Time and Community

Well, it happened to me again this week.

I was in Target picking up an HDMI cable when I noticed a family standing in the software aisle. The teenage son is showing his mother a copy of Portal. She is dubious, he is insistent.

"It's a good game." I tell them. "Should have been game of the year last year." (Yeah, I know. Two years ago now. But I digress.)

"You know about this!" the son asks me incredulously.

"Oh yeah." I tell him. "Played it when it came out. What, us guys over 40 aren't supposed to play games?"

"No." he said. "I mean, yeah! I mean..." he stops, flustered.

I assure him it is a good game and he asks me about its puzzle difficulty then chases me down a few minutes later to ask about Steam activation. He wanders off and I think about this blog, which I see I haven't updated in... seven months? Wow. Where does the time go?

As I have said before one of the biggest challenges facing me as a PaleoGamer is time. As we get older it seems we have more and more demands on our time. Work. Family. Friends. Other interests. The things you have to do to take care of a house. All of these cut into the time we have available.

Since I last posted here back in July I have played exactly 6 games. I finally finished The Witcher (which is what I was playing at the time of the last post). The new expanded content has come out but I haven't even downloaded it yet. I then played Spore for a while and got a couple of critter species up to the galactic stage but never got much beyond that.

I then picked up Mass Effect (only a year after it came out) and finished it, then bought and finished Fallout 3. I grabbed Left 4 Dead during the year-end Steam sale and played through its single-player campaigns and am now working my way through Far Cry 2.

Six games in seven months. And technically I haven't finished two of them. That's not a lot.

What's bad is that I keep buying more games even though I don't have the time to play the ones I already have. I even picked up an Xbox 360 earlier this year just to be able to play games on it. I have five or six titles for it that I've looked at but am nowhere near finishing any of them. (OK, part of this is figuring out how to get the TV away from my wife, but still.)

So why am I buying games when I've got a few dozen already waiting at home? I blame the Internet.

I'm active in several on-line communities, all of which discuss games to some extent or another. As a Gamer, I want to be able to participate in these discussions. So I buy games I am interested in when they come out, thinking that I'll be able to play this one and so be able to participate in the community discussion about them. Of course I never do and when I do finish the game a month or so later I go to the forums or the blogs and start to talk about whatever I have just finished only to find that the discussion has moved on. I may get a "yeah, that was a good game" when I try to resurrect the weeks-dead discussion thread on the game but that is about it.

As I said in that earlier blog post, everything is more fun when it is a shared experience. Even when playing a single-player game we like to be able to talk to other gamers about it to compare notes, strategies, opinions, impressions or just how fast we were able to defeat the evil wizard Foozle at the end. Communities are important and shared experiences and interests are what make communities. And so it is hard to be a part of a community when you are only in sync with it for a brief time before it moves on and leaves you behind.

This is one of the frustrations about being a PaleoGamer. When I finished Mass Effect last month I wanted to talk to someone about it to see how their reactions compared to mine, but I quickly discovered that no one was really interested anymore. What was fresh and new to me was old news to them. Sometimes I am able to stay up with the crowd; I blazed through Fallout 3 with everyone else. But more often than not I find myself in well-trodden ground; unable to contribute anything that had not already been discussed to death months before.

And ironically, being actively involved in the discussion takes even more time away from gaming. Some evenings I can talk about gaming or I can actually game. There is rarely time to do both.

On the other hand, it isn't always us PaleoGamers who are late to the discussion. After all, just two days ago I ran into someone who was just discovering Portal.

So when someone suddenly posts in that old thread (or in that long-inactive blog) don't dismiss them without a thought. Yeah, they've just discovered something you've known about for a while, but the magic is still there for them. And who knows, maybe they have found something you missed. Even the ones in the back of the pack are still part of the race.

The Illusion of Choice

In my last few posts I have been talking about stories in games and how the best games have stories that follow the classic, epic pattern of the Hero's Journey. The downside to this is that, despite being the "hero" of the story, as players we aren't really telling our stories. Instead, we are simply actors in someone else's story; improvisational actors in an outline created by someone else.

Several people have given me examples of games that do allow you to affect the story. I agree that there has been some progress made in that direction, but in reality the effect of your actions is still fairly minimal. The story remains the same and your effect on that story is only an illusion.

