Life is full of little victories that are wrapped in large clinging blankets of boredom. Luckily there is a mad angry midget with hand grenades taped to their bracers who shows up when you are least expecting them and does what they can to make life (please select all that apply):
(a) Exciting
(b) Frieghtening
(c) Terrifying
(d) Cloudy
(e) Require the assistance of an attorney
(f) Launch angry fathers into the room
(g) Misundertood
(h) All of the Above
(i) None of the Above
(j) Some of the Above – Pick what Works Best??
As a part-time rational adult (the details behind THAT little matter are part of a whole other story so you will just have to take my word for it for now) I recognize that my professional accomplishments fall outside of the norm. When my wife sets up play-dates with other adults and we be social certain things tend to happen.
One of those things that invariably happens when we meet new people – or more often when I meet people who are new to me but who my wife already knows – part of the polite conversation involves them asking me what I do for a living, and then telling me what they do – always in that order.
The thing is I suspect that they already know what I do for a living – I am a writer – so what they are really asking is not so much what I do for a living, but how what I do for a living works.
When the person asking the question is female, their eyes tend to glaze-over as soon as I mention video games – no matter how I mention them. If I happen to be in a reviewing frame of mind, Glazed Eyes. Walk-through Guides? Glazed Eyes. Feature Pieces? Yeah, glazed eyes.
Interestingly enough that is also true if I am in Techno-Geek Mode and share the details of that – but it is NOT true when I am covering Fashion Week in Manhattan. Odd that.
But I am totally upfront about the fact that I am a whore, and I write where the money is. Totally up front.
The odd thing is that the fact that I know things about fashion and particularly period fashion and haute couture has just the opposite effect on them – suddenly they are very interested in what I have to say about what I do. Weird.
By they way, haute couture does not mean what you think it does… A lot of guys think it either means high fashion or expensive bits of cloth masquerading as clothing – what it really means is high sewing, and is a French phrase that carries a lot more meaning in two simple words than English speakers are used to encountering in their phrases.
Now for guys it is a different story completely. Their reaction is almost always an are-struck question like “Wait, so you get PAID to sit around and PLAY GAMES?!” and “You get FREE GAMES?!”
Here is the thing – and I hate to burst their bubble, but no, I don’t get paid to sit around and play games all day – I get paid to WRITE about games. That whole playing part? It represents only a tiny fraction of what I do and… Why are your eyes glazing over?
Boom Beach Business
One of the games that I got paid to play and then write about is called Boom Beach – and it’s from the same code wizards – an outfit called SuperCell – who brought us Clash of Clans and Battle Buddies. It is a mobile game of the battle sort, with hints of city-building and resource management. In fact its game play style and cross-genre complication can easily be held out as a metaphor for video games journalism…
Here is the thing – under ordinary circumstances I download a game/app, play the hell out of it, then write about it. Following THAT process, I delete the game, and never think about it again. Unless an expansion is launched, in which case I then re-download the game and its new expansion, and start that process all over again.
In the case of Boom Beach something went wrong. I never quite made it to the delete the game stage, and what is worse, I still spend 10 minutes or so playing it every day.
This has actually happened before… Do you remember the app/games Camp Pokemon, SSG2 and Storm Casters? Yeah I still play those as well…
With Boom Beach at least part of the reason I still play it has to do with the very time-intensive process of how you make progress in it. By building and placing defenses, then upgrading them. I am still doing that! And I might add, making pretty good progress at it as well!
My goal is to get all of the defensive weapons to Level 7 – I am not wuite there yet though – right now I have 4 Sniper Towers, 2 Machine Guns, and 2 Mortar at Level 7, but I still have other weps that need upgrading (A Level 4 Cannon, a Level 5 Cannon, Level 1 Flamethrower, and a Level 5 Machine Gun) which means I have weeks and weeks of 10 minutes a day to play yet before I am even close to feeling secure in my defensive position. Just saying.
But it is those little slices of improvement that help get you through the day mates!
It’s progress that in the big picture has no meaning – but still, it IS progress.
It’s like my favorite George Takei line: “We’re Lost! But We’re Making Good Time!”
So umm, hey… What do you do for a living?
recnef's Gaming Blog 