My Perpetual Games

Games are on my mind as my wife and I head to Boston for PAX East this week, and this post came out of thinking about how I try to prioritize game time in my life. Games have always been my first love when it comes to hobbies, I quickly became obsessed with them during my pre-school years and the desire to play everything I can has burned ever since. And recently I have been thinking about how much time I should continue to devote to what I like to call my perpetual games.

There are basically three kinds of games for me. One, the games I tend to play once and enjoy, but not enough to warrant a replay. A good recent example is Spider-Man, which I reviewed a couple months ago. I played the heck out of that game, and I eagerly await a potential sequel, but I've done everything there is to do, so I feel no need to revisit it. Two, the games I enjoy so much that I think about replaying them often. The Uncharted games are all like this for me. I just love the cinematic quality of them so much that I will gladly experience them over and over again. Other examples are old Mario and Zelda games, the gameplay is so good in them that it’s still satisfying just to get to the end. And three, the games that I play consistently for years, mostly because I'm trying to get better at them.

I think most people who play games have or have had at least one perpetual game. For many people my age, World of Warcraft was (or still is) that game. Competitive games with high skill caps also tend to become perpetual games for people, games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Madden, League of Legends, Starcraft, and so on. Games that are so good that you never want to stop playing them, or games where you want to be the best you can be against other players. They also tend to be games that you can't actually finish because there's no specific end goal.

For me, I've really only had three games that I would consider to be perpetual games, and two of them are really series of games rather than just a single one.

The first, and by far the longest perpetual game for me, has been the Rock Band series. I could also include the Guitar Hero series in that since it started my rhythm game obsession. But even if you dismiss the GH games, I played Rock Band 1/2/3 for a full decade before I finally had to give it up moving to New York. Even then, I do still have the game and all the connectors needed to play it, I just don't have the instruments anymore.

The Rock Band games are super important to me for several reasons. The most obvious one is that I am literally a musician today because of it. I straight up learned to play drums because of Rock Band, and I used that skill to create two albums of original music with some of my best friends. That alone makes the Rock Band series one of the best things that's ever happened to me. And aside from the drums, it also helped with sparking my current interests in picking up guitar and piano as well.

The other great thing that Rock Band did for me was introduce me to a ton of music that I wouldn't have tried otherwise. My first exposure to one of my favorite bands, Coheed and Cambria, was through Rock Band. That's the one that stands out the most, but there have been a bunch of bands that I got into because of the games. Bands like Dragonforce, Dream Theater, The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, and even Rush.

And when it comes right down to it, playing drums and seeing myself get better and better at it over the years, there is nothing like that. Being able to rock out to a bunch of my favorite music while doing so is just icing on the cake. It's only been a few months since I had to give up the drumming for the foreseeable future, but I think about it everyday.

The second perpetual game on my list is helping me through the withdrawals though. It's not really a surprise, given my history with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, that Rocksmith (mostly the 2014 version) is something I latched onto right away when it came out and I've been playing it regularly since. Rock Band 3 tried to do the learn-to-play-real-guitar thing, but it ultimately didn't work for me and I switched over to Rocksmith immediately. And just like how I learned to play drums from Rock Band, I can honestly say Rocksmith has done a ton to make me an okay guitar player. I will never be as good at guitar as I am at drums, but it's still a lot of fun and rewarding seeing the progress. At this point, I basically have to take what I can get, and I try to devote at least one day a week to playing this so I don't get rusty. I'm still waiting for the similar killer game for learning piano (there are game-like apps for piano available, but they just don't get the feel right).

The third perpetual game is the only actual multiplayer game I've ever tried to get good at. I've always been more of a single-player, narrative-focused gamer, so multiplayer games come and go quickly for me. I learned through high school and college that I'll never be a good FPS or RTS player, and I don't enjoy sports games. In the competitive gaming scene, that doesn't leave much else aside from fighting games, and I'm even worse at those than the above (though I do like them). But I did manage to find one game that I really like to play and want to get better at: Heroes of the Storm.

