TOUR-onto

Saturday was good - I finally managed to take notes on chapters 5 and 6 for psych, which I had been “working on” for a month. Then I popped them onto my Kindle and chapter 6 turned out really well - no conversion errors at all. Sweet.

        Sunday morning, I get up at 5 am. Have breakfast, brush my teeth, get dressed, wake up my mom. Then we drive to the bus station, buy the ticket, and I sit down to read psych notes.

        Get on the bus at 7 am, read psych notes for a few hours. Finish Voltaire’s Candide, read The Art of Manliness guide to Building Your Resiliency - highly recommended, in fact moreso than anything else I’ve read lately. Continue reading psych notes. Get stuck in a detour trying to get to the bus station - turns out sunday was the Santa Claus parade. So we spent half an hour getting to the bus station, when it was like right over there.

        So anyway then I walk from my bus station over to Union Station and meet Lily, after many texts of “I am at this place, where are you” and “ok wait I’ll go where you are.” Our plan for the day was as follows: Get hot-chocolate at some place called Soma and go to Honest Ed’s, then go to Kool Haus (not a horrific carnival fun house, luckily) at 5 pm for the show. By “the show” I mean Bring Me The Horizon (eh) and August Burns Red (yeah) playing with Polar Bear Club (woo!), This is Hell (??), and Emarosa (?). Which is something I was planning on seeing with Lily for a couple of months but it turns out I didn’t mention it to anyone. So yeah! I did that!

        So we got a map inside Union Station and walked on over to The Distillery District, which was a wonderful little place and I hope to find somewhere similar closer to home. You know how the little villages were in FF VII, with little brick houses and pipes and metal stuff for decoration? I mean, they were kinda like that. At least the place Cid lived was like that.

        If you don’t know what I mean, think 19th century village. Brick houses. Metal pipes. That’s the defining features. They had metal sculptures and “art” here and there - a “Christmas tree” made out of pipes with light bulbs in the ends, two ends of a bridge that don’t connect, stuff like that. There were people with fancy cameras everywhere, so I assume it was a cool place to be.

        It was also an expensive place to be! We were there for a few hours, went into two? places, and I spent like… $35 or something. First we went into the chocolatiers place, which is to say they make chocolate and sometimes turn it into a drink, and got some Mayan hot chocolate. Which had a pretty strong after taste that burned your mouth. $4.19 for that. I also got four tiny chocolates, which were $9 total. So that was all well and good and we hung out there for a bit to chat while drinking hot chocolate.

        Then we go off to find something to eat - I got a chicken club sandwhich (pretty good, $7 or something) and an Italian cookie/bread thing with almonds in it that was dipped in chocolate - $3. After sitting there for, hmm, an hour/hour and a half, I also got some caramel cheesecake for $3.50. So $15 for lunch.

        After checking the time and checking the map, we decided we didn’t have time to go to Honest Ed’s and decided to go see Kool Haus to scout out the area. This was around 3:30 PM and there were already people in line - like hell I’m going to wait outside on a cold day for an hour and a half. There was a market area nearby so we went there, but it was just flea market stuff because it was sunday and the parade was going by there. We worked our way back to Union Station and got food from a dude in a cart for $4 (each-ish). Worked our way back to Kool Haus not long before 5 PM and listened to increasingly desperate scalpers try to sell tickets.

        On the way in, there was a bag check - I had my pockets full of electronics and maps, Lily’s bag was full of books, the security girl was o.0. Drop off our coats for $2.50, go out into the main room - surprisingly big, actually. Huge crowds around the Bring Me the Horizon and August Burns Red booths, proving who the cool bands are, and absolutely no one over by the other three booths. I got a Polar Bear Club hoodie ($40) and a tour shirt ($10) and they’re pretty sweet.

        At 6 PM, the first band comes on, doesn’t announce themselves until a few songs into their set. Their singer was not that great, their guitarist (or bassist? I can’t tell by look) was a better singer and the best part of the band. He would jump into the air and fling his legs out in opposite directions. I got Lily onto my shoulders (with some help from the bar) so she could see but we were too slow and he didn’t do it again.

