Passion For Work

I've been feeling lately that I have a very serious problem. I have no passion for my work. That's not exactly unusual. It's work, not a hobby and not something I do in my spare time. But without a passion for it, it becomes work.

This realization came from the fact that some days I get excited about a project and will work past five without even realizing I have. Other days it seems like I'm just trying to draw out the tiny bit of progress I've made over the course of eight hours so that whenever my boss asks I can say "Yup, I got such and such done."

Bad! Bad bad bad! So I've been trying to make more of an effort to have passion for my work. Even though I'll never really use the tools I'm building, I need to be excited about them. I need to look at them less as "This is what it has to do" and more as "If it did this and this and this, people would love it."

So far, it's been a little better. However, as with any change of mindset, it's taking time to adjust to a new way of thinking...

Yay work!

Disinclined Toward Education

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
- Sir Winston Churchill

The above quote was waiting to greet me on my Google homepage today. It struck me as something particularly true of my recent attitude. I'm more than interested in learning how to do some things. However, I have no interest in being taught, either due to the time or the nature of the teaching process.

I'm including self-teaching in that. I don't mind finding examples and emulating them, but taking the time to really understand them is something I just don't do. I convince myself that I can't or that it's not worth the effort. Therefore I spend my time avoiding becoming more than I am. Perhaps I need to adjust my views on being taught.

Gaming Itch

About seven years ago I was introduced to a trading card game. It's a memory I hold fondly. It opened the door to a whole new venue of mental exercise. My time was spent studying cards and combinations, looking for things that others might have missed in the hopes of finding a strategy that would be both simple to execute and yet dramatic in effect. I would stay up before tournaments and plot my course, or spend a few hours before a tournament in flurried activity to remedy a flaw in my deck.

When I wasn't looking through my cards or modifying my decks, I was often online on forums, reading and posting about strategies or the most recent changes to rules. In my local circle of players I became an authority on the rules of the game, often serving as mediator when questions were raised. Though I was never consistently the best player at the tournaments we held, I was a force to be reckoned with.

Then three years after it started, it came to an abrupt end. The game's owning company put it on an indefinite hold while they took the license in other directions. Since then, I've had many life changing events. I've gotten married and now have a daughter. We've bought a house and I now have a full-time job. However, the urge to play still strikes now and again.

Unfortunately for me, playing is more than just taking the decks and playing a single match. For me, playing the game is the strategy beforehand. The plotting and building of a deck that will have some new twist. But without the gaming community to appreciate the ingenuity or even to play against the ideas I constructed, the flavor was gone. So that left me with one option; move on to a new game.

One problem: A new game means a new investment into a game. Moreover any game is either a risk or too big to take on. New games have a habit of lasting for a year or two and then losing either the support of the community of players or the support of the producing company. In either case, they soon disappear, meaning that anyone who has invested in cards is in the same situation I find myself in currently.

Other games, like Magic: The Gathering, are so immense that becoming competitive alone would be a very time (and money) consuming task. With an established game, a player has a hard time catching up to the current state of the game simply because they haven't had the time to build up a library of cards, much less learn the nuances and interactions of the cards that veteran players know from experience. Regardless, both scenarios mean money has to be invested and, at present, investing money into anything non-essential isn't an option.

So, if I can't move on to a fresh game and I can't turn to an established game, what have I left? At the moment, I've been contenting myself with other venues of strategy. Real time strategy games on the computer, Chess, and Settler's of Catan are a few of my outlets. But sadly none of them really provide the in depth planning I had enjoyed before. And so, for now, I merely co-exist with my gaming itch. One day, perhaps, I'll be able to justify spending some money on it and jumping into a new game. Until then, Chess, anyone?

Chromatron

I recently discovered a simple little game called Chromatron. Simple, in that the goal is to hit one or more targets with a beam or set of beams of light. The game is effectively a lesson in geometry and color (apologies to the color-blind out there who may not be able to fully enjoy it).

Normally I wouldn't write a post about a game so seemingly simple. Of course, once you get past the first 20 or so levels, the simplicity melts away into a hideous beast of mind rending puzzles. Altogether there are 200 puzzles spread across the Chromatron and its three sequels, which are, of course, cleverly named Chromatron 2, 3, and 4.

The game grabbed my attention due to the clever modifications to a very simple theme. Originally you start out with right-angle mirrors that let you bend your beams of light ninety degrees. Soon you get new mirrors that bend the beam either forty five or one hundred and thirty five degrees, depending on the angle. Add to that multiple beam colors, the ability to combine and divide beams with prisms, and even things as ludicrous as a quantum beam splitter (dividing a beam into two beams which are connected, such that changes to one affect both) or a "complementor" (which changes any beam into its complementary color) and the game quickly creates some very impressive puzzles. By the time you finish the first set, you'll find yourself thinking of mirrors and angles every time you close your eyes.

For the short-tempered among you, there is the ability to 'copy and paste' solutions, so you can work with friends or simply find the right combinations online. Don't start playing the game when you can't afford to lose a little time on it, though. If you're puzzle-minded at all, it will swallow you whole.

The Hand

Long, long ago, in a land far, far away I found a nexus of gateways to marvelous universes. Okay... it was sometime last year at Wal-Mart and I found a pack of EA games at some ridiculously low price. Among those games was Black & White 2 (B&W2), sequel to, you guessed it, Black & White (B&W). They obviously dish out the big bucks to their marketing team for coming up with unique and catchy names.

