StaceyPowers

I’ve posted a few times about how gaming helps me reduce my anxiety and sleep better at night. Over the past few months I’ve discovered another surprising benefit. I’ve had lifelong difficulties making decisions on my own, which reflects childhood issues (pretty standard stuff). Recently, making decisions has become a lot easier, and I feel a lot more confident about my choices. There are a number of reasons for that, but it turns out gaming is one of the factors. I’ve discovered that when I am faced with a set of choices now, I literally line them up in my mind as if they are dialogue options in a game. If there is one obvious right choice in a game, it’s easy to take it, even if party members protest. And now I am basically just doing the same thing IRL, without overcomplicating things. It’s a small thing, but it’s been surprisingly powerful, and I’ve made some significant changes to my life with it. It doesn’t apply with decisions which really do involve a lot of gray areas and complexities, but a lot of choices really are surprisingly simple if one just doesn’t overthink things. Has anyone else found that gaming helps you weigh decisions effectively?

Tell us about them :)

Which would be your number one choice, and how would you want to see it re-interpreted?

One can make a pair of cardboard goggles from scratch?

Oh man, don’t even get me started on that. I can’t tell you how many times I die for no other reason than that I’ve pushed the wrong damn button.

I glanced at Wikipedia and it said that there are indeed still gaming books being made (or made recently, can't remember), though I think they are relatively rare compared to in the past. If you do find any new gaming books and check them out, please let me know!

Is there a classic game you remember from, for example, the NES days, which hasn't been revisited in decades, and which you think would be cool to be re-imagined now in a different style? @The Blackangel

I’m playing Bioshock 2 for the first time right now. So far I’m enjoying the heck out of it, but I have to say that Rapture through the windows totally looked more atmospheric in Bioshock 1. They changed the lighting entirely (it looks kind of "washed out" now), and took away all the colourful neon. Did anyone else also prefer the look of the city in the first Bioshock more?

I can't remember which game it was that someone here mentioned to me had a lot of mist/fog to hide the low-quality graphics, which had the end effect of making the game fantastically atmospheric. @DylanC @killamch89 I think one of you was the one who mentioned it.

Dying tragically in so many ways always made me feel extra satisfied and oddly kind of "relieved" when I found the happy ending at last. My favorite series I think was called "Time Machine" books? Something like that. You jumped through history on adventures, and learned a fair amount of actual historical stuff along the way since they were well-researched and aimed at realism.

I feel like Skyrim and Fallout do a pretty good job in this respect as well. I also don't mind if a DLC adds more than enough value to justify its price tag, even if I'd consider it essential. I would say that Left Behind is essential to The Last of Us, for example--at least in terms of understanding character motives and perhaps in terms of moral framing for the main story--but the amount of excellent content they packed in more than justifies paying for it. I tend to think of it almost as a full title in the series, just a really small one. If you didn't know it existed, you could complete TLOU and feel totally satisfied, but if you do play it, it enriches the story in huge ways.

Imagine if Zork had other players running around in it with you, and that is essentially what a MUD is. Even larger MUDs are often small and tight-knit compared to the huge graphical MMOs around today. So most of the weird stuff that happens seems to involve either interpersonal drama, glitches in programming, or both. But sometimes it’s the “small” nature of the games that generates weird situations. If you join a MUD not long after it opens, everything is a “first.” And firsts make you famous. I was an early player in a large MUD, and happened to be the “first” player to commit high treason against a city. This resulted in the following series of events: An immediate lifetime ban from entering the city (automated systems would kill me if I tried). Thrown out of my guild. Banned from every guild in the game except for one, which had to take everyone. I stubbornly refused to join it for months, during which time I literally had no fighting skill except “kick.” I was recruited as being essentially second-in-command in a major in-game mafia. I played for over a year, and during that time, a ton of people committed treason. Since it became commonplace, most people would be banned from a city or guild for a few RL days, a few weeks at worst, and then let back in. But nobody would unban me from my original city until well over a RL year had passed. The crazy part was what the specific act of treason was that earned me this game-wide notoriety. All I did was read a confidential log entry to another player about why he had been banned, which was, “Need I state the reasons?” Those five words took me from being a complete nobody newb to being a notorious criminal =D

Or maybe it's just that it needs the bad feedback. The moment the right screen isn't pulled up, the brain is like "oh, it's this button this time."

