong! I pledge my loyalty to you! Just please, save my life!

Kratos: (says nothing)

Dionysus: Oh crap. You’re going to kill me, aren’t —

Kratos: (kills Dionysus)

Zeus: KRATOS! I am here to end this madness! Your time has come!

Kratos: I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!

[They fight. Kratos kills Zeus.]

Hera: Whew. I’m glad all that’s over. So Kratos, how about we –

Kratos: (kills Hera)

Bowser: RRaaggghhh!

Kratos: (kills Bowser)

Toad: I’m sorry, Kratos, but your princess is in another –

Kratos: (kills Toad)

Highlander: Who are –

Kratos: (kills Highlander)

Punisher: Oh. You’re here. Well, this is awkward.

Xav de Matos and Kyle Horner, two bloggers that I’ve worked with at Joystiq and Massively, have this podcast they’re calling The Freelancers, all about being a freelance video games writer and what the life is like. They were kind enough to invite me on the last episode, and I showed up and talked way too much about myself, how I became a writer, and what I think all writers should do whenever they sit down to write (you know, besides actually write — though I said that too).

So if you want to get your daily dose of Schramm, you can run over and listen to that today. You’ll probably hear some things you’ve heard me say before, especially if you follow my every word (and if you do that, man, I apologize right now). But hopefully it’s entertaining, and especially if you’re a writer (or want to be one), you might find something that vibes with you in there.

I will also say that I was just joking, and I haven’t killed anybody (that I know of). But I think Xav will probably be a little more leary of me the next time we see each other at a video game convention.

Here’s the latest and greatest in what I’m interested in about Warcraft lately:

• Blizzard released official information for Gnomeregan and the Echo Isles. I’m excited — I guess. It seems like the lower level stuff in Cataclysm isn’t nearly as exciting as I thought. Sure, it’s cool to retake Gnomer, but I’m not quite as interested as I’d be if it represented actual progress for my character. Players want low-level content a lot — at least until they realize that it doesn’t actually help their high level characters. Blizzard’s challenge with all of the low-level stuff for Cataclysm will be to have it apply to high level characters in some way. Otherwise, I think people will log on to their low-level characters, and enjoy the lore, but be bummed that it’s not doing anything for their level 80s-85s.
• Here’s Massively’s roundup from GDC 2010, which doesn’t have anything to do with WoW, but man it was good to see Shawn and Sera there. They didn’t do any WoW coverage as far as I know (Blizzard did have a booth there, but they were just doing job stuff, not actual game demos), but the Massively crew are good people, and SW: TOR is probably the MMO I’m most excited about in, say, the next five years or so.
• I tend to agree — it surprises me a little bit, as I’ve actually purchased dual spec on all of my characters that can use it, but it actually seems pretty optional to me. Especially on a DPS character, there’s not necessarily a lot of call to do it. I think an epic mount is probably a better investment than dual spec in some cases. Which is interesting — we all though that dual spec would change the game, and it did for some players, but I think for the majority of players, it’s not that really a big deal. I would like to see what Blizzard has to say on this one. I wonder how many players who can take advantage of dual spec actually have. And how often people who have the option to change back and forth between two specs actually do.
• Some pretty cool fan art. I like the Blood Elf the best. I’ve been thinking that it’s probably about time that I get a Figureprint made, considering my interesting in the game seems to be on the wane. But we’ll see.
• A while after I said, look, let’s just need on Frozen Orbs, Blizzard decides that we’re greeding. Which is fine — I think need fits better, because we all need them, really, but my point was just that we have a standard. Better to have one way to do it than to have everyone guessing.
• I like this a lot better than sinking money into Blizzard’s plushies: Make your own. Plus, Blizzard doesn’t sell the Night Elf Druid plushie. That thing is great.
• I can’t remember who said it or where I saw it, but I agree: where’s our in-game St. Patrick’s Day holiday? Surely the Dwarves must have some saint that they celebrate by consuming a lot of alcohol, right?
• Finally, I tned to go with boneless chicken wings. I’m not sure why, but with a fork they’re not messy, they’re relatively healthy (well, unless you deep fry them, which I have to admit that I sometimes do), and they’re enough to keep you going even during a long raid. Chicken wings and beer for me — that’s the ideal.

That’s it! Thanks for reading!

Tyler Cowen posted ten books that have influenced his life over at Marginal Revolution, and he encouraged other bloggers to do the same. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but it seemed like an interesting idea, and I needed something to write tonight. Note that these books are some of the influential books in my life, not the most influential or the best books I’ve ever read. Like Tyler, this is top-of-my-head stuff, not a definitive list.

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. This book (and the subsequent “trilogy” of five books — I haven’t read “And Another Thing” yet, so I’m not sure if I consider it canon or not) defined my humor, my geekiness, my wit, my insight into our species and what a silly, messed-up set of creatures we are.

2. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I bought an edition of this called “The Essential Dracula” back when I was a kid, and it got me into literary analysis long before I ever minored in English in college. Here was a pulp story about a supernatural villian told in an interesting way, but when I read the analysis on it, I realized it was actually a commentary on class and wealth, on Victorian sensibility and sex, and the proper modern balanced up against the great old evil myths of history.

3. The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller. Batman was my favorite long before I read this book, but this series taught me about how you can deconstruct a legend, take it over, and place it in your own time. I remember reading that Miller wanted to write this because he was worried — Batman, to him, was always an old man figure, and Miller was rapidly approaching the age at which he imagined Batman had always been. So in this book, Miller pushes the clock back, and turns Batman into a guy who will always be the old grumpy bastard. Not to mention the Joker’s death scene — just a perfect ending to that mythical relationship.

4. Jennifer Government, by Max Barry. I found this book later than the other books on this list so far, but it’s one of my favorite books, and it’s the first book that really convinced me that I could sit down and write a novel. Not only is it a cracking good and funny read, but it was written by Barry while he was working at HP — in short, he was like me, a guy stuck in a tech job and trying to write fiction in the evenings about the geeky stuff he knew. I still haven’t come up with a premise or a book this good, but I am still working on it.

5. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. My high school teacher told us that this was the best novel ever written, and though I didn’t believe her at first, I reread it a few years later, and eventually came around to her point of view. It’s not my favorite novel at all, but yes, in terms of voice and story and themes, it could well be the best novel ever written.

6. In the Hall of the Dragon King, Stephen R. Lawhead. There’s nothing really special about this book — it’s straight fantasy, with a kid who starts out humbly but eventually has to save the world with all of his magical buddies. But this was the first fantasy book I ever read, and so it was my introduction to the genre that I keep finding myself coming back to again and again. Nowadays, fantasy is super popular, and there are all sorts of subgenres and different takes, and it’s much more of a commodity. But this book hearkens back to when it all started for me: a little pudgy kid who was pretty unpopular who found all sorts of magical worlds and wonder in the pages of a book.

7. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. As if you didn’t already know I was a nerd — it’s cliche to like this book at this point. But still, this was my introduction to cyberpunk. Nowadays, I think that The Diamond Age is a very much superior book, and I think Neuromancer should be much more respected for its influence and role in the creation of the genre. But Snow Crash was the first one I read that really vibed with me — Neuromancer was always a little too intellectual when you compared it to Hiro Protagonist’s pizza delivery adventures.

8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. If you want to talk lifetime, this might not register quite yet, as it’s only in the past year or so that this book has influenced me. Still, if you want to talk quality over quantity, this book is more or less responsible for all the thinking I’ve done in the past year about what I’m eating and how I’m dealing with food in general. There are quite a few factors that have influenced my changes in lifestyle over the past 16 months or so, but this book is a big one of them.

9. Gamma World, 4th edition by James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet. I’ll come clean: my introduction to roleplaying games wasn’t through D&D. I never actually played D&D much as a kid — I was in that weird spot where the few friends I had were too cool to concern themselves with video games or D&D dice. But I did buy this book somewhere and I poured over it for hours, reading up on character creation and various weapons and how to design settings for players this postapocalyptic world. I only remember playing this once with my brother, and he didn’t have any interest in it at all (partly because I didn’t really understand it myself, but mostly because he didn’t really care), but I was so darn fascinated by the idea of it.

10. The Holy Bible. Let’s be honest here — I would almost argue that anyone who says they weren’t influenced by this one is lying. But even if you want to claim that this book isn’t a part of your life, I’ll admit that it’s been a big part of mine. I don’t mean to evangelize — personally, I have no real idea what exactly I believe right now, and that doesn’t give me any position to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn’t believe. I figure, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or someone else, more power to you. But from “In the beginning” to “Amen,” I would argue that there isn’t a part of anyone’s life this book hasn’t influenced in some way. You can talk about quotes, you can talk about story (almost all of our stories involve some sort of messianic figure, and who’s the most messianic figure you know?), you can talk about laws and politics and gender relations and wars, and you name it, this book’s had a hand in it. And even if you want to get personal, I went to a Lutheran school — I know all the stories of Jacob and Esau (oh hi Lost) and Isaiah and Solomon and David and Jesus and Peter and Paul and so on. Like it or not, if you want to list influential books, I’m putting this one on there.

That ended up being a pretty interesting exercise, actually. If you read this and end up posting your own list, feel free to send it along, I’d love to take a look.

The Census. It arrived in my mailbox this week, as it did for everyone else, and I’m kind of excited to fill it out. It’s the first one I’ve ever really been responsible for — I guess I was 19 last time the whole thing went down, and I don’t remember ever seeing a form. Plus, I’m actually excited to see the results. The country changes a lot in ten years, both in terms of demographic makeup and in terms of where everyone is living, so I’m interested to hear what the results turn out to be.

