1717: The Story of Your Mail Archive

During a quiet — and, I won’t lie, somewhat bored — moment today, I decided to take a look back in my GMail archive and see exactly when I started using that account. I’ve had a number of different email accounts over the years, some of which have lasted longer than others, but I had a feeling that GMail had stuck with me longer than anything else. (Except perhaps for Hotmail, which I keep around to sign up for things I don’t want to sign up my “real” email address for. And for my Xbox Live account, because in Microsoft’s wisdom, they don’t allow you to change the email address associated with your account, meaning I was forever stuck with it, not that email really matters to Xbox Live anyway.)

Sure enough, my GMail account has been with me for somewhere in the region of four or five years or so. Prior to that, I made use of a .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account (the name has changed several times since I opened the account in 2007 as part of my employment at the Apple Store), and before that, I was using Yahoo. Prior to that, I was using various different proprietary addresses that I got with Internet service providers, and since I moved every year while I was at university — and quite frequently thereafter, too — I changed email address a lot, much to, as I recall, the annoyance of my brother, who never knew which address to contact me on.

Anyway, I digress; my GMail account hails from 2009, and it was interesting to take a look back to what was going on in my life around then. I can use this blog for that too, of course — and often do, as narcissistic as that might sound — but looking back at past emails is a little different because it’s not just a record of my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them; it’s my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them to another specific person.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years will recall, 2010 was Not A Good Year for Pete, and indeed the early pages of my email history reflect that to a certain degree.

Before that, however, was an email from a former colleague containing nothing but this image:

It still makes me giggle.

Anyway, the first few pages of my GMail are actually made up of messages imported from my .mac/MobileMe account, which I was running in parallel with GMail for some time (and indeed still am, though I don’t really use it any more). In those early messages, I can see the first time I was hired as a professional games journalist — Joey Davidson and Brad Hilderbrand were good enough to take a chance on me and hire me for the now sadly defunct Kombo.com. The pay was crap, but it was something at a time when I had nothing else, and I got something far more valuable out of that experience: friends. People I still speak to today — indeed, just today I had a quick chat with Joey via instant message, which was nice.

Around that time, I was preparing for a trip to PAX East in Boston, at which I’d have the opportunity to meet a number of members of the Squadron of Shame for the first time — and to catch up with some I’d had the pleasure of meeting once or twice before. I was also looking forward to the opportunity to cover a big event as a journalist, though sadly I wasn’t enough of a bigshot at this time to be able to score a proper press badge, and as such had to write about things at the show largely from a consumer perspective.

Shortly after my return from PAX East, you may recall that my life fell to pieces, and you can see almost the exact moment this happens, since there’s a sudden flurry of sympathetic messages from friends and family alike. Thus began a very dark period in my life, and one that still, I must admit, brings tears to my eyes to relive, even when looking at it through the cold, clinical view of plain text.

So let’s not do that.

Instead, fast forward a bunch of pages and I was very surprised to spot an email from a familiar name: Shahid Ahmad, who is now best known as Sony’s most enthusiastic employee, and champion of the Vita. Shahid apparently commented on one of my posts somewhere — I can’t quite tell where from the email exchange, but it was a post about the game Mr. Robot, which I recall enjoying a great deal — and we’d evidently had a discussion about Chimera, a game which he made back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 home computers, and which he has trying to remake ever since. (He was talking about a remake a while back on Twitter; apparently, he’s been trying to make this happen since at least 2010.)

Somewhere around the 37,000 email mark (still in 2010), I seemingly start using GMail a bit more for communicating with people and signing up for things. There’s still a bunch of stuff coming in via MobileMe, but messages without that tag are starting to appear more and more.

Around the 35,000 email mark, I start working for GamePro. Of all the sites I’ve worked on over the years, I think GamePro is the one that I think of most fondly and am most proud of. I feel I struck a good balance with my news coverage, and there was tangible proof that I — specifically me — was responsible for bringing in a significant amount of new traffic with the work I was doing. Unfortunately, this seemingly wasn’t enough to prevent the site from being unceremoniously wiped off the face of the planet some time later, but it was nice to know at least.

Aside from my own developments, it’s also interesting to see what names I still know today have been up to over the years. It’s nice to see Tom Ohle of Evolve PR’s name crop up a bunch of times, for example — that man’s one of the hardest-working PR folks in the business, and also someone who always put across the impression of genuinely believing in the games he was representing — as well as folks I’ve worked alongside moving from outlet to outlet.