        But all was not lost! For Polar Bear Club was up next and that should have been great. Except their singer was as bad live as I have heard. I caught, maybe, one piece of each song they played - except their last song, Living Saints, which was recognizable. Hell, even when they announced the songs I had a hard time knowing what was going on. Barring the occasional signal from the music, I was essentially lost, and I knew most of the songs by heart. They played Light of Local Eyes (which I wrote my mock valedictorian speech about), Our Ballads, Boxes, something, and Living Saints. There may have been one more song, but in that case, they played two songs where I stood there for five minutes and had no clue what I was listening to.

        Interest was relatively low for them. Sad, but when they play that way… It wasn’t really their scene anyway, but even so.

        Emarosa comes on, they’ve got a keyboard, I’m like oh no… But it wasn’t actually that bad. I was bummed out after Polar Bear Club but I’ve filed them away to check out later.

        Up until now, each of the bands was getting set up in 15 minutes and playing half hour sets. Opening bands and stuff. August Burns Red also got set up in 15 minutes, and played for an hour. While waiting for them to get set up, I was kinda falling asleep.

        That didn’t last for long.

        The first three bands were all pretty restrained, jumping around and stuff but mainly playing in the middle of the stage and thus being invisible to Lily. August Burns Red were not like that. They brought out a bunch of boxes to put over the speakers and spent most of their time up there and encouraging the crowd. Not only were they more interesting to watch than the previous bands, they also played really, really well. The polar opposite of the other bands, if you will. Everything sounded right, and that was great, because I knew them well enough to recognize a few songs, if only by the chorus.

        So August Burns Red was a highlight of the day. Then we wait for half an hour for their royal highnesses Bring Me The Horizon to get their shit set up. I was pretty apathetic about them from the start, but to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with… Half the people there had already seen the band seven times. I heard it from a chick talking to a fat dude. At least she was there for her eighth time, and as one of the two people I eavesdropped on, that is half of everyone.

        They also had a *SURPRISE* GUEST SINGER OMG! Some girl comes out in the middle of one of their songs and everybody screams “OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS AAAAAAH” and I’m like oh, ok. Now it all makes sense. Yep.

        So she sings for a few minutes and takes off. Wikipedia doesn’t say they’ve ever had a girl in the band or in the credits of any of their albums, so I have no idea who she was. Attractive, probably the one doing all the female electronica stuff in their songs, but if she’s not credited with anything…

        So after their half hour set up Bring Me The Horizon played for 45 minutes, then tossed their shit out into the crowd and left. A brief chant for encore died when it became clear that they were thoroughly done with us. Cue the stampede for the doors.

        We go back to Union Station, I buy a vanilla hot chocolate and a cookie from Second Cup (the first time I’ve ever gotten anything there, actually) which were pretty good. I drop Lily off at her bus stop place, then go off to my own bus stop (around 11:45 PM) and get in line for my bus - which was leaving at 12:30 AM. I popped some ear plugs in and slept for pretty much five hours straight, which was pretty nice.

        So that’s what I did! And now I want to find a place with cafes and dumb art to go with a friend, except that it isn’t five hours away from where I live. Vael, we’re going to find one of those places, and enjoy it immensely in the summer.

So I bought a Kindle.

Did I announce this yet? I don’t think I made it official. I ordered it last night at 10 pm, so I guess not.

        I have more important and interesting things to say, but those will have to wait. Why?

        Because I just bought a digital copy of a 1.1 kg book I own - for those of us who don’t think in metric (pretty much everyone because we’re all overly American), that’s a little over two pounds. I’m not going to lie - half the reason I haven’t finished the book is because there’s no comfortable way to read it. I seriously cannot manoeuvre it/my body into any position that will allow for extended reading. It’s not even like a good workout. It’s just a gradual build-up of pain, until I get so distracted I can’t keep reading.

        I don’t know whether it’s pathetic or awesome that I spent $10 to re-buy a book I already own in order to actually finish it. I don’t feel guilty about it, and in fact I’d buy a dozen digital copies if I knew the money would be sent directly to the author, but it’s just a very strange and very significant event.

        In other news, I have 125 books in my Kindle library, only one of which I paid for. To transfer these to my Kindle, which I do not yet have, I ask my computer to e-mail them to my @kindle.com e-mail address. When I turn on my Kindle and connect it to my wi-fi, they will be downloaded automatically and synced to where I left off reading them on my PC. I can also e-mail text documents, .pdf files, and .jpgs to my @kindle.com e-mail address and they’ll be converted and added to my library.