But first, I guess I have to do my part. Here goes.

The little letter they’ve included with it says that my answers are confidential, but I already see a place on the form to put my first and last name. I guess confidential means they know, but can’t tell anyone else.

“Start here” on the top of the form. Count all people living in your household. Does Batman count? No? How about my teddy bear Trent? Ok then, just me.

Actually, the form is asking about April 1st, 2010, and who knows — maybe I’ll meet a model and have a live-in girlfriend by then. I’ll assume not, though. Just one person lives here.

“Were there any additional people staying here that you did not include in Question 1?” That’s funny, actually — the whole point of the census is to count people, so I guess they’re just checking their math. “Ok, Mrs. Smith, we have you down for two people in this house. Now this may seem silly, but before we go, are there any other people that we need to count?” “We do have two children, do they count?” “Ah, yes, Mrs. Smith. We need to count them too. Good thing we asked.” I have no additional people living with me.

Is the house owned by me or rented? It’s rented, but I would like to know how the “occupied without payment of rent” option works. I didn’t see that checkbox on my lease when I signed it — if I had, I’d have done that!

They next ask my telephone number and my name. Like the government doesn’t know already — they could just check the signal from the chip they put in my head if they want to know all of that stuff!

I’m a male. I was born on May 6th.

They next ask if I’m of Hispanic origin. That’s weird — why don’t they also ask if I’m of Asian origin, or Nordic origin, or Indian origin? I guess they expect the majority of the country to be of Hispanic origin. Probably not too surprising. But I do wonder why they got or wanted to put that question first? I wonder how closely the constitution oversees the actual census questions — I know the whole process itself is dictated by the original document, but I don’t know who actually wrote out these questions.

I am marking myself as white. Technically, I am English/Irish, with a Lutheran background, a Midwestern suburban upbringing and a coastal California transplant. I’m educated, technical, fitter and stronger every day, and inquisitive. I like a good burrito, enjoy beauty, and can be overly sensitive at times. But “White” is good, too.

Does person one sometimes live or stay somewhere else? Again, they’ve already specified in the beginning that the census shouldn’t take note of anyone who doesn’t live in the house permanently (which, actually, is probably what happened to me back in 2000 — I was away at college, so I probably didn’t have to answer the census at all). But then again, this is America — they have to ask everything twice, because 1/4 of us don’t pay attention and 1/2 of us can’t really read anyway.

That’s it — piece of cake. Consider me represented, I’ll mail it out tomorrow. You’d think that I could have done it online, too, at some point, but on the other hand, I don’t mind the actual paper. I’m sure it costs ungodly amounts of money (I also got the letter that told you the actual census letter was coming soon, and that was stupid), but it makes things official. Plus, everybody can get mail. The numbers are probably way off anyway — making it easier for people online to answer the form would probably spin them even more.

I am so sorry, dear readers, but I am in San Francisco once again, this time for the Game Developers’ Conference, and I don’t have time this evening to write up a Warcraft Wednesday. My apologies.

In the meantime, please do listen to the Incredible Podcast if you haven’t already. You will, as I have previously stated, enjoy it.

Oh my ladies and gents, the Internet is a wonderful place for comics. All sorts of amazing artists who I never would have found on comic store shelves are working day and night to deliver week after week of strips (sometimes three a week! sometimes five!) that are touching and hilarious and extremely well done. I feel as though I should do something, anything to honor the hard work of these individuals, so I will do what I do best: blog about them.

This list does not include Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton or The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl, not because they don’t belong here (they very much do), but because I’ve already interviewed them on this site before, Kate on the podcast, and Karl over here. Like all of the other comics on this list, please read them.

In no particular order:

-Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: XKCD if Randall could draw more than stick figures. Gags, often scientific in nature, often geeky, and very funny. The SMBC Theater live action shorts are also extremely well done for a site of this stature, and extremely funny as well. It’s amazing that this site isn’t bigger than Collegehumor or that ilk — it’s certainly more creative and funnier.

-Dead Winter: Zombies, bad guys, and cute chicks. And that art style! It’s amazing how far he’s come, both in terms of storytelling and design, but then again, that’s what happens when you really commit to a webcomic like this. It’s amazing that this shows up for free in my RSS reader every few days.

-Questionable Content: What’s amazing about this comic is that the content is never questionable — despite the fact that it updates so often (five days a week, without fail), the comic is always super true to these characters, to their lives, and often funny anyway (though the humor always comes from who these guys are, not some contrived punchline). Great comic — more touching and true than most TV shows I watch.

-Sailor Twain or, The Mermaid in the Hudson: This one’s pretty new to me but the style is terrific. Moody and Victorian and dark and beautiful.

-Overcompensating: Ok, so sometimes I do like the silly non sequiturs. This one’s got them, along with some weird art, but I like it. And it makes me laugh, even though I often have no idea why.

-Dinosaur Comics: This is on the list? Actually, it shouldn’t be — I did interview Ryan North as well a little while back. But it’s recently come to my attention that some people I know aren’t reading their Dinosaur Comics every day, and so hopefully including this here will rectify that situation. This is the most useful and entertaining clip art in the entire history of the universe ever.

-Gunshow: I think I’m late on this but oh man, Gunshow. It’s the best. Sometimes it makes no sense, but then you think about it for a bit later that day and it both makes sense and is very funny. I am a pro at explaining things, and this one leaves me trying to figure out a way to explain why it’s so good. Read this arc and maybe you’ll see why.

-Dresden Codak: Weird. Beautiful. It doesn’t update as often as some of these others, but it doesn’t have to. Each one of these is a gem, and as you look at it, it’s as if you’re seeing the light hit an idea in various ways and reflections.

-The Non-adventures of Wonderella: I’ve been reading this one almost since the very beginning. Like The Venture Brothers, it both skewers the genre it’s parodying, and yet still offers up a surprisingly solid mythos and backstory. Plus, Jokerella is the most adorably incompetent supervillian ever. She tries so hard!

-Nedroid Picture Diary: Reginald and Beartato have such wacky adventures. Like this one. “You just don’t understand cats.”

-NPC Comic: Considering my audience, you probably already know about Mary Varn’s comic, since I’ve talked it up in a few places already. But even if you’re not a gamer or a geek, it’s a great read, and it’s been really fun to see the comic and the site come into its own.

-Lucy Knisley’s Artjournal: So honest, so beautiful, so perfect. Lucy doesn’t update that often, either (I think she’s spending most of her time doing actual work, which is as it should be), but when she does, it’s always amazing. I wish I could express myself and my thoughts with my words with as much vibrance and honesty as she does with her pictures.

I think that’s more than ten, but calling it eleven webcomics would mess up the title, and I wanted to mention them all. Enjoy.

So baseball and I have a weird history (as I’ve mentioned before). I used to be much more of a fan, in the way that every kid is — when you’re young, you need heroes and role models, and usually sports is a pretty good place to get those. My brother and I were big fans of Ozzie Smith and Brett Hull, not so much because we were good at baseball or because we knew how to play, but just because we knew who they were and had posters (that we’d gotten free from school or from my Dad’s work) with them on our walls. We liked them, sure — we knew Ozzie’s flips and we watched Hull and Oates skate on the ice at the St. Louis Arena — but we followed them because we were told to, not because we knew anything about them. When you’re a kid, that’s probably the best way to do it.

When you grow up, however, the foggy heroes of legend start to come into focus, and then you realize they’re just people, people with jobs and performance reviews and tempers and problems and so on. Not that they’re not great (nobody would argue that Hull and Ozzie weren’t greats), but they’re real, in a way you don’t realize when you’re a kid. I think the baseball strike was when I really started giving up on sports. I was still only 14, so I didn’t really understand the whole thing (and I still don’t, except that I can guess why any given strike tends to happen), but that was definitely the point that I remembered thinking sports weren’t that fun anymore. Coincidentally, that’s about when I started high school, where I joined the drama department, and figured out I wanted to work in broadcasting. So who knows — if baseball had never gone on strike, maybe I’d be a crazy jock dude instead of a guy who writes about tech and video games.

No, on second thought, I’d probably still be into the video games.

But this recent fascination with baseball for me is coming at a completely different angle. I’ve already explained (follow the link above) how I came to be a Cubs fan, despite living in St. Louis for so much of my life. But even then, I wasn’t sure if my “year with the Cubs” would be an ongoing thing, or just an in-the-moment experience. Watching all of those games last year could have just been a fad for me — I just happened to be living near Wrigley, I just happened to go to bars full of people discussing the games, and all of the team’s games just happened to be on my television. When baseball started up again (which is what’s happening this week in Arizona), would I still care? Or would I move on to follow something else?

If this week is any indication, I’ll still care. I’m surprised with myself — I’m pouring over news and rumors of who’s coming back with the team and what the lineup will be like, I’m following the old familiar faces on Twitter again, and I think I’m going to make the most serious investment in my baseball fandom yet: $100 to subscribe to the league’s Internet video service, which will offer me up video of all of this year’s baseball games in streaming HD whenever I want them. (I would kind of rather watch them on TV, but I think I’m going to hook my MacBook up to my TV with HDMI anyway, so hopefully I will get to watch the good Len and Bob broadcast in HD that way.) I’ve thrilled to the earliest news of the Cubs’ spring training games (we’ve won both so far — not that it matters, but I am excited anyway), and the thing I’m perhaps most excited about is that there’s every indication that my favorite player, Kosuke Fukudome (who I hear has been earning a great nickname around the clubhouse), is going to have a great year. He should, too — the Cubs could use it.