Many games have no choices at all, the Half-Life series for example. The most control you have over the story in Half-Life is choosing what weapon to use in a given encounter. There aren't even any side branches or side quests to become involved in. You either proceed along a fixed route while killing enemies as you meet them or you simply stand around until you get bored. Just an actor following the script.

Other games give you some choices but in the end they become meaningless. Most RPGs for example let you take on various quests in any order and allow you to choose which companions accompany you on most of them. (Though even there you sometimes are forced to take certain companions on certain quests to satisfy the needs of the story.) Yeah, you can leave city "Start" and visit cities A, B and C or C, A and B, or even just C and A skipping B completely, but you are still going to wind up doing the same things in those cities and going to city "Finish" for the big, final battle. Your "choice" was nothing more than determining in which order you encountered a series of disconnected story elements.

And this can cause problems when the story tries to continue on its way even after you have gone the "wrong" way. Here is an actual example that happened to me in the Baldur's Gate series. At the beginning of Baldur's Gate you leave the starting city with your mentor who tells you that you are going north to a bar where you will meet some colleagues of his. You then immediately get attacked and he is killed.

Now, the game assumes that you will go on north to the inn anyway and pick up two companions there. Unfortunately, I decided that since we were attacked then someone knew where we were going and were waiting on us. So, I went south instead and picked up another set of companions along the way.

When I did eventually reach the inn I was either too high of a level or had too many people in my party or something. For whatever reason, the two characters simply leave the inn when you arrive without talking to you and are never seen again. Those two characters effectively never existed in my game.

Which caused a problem with Baldur's Gate II. In BGII you can import your last save game from the previous game and so continue with the same character. I did this, and the game starts you in a prison with several former party members. Including one of the two from the inn. The problem here is that the story assumes you know this character well and that she was with you during your adventures in the first game. Which she wasn't in my case.

Yes, it is easy enough to assume that "well, you met her sometime between the two games" and go on from there, but this is an example of a case where my actions should have influenced the story and didn't.

Other games tout that you will face "moral choices" and that they will affect the outcome of the game. But, do they really?

Let's take a recent example and look at Bioshock. The "moral choice" in that game really came down to deciding if you wanted to rescue the Little Sisters or if you wanted to harvest them. There was no middle ground; if you harvested even one Little Sister you got the "bad" ending and if you rescued every one you got the "good" ending. Everything else remains the same. Even Dr. Tannenbaum, who gets quite upset with you for killing her "children", continues to help you through the game. To be fair she does need you to defeat Atlas so maybe she doesn't think she has a choice in the matter. But still, at the end, no matter which choice you made you still end up in charge of Rapture. Yes, you see a different ending cinematic depending on your choice but that is it. The story told in the game remains the same. All that changes is the epilogue.

Other games have the same problem. BioWare likes to imply that you have the choice between "good" and "evil" in their games like Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect but here again your choices don't really make that much difference. Yes, you can choose to be nice to or an asshole to the characters you encounter and it does seem to affect which characters you can have in your party (or how much they complain about what you are doing) but in the end you still wind up playing the same story. Again, the actual ending may change but the story is pretty much over at that point. Only the last scene or two varies.

Overall, I am not aware of any game where your actions make a substantial change to the actual story itself. Party composition, the order of completing quests or the ending cinematic, yes. But actual, different stories based on your actions? Not so much.

And, at the moment, there probably isn't that much we can do about it. Allowing for significant deviations in a story would require that the designers create two or more storylines for every game. This would increase development time and costs to provide something that only part of the audience would ever see. How many people would actually play through the game just to see all the possible stories in there. Some certainly, but not all and probably not even most. The developers are better off creating a second game if there is a story they want to tell.

For now, we are players in a story but it is still not our story. Someday someone will develop a system that can dynamically create a truly individual story based on some set of parameters but until then we are but actors on a digital stage.

Acting as a player, or playing an actor?

Whenever you read a book or comic you are reading the story as it was created by the writer. You may picture the characters a certain way or hear them speaking in a certain voice but you are still seeing the creator's story.

Television and movies are the same way. What you see is the story as envisioned by the director and the characters as brought to life by the actors and actresses playing the roles, but again the story is that of the writer or writers of the script.

