Hypercompendia

Well you just know I’ve checked all the boxes on the games I haven’t played yet to see if I can do so on the Mac. And no, I can’t.

So this may be the first: Apparitions, about ghosts and things and it’s free to try and $19.95 to buy and with this super screen I just hafta try a game out. But not those stretchy, ugly things from Silent Hill I never could escape completely.

Besides this will be research. I’m thinking of going not into sci fi or fantasy, but my own first true love: horror. THAT would be quite a goodie to do in Storyspace with sound effects and Photoshop-liquified images and stuff to soup up my writing, eh?

Very strange: I’m watching people at the WSVG ’07 watching people play people. 

In the first "event" I caught, it was a boxing match and two players chose their characters and well, boxed them.  After the fight, the two discussed why they chose their particular characters and mentioned their particular skills (programmed in?) so that it’s the computer programmed character as well as the player who has input on the result. 

CBS World of Sports (and Intel) hosts this event, so I consider gaming then to be a "sport."  Now boxing isn’t the particular sporting event I would tend to either watch in reality, as I feel it’s ridiculous to allow two people to beat each other up for "sport" and entertainment while you’d be arrested for punching a guy who made a remark about your wife or mother.  But let’s just look at the pros and cons of gaming as a substitute for the real thing. 

For one thing, nobody really gets physically hurt.  That’s a good thing.  But the entire sport has changed (and this would apply to all except virtual reality games) from throwing a physical punch to an entirely different move of either clicking or moving a joystick. 

I gotta think some more.

On TV right now, coming up: World of Warcraft.  Just over: Kentucky Fights (?) boxing.  More later–just thinking of the psychological and cultural impact this is having…

Ah’ll be bach. 

Relative to this post in Spinning, I kept thinking about what sort of character I would create as a persona in an online game.

Being a pretty honest and realistic person in reality–saving my fantasies for my own personal enjoyment, allowing them to leak into story characters at the most–I wouldn’t be likely to create a Barbie image.  Nor would I depict myself as an exact image of my self lest I scare folk off.

I have for various unshared projects come up with an "image" and while I didn’t go so far as to mix the blonde with some grey strands (and darker roots!), I do include the glasses, get as close as possible to accuracy with what options are available, and can’t help coming up with an extremely flattering projection.

But is it necessary to depict yourself?  Can’t we, since it’s a fantasy world, create a character to represent us that is more towards what we’d like to be than what we are?  Somehow, to me, it’d be like lying on a resume.

However, I’m going to find one of these create your avatar sites and see if I can be a bit less truthful, a bit more wishful, a bit more fun.  If it’s a knockout, and if I can make myself do it, I’ll post it later.