Category: Gaming

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WSOP Road Trip: Day 1

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I’ll start this off with an apology: If this post isn’t up to snuff, it’s because I drove 500 miles on roughly 3 1/2 hours of sleep. And I’m still up. I know I said I’d be doing a video blog of this trip, but I’m not sure whether that’s going to come together, so I’ll stick with normal blog posts for now.

Today marked the beginning of my road trip to the World Series Of Poker in Las Vegas. This will be the first – and I’m treating it as the only – year I’ll be able to play in any WSOP events. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me and I’m extremely blessed that I get to take advantage of it.

Blessed insomuch as I’m married to the most amazing woman who ever walked the earth, and who’s been extremely supportive of my trip to the WSOP to try my hand at my first major poker tournament(s). Without her, I would never be able to do this, and I can’t possibly thank her enough.

The first leg of the journey was a drive from Seattle to Boise. It’s a drive I’ve done probably a dozen times in my life, and it never gets better. This is, however, the first time I’ve done the drive alone, and the entire trip was in varying degrees of rain. I’m not gonna lie: it was a pretty shitty drive.

The road from Seattle to Ellensburg isn’t so bad, but eastern Washington is a big yellow-brown blasted wasteland. There’s a brief respite in northeastern Oregon, and then right back to brown, flat roads. I’ve never been a fan of this drive, but it’s a necessary evil.

I’ve never spent any time in Boise, and this is no exception. I’m only spending about 4 hours here awake, but I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by the downtown area. It’s well kept and clean, and it looks like it’s being well developed with a lot of small businesses, boutique shops, and good food. It’s nicer than I expected.

It also helps that I got to have dinner with Jordan, a friend of mine from my Nintendo testing days. I haven’t seen Jordan in several years, so I was glad to have the opportunity to hang out for a bit. Good friends, good beer, and good food are a great way to cap off an otherwise kind of crappy driving day, and I have Jordan to thank:

jordan

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Salt Lake City to meet a couple of people I only know on Twitter. I’ll fire up another post in the aftermath of that meeting.

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Device-Specific Ecosystems Are JUST FINE

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I read a few different “bookish” blogs, and have been getting into the world of prose publishing more and more lately for obvious reasons. I mentioned in one of me previous posts how I’ve seen a lot of people in the traditional book world talking about their transition to eBooks.

A recurring theme of these conversations centers around the major e-Reader makers and their DRM. Many people complain that e-Books available on Kindle, iBooks, and Nook are tethered to those devices, citing that you never had to worry about where you could read a book before eBooks. The book-reading community, as it were, seems to believe that eBooks should be an open platform, and available anywhere, all the time.

First off, I think the term DRM is slightly misused here. Most of the time, “DRM” (Digital Rights Managment) is used to describe the bits of code a company embeds in a particular file to prevent it from being copied (pirated). In the case of eBook readers, it’s less about piracy and more about file format: Each eReader has it’s own proprietary format that ties a piece of content to that particular type of device. The idea being that purchasing a book on Kindle ties you to that device and thus, into Amazon’s ecosystem, is apparently the Devil’s work in the eyes of many readers. My perspective as a geek and gamer places this practice under a wildly different lens.

I grew up playing console video games. My first console was a Nintendo Entertainment System and over the intervening 25+ years I’ve owned almost every major video game console. Having been a staunch Nintendo fan for many years – a stand that has now shifted to Playstation – the idea of “console wars” is ingrained in my childhood. There have always been two or three major console manufacturers vying for real estate in the video game landscape, each with their own proprietary format and exclusive titles.

And that’s never been a problem. If you wanted to play a Mario game, you owned a Nintendo. Same with Sonic & Sega. In the modern era, Playstation has Uncharted and Killzone, Xbox has Halo and Gears of War. I can’t plug a Playstation disc into an XBox. I can’t use a Wii U gamepad on my Playstation. Not only are these divisions expected, but accepted.

So why isn’t the same mentality true of eBooks?

