(no subject)
Jun. 28th, 2019 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty]
Pokemon Crystal was nice for a day or two, but...I just tend not to do well with self-contained RPGs in general. I need a long-term meta-game in order to find a game satisfying.
I borrowed Dad's SIM card and went for an experimental hour of Pokemon Go, figuring that maybe we could use some of Mom's spare credits on another data plan if it went well.
Good Pokemon areas have expanded further into Wi-Fi-less zones; a key hotspot has a slightly weaker signal than it used to; my current phone has triple the RAM of the phone I was playing on in 2017†. The combination of these (plus maybe it just straight-up uses more data now, who knows) means that--while in 2017 I could get away with using 1 - 3 MB/hour--in *this* hour I used 25. Pay-per-MB is not financially feasible at 25 MB/hour: I would *have* to piggyback on Dad's larger data plan, with all the logistical issues thereof.
(Also, I got three mosquito bites *just on the small areas of skin that were exposed*. (I shudder to think what would have happened if I *hadn't* been wearing anti-mosquito hiking gear. Very glad I asked for that for last Hanukkah.) One of them has swollen to about an inch--no, wait, it's grown since last I checked, almost an inch and a half now--across, and probably the other two would have if they weren't constrained by the available space on fingers.)
And...I think a lot of this is just me and my own memories and associations, but Pokemon Go is...it's a bone you throw to the part of you that needs playtime so that you can focus on practicality and survival, when you haven't quite managed to completely pare away that part of yourself but kind of wish you could. I see they've added a couple more aspects since 2017 that can be done at home (especially if, like me, you own a treadmill), but still, with weather and physical tiredness and all it's impractical to play more than two hours or so on even the most amenable day, and many days barely at all. And what's that *for*, if not to free yourself up to work four hours a day for $1/hour, because every penny counts and that's 400 pennies you didn't have yesterday?
(the devs can't possibly have meant it that way or they wouldn't have added so many microtransactions and mobile-data requirements. it *must* be meant as a game for rich people, but nevertheless, for someone with the particularities of my situation, it is a game best played by the desperately poor)
I don't want to live like that anymore. I deserve better than that. But Pokemon Go doesn't fit very well into a life *not* being lived like that, at least if you're game-monogamous.
I think after school I'll try poking Runescape again, see how that goes. The vibes I was getting from my subconscious on why Flight Rising wasn't working out last week were "too small" and "not enough reading material", and now from Pokemon Go I'm getting "not for people who place any significant importance on having fun", and Runescape does not have any of those problems.
---
I'm glad I learned a bit about how to use emulators, in any case. I picked up a couple of Game Boy Advance games I remember fondly from my childhood, in case I ever feel like revisiting them. (And I put a copy of my Pokemon Crystal savefile in my backups, in case I ever feel like revisiting *that*.)
---
†I hadn't realised just how much my 2017 playstyle relied on...not *spoofing* exactly, I *was* in *approximately* the correct physical location, but carefully timed, deliberately triggered GPS-daemon failures. Stand in exactly the right spot to interact with as much of the stuff in the area as possible, wait a minute or so until your phone decides you're not *really* using GPS right now and shuts down the daemon in a desperate attempt to conserve RAM, walk a bit closer to the nearest public Wi-Fi router while your character remains frozen in place.
Pokemon Crystal was nice for a day or two, but...I just tend not to do well with self-contained RPGs in general. I need a long-term meta-game in order to find a game satisfying.
I borrowed Dad's SIM card and went for an experimental hour of Pokemon Go, figuring that maybe we could use some of Mom's spare credits on another data plan if it went well.
Good Pokemon areas have expanded further into Wi-Fi-less zones; a key hotspot has a slightly weaker signal than it used to; my current phone has triple the RAM of the phone I was playing on in 2017†. The combination of these (plus maybe it just straight-up uses more data now, who knows) means that--while in 2017 I could get away with using 1 - 3 MB/hour--in *this* hour I used 25. Pay-per-MB is not financially feasible at 25 MB/hour: I would *have* to piggyback on Dad's larger data plan, with all the logistical issues thereof.
(Also, I got three mosquito bites *just on the small areas of skin that were exposed*. (I shudder to think what would have happened if I *hadn't* been wearing anti-mosquito hiking gear. Very glad I asked for that for last Hanukkah.) One of them has swollen to about an inch--no, wait, it's grown since last I checked, almost an inch and a half now--across, and probably the other two would have if they weren't constrained by the available space on fingers.)
And...I think a lot of this is just me and my own memories and associations, but Pokemon Go is...it's a bone you throw to the part of you that needs playtime so that you can focus on practicality and survival, when you haven't quite managed to completely pare away that part of yourself but kind of wish you could. I see they've added a couple more aspects since 2017 that can be done at home (especially if, like me, you own a treadmill), but still, with weather and physical tiredness and all it's impractical to play more than two hours or so on even the most amenable day, and many days barely at all. And what's that *for*, if not to free yourself up to work four hours a day for $1/hour, because every penny counts and that's 400 pennies you didn't have yesterday?
