wshaffer

I had Younger Nephew over for a nice long gaming session today. I picked him up from his house, and he spent most of the half hour drive explaining to me that he knew that there had to be a "big plot twist" coming in Mass Effect 3, and speculating what it would be. Some ideas: We would discover some Collectors were still around, and they would help us fight the Reapers. The Illusive Man would turn into a giant monster and there would be a big boss fight with him. Or "I'll break the glass and he'll go flying out into space and I'll hang on tightly to a rope."

I suspect that some of his ideas are better than the actual twist ending of Mass Effect 3. Even if I'm not sure that a big boss fight with the Illusive Man would really constitute a "plot twist".

He also speculated about various plot threads from Mass Effect 2 that might come into play in Mass Effect 3. He remembers a heck of a lot more of the plot from Mass Effect 2 than I initially thought - there was quite a bit of time in the early days when I was pretty sure he was in it for the gun battles and nothing else, but he clearly has a good grasp on the story now. It's fascinating. I don't know if he always had this all in his head but couldn't articulate it at the time, or if he's refreshed his memory on the plot points somehow. (Perhaps by watching some Mass Effect 2 videos on Youtube or something.)

While in the car, he also improvised a long song about noogies and wedgies, and how the only way to avoid the coming noogie epidemic (yes, he literally used the phrase, "coming noogie epidemic") was to go bald.

This child used to be rather taciturn. He's become quite talkative. Although, on the drive back home, I used a lull in the conversation to attempt to ask him about what he does with his life while not playing computer games. After dutifully answering a few questions about summer camp, he said, "Could we stop talking about this? Because it's confusing. And you'll just be bored anyway." I assured him that I was curious, but I was happy to stop talking about it. "So, which other characters from Mass Effect 2 do you think will appear in Mass Effect 3?" elicited a much more enthusiastic conversational response. (I shouldn't be surprised, really. It's not like he can talk about the game with anyone else in his immediate social circle. Why waste valuable conversational time talking about summer camp when you could be talking about Mass Effect 3?)

Anyhow, we played for a good few hours, and were reunited with the characters of Mordin and Grunt from Mass Effect 2. Younger Nephew loves Grunt. Loves the Krogan in general. But really loves Grunt. Like, practically every line of dialogue Grunt gets, Younger Nephew gives me this wide-eyed look of, "Isn't he the best!"

Especially for the line: "I don't need luck, I have ammo!"

Played Mass Effect 2 with Younger Nephew today. We're getting close to finishing it. I'm going to have to decide what to try him on next. Mass Effect 3 is probably inevitable, but I understand the ending is disappointing. Then again, Younger Nephew might not care provided that there are suitably epic explosions.

Although his grasp of storytelling has grown by leaps and bounds. He has particularly latched on to the idea that certain scenes are setting up for or hinting at future events. In some cases, quite perceptively - he was very clear on the idea that when he intervened in the fight between Miranda and Jack, and sided with Jack, that that was going to cause problems between him and Miranda later. Other connections seem more dubious - he explained to me that it was obvious that the Illusive Man was a bad guy (something he has been insisting on from quite early on) because "his eyes are blue, and the Collectors...sort of bluish! It's obvious, really!"

He was also very emotionally engaged with the game events. He admitted to being "terrified" by the mission on the derelict Reaper ship, and almost decided to bail on it and come back when he had better weapons. I encouraged him to try again and he got through it. He was delighted by the character of Legion, telling me, "I don't know why, but I really like this guy!" (I really like Legion, too.) He was super-dismayed by the interlude in which Shepherd leaves the ship and you have to play as Joker. ("Aw, I'm Shepherd! Why do I have to be this jerk?")

I'm also really intrigued by how much he remembers of game events that he didn't seem to be all that interested in at the time. When we picked up the character of Jack, he didn't really seem all that interested in her. But today he suddenly informed me that we had to go "find the girl that we rescued from the prison" and do her loyalty mission. And when we visited the lab where Jack was experimented on, he turned to me and said, "No wonder she's a psychopath!" (He was a bit upset by Jack's tendency to swear. To be fair, I'd forgotten how salty her language could be. Younger Nephew turned to me at one point and exclaimed, wide eyed, "I only know two swear words, and she just used both of them in one sentence!" But he also told me that he knew those words because his brother had taught them to him. I want this on record so I won't be blamed if he uses those words later.)

Anyway, if anyone has any game recommendations for an increasingly sophisticated young boy, drop 'em in the comments. (I don't think I can interest him in the Dragon Age games yet, sadly - he's remained resolutely uninterested in any fantasy games in my collection except for The Witcher 3, and he is in not old enough for that one yet.)

I think Younger Nephew and I have been sporadically playing Lego Star Wars II together for something like 4 years now. We've finally started to make progress on the story line in a serious way recently. Today we completed the entirety of Episode V. I might have to get some new games soon.

I find it entirely hilarious that when I'm playing Han Solo and he's playing Princess Leia, he repeatedly slaps Han Solo in the head and addresses him as "Dum dum". He also has absolutely no patience for Lando Calrissian's kissing of Leia's hand.

There are few moments in life that can match taking down an AT-AT by winding a cable around its legs with your snow speeder, and having your nephew look up at you and say, "We make a good team, don't we?" Thank you, development team for Lego Star Wars.

