Oh Boy. Talk about gauntlets getting thrown. So, sound-effects, soundscapes. Music versus noise. Carefully arranged notes in a constant form with pattern, lyric, meaning, sometimes good, sometimes plain awful. Themes, especially the ones that repeat, grow and mutate. And then just silence. Followed by a soft echo of footsteps. A noise here, another there. Sound of the ship’s bulkhead bending in the storm. And as you step out, the roars of wind, rain and lightning hit you in the face with the full force of nature. You hear it roar in the distance, and know it will soon be upon you.

There are soundtracks of wonderful music that guide our thoughts and there are sounds that do that as well, forming a soundscape of the environment we’re in. The big difference between a soundtrack and a soundscape when talking of things like movies or RPGs is that the soundscape, the world of sound effects, is something that exists on the diegetic level instead of the extradiegetic world of the typical soundtrack. These fancy words mean that you can assume that the characters of the story are hearing the soundscape, whereas usually a soundtrack is there only for the audience of the story, not audible to the characters inside the story (exceptions exist, of course).

Now, a well-designed soundscape is something that’s very common (one could say, a necessity) in television and movies, somewhat common in video games but pretty rare in RPGs. At least any I’ve participated in. The two things that have come in the way, to be honest, are the amount of preparation of using sound effects compared to music, and the technology that has been evading the typical game master.

Building a proper soundscape for a roleplaying session isn’t as easy as one might think. In movies and television, you don’t need to think of the lasting aspect of your sounds. The scenes will linger in environments for a few moments so you can think very nicely what exact sounds you need and time them to the millisecond. When you’re playing games like Half-Life or Left 4 Dead, the sounds around you get generated by the computer in response to your actions, the actions and presence of other entities, and randomized from a pre-generated pool of environmental sounds to create the needed effect.

In tabletop RPGs, neither approach is fully usable. Compared to TV, there is no guarantees how long a scene lasts, as all description of action is done as speech and there is a factor of the actors having a say to what happens. You might think a warehouse scene lasts for 5 minutes tops, but your players might spend 10 minutes with their characters at the warehouse, or they might take an hour. Having the same 10 minute planned soundscape loop six times gets annoying really soon, especially if the selected sounds are there to provoke a response. They not only lose their effect, but they will turn it against you as the immersion gets broken – suddenly (gasp) the same creepy footsteps are heard for the third time. As they are present on the character level, they will get ridiculed on the character level. Or you will have to explain that they are not part of the diegetic level anymore.

Computer games give a bit better starting point – a video game’s sound director can’t go about thinking beforehand that it takes 5 minutes, 32 seconds for a player to complete the level. He has to build a generic sound base that will give the player a feel of the environment, without invoking specific action. He avoids the repetition by adding some computerized randomization to the base sound pattern and of course avoiding sounds that would require a response from the player on this base-track. Then he moves forward, having something on his side that a standard GM doesn’t – he can combine the sounds with the triggers from specific events beforehand, so that they play when someone fires a shotgun or walks on a metal floor or topples a pile of cans by accident. Or even when the player is approaching a certain situation or location on the map. Automated responses to the actors, and to be honest, the most realistic soundscapes stem from that.

For a RPG soundscape, like for a soundtrack, you’d pretty much need that base that you can play while there is nothing interesting happening. As a soundscape can be assumed to be heard by the characters as well as the players, it requires more attention than a soundtrack. This base-scape will be playing a lot in a campaign, so it would have to be extremely long to avoid the feeling of repetition. In fact, you’ll need a few extremely long, different bases when you’re building a campaign – there will be various situations that need a somewhat distinctive feel attached to them. Besides those you’ll need other sounds. Sadly, what you can’t really do, is to have sounds for the actions that the players have their characters do – you can’t have a sound-effect for every one of their actions as you have no clue what those actions might be. And even if you did, you’d be always firing the sounds of only after the action has happened on the diegetic level, so there will be unnecessary redundancy that doesn’t especially benefit anyone. And in my opinion, most of the sounds made by other actors should be left to imagination and description as well “you hear the approaching footsteps of the scientists returning from their break”, “the guard accidentally drops his soda can on the floor and curses” as you will need to provide the players with information like where the sound came from and in most cases who was making it. On the other hand, using audio samples to play when something breaks the standard ambiance, yet wouldn’t benefit much from emphasizing on it on the level of the story, would work. A strange sound, a scream, a roar, the sound of thunder approaching that would gradually turn into the base sound once the thunderstorm is upon you. Things that predate actual action or are there just as sounds, nothing more. Yet. Echos of the future.