We live in a world where hardware technology does not support itself. It’s too expensive to develop and manufacture, so hardware makers are forced to find other avenues of profit in order to make their devices successful. Console manufacturers don’t make money on their machines – Sony is a great example of this, having only recently started turning a profit on PS3 hardware after spending 7 years selling it at a loss – they make money on licensing fees and software sales.

Amazon loses money on Kindles, Barnes & Noble loses money on Nooks. Even Apple doesn’t turn a profit on iPads. These companies make all of their money – and fund the development of better hardware – by making it as convenient as possible for the owners of their hardware to stay within their own ecosystem and not venture outward. Every Kindle book sale funnels 30% (or more) into Amazon’s coffers. Without that money – if everyone were able to buy their eBooks elsewhere and read them on any device – the Kindle ceases to exist.

So why is that a problem? The major eBook hardware manufacturers have their own exclusive titles, but the vast majority of eBooks are “multiplatform” – either available in a universal format like ePub or PDF, or are simply released in multiple formats for the different hardwares. This is virtually the exact same model that has been used by the video game industry ever since hardware competition generated the tagline “Genesis Does What NintenDon’t”.

Once the digital publishing world settles down, it will no longer be an issue: It makes ZERO sense for a 3rd Party publisher – be them a behemoth like Harper Collins or a self-published author – to limit their exposure by sticking to a single platform without a major exclusivity contract that pays them hefty licensing fees. The vast majority of books will filter out to all platforms, just like video games from major publishers like EA and Ubisoft do.

I’m sure that the big eBook manufacturers will continue to have their own exclusive titles – especially in light of Amazon starting their own publishing house(s) – but the idea that hardware exclusivity is some sort of demon seed that’s destroying the integrity of eBook publishing is… well, it’s old fashioned and silly. Bookish folk who are just now encountering the notion of hardware exclusivity need to realize that this is not a new idea, nor is it a problem.

Besides, books have a huge advantage in this scenario: If all I have is a Playstation and a game isn’t available there, there’s no way for me to just buy the game in a standalone package and play it anyway. If a book isn’t available on your e-reader of choice, you can go buy a physical copy and still read it, legitimately, without any problems.

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Two Topics, One Post

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I read a lot online. I tend to gravitate toward book blogs and video game sites, which makes sense with my background. Me recent perusals have brought up two wildly different topics, and I’ve decided to just write about both of them.

ON BOOKS

Recurring articles pop up all the time in the book-o-sphere, and one that always catches my eye are bloggers and industry folk discussing their “journey” with eBooks. See, many of them were staunch opponents to eBooks. On one end of the spectrum there are folks who didn’t want to support eBooks because they thought it to be the demise of their favorite industry and/or pastime. On the other end are the more hipster-ish arguments claiming that the feel or smell of a physical book is integral to the reading experience.

First, let me say that both of these arguments are bullshit. The publishing game is changing, yes, but the idea that upheaval in the modern book industry would result in the death of prose as an artform is ludicrous. Any arguments regarding the book as a physical object being an inseparable core aspect of the reading experience is equally silly: it is the words on the page that keep you reading, and I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that when they are immersed in a story they still pay attention to how the pages smell.

On the other hand, I agree that the early days of eBooks were pretty rough. Reading a book off of an LCD screen – especially an older one with a lower refresh-rate – was physically painful for me, causing me tons of eye strain and headaches. Upon the invention and refinement of ePaper, though, all of those barriers go away.

I was thinking about writing an article about my “journey” into eBooks, but it really boils down to this: ePaper is awesome, eBooks rock, and the moment that had the ability to rid myself of stacks and stacks of books and replace them with a single device that could, ostensibly, hold every book I’d ever want to read presented itself I jumped in with both feet. I’m sold.

ON VIDEO GAMES

The big hubbub today centers around EA’s release of the new SimCity title, a game they showed at last year’s E3. In a surprise to exactly no one, EA’s been having all kinds of troubles maintaining the persistent, always-on internet connection required to play the game. Players have reported everything from 5+ hour downloads to the loss of hours of gameplay due to a server hiccup to the complete inability to connect at all.

