Techno-philosophy

I love, hate, leave, and return to Internet based video games, well one. It's a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) known as World of Warcraft. I knew a group of mostly men who played, so I returned to play with them 3 nights a week, we form the 'guild' called 'Descent.'

I have yet to come to terms with what it means, and I've found my own love-hate relationship to be somewhat schizophrenic. Yet, the complexity of our character does produce some contradictions. Right now, I use my struggle with game mechanics as an opportunity to talk about how I interface with it. I posted the following to their guild forums. A post I made earlier 'e-friendship' was what got this blog rolling again back in November.

Meet Robo-Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer is the name of the character I play. A shadowpriest that I named Pfeiffer):

During our hard-mode attempts in Ulduar we picked up a shaman/hunter with some kind of Russian name. He recommend one of his friends, so we picked him up. That guy was Annesh. Once I actually beat Annesh on the meters. I had the unfair advantage of gear. He was a 10-man geared raider. He was also lagging worse than a satellite feed from Afghanistan. I remember seeing him with his character pointing the opposite way during a VOA25 run prior to entering Ulduar. "Poor guy," I thought. "Maybe I'll share with him my advice," I thought. How naive I was.

Then we took on the Iron Council. Annesh raped me like an altar boy. He was a priest after all. Melk sent me a private message and shared with me his log sharing on the forums about my performance versus that of Annesh. There, with my pants down, was every damn spell I had cast, when I had cast it, and when and if I clipped dots, plus my up-time. I felt a bit foolish. The managers were poring over my work, and I was the focus of their ad-hoc performance review. I learned the importance of mini-maxing, and the equal importance of hacking meters via maintaining a rune-empowered shadow-word pain on each of the Council's Russian sounding, metal members. I also learned that Iamdrunk was a cheap and dirty motherfucker who had absolutely no respect for any man. That's another story.

I threw out Squinky's macro and went back to manual weaving. Manual weaving has its benefits, and I got better at dot maintenance, finding ways to cheat meters, and maybe once or twice more I repaid the favor by playing the priest to Annesh's altar boy.

Once or twice.

I quit the game, and upon coming back I went for the minimax strategy by leveling JC. Now with Mixology and 3 runed Dragon's Eyes I was squeezing out as much extra dps as I could. That wasn't enough. My DPS still lacked. With 4 pieces of sanctified tier 10 I was still putting up mediocre DPS. This time Phrawd had to pull me into a different channel to tell me that on one attempt of heroic 10 man Sindragosa I had posted a meager 1k dps. Yeah, that was bad. I was playing it conservative and was once again caught with my pants down.

I took another look at my DPS, my dot up-time, my spell rotation, and realized something very important. The rhythm of dot maintenance doesn't play a song. It's a flow chart of choices that must be made in real-time and coordinated with fight mechanics, phase changes, the big picture. I have rhythm. I used to breakdance to Thriller when I was 6. My brother and I would choreograph breakdance moves to the synthesizer songs on Van Halen 1984 like one of us was Turbo, the other Special K. That was back when Michael was still black and before his nose became an impressionist drawing. Now he's dead, and buried with him are my brother's and my dreams of breakdancing fame.

I recently gave up. I tried a half a dozen recommended add-ons for tracking dots. None of them felt right. So I returned to Squinky's post for 3.3 macros.

Here is the behemoth that he created.

/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/6 devouring plague, vampiric touch, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, vampiric touch, mind flay, devouring plague, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, vampiric touch, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay
/cast shadowfiend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

After I do my initial preparation and cast Shadow Word: Pain I turn to spamming the button for this macro.

Voila.

I did it. Top 3 on Blood Princes.

I feel like a cheat, a loser, a dead beat. I succumbed to the machine by programming my way around its clunky interface of lag times, dot maintenance, phase changes, etc.

I went out to the bar(s) tonight. I had a few drinks, alone. Most of my friends are married or working on establish it via common-law. I was drinking that cheap PBR, listening to Guided By Voices, and watching the Pac Man game play out. There it was again, only in a different form. I was witnessing machine control, voltage control, impedance application, turned into buttons, and knobs for controlling a raster scanned yellow, circular avatar to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. Beer after beer I sat alone and watched that same sequence play out on the table arcade. Pac-man is a finite play field with finite choices that one must make. Thrown in are objects which represent either objectives, bonus points, special conditions, or perils to avoid. While the perils zoom around according to their own algorithm, the operator of Pac-man finds his/her own algorithm and settles into it. The operator establishes a series of implicit boolean statements concerning "if this condition then this action." "Should I eat the cherry jumping around, or will I get trapped between two ghosts?"

I saw a rather illuminating documentary a few years ago: "King of Kong." A man with an apparent OCD and an extremely wide alturistic streak bought the arcade version of Donkey Kong and spent months perfecting his play until he had virtual muscle memory to be able to push the game until it spit its data onto the play field. Among my peers that was called 'flipping the game.' It was the digital counterpart to bumping the pinball game to direct the flow of your circular metal avatar. Putting the game on the ropes was the point. It was the ultimate challenger, and you'd muster all of your attention and patience in mastering the sequence of jumps you'd have to make to achieve the high score. Whether or not you used strategies outside of the game, like bumping the table, didn't matter because what showed of your progress on the screen next to your initials was all that mattered. That mattered outside of the game environment more than the game itself anyway. Games of my dawning consciousness were of that ilk. They were complex, yet finite. Their economics were simple. They established a scrolling complex set of choices thrust at the avatar, which became increasingly complex until the player's avatar had expended its last life. The balance in a game like this was to keep the player's attention and interest long enough to justify their quarter spent while ensuring that the increasing toughness of the game would keep quarters entering at a rate that couldn't be overshot by the extended play time of the virtuosos, the Anneshes of that game environment. The ingenious or the obsessive-compulsive ratmen who would find ways to play Defender for 7 hours straight were the stuff of legend among the gamers in the early 1980s. They gained notoriety as masters of their game. The news of course would lampoon them as the dupes of the gaming industry that only wanted their quarters or use their obsessive habits as the moral panic that this technology signified to the parents.

Why did I go here? I'm not a virtuoso violinist, but I see the connection clearer and clearer. The Paganinis of our time have 97% dot uptime on multiple targets. Their wow logs are the stuff of legend. I find the engineer who deconstructs this ingenuity into a spell cast sequence that establishes the best results, and I adopt it. It's a single button. I was good at beating Asteroids as a kid by spinning and mashing the 'shoot' button as fast as I could. Cockroach reflexes, that was my claim to fame. I've caught many a falling glass, potted plant, by way of those reflexes. I can mash Squinky's macro as fast as can be registered. I'm playing the game better now because I can play through his macro, his spell sequence, his decision tree for maximum DPS. I mash the number 4 button like a boss, and voila. It's like Annesh was never here to challenge me, but what it does do is reduce my play to gear and gear alone when comparing my play to that of another who relies on this macro. Yes, it takes some of the fun and mystery out of the game. Hell, it alienates me from the class mechanics that those slot-machine minded programmers gave to shadowpriests. But as long as my pointer finger doesn't fall off from repeated whackings of number 4, expect me to put up numbers worthy of my gear. I've found a way to maximize dps. I'm robo-pfieffer. Insult me. I will not cry. Punch me. I will not bruise. Ignore me. My blinking lights will not change. I am the lie that you think is my own ability to play the game. I'll keep hacking meters for the sake of performance measures. That's the point anyway. I just regret that I couldn't do it by my own ingenuity. I am the outcome of my choice to use this macro. I am robo-pfieffer.

Beep.

Beep.