On practical side, for campaign play, I’d probably start building the base soundscape myself from scratch instead of using something fully made beforehand by someone else. Even if getting quality sounds for free can get tedious, it becomes much more personal and the feel is less hectic if you take time to manipulate the material to fit your needs. There are good services like YLE’s Tehosto around that can get you started, but the samples you get from one source are usually too short to be used on their own, so you need to look around the internet to find enough sound bits. And even when you have enough material to fill a nice long soundscape, you’ll notice that when you start mixing from sources, the difference in quality and style can sometimes be audible. And you will end up ditching a good portion of the sounds you have, eventually needing a lot more sounds. If you want to be really personal, you can record a sound from some place by yourself. Getting a good enough microphone to be able to record the ambiance of an environment on your own might be a very costly task, unless you have friends in high places who can borrow or rent you one. But recording an hour-long thunderstorm will really pay off if you use it on the background in a game – it will sound a lot less cheesy than something you stole from a sound effect box. Once you have a large enough library of sounds to play on the base, you compile them together with some sort of a tracker program, I suppose. I haven’t done that stuff since the 90’s, to there might be better ways to do it these days.

For the specific sounds that get played, you’ll need some form of a mixing software that allows you to play multiple tracks at the same time. – a somewhat affordable solution is Virtual DJ Studio, that offers a very nice, fully working trial version for you to toy around with while you wonder if you want to use it. Then just line up the effects you want to play next to your base track and slide them in when it is their time. And there you go, a soundscape. I can imagine it working very well in horror scenarios, where the players are already on the edge of their seats because of the story.

As a counterpoint to all of this, I must admit that I love using a non-story level soundtrack on the background of RPG sessions – partly because I takes a part of the pressure off from me if I try to get the game going toward a certain mood, and mostly because I love toying between the story-level and the storytelling-level of the game. You can create a lot more contrasts with music than you can do with stuff that exists on all levels of play. Using music on the other hand allows you to stop using music, which on its own can be very very effective (as Buffy the Vampire Slayer has taught us). Doing a full campaign where the ambience was fully created with sound-effects is something I probably would never do, but using some ideas from this post might eventually creep into the games.

Sound is half of the experience in movies, they say. Probably even more in other media, such as music video. Or radio, if it still exists – haven’t checked.

Sound is also a key player in how we experience our surroundings, draw context from and get important clues we don’t even realize. Like today, when I was happily exhausting the contents of my bladder the way guys do – standing up – and the blasted light went out. There I was, hands full of a tap that wasn’t going to turn off after all the coffee, and I couldn’t see anything. Blind as a bat. Turns out you can aim by sound rather well, and like bats do,  easily differentiate between different materials by the way they sound when .. Well, eventually, I fumbled my way back into light, in a fresh state of mind of having seen – or heard – things in new light again. Learning is a wonderful thing, and often keeps cleaning ladies getting butter on their bread.  Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s the key difference between the car I’m borrowing and my own (..at shop. Thank you, France), as I keep feeling curiously lost with the current car. After my wild mild water park adventure, I realized it’s the sound – too quiet and what I hear is too differently connected to the overall tactile feel, and I’m subconsciously expecting the connections from my own car. All wacko.

