Analog Gaming – Warhammer and Warcraft

If you read this blog you already know I’m a gamer. I play video games, I review video games, I even write up news items about video games (saunter on over to Gamestooge and take a look). What you probably don’t know is that I enjoy more than video games, I enjoy games, period. You don’t hear much about other types of games though. When it comes to the mainstream media, they only have enough time to mis-cover and misrepresent the most ostentatious and conspicuous form of gaming, video games. This means that while even if you’ve never played a video game before you know who Mario is or what Grand Theft Auto games are about. You’ve probably never heard of Warhammer, Ticket to Ride, or GURP before, though these games and others like them have had a tremendous amount of influence on their younger sibling, the video game.

So, in an effort to educate as well as entertain I’m introducing, what I’m sure will become a sporadically updated series, Analog Gaming. In AG I’ll showcase various board, card, and table-top games (some you’ll know and others you won’t) highlighting how you play the game, its history, how long it takes, game mechanics, and then diving in to how it and variations on it have influenced more popular electronic games.

I don’t know if it’ll be successful but it sounds like fun abd it’s what I know.

First up, Warhammer By Games Workhops. Name sounds familiar doesn’t it? It should, it’s the primary influence for Blizzard’s popular, record shattering, series WarCraft. Warhammer is what is called in the industry a table-top fantasy war game. The basic idea is to build a customizable army using the books and rules that Games Workshop provides to write up a fantasy army, then you purchase, assemble, and paint small metal (or plastic) models, these models represent the forces of your Army. After you’ve designed and constructed your own army the next step is to wage war with it. Luckily, there are places to play all around the United States (and across the globe) though it is more fun to play against friends.  Once you have an opponent you set up your playing area (a dining table works great, for starters). You set up your armies and begin moving them around the board, each unit has it’s own characteristics and moves (remember those books I mentioned, all this information is found in them). You can’t win a war without fighting and the heart and soul of Warhammer is the rule-set that controls how units within an army interact with other friendly and unfriendly units.  These encounters are resolved by look at the two fighting units stats and then rolling across dice to see the outcome and comparing the dice to some charts to see who lives and who dies…

I know this sounds boring, and it can be, at times. Referring to books, army list sheets, and quick-reference charts doesn’t sound fun. But this is only a small part of the game and the charts are easily memorized, Games Workshop has tried very hard to make the rules as non-intrusive as possible. Leaving most of your time to beating the hell out of your friend, which is a great deal of fun. The actual game is only 1/3 of the Warhammer experience, the other 2/3 is designing and customizing your army, and then putting it together and painting it. It’s incredibly rewarding to see models you’ve put together and painted spread across a table in the middle of a game your winning.

“Blah, Blah, Blah” you’re saying, “What does all this have to do with Blizzard and Warcraft?” I’m getting there just one more thing before we get to the good parts! If you are a video gamer what I described should sound really familair to you, because I’m describing the analog non-digital version of a Real-Time Strategy Game (RTS). RTSs were the direct offspring of turn-based strategy games, which were the offspring of table-top war games. The historic base war games are very complicated and very long, and their descendants on computers haven’t changed much… In 1983 Games Workshop released Warhammer moving the game into a fantasy setting and cutting out a bunch of complications, to make the game more fun, faster, and less of a headache.  In the early and mid 90’s Games Workshop was approached by a small American development team called Blizzard, the folks at Blizzard were fans of GW’s products and they wanted to make a game based on the Warhammer setting… Negotiations went back and forth and Blizzard began eal development. Then GW backed out. Blizzard though still wanted to make the game, so they tweaked it and changed it a little and released it as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans…  The rest is history, Warcraft was the first successful RTS game (alongside Command and Conquer).  If you look through early Warcraft material and that in Warhammer books you’ll see several similarities: art direction, magic spells, griffin riders, wolf riders, tech gnomes and goblins, all are in Warhammer and the models of these figures look a lot like those found in the Warcraft games.

As the Warcraft brand matured, especially with the WCIII and World of Warcraft, Blizzard has moved away from the Warhammer roots, they’ve injected a great deal of humor, and cartoonish joy into the WC which is absent from the bleak setting of Warhammer.

If you’re interested in playing Warhammer the best place to start is with the Battle for Skull Pass boxed set, which includes two small armies, and everything you and someone you know to start playing with them (they are unassembled and unpainted, part of the game is doing that too).

Sustaining the Energy for Change

If you’re looking for direction, you’fe come to the wrong place. I’ve got no clue. I’m writing this as I’m thinking it out, muddling through it. I’d say this was an attempt at dialectic but there isn’t anyone here to respond to my questions. The name doesn’t really matter, I’m throwing out ideas as they come and we’ll see what sticks..

