Backstabbers Anonymous: Cloaks, Daggers, and Diplomacy

PHILIP: It's their wedding or the Vexin back. Those are the terms you made with Louis.
HENRY: True but academic, lad. The Vexin's mine.
PHILIP: By what authority?
HENRY: It's got my troops all over it: that makes it mine.
-James Goldman, The Lion in Winter.

Some years ago, when my gaming group still held a semi-regular D&D campaign, our host/game master invited us to play a game of Magic: The Gathering. I had heard of the game, but that was the extent of my knowledge; I had never played it, nor looked at the rules -- or, for that matter, the cards. He knew that much about my gaming experience when he handed me a suit and started the game, so he tried to explain the more important rules as he went along. The game was proceeding at a leisurely pace, and even though I was not doing well, I was not being that much of an embarrassment opposite more experienced players. Or so I thought.

After a while, the game master paused the game, rose from his chair and came to my side of the table. He looked at my remaining cards with a sigh: "You're playing defensively with an offensive suit". I don't think there was any reproach intended; he was just stating what he knew to be a fact. And if he was reproaching me for following an inappropriate strategy, how could I have been to blame? I had not seen all the cards, did not know how they interacted, and was not aware that there was a different approach involved with each suit. For all I knew, all suits involved similar strategies, but I never had the chance to perfect my play; to this day, this remains my only game of Magic: The Gathering.

My game master, however, should have known better than to hand me an offensive suit; I am, almost invariably, a defensive player. This explains my general disdain for the shooter genre and my predilection for strategy games. Dwarf Fortress, for example, is the quintessential defensive game, to the extent of making losing inevitable. Yes, that's right, impossible to beat; it has adopted "losing is fun" as its motto, and the player's objective is to last as long as possible. The old Stronghold series also comes to mind, in some of its missions anyway; but the recent Stronghold: Kingdoms, a Travian/Tribal Wars/Lord of Ultima/you name it-style browser game that considers itself too important to run in a browser, is but a pale travesty of its predecessors, as castle defence is automated once you have placed your troops.

I have carried this defensive outlook over to MMORPG's, with mixed results. It certainly accounts for my picking the underdog where fixed sides are involved, even though I know by now that it all goes haywire after this initial choice. In most of the cases I have seen (Pirates of the Burning Sea, Uncharted Waters Online), the underdog was so under-populated that it was not even functional as a faction, and could not even be of assistance as a kingmaker. New players, not surprisingly, tend to stay away once this becomes common knowledge.

Then there is the play-to-win mentality, which I loathe precisely because it lies at the opposite end of the gaming spectrum. It despises magnanimity in victory, denies nobility in defeat, attributes its victory to "skill" (loosely interpreted) regardless of circumstances, and, scoffing at fair-play, isn't particularly concerned about how it wins; the end justifies the means and all that. I saw the Asian mutation in action in Uncharted Waters Online, which was rife with multiboxers, macro users and other cheaters, with the bonus of racism against Westerners on top; the Western version should need no introduction, as it can be found in such games as Darkfall and EVE Online.

But the problem isn't that the mentality exists; it is that it infects all factions alike, including underdogs. And whereas I get my fun, playing as the underdog, from trying to avoid losing as long as possible, the play-to-win gamer who picked the underdog will just spout hollow phrases about needing to play "harder" or -- my favourite -- "smarter". He (it's nearly always a "he") thinks, no matter how great the odds are against him, that he can actually win. And who knows? Maybe he can, and I certainly wouldn't mind the laurels landing on my head once in a while. Unfortunately, there are always two problems. First, the play-to-win gamer tries to avoid sharing the credit of victory with anyone outside his circle of sycophants. Second, he doesn't care about how he wins; his victory could be achieved at the expense of his own side, or of the long-term longevity of the game, and he would hardly mind.