All this, in turn, made me wonder about audio backgrounds in games. Half-Life series are excellent in this regard concerning atmosphere, and just about everything from DICE concerning sheer intensity and psychological pressure. If you have a buddy with Battlefield: Bad Company, get him playing it and listen. That’s not a game you hear anymore, if you stop looking at it.

I’d probably get massive (and good) creeps if I was playing some Fringeish/XFilesish/Madsciencegonebad RPG with a soundtrack that took cues from Half-Life – lots of ambient creaks, rattles, scurrying sounds, everything that makes you jumpy of the next corner. How’s about it, Alvan? Ever thought of ditching music in favour of “ambient surroundings” with music coming in only at few key points where it serves intensity and emphasis, and even then on top of said soundscape, not replacing it?

In the bright future, tabletop RPG sessions are built hardcore, with a sound mixer guy who knows GM by heart and adjusts, mixes and changes the aural soundscape constantly .. Be the player group walking from thicker woods to a husky meadow, or surprise ambush by 500ft squirrels that murder light itself — the sound is always there, describing things and changes in local surroundings with language you never realize listening. I said it first.

Post contains slight spoilers on Dead Like Me and Tru Calling, be warned.

With the arrival of the new Dead Like Me movie, I got inspired and got the first season boxed set (The movie wasn’t that great, sad to say that) and started watching while working. Now, remember how I talked about how Tru Calling explored the premise of the show with a nice organized pattern, starting from the typical case and slowly expanding the question and starting to question it. Well, Dead Like Me does pretty much the opposite. The first assignment George gets as a grim reaper, she puts into question, trying to save the little girl. And in the second episode she tries to see what happens if she doesn’t do anything. These are things that in Tru Calling were explored a lot later (the other question would have gotten answered on the second season had the series continued, the other sort was explored in the episode Last Good Day through Jack). Dead Like Me does the learning curve to its premise by questioning it from the very start. And (movie spoilers ahead, skip to next paragraph if you don’t want to know) in the DLM movie, we eventually get to the point where the questioning of it all ends, sort of. As George gets promoted to a middle-management job previously held by Rube (at least that’s the way I read the ending) and will have to stand as an example to the other reapers from now on, thinking the one thing she could when the post-it notes rain from the sky: “I am so fucked”

If we’re honest, the core of Tru Calling is exploring the Calling mythos. Tru, her mother, Jack, Tru’s father, their place in the grand universal scheme of what it is all about. It approaches the system from the outside, giving the characters new puzzles and angles to solve and when you thing you have it all figured out, it throws you a curve ball. And the episodes are about the save. Each episode is really about these outside characters we catch only a glimpse of. The central characters’ issues are pretty much always explored through the characters in the episode who are doing the Calling.

In Dead Like Me, it’s the other way around. The people who get Reaped are very rarely hugely important. The way the reapers handle their jobs is usually a side point about the episode, something they do while dealing with their personal problems. There is no grand mythos to speak of. Sure we see what happens when a grim reaper takes a day off or who is the boss of all Gravelings or how one gets turned into such. And of course there are close calls to getting to the scene and trying to figure out what’s about to happen. But they’re only there to provide a backset to everything else that happens – How the human interactions between the undead, the living and the soon-to-be-dead work. What’s important here is the fact George’s sister is stealing toilet seats to grieve for her loss.

I’d love to see an episode of each show done in the other’s style. Seeing Tru do some menial morgue work and really struggling with the whole “Do I want to do this for the rest of my life”, not do homework and getting then Called, followed by her waltzing through the rewind day like it’s her routine and then share some heartwarmingly universal moments with Harrison and Davis. Or a grand-conspirational upper management playing their little grim reapers to their plans, and we’d discover there being another division of grim reapers that have an agenda that might be totally different from just saving souls. The saving of souls becoming tediously difficult when the reaping is done in a convention of people called “John Smith” and then realizing that the person who got saved didn’t have a soul at all. What does it all mean? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!

Ok, got a bit carried away there.