In other words, I’m in. I’m surprising even myself — I’m not a sports guy, and I don’t usually have the stamina to keep up with a whole season, much less start in on another one (my few attempts to join fantasy leagues usually have me forgetting to check the stats a week or two in). But for some reason, this is clicking with me now, and I’m really excited to be a fan again this year.

Why? It’s not the same as when I was a kid. Back then, I used to listen to Jack Buck with a reverence, and marvel at Ozzie and all of the other guys like they were larger than life. Nowadays, I feel much more equal. I know how a business works, and I know how the team works, and that they need to win X games to match a record, or X hits for a bonus. I know what the broadcast guys have been through during a long road trip, and I can hear what it’s like in their voices when they’re running on far too little sleep (because I’ve done the same thing myself). And sometimes I even feel more experienced than these guys, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes me realize what I’ve learned from my own life. Some of them are even younger than I am, and so when Zambrano throws a fit during a bad game, I think of the same kinds of frustrations I’ve dealt with in my life, and what might be the right way to deal with them.

The kid that was me didn’t think any of that stuff — he didn’t even realize, I think, that Hull was getting paid, or that he had a life outside of the rink (yes, like you were surprised when you saw your teacher at the grocery store). But the fact that I’ve learned so much about people, and that these young guys playing sports are real people, kind of makes me appreciate the whole circus more.

And to be honest, I have finally landed on one of the great truths of sports fanmanship — you feel good when your team wins. Sure, you feel bad when they lose (and c’mon, I chose the Cubs, I know what that feels like), but you could be having a terrible day when suddenly the bats start to light up, and your team wins by three. You step outside after that, and even though it’s raining and you’re in a hurry, you smile anyway. Because no matter what else happens, the Cubs won today.

Hey hey, Wednesday means it’s time for me to look at what interested me most in the World of Warcraft this past week. In case you missed it, here’s my episode of Polygamerous, and here’s The Incredible Podcast, a relatively new podcast that I’m doing with the T. It’s good, go listen.

• I like this Hearthstone pillow a lot. I bought a black leather couch just recently, and it seems a little plain without some Warcraft-related pillows on it. I don’t know when I’ll have the time or inclination to actually pick any up, but my birthday is coming up in early May. Also, I would have liked to see that mana strudel in a closeup. I wonder what mana actually tastes like.
• I actually wrote about World of Warcraft on Joystiq this week — Activision not only went nuts on Infinity Ward, but released their annual financial report, and WoW was mentioned quite a bit in there. It’s probably no surprise that Blizzard’s WoW subscriptions, and therefore revenue, are dropping pretty quickly. As I’ve said here before, Cataclysm is the key — if they can bring back that original swell of players by promising a return to the old glory days, they can probably get another few solid years out of this game, at least until Diablo III comes out. But if Cataclysm doesn’t attract enough attention or get players intrigued enough to come back (and bring their friends with them), then I think we’re looking at the long, slow end of the World of Warcraft. Not that it’s bad for Blizzard — this game is already legendary, obviously, and they’ve got StarCraft II and Diablo and plenty of other irons in the fire that haven’t even been announced yet. But if Cataclysm doesn’t explode for them, I don’t see the game growing any more, especially with threats like The Old Republic and all of the other games stealing free time in 2010.
• This is a pretty interesting discussion that’s been running through the blogs (you can follow all of Matticus’ links to see what people are saying there). I would say that if you get /gkicked from your guild for something that you blog about, then you probably shouldn’t be in that guild anyway. Remember, it’s a game — if something makes you angry enough to really rail on someone on your blog, then it’s probably not worth the effort. And if someone goes to the trouble of /gkicking you just because of something they read, again, it’s not worth the effort to stay with them. Of course, me and my guild almost never see each other these days — I tend to sign on late at night and tend to be one of the only players on — so you probably shouldn’t take my advice anyway. But I wouldn’t worry too much if you get /gkicked for something you write. Either you shouldn’t be there anyway, or it’s not your fault, it’s theirs.
• Facebook is still waiting for their Mario, Halo, or Sonic. This didn’t get reported on any of the WoW sites (that I know of — if you saw a WoW site that mentioned it, let me know, so I can start following them), but I think it’s intrinsic to what WoW was and is. Farmville, for all of its silliness and simplicity, is an extremely popular game, and in many ways, it’s the next World of Warcraft. It’s a game that’s pulling in people who aren’t game players, and that’s exactly why Warcraft got so big in the first place. For Facebook to say that they haven’t yet had their flagship game yet is kind of a big deal. When that game does come along, my guess is that it will dwarf what Blizzard has done with this game. Don’t believe me? How many players did World of Warcraft have at its peak? 12 million? Gee, that’s cute.
• There’s some whining going on about the “dumbing down” of stats in Cataclysm. Again, I don’t think that’s bad — Blizzard is going back to basics. The game has become complicated by necessity — to keep theorycrafters interested and keep the game mechanics solid, you naturally have to add a little complexity into the mix. But Cataclysm is the big return to the old days that Blizzard is trying to pull off. I’m looking forward to seeing if they can do it. I will say that they sound like they can, and the stat changes I’ve seen seem focused on making gear more straightforward, which makes it easier for everybody. But my big worry is if they’ll keep enough of the old world to remind people what early Warcraft was like — is it possible to create nostalgia by changing everything?
• Some cool desktop calendars to help you keep up on dates during March.
• It still surprises me that people wait so long to do instances. Seriously, they’re the best part of the game. Go do them!
• I saw this community team picture as well, and had the same thoughts (though you’ll have to go find it somewhere yourself. For a game with an audience that is so diverse and varied, I was a little surprised that the community team was still a bunch of dudes who look like they love to play CounterStrike. Not that there is anything wrong with dudes like that, but even on WoW Insider, we aimed to pick up writers that represented the community.
• Finally, I don’t have much to add to this, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe the Facebook Mario game will do exactly that.

That is it! Happy raiding everybody — hope you’re enjoying all of your adventures, in and out of Warcraft.

I didn’t write anything yesterday because I spent the evening with the guys at the Polygamerous podcast. I will link up the mp3 here when they post is so you can listen if you want, but I’ll warn you now that it’s mostly about video games, and thus probably only interesting to somewhere around half of you, if my extremely informal demographic knowledge about readers of this blog is correct. But it does have lots of me talking, so if that’s the thing you like to listen to, you might even enjoy it.

And in the meantime, there’s also lots of me talking on the Incredible Podcast. Go listen to that and review/rate/subscribe the thing in iTunes if you haven’t yet as well. Please. I beg of you.

I ran my third 5k last Sunday, my first here in LA, over in Chinatown. I did pretty well, I think, but was probably a little overenthusiastic. Probably.

To: Michael Schramm
1523 XXXXXXXXXXX Ave.
West Los Angeles, CA 90025

From: Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
Los Angeles, CA 90313

Dear Mr. Schramm,

We are extremely pleased that you were able to attend our 32nd annual Firecracker 5/10k Run/Walk event this past Sunday. You certainly ran a respectable time, finishing the 3.1 mile course in just over half an hour, constantly running despite the multiple climbs we placed on the path from Chinatown up to Dodgers Stadium. We hope the event was fulfilling for you, and that you enjoyed your time in our historic and heritage-rich part of this great city.

However, we did want to bring up a few concerns with you in regard to your behavior at the race. While we make it a priority to make sure that everyone at our city’s events is able to enjoy themselves, we’re afraid that you seemed to do so to the detriment of our other guests’ experience.

For example, when you first showed up on Sunday morning, it was probably less than prudent for you to yell out, “All right I’m ready, let’s run this [expletive],” as you did upon arriving at the starting line. We spent a lot of time planning out a short opening ceremony, and both State Senator Carol Liu and special guest star James Hong were probably extremely disappointed when you suggested that they should “stuff this noise” because you were ready to “beat feet.” They were both too polite to say anything, but we could see it on their faces.

Likewise, once the race actually started, it was probably not appropriate that you proceeded to push not only women but also children out of your way in order to keep up your running pace. We are proud that you were able to hold such a solid pace (one of your personal best, we believe), but given that our event is clearly labeled as a “run/walk,” we don’t feel it’s right that you were so competitive. Mrs. Nancy Hodgson of Pasadena also shared with us that you asked her to “move it, Grandma” as you ran by, and we also agreed with her that it was considerably rude to do so.

We do admit that not all of your competitive spirit was directed at other participants of our race, but considering that there were in fact children on our run, we were troubled to hear that as you ran up the aforementioned course hills, you constantly berated our city’s geographic features. Telling our hills that you were “rocking” them “silly,” and that you were making them your “[expletive],” while admittedly true, was not the thing to do with young ears around. Likewise, asking our hills “what ya’ll think of that, [expletive]! That’s right!” after you’d crested the summit was not at all appropriate.

Finally, your behavior after the race was, in a word, shocking. If your interpretation of the Thriller dance after crossing the finish line had been slightly more accurate, we might have let it pass, but in its current state, we regret being there to see it. While your physical prowess is certainly significant, the women in attendance were made overly uncomfortable by your clumsy flexing and posing, and the table full of post-race smoothies that you overturned during your impromptu celebration had been set up by a group of volunteers who were very distraught to see their contribution destroyed in a short albeit spectacular flash.

In short, Mr. Schramm, while we do hope you are able to visit our city again, and we do hope to see you at the Firecracker run next year, you would do well to leave the competitiveness at home. We agree that you do indeed rock, but we sadly inform you that our Master of Ceremonies did not appreciate you grabbing his mic and saying so in front of the gathered crowd at the finish line.

