A salute to mature gamers

It would be a lonesome journey without them

As you might know, the Clairebear and I are in the middle of our wedding plans. We're not anywhere close to being done, however, since there's a whole lot of money and paperwork involved. They're not happy with my sheet of paper, which clearly states, "Yeah, that guy has been born someday ages ago", because it's in German. Same for the sheet of paper, which states that I have divorced that fat, nasty devil I used to be married to. I don't understand why they're having such difficulty figuring out 2 lines of text in a foreign language, but rules are rules.

Should we ever manage to get all of that crap sorted in this life, I'll find myself embracing a whole lot of strange new things: A new lastname (seriously, who'd pass up a chance to call themselves 'Nicholson'?), monogamy and a brand new mother in law.

Alright, it's not like I'm really gonna have to get used to Momma Bear there. In fact, she's been part of our WoW guild for several years now, she sports several level 85 toons in full epic gear and she actually raids! She's not exactly that hunter, who put BWD-Solo videos on Youtube the other day. Truth to be told, before she joined us on WoW, she hasn't really done a lot of PC gaming since the days of Monkey Island. I know, I know. It shows how WoW goes out of its way to cater to casual gamers, does everything to protect them from failure and attracts people, who haven't touched a computer since the days where 128kb of RAM were an utter luxury.

But I think that she, as well as her generation of gamers, deserves a lot more credit than we, as well as the industry, are willing to give. The other day, she got herself a high end gaming rig. How fucking cool is it when somebody, who is old enough to be your mother in law, spends a metric shit ton of money on a powerful gaming PC? And since WoW doesn't exactly push modern hardware to its limits, she grabbed the free client for Age of Conan: Unchained (AoC).

I'll be honest with you. I didn't think she'd make it through the tutorial. Don't get me wrong - I sincerely hoped that she would, but when it comes to difficulty, AoC isn't just a far cry from the rainbows and candy-cotton clouds that pave the way of the average Azerothian noob. AoC is the Anti-WoW. For as much as I love virtual Hyboria, it's not the kind of game you'd present to somebody, who has never touched an MMORPG before.

But what do you know - she hacked and slashed her way through the first ten levels without casualties, her sword-swinging barbarian was chopping off limbs and heads left and right and there's a fair chance she'll help set up our guild city one day. Is she gonna wade through piles of corpses on the pvp battlefields? Will she slay the biggest and baddest raid baddies at some point? Maybe not. But that's not the point. She knows how to pull off her combos. She knows how the stealth system works. If you screw up on AoC, if you can't figure out the core mechanics of your character, the game will kick your ass. Hard. Over and over again. And that's a good thing. Because it makes winning, killing a tough enemy or beating a difficult quest so much more rewarding. There is a sense of achievement here.

And it shows how all that core vs casual crap has gotten way out of hand. They're getting rid of basic character attributes in Skyrim. Strength and Intelligence are no longer deemed necessary, they're too complex, too confusing, too outdated. I dunno about you, but to me, they're part if the RP-feeling. If my character is strong like an ox or dumber than a brick, it feels different to me, it adds to the immersion. It's an important part of the game, which the designers are going to scratch, in order to appeal to casual gamers. To the industry, those people must be a bunch of drooling morons, who couldn't wipe their own butts without help. Which might be true to some extent, but when and where is it supposed to end? When is a game too casual, too simplistic to be fun?

So this one is for the Clairebear's mum. For all gaming mothers. For all those 'casual' gamers, who don't give up, who show that they're very well capable of playing stuff, that goes beyond pushing 3 or 4 buttons and following the massive onscreen text, "Move out of the flames!" What you do deserves nothing but respect and I'm proud to have you on there. And I hope I'll never stop playing kickass modern PC games myself, even if one day I'll be old enough to be a mother in law.

Keep on rocking! And be living proof that it's time to stop dumbing down our games more and more. Because if you remove every challenge and every obstacle, flatten the learning curve and take away all punishment for failure, you will inevitably reach a point, where you lose all sense of achievement, competition and fun. And fun is what it's all about.

-Cat