And then, of course, there’s the first appearance of Andie in my Twitter direct messages (Twitter’s email notifications used to look a whole lot different!) and… well, we all know what happened there. (She’s sleeping upstairs in the house we own together right now as I write this.)

So anyway. Having rambled on for over a thousand words about nothing more than my email archives, I think I’m ready to call that a night. It’s been an interesting trip back along memory lane — not always pleasant or comfortable, but certainly interesting — but I think I’ve sated my curiosity for now, at least.

So what’s the earliest email you still have, dear reader?

1716: Desperately Seeking Information

Something a friend of mine said in an online chat earlier made me think about the way we, humanity, use the Internet on a daily basis — and particularly the role that social media plays in many of our lives.

He said that as human beings, we crave information. It doesn’t matter what that information is, we’re just hungry for it; forever consuming, devouring any input we can get our brains wrapped around, however mundane, stupid or fury-inducing.

After he said this, I took stock of my online existence since leaving Facebook and Twitter behind. I still haven’t looked at the former at all; I’ve peeped at the latter once or twice to see if I had any mentions or direct messages — I didn’t (apart from a share of this post by a dentist who clearly hadn’t read it at all), which, I won’t lie, smarted a bit, but I’ll live.

What I have done, however, is almost immediately replace them with other things. I was always intending to make more active use of the Squadron of Shame forums, for example, but they have become my primary go-to hangout online — which makes their occasional lack of activity a little frustrating. (Come join up and talk in a chin-strokey fashion about games!) But that’s not all I’m doing: instead of relying on what Twitter is talking about for a picture of the day’s news — a practice which tends to give you an inherently biased picture of what is going on, due to the political tendencies of some of Twitter’s most vocal users — I’m specifically seeking out sites like the BBC and the Guardian to read about stories at my own pace. (I still skip over anything that just offers me a video and no text, though; fuck video.)

I am not, however, reading a great deal about video games. This is less about losing interest in them — which my marathon Xillia 2 session this evening will emphatically attest that I am not — and more about feeling there aren’t really any sites out there that speak to (or for) me. I’ve discussed this with a number of people with whom I share similar proclivities, and many of us tend to feel the same way: while the ad-based revenue model for these sites continues to be in place, we’re never going to see the sort of coverage that we’re interested in seeing. Those sites that do try different things — like Polygon with its now-defunct features section, or 1up with its community-driven nature — end up either closing down altogether, or at the very least shedding the things that made them unique and becoming yet another identikit site of daily triple-A and indie darling news churn.

But I digress. The point is, the information void I left when I cut social media out of my life was immediately filled by something else. It’s a compulsion; an uncontrollable urge. As a human being, my brain demands information; it needs input. More input.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s a healthy compulsion, since as I noted above, the 21st-century brain doesn’t appear to be all that selective about what it wants to absorb into itself. Perhaps if the brain craved nothing but new knowledge — information that would allow it to let its host function as a better human being — that might be absolutely fine.

But no. The 21st century brain is interested in menstrual menaces and megachile perihirta (commonly known as the Western leafcutting bee); in cats drinking from squirt bottles and… oh, you get the idea.

The human brain is a mysterious thing. Whatever you may feel about the information you stuff into it on a daily basis, though, I think we can probably all agree that the Internet has had a profound impact on how we perceive, seek out and consume information these days, hmm?

1715: Twintania Downed, Again (and Again)

This evening it was my great pleasure to be a part of the inaugural Giant Bomb/Loose Cannons (aka GBomb/LoCo) raid party in Final Fantasy XIV — what I hope will be the first of many joint adventures that take place on a UK timezone-friendly schedule.

Since a couple of members of LoCo hadn’t yet cleared The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 5 — something of a “benchmark” for how well groups work together — we had decided that, come hell or high water, we were going to get a group of some description together and attempt it.

We’d tried this once before, filling out the extra spots in the party using Final Fantasy XIV’s matchmaking Duty Finder system, but the downside of this is that you never know who you’re going to get — even in challenging content like Turn 5, there’s always a possibility you’ll get someone who is just looking for a quick and easy clear with no fuss, and who might not have patience to deal with people who are hoping to learn the fight and practice it. Indeed, this happened to us; the first time we got to

[Editor’s note: At this point, Pete was called away for another hasty attempt at Turn 5, this time with Andie in tow. It was a successful attempt, as was, I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the one about to be discussed.]