(the devs can't possibly have meant it that way or they wouldn't have added so many microtransactions and mobile-data requirements. it *must* be meant as a game for rich people, but nevertheless, for someone with the particularities of my situation, it is a game best played by the desperately poor)
I don't want to live like that anymore. I deserve better than that. But Pokemon Go doesn't fit very well into a life *not* being lived like that, at least if you're game-monogamous.
I think after school I'll try poking Runescape again, see how that goes. The vibes I was getting from my subconscious on why Flight Rising wasn't working out last week were "too small" and "not enough reading material", and now from Pokemon Go I'm getting "not for people who place any significant importance on having fun", and Runescape does not have any of those problems.
---
I'm glad I learned a bit about how to use emulators, in any case. I picked up a couple of Game Boy Advance games I remember fondly from my childhood, in case I ever feel like revisiting them. (And I put a copy of my Pokemon Crystal savefile in my backups, in case I ever feel like revisiting *that*.)
---
†I hadn't realised just how much my 2017 playstyle relied on...not *spoofing* exactly, I *was* in *approximately* the correct physical location, but carefully timed, deliberately triggered GPS-daemon failures. Stand in exactly the right spot to interact with as much of the stuff in the area as possible, wait a minute or so until your phone decides you're not *really* using GPS right now and shuts down the daemon in a desperate attempt to conserve RAM, walk a bit closer to the nearest public Wi-Fi router while your character remains frozen in place.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-29 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-29 03:47 pm (UTC)I need *progression*, need to feel like I'm setting up a better world for my future selves, planting trees that they will harvest. I do that in other areas of my life too, of course, but it seems to also be psychologically important that I have that in games specifically. Short games can be fun, but they aren't *satisfying*: they don't fill the game-shaped hole in my psyche.
(The mental widget seems to function similarly to special interests, but in miniature. They *can* overlap: if I have a special interest in a game, phases for that game are longer and phases for other games are shorter. I have never had a special interest in a game I couldn't also be in phase with, though admittedly the sample size is not that large.)
I played a little bit of the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban GBA game a couple days ago, a game that I remember specifically liking *because* each game influences the next, and that I had stopped playing after reaching the end of the meta-game. I could definitely see the appeal, but it felt shallower than I'd like, and I think the knowledge that I *have* fully completed this game (albeit in the distant past, on a machine whose savefiles I probably can't feasibly preserve if I can even find the device and get it to function at all) is hampering it too.
(A couple months back I checked to see if I could still get into my old Neopets account--I stopped playing several years ago because I'd grown tired of the increasingly intrusive advertising, but then again when I left Runescape in 2016 I didn't really expect to come back, so who knows--and I found that they had deleted my account from inactivity and given the username to someone else. I don't even really know how I feel about that: maybe it's too big for me to wrap my head around. That's the problem with games large and actively developed enough to satisfy me, I suppose: they tend to be dependant on external servers.)
I know I used to be at least somewhat more flexible about this, but I don't know how much of that is a childhood approach to play, or what. Some of it could even just be being *worse* at games so that "won't finish this in the foreseeable future" is a lower bar to clear. (I was going to say "I played so much Croc 2 and *never* made it past the first village", but I just looked it up and apparently that game actually has a reputation for being difficult, so possibly not a good example. (And come to think of it, I'm not sure I was even *aware* as a child that Croc 2 had areas beyond the first: I may have *believed* that I'd finished.) I wonder if I could make it past the first village now.)
(Or it could be partly to do with time relative to lifespan: "this game will take you about three years to complete" gets a response from an 8-year-old of "that's basically forever, I'll take it", and a response from a 25-year-old of "I mean, that's a *fairly* long time, but I'm not sure it's long *enough*". Or just lack of access and autonomy, making do with whatever games I could get ahold of the same way I had to make do with music and porn†.
(I remember thinking, when I was perhaps 11 or 12, that dressing up Barbie dolls had been a mere proxy, making do because I hadn't the concept of anything better: what I'd actually wanted was a Neopet.))
---
Oddly enough, I am *not* the kind of person who never re-reads books, nor do I watch soap operas. There are many forms of media where I am perfectly okay with them being finite four-dimensional objects that one simply revisits if one wishes to experience more of them: games are just not one of them, for whatever reason.
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†I feel like you're probably going to respond to that with "you had *any* access to porn as a child??", to which I answer "Well, I mean, define 'porn'".
no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 05:52 am (UTC)That said, re: dressing up barbies and neopets, I can def feel now that my playing with lego was proxying playing/GMing TTRPGs (And the various simulation/worldbuilding things I do in association to that), so this seems valid.