Which brings us to Diplomacy, the venerable board game created by Allan B. Calhamer, first published in 1959. Called by some the "thinking man's Risk" because luck plays no part in it (it is played without dice), it is alleged to have included John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger among its fans. Set in pre-World War I Europe, you choose one of seven powers (the UK, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy and the Ottoman Empire) and attempt to win the game by holding 18 territories with supply centres (represented by dots). To achieve this, you must make alliances with, well, possibly everyone else, just for the fun of betraying them when their flank is exposed. Indeed, it is a sadistic little game, where alliances are necessary to achieve anything, but where backstabbing is the norm once such alliances have outlived their usefulness.

I played a few games at one of those websites of questionable legality, and, needless to say, I fared rather badly at it: it is a game where the rules -- which favour a play-to-win mindset -- are in direct conflict with my approach to gaming. Don't take my word for it; allow me to quote Richard Sharp, the author of The Game of Diplomacy (1978):

In a changing world, some things do not change. It may be fashionable to decry the simple Virtues, but we still like to find them in our friends. Loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity - these are the hallmarks of the good friend, the good husband and father, the nice guy we all hope our daughters will marry.

In the amoral world of Diplomacy, however, they are the hallmarks of the born loser. If a fallen enemy reaches out a hand for assistance, the wise man lops it off. If a friend does you a good turn when you’re down, wait until he’s down, then beat him to death. If an ally asks for your help in planning the next season’s moves, give it freely and copiously, then do the reverse of what you agreed and let him take the counter-attack. Try to surround yourself with people who trust you, then let them down; find an ally who will gladly die for you and see that he does just that.

In short, Diplomacy is not a nice game; to win, it is necessary to behave like a complete cad. Some people adopt a tone of moral outrage at the philosophy of the game, and refuse to play it at all: though it is already unfashionable, and will soon no doubt be illegal, to acknowledge any difference between the sexes, this attitude is particularly common among women — a cynic might say that Diplomacy threatens to erode the natural advantage their innate duplicity gives them over men in real life. At any event, this moral posture is quite untenable. We all have these anti-social tendencies somewhere within us, and it may be better to give them free rein in a harmless game, suppressing them where they could do real damage.

Because I cannot find it in me to "behave like a complete cad", I am likely to find myself forever on the defensive -- therefore, the losing side -- in Diplomacy; it is not that I cannot see a good opportunity, but that I will not seize it. And I would argue that it is precisely because such virtues as "loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity" are in increasingly scarce supply in the real world that I favour them where they can be given free rein: in games.

Going in, I decided that I would not lie, by which I meant not saying something that I would break in the next round; if I said to someone that I would not do x, I would not do x, unless provoked into it. I might do the equally devastating y, but I would simply omit any mention of y, or skirt the issue to the point of ambiguity. It turned out that even that wasn't enough. Surrounded by players who said they would not do x, only to find them doing x the very next turn as though nothing had been promised, I could only find myself at a disadvantage.

I can appreciate a good backstab, provided there is some artistry involved. The Guiding Hand Social Club infiltration in EVE Online. The plot of The Sting and heist films generally. In comparison, breaking your word in Diplomacy in the course of one turn is graceless, commonplace and cheap. But more troubling is that the players I have encountered in those online Diplomacy games who would consort with the play-to-win crowd found in MMORPG's or even browser games; however graceless, commonplace and cheap the actions of these Diplomacy players might be, the players themselves are anything but. On the contrary, I sense great intelligence among the body of players, which makes the game all the more chilling because of what is required to win: cunning, wits, guile, and an utter lack of scruples. It brings to mind the excesses of intelligence: those which fuel confidence artists, Wall Street speculators, political staffers -- indeed, even diplomats. One almost expects it to be a favourite at MENSA meetings.