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway. As I was saying, the first time we got to try it together, we were lumbered with one of these people, who got all huffy when someone got hit by Twintania’s notorious “divebomb” mechanic — one of the more difficult attacks in the game to dodge and otherwise deal with. Eventually, when Huffy McHuffypants left in a huff, we had to abandon our attempt as, since Turn 5 is fairly old content now, it can sometimes be difficult to get people in there unless you pre-form a group before you start.

But anyway. Tonight we assembled a crack team of GBomb and LoCo types, including a couple who had never cleared it before and a few — including me — who had. Then we jumped in.

Our first attempt went reasonably well. Twintania’s companions, the three Scourges of Meracydia, all fell to our onslaught pretty quickly, and we handled Twintania’s barrage of fireballs and conflagrations without breaking a sweat, since we were all, by now, pretty familiar with how this part of the fight worked. When Twintania swept off into the inky blackness high above the right hand of Bahamut, we dove into the nearby ditch between the fallen god’s fingertips and waited for the angry dragon to show her face again.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the first set of Divebombs passed without incident, and Twintania’s snake-like guardians Hygieia and Asclepius showed up. We dealt some damage to the two Hygieia and then focused our attention on Asclepius again; then it was time for another set of Divebombs.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the second set passed without worry, and one of our two paladins dragged the annoyed Asclepius and Hygieia across the right hand of Bahamut to join their two companions that had just showed up.

I used the party’s collected energy to unleash my Limit Break, calling down a shower of meteors onto the heads of the snakes, killing two of them outright and seriously wounding the rest of them. As the Hygieia died, they increased Asclepius’ vulnerability bit by bit, until we were all eventually dealing about twice the normal damage we usually did. It wasn’t long before Asclepius fell to that onslaught, at which point we dove into one of Twintania’s dropped Neurolinks, the collars that the ancient Allagans had used to control her, and which had gradually been falling from her neck one by one as the fight progressed.

At this point, things fell apart somewhat. Twintania summoned her deadly Dreadknights, and it wasn’t long before they ripped through several of our number; the rest fell to her powerful Twisters attack. But not to be deterred, we picked ourselves up and tried again.

Once again, the Scourges fell, and we set to work on Twintania. The fireballs and conflagrations proved little challenge for us, and we deftly avoided the first set of Divebombs. We got a little too enthusiastic on the Hygieia this time around, however; one died before we got out of the ditch and the other was nearly shuffling off the mortal coil as we pulled them together for another Starstorm summoned by my command over black magic.

This time, the furious Twintania didn’t faze us. While our lead paladin kept the attention of the giant dragon, the other made sure the Dreadknights didn’t reach their destination, battering them repeatedly with their shield while I pelted them with freezing ice, which slowed their movements when they weren’t stunned. A Dreadknight would fall, then we would move as one to sidestep Twintania’s next Twisters; then another Dreadknight would fall, and we’d once again hop neatly out of the way of Twisters.

Finally, the weakening Twintania resorted to the same attacks her Scourges had used on us at the start of the fight; spitting huge gobs of flaming matter all over the battlefield, creating a Liquid Hell. We’d run to avoid these, but by this point our victory was all but assured; sure enough, not long after that, the beast fell to our relentless assault, and we were triumphant.

I love this fight. It’s no longer the most difficult thing in the game, but it’s a demanding battle that ensures everyone involved is on their toes and sets expectations appropriately high for the Second Coil of Bahamut (and the Third Coil of Bahamut, which is coming soon). It also bodes well for the group of us who are planning to tackle some of this content on a regular basis; clearing Turn 5 on a second attempt is good going by anyone’s standards, and we repeated the situation almost exactly when a few hours later Andie wanted to give it a go with us, too. We seemingly work well as a team — even without using voice chat to coordinate what we were doing — and our own individual skill levels were apparently well up to the challenge Twintania offered.

So what’s next? That remains to be seen; all being well, we’ll be giving the first Turn of Second Coil a go this week. I’ve tried this battle once before and it appears to be somewhat demanding in the same way as Turn 5 is; you need to pay close attention to what is going on, and react quickly and calmly to the things that are happening around you. One mistake can leave you lying dead on the floor at a moment’s notice — and potentially kill off the entire party. I have faith that we can rise to this challenge, though, and I’m looking forward to giving it a shot.