I've been playing HotS pretty consistently for over two years at this point, and I still think about it all the time. I spend a good amount of time watching other people play it and talk about it to try to get better at it. Like other MOBAs, the skill of playing different characters is only one part of the equation, you need to be good at reading the situation as well, which is where watching other people play helps a lot. That being said, I'm still not very good at the game. If my ranking is to be believed, I'm in the bottom 25% of the player base, but it doesn't bother me too much. The game is still fun whether my team is winning or losing, each game is a learning experience and I get better.

The only real problem with playing HotS is that it has been on the ropes in terms of whether it will be around much longer. The team working on it was cut quite a bit and all of the official tournament play around the game went away. This has caused a large part of the player base to move on. The way I look at it, I still like playing the game, and I will just keep doing that until it goes away or I find something better. If it does happen to die, then I guess my time with MOBAs will be done for a while and I will get some time back for other things.

There are a few other games in my sphere right now that could potentially be perpetual games, but don’t quite hit that sweet spot I’m looking for. I'm working through Destiny 2 when I can, but I feel that I'm going to be done with that as soon as the story content is done. Returning to a post from a while ago, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and Neverwinter are also still very much in my rotation. I don't think Idle Champions can ever be a perpetual game because it's not much of a game to begin with, there is no getting better at it. It will be a game I keep having in the background until there's nothing left to do in it, and then I will move on. Neverwinter is still early enough that it could become that MMO I play for a long time, but I doubt that as well for similar reasons as Destiny 2. Once the sense of progression ends, I will probably move on to something else (maybe actually play WoW?).

Anyway, there wasn't much of a real point to this post, just needed something to write about. I have a few things in the hopper that I hope I can write about in the coming weeks.

Two Months in NYC (vs Seattle)

This is a continuation of my post from a month ago about how my first month in NYC went. At the time I wrote it I wanted to devote some time to talking about how life here has differed from living in Seattle, but didn’t have the time and that post was already getting long. So I’m going to complete that thought this week with a little more experience under my belt.

Just to start off, the biggest difference between the last post and this one is that, since then, everything has been moved here from Seattle, including my wife and cat. So right away I can say that it is a lot less lonely and it is starting to feel like home, though we both still have several moments each week where we have to remind ourselves that we really live here now. The only other comparison I can make is when I moved to Spokane for college, but that was always with the understanding that it was a temporary thing. With this move, we don’t know yet how long it will be. Hopefully it will be a good, long while since we both like it so far, but the future is never set in stone.

Let’s go ahead and start in with the differences between NYC and Seattle. First, the apartment we’re in, since we spend most of our time here. Definitely smaller than our old townhome, it’s somewhere between the sizes of the previous two apartments. But since we got rid of a ton of stuff during the move, it honestly feels more open than it used to be. Due to the design of the townhome we could only host 8 or so before it started to get crowded. The new layout allows for 10-12 easily. Plus, since it’s an apartment building, there are community areas that can fit even more if required.

The other big difference is that this apartment is 100% wood flooring. Living in Seattle we never had a home that wasn’t mostly carpeted. There is one part of me that will always prefer carpet over wood since it’s just nicer to walk on. On the other hand, wood floors are easier to maintain and you get a better sense of how dirty things actually are. Carpets are straight up nasty if you think about it. The wood floor, along with other aspects of the apartment, will lead us to be better at keeping things tidy and clean, so it’s a benefit overall. Just have to be more careful about dropping things.

In terms of other apartment amenities, most of them we’ve seen before. Rooftop deck, courtyard, fitness room, community area, garage, etc. The only real amenity that’s different from Seattle in general is the 24/7 doorman (or woman). It is super common here, particularly for luxury apartments like ours. The hole-in-the-wall apartments don’t have them, but any building that has a front desk of any kind will usually have one. Plenty of apartment buildings in Seattle have leasing offices that handle most of the same functions, but I can’t think of any that were 24/7. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty convenient, and since we see them so often, it quickly becomes a bond like being a familiar at a bar or restaurant.