I remember watching the demo for this title during E3 and being really excited for it. I used to play a ton of SimCity on an old Mac Classic, spending hours and hours using cheat codes to get extra money while having natural disasters turned off, then building up a giant metropolis only to turn natural disasters back on and watch the whole thing sink into what amounted to an apocalypse.

When they announced that the game required a persistent internet connection, though, I immediately scratched it off of my want list. The entire concept that if my internet connection goes down I suddenly lose access to games that I’ve either purchased in physical form or downloaded to a local device is appalling to me. It has, and always will be, a deal-breaker.

I really wish I could be a fly on the wall in meetings where executives discuss the reasoning behind requiring an internet connection to play single-player games. Video game industry folk try to sell us this idea as an anti-piracy measure, but I believe that’s more smokescreen than anything else. Executive-level folks like to make a big deal out of piracy, but it has considerably less effect on a company’s bottom line than many would lead us to believe.

In reality it’s more of a way for them to collect data on their players and target all of us with advertising. Plus, with the video game industry about to enter a major era of flux, game companies are panicking because they have no idea what gamers want anymore. Many of them believe that collecting this sort of data will help them figure out what the next big thing will be before it gets here. What they don’t realize is that with game development cycles that last 3+ years, the fickle nature of the industry will have changed between development and release, so all you can do is cross your fingers and hope.

In the meantime, the larger companies like EA and Blizzard are instituting this asinine always-on DRM that will end up losing them way more customers than piracy ever would. How about trying a different tactic: make good games, and make them as easy to obtain and play as humanly possible, for a decent price. Could it truly be that simple? Seems pretty basic to me.

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The PS4’s Best Feature

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I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot of thoughts in the coming weeks and months about the Playstation 4, but I’m going to start off by talking about my favorite feature – or feature set, rather – about the console: its focus on downloadable content.

Or, rather, the focus on making downloadable content instant and invisible, or at least as much as is possible in this day and age.

Last July, Sony acquired streaming-game service Gaikai. Gaikai, for those of you not familiar with the name (don’t worry, most of us weren’t), created a set of streaming technologies that would operate similar to OnLive, but rather than creating a distinct service, they focused on partnerships that would embed their technology into websites and devices. There was a lot of speculation surrounding Sony’s purchase of Gaikai, most of it centered around whether or not the PS4 was going to be a cloud-based game system like OnLive.

Thankfully, that speculation was incorrect, and the realization of that partnership is even better than we could have imagined. It seems that rather than using Gaikai’s technology solely for game streaming, Sony will instead focus that technology on streamlining the download and play process for gamers, thus addressing one of the largest and longest running complaints about the PS3: constant and frustratingly slow updates.

Sony will combine Gaikai’s streaming tech with something that has never been conceived on a console: internal hardware dedicated solely to managing downloads. In the past, in virtually all digital spaces, the management of background downloading, multiple downloads, or updates to software has been limited to software-side solutions. This would always require the software to set aside chunks of processor real-estate to handle the downloads, and while there have been a few decent PC implementations, it’s never really been done properly. With internal hardware dedicated to the task, gamers will never have to wait for a download to play a game, and background downloads will rarely – if ever – need to be paused in order to accommodate gameplay.

Combine this hardware solution with Gaikai’s streaming tech, and you have an absolute nirvana for gamers: a system that will allow you to download everything in the background regardless of what you’re doing on the console at the time, will let you stream content from the server while you’re waiting for a game to download, and will download and install any and all updates automatically.

Never again will you put a game disc into your console and have to wait for an hour for the most recent updates to download and install. Never again will you purchase a digital title and have to wait for it to download before you can begin playing. Never again will you turn on your system and wait for an interminable system update before you can begin playing.

This set of features, if executed properly, could be one of the best things to come out of console gaming in years. It also proves that not only was Sony listening intently to their fans and detractors, but they took their solution to one of the strongest complaints of this generation a step further than many of us even knew was possible. It bodes well for Sony’s standing in the next round of the “console wars”, which is good news for long-time Playstation hardcores like me.