1714: Arachnid Dentistry

I had an enjoyably bizarre dream last night, or possibly early this morning — I’m not quite sure. It doesn’t really matter when it occurred; what does matter, however, is that it was most peculiar, and has somehow stayed in my memory for most of the day rather than, as dreams are often wont to do, dissipating in a puff of imagination shortly after getting up.

I will preface this by saying there was no poo involved in this dream. I’m sure you’re devastated.

Anyway. The main premise of the dream was that Andie and I were living somewhere that was not the house we now own between us. Instead, we were the proud owners of what appeared to be a rather house-like flat that was actually inside another building. In other words, the flat itself was multi-level, like a house, but its “front door” actually opened into a corridor of the building which contained it rather than onto the street. I recall commenting on this to dream-Andie, noting that she had been adamant about getting a house rather than a flat (she had; it was one of our few “musts” when looking for a new place) and that we’d somehow ended up with a flat instead.

For whatever reason, I elected to step outside what was seemingly our newly acquired flat to go and explore the rest of the building. I followed the corridor from our front door through another set of doors, and discovered that just a little way down from where we now lived was a dental surgery. This struck me as a little odd at the time, but I just shrugged it off. We lived next door to a dentist, and that was just how it was.

I’m not sure how long I walked for, but the building itself appeared to be rather large, with different areas fitted out in noticeably different manners. Lower down — apparently our flat was quite high up in it — the building appeared like a classy hotel, with ostentatious decor and lush carpets; higher up, meanwhile, the drab walls, endless fire doors and strangely arranged staircases called to mind some form of student accommodation I’d spent time in in the past. It wasn’t the halls of residence I lived in; I have a feeling it was either some friends’ halls, or possibly a sixth form college where I stayed for a residential music course while I was a teen. Either way, it was somewhat out of place when compared to the richly decorated lower levels.

At some point, I got lost. I found myself somewhere on the lower floors in what appeared to be the headquarters of an affluent, successful company — all leather sofas, marble-effect (or possibly just marble) tabletops and shiny floors. Whichever way I turned, I couldn’t seem to find the way back where I came from, and eventually ended up on the street. Apparently this building was in Toronto, somewhere near where my friends Mark and Lynette used to live, as I recognised the street corner on which I found myself.

I went back into the building and found that this time I was able to successfully navigate my way back into the hotel lobby-like area, up the stairs into the dorm-like area, and eventually past the dentist back to our flat.

When I came back in, I’m not sure if the arrangement was different or if I just hadn’t noticed it before, but bizarrely, there was a shower room right by the living room. Even more strangely, there was a hole in its wall where bricks had seemingly just been removed, leaving an open “window” between the shower and the living room.

For some reason, I opened the door of the shower room and lay down on the floor. There was a computer keyboard in front of me. I started typing, and as I did so, hundreds of small spiders started emerging from the shower’s plughole, then crawling into the corner of the room and disappearing. As I continued to type, the spiders kept coming, but they always seemed to be going the same way. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I didn’t really want to know. All I knew was that I needed to keep typing and typing and typing and typing… you know, much like I’m doing right now.

Then I woke up in a state of some confusion that was swiftly followed by disappointment that I was probably too late to go out and get a McDonald’s breakfast.

Explain that one, then.

1713: Yep, You Should Play Ethan Carter

I must confess I hadn’t been paying all that much attention to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I knew several people whose opinions I trusted were excited about it, however, so I was always intending to give it a try. And with it releasing this week and Andie out of town for the weekend, I figured tonight would be the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

I completed it, as it happens — it’s not a terribly long game, but it is a very worthwhile experience that I recommend you indulge in, preferably in a single sitting if you have three or four hours to spare.

But what is it? I hear you ask. Well, it’s… Hmm. Sort of hard to describe, in one sense, but pretty simple in another.

Its developers describe it as a non-violent investigation game in which you attempt to track down clues as to the whereabouts of the titular character, a young boy who wrote a letter to the protagonist — the rather wonderfully named Paul Prospero — prior to the eventd of the game beginning.