As it has been a mainstay of postal and e-mail play, Diplomacy also seems to be regarded with the same reverence as chess; it has certainly been written about extensively, to the extent that opening moves have all been named and catalogued. A typical Austrian opening, for example, is the Balkan Gambit, where the Budapest army invades Serbia and the Trieste fleet moves to Albania, with a combined attack on Greece in the next round; but what you do with your army in Vienna will involve a variation of the Gambit: usually moving to Tyrolia or Galicia, to guard against the Italians or Russians, respectively, or staying put in Vienna. I can't say I particularly enjoy playing chess, but at least it retains a versatility that Diplomacy lacks. And at least chess isn't unbalanced; Austria is notorious for early elimination, and a common house rule involves giving Italy a second fleet instead of an army because land expansion is unlikely in the early stages.
Reading some of the negative comments at the Board Game Geek website is quite revealing: the game is too long (6-8 hours), the rules are convoluted, a player will get eliminated early, it is a wrecker of friendships; in one word, just plain evil. I would suggest, however, that the true evil of this game lies in its approach to international politics; not so much in its claim that diplomacy is, by and large, conniving skullduggery (we all suspect that it is), but more in its game design that discourages genuine alliances. In the game world, the British in November 1918 would tell the French: "Nice place, Picardy. Guess we'll keep it. More objectionable is how the game reduces the purpose of a small country to being gobbled up by one foreign power or another -- a contrast to Risk, where you do not play as a specific country. In Diplomacy, the uncertainty is not over whether Belgian neutrality will be violated, but by whom. Likewise, Holland, Spain, Norway, Sweden, every minor country of Europe (with the exception of Switzerland, which simply does not exist) are sitting ducks, and exist purely so they can be taken over. Then you remember that this game was created by an American at the height of the Cold War, and appreciated by JFK and Kissinger. Unfortunately, if they were looking for merriment in the prospect of invading hapless pocket-sized countries, the Reichstag Follies of 1939 beat them to it.

Many of the comments at Board Game Geek also point to something else, which can be summarized as: "I used to play this in school, but gave up on it 20 years ago." This would coincide with the end of the Cold War. Today, the Realpolitik is still there, but it has mutated into something far different from 1914 or 1959; and it may well be that, as a result of this, Diplomacy will soon find itself becoming a relic of little more than historical curiosity.

I won't miss it, though; I'd rather take a stab at something else.

A Date Which Will Live in Infamy, If Anyone Cares

Blizzard to unleash Cataclysm next December 7. Which makes this World of Warcraft expansion the most important add-on released on that date since World War II: Awakening the Giant, which memorably unlocked the United States as a playable nation.

As a bonus, this MMORPG.com article, entitled "Cataclysm Dated". You can probably hear the snickers from here.

I can't say I'm particularly surprised to find that a great many people had made the Pearl Harbor connection before I even learned that a date for the release of Cataclysm had been set. Still, the decision to release the game on December 7th is unfortunate -- and keep in mind that I am not American, that I am the citizen of a country that joined the Allies in September 1939, and that I never really liked the tendency of Americans to come late to the party, only after being directly threatened or attacked, and then to pretend that what happened before their own declaration of war never really mattered anyway. The American "beacon of democracy" act really started with the Cold War; during the Battle of Britain, their most generous gesture towards England was to obtain themselves bases all over British colonies, in exchange for surplus destroyers.

But anyway, December 7th; quite a smart move, Blizzard, to release an expansion called Cataclysm on precisely that day. It reminds me of the announcement by Pirates of the Burning Sea's Flying Lab Software that they would enable transfers between servers (to eventually close down seven of these, out of eleven) on the night of April 15, 2008 -- which was, if you are a maritime history buff, the 96th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. When I pointed out the coincidence about servers going down on the same day as the Titanic, one of their staffers posted: "Oh man, the office just went nuts when I yelled this out." This points in the direction of an accidental mistake, and nothing more. Had the servers gone down a day earlier or a day later (it was first announced the day before), nobody would have noticed; even though Pirates of the Burning Sea is a nautical game, I assume that very few people bother with such dates to begin with. And Flying Lab Software had nothing to gain from choosing that date; quite the opposite.

