Tag: nerds

#oneaday, Day 257: Away Message

I’m away for the weekend. Specifically, I’m attending the Eurogamer Expo, the UK’s answer to gaming conventions like PAX. It’s been running for a good few years now apparently but I only really became aware of it this year. I decided to attend, as I thought it’d be a good opportunity to get hands-on with some of the latest hotness that I’d missed out on at PAX, as well as catch up with a few friends from Twitter.

Eurogamer Expo has a way to go yet before it can even think about competing with PAX in terms of scale, but it’s certainly got potential. There are plenty of high-profile companies in attendance with their big games, and tickets sold out completely, so people are certainly interested in events like this. They need to sort out their non-existent press provision and look at more in the way of “special events” to make it a truly excellent gaming convention, though. Some evening concerts wouldn’t go amiss; or more in the way of the few developer talks and presentations that they do have already.

Day 1 has so far passed in a most pleasant manner and I am looking forward to tomorrow. I wrote an article about Fable III today, you should totally go and read it, as it’s awesome. Here’s the rest of the day in one-word summary format:

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Multiplayer: Tense.
Killzone 3: Loading.
Killzone 3 in 3D: Migraine.
Gran Turismo 5 in 3D: Cardboard.
Peter Molyneux: Entertaining.
Fable III: Amusing.
Dead Space 2: Frightening!
Gears of War 3 Beast Mode: Multiplayer?
Fallout: New Vegas: Fallout.
Saw II: Bloody.
3DTV: NO.
Rock Band 3: Realistic.
@jenjeahaly: Yay!
@shoinan: Fun!
@lewisdenby: Brief!
@LinkYeah: Freshers.
Eurogamer’s press provision: Horseshit.
Being told off for taking a coffee while wearing the wrong wristband: Bewildering.
That redhead girl I saw at one point: WOW.
Tonight: Surprise!

So that was my day. Tomorrow will be another day and hopefully I’ll get a chance to try out a lot of the things I didn’t get to see today. There’s a lot of really good-looking games on offer, most of which will be well familiar to people who went to PAX, in all likelihood. Fable III in playable form was the big deal for those who like that sort of thing, and it’s looking lovely. Peter Molyneux’s talk on the history of the Fable series and its influences from movies and games was particularly interesting, as you’ll know already if you’ve read this like I suggested earlier.

It was great to finally put a face to some Twitter usernames, too, and meet a few new ones as well. Hopefully over the next couple of days there’ll be more of that until we’re all one nice big happy games-loving family of awesomeness.

And, of course, tonight. Surprising a very dear friend was totally worth it. Even if I got called a few rude names along the way.

For now, I bid you good night.

#oneaday, Day 172: Epic Win

This is the best. Idea. EVAR.

Video game nerds like to think about things in terms of video games. It’s part of what we do. RPG nerds are the same. And when you get a video game nerd who also likes RPGs? Well, that’s it, really. Everything degenerates into jokes about gaining XP for changing lightbulbs and the like.

Epic Win looks set to allow people to do just that. At last! This is the To Do list I’ve been waiting for.

I have no shame in admitting that I’ve named projects in OmniFocus for the iPhone so that they look more like quests, or chapters from a story. And I’d love a Deus Ex-style nanomachine HUD that allowed me to track my objectives from inside my own head. So long as you could turn the damn thing off. Trying to sleep with a waypoint tracker would probably be difficult.

And gaining experience points is cool, as everyone knows. Experience points are even cool for non-nerds now, as anyone who wastes hours of their life playing Farmville will attest. Experience points give us something to focus on. They give us a sort-of-tangible reward for achieving something, even if that thing is mundane. They offer a recognisable, attainable goal in the form of the next level. And they encourage competition with friends.

So why not apply them to your personal life? That seems to be the exact approach that Epic Win is taking, and I love love love it. The app may not be out yet, but for the simple reason that it aims to get nerds organised, it’s a day-one purchase for me.

And you just know there’ll be Achievements in there too. And probably some means of comparing said Achievements with friends. Who knows? Maybe it’ll turn a generation of slovenly geeks into houseproud types.

Perhaps not. But it’s a noble goal, at least, and a nice way to make the mundane and boring into a game, something which products like EA Sports Active have done with some success with other activities in the past.

Check out the app’s official site here.