But the two are really a good example of how to take a high-concept idea and then steer it to totally different directions. By making a simple choice of what’s core of the show. Is it the lives of the core characters or is it the concept. Dead Like Me takes the high-concept core and uses it to paint a very vivid and real (if you can use the word when speaking of grim reapers) picture of the people it affects. I would say this makes Tru Calling a bit more easier to follow if you regularry miss episodes, but makes Dead Like Me easier to get more emotionally attached to. The fact that DLM is probably one of the wittiest shows ever written doesn’t hurt.

According to the show’s blog, we’re getting more human antics from the best scifi/horror/drama/urban fantasy whatnot show from BBC. The penultimate episode was a very by-the-book cliffhanger and I have a bad feeling the season finale for season one might be awesomely action packed (in contrast of being about what matters the most). But I wait to be pleasantly surprised.

Mean while, I started collecting the soundtrack of the show as spotify playlists over on a page of it’s own. Missing quite a lot of stuff and I had to resort to covers on some songs as the originals weren’t available on spotify.

Over on TED, J.J. Abrams talks of boxes and Tom’s nose

Really nice stuff, and shows how good he must be doing his sales pitches. The stuff everyone who ever has done a scenario based on a movie or a TV-series really needs to be listening is the brief stint where he talks about the best scene in Jaws.

On one hand, I managed to get my father’s printer working and he’s happy.

On the other, I just heard my godmother had died.

So, me and good old Spikey over there were talking about how my blog posts tend to be there for a very small audience, because I talk about the slight intersect of RPGs and Television, and rarely about anything else. I came up with the idea of trying to open up the reasons for this a bit, but it came out a bit dull on the first try, so tonight’s solution:

This should help a bit. Notes in italic are written on the morning after.

So, Alvan, television and role playing games, 101. As one might see from the odd blog posts I write, both are a big part of my daily thought process. To be honest, I don’t actively play RPGs these days. It’s almost more likely for me to have a month when I don’t play a single game than one when I do. On the other hand, I still maintain my healthy interest in TV-shows, watching the essentials daily and sometimes popping to the non-essentials in nice big rounds (season at a time, DVD rental these days is awesome). But let’s take a look back in time.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I convinced my mother to buy me the Finnish edition of RuneQuest after seeing the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box in my best friend’s bookshelf. Now, to a toddler like me (I was something like 10 back then), the mechanics of the game were way too hard to understand. My best friend managed to play a couple of D&D sessions with me, but he never got RuneQuest. Neither did I, but kept returning to the book, trying to figure out what the deal with it was. I made simpler versions of the rules and had a couple of games, but to be honest, I spent most of the time just reading the book. By “simpler versions of the rules” I mean something like “let’s roll these dice and if we roll something like X or lower, then we succeed, okay?”, not something that was really thought out – as said, this was when I was very very young.

Years passed, monkeys found monoliths and discovered fire and death. Somewhere around this point I met a lot of the people who are still part of the gaming group I still consider I belong to. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons became the game of choice (and in case you’re wondering: I still don’t understand some of RuneQuest’s rules, and have stopped trying 15 years ago), as we knew how to read English (I blame the computer games and old-school Batman TV series for that). So, back when I was something like 14, the RPGs we were playing were pretty much about a group of good guys (the players’ characters) fighting the bad guys (who were about as 2-dimensional as they get). And the biggest thing that was considered a story twist was that the game master poured a surprising monster or two at the end, or an ally turned out to be a traitor.

At some point, humans escaped the Garden of Eden and the games started getting more mature with the players. There was the Vampire: The Masquerade era when the games moved to a story-focused and more serious direction. Story-focused meant that it was pretty much the game master telling a story where the players were allowed to listen. And serious meant that things were cool. On the outside. The worst of this era was probably symbolized by a legendary game called “Varastoalue”, where the players were so desperate to affect the story (which was bad) they actively tried to kill own their characters.. and failing. All while the Game Master’s “story” went on. With cool ninja bodyguards and whatever else that was supposed to be awesome, but in reality just dreadful. As manatic comments below, Varastoalue wasn’t a full-fledged, planned adventure. But to be honest, not many games back then were. Lots of improvised one-shots that tended to be nearly as awful as Varastoalue. It just has a symbolic value that shines over the other games of the era because of the sheer absurdity of the things that happened in it.