In a recent performance review discussion with my manager, she suggested that I do some work on my presentation and public speaking skills. Mine are adequate, but I think I'm more distinguished by my lack of fear of public speaking than by great skill. As a child, I was actually terrified by public speaking, and would do almost anything to avoid it. This fear was slowly ground out of me by stints on the high school debate team (I was terrible at debate), Constitution team, and various other academic competitions that required impromptu speaking; class presentations in college; and teaching during grad school. In the middle of my first year of grad school, I stepped onto a stage in a 150-person lecture hall on the U.C. Berkeley campus to deliver a pre-exam review. I looked into the lemur-like eyes of a full house of undergraduates desperately hoping that I would impart to them in the next three hours the knowledge that they had failed to acquire all semester. The atrophied remnants of my fear sighed heavily and slunk off somewhere down Telegraph Ave., never to trouble me again.

Anyhow, there was one obvious place to go to get some training for my fearless semi-competence: Toastmasters. People have been recommending to me that I do Toastmasters for years now, but I've always found some excuse not to do it. But my employer has their very own Toastmasters chapter, that meets right here on campus, so I decided that I would bite the bullet and go visit a meeting today.

The meeting started with someone giving a pre-prepared speech, which we all got to evaluate. Then there's this thing called "Table Topics", where someone comes up with a topic, and everyone who wants to can give a 1-2 minute speech on this topic. Our topic today was "reincarnation," and what immediately sprang to my mind was my character in the Legend of the Five Rings game I'm currently playing in, who has been repeatedly reincarnated. So, I began my speech with, "I don't believe in reincarnation, but I do play role playing games." I then managed to give a reasonably concise explanation of what a table top roleplaying game is, what Legend of the Five Rings is about, and how my character discovered that she was reincarnated. And then wrapped it up by observing that playing RPGs is sort of like being reincarnated, because you get to experience being many people. All in 1 minute 58 seconds.

At the end of the meeting, everyone voted on their favorite table topic speech. I was the winner. I got a ribbon and everything! Not too bad for my first try!

I spent three hours or so this afternoon playing Lego Star Wars with Younger Nephew. It's pretty neat to observe the difference between the first time we gamed together, back in November or so: his hand-eye coordination is better, his problem solving skills are better (he not only solved some of the puzzles himself, but was much quicker to grasp what I was getting at when I suggested a solution to a puzzle), and his attention span was much longer. He's even more fun to play with than he was before.

He's also really into Star Wars.

I also got an interesting demonstration of the development of the capacity for delayed gratification: when his dad came to pick him up and we had finished playing, Younger Nephew wandered into the kitchen. I asked him if he was hungry or thirsty, and he asked if he could look in the fridge. I told him he could, and he opened the fridge, spotted a Cherry Coke Zero, and asked if he could have it. I said, "Yes, if your dad says it's okay."

His dad said, "Well, you can have the Cherry Coke now, or we can go get ice cream and you can have ice cream."

Younger Nephew looked very thoughtfully at the Cherry Coke for about 30 seconds.

"You get to pick," I said. "But I think I would go for the ice cream."

He looked thoughtfully at the Coke a bit longer, sighed, and said, "I think you are right." And put the Coke back in the fridge.

That was such a hard decision for the little guy.

An afternoon of video gaming with Younger Nephew was a success. We mostly played Lego Star Wars, but we also tried out Lego Marvel Superheroes (which I think might actually have been my favorite), and Lego Batman. The Lego games are just about perfect for a kid and an adult to play in co-op mode. And I don't think I've ever seen Younger Nephew persevere at a difficult task as long as he worked at some of the bits of Lego Star Wars that he had trouble getting through. If Jane McGonigal is right about games building resilience, we built Younger Nephew some Jedi-level resilience.

Younger Nephew spotted my copy of Mass Effect 2 and asked if he could try it. I told him that it was kind of complicated game and that I'd have to read a lot of it to him, but we could try. After a couple of minutes of the prologue, he handed the controller back to me and said, "This game is too complicated!" He was absolutely riveted by the opening cutscenes, though. Someday, we'll play Bioware games together.

The great "Unpack all the boxes in the garage" project continues. After several weekends of unpacking stuff that mostly went straight to the trash, recycling, or "Donate to Goodwill" pile, I unearthed some real goodies today. I found a box that contained some carefully hoarded relics of my early geekery, going back to elementary school.
( So I took some photos... )

So, I'd seen this linked on Geek Feminism, but didn't actually get to watch it until obadiah cued it up on his iPhone for me when we got together to do some writing yesterday. It is a thing of beauty, and if you've ever even dabbled in tabletop RPGs, you need to see it.

I keep trying to rewrite the lyrics to be more applicable to the game I'm currently in, but there's just no way to get, "Roll an enormous double handful of D10 and add your auto-successes," to fit either the meter or the rhyme scheme.

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

And yes, you can buy the song from iTunes.

A recent episode of the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent informs me that the Samoan word for cowardice translates as "uncompleted tattoo". Of course, in Samoa, they throw you into the ocean after each tattooing session, because having ink hammered into your flesh with sharpened pig tusks isn't painful enough.

I think it was reading this New York Times article about the supposed "controversy" about a gay romance in Dragon Age: Origins that finally tipped us over into buying the game. I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I've done my bit to support gay elves.

Had a grand old time this afternoon watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Nightmare Before Christmas. (Hey, just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I can't enjoy a good Christmas movie.) Thanks, swan_tower!

And, look, BBC 7 is broadcasting a radio version of Red Dwarf! (Looks like it's probably an abridged adaptation of the novels, read by Chris Barrie.) I'll definitely check it out.