Distractions

Ammo for your Dreams

1. I. 11.11.06 / 9am

   Dude, the similarity between “pixel bitching” and “clickable” is purely lingual. Both were made-up by computer-savvy, role-playing geek folk; we pick our metaphors in the the same field. However, you do not do tollbooths (”Not let me pass unless I give him my ship, will he? OK, no more mister non-violence!”), and you never expect us to solve problems the “appropriate” way, probably because we never do (”Answer the riddle to pass through the gate? I kick him in the nuts!”).

   Nice read, but not really for the GM like you. Or for the party like us.

   And yes, I am up REAL early in the morning. It must be because role-playing builds character.

   I.
2. I. 11.11.06 / 9am

   Ha! Your timestamp is clock-of-summer! Or Baghdad time.

   Fix fix, don’t pharsh me, it is now 08:50 LIFNOT BOKER!

   I.
3. Dotan Dimet 11.11.06 / 2pm

   OK, pixelbitching and clickable are related only by the source of the metaphor; in real game, everything is clickable even if not everything is rendered.
   The best example of Pixelbitching I can think of was that bit where we had to figure out how the dimension-hopping device worked in the one-shot game where you first called me an asshole player. I hate stuff like that, which is why I don’t enjoy computer adventure games, and why I don’t put it in my games.
   Gingi did interesting things with the idea of tollbooths and inventory in our games, deciding that something in his inventory (or more broadly, something that showed up earlier in the game and which his character could just pull out of his ass) was the right key for nuking some problem, and of convincing me/us that this was cool enough to work.
   Also, I notice that while I don’t usually end up asking you to give up your stuff, I have no problem blowing it up arbitrarily (the Mothership, Costia’s mom, Atlanta’s cat and butler…) – I guess that this isn’t a price, it’s just a complication.
4. I. 15.11.06 / 1am

   Pixelbitching exists in RPG, for sure, but it is really not an issue in our game – which is why I cried bloody murder when you wrote “For the GM like me who’s players wonder if something he’s just described is clickable or not”. In retrospect it was more a segue than a jaccuse and I was overreacting.

   It is bumming to play when there is only a single solution to a problem, mostly because that way, even when you “win”, you only get to feel clever, never creative. It is a creativity inhibiting technique – creativity on the player’s side is rewarded with failure – and it is giving up on one of the greatest advantages of RPG over other media (everything is clickable, indeed). Also as a DM it is bumming, both because you have to think of solutions to everything beforehand, which is a lot of work, and because the players always have cooler – and more surprising – solutions. THIS is Gingi’s glocks, and is the opposite of pixelbitching.

   Destruction of stuff, AKA “loss”, is a powerful motif in the human experience. Is important to game. Develops character, this. Again, opposite of tollbooth, which is defined, at least in my book, as the point in which you take from the character and the player does not really care. Can you say that Bo does not pine over his sheep? That’s why his Scottish ancestors began to wear skirts in the first place: a Scottish sheep can hear the sound of a zipper opening from over half a mile.

   I.

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