And ultimately, the story reigns supreme. Luke Skywalker fires off the "million-to-one" shot that blows up the Death Star, Gollum steals the Ring then falls into the fires of Mount Doom and James Bond will always stop the evil mastermind and get the girl. It's in the script.

Gaming lets us play the hero of a story. Instead of Luke Skywalker, we are the one who is flying down the trench with Darth Vader in hot pursuit, we are the one on the summit of Mount Doom when Gollum makes his attack and when the evil villain announces that he expects us to die, we are the ones strapped into the death machine.

But, if we are the one in the center of the action, what happens if we don't want to, or are unable to, follow the script? What happens if I, as Luke Skywalker, miss miss my shot at the reactor port? What if as Frodo I decide "to heck with this" after being attacked by Shelob and give Sam the Ring to carry while I go back to the Shire to grow pipeweed? Daniel Craig has no choice but to go after the villain; he's an actor following a script. But what if I, playing James Bond, decide to take the villain's offer of a vodka martini filled swimming pool and unlimited access to the Playboy mansion? As a gamer, am I really in control or am I just an actor following a somewhat less clearly defined script?

Some time ago I was running a (pen and paper) role-playing game scenario for a convention. In the game, the players were to be a covert team that was supposed to secretly infiltrate a facility and retrieve an incriminating document that was hidden within. The players spent the first part of the session gathering information on the security system, guards and defenses they were likely to encounter.

However, about 15 minutes into the session several of the players decided that they weren't that interested in the "covert" or "secret" parts of the mission and that the best way to approach things was to simply storm the front of the facility, guns blazing. I was caught a bit by surprise but I've run enough games that I was able to quickly shift gears, ditch the scenario I had planned and lead the players though their military assault. The scenario ended with half the facility destroyed, several city blocks in flames and the players fleeing the city (without the document they were sent to retrieve) with the local military in hot pursuit.

I could do this as a live gamemaster in a live game, but it is very difficult to handle situations like this in a computer game. While many games may boast "alternate endings" in actuality these are only minor variations on a theme; the only difference usually being which cinematic you see at the end.

While we have come a long ways from the days when having any sort of choice was a major advancement most of our actions in almost any game are still quite constrained. We may have a choice of going in the front door or the back door, we may be able to bribe the guard instead of shooting them or we may decide to use the M16 instead of the AK47, but we somehow always end up in the final showdown with the evil wizard Foozle at the top of his Tower of Doom. No matter how much we may think that Gordon Freeman should just run off to a beach somewhere with Alyx he doesn't have any choice except to pick up his crowbar and head back into the Citadel.

So it seems that the more a game has a story, the less freedom we have in our actions. Perhaps someday our games will advance to the point where our stories can take us anywhere but until then we will just have to paraphrase Shakespeare... "All the game's a stage and we are merely players..."

The Hero With a Thousand Avatars

Think back over the games you have played for a moment and think of what your strongest memories from them are. You may remember the time you defeated a particularly difficult boss or when you finally pwned your friend for the first time, but most of these memories are probably of some particular scene or event. Maybe you remember when the resonance cascade started after Gordon Freeman placed the sample in the test chamber in the original Half-Life, when Aeris fell at the hands of Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII or when Andrew Ryan handed you his golf club while asking "Would you kindly..." in Bioshock. In short, you remember a part of the story.

The first video games didn't have stories. You were a big yellow dot running around eating little white dots while evading primary colored ghosts, or you were a short, Italian plumber trying to get to the top of a tower while a giant ape threw barrels at you. There was no story (or at least just the barest trappings of one). Instead, these games were little more than exercises in hand-eye coordination.

In many ways, that is all games are today. Fundamentally, there is little difference between Master Chief shooting Covenant attackers in Halo and the unnamed ship shooting asteroids in Asteroids. Yeah, the graphics have gotten better but the basic gameplay is still evade and shoot. Hand-eye coordination. The difference is that Halo and other modern games have stories.

Tales of heroism and adventure have been with us for a very long time. One of the first recorded stories is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written over 4,000 years ago (and had probably been an oral tale before that). The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of the god-king Gilgamesh and his friend and companion Enkidu and their adventures, Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's subsequent quest for immortality. This story set a pattern that has been repeated countless times since.

