We have this at times, we go back in time to remember the party we were at, the party we gave. There is a reason for it. It can be sentiment, lust, desire, achievement there are hundreds of reasons why a party remains in memory forever. A party is for most the easiest to see, and there is a second reason. It is a setting where the crowd remembers you, the crowd was part of it, you either distinguished yourself, or you were distinguished by others. It is the crowd that is an essential element in all this. It is part of the multiplayer appeal, or at least that is what I believe is the case. I play single for myself, for my own needs, for my need for joy. I am not a racer of routes, not a shortcut maker of cleverness. I walked through Oblivion and Skyrim for hours, enjoying the perfection that Bethesda created. I see solution after solution that is all about feigned perfection. It is about showing a crowd how perfect you are, but is that a truth? A reality? To present ones self as clever is not a presentation, it is deception. That is the side that I going wrong in too many games. Whilst I focussed on giving the gamer a good time, others are setting the dressing to pretend the gamer is much better than he or she actually is. I have been brooding on this, you see it is the game Elden Ring that brings the real gamers to the surface. I am a real gamer, but I was never that great in action games, I learned that the hard way in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. I still have these games. They are beautiful, but for me not something I can hope to conquer. I feel no shame, I have my own speciality and I have achieved plenty of game completions over the 40 years I have truly enjoyed gaming. From the VIC20, the CBM64, the Atari ST, the CBM Amiga, N64, CD32, SEGA Megadrive, Playstation, Xbox, SEGA Dreamcast, the PS2, Gamecube, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and the PS5. I have seen and enjoyed gaming to the largest extent, but when the Xbox360 came things changed. This is not the fault of Microsoft, in this they are innocent. There was a push for achievements and to get them any way possible and I was the same. I wanted (for the most) all the achievements, I was not an online gamer, so I missed out on several achievements. I think it is what ‘saved’ me and even the Sony group has that issue. You are not a gamer until you get the platinum achievement. There is something wrong with that notion. It is like a new dimension of workforce adhering to the Wall Street stage of ‘Greed is good’, it is not, it really is not. I think the stage of Nintendo Switch to do away with achievements was wise, a lot more wise than most of us realise. Ask yourself the question, are you driven by achievements or to have fun? Do you enjoy walking in the world you play in? These questions have been bugging me for some time now. The Bethesda games brought it to the surface and to some degree the Ubisoft games too. Guerrilla pushed it into overdrive with the Horizon games. It matters, it really does because the wrong setting here could break streaming games. In the games I designed for streaming I think about rewards, not achievements. The Luna keys were part of that. Silver keys to the game you get them in and gold keys to unlock something in 5 games that you have at that point. Rewards are more satisfying, rewards are a token of achievement, a point where we all will get, but not having it on every profile matters. It stops the wannabe’s, it heralds those who are and it gives to those who attempt and overcome. We want to be the gamer that has it all, but why? You see there is so much to gain from replayability, there is so much to get when some options are only there for the arcane, for the shadow dancers, for the brawlers and it is possible we will not become all of those to the degree of perfection, but the inner feeling of what we get done is overwhelming and I believe that achievements undermine that. Now, this is nothing against Microsoft (I slapped them often enough), Microsoft brought achievements and it is a great idea, but game makers and others seem to have subverted the concept, that is how I see it and it took me a while to see the Nintendo Switch step as the great step it was. Yet I understand that achievements are important to some, so how to embrace the idea and make it better? The keys are part of an optional solution, but only in part. So to look at the party of what was is also a way to see the side of what might be. I have no idea if I will solve it, it might be up to someone else to do that, but it needs to be done. We need to go back to the old days to when gaming was pure it was about the gamer getting to places, not others judging the gamer on how he got there, how fast and in what way. We lost something there and we need to find it again. The streaming stage will push gaming further, but it will also push weaknesses and corruption of the gaming mind further. Gaming is about checks and balances and we seemingly ignored the balancing act. I have done that as well and now my mind is making up the consideration and the tally of balances missed. How it will fare? I cannot tell at present.
Tag Archives: Achievements
Lunae commentarius
Yes, it might be Latin to you, yet we are talking about the Diary of the moon, my idea for adding social media a safe place to gamers. You see, I have had a few discussions in the last few days. The responses go from ‘Why, they’re only gamers’ and ‘Why do we need another social media’ to ‘Don’t worry Facebook will solve it’, and that is the problem, Facebook does not solve our problems, it uses whatever bothers us towards a data setting for them. They are not doing anything wrong, they are a commercial party. Yet the time has come for gamers to get a real safe space and as such we are looking around. I saw what Google+ offered and I preferred it, but Google shut it down, recently we got Cocoon (2019) and they (at www.cocoon.com) give us “Cocoon is a home for the people you feel close to today, and will feel even closer to tomorrow”, they are right. In the beginning there was Facebook and Facebook alone, but as their saturation increased the amount of advertisements grew, it is the trade-off of saturation against quarter on quarter growth. There are no clear numbers, yet it seems that Facebook has 25%-50% of the ENTIRE planet. That has never been done before, that is what saturation looks like and everyone on that advertisement stage is trying to fill their pockets.
The stage is also getting banked (towards Facebook). We might see (if we look) “Cocoon 3.0: a place to share with all your people, and just your people”, we see this in the media page on July 22, 2021, the media is remaining quiet as a mouse. So when we seek Google search, we get all kinds of cocoon mentions, but only when we seek deeper will we see that the media is avoiding this new option, perhaps someone needs to talk to media stakeholders that need Facebook as a ‘friend’? Yet these issues shows that we need another way, a Google+ and Cocoon way to set the stage, first for gamers, then for all the other people.
So how does this work?
In my view, a social media account is like an RPG game. You are your castle, your house. Together with your friends you have a cluster and that cluster is seen in two ways, your cluster of all your friends and your ‘in-crowd’, those who see everything. The book (it look like a leather bound diary) has some details, optionally a photo (if the gamer wants this), but in essence there is a closed avatar and the open avatar. The closed avatar is only for friends and in-crowds. That avatar has pages, each game a page, each game with the option to add images (screenshots) with an edited screenshot at the top, which is either made the diary header, or (more to follow), the page holds your achievements and a timeline with data available for YOU to decide where it goes.
So it goes on for every game you play. But it is what happens next that matters. You decide whether the friends see everything, whether you want to spread everything, top-line or nothing to the game maker, the official game page or the Amazon distribution page. The important part is that it is up to YOU, the gamer to decide what is send around, and the stage is that NOTHING is shared until you allow for it more important, those who get the information can never forward your details, your nickname is seen, but not searchable and the list goes on. I also envisioned a stage where there is a Sony Tab and a Nintendo tab, completing your game experience on the entire field.
So we see clusters, ranks and vines. A station where you are in charge and that setting changes social media. When Amazon launches this, the need to non advertising continues and it goes all over the place.
The stage is more than just achievements, you have a header of your favourite game and you have headers of the games that you play the most (at present), a stage where you profile yourself into a larger community of YOUR making, merely your friends and family. This is not longer about selling ads, this is a safe space where the gamer can communicate achievements and milestones to their group of people with no advertisements. It will be a band new day for the gamer. It was something I had hoped we would see on the PS4, now we see a setting where Amazon has a much larger playing field. Consider that the Luna account can be linked to your Kindle, giving you your game diary on the go?a stage that can only get larger, there is a setting where the other streamers will have to run, run really hard just to keep up with the Amazon Luna, just a thought.
Filed under IT
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 