And so eventually mankind blossomed, built pyramids and cathedrals, and we got pissed at it all – the railroaded games, the superficial cool (that wasn’t cool) and the gaming. I think we actually stopped playing for a good while at some point. When we came back the games started to change, something a bit different. (there’s a 10 years or so leap somewhere here in time). And after being so pissed at how things had worked, we started questioning the fun of the games we were playing.

And with the questioning of the games and gaming, we started looking for answers in the other things that we had been comfortable with. In my case, it was television and popular culture in general. To give another example before moving on – one of us has moved towards exploring the games through linguistics and history.

Now, to emphasize the point of loving TV series, here’s a photo I took earlier when cleaning my DVD cabinet (yeah, here only to show off, also, sorry about the quality, cameraphone + bad lights = not a good combo):

Bonus points if you recognize them all. Hint, my Whedons aren't there. And someone's got my Life on Mars season 1...

Whoa, pretentious much, well – I guess when you have taken a photo of the collection, you need to post it somewhere.

Now, what was I saying. Yeah. (the port’s good btw, you should try it someday) I’ve grown with television series. Mostly the geeky stuff you’d expect – Star Treks, Babylon 5s, Batman (the old series), the works. But also other things – Love Boat, Knight Rider, MacGyver, Twin Peaks… Hmm, I guess those are the geeky stuff too. Lovejoy, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Bergerac, The Darling Buds of May and other quality Brit drama. So, anyways, the main point – watched lot of TV, and TV started affecting the way I viewed my games.

And while movies and books are great when you’re talking about a singular story structure that’s maybe played in one session as a RPG, television series (in my mind) provide a way better analogue to story structure of a game that gets split into sections. Sure, it’s not perfect, but quite many problems that come up with TV series also apply to games. And thus I blog. About the problems of television series, and try to create the analogues to RPGs the best I can when they arise.

Now, as said, I don’t actually play that many games these days. I have returned to the phase I was when I had RuneQuest. I try to keep up with the trends of the games and still buy the books that I find interesting, but most of the time, I just read them and think about how they might work. Most of the game design I tend to do these days is when I’ve watched TV. And try to see what’s good, what’s bad and what can be learned from it.

So. The best I can come up with for parting words now that the Niepoort has been working wonderfully are: When you’re reading these blog posts of mine you will hear me talk of role playing games. And if you’re someone who is not familiar with them, there might be some preconceptions that might make you want to just ignore the posts. When that happens, please try to think less of the stereotype (that I might somewhat fit, granted) of sad grown up men in their parents’ basement, rolling dice and talking about Sir Ben Dover saving the fair elf princess from the vile Dragon of Omfgawesomeness of +5. And maybe think about the text more in terms of writing and thinking of television drama – should make the reading experience a bit more balanced and maybe a little less sad. And most of the time it might even make sense.

I’ll take another look at this tomorrow and see if there is any sense in what I’ve written. Now it’s time to go rest and hope I feel better in the morning. Yeah, wasn’t half as bad as I had imagined. I can live with this. As someone commented on IRC – it’s a “this is why we can’t have nice things” sort of a history. Whatever that means.

Oh boy, I really went for the very bottom just now and saw some unexpected light there. Not necessarily as bottom, as you’d expect for example a burnout drugaddict buried beneath a continent do, but more roots level bottom. No, I have still not gone the Fear and Loathing route either. I’m just talking about a particularly excellent bad film. Following me? Don’t touch anything.

