The power of planning

I had a wonderful epiphany last night while talking with my wife about getting things done - apparently the difference between procrastination and diligence is scheduling.

It had never occurred to me before that all these people who run around with little appointment books packed with notes and scribbles who seemed to be efficient and on top of everything were actually the worst kind of procrastinators of all. They were so self-forgiving about their own procrastination that they developed entire systems to accommodate it. These daytimers and little black books were doing double duty on feeding people the rewards of accomplishment while still enabling procrastination!

Here's the way it works: Normally, if someone says "Hey Vaalin, can you run my alt through Mana Tombs" I will think to myself that I would rather sleep in a pile of angry hedgehogs. I will consider brushing my hand over the wireless adapter and lose connection for a while, or I'll say "I'm farming such-and-such right now and I was going to head to Dire Maul, um..." and really try to avoid this thing. But with the power of scheduling I have the ability to procrastinate as much as I want while still appearing responsible and organized. I can flip open my appointment book and say "Mana Tombs is definitely a possibility. How does Thursday the 22nd work for you? I have a slot open from 5-6pm." Suddenly the gift is there, an open spot on your obviously busy calendar, you've made a generous offering to the requester and the onus is on them to either refuse your generosity, or accept the scheduled run.

"Uh, I'll be 80 by then."

"Well, it pays to plan ahead."

Oh scheduling, how I love thee, let me count the ways!

Alone in the crowd, in Dalaran

I'm at another turning point in playing Warcraft. I've been playing the game on and off - mostly on - for almost exactly five years, and I've seen the game and the community change and I've gone through different phases while playing. I have this feeling right now like Vianne in Chocolat where the winds are blowing and I feel the need to pack up and move to a different server, a different environment and reinvent my experience in Azeroth. I do this periodically. Sometimes I feel forced, sometimes it's just angst or a desire for adventure. The season has changed, it is time to pack up my things and move someplace new.

My current guild is one that I never intended on joining, really. I was playing independently on Cho'Gall when I met a nice group of adults who were also playing on a daily basis, and we had the promise of doing some 5-mans together and maybe raiding eventually. Between then and now two things happened - the main couple decided that they were going to transfer off with the active portion of the guild to Illidan, and Blizzard released patch 3.3 that included the new looking for group interface.

The move to Illidan was both wonderful and terrible. It was a wonderful economy to reroll in, with stacks of copper ore selling for 6 gold each and mithril selling for 75. I had all the gold I would need for leveling and more and it was an easy and prosperous path to 80. The server itself is kind of terrible though. The people are loud and awful and there's tons of them. Dalaran is incredibly laggy. We win the battle in Lake Wintergrasp all the time, which is nice for farming epics, but it ruins the experience when it isn't competitive.

The group of people I transferred with joined a guild where they had friends, and the day we arrived it exploded. At least I didn't pay for a new transfer I guess. One person has stopped logging in altogether, and there's only a total of about 5 active people other than myself. There are no guild plans. I am the only person depositing anything in the guild bank, and I have no access to retrieve anything. Basically, I'm alone on an overpopulated server. The best times I have are with the LFG interface. I can queue up for a new group, get transported there, knock out the whole dungeon efficiently, and be back where I started with some quick gear and badges with no fuss. It pretty much eliminates the need to be in a guild.

And that's pretty ironic considering that Warcraft is finally paying some attention to guilds for the first time since guild banks were introduced in vanilla. In the upcoming expansion guilds will be able to earn experience by themselves through the actions of their members. The top 20 characters (players?) will contribute points to a total for the guild for different achievements that can be spent to grant the guild and members of the guild different benefits. It's all a bit hazy and undefined at the moment, but it's a package of incentives for people to be in guilds. It's a good thing they're doing it, because the new LFG tool is a way better experience than the typical guild experience right now.

In the old days guilds had goals and supported each other, these days they are usually drama-filled electronic penis-waving contests where people try to maneuver for favor and access to loot. The LFG tool is much more fair. It doesn't care who's sleeping with the GM or whether you have DKP saved up from old Molten Core runs you never spent, it rewards the here and now with a need-before-greed share of the spoils. It's fair to a fault, which makes it easy to negotiate around. It provides more structure and equity than most GMs, and it promises that no matter how bad a dungeon run goes, tomorrow is another day.