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PS4: Initial Thoughts

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If you’re not a gamer, or if you’re some sort of reclusive hobbit gamer that lives in an abandoned missile silo, the news of today’s Playstation press conference may have passed you by. For the rest of us, this was the first shell fired into the newest generation of warring consoles, where Sony spent the better part of two hours announcing their plans for the upcoming Playstation 4.

Anyone who listens to the After The Fact podcast knows that I’m a humongous Playstation fan. I grew up a console gamer and cut my teeth on Nintendo’s classic systems. I was just the right age – a senior in high-school – when the Playstation came out, and it was the first console I ever bought with my own money. I was a mild Playstation fan through the life of the PSOne, mostly because I was wholly disappointed by Nintendo’s offering at the time. When the PS2 came out, though, I was completely hooked, and have been ever since.

Today’s PS4 announcement had a hell of a lot of good in it. It seems, for the most part, that Sony has learned from many of their mistakes during the PS3 generation, and is focused on providing a wholly reinvented online and social experience, combined with a system that is focused on getting you gaming as fast as possible and as soon as you want it.

My only real disappointments with today’s conference came in the form of the games that were showcased. A few really caught my eye like inFamous: Second Son and Knack, but the rest kind of fell flat for me. Killzone looked beautiful but it’s a series that’s never found it’s way into my heart. I’m glad to see that Watch Dogs is a PS4 offering rather than PS3, but the gameplay demo they showed actually didn’t feel as dynamic as the one Ubisoft showed us at E3. The Destiny announcement was a given – especially after their conference in Seattle just a couple of days ago – and the Diablo III announcement left me scratching my head.

The two biggest standouts in my mind, though, are the PSVita connectivity – remote play that might, for once, actually work? – and the controller. The DualShock 4 is the first departure from the standard DualShock design since its introduction in the mid-’90’s, and it looks nigh on perfect to me. A more ergonomic shape, added features, and just slightly re-designed everything means a DualShock that seems like it’s just better.

I’m still processing everything I saw today, and I’ll have more detailed thoughts in the coming week.

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Play A New Game Every Once In A While

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Even though I’m lying here, sick as a dog, living off of Robotussin and cough drops, this subject has bothered me long enough that I had to sit up and write about it.

I’m always amazed at people’s reluctance to try new things. This is primarily a reaction to my experience with games and poker. I’ve been playing board games for most of my life in some form, and I’ve always been interested in playing something new. I’ll give damned near any game you put in front of me a try, if for no other reason than to understand why I don’t want to play it.

I’ve met a ton of people over the years who are stuck in some kind of rut when it comes to board games. They’ve found the one or few that they like, and fuck all the rest. Even if something new comes out that’s right up their alley, they blanch at the whole idea of putting the effort out to learn something new, especially if they feel as though they’ve “solved” the game they’re familiar with.

This is especially true with poker. After Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003, the world saw an explosion in poker interest, centered primarily around No-Limit Hold ‘Em, the game that’s played in the WSOP Main Event. Everyone and their brother, sister, cousin, neighbor, mistress, gigolo, mild acquaintance, and most-hated-enemy learned how to play Hold ‘Em. In the years that followed, the combination of home games and online poker kept spurring this interest in Hold ‘Em and everyone just kept playing, whether they were good at the game or not.

What about other poker games? Poker, in it’s current form, has been around for a couple hundred years, but No Limit Hold ‘Em was only invented in the early ’50’s. 5-Card Draw, 7-Card Stud, and their variants predate Hold ‘Em by a long shot. Since Hold ‘Em’s introduction, variants on the community-card theme – Omaha, Tahoe, Pineapple and the like – have exploded as well. There are a ton of poker variants, and most of them are pretty damned fun. Just look at the WSOP schedule this year: there are 8 or 10 different games being spread, and even more if you count betting variations like Limit, Pot-Limit, and No Limit.