I watched Airport 1975. I loved it for all the wrong reasons, but I’m sure it’s all right. See, everyone knows the classic, legendary gag-festival of a movie, Airplane!. Guess what movie it parodied? Yees, you’re now following me. Airport started a string of aviation disaster films, basically setting the basis for a genre of its own. It was a success as far as I know (haven’t checked this, but I just seem to recall etc.), and sported quite a few sequels and tag-along movies copying the concept. Of course, such boom always waters down quickly, and no exceptions were offered here. Final nail on the coffin full of disaster corpses came from the movie Airplane! that meticulously took the very same elements, same shots, same characters, same structure, same bloody hell everything and then calmly and carefully shredded it all into pieces and took a long and equally meticulous piss on everything, without stopping for breath just like this insanely long sentence. Of course, it sported a sequel that sort of sucked, so it’s nice to see it really respected and picked up on the originals in that sense, too.

Having never before seen this original father-of-all, I did have gained levels on disaster movies of later eras and I’ve been a diehard fan of Airplane! ever since I was conceived. It really has been a grand part of the grand scheme of things that define me. Now, after almost memorizing that wonderful, graverobbing, gratuitous, disrespectful black awesome sheep of Hollywood, I saw the daddy and it was just like watching the parody that murdered it. Bewildered, I was.

I honestly don’t know which one I was judging, as I was only marveling at the level of parody, shot by shot. They did take different paths at the moment of disaster, and only then I managed to see it standing on its own feet. Wobbly feet with no toes by todays standards, but entertaining nonetheless. Golden stuff, both on “oh haha this is awesome” level and “oh wow I’m really so tainted” revelations. See, it kind of blames you: You’re laughing at the serious old guy because all you’ve seen of him was through a clown mocking him, and then you notice he doesn’t want to be laughed at, then you notice yourself laughing at both, get torn apart, stop caring, and that’s the point of zen right there. It’s a process that cleanses and prepares you for the death that happened to the movie long before you never saw it happen. Instant level-up right there.

Had I not seen Airplane! before, this would have been dire, campy and only mildly entertaining on 70’s pulp values. Good in its own field, but the kind you have to scrape the bottom to get a good taste in your mouth afterwards. Prepared for the blow by a teacher that throws genre curveballs at you, you end up watching it a bit like some teaching experiment or a spotting test, putting you in a state of mind that lets you pick it apart and enjoy the pieces. Too big mouthfuls and it sticks in your throat, finely chopped and it’s like fine caviar mixed with Red Bull. Completely unnecessary and completely win-win.

If you’re a huge fan of movies that are ultimately parodies of some defining movies of the genre, make sure you see the originals. You’ll see the parodies with completely new eyes. Yes, most people do that already and yes, the parodies often are excellent on their own, but to really appreciate them on some deeper, illogical and somehow violated levels, you have to know their ancestors. I just have this nagging spider-sense that’s telling me most people haven’t seen Airport 1975, although they’ve seen Airplane!.

Oh, and as I mentioned Airplane! The Sequel, I must also readily recommend Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land, aka Starflight One. It’s simple concept – take a virgin hypersonic airplane that skims the edge of atmosphere at ridiculous speed, take the usual lineup of basic characters and required tensions and love interests and whatnot, insert said characters in plane, insert disaster event, have said plane stuck in space full of screaming characters, get NASA shove some space shuttles to save the bugger, have people, go nuts, et cetera. It’s really the fat and icky bacteria that makes cream so good.

So, chatting with Spikey….

Alvan: I’m watching heroes again. I can only assume this is what it feels like to poke yourself in the eye with needles. And the first season was so good…

Spikey: Yeah, I think it flunked when they stopped delivering things they had teased us about for so long when the seasons turned. At least it didn’t work the way I expected. Now there’s nothing there but soap.

Alvan: I wish there was even soap.

Spikey: Says the guy who doesn’t bathe.

Lately, thanks to a three-week long sick leave, my “human interaction” has pretty much been virtual. That in practice means MSN/IRC, Facebook, Left 4 Dead and City of Heroes. I also logged on to Second Life after a pause to collect my weekly free money.