        I’ve already downloaded the books I need to read for my courses, because you’re always reading the classics, and the classics rarely have valid copyrights these days. I’m not saving much money, but I’m saving backpack space (valuable) and it’s convenient (also valuable).

        I don’t even have the thing yet and I’m already debating which books I care to physically have in my library. I imagine that at the age 45, when having a library should be cool, people will laugh at me for having physical copies of books.

Sunday Something

I’m not sure how many times I’ve link dumped on a sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll make it a weekly event. But it’s sunday, and this is something, so without further ado, I present several things for your reading pleasure. I’ve been cleaning out my Read It Later list, so for that reason you also get to read the things I’ve picked up over the last couple of months.

First we have a number of Gamasutra articles, beginning with MMOs and moving gradually into the mainstream:

• MMOs: Just a Matter of Time?: A well designed MMO relies not on time spent playing, but rather on spacing out its content and ensuring players come back for more. By enforcing a regular schedule (raids only once a week, or limiting the experience to be gained in a specific period) it creates a mental pattern encouraging the players to come back more often and hopefully spend their spare time away from the grind making friends. Making friends means staying in the game. Staying in the game means making more money. The reality, then, is that no MMO designer wants to limit the time you spend playing their game. They just want to make the game seem more fair, and keep you around for a longer period of time. Why let you play 3000 hours in your first month, when they can limit you to 300 and keep you for ten months?

• Targeted Focus, Broad Audience?: Two design angles for social games that are seemingly at odds with eachother. One method says to target a niche audience, another says to keep your appeal broad and get as many individuals as possible. The question, then, is how to unify the two. Some games might seem pretty niche at first (Frontier Ville, Mafia Wars - how many western or mafia games have you played recently, in comparison to much more popular genres like World War II shooters and sci-fi? Those are also bad examples because two successful and high profile games have recently come out in both of those genres, but hey, I tried), but then have a general enough appeal to get your grandmother playing. Seems like cornering a market is the real key to success.

• Warren Specter on Game Culture in the Mainstream: Warren Spector reminds us that casual gamers are gamers too, and says that gaming will thrive as it enters the mainstream culture much like every new art form before it has. By embracing other types of gamers and expanding gaming’s appeal, we’ll see more and more widespread cultural acceptance, not to mention bring some diversity into the types of games available. Imagine if movies tended to fall in only two categories: the Nintendo family game and the violent and bloody power fantasies. The hope, then, is that with a more diverse audience we’ll have more and more demand for games that fall outside of those groups.

Next, on an entirely different spectrum, we have an article about the future of books. However, there’s a hilarious quote from a man who doesn’t know video games other than them Grand Auto Thefts and Modern Wars, so for that reason it’s the logical follow-up to articles about video games.

• Book Have Many Futures: It’s pretty good timing that this article mentions a gradual transition away from the traditional university textbook, as spending hundreds of dollars on books that are out of date by the time they come into our hands is an incredibly wasteful, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable practice. Not that the textbook publishers have a problem with that. On a broader note, they also discuss the possible avenues for books to pursue in the future. A word of caution, too, on the Kindle vs hardcover books statistic: paperbacks are of course not included in that number, so it’s not like they sold more electronic books than they did physical ones. Personally, I loathe hardcover books, so I wait a year or more if that’s what it takes to get my hands on a paperback. Not just because of price, either, I just hate having huge books that wouldn’t look out of place in a classy library when you take off the jacket.

Moving from books to writing for anime, we have a rant from the writer behind well-known anime like Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo, Eureka 7, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and the biggest one of all - Cowboy Bebop. Then a roundtable discussion on his rant from the wonderful folks at Japanator. Following that is a discussion of the American meaning of the word “otaku.”

• Storywriter Dai Sato is frustrated with Japanese anime: Not much to say about this, honestly, it’s just the story of how this guy is really angry about the state of anime in Japan and how he sees the industry losing much of what made it special and pandering to a rapidly shrinking audience. By catering to existing fans and not seeking to provide new experiences and expand that audience, the anime industry as we know it could very well crash. More on that in the next article.

• Japanator Discusses: Dai Sato rants on the state of anime: Analysis of Dai Sato’s rant, judging it more than a little “butthurt” but admitting he may also have a point. In particular, Brad Rice dishes (hey get it rice dishes) some Serious Business on the industry, which is exactly why he hosts an infrequent podcast called Serious Business with Brad Rice.