Thank you,

Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
3/2/2010

I’ve been meaning to buy a slow cooker (a.k.a. a crockpot, although I think that’s a brand name) for a while now. It’s actually a long story as to how I got to this place, but suffice it to say that I feel like I’m advancing up the cooking tree limb by limb, and even with a few falls on the way, I think I’m doing pretty well.

The branch structure I’ve decided to explore (because man, you could spend your whole life learning how to cook, and maybe I will) is what you might call “quality easy” — lately, I’ve been trying to come up with some easier ways to make food that’s usually tougher to do. For example, instead of deep frying things like fries or buffalo wings, I’ve been working on baking them. I’ve been buying premade ingredients, and cooking and mixing them together in new ways. And I’ve been slowly incorporating and getting myself familiar with more actual chef’s tool: For a while there, I was on a stir fry kick — just a wok-style pan and some oil — but then I realized I had an oven in my kitchen, and started using that. I had lasagna tonight, and I’ve baked chicken, baked potatoes, cooked veggies, made some bacon wraps, and so on. I still don’t think I’ve fully explored the oven and all of the things it can do, but I think I’m ready to move on to another appliance.

And the one that I’ve landed on is the slow cooker. I’m kind of excited about it — I work from home but usually have my attention focused on work, so my plan is to wake up and add ingredients on the various times I take breaks throughout the day. I’m not quite sure what you cook in a slow cooker besides chili (which is what I’ll do first), but I’m sure I can come up with some things. Meatballs, right? Some kind of roast, I know that (though traditionally, I’m not that into roasts, but I’m open to ideas). Oh, and there’s probably some kind of awesome BBQ I can put together, no?

Clearly I’m taking my sweet time with this. I’m sure, just re-reading that last paragraph, that some of your are already pasting your favorite recipes into your email, thinking I’m crazy for not knowing 50 things I can make in a slow cooker. How can I be a meat eater and not know the paradise of slow-cooked BBQ pork, you’re thinking. And if you do send me recipes, I’ll appreciate it, and when I have a chance, I will try to cook what you send.

But really, I’m not too bothered. Cooking, for me, has become much less about the mastery and more about the experience. When I was younger, I would try to make cookies, and I would make a mistake somewhere in the mix, and when the batch was ruined, I would get discouraged and never make the same thing again. But lately, it’s much more about the iteration — I enjoy thinking about the recipe beforehand, and even as I do it, I think what else I could do with it. “This recipe is good, but next time I’ll try some oregano.” Half of my thoughts are on what I’ll do next, so when the final product comes out less than exactly perfect, it’s ok — I’m already thinking about what I’ll do differently the next time. And by the third or fourth try, I’m finding I can make stuff that’s really good. The iteration is the thing, not the instant mastery. Which is the way it should be, I think.

So that’s my plan with the slow cooker — take it easy, experiment a lot, and hopefully through some trial and error, come up with something I like that’s reasonably good for me. And then make that a few more times just for fun.

I’m no chef, obviously. But lately, I cook like the guy painting the sunset at the park with a canvas paints — the painting may not be very original or good, but I’m happy just to be out there watching the sun go down anyway.

• Hey hey, patch 3.3.5! Called it! So the Black Dragonflight is invading the Ruby Sanctum, and that’s the kickoff for Cataclysm. I’m down for sure — I said last week that I wasn’t sure whether or not Cataclysm held as much signficance for players as the Arthas story did, but one way Blizzard can make that happen is by bringing in the old lore early and often, and it looks like they’re going to do exactly that with this patch. Sounds good to me. There are a few other spoilers released so far, and they do make things interesting, I’ll say that. But I won’t reveal here what they are.
• One of the things about Warcraft I was actually most excited about this week wasn’t in Warcraft at all: it was the Starcraft II beta. I finally joined up a few days ago, and I have to say, not only am I impressed by the game, but I’m very impressed by the social connections made with the new Battle.net. Finding friends is super easy, and while you can tell the party matching system is definitely still in beta (I’m not even sure their netcode has been optimized yet), I like all the options available: You can leave notes for and about your friends, you can share replays with each other (and I’d imagine that there’ll be a web interface for doing just that eventually), and it looks like you’ll even be able to create and share maps. Very social, and very much the influence of Blizzard’s time spent on World of Warcraft. I’m interested to see what they come up with for Diablo 3 as well — I can’t wait to see new ways to share your character, or keep track of friends as they’re playing.
• Felicia Day at Farpoint last Saturday. With some good insight about creating media, and a funny story about Vork. Although how much of a WoW nerd is he really if he’s bragging about being 78? Hit 80 already, man!
• I guess there are going to be “overcloaks” added to the game in the future. I guess that’s cool — it’s actually a step away from the idea of “gear as identification.” We always used to talk about why you couldn’t customize your gear, or just change the look of your gear to, say, your favorite tier while keeping your stats the same: it’s because Blizzard wants your gear to be an identifier not only of who you are, but of what you are: which race, which faction, which spec, and so on. I guess covering up the cloak doesn’t change things too much (I can only ID one cloak by look, and then only because it’s “white and longer than your average cape”), and it does provide a little more graphical flair on the character.
• Is it possible that people are tired of the Dungeon Finder system already? I guess if you ran the thing day and night when it first came out, you might be a little burned out on it, but let’s not forget that we had five years, five years of “LFG Gundrak plzzzz need healer and tank” before this. Wait times have been a little longer, I’ll grant, but I think that’s just the state of the game at this point — we’re between patches and between expansions, and you have to admit, 2010 has had some terrific games so far. I would laugh if people are going after the Dungeon Finder already, though. We just got it — if you’re already tired of it, you’ve played too much. And speaking of the Dungeon Finder, this is a great move as well.
• Finally, this isn’t about WoW, but wow. I played Global Agenda at E3 last year and I liked it a lot. But it’s fine to have a differnet opinion of the game — assuming you’ve actually played it long enough to know.

That’s it — a little short this week, but in my defense, I cleared out the feed complete. There isn’t much going on, though I did let a few good drama stories slip by. If only there was a place where someone was collecting and posting those…

I’ve been thinking this week about the strange case of Craig Barth. Craig Barth is (was?) the CEO of a company named Devil Mountain Software that supposedly made benchmarking software for Windows programs and computers — when companies want to know how much time it should take their employees to work with certain programs, they’d run Barth’s program and find out. Barth was used as a source often by the bloggers and writers at a site called InfoWorld (as well as other outlets, including Fox News, and even Gizmodo at one point), usually claiming that Windows Vista was bloated and slow, and that anyone who used it was probably a fool.

There’s only one problem (and no, it’s not that Vista isn’t bloated and slow). Craig Barth doesn’t actually exist. Turns out he was an alias of one Randall C. Kennedy, a pretty well-known guy who also works for InfoWorld as a commentator and columnist (usually also, probably not coincidentally, spouting off various controversial opinions about operating systems). Kennedy actually does own a company called Devil Mountain Software, and he claims that he started the alias simply to separate his blogging and his working personas. Which in and of itself might not have been a problem, except that he was blogging and working on the same things. Using a pen name is one thing, but actually hiding your identity while posing as a source for the exact same publication you’re writing for is really another. He never directly quoted “Barth” for his own stories, but he apparently did talk about the company in third-person without revealing the tie, and he was more than happy to be quoted elsewhere, including on the very site he worked for, under a fake name.

There is some confusion here — Kennedy actually claims that his editors and the writer who sourced him knew all about the dual identity, while they claim that they had no idea (and the publication has subsequently fired him). He also says that it was totally fine for him to use two identities — when he started up the company, “Craig Barth” was an alias that he came up with to keep his public and company personas separate, and it’s only when “Craig Barth” started getting quoted that trouble arose.

Whatever the truth (and Kennedy doesn’t actually seem to care anyway — he claims the whole identity reveal is an attack on him by Microsoft, and that he’s living out the rest of his days on the beach), this whole episode has me thinking about fake identities online. They’re so easy to create — signing up for a Gmail address, a domain with hosting, and a Paypal account is almost enough to make a company out of whole HTML these days — and they seem so easy to keep anonymous that when a situation presents itself where you might want to keep one reputation separate from another, why not be “Craig Barth” instead of Randall Kennedy?

But that’s the key here — your identity is your reputation, and while a fake identity may allow you to escape some of your own actions or words some of the time, I’d like to think that even on the Internet, you’ll eventually be held responsible. I can think of quite a few manufactured online identities — this kid who created an airline, Fake Steve, Ferrarro the WoW paladin, EA spouse, Belle du Jour, and so on — and in every single case, we eventually found out who was who. Sometimes, the revealed party was punished, sometimes rewarded with a book deal, but even online, the person hiding eventually had to face the light.

When I tweeted something to that effect yesterday, my colleague Eliah Hecht pointed out that we just haven’t heard about the ones who are still keeping their secrets, which is definitely true. But on a long enough scale, and especially when the identity really is used to circumvent ethical or legal constraints, I believe most major secrets come to light. We eventually found out who Deep Throat was — if a guy who can bring down the President anonymously can eventually be revealed, Joe Blogger who pretends to be as Jane Blogger doesn’t have a chance in the larger scheme of things.

That won’t stop guys like Randall Kennedy from thinking they can still get away with it. Your identity, even in this virtual age, is your reputation, and your reputation is everything. Can you keep your word? Can you be who you say that you are? Can you represent yourself in a worthwhile way, and do and post things online in a way that you’d want to be proud of, rather than hiding behind a secret identity and hoping no one finds out?

I know I’m moralizing here, and I know this could come back around in my face. Maybe someday in the future, I’ll be put in just such a situation where I think it’s easier to hide behind a fake name rather than live up to what I say and do, and I’ll eventually get caught, and someone will come back to this post and call me a hypocrite. I’d deserve it.