Now, the description of “non-violent” usually points to an example of those games that are often derided (or sometimes celebrated) as “walking simulators” — games that are, in effect, little more than theme park attractions in which you wander around and have a story delivered to you through various means. Notable recent examples include Dear Esther — which kind of invented the “genre”, if you can call it that; Gone Home, which famously got branded “Not a Game” upon the introduction of Steam’s tagging system; and The Stanley Parable, which no-one seemed to mind too much because it was amusing.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not quite in the same wheelhouse as these games. Rather than funnelling you down a specific path, Ethan Carter offers a certain degree of freedom — though there’s still a natural order you’ll come across the game’s main… bits.

It’s these “bits” that distinguish Ethan Carter from your common-or-garden walking simulator, however, because each involves a degree of puzzle-solving, deduction and thorough investigation of the environment to succeed. And in order to see the game’s story through to its conclusion, you’ll need to succeed in all of these little mini-adventures scattered across the map.

The exact form of these mini-episodes varies with each one: some require you to simply find a bunch of objects in the nearby vicinity; some require you to figure out what happened where in a particular situation, and then correctly identify the order the events you uncovered occurred in; some are more traditional “puzzles” requiring a bit of lateral thinking and investigation to beat. The nice thing about the game’s relatively brief length is that it never feels like it’s repeating itself too much: the most-repeated game mechanic is the chronology-identifying system, and that usually comes at the conclusion of some other investigative work.

The most pleasing thing about Ethan Carter, though, is that it warns you when you start that it’s not going to hold your hand at all, and then it’s true to its word. No navigation arrows. No journal. No flashing objectives. Just you and your brain looking out onto the lovingly detailed (albeit fairly small) open world that forms the setting for Prospero’s investigations.

And what a world. It may be small, but it’s beautifully crafted; this is by far one of the best-looking games I’ve seen for a long time. Outdoors, grass, bushes and trees blow in the wind as the sunlight streaks down through gaps in the leaves. Indoors, light streaming in through windows shows dust floating in the breeze. Textures are beautifully detailed, meaning you can easily read things like book titles and small incidental signs without having to get right up close to them, and the overall atmospheric effects are marvellously convincing: there’s a lovely gentle haze in the background, and although the explorable area of the map is fairly small, the background is rendered in a convincing enough manner to suggest that the area you’re tooling around in is very much part of a much larger world. It’s gorgeous — and it provided the workout I’ve been craving for my brand new nVidia GTX 970 graphics card, which handled it perfectly on max settings without breaking a sweat. Lovely.

I shan’t get into the story of Ethan Carter now, since with it being so short, it’s something you really should experience yourself. I will say, however, that I enjoyed it a great deal, and can recommend it highly — even if you’re not normally a fan of non-violent “walking simulators”. The puzzle-solving and investigative elements elevate this far above titles like Dear Esther and Gone Home in gameplay terms, and, although short, it’s a satisfying game to work through and complete.

So go on. Set aside a few hours this weekend and go find out just where Ethan Carter has got to. You won’t regret it.

1712: Les Oignons

There are, as you’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog a while now, many things that I do not like and wish to change about myself. Some of these are things I probably could change if I tried hard enough. Others are things that appear to be hard-wired into me, and I couldn’t change them now even if I tried.

One of the most frustrating things in this latter category is my dislike of onions.

I have hated onions for as long as I can remember. Initially dismissed by my parents as me just being a fussy eater — like most children, I was fairly fussy about a lot of unfamiliar foods when I was young — I continued to insist that not only did I simply not like onions, but they actually made me want to be sick.

That’s not an exaggeration, either; even today, if I can so much as taste a bit of raw onion, it makes me retch and completely puts me off whatever it is I am eating that has turned out to be stuffed full of onion. I won’t even eat something that has had raw onion on it, because I remain convinced that raw onion infects the flavours of everything around it, making everything else taste of onion even when the offending slices themselves have long been removed.

The strange thing about my violent dislike of onion is the fact that, in many cases, I’m absolutely fine with it if it’s been cooked into something. I don’t mind a pasta sauce that incorporates a bit of onion, for example — so long as it’s not too much — and I don’t mind a curry or Chinese dish that has a bit of onion in it — though again, not too much. Basically if I can taste it, it’s out; I cannot think of a single dish that is improved by the presence of onion, but handled correctly I can at least tolerate it.

What’s even stranger is that over the last couple of years or so, I’ve started to find even specifically onion-based things more palatable than I have done in the past. I can eat and even quite enjoy an onion bhaji, for example — though in most cases these have been deep-fried to such a degree that any resemblance to actual onions is by that point purely coincidental — and I have been known to have battered onion rings with steak and the like, too — though I will add to that that I usually smother them in so much sauce that it becomes impossible to discern their oniony origins.