• I, Otaku: Identifying as a J-Culture enthusiast: People like to have a label for themselves, if only to explain to other people what exactly they’re interested in. For that reason, otaku has largely become the accepted term for english-speaking fans of anime and pretty much anything Japanese. Some people argue against the use of the term by people who are ignorant of its origins (it’s a derogatory term in Japan), while others happily prance about squealing about how they’re the NUMBAR OEN OTAKU EVAR. The reality, then, is that this is America and we can steal words and adopt them for an entirely different use than they were originally intended. But isn’t that a wonderful thing? I think it is. I think we can be otaku if we want to be.

If you have no idea about my interests, there’s your crash course. Hope you enjoyed something up there!

So I realize that perhaps I’ve barely mentioned my current real life status here on tumblr. Since people I talk to all the time were unaware of why I was absent. Perhaps those of you who know nothing but what I post on my tumblr worried that I was dead, or that I had abandoned you. No, I was just in the middle of moving fifteen hours away from the city (more like overblown town) in which I was born and raised. From peaceful little Summerside, Prince Edward Island, where you could have found my house if I told you the slightest bit about me, I have just finished moving to Ottawa, Ontario, where I could give you my full name and you could never find me. Prince Edward Island had a provincial phone book. Ottawa has two, or maybe three, phone books to itself. And each of those is at least twice the size of the PEI phone book. Yep, it’s a change of pace.

        We’ve been all moved in and everything for a little over a week now, and it’s kinda weird taking all of the *stuff* from your house and putting it into a new building, where you will be living from now on. We didn’t get internet because we were trying to find a good deal, and we ended up with Rogers because Bell was hardly an option. Their good service wasn’t available here, and we wanted good. So Rogers it was, and so far I’m not exactly happy. But I’ll live. Life goes on. I have a lot of catching up to do, but I’m alive! Hooray! And I’m so bored that I could post every day if I felt like it! I even have posts pre-written to post, but I’ll try to space things out. Honest. I’m going to post one now, and then another tomorrow or the day after. Sound like a plan? Yes? Great!

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        If Serial Experiments Lain, Welcome to the N.H.K, and Inception had a threesome, Chaos;Head would be born. I can’t speak for the visual novel it’s based on because I didn’t want to change my language settings just to play it, but holy crap, what an entertaining show. Those of you who don’t like subs (hi vael) won’t be able to watch it for a little while yet, but it has been licensed, so yay.

        It starts with a series of unexplained events dubbed the New Generation Madness by @Chan (it’s full of less-than subtle references like that, but some are funny), starting with a group suicide and a man becoming pregnant. The hero of our story, Takumi Nishijou, lives in a storage container on top of a tall building, where he spends his time watching anime, being the best at an archaic MMO (why would the data for his character be stored on his harddrive, and furthermore, how could he play in an internet cafe that way…) and jerking off to plastic figurines. Takumi has no friends, goes to school only as often as he needs to graduate, and hallucinates that one of his figurines is alive and talks to him. His sister occasionally comes to his “base” to make sure he’s still alive.

        Then he stumbles upon the third event of the New Generation Madness, the slaying of a professor studying a phenomenon called GE-Rate. The killer is… a cute high school girl. Who suddenly appears at Takumi’s school the next day and claims to be one of his only friends. The plot thickens!

        Takumi’s pretty much nuts and the whole idea is that half the time you don’t know if anything is actually happening. He hallucinates pretty frequently, often erotically, only to hear someone say his name and realize it wasn’t real. Then these hallucinations start becoming reality, simply because he imagined them. Then girls with swords no one else can see start paying a whole lot of attention to him. Then he becomes a suspect in the murder of the professor, and then stuff gets really crazy.

        It’s only twelve episodes long, and honestly it’s pretty well paced. There really aren’t any boring sections where nothing really happens. It’s one mystery after another, and as the pieces start to come together it all works pretty well. Off the top of my head, I don’t think there are any loose plot threads. It just clicks in a really satisfying way, and I think it would be as interesting to watch in one sitting as it would be to watch it slowly and give yourself time to think about it. In the last few episodes, there were a few times where I stopped for a second to connect little details and figure things out. One thing it doesn’t do is patronize you - no big villainous reveal followed by “yes indeed, I AM the villain!” Rather, you’ll see a chat screen left open, and then a confrontation. No need to tell you what you already know. So I like that about it.

