It's All Fun & Games.

Last Friday, L.G. Smith of Bards and Prophets mentioned Alex J. Cavanaugh's 'It's all fun & games' blogfest, which sounded like an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Alex' idea was to list our 3 favourite games (board games, card games, RPG, video games, physical games, drinking games - even mind games!) and why.

In my day job I teach applied psychology and game design to budding game developers, so you can see why this blogfest caught my eye.

I had expected this post to be easy, but narrowing down my list to only 3 games turned out to be quite a challenge. I have a number of board games I really like - like Samurai - but in the end I narrowed down my selection to just computer games, because overall they've been more important in my life.


1. Planetarion

Planetarion is a browser-based MMOG (massively multiplayer online game), which I started playing shortly after its release, when a couple of my students alerted me to its existence.

The game is set in a Science Fiction world, where each player owns a planet and has to mine nearby asteroids for resources. In between scanning for asteroids, you build a fleet to defend your home base or attack other players and steal their asteroids. In short: it's all about space battles!

Planetarion was the first online game of this type and scale I encountered, and I played it like a maniac. I hardly ever slept more than 4 hours a night, and I worried more about my planet's well-being than my own.

I remember seeing coffee mugs for sale with texts like: 'Not now. My planet is under attack.' or 'I need to cancel this meeting; I've got incoming.' I could relate ...

I was most fascinated by the social and communication side of the game, the alliance politics and the negotiations, but I also loved organising alliance battles and calculating the defences needed to stand up against an attack.

However, after playing Planetarion for about a year, I needed to get my life back, so I quit the game and promised myself never to play anything like it again.


2. Diablo II

Diablo II is - or better, was - a popular computer game, in which you played a character that ventured through a dark fantasy world.

In the original game you could choose to impersonate an Amazon, Barbarian, Necromancer, Paladin or Sorceress; in the expansion, 'Lord of Destruction', an Assassin and Druid were added to your character choices. I preferred both Amazon and Sorceress.

As your hero ventured through the world, he or she had to chop up (or blast away) monsters in order to find armour, weapons and magical items.

What I most liked about Diablo II was its story line, atmosphere and the overall feeling of empowerment while playing. The game presented its players with tough challenges and - especially in the dungeons - we needed to proceed with an interesting mix of caution, courage and stubborn determination, which felt every bit as real as emotions in the outside world.


3. Everquest

Everquest was the game I broke my post-Planetarion promise for. I had managed to stay away from massively multiplayer online games, so when one of my best friends at the time - now my husband - recommended it to me as a 'game I would like', I knew he was right, so I tried to stay away. Tried.

After a few months I gave in when another friend showed me the game's website where I could read up on the different races and classes that populated the world. Once I had discovered 'the Enchanter', I was hooked.

So I made a Dark Elf Enchanter, called her Triksi (after my Diablo II sorceress who'd been called Trixi) and took my first tentative steps into the world of Norrath.

I spent every free moment playing, levelled up in no time, joined a guild and in a matter of months I got to the level I needed to join the higher-end guild my friend was in: Xanadu.

In Everquest I discovered that I am not a casual gamer - and never will be. When I like a game, I need to give it my all. If I can't do that, I'd rather not play at all. Come to think of it, that's true for most aspects of my life.

I played Everquest for about 3 years and my character ended up as one of the top 5 enchanters on the PVP server. (PVP = player-versus-player, i.e. a server where players can attack other players as well, not just computer-generated monsters.)

When I could no longer play the game the way I wanted to, I quit, once more promising myself never to play anything like it again.

So far I have managed to keep that promise. It's been easy, really, because once I had more free time and a more relaxed mind, I realised how much I missed writing, and how it's even more rewarding to create my own worlds and story lines.


Which are your favourite games?

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X is for Xanadu.

In between being a reader and a writer, I used to play computer games. I loved roleplaying games in fantasy or science fiction settings (no surprise there).

My absolute favourite game was Everquest. I played it for several years and met an amazing group of people because of it.

Everquest was an MMORPG, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, in which hundreds of thousands of players took control of their elf, dwarf, ogre, ... character to overcome challenges in an elaborate fantasy world.

