Gaming

The year before last (I don't recall the weather), I was informed that I would have to call myself a gamer. I hadn't realised I'd been particularly denying it, largely because I felt I wasn't justified in calling myself one. However, when, at the tender age of late twenties the Christmas present I really really wanted was a Nintendo 3DS, it is definitely time to be allowed to name myself as a gamer (I got it, by the way. Very pink. I love it. 3D Tetris, dude. 3D Tetris.).

So, here I am, gamer girl, by all accounts, but in some ways, I'm a very specific kind of gamer girl. I'm not the biggest fan of first person shooters. I find them a little dull. I prefer point and click, bonus points if there's a puzzle involved somewhere. I've also been known to have an impressive collection of hidden object games, which I know many other gamers would find ridiculously boring, but I always enjoy a quiet evening making fun of some terrible plot as I try to figure out whether they mean a bat as in baseball or a bat as in 'blind as a'. I'm also pretty fond of Heroes of Might and Magic. Right up to the levels I can't beat...

I'm incredibly impatient when it comes to maintenance games. Like Minecraft. I appreciate that it has some very cool elements. I enjoy those videos on Youtube of people making cool things on Minecraft. But I find it so boring. Seriously. I need plot. Even terrible plot will do. At least terrible plots make me laugh. Leave me plotless and you will find me randomly digging all the way down to lava and feeling far too bored to dig back up (this happened when I downloaded a demo for Minecraft).

The worst thing you can do? Play a game where you have to serve customers in a timely manner when you are working in the food industry. I remember playing one of those games years ago, I think it was on Yahoo, and I couldn't understand why I was getting so stressed until I realised it was just like being at work at the bar I was in at the time. I changed to a matching game, and I felt infinitely better. If you're going to game, game away from what you'd do at work. Your blood pressure will thank you for it.

I love platform games. Anyone else out there remember the New Zealand Story on the Atari? Not to mention the first Super Mario Bros on the Gameboy. And since we've mentioned Tetris, I will briefly tell you that if you want to see competition, give myself and my immediate family a Gameboy and Tetris and mention the words 'High Score'. Then step back. We still argue over who had the highest score nearly two decades ago. Good times. Recent holidays have seen us using a very pink Playstation to play quizzes, in which it has been attempted to stop me holding the joypad, since I have the fastest reaction time in the family. Yeah, I don't think so.

I'm also something of a card game fiend, though Immediate Female Ancestor is the true shark in the family. I pick up card games pretty fast and I can get pretty ruthless. I can still see the look of defeat on Swordsman's face when, during a game of Munchkin, I gave him this ultimatum: "I can either help you, or really hurt you". Yeah, I'm that mean. I've also been known, during Fluxx, to play crazy cards just to see what happens.

Child of Chaos suggests that I start blogging our Magic: The Gathering games, after one truly epic battle last year. Child of Chaos plays Forest, I play Plains (I like white better than green). In one game we managed to pick up lands at about the same rate, so we started building up our creatures at about the same rate, and about the same strength; so much so that neither of us wanted to attack the other, until much later in the game, when Child of Chaos, with a few more higher level monsters than I had, decided to attack. So I used a Neck Snap card to kill her best monster. She could still have beaten me, until I used a second Neck Snap. Child of Chaos's face was priceless. I think I would need more details to make this sound as cool as it was...

Funnily enough, the person who told me that I had to call myself a gamer, GameQueen, didn't know most of this. All she knew was that at the time I was gearing up to play a whiskey and chocolate obsessed Technomancer Elf in Shadowrun. Her opinion of me has been reinforced by my currently playing a Malkavian who sleeps in a morgue with her pet morticians in Masquerade (never underestimate the power of playing the crazy girl), and my participation in my first steampunk larp. Spending a few hours as a genius airship designer was far more fun than I'd imagined it would be. Later that day I purchased the Ankh-Morpork board game and discovered that I truly love putting trouble markers into other people's city blocks. I suppose it doesn't take much to make a gamer, but there are so many types of gamers.

Perhaps my favourite gamer moment is the look of pain on Swordsman's face as Child of Chaos and I discussed our Facebook games. It wasn't that we were playing Facebook games that pained him; it was that both of our computers were capable of playing much more complicated games than what we were using them for. It was the wasted capacity that cut him to the bone.

Still, I am of the opinion that when you're tired but not quite ready to go to bed, there can be nothing more relaxing than matching things for a little while until you are ready to go to sleep. The only trick is making sure you stop before it's 3 am...

Funtimes

So I took an hour off this afternoon and got to have one of the most fun recurring experiences in my life. I went to the hairdressers and asked to get most of my hair cut off. They are always alarmed. Apparently, many people don't realise how short is short. I was going for something much longer than the pixie cut I've had before, so I was prepared and delighted to once again be sporting a manageable length of hair that, I've discovered, looks very fetching with a hairband.

I must purchase a wider range of hairbands.

Funtimes continued when I wandered to a bookshop and discovered that they have reprinted Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology. It looks fantastic, but beyond that, it is one of the best anthologies of SF that I have ever read. The stories were published in 1967 and includes Philiop José Farmer's 'Riders of the Purple Wage'. The sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, features Joanna Russ's 'When It Changed', the precursor to the amazing The Female Man. The sequel doesn't appear to have been reprinted since the 1970s, which is a shame, because I think it has some of the better stories between the two anthologies. I read these when I was in my late teens/early twenties and they shaped my writing by introducing me to the 1970s New Wave. Science fiction, Ellison and his compatriots taught, could be really strange. I still haven't figured out some of the stories. SF could also be witty, funny and extremely subversive. It could be unrecognisable (though I think it was probably a good idea that Ellison warned the reader what they might expect). You guys should definitely take a look at those anthologies, because they are brilliant. And hey, if enough copies of Dangerous Visions sell, they might even reprint Again, Dangerous Visions in its own shiny new cover!