So there’s the question. How do you do it? How do you overcome the inertia of your life when you get a brilliant idea or you recognize areas of your life that you don’t like? The idea, the revelation, is easy enough it doesn’t take any energy or persistence. Ideas come all the time to everyone, acting on them, and then sustaining them that’s the difficulty. I have journals, txt files, scraps of paper, indez cards, stick-its, all full of great ideas, and I’m not bull-shiting you either. Some of these ideas are the kind that you can build a career, life, empire out of even.  I’ve even half-assed followed some of them through, laid part of the groundwork for something great. So what though, I’m not bragging here, telling you how great and smart I am, great ideas like that come to everyone, everyone. Sit in a coffee shop or diner for a day and take notes you’d walk out with enough great ideas to last a lifetime. My ideas are shit as long as they stay on all that paper.

See, there we are back at the problem, is it fear of failure? fear of greatness? fear of standing out of the crowd? I’ve started on some of these ideas, put some time and effort it, only to see myself lose the energy to follow through, lose interest in the idea, and I’ve sat and watched everything I’d worked on cave in on itself. So why looking back on my life so far do I only see lots of foundations, some even have the beginnings of a superstructure, there are no monuments though.

I’m going around the idea in my head, over and over, and perhaps that’s the problem. I sit here thinking about an idea so much that by the time I DO something about it I’ve already become bored with the idea. You can live a thousand lives in the blink of an eye, and see the actions of all your decisions in a heartbeat. Reflecting constantly on what the consequences of your actions will be so thoroughly so that, you no longer are even intrigued by those consequences can go a long way in killing any desire to act on them.

I’m not going to advocate acting on a thought or idea without any forethought on what it entails, that’s too irreponsible. I’m going to try and stop living so much in my head though, less time thinking just what and how I should do something and just try doing it… Maybe then it’ll stay fresh enough, I can sustain it long enough to see some of the change I want to see in my life, or not. I don’t know how thise thing works

So talk back to me here, am I wrong? right?… Let’s go ahead and try that dialectic thing I talked about. It worked for Socrates and look where it got him……..Oh.

Internet Fear and the Loss of Authority

My first foray into the intellectual world of criticism

Resurrection…

isn’t just for Jesus! Since my internship at the Capitol started I haven’t been able to give this site the attention it deserves. While I was working at Borders I had plenty of time as I was never scheduled for more than 36 hours a week, often less than that. At the Chief Clerk’s Office I work 9am to 5pm every weekday, knock off an hour for travel there and back… Well, I don’t have as much downtime as I used to especially with a girlfriend I want to keep and an active social life (this means whatever you think it means).

I don’t want to make excuses, but I do want to explain and put some things into perspective… I love writing and at some point I hope to make a go at getting some of it published. I don’t know yet if this site is going to help. I started DMS in the hopes that having a forum would help and encourage me to write regularly and it did, when I had more free time. Right now my focus is on doing good at this internship and getting a good job at of it, starting a career…. Yes, in politics. You might think that there’s no point in trying but I’m not that cynical, I think a difference can still be made in this world by anyone, up to and including me!  Once I have that and things settle somewhat, then I can look around and see what needs getting done in my life and doing it.

So what am I to do with DMS (and half a dozen other projects) in the mean time? Mostly slow down. I will be posting here but not everyday, probably not every other day. I’m going to start small and commit to updating twice a week. I can’t say which two days yet, but probably Monday and Saturday or Sunday and Wednesday. I promise that these posts wont be just filler but will content actual content, most of which I hope you’ll enjoy reading. If you find that you absolutely have to read something written by me point your browser to Gamestooge, I’m posting there regularly now, chances are very good you’ll find several posts there by me.

First up here is something I’ve decide to call “Beating the Backlog”, where I show you all the books, magazines, articles, and games I’ve got lined up for “processing” and then how quickly I can get through them. This  is definitely more than just a list of what I’m reading and playing though. I’ll be writing on the thoughts, ideas, and criticism these things raise, This should be really interesting, to give you a taste of it I’m finishing up The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt , just starting Dragon Quest VIII and the Prince of the Marshes and am in the middle of Cryptonomicon, also you’ll see the scraps and bits that become poems ans short stories, or (in most cases) never go anywhere.

In other news my Xbox 360 broke. Microsoft though has been nice enough to fix it for free and pay for the shipping both ways (I suspect this is because they actually broke it before I ever bought the thing).

See you next time!

Not only gods…

Why I haven’t been updating