Minecraft returns

Minecraft is Minecraft, and there's a whole internet full of people who discuss it and describe it. So I won't do that. Instead I'm going to talk about why I play it and all the other games I play with people in the wide world of internetdom.

Every so often I'll get involved with (or instigate) a bunch of people playing a game very seriously. I'm going to start with my idea on why I (and other people) do it.

Persistent online games are an opportunity to have a little world where you can have measurable progress toward defined goals. How many bars are you away from the next experience level? What life percentage did you get the Lich King down to before he inevitably devoured your souls for the fourth night in a row?

Real life has no achievements and no progress bars- contemplating the world as a massive game where one could potentially reach the highest levels of accomplishment is a dangerous contemplation. You don't know your class, you don't know your level, and you can't look at any objective metrics of success or completion. Class balance regarding whether the Banker is exploiting unintended player-built game mechanics and the Mystic Practitioner is generally well-tuned but needs more incentives to engage in large-scale multiplayer modes is not a conversation you can have with the developers, and most importantly, you (simulationism aside) can't decide to reroll and try another game mode. We play games because they condense a life experience and let us make long-term memories over short-term time commitments.

Topics, as a species, are hard to stay on. We should probably give up on domesticating them as beasts of burden.

Anyway, to skip ahead a few box cars in the train of thought because I don't feel like writing more analytical paragraphs about why people game, we have a new minecraft server, and I've been playing a lot of it, and as soon as Felix gets nether portals working I'm going to build a horrific arcane tower in the middle of the desert, surrounded in devious traps made of cacti, dynamite, and geographically-anomalous snow golems, which can only be accessed by tunneling through Hell.

It's not World of Warcraft, and it's not League of Legends, and it's what we want right now.

another drawing

My willpower made a deal with my incorrigible uselessness today. In exchange for being allowed a white russian to wash down my incredibly spicy Thai food (Twitch ordered the food specifically with the request "make us cry") I would create and post some piece of art to the internet. So here I am. Once again it's D&D character sketch time. It's not that I always play ladies... it's just that I enjoy drawing them more, I think.

[edit 2 minutes later] I looked at the posting I just made, and realized my new snake-blooded (third generation medusa) sorceress takes up a lot of vertical space, while the one lonely paragraph above does not. So let me tell you about the "willpower" with which I have made the aforementioned deal. Impossible, you say. Me? Willpower? And this skepticism is well-founded: willpower and discipline have as much chance of turning up in my life as unexplained cases of hundred dollar bills. There are even days when I think these two scarcities are related!

Anyway.

I've been reading a book by Roy Baumeister, a researcher whose stuff I read back in undergraduate Vassarland. He has very interesting things to say about willpower, which are better summarized in the amazon link I just embedded than they will be here. On the practical side, it means that I now spend a lot of time during my day willing myself to do meaningless things, and because of it I seem to be better able to will myself to do less meaningless things. Someday I may even work my way up to meaningful things, but I'm trying not to get ahead of myself. Drawing impractically-breasted sorceresses and preventing internal Thai-induced hemorrhaging of the stomach is about my limit right now. Realistic goals and all.

I'm watching the Occupy Boston livefeed, and the announcement just came that the camp isn't being cleared tonight. If my bike was functioning, I'd like to think I'd be out there. Realistically though, I suspect I would find another excuse. I'll continue my donations, my membership in organizations that forward the cause, and my limited social media support, but god damn I don't like being in large groups of people. I've spent maybe a total of twelve hours in the camp, and I am just amazingly bad at it. Maybe that willpower thing will come around someday. The people standing out there in the camp blocking the police from clearing the occupation out are mighty, glorious beasts. Thanks internet, and thanks fellow humans. The future will be awesome, and I love everyone who's helping it get there sooner.

Ha. Vertical space filled. Take that, enormous picture.