The next big area for me is working, since that’s a good 50+ hours of my week (including commute). Speaking of the commute, outside of the obvious differences of using a train instead of a bus, there really aren’t that many actual differences. The trains are more frequent and don’t get held up by traffic of course, unless there are delays for one reason or another. I will say that work on the subway is consistent enough that you do always have to be cognizant of what might impact you and how you have to work around it, which never really happened taking the bus in Seattle. There are really only two cultural differences in the commute. One, people rarely shoved to get on the buses in Seattle. It is as common here as it is in any other big city you might visit in Europe or Asia. Two, pedestrians in Seattle definitely do not jaywalk like they do here. I know there is a general stigma because police in Seattle will actually write people up for it, but it’s simply not enforceable here so literally everyone does it.

As for work itself, this is the first job where I’ve had a standard 9(ish)-5(ish) schedule. My first standup of each day is at 9am, so I have to be there by then (I usually get there by 8:45). And I leave sometime in the 5-6pm hour, depending on how long of a lunch break I took and whether something urgent needs to get done. I think the only reason why this actually works for me is because rush hour isn’t that big of a deal here, as long as you don’t drive. Trying to get around Seattle during rush hour was literal hell, so most people I worked with shifted hours to avoid it, including me. It doesn’t seem to be that big a problem here, so most people hold more standard hours.

The culture of the company itself is different in plenty of other ways. I can’t say how much of it is really coast-versus-coast rather than Amazon-versus-literally-everyone-else, so I won’t get into it. I’ll just say that it’s more old school here where people are more interested in protecting their backs than collaborating towards a common goal. What I can say is coast-dependent is that everyone here dresses so well. I feel like a damn slob most days because I haven’t had a chance to update any of my wardrobe yet. About the only piece of clothing I have that isn’t embarrassing is my jeans. Luckily everyone understands that I’m west coast and haven’t transitioned yet, but I feel bad about it. I just want to look good too.

The last area I want to mention is around the food scene. I’m sure there are plenty of other cultural areas I could get into, but since we haven’t had any real time to explore I don’t have any observations there. But when it comes to food, it is a pretty easy statement to say that the quality here is off the charts compared to Seattle. I’d like to think that most of the places I liked frequenting in Seattle would probably do just fine here as well, but there’s a good 90% or so of Seattle restaurants that would be laughed out of town. And it’s not just the flavor either, you can tell that the ingredients are also better. You go to any grocery and the stuff you find is all high quality. The side effect is that none of it is cheap, but that’s just an adjustment you have to make in general.

One of the things that I noticed within the first week of going to work and getting food around the office is that NYC as a whole is a bit behind most cities on the west coast in terms of eco-friendly packaging. Even though it has technically been banned, I’ve been to a few places where everything is still styrofoam. And plastic bags haven’t been banned at all, so they are freaking everywhere. It is legitimately difficult to convince people that you don’t want or need a plastic bag to take something with you. The idea of reusable bags at the grocery story is novel to many cashiers. Seattle hasn’t even had the bans on these things for that long either, but it’s been long enough that it was immediately apparent what a difference it makes.

In terms of the varieties of food, NYC is certainly going to be more diverse, but it’s interesting to see which cuisines get more favor. The biggest thing I miss here so far is a distinct lack of Vietnamese food and teriyaki (sushi and ramen are pretty common though). There is a lower percentage of Asian food across the board here compared to Seattle, for obvious reasons, but those two in particular are things I’ve had trouble finding. Over here what you will find a ton of that Seattle has relatively little of is Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food. It seems like every other food cart on the street serves either bagels or shawarma. Another thing there’s more of in NYC that I never saw in Seattle is South American food. I’ve had a chance to have Venezuelan, Colombian, and Peruvian stuff here and it’s all amazing.

Another obvious area where Seattle reigns supreme is in coffee shops. Sure you expect there to be more Dunkin Donuts here versus Starbucks, but there aren’t that many of either compared to Seattle. In my experience most people don’t care that much and will just have the office coffee or get whatever is closest to the office, whether that be Starbucks, Dunkin, Pret, Joe and the Juice, or whatever. I don’t care being a coffee avoider, but my wife will probably miss that aspect of Seattle over time. On the flip side, NYC has pizza everywhere in the same way. And yes, the pizza here is better than any pizza in Seattle, with a couple exceptions.