So I am in my red traveling coat, following the winds to a new shore, and I don't know where I will set up shop next. Probably someplace small, where the ability to provide pleasant conversation and occasional assistance is still valued.

I've got the winner

I managed to do a very quick rundown of my gaming life and somehow completely left out arcades, which is totally unfair. I left out lots of things that I hope to cover eventually, but arcades had a huge influence on me and other kids growing up in suburbia.

As a suburban kid I was a little atypical in that I was always ready to venture outside the air conditioning for some sports or adventure, but even so I wasn't too fond of actually going anywhere. Playing baseball in the street or riding to the playground a block away was enough usually to burn hours of summer. But if I had a handful of quarters or five bucks (usually thanks to grandma - birthday money is the best) I would take that bike all the way across town to Southridge Mall where there was a video arcade.

Early arcades were pinball machines with a few Pacman machines stuck in them, and later arcades were the skee-ball ticket emporiums with a couple of Soul Calibur machines stuck in the back. In the middle time period were the arcades of glory where players would compete against each other in games of skill. Occasionally someone would visit the arcade who had a tremendous amount of skill with one game, and they would 'hold court' at the machine challenging all comers. The rest of us would stack our quarters on the edge of the plexiglass covering the monitor as a way to hold our place in line to try and unseat the champion.

In retrospect the games came and went pretty fast, but at the time they were all-encompassing. Figuring out the secret levels for Defender, the best strategy for Joust or Qbert, and later, learning all the secret finishing moves for Mortal Kombat. I didn't have a console during this time so instead of the A-B-A-B-up-down-etc. Nintendo cheat codes I was learning forward-down-forward-highpunch so that when I beat someone with Sub-Zero he would tear out their spine. It was one thing to do this against the computer, but when someone you're playing against was a real jerk and they deserved special punishment, you could add insult to injury and burn them to ashes or rip out their still-beating heart after a match and rub it in. Yes, this occasionally started fights.

But all of this PvP stuff was temporary - what really ranked up there on a list of arcade achievements was holding the High Score. When a machine wasn't being played it would rotate through a few screens advertising itself, and then show the list of high scores for the game and a three-letter name that someone could enter to identify them as the person who earned that score. Everyone had an acronym at that time, and we used to identify people by these schortcuts. "Oh hey, look out - BBQ just walked in and he's headed for John Elway." My abbreviation was usually DRV, and I was sad every time the machines were reset for maintenance and my initials were erased from the leaderboard.

The arcades started to close at the end of the 80s and the ones that survived were franchised and used tokens instead of quarters. Eventually they started shedding the cost of rotating out games and switched more of their stock over to skee-ball and coin drop games that ate your tokens quickly but spat out tickets that you could exchange at the counter for cheap toys. But I didn't want toys, I could just buy them with my five dollars. I wanted adventure and glory, and my three initials at the top of the leaderboard - a piece of recognition that as a kid you couldn't get anywhere else and lasted longer than a pack of gum.

The arcades died but the kiosk games didn't. They're still around here and there, sometimes they have fake guns mounted on them as controls, or overly cartoonish graphics and loud noises to pull in the quarters from little kids. They aren't respectable enough to have their own pieces of real estate anymore and they hide out in the corners of airports, bowling alleys, and the airlock entrance ways to hotel pools. Sometimes you'll find an old game that you spent hours mastering and you can pop a few coins in and leave your DRV on the leaderboard among the dozens of identical entries left by the night janitor.

Insert coin to continue

I've been gaming my whole life, and I probably have my brother to blame for it. There are a lot of tools people can use to explore the world - ships, cameras, telescopes - but one of the least appreciated is the game.

Since ancient days when students of strategy honed their minds in contests of chess, games have been used to explore the possibilities of the world in an environment where they risked nothing for the chance at insight. My dad was an excellent chess player, and when I was younger he would play against my brother while spotting him a rook or a knight, and never lost a serious game. In turn, my brother could beat the pants off me while hardly trying. He'd spot me a rook and a knight, or occasionally his queen, and trounce me while reading a book.