Despite these changes in the last few years, though, I’m doubtful I’ll ever be able to eat onion in the same way as a lot of other people I know — and I certainly doubt I will ever get to a stage where I like it enough to specifically want to add it to things. This is frustrating, because it’s surprising quite how much food out there — particularly stuff designed for lunchtime consumption like sandwiches, wraps and the like — is absolutely rammed full of onion, in many cases ruining what sounds like an otherwise delicious item of food for me and, more often than not, making it completely unpalatable.

Oh well. I’ve survived 33 years without onions; I’m pretty sure I can probably go the rest of my life without them, too.

1711: Soporific

I have… a problem.

Said problem is that if I have to sit still and do nothing while concentrating on someone else talking for any length of time, I get extremely sleepy, regardless of how tired I actually am. My eyelids start to get heavy, my body gets tired and all I want to do is just curl up and get comfortable for a bit of a nap.

This is a problem because the times when I am supposed to sit still, do nothing and concentrate on someone else talking for any length of time are generally occasions where it would be impolite to fall asleep. Weddings and funerals, for example, but also meetings.

I’ve suffered with this issue for as long as I can remember — certainly for as long as I’ve been an adult. I remember it happening on occasion at university during lectures, but more often than not this could be attributed to a heavy night out the previous evening and a hangover weighing on my mind. (My peers found it terribly amusing when I had to quietly slip out of our weekly piano workshop to go and be a bit sick. Well, I didn’t want to throw up all over the Turner Sims concert hall.) At other times, I could fend it off by occupying my brain somewhat: either taking notes if I was actually interested in the subject of the lecture, or doodling the lecturer getting sucked off by some sort of sinister vacuum cleaner-like contraption if I wasn’t. (This happened once; it wasn’t something I found myself drawing on a regular basis.)

It’s mildly embarrassing, but fortunately I’ve never managed to actually completely fall asleep before. I’ve come perilously close, I must admit, but I always manage to maintain my faculties and remain in the land of the living. I came perilously close on more than one teacher training day while I worked in schools, too, particularly since said training days tend to ignore everything we’re ever taught about engaging people and helping them learn and instead tend to consist of someone waffling on and on and on for hours about something which is, quite possibly, a load of old bollocks.

The peculiar thing is the moment I step out of the situation where I’m supposed to be concentrating on someone else droning on about whatever, I can be back to full alertness in a matter of seconds, with no trace of tiredness. It’s just that while I’m sitting there, expected to take in everything that is being said and actually retaining very little of it at all — usually because it’s not relevant to me and thus immediately filtered out by my brain — my body appears to go into its shutdown sequence. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Or am I? That would be awful, and even more difficult to explain than falling asleep in a meeting already would be. But I guess we’ll cross that bridge if — yes, if — we come to it!

1710: Perfectionism

“I’m a perfectionist” may be the lamest, most clichéd answer possible to that equally lame and clichéd job interview question “what is your biggest weakness?” but, well, it really is a weakness.

Why? Because perfectionism often makes you feel responsible for things that aren’t your fault. Perfectionism often makes you feel bad for making mistakes based on information you weren’t given. Perfectionism often ruins an otherwise pleasant day when that one thing that didn’t go quite as well as all the other things weighs on your mind more than the considerably greater number of positive thoughts you could be having.

I came to the conclusion today that I suffer from perfectionism. I hate doing a bad job. I hate feeling like I’ve made a mistake. I hate feeling like I could have done more.

I made a mistake today. It wasn’t a big mistake. It didn’t get me into trouble. It didn’t hurt anyone or spoil anyone else’s day, and thinking about it rationally, from a distance, it wasn’t really a “mistake” at all since, as noted above, I didn’t have all the information available to hand. It does, however, have the potential to make more work for me — thankfully there is plenty of time to complete said work if it is necessary — and it’s probably something I could have avoided. I didn’t, however, and now this has happened. And I feel bad.

I’m assured that I shouldn’t feel bad, that I wasn’t to know, that it might not even be a problem at all — I won’t know that latter part until tomorrow — but it’s too late; the knowledge that I Did Something Wrong has already sunk in and already made me a bit mopey on the way home. Thankfully I managed to distract myself in time, so with any luck I won’t be spending the evening in a depressed haze staring at a wall as often happens on such occasions, but the fact remains: perfectionism stinks.