But the attack on Pearl Harbor, that's a well-known date, especially, I would presume, to Americans. And I cannot shake off the impression that someone at Blizzard, with that someone being almost certainly an American, meticulously went through all the possible dates for release, and arrested his choice on December 7th. Why? I don't know, but I don't think it's a coincidence. December 7th falls on a Tuesday this year, but the previous World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released on November 13th, 2008 -- a Thursday -- and was successful enough, if you have seen the videos (safe for work; unsafe for your sanity). And assuming, unrealistically, that all staffers at Blizzard flunked high-school history, they should know by now, if they bother to read their own forums, that to talk of Cataclysm on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack is, to some, not only in bad taste, but also callous.

One of their subscribers posted on the World of Warcraft forums:

So do you think Blizzard is just aloof to Pearl Harbor Day being December 7th?

I mean, does anyone think it could be an accident to release a game called cataclysm on a 9/11 or 12/7?

This was the 260th post in the thread (named "Pearl Harbor Day release of Cat not P.C.?"), and was written on October 1st, based on rumours of a December 7 release. But don't look for it now; Blizzard's forum moderators deleted the thread. What remains of it can be read here. At least one other thread remains (update: it's now deleted), but I wonder for how long. It's also a masterpiece of how those who oppose the planned date are called "trolls" by those who firmly believe Blizzard can do no wrong (undoubtedly the same who were actively at work when their favourite company wanted to make real names mandatory on their cesspool of a forum a few months ago), and that 1941, unlike 2001, was a long time ago.

As I mentioned above, I have all the reasons in the world not to be bothered by Pearl Harbor; but it is because I am incapable of being entirely convinced that Blizzard isn't capitalizing on the widespread knowledge of the date for the release of a game known as Cataclysm, or that someone didn't notice the awkwardness of the situation before okaying it, that I question the choice of December 7th as the release date. Not that Blizzard is likely to change its mind, of course, when there is so much money at stake...

(The picture on the right comes from Blizzard's press kit. Ah, for the good old days when press kits were just for the press...)

Discover New English with "Christopher Colombus"

I don't know, perhaps it has to do with my English-as-a-second-language background, but I tend to be quite lenient when I see someone making an effort to speak or writeEnglish to the utmost of their ability; at the same time, I can become particularly exacting when someone believes it is fine to flout the most basic rules of English, especially on minor points that would have taken five minutes' research to rectify, and in particular when it is seen as not worth it because everyone involved is in pursuit of such an exalted goal as the accumulation of money.

Earlier today, I came upon a Flash ad for the MMORPG Uncharted Waters Online, part of a long-standing Japanese franchise, between two paragraphs of an article on MMORPG.com. How bad is it? Well, the image accompanying this text is the "good parts version" (and for the record: yes, I too get annoyed at Princess Bride memes).

The first frame manages to mangle the name of Christopher Columbus, the accepted English spelling. True, several languages (such as Italian, French, and Portuguese) follow the Colo- spelling, but if you want to give his name in English, Wikipedia is just around the corner. At least they got the year right for his discovery of New World.

What's the deal with "2016"? That's because the ad followed the cliché of rolling the years up from 1492 to 2010, in the style of an odometer, which is effective except in one respect: it put the zero in the last column at the end rather than at the beginning of the sequence. Which, I guess, is fine -- except when you're facing a year that ends with a zero, because the designers, to maintain the illusion of an odometer, and perhaps for aesthetic reasons, made the last column stop last, instead of accurately making the last two columns stop at the same time. Hence we get not 2008-2009-2010, but 2008-2009-2010-2011, and so on, until 2018-2019-2010. With one extra rotation, the column for decades has long stopped moving by the time the last column ceases spinning.

From this, I'm almost tempted to try out Uncharted Waters Online. Not for the gameplay, but for more gems of pseudo-English.

