More-pug Cribs
In my never-ending quest to improve David (which will now be known as NEQID, pronounced naked—does my cleverness know any bounds?), I have attempted to squash each of my addictions, similar to what I’ve been doing to the spiders that have taken up residence in all of the Castle’s windows and occasionally sneak into the house and scuttle across the carpet before they find the unkind side of my foot. There are just some things that I enjoy more than others, and when I find those things, I end up doing them over and over again (and I’m not just talking about vacuuming-up bugs). It’s when I stop enjoying those things but can’t stop doing them that I force myself to take a closer look.
I last gave up television at the end of a marathon session of MTV’s Cribs. In the happy event that you’ve never seen this show, let me give you a brief primer: in 30 minutes, MTV tours two famous peoples’ houses. Think of a modern day Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with jerky, 30-second attention-span camerawork, and overly perky famous people. MTV, similar to many basic-cable channels, has marathon days, where to fill time, or more probably to drive people mad, they repeat different episodes of a show continuously across the day or weekend. It was during a Cribs weekends that I knew I had a problem. I was lying across my couch watching Cribs when I found that I couldn’t stop watching it. It wasn’t that it was interesting: the famous people were demeaning and the houses all looked the same, with gaudy bathrooms, sporting TVs installed in the mirror; garages filled with the same cars and SUVs; and swimming pools with fake rock formations. I knew it was horrible and yet there was nothing I could do to stop myself from watching it. The best way to explain this is to think of the scene (in the book or movie) of A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist undergoes an experimental treatment to “cure” him of his evil impulses. The scientists pry open his eyelids with (from the movie) thin metal spikes, and force him to watch gruesome violence while under the influence of a nausea- and pain-inducing drug, with the hopes of conditioning him to be a less-violent person, or, more exactly, conditioning him to become horribly sick when he starts to perform a violent act.
It was in the fifth hour of watching MTV’s Cribs that I knew I had a problem. I don’t remember how I escaped, but I do remember that it took a tremendous psychic effort to press the power button on the remote control. I then flung it across the room to remove any temptation, peeled myself from the couch, and ran out the door. I jumped into my car and drove as far away from my television as possible. I don’t think I was fully dressed. The next day, I disconnected ReplayTV and cancelled my cable. Since then, I’ve not watched television in my house (I do have exceptions to my self-imposed television isolation, including DVDs and other people’s TVs), and I’m happy to report that the Castle, like the unnamed and unmissed Houston apartment after the Cribs incident, continues to be Cable-free.
These memories are a long-winded way of bringing up what I really wanted to talk about: my relationship with video games, and in particular, the online games that I play with Julie. Technically, these games are called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (a horrible name), or MMORPG (okay, it just got worse), but I’ll call them More-pugs, because that makes them seem cuter. Before I describe what More-pugs are, let me tell you where I find myself.
Julie and I were playing the More-pug Dark Age of Camelot for the past six-months or so. It was working out well for us. Before we started playing, we would spend the evenings talking on the phone (remember, she was in California at the time, and I was in Texas). That’s when I had the brilliant ideas to revisit my More-pug addict…err…habit. The reasoning was rather sound: instead of spending all night on the telephone running out of topics to discuss, we would spend all night on the telephone, while we played video games and never ran out of any topics to discuss. Knowing Julie’s personality and her fondness for console video games, I thought it would be an easy sale. It was. Especially after I offered to buy her a new laptop to play the More-pug on (her old laptop wasn’t fast enough).
We started playing for a couple of hours a few nights a week and everything was good. Julie learned the game quickly and our telephone conversations benefited from discussions on the More-pug. The longer we played, the more we both enjoyed it. Our characters grew stronger, as they do in More-pugs, and we moved from fighting the computer-controlled monsters, which are fun but not terribly challenging, to fighting other players, which increases the difficulty and excitement of the game. Before I left Texas, we were playing about five times a week for two to six hours (the six hours was mostly on weekends) at a time. Especially toward the end of my stay in Texas, when my workload was almost nonexistent and Julie was working (i.e., mostly sleeping) nights in the hospital, we would spend most of the day playing our maturing characters in the More-pug’s world.