But I’ll be bug-fuckered if I can figure out a way to get home-game players to play anything but No Limit Hold ‘Em.

I was introduced to poker in 2004 via Hold ‘Em, just like most people. I played in a home game that ran for several years, and when it fell apart I started running my own home game, which has been running with varying degrees of success for a number of years now. Even though I started on Hold ‘Em, the whole concept of poker is what drew me in, and my appetite to learn the other games has never really been quenched. I’m absolutely fascinated by the fact that someone designed a deck of 52 cards that a) hasn’t appreciably changed since it’s initial creation and b) has spawned countless variants not only of poker, but of a ton of other games that can be played with that very same deck.

Apparently, many do not share that same level of enthusiasm. There is a small, core band of players in my poker group that will play whatever game is put in front of us. Getting anyone outside that group to play anything but Hold ‘Em is like herding cats. All the other poker games seem to hold this stigma that they’re for “more experienced” players, or people just aren’t willing to learn them because they’re afraid to move away from the game they already know. This cenophobia just baffles me.

The most common excuse I hear is “I’ll just lose my money.”

Wait… Didn’t you do the exact same thing to learn Hold ‘Em in the first place? At some point, every one of the millions of Hold ‘Em players out there were newbs, myself included, and we were just lighting our money on fire by playing it at all. This is especially funny coming from the people who routinely lose even playing Hold ‘Em. Clearly you’re not in this thing for the money, so why should spending a few bucks on a new game bother you? And yet, not one of these people who’re afraid of Omaha or Stud or Lowball has been able to sufficiently explain to me how learning one of these new games would be any different from the experience they had learning Hold ‘Em.

I mean, I really love Hold ‘Em, but with as much enjoyment as I get out of it, it can get a little tiresome after a while. Break out of your shell! Do something new! Don’t be a chicken-shit! Play a new game every once in a while.

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My Journey With Poker

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I completely missed my blog post yesterday. I’ll see what I can do about getting two out today, but I make no claims or promises.

Yesterday my house was a mess, and I had people coming over for my weekly poker game. It may seem like a trivial thing to prioritize over my book or my blog, but poker is an extremely important part of my life, and one that I treat with a lot of respect. I try to make my poker room the best environment for the game as possible because I take pride in the fact that people enjoy playing at my place, which is what took up the time that I should have spent writing.

I know a lot of people see poker as nothing more than gambling. That’s unfortunate because, while it has an element of risk to it, the amount of skill involved in poker can far outweigh the luck. That’s an argument I could spend an entire blog post making, but I’m going to set that aside right now so I can talk about the topic of today’s post: the effect poker has had on my life.

Many years ago, I had a temper problem. A pretty bad one. Not to the degree of being violent toward other people (at least not physically), but mostly toward inanimate objects. Trivial things would get under my skin, and send me flying off the handle at the dumbest times. My previous relationship (prior to my marriage) exacerbated that situation ten-fold, because my ex-girlfriend knew exactly what buttons to push to set me off, and kept her thumbs firmly planted on them. There were a number of emergency door replacements and strategically placed pictures in our old apartment in the aftermath of my frustration.

Unfortunately, this trend continued even after I was in a wildly better relationship. Rather than identify the problem and work on setting it aside, I had reoriented my mindset around what was acceptable for me to destroy – a place no human thought process should ever go, mind you – so I was no longer punching holes in doors, but frequently breaking things that I owned or, in one case, bending the shit out of the steering wheel of my car.

In 2004, I was introduced to poker. A friend of mine who had been into the game for quite some time taught me how to play at a 4th of July picnic that year and, being a pretty hardcore gamer all of my life, I took to it immediately. I had a decent eye for the strategy of the game, but it would be quite a while before I developed the temperament for it.

My first few years as a player my temper translated right into my play, and I was a complete tiltbox. I had spent an inordinate amount of time learning the intricacies of poker strategy, but one bad beat would throw it all out the window and send me spiraling into a spitting, cursing oblivion. One night, about a year after I started playing, I was heads up with the guy who ran our weekly poker night. To say that this guy was bad at poker would be like me writing an entire blog post explaining the reasons why humans should breathe. You know, air. This heads up match lasted almost an hour and a half (a long time with our structure back then), and on eight separate occasions I had him all-in and had the best hand, and all eight times he sucked out on me and put me out in second place.