It's the Games that Got Small, Part One

MMORPG.com author Jon Wood recently published an article addressing the prevalent negativity surrounding new MMO's from what is by no means a new perspective, but, coming from that site, a refreshing one: age. The author, who will turn thirty this year, related a personal anecdote which, I suspect, carried painful psychological undertones:

"I actually sat down recently with friends and discussed things that "kids today" would never know, or have never known. That, I fear, is the first sign that you're getting older. When you start to really notice (and worse start talking about) how different the world is today from "when I grew up," you just know that what "it" is has changed. You're just not in the demographic the world revolves around anymore."

Being approximately of the same age, I can attest that most of this rings true. There is, indeed, a major difference between my generation and the next, as mine is the last to have come of age, by and large, without the omnipresence of electronic communication. But that last sentence is jarring, for the simple reason that the world never revolved around our demographic -- at least, the world which matters, and computer games are not part of it.

Wood argues that what we liked in the games of our time no longer passes muster in game design boardrooms. This is quite a reasonable assessment; Nintendo's pursuit of the casual market is evidence enough of that. But I don't believe this explains everything.

The first reason for doubting this is my gaming pedigree. Despite my age, I never was much of a gamer, at least as far as MMO's are concerned, until 2007. This means I skipped the entire era over which I should now, like Wood, be waxing nostalgic. Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars: Galaxies and Dark Age of Camelot, to name just a few, are merely names to me, and as I never played them, my own conclusions on current games are not based on a comparison of the new with the old. I must add that, in spite of the disconcertingly rose-tinted transparency of "old school" nostalgia, when I look at games today, the flaws I find -- the solo focus, the heavy instancing, the "theme park" approach which prevents players from leaving any imprint on the game world, the instant gratification -- are mainstays of old schoolers' list of grievances. But why?

Wood's own explanation is a disappointment: "In "the old days," there was a much smaller audience of people looking to play MMOs. That smaller audience created an average gamer who was more "hardcore," wanted a challenging, open concept world in which to play and make their own adventures. As the market has widened, the average shifted to a more casual style of gamer that was more inclined toward a theme park experience than a sandbox." This will definitely resonate with those who blame all the current ills of MMO gaming on World of Warcraft's proverbial opening of the floodgates, but it's a little too pat to my liking.

The second reason stems from Wood's foisting the responsibility for MMO games' switch in focus on the players, not the developers and the publishers, while rightly skewering the myth that game development in the late nineties was a primarily philanthropic venture. When Wood writes that "it used to be that the way to make money making an MMO was to create a sandbox-style experience, the kind of game that today's "complainers" are clamoring for. That just isn't the case anymore. The generation that has come up behind us, as a whole, is looking for a different kind of gaming experience and unfortunately, catering to their whims and wants is more profitable than catering to ours", what is his evidence?

Put the two together, and you get the impression that it was the sacrosanct pursuit of better graphics at all costs, and the corresponding increase in budget, that led to the pursuit of the lowest common denominator -- or, rather, a lowest common denominator that is different from what it was a decade ago. At that time, today's lowest common denominator was still finding MMO's a little too nerdy to buy into the idea (especially with a credit card, online, through a company they probably did not know). Hence, it is probably the development of the industry, not generational conflict, which provides the key to any differences in gaming focus. If MMO's were still nerdish today, perhaps a World of Warcraft would not exist (heresy, I know), while EVE Online and Darkfall undoubtedly would.

On a similar note, Scott Jennings' blog Broken Toys recently hosted a debate around Metaplace's embrace of the Facebook-application gaming market, less than a month after its failure as a standalone virtual world. Behind Metaplace stands Raph Koster, formerly of Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies (in other words, as "old school" as it gets), and in some of the comments, there was a palpable sense of betrayal -- including, to be honest, from me, but not for the same reasons. Having played Ultima Online for less than a month, and never having played Star Wars: Galaxies, no stab wound was to be found between my ribs; but Koster's new-found dedication to the "casuals", after a few years of having the "hardcore" provide him with his bread and butter, seemed like a leisurely trek towards a dead end, abandoning one (admittedly small) demographic for another that might never materialize, so artificial and, yes, condescending, its construct appears to be.