Then I moved. My computer was packed away and took a long and unsuccessful trip to the lovely state of Washington. Although my movers did a good job of moving most of my stuff (I had a much better experience during this move than the move from NYC to Houston), my computer didn’t make it. It would be easy to point fingers, so I will. The movers devised an ingenuous slide made from flattened garment boxes to send my packed stuff from my second floor apartment to the ground floor where they could then trolley the boxes to the moving truck. I anxiously watched them drop box after box down the slide and cautioned them that the boxes marked “Fragile” and “Computer Stuff” should probably be carried down and not slid down. I’m sure you can see where this is going. While I didn’t witness them sliding the fragile boxes down the chute, when I returned to supervise the box dropping, all the fragile boxes were on the ground floor and the chute was still in use. The move left three casualties: the face of my favorite clock, three dents in my stainless steal kitchen table, and my Alienware computer, loaded with the More-pug.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I didn’t learn about the broken computer until after I moved into the Castle. When I first arrived in Seattle, I spent almost a month living in temporary housing while I closed on my house. During that time, Julie and I did not play the More-pug (Julie wasn’t allowed to play without me because of addiction concerns). After moving into the Castle, I immediately unpacked the computer boxes and tried to get my Alienware box running. The computer died before the bios came up, and the computer-store guy, after I brought it to him the next week, didn’t think it was worth fixing. His diagnosis: the motherboard died, and with it, probably the CPU. Because they didn’t make the motherboard anymore—the computer, while top of the line three years ago, hadn’t aged particularly well—I would be better off buying a new one. And buy I did! I upgraded all the parts except for the sound card, the peripherals, and the power source. It screams now.
After getting the computer home (safely) and installing the OS and drivers, I installed the More-pug. As I mentioned in my last post, Julie has been wading her way through a painful night-float OB rotation. She works all night, drives home while trying not to fall asleep at the wheel, and sleeps all day. I wake her up at 4:30pm to get her up and moving so she can rinse and repeat. As you can see, her schedule is not conducive to video game playing. Since I packed up my computer in Houston months ago, Julie and I have not played the More-pug.
I’m sure you’re asking yourself (or probably me, but we won’t get into the discussion of whether I’m talking to myself or little, green, intangible, invisible space aliens) what exactly is a More-pug and why do I spend so much time playing it? I was getting to that, hold onto your britches. The More-pugs, in short, allow its players to step into a different persona and interact with an environment that is very different from the world we live in. The new persona is called a character, and the player controls the persona’s appearance, name, dress, and abilities. Since the More-pug we play is based on a fantasy world, like what you see in the Lord of the Ring movies (or books, for those, like Julie and me, who are into that genre), our characters have the magical attributes and medieval fighting abilities of this world. As we play more, our characters become stronger, relative to where we start and the other people who play. For the most part, the longer you play, the stronger you become. The main difference between a More-pug and a normal video game, is that you share the world with thousands of other players. That is, Julie and I played with different characters played by people of all ages from around the world. I attempted (quite unsuccessfully) to recreate this in my short story Grelko the Giant Slays a Mouse. I’ll hopefully revisit More-pugs in another story and do a better job of conveying the excitement and enjoyment of these games.
Getting back to the More-pug, Julie will be finishing up her rotation on Monday, and we’ve been talking about whether we will continue to play. I’ve raised some questions as to whether this is a good use of our time; particularly looking at how much time we spent playing the game before I left Houston. I had almost convinced myself (if not Julie) that we would not return to the game, when I started thinking about all the new More-pugs that are coming out over the next month. As I browsed these websites, I felt the tingling of excitement as I read the descriptions of World of Warcraft and Everquest II. Here were two new games to play, new worlds to explore, and new monsters to keel.
I had high hopes of describing what it was about More-pugs that I enjoyed, but it’s obvious I won’t get there tonight. I’ve written too much and said too little. I wanted to talk about my love of magic; the beautiful microcosm that More-pugs create, which allow the player to study the economics, player interaction, and community interactions; the sense of power and achievement (some of it false) that these games impart on the players; and the addictive force of these games. But, alas, such discussion will have to wait for another day. While these games are inherently addicting, they are also rewarding, and as long as Julie and I can control the amount of time we spend exploring their regions, we will probably continue playing them. It beats watching Cribs.