And so, while I hope that doesn’t ever happen, I will agree that sometimes, you need a fake identity. To use my examples from before, Fake Steve made his fortune with his, and EA Spouse and Belle du Jour probably would have never written what they’d written if not for anonymity. Brooke Magnanti, a.k.a. Belle, said that the anonymity she used “will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.” I can’t argue with that — there are exceptions to every rule, and certainly there are times when names have to be left out if it, if not changed completely.

But I do think it’s best to try and avoid that situation if possible. Even Magnanti admits that once she came clean, it felt much better “not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about.” That’s what should keep guys like Kennedy from doing what they do — not the fear of being caught or the punishment of revelation, but the gnawing feeling that you’re failing your job as a writer to tell the truth whenever you put words down. Even the people who have to hide behind a fake name shouldn’t want to. And if you’re using a fake name to hide something you’re simply not proud of (or that you can get in trouble for doing or saying), you’ve got no excuse at all.

So Mike Schramm is my name, and hopefully everything I do and say, even online, will appear under it in the future. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this reputation going — hopefully the time won’t ever arise when I need to start up a whole new one.

Before I start writing this, I just want to thank everybody for stopping by the Incredible Podcast recording the other day — we had over 100 people show up to listen, which is more than I ever expected for the first show. Just fantastic — thanks so much for your support. We’re now over in iTunes, and we’re blazing up the charts, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. Even if you don’t plan to listen, it helps us out getting noticed and building up an audience (and we need all the help we can get, considering that this is as DIY an operation as it gets so far). Thanks!

On to today’s post:

Five Lessons Learned from Final Fantasy Tactics

Yes, one of the things I meant to talk about on the Incredible Podcast last weekend was the fact that I recently bought Final Fantasy Tactics to play on my Playstation 3. I’ve been jonesing, at various times, for a good old-school Final Fantasy game, a complicated strategy game, and a solid RPG, and FFT is supposed to be all three of those at once, so I figured I’d go back and give it a playthrough. There was only one problem: I am really, really bad at strategy games.

I don’t know what it is (and I don’t think it’s that I’m dumb, though you may disagree), but whenever video game choices get really hard and/or complicated, I stop paying attention. I do love me some Civ, and the factor with that seems to be that even though there’s a lot of things happening in that game, you’re really only making one choice at a time — you’re just moving a unit, adjusting a city, or setting a production queue. And there’s no time limit, obviously, so you can make choices as slow or as quick as you want. Real-time strategy games, however, have nothing but time limits — I just got into the Starcraft II beta tonight, and sure enough, I’m bad at it. Pressured to fight against an opponent, I can’t keep track of units and queues and tiers and all of the other things you need to keep an eye on when you’re playing that game.

But FFT (as well as the tactics genre in general) has elements of both — it’s basically turn-based, like Civ, but you are managing multiple units and queues at any given time. You need to control up to five characters on a tiled board, and you need to move them around in turns to variously attack enemies, heal themselves, or line up buff spells or other items or abilities. In short, I figured it was hard, but it was manageable. I would buy Final Fantasy Tactics, and learn how to strategize, even if it killed me.

And it turns out that I survived — after a weekend of playing the game, I think I have a pretty good grasp on how things work. It took me a lot of lost battles, and a lot of resetting the game, but at this point, I can survive almost anything. I’m still not great at the game — I can’t walk into a new battle and rock it unless I get really lucky — but even if things go wrong during one of the battles, I can make the right moves, use the right items and abilities, and make it out alive.

So I figured, since I spent last weekend learning as much about myself as I did about this game, that I would share some of the wisdom I gained with you. Here’s five things I learned from Final Fantasy Tactics.

1. Attacking is not always the right thing to do. Most of the winning conditions in this game are to “kill all the enemies,” so you’d think that diving in and taking them all out would be the way to go. But not at all — there are lots and lots of times in the game when it’s much wiser to make a move that doesn’t hurt the enemy. That was one of the things I learned right away — while I would see a wounded enemy and think that all I had to do to win was walk up and attack, that attack would miss, the enemy would return fire, and all of a sudden I’d be the one in danger. Once I wrapped my head around the idea that it was always better to consider my options before jumping into the fray, I got a lot better right away. Sure, it sounds obvious now, but lots of my early losses were because I went on the offensive way before I should have.

2. Let them come to you. This is a corollary to the first lesson. On some of the levels, you can see that there are actually waves of enemies — there are multiple groups of powerful, slow enemies that you’re meant to take on one group at a time, because as you’re fighting the first group, the other group will slowly be making its way toward you. If you attacked both at the same time, you’d be overwhelmed, but being patient and using the extra movement time can get you the win. Even on levels where there’s just one group, it’s almost always better to wait and buff up as the enemy comes to you rather than rush out there yourself. Allowing the enemy to try and move in first tends to put you in a much better position to react and return fire.

3. Heal up when you can. This was the other big thing I learned right away — healing makes the difference in a tactics game, because very often, your enemies don’t heal at all. So any time you can take a breather and heal up, you should probably take it. In all of the battles I’ve fought so far, there is no time limit, so taking an extra turn to finish the fight isn’t a problem (I’m sure there will be limits in the future, but first things first). Even if a character is only down a few points, those points could make the difference the next time they get attacked, so use the heal spell first, and then go in for the kill.

4. Strengths on strengths. This is actually something I learned before FFT (in other games, actually), but it’s especially applicable to a game like this: stacking strengths is often better than spreading yourself around. Especially in the case of a game where you have multiple characters with various roles, it’s better to buff up a knight’s strength with his armor and give him the sword that does extra damage (and maybe even throw a strength buff in there, too). Weaknesses are something to keep an eye on, but you can usually take care of weaknesses with other character’s strengths, so stacking in one direction as much as possible is usually more helpful.

5. Read the manual. For most of my life, I wasn’t a guy that reads manuals — whenever I got a new device or a new game, I just flipped it on and poked around until I found what I wanted. But for really complicated systems and games, I’ve learned that it pays to start at the beginning and read to the end. It takes much less time and effort to read the manual than to figure it out yourself or fix a mistake you’d otherwise make. Again, that sounds obvious to you, dear reader, because you’re smart. But it wasn’t until more recently that I figured out that’s the right thing to do, and going through the whole FFT manual and tutorial helped out a lot.

I’ve probably lost most of you by now — “Seriously Mike, you had that much trouble just playing a game?” And it’s not that I had trouble — until this weekend, I’d pick up a tactics game, play it for a few minutes, realize it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and move on. But last weekend I sat down to conquer this complicated genre, and I really feel like I did. I’m about halfway done with the game now, and I already have my eye on Disgaea 3. I’m starting to see patterns in the gameplay, and as you’ve probably already figured out from this post, parallels in my life. By conquering this game, I feel like I’ve built up some new pathways in thinking, some new talents that weren’t developed before. By figuring out FFT, I’ve figured out another part of my life, and I feel like I’ve already been rewarded for it.

All that for $10 on PSN. Good deal.

I don’t do too much self promotion on this site — I figure that if you’re here, you already know me and what I do. But the reason I haven’t posted here much this week and last is because I’ve been pretty busy working on the other sites I work on, and there have been a lot of cool things I’ve done you may not have seen. So just in case you missed something, here’s some great posts I’ve done on Joystiq and TUAW lately:

• I did a lot of fun stuff at Macworld last week — I played with the Parrot AR.Drone in this video (for the post that got my first front-page placement on Digg of the week), and wrote a hands-on here.
• I also did a lot of great interviews at Macworld: I talked to the great Telltale Games both in text and on video, Dr. Ge Wang of Smule, and Andrew Gregory of Autotune the News (you may remember my first conversation with him and his brothers on the first episode of The Modern World).
• I also talked to Heroes star Greg Grunberg on the red carpet at an EA event this week. He showed me his favorite iPhone games, good guy.
• I shot this video of an iPad mockup at Macworld, and as I was shooting it, I guaranteed to my co-workers that it would get on the front page of Digg, and sure enough, it did.
• And this little post about conservatives bringing in a younger audience with video games also got Dugg. That’s three Diggs in one week, not too shabby.
• Finally, this post about Noby Noby Boy on the iPhone wasn’t super popular or anything, but I really liked writing it.

Pretty good week’s worth of work, if you ask me. I’ve also been working on a brand new podcast with my friend Mark “Turpster” Turpin, and you can find the site we set up this week (well, he set it up, I only did some of the background things) over at IncrediblePodcast.com. If you are a fan of our work on the WoW Insider Show, you will want to listen for sure, and even if you don’t play WoW but want to hear me talk about things with a really funny guy, you should tune in and check it out. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I’m making the mistake yet again of apologizing for not posting on my blog, but I apologize for not posting on my blog. After a week’s worth of work like this, I end up out of ideas at the end of the day, and neither of us have any fun if I sit in front of a blank screen for an hour before closing it angrily and going to bed. I will try to think original thoughts over the weekend, and write them down for you all next week. Thanks for reading.

This Sunday, 1pm. Be there, and by there, I mean here — I’ll have a link to our Ustream page by then.