If you're not aware, B&W2 is a "god-game." It's exactly how it sounds, you play the role of a deity whose goal is to help your people through whatever the dilemma du jour might be. Of course, this dilemma might be something as basic as providing them with houses to live in or you might be trying to fend off the opposing army while carefully balancing your village's needs against the resources you actually have available. Unlike other sim games, you actually have an avatar that represents "you" in the game world. In B&W2 (as in B&W) you're represented as a giant hand floating around the island. Which is convenient since you're picking things up all the time. If you'd been a foot or elbow it just wouldn't have worked.

One thing that sets the B&W games apart is the free-form style of play. You can be a benevolent deity, providing for your villagers' needs or you can be a heartless master, literally throwing your followers to their death on a whim. The game cleverly changes the design of buildings and the coloring of the landscape to reflect your alignment. If you're kind, then flowers will grow everywhere you touch the ground, however if you're cruel you'll see lava bubbling up through cracks in the wasteland of your domain. Of course, since you can tread the line and be both good and evil, the game might have more aptly been named Some Shade of Grey 2. I didn't make a conscious choice about the matter, but I tend to be more good than evil only because I don't want to spend my time throwing villagers into the torture pits. Instead I focus on expanding my influence and building whatever ridiculous monument my people demand. "Do we really need ANOTHER fertility statue in town?"

Fortunately, you do get some help in managing your village. Well, as much help as you can from a pre-pubescent King Kong. The game gives you the opportunity, before you actually take control of the village, to choose among a few creatures to be your assistant and pet, whom I'll be calling Stanley for the rest of this post. The choice before you is between an ape, a lion, a wolf, and... a cow? More importantly the two characters who appear as your conscience constantly refer to Stanley as a male and the cow has very prominent udders. Someone apparently skipped their biology class.

Stanley begins as a blank slate which will periodically try various things, like eating, sleeping on, playing with, or even defecating on the various things in the village. Your job is to punish or reward him for the appropriate behaviors. For instance, if you want to encourage Stanley to only defecate on fields (fertilizing the crops, though I'd personally worry about what kinds of bacteria live in giant creature feces) you stroke him once he's decided to perform that action. Similarly if you want to keep him from trying to eat rocks, you have to slap him around (by dragging the mouse across him quickly) to help him get the idea. Of course you can also simply open one of the menus and select each action Stanley might perform and train him all at once, but that could take a while and sometimes it's fun to watch him try to eat a tree before you let him know it's a bad idea.

Aside from Stanley you can also get villagers to aid you in your work. By picking a villager up and dropping them near specific locations, you can create "disciples" who will perform whatever task you assign them until they eventually die of old age (provided you don't feed them to your creature first). Now, the disciples largely make sense. I'll put farmers in fields, builders near my new housing development, and I'll throw some foresters and mineworkers out to gather resources. However the strangest disciple is one that you're encouraged to create, sometimes in bulk. By taking a male villager and dropping it near a female (or vice-versa) you create disciple breeders. That's right, you can tell your villagers that their sole purpose in life is to do nothing but make babies. If you ask me, that's just a little creepy.

Of course, it's important to have a quickly growing population in order to conquer the lands you find yourself in throughout the game. Each land essentially becomes an real-time strategy game in which you try to out-influence an opposing deity. You have the option of simply building a city of sufficient impressiveness so as to cause other villages to come flocking to your gates or you can create armies and send them (along with Stanley) out to do battle and capture neighboring towns. The trick comes when you realize that you're only able to perform miracles or other "god-like" actions within the ring of influence around your village(s). So in order to participate directly in battles they have to be staged within your influence or you have to leapfrog your troops out to capture your neighbors and use them as staging platforms. I personally find myself capturing empty villages (that have already converted and come flocking to me) simply because I need the extra space.

On top of all this management, they throw quests. The quests are generally minor and don't impact the outcome too much (though they do grant you points toward buying new abilities, etc.) but they're there. The quests span everything from throwing a keg from island to island, helping a bunch of brothers get hammered while they sing you a song, to catching some 20+ lambs that are launched from a ewe in labor. So if you ever need a diversion from micromanaging your baby booming villagers and keeping Stanley from pooping on their heads, there's usually at least a couple quests in the land to provide that break for you. Because, you know, you can't just save it and go outside or something.

While you're playing this game you'll find yourself constantly juggling between meeting your villagers' needs, training Stanley, building walls and armies, and performing the occasional quest for some extra points. And what's it all for? So that a few hundred tiny virtual people will jump up and down and say you're great! When you have their pre-programmed appreciation, do you really need anything else?

WiiVD

Well, it's finally happened. Someone proved that the Wii can play DVDs. Of course... that's if you're willing to hack your system (potentially risking permanent damage).

The amazing thing is Nintendo couldn't seem to figure out how to pull it off, but some guys working in a basement (or an attic... or castle, for all I know) were able to do it. Of course, there's supposedly hardware issues with Nintendo's player not being intended to spin at full speed constantly, meaning that your DVDs might be putting more strain on it than it's meant to handle.

Is it worth the risk? I have no idea, I'm not going to be hacking my Wii anytime soon as I can't afford to replace it if I were to wreck it. Besides, I like my Twilight Princess save files and the hack requires deleting them. However, maybe this will get Nintendo to re-evaluate their non-DVD playing Wiis. Maybe (if the hardware can handle it) they'll release a legitimate channel and we'll all be able to enjoy our DVDs on the Wii.

At least I'd finally have a reason to throw out the so-called DVD player we have now.