        One of the characters was tortured as a young child and developed some serious psychological issues, as well as her special powers. She sees the world through mystical fantasy terms, like Black Nights and Demon Kings rather than people with special powers and mind control machines. She makes several references to Cocytus, the River of Grief  in Hades, only one of several horrible and depressing rivers to be crossed. At the end of the series, she realizes that the rivers past Cocytus don’t make passing it meaningless; rather, they validate the effort as a proof of strength to surpass further trials. Having passed one challenge, one can clearly pass the next, and the next, if only through willpower alone.

        Meanwhile, in Synthetic Worlds, the author compares the endless grind in an MMO to the trial of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to roll a boulder up the side of an impossibly tall mountain. Only at the end of the day, as he neared the top, his strength would fail and the boulder would fall to the base of the mountain. The reason people enjoy the grind in an MMO, however, is because they aren’t simply crawling up one large mountain. They’re crossing an entire mountain range, getting the reward for each milestone they pass rather than only being rewarded at the very end.

        Greek mythology aside, the two philosophies are similar at their core. Having climbed one mountain, you don’t admit defeat because there’s a taller mountain ahead. Nor should you expect a grassy plain on the other side, because there will always be challenges to be met and problems to be solved. No amount of success will guarantee a worry-free life forevermore. However, we need to take pride in our accomplishments and relish the joy of success to get us over the next mountain. If you disregard what you’ve accomplished, then every further challenge will be a source of despair, one more reason to be miserable.

        That’s the way I see my life when I look back. With every challenge I’ve overcome, I’ve become a better, stronger person. In the face of every challenge to come, I’ll take what I’ve learned and I’ll work until I succeed. Forward motion. Constant progress. I’m not looking for a grand reward at the end of the road to validate my efforts. The results are validation enough. It’s just a question of how you measure progress. Every little step is worth something, even if you need to take a thousand more. Don’t stop moving just because you aren’t there yet. Run faster if you’re that anxious to arrive.

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        Hey there kids! Are you really tired of writing, and completely forget the point you were originally trying to make? Don’t worry about it! Here’s a fool-proof guide to making nice fluffy arguments that barely form a cohesive thesis but give you an opportunity to mention all kinds of neato things.

1. Think of something that, in some small way, relate whatever your last paragraph was about.

2. Mix far too many metaphors and sound fancy without being completely clear what you mean. Don’t worry, nobody will notice except your english teacher.

3. Repeat steps one and two until you run out of neato things to bring in.

4. Repeat yourself, either with the same or different metaphors, and maybe add something personal. Just to make sure people reading the rest of what you wrote think of the things you wanted them to think about. Also, if you get a little lost yourself while writing this part, that’s ok. It’s all about the personal discovery they have reading what you’ve written. Let them draw their own conclusions! It’s like Writing 2.0 - involve your readers!

        I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again, because I start writing late or I just get frustrated with what I’ve written but plow ahead because I want to get it out. I’m not going to rewrite this, and I totally want to plug Choas;Head, and I’ve acknowledged the failure so now it’s a learning experience for everyone. Also, plan your essays. Having a thesis is important. Having supporting points is a nice touch.

        Now it’s time for the bonus quote, yay! From Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson, the ninth book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It’s a completely ridiculous series, and not for the faint of heart. I started when book 6 was new, and they only get longer. I think the entire series reaches my hip or higher now. I wouldn’t know, because I donated them to my high school library because I knew I wouldn’t have enough space to take them with me to Ottawa. Sad, because now I don’t know what to do with this book and the next, which will be the final volume. I can’t just keep volumes 9 and 10 on the shelf, but who could I ever give them to? They’re basically useless on their own T.T

        Also as for the quote specifically I absolutely love it and it was like the most amazing thing ever to read and it makes so much sense in context and the reference is obvious (in the book I mean) but it still makes me think of a badass person going around fixing everything and knowing the world is horrible and they can’t change that, but doing their own small part rather than giving up. Kinda like Scott Shelby in Heavy Rain appearing out of nowhere to solve problems and then just disappearing without needing any thanks. Kinda like what I aspire to be too. I want a fist full of tears T.T

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Somewhere, out there, you will find the purest essence of that philosophy. Perhaps in one person, perhaps in ten thousand. Looking to no other entity, no other force, no other will. Bound solely in comradeship, in loyalty honed absolute. Yet devoid of all arrogance. Wise in humility. And that one, or ten thousand, is on a path. Unerring, it readies itself, not to shake a fist at the heavens. But to lift a lone hand, a hand filled with tears. You want a faith? You want someone or something to believe in? No, do not worship the one or the ten thousand. Worship the sacrifice they will make, for they make it in the name of compassion - the only cause worth fighting and dying for.