I think that’s enough bloviating for one post. I’m sure there will be more observations to make in this area, so maybe another update will be due in a few months. Until then, going to try to do as many new things as possible.

Gone Girl and Unreliable Narrators

The idea for this post actually came to me about a week before I sat down to write this, but I wanted to make sure I finished the book before I gave my complete thoughts. The book in question is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is not a book I would normally read but it was one of those audiobooks I decided to listen to specifically because it is outside my normal wheelhouse. I’m sure it got recommended to me by Audible because I also listened to The Girl on the Train after it got a bunch of accolades. I’m glad Gone Girl ended up being a lot better than that book was, but it did bring up a major gripe I have with certain works of literature.

This post is going to be half-review and half-deeper analysis about why the book ultimately failed for me.

I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that I might be on the verge of quitting on my first piece of media this year, and that was this book. The first few hours of listening were rough, I just couldn’t get into the characters, the writing, or the performances by the two readers. I do appreciate that, since the book is told through alternating viewpoints of the two main characters, Nick and Amy, they got different readers to voice each character, but at the beginning both of them came across as cloying and artificial. Having gotten through the rest of the book I understand why, but it didn’t make it any easier to get through.

But I stuck it out for the five hours I said I would, and by that time there was enough mystery building up that I did want to see where it was going. And when the big twist happened in the middle, I definitely wanted to finish it out. Unfortunately it’s one of those books where the second act is the peak, and the third act ends up being unsatisfying as it limps across the finish line. I don’t want to get any more specific than that because I’m not one to give spoilers for no reason.

In the end, I don’t regret listening to it, but I could’ve done without it. Both of the main characters are awful people and where they end up is not satisfying for me. I could be more elaborate on exactly why, but again, spoilers. I will say that though the readers started out as an annoyance, they were really good by the end and they brought a lot to the emotional beats of the story.

What ultimately came out of this book is something that I’ve noticed before but hadn’t thought about in a while, so I think it’s worth mentioning here as to why I can never fully get into books like this.

I hate unreliable narrators.

You might be saying, “wow, hate is a pretty strong word,” or something like that. And it’s true, I reserve that word for very few things. I keep it for things that truly make me angry, not for annoyances, but for things that this world would be better off without. Time after time, when I read something that’s told by an unreliable narrator (and in this book there’s two of them!), I get angry. And not just angry at the character for being dishonest, but also at the author for using such a lazy way of telling their story.

I get angry at the character because once I find out that they are unreliable in the way they tell their side of the story, I immediately know that the character is an awful person. By definition, people who are dishonest all the time are awful people. It’s one thing to have a character who lies a bunch to other characters, but it’s another to also lie to the reader. Granted, a lot of the dishonesty in this story isn’t actual lying, it’s more being dishonest through omission of details, but there is also just straight up lying. Even more frustrating than that, Nick or Amy will lie to someone else, admit to the reader that it was a lie, but then provide nothing else. It’s hard to get on a character’s side when you don’t know what they are hiding until much later.

But you could say that’s the whole point. The mystery is built because none of the people telling the story are telling you everything, you need to be held in suspense. Well, that’s where I get angry at the author because it’s an artificial way to create suspense. Keeping details away is necessary for mysteries of course, but it really only works well (for me) if the reader is learning them at the same time as the characters. If the character knows some stuff and waits until they are forced to divulge it to the reader, that is just frustrating. Case in point, the whole first half of the story all you really want to know is if Nick had anything to do with Amy’s disappearance or not. But because Nick is an unreliable jerk, you don’t get a straight answer about anything, which is exactly why the other characters in the story turn on him. As a reader, I don’t blame them because he does the same thing to me. And when you step back a little bit, you realize that there is no reason for it be written that way, it is artificially created. Nick could have been honest the entire time and he still would’ve ended up in the position he does, and I probably would’ve felt sorry for him. Instead I simply don’t care about what happens to him, I just want to know if he did it or not.