More importantly, this sense of betrayal had nothing to do with age -- at least, not in the way Wood was describing it. The pursuit of the casual, in the Broken Toys thread, definitely had an eye on the middle-aged and perhaps even older people who, to paraphrase an essay of Koster's from 1999, had never been exposed to video games, but it is a party to which everyone is invited. Perhaps even thirty-somethings who, for the time being, still refuse to come to terms, not so much with the fact that youth has abandoned them, but that they are expected, with age, to develop enough of a sense of their social obligations to turn away from wasting every waking hour on what should never be more than a hobby (that is, unless you work in that industry).

But such considerations will be for another post.

Addition, October 2010: After posting this, the author of this blog boarded a vintage 1930's airplane and set off from Florida to explore the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. He was never heard from again. Or he may have been too lazy to continue an article he posted over six months ago, and about which he forgot all of what was meant to have been in its sequel, so he is coming up with a plausible reason to justify the abrupt conclusion of this piece.

News from the Burning Sea

In spite of its shortcomings (and there are several), I have a soft spot for Pirates of the Burning Sea. It was the first MMORPG to which I subscribed, and it offered something different from elves and spaceships. After playing from January to June 2008, I returned briefly to it in April of last year, but I quickly succumbed to boredom.

Flying Lab Software, the makers of Pirates of the Burning Sea, recently reduced its five servers to two, and started offering a free month of play (ending March 5) to anyone who subscribed to the game and cancelled before last January 15. I may avail myself of this offer, but I have not yet decided whether there is anything left in this game that I have not tried, or that is worth returning to.

Since this announcement provides me with an ideal opportunity for emptying my drawers, allow me to offer you the entire run of the "Courrier de France", the newspaper I created when I played the game (all for the Blackbeard server except where indicated). Enjoy!

First Issue - Second Issue - Third Issue - Fourth Issue - Fifth Issue - Sixth Issue - Seventh Issue (recruitment, dating back to the first round of transfers) - Eight Issue (sold to British interests) - Ninth Issue (only issue for Rackham) - Tenth Issue - Return Issue #1 - Return Issue #2 - Return Issue #3 - Return Issue #4 - Return Issue #5 - Return Issue #6

Triumph of the Swill

I like independent games, I really do. At a time when large studios are milking game franchises to the last drop, and churning out an endless stream of derivatives of popular games, one almost feels like leaving them to their millions and encouraging the smaller developers who manage to achieve great things with only a fraction of the majors' budget. Mount & Blade, for instance, easily one of the last great games I played, was started by a couple in Turkey, only to be joined by a modding community that refined the game until it became worthy of a mainstream release, with an expansion now in the works.

Unfortunately, it's all too easy to list all the concerns that come with independent games: sloppy coding, amateurish graphics, even a certain form of elitism (reminiscent of that surrounding independent films, but here technologically oriented), and, perhaps, a nagging impression that should the developers strike it rich, they might become as despicable and unimaginative as the mainstream studios outside of which they are currently thriving.

Yet, apart from that elitism mentioned above, independent games and insufferable communities are rarely thought to go together, while the mainstream is always blamed for opening doors, that ought to have remained bolted, to the proverbial Great Unwashed; to wit, the frequent claim that World of Warcraft ruined MMORPG's by simultaneously popularizing the genre and raising the bar for other games. Conversely, the communities of independent games, it is perceived, are so exclusive and tight-knit that they would quickly ostracize anyone who should fail to maintain basic rules of decency, especially if moderators and even the developers themselves uphold them.