Now that I’ve been here for something like 30 hours, there are a few things I’ve noticed about Ottawa that are different from Summerside, Prince Edward Island. They aren’t exactly pros and cons, they’re just things that have stood out since I’ve been here. Not so much culture shock, as I’ve spent a week here and a week in Toronto before now, and there are things I knew to expect. Just interesting things to note.

• There are bike lanes on most of the large streets I’ve seen so far. Without exception, there have been people walking, running, and biking literally everywhere. No one is worried about their safety, they’re just out for some exercise. There are also paths set aside for walking and such, in parks, near an experimental farm nearby.
• In any public place, chances are pretty good that at least one conversation in both french and chinese will be happening withing hearing range of you. I’ve also seen several women in burkas. Here’s the thing - where I grew up, there were fewer non-white people than there are individual cultures in Ottawa. Like, we had, perhaps, twenty to thirty non-white people in our city of 14,000. That’s not to be rude, or racist, or anything like that. That’s just how it was. Here, there are people from likely every country in the world. It was rare to hear a conversation purely in french in Summerside. Generally it was tourists.
• It’s very clean, and certainly extremely modern. Again, this should be no surprise, but the difference from what I’m used to is pretty striking. We passed a building dedicated to “geophysics,” which previously was something I didn’t know even existed. It’s just a change from places where nobody paid much attention to looking shiny and new because it’s not like they had competitors lololol. If you offered a service, it was probably just you unless they wanted to go out of their way. You just did what you had to do for the most part.

Ok I had more to say but I forgot because I started trying to plan stuff out. We found a comic book/board games/card games shop nearby, and an anime shop in the same little plaza thing. That’s pretty cool. I purchased All You Need Is Kill which is about a guy fighting an impossible battle against an alien swarm, but being reborn repeatedly and slowly getting better and better each time. I also purchased Harmony (I think that was the title) about some future Utopia in which no one wants or needs for anything and some people try to kill themselves by starvation and simply aren’t allowed to do so. It seems really awesome and interesting and when I’m done reading it I’ll recommend it if it’s worth reading.

Ever noticed how much more tempted you are to get three games you didn’t want, and one you did, for a relatively good price? Ever wondered why? Psychology has the answer! Three Reasons Why We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles over on Gamasutra.

        I finished Slum Online, and one particularly interesting thing to me is that everyone in the book considers their online characters a persona they assume solely for going online. It’s not “I threw a low kick and chained into a dash-throw,” it’s “Tetsuo threw a low kick and chained into a dash-throw.” They see their concerns as solely those relating to outside of the game, and their character’s goals are their own. Tetsuo the street brawler (main “character”) wants to be the strongest fighter there is, whether recognition comes with it or not, and Hashimoto the ninja wants to investigate the mystery of Ganker Jack. Etsuro, the protagonist, wants to spend more time with his charming classmate and attends classes he hates just to be with her. Hashimoto’s player, by contrast, is a complete shut-in who won’t even respond to his mother. Hashimoto’s player plays the wise ninja as a way to escape his life, but doesn’t believe he’ll gain anything from Hashimoto’s growth as a character.

        Hashimoto tells Tetsuo that “their characters are not them, they are enhancements of their personalities… while they may become friends online, there is no guarantee they would be friends IRL.” Hashimoto’s player doesn’t want to connect his useful online persona to his “useless” identity as a social shut-in. In the end, though, he’s wrong: his player, Jun, used to be friends with Etsuro. They reconnect outside of the game after working together to solve a mystery, and Jun looks like he’s going to develop a healthier life outside of the game. By adopting the persona of Hashimoto online, Jun did grow as a person and re-established an important connection with a friend he had given up on.