I played a dark-elf enchanter called Triksi, and for the bigger part of her virtual life, Triksi was a member of a great guild called 'Xanadu'.

Playing this game and being in Xanadu taught me a lot of skills that have proven useful in other areas of my life.

You don't play MMORPGs on your own. You need others to get ahead in the game, sometimes smaller groups, sometimes a raid party of 50 or more.

When any group of that size gets together to accomplish a task - whether that's slaying a dragon, organising an event or creating a product - you inevitably learn about organisation, multitasking, communication, perseverance, offering and accepting help, applying strategies, problem-solving, human interaction and putting individual differences to good use.

Along the way, we became friends. Online friends at first, but many of us met up in real life. Our first big gathering took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, and it was interesting to see how close those online friendships came to real-life friendships: the people I got along with in-game were the same people I connected with when we met up.

Several of them have stayed good friends up to this day, even after we stopped playing Everquest.

Others have disappeared in the cracks of time and distance, some to reappear on Facebook or other social networks in recent years.

To this day, the word 'Xanadu' still makes me smile. It rings of friendship and great accomplishments - against all odds.

It also reminds me of the temporary nature of many friendships. Some friends are there for life, others will cross your path, walk with you for a while and disappear - quietly, or with a bang.

Does that make those friendships less valuable? I don't think so. Duration and longevity aren't the only ways of measuring quality. We don't judge the beauty of a rose or the flavour of a dish by how long they linger, do we?

So this post is dedicated to my Xanadu friends, past and present. Wherever you are now and whatever you're doing, I hope you're well, and I think a reunion is due.

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A Tale of Life, Death, Hunger and Love: Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games. A Review.

I have just resurfaced after burying myself in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. I had downloaded the first sample to my Kindle a while ago, but I needed to create a stretch of free, uninterrupted time to bite into it. And wow, did that bite turn into a binge!

Book 1 - cover

Up until half an hour ago, the outside world no longer existed. For a few days, I've co-inhabited the head of Katniss Everdeen, a mature sixteen-year-old, looking at a world that could have been ours. Or might become ours, one day. It's the tale of a resourceful girl in extraordinary circumstances, playing the cards she's been dealt and forced to face the consequences of her actions and decisions.

I don't want to go further into the story here; there are plenty of sources out there that do. What I do want to share is why I loved it so much.

First of all, Suzanne Collins is an amazing writer. These three were the first of her works I've ever read, but the Underland Chronicles are next on my list. It will be hard to meet my current expectations, but even if they're only half as good as the Hunger Games trilogy, it still won't be a waste of time to read those. All five of them.

Lately, with my own novel in the stage it's in, I've found it difficult to read other people's work without having my inner editor jump in, pointing out style, tricks, show vs. tell, great or poor dialogue and much more. I was starting to fear I had lost the ability to submerge myself in other writers' worlds, new stories and characters' lives.

Book 2 - cover

I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Hunger Games grabbed me from the first few pages and sucked me in, right until the end of Mockingjay. Along the way I laughed and cried, I ached and wondered, I felt empowered and enraged.

There are so many layers to these novels I can't even begin to describe. But of course I will try.

In these stories, Suzanne Collins captures human nature's paradoxes unlike any author I've read in a long time. She reveals our weaknesses and strengths, our courage and cowardice, the good and evil we are all capable of, especially when it affects the ones we love. Or hate.

These dilemmas emerge in a world where poverty, political corruption, brutality and violence reign. But we don't have to look far to find, interwoven, the importance of love, family, loyalty and hope.

Book 3: cover

I was very impressed with the wisdom the author shares and and the insights she provokes, without waving the belittling finger I so dislike (possibly because I'm not entirely unguilty of it myself.)

Suzanne Collins created a bunch of amazing characters here. I love how they come to life in her words, and how real they feel. Some of them I adore, others I despise, still others I pity. But hardly any don't affect me at all. And even in those cases, I feel that's exactly what the author intended. That might not be true, but the mere fact that she has me believe it, proves to me what an extraordinary writer and storyteller she is.

