Still cranky after all these years

Yesterday, I fired up the game I can’t tell you about or I’d have to kill you (there is no testing phase and I am not in it). In all fairness, the client ran pretty well, but it hitched now and then and immediately reminded me of the hitching I used to get in WAR. (No, I’m not talking about what happens when you get harpooned by a Witch Elf.)

I still haven’t logged in to the Murder Night event, though the various writeups are making it sound like good fun, because I don’t know if I can handle the client performance right now. It’s a subtle thing, and I suspect it’s different subtle things for different people, but the last thing I want to be doing is telling myself I should log on to anything. These are games; I pay a monthly sub, so Mythic gets their money whether I log in or not.* It’s entertainment, not gym class — nobody ever tells themselves they really should have a game of Scrabble, or play a bit of Monopoly. (Well, maybe Tipa does, but that’s only because she has weird and frightening voodoo Monopoly pieces.)

I guess we’re no longer just “gamers.” We now have specific game allegiances. A decade ago, if someone played EQ and I played AC, we didn’t come to blows over it even if we each thought our game was clearly superior. These days, if you admit to liking game A it’s akin to saying game B is the biggest pile of garbage ever put out. So, if you’re a game A fan, then you really ought to log in and play it. And love it. And be really LOUD about how much you love it. Blow that horn!

It’s a shame, then, that I’ve always been particularly awful about doing what I ought. The more I ought to do something, the less I want to do it, especially when it has to do with my own spare time. I think WAR has huge potential and is a fun game — I just don’t want to play it right now. And I’m pretty damn tired of having to justify that, too. Can’t we just go back to being gamers, not Game A gamers or Game B gamers, and asking each other if we’re having fun rather than trying to analyse why or what one game does better than another? (I’m not knocking analysis, we’ve done enough of it here. It’s just the direction of said endeavour.)

‘Course given the readership here, I’m probably preaching to the choir (hey you, you’re flat on that A!). But it’s off my chest for now.

* Which is debatably a bad thing for me, but in this case I’m quite happy to support the game without having to be IN the game. Hrm. That’s a possible argument in favour of the subscription model — not one that will please many gamers, I’m sure, but it appeals to me. Maybe not a $15 appeal, especially for something I don’t log in to, but I could see myself paying $5 to a game as a “supporter.” It’ll never fly, so it’s a moot point anyway.