My brain exploded. There are very few times in my life that I’ve ever been so angry about something so insignificant. I came very close to flipping his poker table over, and stormed out of his house, slamming his door behind me so hard I almost knocked his entryway windows out of their frames. And that was only the beginning of a tirade that lasted the rest of the night.

It was that night – coupled with a very serious conversation with my wife the next day – that honestly changed my life forever. What I didn’t explain earlier was that my temper, having been ignited by my ex-girlfriend, should have been extinguished – or at least dampened – once that relationship was over. I can very specifically trace my temper issues back to that one woman (mixed with a high volume of my own immaturity), but once she was out of my life, I either couldn’t or simply didn’t work on a way to bring it into check.

And I came closer than ever to losing my wife because of it.

That night was the trigger for an interesting type of soul-searching mission. I was desperately trying to find a way to get my temper in check without the use of drugs or a therapist. So I buried myself in poker.

Does that sound odd? It shouldn’t. The disciplines involved in being a good poker player include strategy, odds, reading players, and understanding your place at the table. Underpinning all of that, though, is self-discipline. The most important aspects of being a great poker player are not rooted in understanding the mechanics of the game, but instead understanding yourself and being able to remain in control at all times.

During this delve into the game, I read more poker books than I can count. I studied strategy on online sites, talked poker with friends constantly, and was playing some form of poker literally every single day of my life. If I wasn’t playing a home game, I was making trips to a local card room or playing online. And during this entire process I was learning two very important skills: how to objectively identify flaws in my own gameplay (including strategic errors AND mental and emotional lapses), and how to control my emotions.

Poker is a roller coaster of a game. Playing against terrible players is the best way to make money, but it’s also the most frustrating thing in the world. Bad players spend most of their time making the wrong moves, but that little bit of luck sometimes brings them out on top. You can do everything right, and still get screwed for it. In the long run it all evens out, but in the moment it’s fuck-all aggravating. The good players – the truly good players – are the ones who can let it slide off their back and not affect their play.

I’ve played against a lot of bad players. At that time, when I was playing daily, it was pretty much constant. There is no better immersion course in emotional control than playing $10 sit-and-go’s online, or sitting down at a $2/$4 table at a shitty local cardroom. Over the next year, I focused so hard on learning how to not let bad beats and crappy suck-outs affect my game, that I was simultaneously teaching myself how to let other things roll off my back, and keep my emotions check away from the poker table. And it wasn’t always a conscious effort. Sometimes I’d find myself starting to get frustrated by something, and feel myself putting it aside and telling myself not to let it bother me, and it was only in a moment of clarity that I identified what I was doing and where it had come from.

Never in my life have I found a better lesson in prioritizing the things that affect me on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to set aside stupidity I could not control in a poker game shined a spotlight on all of the things that I was letting under my skin outside the game, and taught me how to diminish their importance and learn what truly mattered. In the process, I was also learning how to identify my own faults and determine courses of action to fix them – starting with my temper.

It took a long, long time. Years, in fact. Along the way, I made some pretty big mistakes. Unlike the years before, though, I knew now how to see those mistakes for what they were, and admit to myself that a solution was needed. Admitting my faults to myself allowed me also to admit them out loud, which went a long way in saving quite a few of my friendships. And all along, I was chipping away at the foundations of my shitty temper until it finally fell away.

I’m not perfect; I still get pissed off about things. Only now, it usually doesn’t last very long, and it slides out of my consciousness rather quickly. For me, anger was a destructive force that cost me friends and almost destroyed my marriage. The disciplines I’ve learned from playing poker – both strategic and emotional – have translated into almost every aspect of my everyday life. Every skill I’ve taken away from poker has had a quantifiable impact on my life, but none so significant as allowing me to live without having childish temper tantrums.

