d20

my death from above LP should be arriving soon... worlds will collapse. it excites me. i guess you could say i like them round and black, and if you were crass you'd add a crack about a tight hole.

a note about relative value and what exactly tangible rewards are:

last night i camped the Valkrum Dunes for seven goddamn hours in FFXI. seven hours. i was on a rather important quest (read: vital quest) and needed an incredibly hard to get item that's dropped by a monster that only spawns for about ten minutes in the middle of the night then dissappears for an hour. did i mention that the item only drops off this monster about 1 in 20 times you kill it?

so, here we have a very tired d20 that's been sitting around the fucking stupid ugly garbage head dunes for six and a half hours, haven't leveled, haven't found the skull, am unhappy. boo. i stuck around to help someone get the last few kills they needed to level then was going to log off, BUT WAIT. the clock rolls over to 10pm game time, i beg my party members to help me find a Ghoul to kill. we end up finishing off a few kills on the beach... by this time the Ghoul spawn is half over. finally they agree to help and i run up to my favorite ghoul spawn on the hill... GHOUL! found it, killed it, it dropped the skull and everyone passed on it so i could have it. also, i leveled when the Ghoul died. i had been fruitlessly working on that level for 3 days. all of it fell into place at once.

now, unless you're a gamer i'm sure that last passage was incredibly boring, but there's a point: i was happy. at that moment i was truly and wonderfully fulfilled. i went to bed feeling good about myself. people laugh at gamers for being pathetic, but what makes that sense of accomplishment less real than any other? to me, there's no difference, and it ties into a discussion yohann and i had the other day, which is my cue to segue into another anecdote:

colby and tyler were arguing about the time she walked in and turned off Final Fantaxy VII while he was playing. yohann made the case that it was directly analogous to tyler walking in and ripping up one of colby's paintings as she was working on it. a game is not just a story, but a story you guide and shape as it unfolds. a completed game is a book you starred in, a work of both literary and visual art that was made specifically to allow you to be a central part of it.

i'm not sure what exactly the thrust of this whole thing is, other than maybe to explain a bit of the gamer mentality. maybe to validate it in other peoples' eyes... though if geeks really worried about what other people think of them they'd all be terribly awkward shut-ins with social scars from high school.

oh wait...