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve found interesting in the World of Warcraft this past week (actually two, since I was at Macworld and busy last week):

• Sex advice from World of Warcraft players. This is silly, but what it showed me more than anything is that “Warcraft players” is a huge group of people. Giving them advice about anything, from spec builds to sex positions, is a tough thing to do, just because there are so many different kinds of people in the group that they’re tough to box up.
• Blizzard announced today that they’ve given $1.1 million to the Make-a-Wish foundation thanks to the sales of the Pandaren in-game pets, and my friend at the OC (don’t call it that) Register was on the scene. Apparently Samwise was drawing characters for one of the MaW kids (awesome!) and they had a big check and everything. Plus, though I could have only told you about Ezra, Blizzard has actually hosted eight different Make-a-Wish kids. Good for them. The cynical side of me wonders what they could have done if they had donated all of the earnings from the Pandaren to charity (instead of just the half), but that’s just the cynical side. Also, boggle at the fact that over 220,000 players bought the Pandaren, one of only two pets to show up on the store that day. Just think what they’ll do with these. Blizzard has yet another money printing press, and it doesn’t even require them to develop a game.
• Pike is the latest WoW blogger to let the account lapse. I still have my account (though I’ve been too busy to play over the past week or so), and I’m not going anywhere, but we are definitely moving into the hibernation period of the game, with all of the Wrath content out and competitors like Star Trek Online (and even Starcraft II, which opened up a private beta today) knocking at the door. I’m too good at hedging my bets to call it quits, but I will say that Cataclysm represents a big challenge for WoW. Their goal will be to get WoW players who’ve quit once or twice already interested in the game yet again, and the fact that most of their new content will be revamped versions of old content will be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, maybe people who actually miss the Barrens will find new things to do there again. But on the other hand, who actually misses the Barrens?
• Turns out Blizzard is splitting up with Upper Deck. Lots of people are saying that this has something to do with the Yu-Gi-Oh thing, but really, I’m sure it has more to do with sales and interest — even at GenCon last year, interest in the WoW TCG was way down, and they were even canceling events at the end of 2009. I don’t think Blizzard will start it all up again with a new vendor, though — I think, from the rumors I’ve heard for a while, that they’ll start it up in a completely new way. Probably not one involving a separate company, or those pesky actual paper cards…
• Larisa wrote a post about Blizzard’s guild program, and her guesses are true: the whole thing is super shady. There’s way more interaction between developers and the top guilds in the game than most people realize. The developers have multiple tools to watch and see what’s going on in the game’s dungeons, and so when they see anything strange or interesting, odds are that they’re either there in an invisible (or even visible) form, or looking through the many logs that Blizzard keeps about what’s happening on the servers. I’ve heard stories from the developers about how on the night after a patch release, all they do is follow guilds through the content, taking notes on what they’re doing and what should be fixed. On a 25-man raid the night after a given release, it’s very likely that you’ve got 5-10 folks on Blizzard campus right there in the raid following along with you. The other reason it’s shady is that communication goes both ways — I won’t say these high level guilds are cheating on the live servers (at least not any more — there was a time when Blizzard would provide server transfers and character re-customization to free to some high level guilds, even before the public could do that for pay), but on the test servers, anything goes. And Blizzard is running any number of test or mirror or special event servers at any given time, not just the ones we see when we log into the test realms.
• These are great.
• You’ve all seen this, right? The lyrics are iffy, but I love the camera work and the voices. Very well done.

And that’s all I got for now — there are about 500 more posts sitting in my RSS reader about Warcraft, but I don’t have time to sift through two weeks of stuff at the moment. Stay tuned on Sunday though — we will discuss WoW and lots of other things. If you have something you want to us to answer, discuss, or make fun of, please do email me about it!

I know, I know, I am neglecting my duties here. I have a few different bits of pressure on me lately, some of which I can’t go into, but I will say that I got a little cold, along with a lot of experience, during my trip to San Francisco last week, so I don’t have all the energy to put into writing something good. Or even something, really — you readers know I don’t always even shoot for “good” on this site anyway.

I guess the most momentous thing that has happened to me lately is that I won my bowling league. Well I didn’t win — we did. Two other nice folks and I (who had never met before — we got teamed up together at the start of the league about three months ago) somehow picked up the most points in the league overall, and so earlier this week we were awarded the biggest trophies they had, along with a little magnet that says “USBC league champion.” We did this mostly by having a great handicap — I’m not sure how exactly a handicap makes the game fair, but the way it works is that you’re awarded a number of extra points per week depending on your average, so that lower scoring players are evened out with those who have more experience. My math is terrible, but I guess we were the lowest scoring players of all, so we won.

No, I’m joking, we did pretty well. But most of our victories were simply victories against our average, not actually victories against the other teams. On the last week, we had to win only one point, and on the last of three games that night, I just happened to score 30 points above my average, securing us the victory. It was fun to win, but my biggest worry was actually not celebrating all that much — the other team bowled really well, and we only beat them because of our handicaps.

But just as I didn’t want to be a poor sport by celebrating too much, I also didn’t want to be a poor sport by refusing a victory, so I took the trophy home. It’s quite an accomplishment for me — as I twittered last week, I don’t think I’ve ever actually won at anything even remotely athletic. I’ve competed and accomplished things requiring physical prowess before (and now that I think about it, I guess I’ve contributed to team victories). But winning? Not usually my thing.

And apparently it didn’t appeal to me too much — after much deliberation, I finally told our league organizer and my teammates this past week that I wouldn’t be back during the next bowling league season. I joke about retiring as all-time champion (and certainly it’s probably more fun, if not very sporting, to go out on a win), but really I just want to try something else. Sure, I joined the bowling league to meet people, and I did meet a lot of nice people, but really I just joined a bowling league because I’d never joined a bowling league before. And now, I have — next season wouldn’t be quite as original.

I’d rather do something else — I’m thinking that I’ll take a class of some kind, either an improv or acting class, or a cooking class. I’ve been meaning to learn about wines for a while, maybe I’ll do that.

Maybe I’ll even win a trophy.

Hey folks. Sorry I didn’t get a video up this weekend — my Saturday consisted of me running errands, and my Sunday consisted of making some food and watching the Super Bowl with my family, so I didn’t really do anything that you’d want to watch.

I’m really looking forward to this week: tonight is the last night of my bowling league, and the way I see it, we only have to win one game out of three tonight to win the whole thing. So hopefully we’ll be able to pull that off. After that, I’m racing home and packing up for my first trip ever to San Francisco. I’ve never been up there before, and I’m driving up the tomorrow morning.

I’m going up there to cover Macworld for TUAW. I’m not sure what to expect at all. I’ve been to many conferences before, and I’ve covered almost as many as I’ve been to, but I’ve never been to a Macworld before, and I’ve never worked with the TUAW team. This one should be interesting — it’s a weird year for Macworld (Apple isn’t actually there, long story), but TUAW is going all out. We’ll be livestreaming video and posting coverage nonstop on our official Macworld page, so keep an eye there this week if you’re interested in Apple computers and iPhones, and you’ll probably see me doing some interviews and demos.

Other than that, it’s always fun to meet new people at a convention (and to hit up all of the PR parties in the evenings). Posting here may be slim, but I’ll try to keep you in mind, dear mikeschramm.com readers, and maybe get a picture or a little text your way when I can. I’ll be back to full steam here next week.

Thanks as always for reading. Hope your week is as good as I think mine will be!

I took a break from reading A General Theory of Love to read World War Z, but now I’m back on the emotional psychology, and it’s just as interesting as it was earlier. The part of the book I’m reading is talking all about memory, and the role it plays in emotions, and the point that they make is that there is no emotion without memory. We only have feelings for others because we remember them, and it’s that memory, that continuity of feelings and senses and thoughts, that makes up our emotions and relationships.

Pretty interesting stuff. In one sense, it’s awfully freeing — we are constantly creating memories, and constantly taking in what we see and comparing it to what we’ve seen before. The book talks about how we actually remember things, and says that we’re not only explicitly learning things (“1+1=2,” and all of the other things you remember from school), but that we’re constantly and unconsciously implicitly learning how the world works around us. Whether it’s a brand new video game that you’re deciphering the rules to, or a new person that you’ve met multiple times, we’re constantly unconsciously picking up cues and storing them away. You learn that if Mario eats that flower, he can throw fire, or that the person you just met also used to be really into Tori Amos, and millions of other little ideas and facts and even wordless emotions that we’re storing away for a future time.

That’s pretty impressive — we’re all doing that, all the time. When you think of just how incredible and powerful our minds all are, and that we’re feeding each other information and emotional feedback in concert all the time, you start to get a big picture view of just why humanity is so strange and so wild and so amazing.

But memory is also a chain. As much as it tells us, both about ourselves and the world around us, it also ties us down into what we’ve known before. If every time you touch a hot stove, you get hurt, you’ll remember not to touch the stove again. But what if it’s a coincidence that the few times you touched the stove, it was hot? What if the cues you get, and the things you learn, are wrong? We’d never know — everything we know and feel comes from our own memories, and even in the face of absolute clear reason, our memories are what dictate our actions and emotions.

The book doesn’t talk much about this yet (and maybe it will — I haven’t finished it), but I had a memory float up from the murk today that came unbidden, that just rose up in my head unrequested, spawned by something random that I saw or happened to come across. And once it was there, I couldn’t get it out.

My life has changed a lot lately. But then I again I guess that’s what happens when you live long enough — I also read today that as you get older, time means less because you’ve lived through more of it. Nevertheless, I thought maybe that I was a completely different person, that the now was what mattered, and that the before didn’t affect me, wasn’t really a part of me any more.

But of course it was. One memory, and it was all back — the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same emotions and oft-traveled mental ground. Our memories can help us learn all kinds of new things, and they serve (well) as our compiled realms of knowledge, vast libraries of storage about all we’ve seen and all we know so far. But man, they are powerful in the other direction, too. One thought, hidden away for years, can set us right back into old thinking and patterns.