Of course whenever I think about the concept of the unreliable narrator, I always come back to The Catcher in the Rye, which is famous for that very reason. And I freaking hate that book too. I totally get that it just means the book wasn’t written for me, there are plenty of other people who understand and empathize with those stories. It does make me wonder a little bit about those people though, that you would feel for someone who is clearly an awful person. The thing is, it’s totally fine to have awful, dishonest people in stories, they create tension. But when you read a story, those people need to have foils, and you need to believe that the foils are keeping things in balance. When the story is told by the awful person, you can’t really believe that the foils are keeping balance because you can’t trust the narrator.

Anyway, I don’t know how much more I can say about that. The only reason I didn’t end out hating Gone Girl as a whole is because the unreliable narrator thing isn’t used the entire time. Once you get halfway through to the twist, most of it falls away and the characters are more direct and don’t contradict each other. At the end of the book, I can’t help but feel like the story would’ve been much more compelling if it had just been told from a different perspective. It would’ve necessitated a different ending of course, but as I already said before, it could’ve used one.

My First Month in New York

Since the move to New York City is still very much top of mind, I think this week's post will be a short bit about how the first month of living here has been.

So far I've been at my new job for four weeks. The first week I was just staying in a hotel while I got the keys to the new apartment and some basic necessities I would need to start staying there the next week. Namely a bed and some toiletries. Therefore only three of the weeks have been spent at our new place. The exact number isn't really relevant, it's just to give some context.

I have had several positives since work started. First, I can already tell that I made the right choice in terms of relocating. I've fallen into the routine of going to work and going home, and I already like it a lot. Just being in Manhattan during the day makes me feel good, even despite the cold weather. I'm a bit of a weirdo in that I'm quite introverted, but I love being around a lot of people at the same time. As long as I don't have to interact with anybody, being surrounded by others is strangely comforting, and NYC has no shortage of that. Being crowded on the subway during rush hour isn't exactly the same feeling, but it still makes me feel like I belong.

Second, I've really missed the ability to walk around the neighborhood and try different things out. With our last place in Seattle, there wasn't much in easy walking distance so everything was either a long walk or we would have to drive. With the new place there's a ton of options nearby and if we want other things, the bus and subway are super close to take us to other neighborhoods. It's one of those things that my wife and I have missed constantly since we moved away from Capitol Hill in Seattle, so it's great to be getting back to that again. It also helps that most of the places I've been too so far have been good so I don't see us getting into the same rut of rotating between only five different restaurants like we have the last year or so.

Third, I've been able to hang out with some of our friends in the area a couple times and that's also been really comforting. It would've been a much harder move if we had to start from zero again when it came to having friends. Again, the whole introverted thing makes that difficult, so having a few friends already helps significantly.

Fourth, it feels so good to be working again. I admit that what I got is certainly not a dream job, but it's a good foot in the door since it's a good paying job, it's in the city I wanted to move to, and it's in a new industry that I could come to really enjoy in time. The people I'm working with are very friendly and are already looking to me for advice on how to do things, especially coming from a company known for scaling. I know that I wanted to have some time off between jobs this time around, but turns out it was a little too much. Should I decide to move on from my current place, I will definitely go the route of having the next thing lined up and just take a few weeks off instead of months.

There are definitely a few negatives about this first month though. Namely, it has been very lonely outside of the times I've been with my friends or back home with my wife. It's not something either of us is used to, so it has been hard on both of us. Granted, we both know couples who have been split apart for much longer and seem to do okay, but that just isn't for us in general. Week long trips is one thing, but multiple weeks in a row is something else. It doesn't help that the apartment in NY is practically empty and the apartment in Seattle has been slowly put into boxes. So neither place really feels like home. At the time of writing this though, the Seattle apartment is now completely empty and our stuff is on the way to NY, so only a couple more weeks until we have a real home again.

Some other negatives, eating out for every meal for over a month has been taking its toll on me too. It's going to be great getting back to actually cooking again. Can’t really get back to that yet with our stuff a few weeks away, but I can at least try to have some fresh food at home in the interim. Getting back into some sort of exercise routine would also be great, and hopefully that will be a little easier without the flying every weekend I have been doing.

Not having my normal stuff is a drag too. I get urges to play a specific game but then I don't have it. Or just have a couch to sit on. Or chat with the cat. It all feels like I'm on a constant business trip and I can't wait to finally get home.