This, I thought, was a standard rule until I played Haven & Hearth, an independent MMORPG currently being developed by two university students in Sweden. A bad game? No, not by a long shot, even in its current alpha state; but it harbours a bad community that, if left unchecked, will end up ruining its immense potential. What is to blame for it? The sandbox format of the game, and some of its untested mechanics, certainly enable the worst in online human nature. But perhaps the real reason is that the smaller the asylum, the easier it is to overrun it, especially when the developers, in addition to being outnumbered, clearly think they have better things to do than try to rein in their game's players. Quoth one of Haven & Hearth's developers: "Am I the only one who kinda likes the community? You know, on the whole?"

I wish I could be of the same opinion. A recent example of the game's fine community at work was the discovery that one or more players had placed pavement in the shape of a swastika; and when the matter was brought up on the game's forum, someone tried to justify it by citing its original meaning as a sign of good luck. I have to concur with a later poster, however, who drew out a knowledge of probabilities that would put to shame many an Ascot bookie: "Odds of a person creating it for the lulz: 99%. Odds of a person creating it as a good luck symbol: 1%." That's because, as a film once pointed out, "Nazis are a barrel of laughs".

Worse, very few people who commented in the thread seemed to take the matter seriously; and what devastated me was not the belief that a hate crime had been committed, but the sheer insensitivity displayed by those involved. To them, nothing is seemingly beyond bounds, and anything is good "for the lulz", no matter how offensive it might actually be. And, as with anything good for the lulz, the Haven & Hearth community demonstrated that it thinks this makes a wonderful running gag (a quote from this last thread: "He's doing it to offend you, and it's working"; now there is more virtue in not being offended than the opposite). After all, nationalism and online games rarely get the opportunity to mix, right?

Recently, the users of a Russian forum started playing the game en masse, creating lag of a magnitude heretofore unknown. This led to forum threads with the appetizing titles of "Declaration of Russian Jihad" and "Massacre in Bitardsk and Stalingrad", rife with juicy quotes such as "against my better judgment, I'm making a post here to inform WV [a German group] that they've killed a Canadian while apparently on the hunt for Russians." Mindless ethnic saber-rattling at its most repugnant, which brings to mind the old racist goings-on in Shadowbane after that game went free. There, it was for server domination; in Haven & Hearth, it's all about the smoothness of one's gaming experience.

Because lag, apparently, isn't something that can be lulzed about.

In the way of an introduction

Some people begin writing blogs because they strongly believe in causes that warrant struggling against a thousand-to-one word-to-page-hit ratio; others, because they feel the need for attention. I, however, do it because I'm bored. Yes, that is correct, bored, which I'm sure sounds like an exceptionally auspicious impetus for a blog on gaming. After all, if you play games, how can you even find the time for being bored? But ask yourself this: "Is there anything more futile than gaming?" Never forget this question, as it's probably bound to become a recurring theme on this blog; and don't worry, this is as philosophical as it is ever going to get.

Sunshine and merriment aside, the principal reason for Please Update Your Chauffeurs is that writing walls of text in forum threads on other sites, only to find them buried amid one-liners by other posters who never bothered to read all responses (including yours) before hitting "reply", is in many ways, after gaming, the apex of futility. I hardly mind not being read, but if I end up writing without an audience, I would sooner scribble from the solitude of a monastery than engulfed in the din of a forum, especially one whose sources of financing are suspiciously the same as its subjects for discussion -- which, come to think of it, applies to pretty much every gaming magazine in existence. This is why, despite my commitment to continuing to post on other sites, I have taken up residence here, where I can succeed or fail on my own merits and flaws.

Does this make me a gaming snob? I hope not. And don't be misled by the word "chauffeur"; the name for this site was adapted from a joke, if we can call it that, I have been using for quite a while. I welcome and encourage polite debate; this, after all, is the basis of democracy.

So let me welcome you to Please Update Your Chauffeurs. Feel free to join in on the discussion, and, above all, never allow me to depress you too much.