American mythologist Joseph Campbell studied myths, legends and stories from around the world and through history and discovered common patterns and themes running through all of them. He wrote of his findings in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the introduction to which includes this quote:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell called this the "Monomyth" (a term he took from Karl Jung) or "The Hero's Journey". Wikipedia, in its entry for The Hero With a Thousand Faces, describes the monomyth this way:

In the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or "boon"), which often results in important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon).

Almost every story you can think of follows this pattern, from the original Epic of Gilgamesh or The Odyssey to such modern tales such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or even the recent Iron Man. Not all of these follow the pattern exactly and even Campbell admits that not all epic tales contain every step of the Hero's Journey but the vast majority of all memorable tales do.

It seems that all of us are programmed, at some fundamental level, to recognize the Hero's Journey and to respond to it. For all of recorded history, our stories have told this tale again and again. The setting, the struggle and the hero changes, but the underlying journey remains the same. The hero has a thousand faces, but only one heart.

Which brings us to modern gaming. Our games also follow this pattern. As an example, consider Half-Life 2. Gordon Freeman starts in the normal world (City 17) and receives the Call to Adventure (he meets Barney and Dr. Kleiner). He accepts the challenge (takes the HEV suit and crowbar and heads out into the city) and sets out on the Road of Trials (most of the game, actually) sometimes alone and sometimes with allies (Alex and Dog). He faces a Great Challenge (has his equipment confiscated and is then captured by Dr. Breen) but survives and receives a Great Boon (the improved Gravity Gun) which he uses to improve the world (destroying the dark energy reactor at the top of the Citadel).

This is not to say that Half-Life 2 is derivative or a rip-off of something else. Not at all. Half-Life 2 is simply following the Hero on the same Journey as every other compelling, memorable story that has been told since we first listened to a story being told around a campfire.

We have listened to, read about and watched the stories of the thousand-faced Hero for generations. But now, with gaming, one new factor has been added. We are no longer listening, reading or watching passively. Now, we are the ones leading the Heroes on their journeys.

The Hero now has a 1001st face. And that face is our own.

From Russia (more or less) With Love

While my last few blogs may make it appear that I am some sort of curmudgeon who just wants all those damn kids to stay off his LAN, I actually have been having some gaming fun. I'm currently playing several games that I am enjoying, both of which are from eastern European developers. Both came out last year so many of you may already have seen them, but I thought I would throw out my impressions anyway.


The first game occupying my time at the moment is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadows of Chernobyl by Ukrainian developer GSC Games. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person shooter set in the area around the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in an alternate time line in which a second, larger explosion at the plant has had a strange effect on the surrounding area, an area now known as "The Zone". In addition to the expected radiation, areas known as "Anomalies" have appeared where the laws of physics have been changed in strange ways. These Anomalies have created "Artifacts", objects that have been changed to have strange and unique properties.

Various groups wander the Zone. The military tries to keep the area cordoned off but may also be running some kind of strange experiments within it. Two rival groups also struggle within the area; Duty, who feel that the Zone poses a threat and that the world needs to be protected from it, and Freedom, which feels that the Zone contains discoveries that should be made available to all of mankind. There is also a group of Scientists within the Zone who are studying it.

Then, there are rumors of a group known as Monolith, who worship an alien artifact at the center of the zone.


Finally, there are individuals such as yourself known as Stalkers. Stalkers travel through the Zone looking for Artifacts to sell for profit. The Stalkers often work with or are opposed by one or more of the above groups. Additionally, they are threatened by Bandits, individuals who also want to collect Artifacts but who would rather not find them themselves but instead want to take them from the bodies of the Stalkers who found them.

You are a Stalker with no name. You were found in a wrecked vehicle; a vehicle that was carrying dead bodies from somewhere deep in the Zone. You do not know who you are or why you were in the Zone. All you know is that you were carrying a PDA that said you were on a mission to kill someone named Strelok. You must find your way though the Zone, learn how to survive, try to remember who you were and, possibly, who Strelok is and why you must kill him.

In the past I have talked about some of the problems I have with many FPS games and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. manages to avoid most of them. First, the environments are quite large and quite open. You are constrained to a certain area, but within that area you have almost total freedom of movement; there is no feeling that you are being forced along a certain path. Additionally, the areas are quite varied and interesting. There is an extremely good sense of atmosphere and there are enough places to visit and see that you do feel as if you are exploring ruins in the aftermath of a disaster.