Anyway, I don't want to leave this on a downer, so I will just end by saying that I have no regrets about the move I have made. It will end up being a rough couple of months where nothing is truly routine or normal, but in the end we will come out the other side in a great place.

How I Navigate (and Learn in General)

Given the craziness of moving to New York, which is going to end up being a two month process, this post is going to be more throw-away than usual because I just don’t have much else to talk about right now. In essence, this post is just some musings about how my brain works, specifically when it comes to retaining memory and how inconsistent it is. And to help explain it, I will use the example of how I navigate while driving or walking. The main reason being that people I know have often marveled at how good I am at it, yet I can be extremely forgetful about other things.

When I was young, I used to be fascinated by maps. I would get a map or an atlas out and just spend a long time looking over it and enjoying all the details. I especially enjoyed looking at the street maps of the areas I was currently in, I liked to know exactly where I was in the universe.

Eventually this lead to some inevitable questions. How do buildings get their numbers? How do streets get numbered or named? How do interstates get their numbers? What’s the difference between streets, avenues, drives, boulevards, roads, etc.? Luckily, I asked these questions during a time where looking up directions online didn’t exist so my parents actually knew the answers, and I managed to remember them despite not really needing to know them for years.

What I was doing there was learning some fundamentals about street navigation that I keep to this day, and I can use them to make bigger observations about the area I’m in. Computer programming is similar and probably why I’m good at that too. You learn some fundamentals about how most languages work and you use that knowledge to understand the details that make each language different. So while some people may get to a place and flounder about trying to find the right building, I know that, if I know what the address number is, I can find it pretty easily because numbers follow two basic rules: numbers always increment away from the origin (as street numbers also do), and numbers are always split where evens are on one side of the street and odds are on the other. Granted I don’t know if these rules are true everywhere in the US, but it has been in all the places I’ve been thus far.

I think it’s largely because of the way I studied maps that I always get directions using streets rather than landmarks like many other people prefer. I remember in high school when I first started driving, my friends would try to give me directions to their places using landmarks and it was a real struggle. But if I looked up where their house was earlier, I could remember a minimal number of streets I needed to turn on, and it would be a breeze. I still do this today if the route is easy enough, I don’t need to worry about using turn-by-turn navigation, I just remember the turns. This is one of the things that impresses other people the most, that I can look at a route for a minute or two and just know it. I try to carry this into other areas of my life as well, finding the easiest path that I’m more likely to remember, even if it may not be the most efficient or quickest.

So I use some basic rules to figure out how to do things without knowing the full details and I use reference points to memorize minimal paths that I need in the short term. When it comes to long term memorization, it always comes down to doing versus seeing. If I drive to a place for the first time, I can usually get there again a second time if it’s within a few months without looking it up again. If I go somewhere between 3-5 times, I will likely remember how to get there for the rest of my life. Everyone has the ability to remember things like this, if something is a routine, eventually you build a habit and you just know how to do it. But I seem to build this habit much faster than most. It’s one of the things that makes me so good at adapting. If I’m forced into using something new, I am good at remembering how it works within a few uses.

This comes with many advantages. It makes me very effective at certain tasks, including my job. I work a lot quicker than others because I can remember where things are, I don’t have to do searches all the time, and I can find problems easier. I feel that it also makes me a good teacher because when I know something and I’m conveying the knowledge to someone else, I can arrange it and frame it in my mind without needing to look up references or jump all over the place as things come to mind. On the other hand, sometimes I do get into situations where I think I know how to do something, or it’s been so long that I have forgotten how, and I never have any notes on how to do it, so I often need to relearn things that have slipped from scratch.

Having this ability also means that I have terrible memory when it comes to facts and trivia. When I just read something, I forget pretty much all of it an hour later. Same with things I hear or watch. It takes much more investment in something for it to stick with me, unless it’s something like a game where I’m directly involved in it. This definitely has more disadvantages since I constantly forget things, including things that I should be remembering to do. So for things like that, I have to put them on a to-do list or I never get around to it.

Anyway, this one is pretty short and sweet, I could give more examples but I think I got the general idea across. I also have a lot to do so no need to spend more time on this than necessary.