I’m not sure where this stems from. My most plausible explanation is that it likely hails from my childhood, where I was typically — not to blow my own trumpet here, it’s a statement of fact — one of the top-performing students in the class, both in primary and secondary school. On the few occasions where I failed to live up to the standards I had apparently set for both myself and others to expect of me, I felt really bad. I still have a vivid memory of a two-page spread in my Class 2 (year 3 or 4 in new money, I think) Maths book where the left page — on which I had completed a single sum — was adorned with the teacher comment “Lazy work” in red pen, and the right page — on which I had completed three sums, two of which were incorrect — was forever blemished with the words “Very poor”, also in red pen.

I was mortified at the time; the rest of my school books were so consistently good and I was so regularly praised and rewarded — “go and colour in a square on your rocket” — that doing something badly brought me crashing down to earth and upset me a great deal. I didn’t want anyone to see those pages in my books; they were a stain on my otherwise good record. To my credit, though, I always made sure I was both more industrious and careful in Maths lessons from that point on, even though I absolutely loathed that subject right through until the end of secondary school.

To date, though, every time something doesn’t quite go right, I end up feeling like I did that day I got that book back with those two awful pages. Whether it’s a negative comment on something I’ve written, an offhand remark by someone I know or simply the knowledge that I messed up somewhere — even if no-one else knows — it hits me right in the Black Dog and, more often than not, ruins an otherwise good day.

Thankfully, the very act of writing this post is helping banish such thoughts from my mind, and I fully intend to go and have a thoroughly pleasant evening now. So suck that, perfectionism.

1709: Stories All Around

Whenever I see a police car or an ambulance screaming down the road in the opposite direction to the way I’m going, I can’t help but wonder where they’re going, what they’re doing and what the story behind that split-second encounter was. For a brief moment, my own story — usually something rather mundane like going to the shops or to get some petrol — intersects with that of some other people; an exciting, possibly tragic story that I will likely never know the details of.

That doesn’t stop me wondering, though.

Stories are all around us. Everyone you see is living their own story. And while few of them live up to the obnoxious banner currently hanging in Southampton’s WestQuay shopping centre (which promotes a local photography studio and reads “The Most Important Story Ever Told: Yours”), they’re all different and they’re all interesting in their own way. It can be kind of mind-boggling to contemplate quite how many things are going on at any given time, particularly when you contemplate how many things happen to you — however mundane — on any given day.

It’s in acknowledging the fact that stories are going on all around us — and continue without our intervention — that it becomes possible to craft a convincing, compelling fictional world. And it’s true across all forms of media: many comic books these days unfold in shared universes, with foreground events in one series fading into the background in others, but still being acknowledged; crossover TV shows keep their own narratives mostly parallel, but occasionally bend inwards a little to meet for a fleeting episode or two before diverging again; prolific authors spend volume after volume building up a convincing mental picture of how their world works, and the many adventures that the people therein have over time.

And the same is, of course, true of video games. The most well-crafted video games embrace this feeling of stories happening all around us at any time and, more so than any other medium, allow us to explore them at our leisure, pursuing the threads we’re interested in to build up a full picture of what it must really like to be an inhabitant of a virtual world.

This sort of thing is particularly important in sprawling role-playing games, where a poorly crafted world can do great harm to the immersion factor of the game. It’s the reason why the Elder Scrolls games have never really resonated with me: I never got the sense that the people wandering around and occasionally looking in my direction mattered; I never got the sense that they had their own personal stories, even when they formed the basis of a quest or two. There was the odd exception — tucked away in a few nooks and crannies were some interesting diary entries and illicit items that suggested all was perhaps not as it seemed with a character that seemed otherwise respectable — but for the most part, the identikit nature of most of the characters in these games was immensely offputting.

It will doubtless not surprise you to hear that this is one thing I feel Final Fantasy XIV does exceptionally well, much as its predecessor Final Fantasy XI did before it. Although the world is primarily populated by static NPCs who go about their same old business at all times of day or night — that and the players, of course — the game does, on regular occasions, make the effort to make the land of Eorzea feel truly lived-in.

This is most apparent in the relatively recently added “Postmoogle” quests, in which you’re recruited (somewhat reluctantly) by the Deputy Postmoogle to deliver a series of letters to various characters around the realm. Mechanically, these quests are little more than “go here, talk to this person” fetch quests, but if you stop and pay attention to what is being said — and who is involved — they take on a whole new amount of meaning.