Additionally, the game really never really forces you to follow the plot; you can follow it or ignore it as you please. There are a large number of NPCs around that you can interact with and talk to who will offer y0u side quests and the like. Or, you can just wander around and explore on your own, shooting bandits and mutant pigs to your hearts content.

The number and variety of inhabitants in the Zone is also worth mentioning. Unlike many FPS games, where it seems as if your opponents are just sitting around waiting on you, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the various NPCs all seem to be living their own lives. For example, at once point while playing I heard gunfire off to one side of the road. Heading in that direction, I saw a gunbattle proceeding between a Stalker encampment and a group of bandits. I was free to join in or ignore it as I saw fit. Later, a military patrol coming down the road saw me and started shooting. I was returning fire when a wild dog pack suddenly burst out of the bushes on one side of the road and attacked the patrol. The patrol promptly forgot about me and started attacking the dogs. One of the patrol members broke off and ran while another was torn apart by the dogs. With the distraction I was able to finish off the patrol. Incidents like this are common and really make it feel as if you are part of an actual, living world.


Combat itself is quite simple and quite deadly. However, unlike many similar games where the difficulty comes from either wave upon wave of enemies or from enemies that are impossibly accurate shots from impossible distances, the difficulty here comes from more realistic combat. Two or three shots are enough to kill almost anyone and many encounters are over in just a few seconds. The enemy AI is fairly smart; opponents will almost always attempt to take advantage of cover and I have had cases where they (or their colleagues) would attempt to flank me and catch me in crossfire. Despite the difficulty I like this more than many games with similar difficulty curves in that it feels to me as if the game is "fair"; I don't think it is artificially making things difficult for me just to make it harder.

So, if you are an FPS fan and have not played this one yet, I would suggest that you check it out. It has been out for a while so you can probably find in fairly cheap. Plus, GSC Games is releasing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Skies, the prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl later this year and you may want to play this one before it comes out. That's why I'm trying to finish it anyway.

But I hit the easy button...

OK, so it's been a while since I posted. Well, it's been a really busy month or so for me. I had a major project wrap up at work. Then my wife and I took our first vacation together in about four years (and the computer wasn't invited). Then I had to do taxes. Then I had more project fun at work when we had a Microsoft analyst show up for about two weeks to help us resolve some major problems we were having and I was assigned to work with him. Then my mother had what may or may not have been a stroke (even her doctors aren't quite sure what happened) but she fortunately seems to be fine now. And my dog managed to escape from the fence for a day or so (fortunately someone found her and she's back now).Obviously I haven't had too much time for gaming lately but I had a need to take some time to relax and unwind. So, this past weekend I fired up Far Cry, courtesy of Gametap.

Then, a few hours later, my wife comes in to see what I am yelling in frustration at.

The problem was that Far Cry was proving to be quite difficult for me. The game is quite unforgiving. Your opponents all seem to be able to see you almost anywhere on the map and all have deadly aim. (I was once crawling through some bushes in the jungle and got hit by a rocket from halfway across the island. Unfortunately this is a regular occurance.) You never have enough rockets or sniper rounds yourself, and when you get in a firefight with five or six opponents you can't take them down fast enough to keep from getting killed yourself.

And this was on "Easy". I'd hate to see what the hard levels look like.

Yes, I know. You played through the game on "Realistic" and thought it was too easy. Good for you. I'm not you though; my reflexes quit being good enough to keep up in shooters about the time the original Half-Life came out.

Which leads us to ask, "Why do different people play games?" Some people play for the challenge. Others play to test their skills against others. Me, I play to relax and for entertainment. I'm not looking for a challenge; I'm looking for fun.

In this case, I'm not wanting to play as a semi-competent software developer trying to figure out which end of the rocket launcher is the dangerous bit. I want to play as Jack Carver; ex-special forces and general badass. It's hard to get that feeling when you're getting shot from a guard tower halfway across the island while you're trying to avoid being seen by the mutants in the trees ahead of you. After the third or fourth reload, it starts getting frustrating.