• There’s a rumor going around that BlizzCon is being held in Anaheim later this year, which is probably true, but as I’ve always said, there is no BlizzCon until Blizzard says so. Everything I’ve seen of that event is that Blizzard does it both as a favor and an afterthought for the community — they lose money on it, they don’t waste time planning anything for it until a few weeks ahead of time, and when the time actually comes to host it, it’s completely barebones. They pay to outsource most of the work, and/or they use call center employees as volunteers for most of the staff members. If there is another BlizzCon, I’ll be there — they’re a great time, and it’s awesome to see all of the community people in person. But all of this worrying over whether there will be another one or not, or where it will be, is much ado over nothing. There is no BlizzCon until Blizzard decides so.
• On the other hand, Blizzard did reveal this week that they’re planning on integrating the Auction House into the Armory (in both its online and mobile incarnations) in a “premium” way. Now that is fascinating — obviously we’ve wanted to have an iPhone app that accesses mail or the AH for a long time, but the fact that they’re going “premium” (which is a code word for they’re charging) is new. I wonder how much they’ll charge — I can’t imagine it would be more than 99 cents or so, maybe up to a maximum of $5 if they’re offering some serious functionality, meaning something like access to the inventory, ways to schedule auctions, and so on. I would never buy any virtual goods with real cash, but I would spend some real money on real functionality, and creating a market for mobile apps under the Blizzard banner could be a cottage industry. A mobile Battle.net chat client would probably sell, as would an online minigame for Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 that affected the main game in some way. And while free apps would have to justify their existence (to take away from development time, and so on), paid apps fund themselves. Very interesting. We’ll have to see what Blizzard offers.
• Oh, and the Lich King is dead, but I don’t care. I’m not sure why — Arthas was a pretty epic storyline. But the ending, spoiled by that cinematic that leaked out, feels cheap somehow. It’s funny — at this point, Blizzard must realize that there’s a flip side to including epic cinematics in their games. On the one hand, they want to have epic events feel epic, and putting together a cinematic is a good way to do that. Obviously, they’ve invested a lot in a team that will help them do that often. On the other hand, cinematics are very easily extracted and leaked out on to YouTube, which means that the most epic events in the expansion were seen by everyone even before the patch finished installing for most of us. I wonder if they’re trying to think of another way to keep epic lore epic (seen by only those who’ve unlocked the moments in-game), or if they’re already programming cinematics in expecting that they’ll be seen by everyone when the patch drops.
• Now that Arthas is dead, of course, we can probably expect the usual post-expansion valley of interest, at least until Cataclysm fever really takes off in a few months. Don’t forget my prediction, though: I still think we’ll have a full content patch (rep, daily quests, instances) worth of world event material to bring on the Cataclysm with. I don’t think Blizzard will let us sit around for long before some serious Cataclysm happenings start up in the actual game.
• In game, I’m still mostly just doing random pickup groups, and I’ve found, like Gevlon and Rohan, that groups are extraordinarily patient. I’ve tried to start some group kicks, and I haven’t been kicked myself (yet), but I’ve found that it’s very hard to get anyone kicked for underperforming or even being a pain. That’s probably a good thing — I know I’m often underperforming, and I’m probably a pain as well — but it’s interesting. For all of their reputation about WoW players being jerks to each other, when it comes to random in-game groups, people are actually pretty forgiving. Either that, or they just don’t want to wait for another tank to come through the system and get ready and buffed.
• Some excellent Warcraft wallpapers over here.
• Zath (whoever that is) is running a competition for some WoW gear, and I think all I have to do is mention the contest on my blog. So there you go. If I win, I’ll give the prize away here.
• This is a good question — Blizzard doesn’t always (well, hasn’t ever, actually) made it clear what symbols and flashes and spell sounds are which. Of course, there is a graphic and/or a sound for every single spell, and if you play WoW a lot (which, if you play WoW, is probably how you play it), you can just listen to a raid and hear the rogue hitting their cooldowns, the mage casting their fireballs, and the shaman spitting out Chain Heal. But for players who don’t play (or raid) as often, I wonder if there’s any way to make that a little easier. It might be interesting to see a wiki or something (or a part of WoWWiki) that matches up spell animations and sounds with the spells themselves, sort of a quick reference guide for what kinds of casting are going on.
• Finally, here are some Healthstone soaps. They look like they smell terrific. If you know what I mean.

That’s it! Until next week, happy Warcraft-ing!

Sorry, I’ve been busy this evening — I watched Groundhog Day to celebrate, and then I saw the Lost premiere (which I’d like to write about, but which I don’t want to spoil for anyone, so I’ll wait). And now, it’s late already, and I’m too tired to write anything.

Instead, enjoy this rap about the movie Aliens.

The Grammys were last night, and there are lots and lots of food trucks in LA that I’ve been meaning to try. Can you tell which is which?

1. Vesuvio

2. Hot N Cold

3. Let’s Be Frank

4. Marked 5

5. Ego

6. Twang

7. Nom Nom

8. Pretty Wings

9. Umami

10. White Horse

Food trucks: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9
Grammy winners: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10

I started this jokey series a ways back, and I don’t think it actually ever made anyone but me laugh, but really, that’s all I need.

It is 1901, and a new century brings with it many marvels of technology and wonder! Throughout the Earth, certain individuals are making vast steps both forwards and backwards in time, both unlocking the secrets of the past and slowly unraveling even the most mysterious mysteries of the future! First among these is one PROFESSOR INTELLIGENT, who with his assistant TIMMY, is currently researching the secrets of ancient Egypt, finding items one would never expect among long-buried treasures and tombs of yore!

But we’ll return to the current adventures of our dangerous duo in just one moment. First, we set our scene in darkness. But only relative darkness, as, slowly, a torch of yellow light emerges in the background. We are in a cavernous hallway, one surrounded by what is clearly manmade stone, yet covered in dust and dirt that only years of inactivity can place. Two men appear in the darkness, one holding a torch — they appear to be Turkish in origin, and they speak a strange language, one of many from around the ancient Mediterranean rim.

Still, their gestures and intonations reveal their intentions: they are planning an ambush! One signals behind a statue on one side of the chamber, and the other signals farther back down the hallway. As the two strange men from the Near East move to their appointed hiding places, a worry may cross your mind. Who are these two Turks planning to ambush? Could it be our own Professor Impossible and his trusty entourage? And if so, what could our intrepid hero do?

But worry not, young reader — our man has many talents, and among them is certainly the ability to see trouble coming! Worry not one bit, for we shall see what lies ahead for the good Professor.

And on that note, look! Near the far end of the ceiling of the hallway, there is suddenly a movement, a shuffling of rock and stone! Suddenly, light from above pushes through, and then, a shape falls to the ground below.

“Auggh,” says PROFESSOR INTELLIGENT as he falls into a heap on the floor, and then stops moving.

Another person jumps down from above, and lands deftly, and then another person arrives in the now torchlit chamber. It is, of course TIMMY! And our friend INSPECTOR MILLIBANK from Scotland Yard in London!

“I’m sure glad you decided to come along with us from London, Inspector!” says Timmy. “You never know when or where we might find ne’er-do-wells, even in an ancient tomb of an old pharaoh!”

“Think not of it,” answers the Inspector. “The professor has answered my call many a time, it was only prudent that I answer his! Speaking of, is he alright? He hasn’t moved since he got down here.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s just examining something closely on the floor.” Timmy says, kneeling down to pat the face-down Professor on his back. “What is it, Professor? What did you find?”

“Euggh,” says the Professor, who rolls over on his side. “What the gell just happened?”

“I’m sorry,” says the Inspector, “did he just say gell?”

“Oh no,” Timmy exclaims, “it must be a curse! A curse from the ancient tomb!”

“No, you idio-uggggh,” answers the Professor. “My head is killing me, I can’t see straight. I think I’ve got a conduss — a concussion. I landed on my head after falling through the floor up there.”

“Fight it, professor!” Timmy exclaims. “We’ve got to keep moving ahead! We’re almost to the tomb!”

“Afraid not, gents,” says one of the Turkish men in a rough accent, stepping out from behind the shadows. “This is the end of your line.”

“We’ve got orders,” says the other, appearing at the end of the corridor from his own hiding place brandishing a pistol in his hand. “Hands in the air!”

Inspector Millibank appears to survey the situation, looking for an advantage to fight from, and then resigns and raises his hands in the air. Timmy does the same, but the professor remains on the floor, rubbing his head and looking a little woozy.

“Did you hear what we said?” says one of the Turks. “Get up! Hands in the air!” To prove his mettle, he fires the pistol at the ground near our professor, and the gunshot echoes throughout the underground cavern. The Inspector and Timmy cover their ears in pain momentarily and then put their hands back up in the air as quickly as possible.

“Jesus!” says the professor. “We didn’t even know you guys were down here. I’ve got to go to hospital, anyway, I think.” he says, stumbling a little as he tries to stand. He touches his head and then checks his hand. “Is that blood? Damnit!”

“No one going anywhere,” says one of the Turks as he checks Millibank for weapons and pulls a second pistol from within Millibank’s coat. “Not until boss arrives.”

“Boss?” says Timmy. “But you don’t mean that it’s… ” Timmy trails off in fear.

“He surely does, Timmy,” says the Inspector with a growl. “Only one villian is dastardly enough to solve the riddle and arrive in the tomb before the great Professor Intelligent. Their boss must be…” he says, with a final pause before dramatic effect.

“Look, I think I’m really bleeding here,” says Professor Intelligent. “It’s starting to get on my coat. Oh god, and who knows what kind of fungus is growing down here? This can’t be safe.”

“Dr. Vile!” say both Timmy and the Inspector in a fright.

“The one and only,” says the evil Dr. Vile, emerging from the end of the chamber with a twirl of his mustache and a grin to match his name.