It may sound sappy or cliche, but poker saved my marriage, and changed my life.

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The PSN Outage and Gamer Entitlement

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Earlier today, I got into a rather lengthy argument on Twitter with a good friend of mine over the current PSN outage. For those of you living under a rock in the Australian outback, the Playstation Network went down last Wednesday and has been down ever since. PS3 owners have been up in arms for days, demanding information.

The timing of the outage is horrible for Sony, coming during the week of three major game releases that all use online functionality. Gamers who purchased SOCOM 4, Mortal Kombat, and/or Portal 2 are understandably perturbed that they can’t get online with their new games, but the outage also affects all online-capable PS3 games, the Qriocity service and the Playstation Store. As the outage continues, gamers are becoming more and more upset, lighting up the internet with complaints.

Sony initially identified the source of the outage as an “external intrusion”, and let gamers know that they shut down the services in order to identify the breach and determine a course of action for fixing it. This backed people off for a day or two, but then began the complaints of Sony’s vagueness in identifying the problem to consumers.

On Saturday afternoon, Sony posted the following update to the Playstation Blog:

“We sincerely regret that PlayStation Network and Qriocity services have been suspended, and we are working around the clock to bring them both back online. Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure. Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security. We thank you for your patience to date and ask for a little more while we move towards completion of this project. We will continue to give you updates as they become available.”

This time, gamers were not appeased. Since this post, people have been complaining about every aspect of how Sony has been handling this situation, but primarily about the perceived lack of details regarding the process of restoring PSN service. Many feel that Sony should be providing more information – on any number of fronts – and that we as gamers and Sony consumers are entitled to more information. But are we actually entitled to anything?

Absolutely not.

First, people want to know what caused the outage. Of all of the different aspects of this issue that people are complaining about, this is the least valid, and least likely to get answered in any meaningful way. Gamers don’t need to know exactly what caused the issue, and Sony is under absolutely no obligation to publicize that information. If the problem was internal to Sony, releasing that information does them no good whatsoever, and if the problem truly was caused by a breach, then that information just points other hackers in the direction of a successful hack.

Sony has to be very careful with what information they release, and whom they release it to. It is fair to say that the PSN is a selling point of many products, and that a lack of the PSN would constitute the removal of a feature integral to those products. This argument would be valid, if Sony were permanently removing the PSN. But they’re not – it’s just an outage, caused by external forces out of Sony’s control, which is something everyone should expect with any service. Sometimes shit happens.

Besides, Sony is still smack dab in the middle of dealing with this crisis. If their info is to be believed (and we really have no reason to disbelieve them), they’re working around the clock to restore service and plug the holes, lest another incident occur and cause another extended outage. Why should any of us expect to be spoon fed information about their processes? Giving gamers minute-by-minute updates of their progress would do nothing but open them up to further scrutiny by a community of people who have no real knowledge of the problem. They’ve told us they’re working on it, and that’s what we need to know.

Similarly, people are bitching that Sony has not offered any kind of timetable for the return of the service, and are vilifying Sony for it. This is like saying “My favorite restaurant closed down because someone blew up their kitchen with a pipe bomb, but the owners aren’t telling me how long it’ll take to fix or when they’ll reopen, SO FUCK THEM.”

I’m going to sound like a broken record here, buy how are they even supposed to have a timetable? Building an infrastructure like this from scratch takes months, if not years, and rebuilding, testing it, determining a re-launch strategy, and re-launching it is not going to be an instant (or even fast) process. They’re not just deciding to flip the switch mid-stream to sate our hunger for gaming – they’re going to put the service back up when they’re damned good and sure that they’ve done everything humanly possible to ensure that we, their consumers, don’t have to endure something like this again.

Then there’s the question of compensation. Most of the complaints lie along the lines of “What are you going to do for me?”. I won’t deny that Playstation owners are probably due some sort of compensation for lost time. As I said before, the PSN is an advertised feature and a selling point for the console and a great many games. Playstation Plus subscribers have the most valid complaint, since they actually pay for the service directly and can’t partake. Is now the right time to be asking that question, though?