Now frustrating can be good, to a certain point. A little bit of frustration is good because it makes success that much better when you get past it. Portal has a lot of that and the final Strider battle in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 did as well (though it came periolously close to the edge). But when frustration goes on too long it has a negative effect; reducing enjoyment instead of enhancing it. I've actually reached a point in Far Cry where I'm not sure I can continue. I have tried to get past this one point for hours now and have reached the conclusion that the only way I will ever be able to continue is through pure luck, and I'm not sure if I want to keep playing that long.

((Just to be fair, it is possible to have the opposite problem too. I actually turned up the difficulty setting I was using in Bioshock because, really, at Easy that game is just ridiculous. You have to have some level of challenge.))

I guess my real frustration here is that this is a game that I would really like to see the end of and I may not be able to. I suppose the developers may have wanted to make the game difficult, but it seems to me that a creator of anything would prefer that the majority of creators would want as many people as possible to see what they have created. We are no longer in the era where games had to be deliberately as difficult as possible just to make sure the players kept putting more quarters into the machine. It should be possible to have enough difficulty levels in a game that the really good players can still be challenged while the rest of us can at least get through the game while pretending that we are a badass ourselves.

Even us Paleogamers.

Playing with myself

Us Paleogamers never seem to have enough time to game; there always seems to be something else pressing on us for time.

For example, within the last few months my wife and I spent several weeks in Europe, our daughter was on break from college and we spent time with her, spring completely sprung here in Atlanta so I have been involved with yard work and the like and there is the continual press of work and other responsibilities. Sadly, as the Jackson Browne song Stay says, "The only time that seems too short is the time that we get to play."

Given the rarity of my gaming time I have to pick and choose what I decide to play carefully. So, it was somewhat strange that I decided to pick up Age of Conan the other day, especially considering the last set of comments I made about MMOs.

The reason I did was because there had been a lot of talk about it on a gaming site I frequent and I thought it might be fun to play with the other members there. Well, sadly, things didn't work out and I'll probably be dropping the game after my free month is up.

The reason has nothing to do with the game itself but instead has to do with those Paleogamer limitations on gaming time. I was just never able to devote as much time to it as the other players and so I was limited in the amount of time I could group with them.

This isn't too much of a problem at first. Age of Conan has a fairly good introductory scenario and much of your first 20 levels or so are made up of an interesting (if somewhat short) single player adventure that would actually have made a fairly decent stand-alone adventure. However, after that is over you move out into the larger world and the problems start to emerge.

There are still things to do but the quests you are given return to those grindy feeling quests that I complained about before. This wouldn't be too bad if I was actually playing with those people I had signed up to play with, but by the time I hit level 20 they were all at levels 35 or higher and we simply weren't questing in the same areas. Without having other people to play with the game became boring.

Just about everything is more fun when other people are involved. This is why my local boardgaming group or my sporadic RPG group or even my weekly team trivia nights are more fun than just playing something on my PC. All MMOs are at their best when they aren't just games but are more of a social activity. Even grinding mobs isn't so bad when there are other people there to grind with you. The best part of any Massively Multiplayer Online Game is the Multiplayer part.

The problem seems to me to be the leveling system used by the vast majority of MMOs. Levels have been used in almost every RPG since the original D&D and with good reason. Players like to feel that they are advancing and getting better as they go through the game and the "Ding!" of level advancement is a great form of feedback; another step on the way from being a 98 pound weakling to becoming a destroyer of worlds.

Unfortunately, this results in artifical barriers being created between players at different levels. A level 20 player is simply not going to be able to play alongside a level 40 player, at least not in any meaningful way. Yes, various games have tried things like sidekick and apprentice systems but none of them ever seem to work that well. In general, you can only play with other characters at around your level, which in practice means you can only play with other players who play about the same amount of time that you do.

This is fine for the player who can spend a lot of time in the game put it produces problems for us Paleogamers. Yes, there are probably others out there who spend no more time in the game than I do, but because our game time is so limited the amount of time when we are both logged into the game at the same time is even smaller. This makes it almost impossible to even get a small group together and forget about any kind of sizable raid.

Yeah, there are always pick-up groups but I think we all know how well most of those work. Besides, the social aspects of gaming are best when you get to know the people you game with regularly. Pick-up groups and occasional contacts don't fill that need.

So, for now, it is back to solo gaming again. Perhaps when the Next Big Thing comes along I'll try MMOs again, but for now it is just me and my PC.