This is because they involve characters that you will have seen elsewhere out and about in the world in various contexts.

One quest sees you accompanying the aptly named Hunberct Longhaft and his two adoring Miqo’te companions around the city of Ul’Dah; your only previous contact with these characters will have been during one of the major “FATE” events out in the world, at which point there was little time for conversation, but just enough time to wonder exactly what was going on between Hunberct and the two Miqo’te.

Another sees you engaging in conversation with a group of four gladiators whom you’ve likely only ever encountered as the last “boss” of the dungeon Halatali (Hard). Another still delves into the background of the “aesthetician” — the character you can summon from your inn room to get a new haircut — and his Ishgardian heritage.

It’s not just the Postmoogle quests that do this, however. Many of the sidequests that have been added since the game’s launch acknowledge popular minor characters, such as the ill-fated adventuring party you run into early in the game’s main scenario, whose erstwhile leader is beheaded in battle “off-camera” while you run your first dungeons. The next time you meet the group, the healer of the party — the deceased leader’s fiancee — is carrying his head around in a bag with her, stricken with guilt; the next time you meet them, which is much, much later, at level 50, long after the initial main scenario is over and done with, things have gone very, very wrong indeed.

Final Fantasy XIV is far from the only example of this idea of stories being all around us being used effectively in video games, but it’s one of the best in recent memory.

I still can’t help wondering where that ambulance was going, though. I hope the person it was on its way to help is all right.

1708: Playing on Home Turf

Regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with how much I enjoy Final Fantasy XIV (as does Andie now, too) and, for sure, I’ve had a blast since the game’s original beta sessions last year. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to run with the same people since I started playing — the Giant Bomb Free Company — and most of them have been playing fairly constantly since launch, so there are usually some familiar faces online at any given time, and other people come and go around that stable of predictable, reliable players.

The downside to the Free Company that I’m a member of is that the vast majority of people involved live in the States. This makes things a little difficult when I want to participate in things that practically necessitate forming a group yourself rather than relying on the game’s built-in “Duty Finder” matchmaking system. It hasn’t stopped me trying, of course — and I’m very pleased to have completed both The Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5 and Ramuh’s Extreme Mode incarnation with my friends in the Free Company — but since these attempts normally necessitate staying up until about 3am at the earliest in most cases, they’re not always practical, particularly now I have a proper job and consequently have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning in order to arrive on time.

Enter our neighbours, then — yes, they’re actually our neighbours; their Free Company house is right across the street from ours — the free company Loose Cannons, more commonly known as LoCo. I’ve seen these guys around a bit over time, but didn’t really know them that well. They always seemed to be pleasant people, though, and they were always gracious enough to wave and greet me when I passed by them on my way to do something else.

After a while, a “linkshell” — essentially a custom chat channel, for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV parlance — was set up to allow Giant Bomb and LoCo to communicate with one another, since the Free Company chat channels are restricted to members only, and you can only be a member of one Free Company at once. You can have up to eight linkshells, though, so I happily accepted the invitation — though, being me, I was somewhat hesitant to muscle in on what I saw as already-established social groups, and thus remained rather quiet around the unfamiliar people.

The other night saw an encouraging milestone, though; it transpires that many of the members of LoCo operate in the same timezone as me, and moreover, that a lot of them are interested in taking on the game’s most challenging content, such as the aforementioned Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and the subsequent four-part raid the Second Coil of Bahamut. Since I’m also interested in challenging this content, but didn’t want to muscle in on the established, US-timezone groups that had already naturally formed in Giant Bomb, this has the potential to be an ideal situation for me.

I’ve never been a part of a “static” raiding group before and indeed have usually shied away from this sort of thing in MMOs because I doubt my own skills, usefulness and ability to commit to the group. As I wrote the other day, though, Final Fantasy XIV is one of a few games that I actually feel confident that I’m quite good at, and the prospect of not only challenging myself but developing some close friendships with others who enjoy the game in much the same way I do is very exciting to me. I’ve often mentioned how playing Final Fantasy XIV can be as much of a social activity as a video game, and having a regularly scheduled evening where a predictable, reliable group all shows up and we work our damnedest to try and take down Twintania, Rafflesia and whatever lies beyond that? Well, that’s something that I’m looking forward to a lot.

Is this how people on sports teams feel?