“All right,” says the Professor. “That’s it, then. Look, I don’t know what’s going on — last I remember, I was drinking in some bar, and the next thing I know the kid and the cop are dragging me around some dark temple place. I just want to go and get some medical care and hopefully some painkillers. I know you always have some plan going on, and really, that’s fine by me, let’s just –”

“ENOUGH!” shouts the terrible Dr. Vile, and motions to his two minions to grab some nearby rope and tie up our three adventurers. “You’ve tangled with me for the last time, Professor Intelligent! I knew that if you were in Cairo, you wouldn’t be able to avoid the mystery of the Tomb of Imhotep!”

“You mean you solved the Riddle of the Sphinx too?” exclaims Timmy, now tied up with the Professor and Inspector Millibank. “You found the golden feline and replaced it in the Emperor’s harem before dawn on the day of reckoning!”

“Look,” says the professor, “I don’t know where he gets this stuff, seriously. I think he just makes it up. We can go, it’s fine.”

“I did!” shouts Dr. Vile, twirling his mustache even more menacingly. “I made plans to arrive here even before you did, and ambush you myself! And now you’ll be able to see my final triumph!”

“No!” shouts Timmy. “Professor, he’s found the Ancient Chalice of Imhotep!”

“Seriously?” asks the professor with exasperation. “Is that a real thing? Where are you getting this stuff? Millibank, do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

“No, sir,” says Inspector Millibank faithfully, “but then again you’re usually the one who solves all of the mysteries.”

“See, Vile?” sighs the professor. “This is what I’m dealing with. I don’t care what you do or what you have wired to explode or whatever. Just let us go.”

“Silence!” retorts Vile. “I… actually do have this whole place wired to explode. I’m surprised you saw through that part of my plan!” The two Turks exchange looks of slight alarm.

“Are you kidding?” asks the professor. “You always have something you want to blow up or — look, seriously, I don’t care. I’m bleeding here. Just let us go.”

“Never! Now that my plan is almost complete, I can tell you: I’m going to drink from the chalice! And then I’m going to blow this whole tomb sky high!”

“But, you’ll kill us all!” cries Millibank.

“All of us, Inspector,” says Timmy. “But not him — he’s got the chalice!”

“Exactly right, Timmy,” replies the evil doctor, and pulls a golden chalice from beneath his scientist’s coat. “I will drink from the chalice, and earn eternal life! You’ll all be blown to bits, but I will survive!”

“No!” cries Timmy. “Professor! We’ve got to stop him.”

“Ah, you stop him, you little snot. I think — I think I’m losing consciousness,” the professor replies, his eyes slowly closing into what must surely be deep thought about their current predicament.

“Now,” Dr. Vile speaks, “I will drink, and live forever! Turks, light the explosives!”

The Turks look at each other, and then at Dr. Vile. One of them speaks: “We do not think so, effendi.”

Dr. Vile is incredulous. “What!? Do as I say! Obey your master.”

“We will help you find your treasure,” says one of the Turks. “But drinking from the chalice must not be done.” They advance on the doctor.

“Professor, wake up!” whispers Timmy. “I think something is happening!”

The Doctor makes a desperate move to sip from the chalice, but one of the Turks is on him like a flash, knocking the cup from his hand and spilling its liquid on the tomb’s floor. The other moves quicker than lightning across the desert sky, and soon the Doctor is vanquished, unconscious on the rough stone.

“Professor, you did it!” says Timmy, and Millibank seems to move to protest but then shrugs. The professor says nothing, lost in thought, a little drool falling from his mouth and blood from his head wound slowly coloring his coat-collar.

“The doctor reached too far,” says one of the Turks to Timmy. “We will let you go, if only we get your word that you will stay away from the Ancient Chalice.”

“Of course!” says Timmy. “The professor seeks only knowledge, not eternal life! We’ll leave you and your tomb alone!”

“Then we will let you go,” says one of the Turks. “And we will return you safely to Cairo. But first, we best seek medical attention for your friend.”

“Uggghhhh,” says the professor as he is untied. And the great genius does not speak again until back in the haze of morphine in a Cairo hospital.

So once again the great professor has defeated the villian and saved the day! But what will become of the evil Dr. Vile? And who are the two helpful Near Easterners who assisted our hero?

Stay tuned for more of Professor Intelligent’s Thrilling Tales of Thrills!

• I actually, finally, after about two years of fishing those stupid pools on and off, got Mr. Pinchy this week. I’m surprised at myself — I didn’t accidentally click away from the loot (I did that once on the old fishing tournament), I got it within a few casts on the day I tried, and on the very first wish, I got what I wanted: the noncombat pet. Pretty amazing. That was my last big goal in WoW, so now I’m not sure what I want to do. I guess my Pally (which I haven’t been playing lately) could stand to get his epic copter and his motorcycle, so that’ll probably be what I go after next.
• Speaking of things I posted about on Twitter, it is coming. Stay tuned.
• This was an interesting question bouncing around the blogosphere: do addons make the game too easy? And if so, is that ok? When I posted that Mr. Pinchy screenshot, someone on Twitter replied back to me to point out that I’m not using any bag addons, and when I wondered why, I figured it was because I liked organizing my stuff the way the developers wanted me to, rather than having some addon do it for me. Sure, it’s a little harder, and sometimes things get lost in my bags, but in that case, I’d rather use the game’s UI. That doesn’t mean I don’t use Pally Power and Recount — in those instances, I’d rather that the game be “easier,” or at least not use up my mental awareness on the little things. But yes — those complaining that the game is too easy could probably stand to look in their addons folder and see just which parts of the game they’re bypassing with automation.
• Here’s an awesome Felhunter plush as well. I’ve been looking for some more lamps/lights for my apartment, and I’d love to find something Warcraft-related, but I haven’t see anything yet. If you do, let me know.
• I’m bummed that Ghostcrawler doesn’t seem keen on letting us use different types of ammo in different situations. I agree that if you do it the traditional way, it can make for some full bags and a lot of micromanaging. But shamans have their own UI — maybe hunters should get another set of spells or a dropdown menu somewhere to choose which “ammo” they’re using. If ammo really is going away, why not just put it in the UI? He says that there aren’t many situations where you’d need to use different ammo and that it’s too much for hunters to worry about, but I have faith that a) developers will come up with ammo different enough that there’s reason to make a choice and b) surely a dropdown menu where the ammo slot is right now wouldn’t be too much to worry about. If you’re losing ammo anyway, make it that easy, and turn up the costs for repairs on the weapons.
• There’s obviously nothing to this, but I thought it was cool that she responded.
• Finally, convention season is starting up again, and I found out this week that I’m going to get to go to GDC 2010 in March. It’ll be my first GDC, and I’m really looking forward to it. Though I’m not covering Blizzard specifically (unless they want to announce any upcoming apps for the newly-announced iPad, ahem), I’ll definitely stop by the booth and say hi, and if they happen to be showing off Cataclysm, I’ll let you know how it looks. Should be fun!

Thanks for reading, ya’ll! Hope all is well with you in the World of Warcraft. As always, if you see something cool you think I might like, feel free to email me and I’ll be happy to check it out.

Mass Effect 2 came out today, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m still playing Dragon Age. And I think I’ve figured out why.

Jonash: Hello! Welcome to the thriving city of Denerim! What can I do for you?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: What’s here in Denerim?

Jonash: Oh, lots of things! The shops are mostly in the main square, but you can find different places to go all over the city. Just be sure to stay out of the Elven Alienage — that place is a mess. Anything else I can help you with?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Who are you exactly?

Jonash: Oh my name is Jonash, I’m the blacksmith here in this part of town. My son used to help me, but, well, it’s just me lately…

• Oh no! What happened?
• Where’s your son? Can I help in some way?
• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Oh no! What happened to your son?

Jonash: Oh, he’s been rebelling against me for a while — he left about a week ago and hasn’t been back since. I would be more worried, but he’s been gone before, and at least it’s one less mouth to food. I would like to have him back, but only for the work. I don’t have enough money to hire anyone else.

• Can I help in some way?
• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Can I help in some way?

Jonash: No, not really. Unless you find him somewhere around the city. I don’t know if he’d want to come back at all, but if you do find him, I guess you could tell him that the irons need heating again.

• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Haven’t you hired another assistant?

Jonash: Wait, didn’t you hear me? I already said I didn’t have enough money to hire anyone else. Are you even listening to these answers?

• Tell me again about Denerim.
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: What’s here in Denerim?

Jonash: Seriously? Didn’t you already ask that question? Are you just clicking all of the choices so you can make sure to hear everything? I told you — Denerim is the market and a lot of other places. It’s all on your map, just go look.

• Tell me again about Denerim.
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Where can I find Brother Genetivi?

Jonash: Brother Genetivi? Never heard of him. But I believe he usually hangs out near the Chantry — which you probably would have known if you’d actually paid attention to your quest log instead of stopping by every single NPC to ask them every single question you could because video games have conditioned you to talk to everyone. No wonder this game is taking you so long. Can I help you with anything else?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.

Jonash: Sigh. I already told you everything I know, and you didn’t even have to ask me about that. Seriously, I don’t know why Bioware even bothered to record all of this dialogue — it’s completely meaningless to both of us.

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Do you have anything for sale?

Jonash: Sure, here you go. Feel free to spend five minutes sorting through all of the junk you picked up in the last dungeon, because you’re playing this game like Diablo and think that you need to save everything for vendor trash. I’m sure you’ll do the same thing at the next vendor, even though we pretty much have all the same stuff anyway. Man, you’re bad at playing this game.