If you haven't read the novels yet, I can only recommend them. If you have, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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The Times They Are A-Changing.

As I've confessed in a previous article, in another part of my life I'm a teacher. I'm also a huge fan (and advocate) of student diversity, since long before 'diversity' turned into the stale, nausea-inducing term it is now. But somehow, being a fan of 'multifariousness' or 'heterogeneity' doesn't sound much better, so I'll stick with diversity for now.

Fact is, we are all individuals. Some of us even more than others (hah!). We're part of a diverse and specialised but social species. We're born and bred to cooperate.

For that reason, I'm a firm believer that education should focus a lot more on:

1. helping pupils / students to understand their individual talents
2. showing them in which ways others are different
3. providing them with plenty of opportunities to combine their efforts and work towards better results.

I am convinced that this approach is much more effective in order to teach them to deal with the challenges real life is throwing / will throw at them.

It's a simple truth that most of our students / pupils / ... are going to end up in different jobs, different personal lives, different careers, different locations, situations and quite possibly different countries and cultures. How could we prepare them for that any better than by helping them develop a healthy and realistic confidence in their own talents? In their personal, individual ability to contribute to the world?

To avoid misunderstandings: I'm NOT pleading for educational pampering. To the contrary!
We all learn by being challenged. We feel better after we've tackled something that was really difficult. What is important is that we were able to tackle it.
The challenges we present to our kids / pupils / students / trainees should be tailored to their level and their needs. Not to a standardised programme or idea of what a person should be able to do at a particular age.

This is something that game designers have understood a long time ago. They throw challenges at players that educators can only dream about. And players overcome them. Game designers create difficult circumstances based on clever insights like risk versus reward, or team effort.
Their customers choose the roles they naturally prefer: some of them play healers, others pose as fierce warriors and still others manage and organise their fellow players. These game events, like life, wouldn't succeed without either kind of participant.

We simply can't expect everybody to be good at everything. It's unrealistic and above all unneccessary.
Instead, we should offer our kids, pupils and students opportunities to shine at what they're good at, and show them ways to use those talents for the greater good of society, (wo)mankind, industry, ...

After all, isn't that what so many adults these days are desperately trying to find out about themselves? Wouldn't it be more efficient if we'd start working on that before frustration and disappointment have already clobbered people down?

I wanted to share a great (animated) speech from author and educational advisor Sir Ken Robinson. It deals with a lot of these aspects. It's only 11 minutes long and even if you don't care about the message, the animations are fun to watch.

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Dark Elves, Confessionals and Games for Change.

It's time to come clean: I have a secret life. Apart from writing and hanging out in weird places with people who like to dress up, I also have a regular job.

Fortunately it's a really cool one. By day I get to teach about computer games to future game developers. That might not seem like an obvious career choice for a writer-at-heart, but it was for me. I've always been fascinated by technology, and especially by computer games. My favourite ones are fantasy and science fiction roleplaying games. It's a genre that's strongly driven by story, so there's your connection.

Dark Elf enchanter in Everquest® whose virtual body
I may or may not have inhabited in the past.

In my job, I try to make people aware of the 'other side' of games.
There are definitely social issues around computer games that I'm not trying to deny. But there is also the huge potential that we're currently not tapping into. In games, people acquire skills, knowledge, friends, confidence and so much more. Games are learning tools. Players challenge themselves over and over again, spending time and energy doing the impossible, to overcome the problems that are thrown in their general direction.

Unfortunately, most of what is learnt in games is currently only used, valued and respected in those virtual worlds. We need to find ways to bring the different realms closer together and - who knows - they might even merge.
Most of all: we should be brave enough to ask ourselves not just what so-called real world knowledge or skills we can bring to games, but also what our material world can learn from its virtual siblings.

This morning I was watching a TED video, and the omnipresent and omniscient Right Column suggested I would also like Jane McGonigal's presentation 'Gaming can make a better world'. I believed I would. I've seen her talk a couple of times at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and she's managed to entertain and inspire me every time.

Jane is a game researcher and game designer at the Institute for the Future in California, and the brain behind the Top Secret Dance Off. Here's her talk:

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