I can't say I have the patience for chess though. My brother Mack and I have the same father but different mothers, and something I picked up from my mothers' side tipped the balance of my psyche in favor of adventuring before planning, which is fatal for a good chess player. I've never been able to think more than three or four moves in advance. Well, I guess I'm able to, but I don't want to. I have to fight my nature to do it. I sort of want to be surprised by what happens and to react to it rather than control it. It makes me an excellent Lieutenant rather than a General, and gives me a better appreciation for athletic and dynamic environments that can sometimes paralyze the 'planners'.

I was born in 1969, two months after the first moon landing. I have very few memories of my early years, and my mind didn't really start creating permanent memories as a result of my environment until I was about 7. At this point, several things were introduced that changed my life to define who I am.

• Star Wars was released by George Lucas. Say what you want about the man's skills as a movie director, he got the story to the screen in my rural Minnesota town and it changed my life. From the opening phrase "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" I was blown away. He showed me possibility that I didn't realize existed.
  
  
• I had endless summer hours and the freedom to be outdoors, and a giant sandbox. I could take my toys and Star Wars figures out there and create castles and rivers and houses and roads and battles and feasts and daring rescues and entire worlds made of sand. I had a couple of buckets of legos also, but sand was fungible and as infinite as my imagination.
  
  
• We raised chickens on our little hobby farm (mostly white ones, with the occasional araucana). There is something about the character of a person who has been responsible for life that is absent from others. You're changed forever when you have a pet, more so when you live with livestock, and much more so when you have children. You learn the consequence of inaction, you learn the randomness of life, you learn that some decisions are permanent.
  
  
• Mack got the box set of Dungeons and Dragons for Christmas, and he recruited me to join him in an imaginary world where I was no longer a scrawny farm kid with a bowl haircut, but instead a powerful warrior wielding a sword and torch through a dark dungeon haunted by monsters jealously guarding their treasure.

The result of all of this was a rapid expansion of my own imagination, and the desire to create things - worlds - full of excitement and adventure. At first, the only real option was role-playing. We rolled the dice in the original D&D box set until they turned into marbles, and kept going. My brother played games with his friends - tactical games like Blue Max and Squad Leader - and I played more RPGs, where world creation was unlimited. Traveller, Champions, Vampire, anything that gave me a taste of a different world where possibility was unlimited.

While I was growing up with games I was also growing up with computers. We moved to Milwaukee in 1981 when my dad went to work for IBM, and the PC entered our home. I've never lived without a computer in the house since then. We had a copy of Adventure that ran from disk on an Imsai 8080 that my dad & Mack put together as a 4-H project, and an Atari console that we played tank combat on, but the PC had an allure to it that the console was missing.

For one thing, you sat at a desk when you used it. Desks were for serious endeavors, when you played the Atari you were slouching in a bean bag chair in the den. The PC also communicated to you with words, and was eloquent and exact. And when I fired up a copy of Zork and it told me that I was likely to be eaten by a grue, I knew this was a serious danger and I needed a source of light, pronto.

The early PC was an excellent business machine, but the developers failed to see how much more people wanted to do with it. Apple was sporting color graphics and sound, and we had a 4-color monitor and beeps. I tried to explain to my dad that the Apple was the better computer and he was terribly offended. He tried to tell me about the components of the machine and the capabilities, and I tried to explain that the person who would be sitting at the computer didn't know or care about these things and just wanted to communicate with it. I was taking AV in school, and it was plainly obvious that the PC lacked audio and had limited video, so what kind of presentation would that make?

The AV gap is gone now, but thanks to 25 years of playing catch-up many graphics studios still use Apples. However... the games are designed for PCs first now (or consoles). There was a time in there where I couldn't wait to visit my cousin at the holidays to see all the computer games he had that our green-screen PC couldn't play, like Castle Wolfenstien and Choplifter.

But the computers didn't have the same feel as role-playing did, and I continued to do them separately. Over on one side I would be playing Red Baron as a WWI flying ace, and on the other side I'd be hosting six-pack Champions games with heroes battling villains for interactive glory. But soon after the internet arrived, and it changed everything.