Nonthon

This is my first year since 2002 when the lead-up to noon on President's Day Eve does not see me establishing my nest in the theater, waiting for the 24-hour Boston SF Film Festival to start. The Thon is exercise in endurance unbearable without friends, and while I have friends in attendance, this year all my past Starship Thon berthmates are otherwise occupied.

I am OK with this! I have a lot on my own plate as well, and honestly? I can't say I feel much regret in breaking tradition this year. I find that I don't even have to console myself with the guarantee that this way I won't be stuck sitting behind Constant Screen Talkback, Laughing At His Own Lame Joke, Then Looking Around To See If Anyone Else Is Laughing Guy. So, best wishes to all who are attending. Even that guy.

Next post: what the hell I've been up to, lately.

State of the jmac.

Work is work. There's stuff worth talking about but nothing I'd want to blog about; so goes working for oneself. The overall status of Appleseed and my relationship with it remains stable.

I want to finish the next Gameshelf before PAX, which affords me another five weeks. I've put a lot of work into it (as have many friends), but my motivation level now is not nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago. This is in part because of the resurgence my interest in -- wait for it -- gaming, or anyway gaming of a particular nature, and the novel creative paths this activity has been urging me down.

I found my interest in multiplayer online digital games re-ignited last month. This started with my rediscovery of TF2 on Xbox, built itself up with my ensuing seeking out and palling around with certain online communities of mature gamers, and most recently culminated with the surprise re-launch of Planbeast.

I'm not sure what pushed me to actually do it, but at the start of the month I made a post about Planbeast to Geezer Gamers, a web-based community of grown-up Xbox Live fans I'd been hanging around long enough so that I could make a project-pimping post without feeling like a spammer. The next thing I knew, the Planbeast website actually grew a bunch of events from people other than myself. The interest has died down somewhat from its initial spike, but it remains far higher than it was at any earlier point.

Tending to this effectively sopped up all of my attention for an entire week, and made my thoughts wander even further afield. And: I loved every minute of it. I am starting to cultivate a new obsession. Planbeast, after all, is the child of a greater interest: researching the state of multiplayer video games, isolating its faults, and investigating the ways it could be improved. I have a lot of loose notes about this which I'm presently choosing to spare you. You will be informed when I have patted them together into some more concrete shape.

To give you a taste, here are four tweets I made on the topic:

Shooters are the superhero comics of the multiplayer videogame world. The medium's potential is vast, but nobody wants to leave the house.

Spider-Man (the character) and TF2 are best-case scenarios of their respective sub-genres, building on decades of art. I am glad they exist.

But the continued super-ultra focus on gun-fetish games or underwear-crimefighter stories rolls on anyway, as if there's no other path.

Part of what I wanna do with Planbeast is help strengthen the signal of all the other MP games that are unheard in the chattering gunfire.

My guiding light, here, is a piece of self-realization about my relationship with games, come to me a good decade after I got back into the tabletop gameplay hobby: I am far more interested in media that bring people together through play, rather than solitaire play experiences. This is true in both face-to-face games, and the much (much) newer world of online games. As for the latter, for all its good press, its exploration beyond the familiar is so goddamn timid it drives me up a wall. I want to do something about it.

One related whim of particular interest is an untitled web game project, based on a design I scribbled together last fall while I was thinking about Facebook games. It's a web-based multiplayer game of a sort that I've never seen before, and might not actually work, but deem Absolutely Worth Creating just the same. I really want to block out a month or so of free time and make it happen.

( And now, the whinging. )

Thonagon

OK, reading the #sf35 tag on Twitter is really making me regret missing the Thon. (An event that I've never attended as an active Twitter user.) Thanks a LOT, derspatchel.

Next year.

(Actually, am getting a lot of personal poo-poo sorting done today, the previous post being evidence of. But still, it sounds like a hell of a lineup this year. La.)