On IRC, I “hang out” on about a dozen channels these days. There’s one that’s actually quite active, but sadly, the activity is something that doesn’t really concern my life a lot anymore – it’s the channel for my old main subject’s student group. Then there’s a “nowplaying” channel, where music I listen to gets pasted on, in real time. Pretty much like last.fm does. Sadly, haven’t found a spotify-mIRC plugin, so not much of the music I listen to these days actually gets pasted there. And it’s very rarely someone listens to something there that grabs my attention. Then there are a couple of “legacy” channels – channels that used to be active, but have gone into some form of a hibernation in the past years. I join the channels, and hope someone would talk about something, but the best they can do really is paste a couple of links and not really comment on anything. Some of the channels I’m on are only about organizing games these days. RPGs or Online Games, depending on the mood and time. But there is nothing really interesting to chat about there either. And on the rest of the channels, people hang out because it would be impolite to leave the channel as the two or three other people you know would take offense. Some of these channels are silly to the point that the people on the channel won’t talk to you on the channel, but start a private conversation, killing any hope of some conversation happening on-channel.

In case it doesn’t show, I’m thinking of quitting IRC.

On MSN the situation is actually much better – While there’s only a handful of people I talk on it, the conversations are much better. Even if there’s not a community feel to the conversations, they at least seem to exsist. But there are a lot of dead contacts there as well. I don’t even know why I have half of the contacts I do, anymore.

Facebook, as Larsa put it the other day, is something that you thought you would hate, but is actually quite great when you got into it. For me, it’s not that important, except for the few people I keep touch in through it. There are of course downsides to every coin, but mostly it’s a very “cute” system of staying in touch with people without actually staying in touch. Or to internet-stalk your ex-girlfriends, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only thing that really bothers me about it is the careless way some people seem to regard their own personal information. Somehow there’s been an abundance of memes going round that, when seen by wrong people, can be used for malice. Like provide the reader with information like “your mother’s maiden name”, something that is used quite commonly as a user verification question.

City of Heroes has seen some turmoil in the past few weeks – the EU offices are being shut down and moved to the US, something that might cause horrors to the EU players. But that’s something that only time will tell. Meanwhile, a small group of people that I know only through the game provide me with lots of great humor and good cheer. The group of us (all many-year veterans of the game) do a couple of hours of teaming every now and then and catch on on the latest gossip. Stories of what has happened to one another (who has gotten married, who has been in a drunken bar fight this time) and to those that we haven’t seen online in a while (but someone in the group happens to know in real life). Compared to the other communication channels, the fact that I haven’t met any of the people I play these days with in real life makes it quite unique compared to the others.

Which leads to Left 4 Dead, another game I’ve been playing actively. The main difference between CoH and L4D crowds for me is the fact that there is voice chat in the game. The people I play with vary from those I know in real life to those I’ve never met. But not having to rely on keyboard to expres yourself, and the game being very action-oriented, changes the communication quite a bit – most of the things said are very much related to the gameplay, which leads to text that’s very, very shallow – I have no idea what’s going on in the other players’ lives, whereas in CoH someone might curse his girlfriend’s cat or other small things that are in no way relevant to the game, but are quite intimate.

I also mentioned Second Life. I’ve been a user for so long that they’re actually paying me to log in every week, but I’ve never really “got” the environment. I guess it’s all those flying obscenities that man can imagine that keep me distant from it, but I must admit, there are some good things here and there – “specs of light” as one might say. One is a garden decor store a friend of mine runs there – a shop full of very “normal” things for sale. It’s almost unnerving to see someone sell a well-crafted rock when you’re mostly used to seeing … well, unnerving things. And another thing I’m going to have to buff is the Second Life Shakespeare Company, that try to provide some meaning to the damn place.

None of these really beat human interaction on a “real” level. A phonecall from a friend usually means a lot more than him pasteing you a link of people walking across a road.