I posted about text adventures in this thread, and @kingpotato mentioned Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Does anyone else remember these fondly from their youth? I remember when those books were everywhere. I didn’t realize that they are more broadly called “gamebooks” until now, but I have thought often about how they were essentially non-digital games which in some respects helped pave the way for the modern digital games we enjoy today. I figure that the growth of computer and console gaming probably directly led to their decline. If anyone reads modern gamebooks today, what series do you read?

What are your favorite and least favorite gamepads you have used on any console at any point? I really like the DualShock 3 in terms of how it handles, though I hate how short its lifespan seems to be. The controller I hated most was the one I used on NES when I was young.

I think all of you have made some excellent points. @Matt Morgans What you said both here and in the podcast about framing the issue around the children bothers me as well, for the exact reason you mention about the “moral panics” of the 80s and 90s. I remember those panics concerning not just video games, but RPGs, quite clearly. They were quite destructive, and ended up scapegoating entirely innocuous content and communities. @The BlackangelI totally agree that ideally, parents should be the ones putting their foots down. When I was a kid I didn’t have a credit card. My parents were absurdly over-the-top about a lot of things, but on that point I don’t have any issue with what they did. I didn’t need a credit card. @SpaceExplorer I don’t mind cosmetic microtransactions either. I despise those that give an edge though. It’s also tiring when devs release games that don’t provide “finished” value, and then keep charging for content. I’m not big on government regulation of private activities in general, but in the case of gambling, I’d prefer regulation over an outright ban. Even taking all of this into account, I do wish that non-cosmetic microtransactions would go away.

Hahah, yeah, exactly what happens with me. In fact, I’m so used to it now that when my muscle memory fails to kick in and push the right buttons to move through the menus, my brain auto-corrects a moment later without any conscious thought and pushes what it should. Too bad it can’t seem to get it right the first time.

I haven't even played Apex Legends and lack context on this story, and still found it crazy/funny.

I'm a bit of an unfortunate "princess and the pea" when it comes to this sort of thing. My muscular syndrome saps strength from my muscles. Basically, instead of 100% of my muscles being available to perform simple tasks, picture that some percentage is always under a load, and not able to perform. Even small things like carrying a handbag can hurt me 😞 I need that lightweight cardboard VR headset.

That part I'm not sure about. @killamch89 Can you answer this question?

I've been going back and forth endlessly between Fallout and Skyrim for years, and I still mess up. Then again, I have poor executive function skills. Maybe it is the visual design of Skyrim's controls that make them easier to pick up? I think they may simply be more easy to read than the Pip Boy display (the map sure is). DA's combat amalgamation that you mention is indeed confusing to me as well, and the control scheme in general is a nightmare. I just thought the menus in II were more accessible than they were in Origins. That being said, on the whole, they're still quite poor IMO.

I probably don’t have any funny stories about online gaming. Plenty of weird stories though, back from my days playing MUDs. The craziest online gaming story I have is about a friend who was trapped in her house during a natural disaster together with her husband. There was a lull in the storm and food available down the street, and they had only a tiny window in which to get out, grab it, and rush back home, but he wouldn’t go. He just had to capture that last objective in his game.

I work at VGR. Aside from that, when I was in high school, I did do some volunteer writing of room descriptions for MUDs.

Incidentally, that's the only game on your list I've played. I remember Hexen fondly.

I like Skyrim's menus a bit more than Fallout's menus, but it's hard for me to put my finger on why. But nothing is more annoying than switching back and forth between Skyrim and Fallout and continually mixing up what buttons to press. The menu systems are so similar ... but just different enough that it trips up my brain. It usually takes me a day or two to "reset" mentally, and I still end up doing a lot of wrong button presses on a continuous basis. @DylanC You mentioned previously that you like Skyrim's menus. How do they compare to Fallout's menus in your opinion? Incidentally, I actually like DA II's menus much more than Origin's menus. The radial thing is a lot faster to navigate through than having to press R1 or L1 (or whatever it was) continuously in Origins to get to the screen I want.