The outage hasn’t even ended yet, and Sony likely doesn’t even know the extent of the damage or cleanup time. With the amount of work they’re doing to fix the problem – namely rebuilding the PSN from the ground up – they likely don’t even know when it’ll be fully back up and running again. If they don’t know how long the outage will last or what it will take to fix it, how exactly are they supposed to determine a proper course of compensation for the affected users?

Probably the worst part of all of this, to me, is that the gaming media are fanning the flames of discontent. Gaming journalists repeatedly lambast gamers for their hot-headedness, even to go so far as to make fun of them (us) for flying off the handle at the tiniest little thing or for making entirely uninformed complaints. This is a time when users need to calm down and back off, and the media is a) making the PR hit that Sony’s taking from this even worse than it would have already been and b) acting just as reactionary as the gamers they make fun of.

What does this all boil down to? Under normal circumstances we, as consumers, are entitled to one thing: to get the product we pay for, as advertised, and to not be misled. That’s pretty much it. Sony hasn’t misled anyone, they haven’t engaged in false advertising, and – most of all – this is all out of the ordinary. Concessions must be made for off-the wall situations such as natural disasters or hackers or other situations out of Sony’s control.

We, as consumers, are not entitled to any specific amount or frequency of information from the companies from which we consume. How Sony handles its consumer service is entirely up to them, based on how they (not we) think it will affect their business and their consumers. Once the problem is fixed and they can take a step back and look at the big picture, they’ll determine a course of compensation and let us know how they are going to try and make it up to us. It would be stupid of them not to, because we are the reason they’re in business in the first place.

Complaining about the flow of information while still in the midst of the issue displays a frustrating sense of entitlement amongst the gamers making the complaints.  If, after all is said and done and we know Sony’s post-outage course of action, you feel that Sony has not treated you the way you want to be treated as a consumer of their products, the solution is simple: stop consuming their products. That is your recourse, and it is available to every single citizen of this wonderful capitalist society.

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My Finished Game Room

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This weekend, my big project was mounting my game room TV to the wall, opening up space on the top of my entertainment center for some of my classic consoles. The project is complete, and now my game room is officially made of win and makes me very happy. The setup: 50″ Panasonic Viera 1080p plasma, SNES, NES, Genesis, PS3, Wii, XBox 360. To the right of the setup is a shelf of classic games and memorabilia, to the right of that is my shelf of current-gen games, blu-rays, and DVDs. The Nintendo sign was acquired at a garage sale a while back.

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Welcome!

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Welcome to my blog! If you’re wondering what it’s all going to be about, you and I are in the same boat. As with most blogs, the intent behind this is to be a (hopefully) steady stream of consciousness that will (again, hopefully) be entertaining to some degree. A little rundown of my brain-pan might help define what things I’ll post about, and the categories I intend to separate everything into:

First and foremost, I’m a geek. If there is a geeky pursuit, I’ve probably done it, primarily in the form of games. I play games, and that occupies most of my free time. I play video games, card games, roleplaying games, board games, poker (lots of poker…), and I’ve even spent a good chunk of my life LARPing and playing live-combat games. I’m a gamer, in both the purest and broadest sense of the term.

I’m also a husband, a game designer, an artist, and a writer. I’ve just finished the first draft of my first full-length novel, and I’ve got several traditional game designs in the works.

The posts on  my blog will be split into one of the following categories:

EDITORIAL, which is further divided into:

Thoughts:
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Rants:

and
Reviews, which doesn’t have it’s own image because it’ll usually be tied to one of the categories below.

ENTERTAINMENT, which is further divided into:

Books (including my own):

Comic Books:
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and
Movies:

and GAMING, which is further divided into:

Poker:

Video Games:

and
Traditional Games:

Hopefully you’ll find it as entertaining as I find it cathartic. I’m not here to take you on a journey, I just plan on putting myself out there and seeing what people think. Let me know, okay?