        All of this just reminds me of the approach Persona 3 and Persona 4 take to this theory. There, a person’s persona is a deeper of themselves that creates (or evolves because of) conflict in their life. By misunderstanding or completely missing their true feelings or desires, problems arise for the characters you meet throughout each of the games. Your party members, who fight as you do with their personae, become stronger as you work together to help them understand themselves and solve their problems. The non-combat party members don’t consciously recognize this change in themselves, though your main character can tell and grows through their connection to all of the people they’ve helped. When your social links (the game’s representation of your relationships) get maxed out, that means they’ve come to terms with themselves and resolved the conflict in their lives. It may not be perfect, but after conquering their pivotal problem, nothing else can really hold them back.

        Which brings me to my whole connecting point with this: how our online personae and the relationships we make online teach us about ourselves, and how it helps as much to consider them as separate from ourselves as it does to simply be ourselves. First, words typed online have no less meaning than words spoken out loud. The difference is when instant messaging (or e-mails) is a way to avoid potentially awkward conversations, or it’s a message that takes guts to deliver. I prefer to have important personal conversations in person, because it’s more intimate that way and it proves a point to go out of your way to connect with someone and have the courage to speak your feelings out loud. Aside from that, there’s no less value in a relationship that communicates based on usernames rather than given names.

        I don’t think people make less personal connections online than they do in person. I couldn’t really say, either, if choosing the level of anonymity and being able to pick and choose what someone knows about you encourages close relationships. What I do know is that by acting like someone else, we can make friendships and form relationships online that we wouldn’t have the courage for, or otherwise be able to make, in person. Whether or not those relationships get closer, and move beyond the online personae, depends on the people adopting them. When we do choose to be someone else online, we do it for a reason, and developing relationships with others with that altered personality reveals things to us in much the same way the main character in Persona ¾ reveals the truth to the people he meets. Children learn things “they” couldn’t have learned otherwise by imitating others and playing roles, and doing the same online is a similar experience for an older child. Everyone and everything I’ve been online has contributed to who I am today, and it’s strange to imagine who I might be in an alternate world without the internet…

        I have a hard time justifying all of the effort that goes into a truly complete role-playing experience, because I’m just not creative enough on a regular basis to become someone else entirely. When playing games, though, I do fall into the usual psychological trap: I consider one of the characters to be “me.” I’ll raise “my” agility, or train “my” skill with daggers, and then if I control a party, the others take secondary importance to my “main” character. They usually get to be their own characters, perhaps less developed than “my” character, but they’re unique and serve whatever purpose they need to for the success of the party. It’s an opportunity to learn things about yourself when you role-play your characters, but generally I go for role-playing lite and converse and make story decisions based on my own beliefs and values.

        When it comes to the usual fantasy/sci-fi RPG, it’s a bit hard to “be yourself.” But this is where the recent Persona games come into play. They’re set in a modern setting, and when someone has a problem, it’s a run-of-the-mill problem normal people might have. I played through both Persona 3 and Persona 4 playing the main character as myself, and acting how I would act in that situation, even if it didn’t get me the best in-game results. Oddly enough, Persona 4 in particular showed me things I had no way of experiencing previously: Naoto’s struggle with her gender identity and Kanji’s struggle with his sexuality have been surprisingly useful to me. By considering myself the main character, I got to test myself in situations I’d rather not screw up in. Of course, a live human being is almost guaranteed to react differently than a scripted character in a video game, but it’s the experience that matters. A lot of people panic when they run into a situation they’re completely unfamiliar with, or feel uncomfortable, and at least thinking about what I might do in a situation like that left me well prepared for the future.

        Bonus thought: “Like magnets: opposites attract. People are the same. Everyone has their flaws, their quirks. Rub them together, you get friction. It’s the places where they’re different that locks them together.” You ever meet someone and just click? Maybe it happens right away, maybe it happens when you aren’t looking over the course of a few months, but I like that as an explanation for it. Comes from Slum Online like all the other quotes here.

        It’s not so much about opposites attracting as it is about why some people stick together and others don’t. It’s like velcro, or anything else that works using interlocking pieces - similar pieces rub together and only create friction, while different pieces lock together and form an intense bond. You don’t need similar interests or personalities to get along with someone or make a relationship work - you just need something to lock together and make that connection.