Happy Budday

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

I am going to erase some things out of my life. I had so many plans for so many things, but of late I think I have grown wise to the idea that I will not have enough time for many of these things. I am not sure if I have complained about this before, but my life has been completely scheduled. If my life was a restaurant and you came in my maître d’ would tilt his nose into the air and say that I am full.

From one Monday to the next, every week, I am booked. I never used to be this way. I used to have more free time than I deemed necessary. People would call me up out of the blue to invite me for a night out, and I would gladly accept. Now my nights out are planned two, three, sometimes four weeks in advance. I have people consecutively booking me at the same time every week. One of these, my kid brother I look forward to and enjoy immensely. However I loath that he just won’t give me the controller as he sits on my bed and plays Halo wrong.

Whenever I am not stuck at work, I’m being either pushed to the gym or being pulled to play tennis (because my kid sister is getting married and she will not have me at the festivities till I can fit in to that damned kurta she got). Because of this four evenings a week are taken up (the other three being occupied by the Internet and my latest online muse of the week) which means I can’t go to the beach and stare at waves and I can’t get drunk on boys' night out and I can’t go scrounging around for that new really nice, really cheap place to eat.

I have also been travelling, reading and catching up on my sleep. Everything else is taken up by everyone else. So I am going to delete some from my life. Deletion. Simple catharsis. The joys of chopping away at weeds as they strive to enter mainstream essence. But what can I delete?

Friends.
Films.
Reading.
Writing.
Work.
That startup that refuses to budge.
Tennis.
Recent History.
Internet.
Music.
Television.
Useless talents.
Family Drama.
Musical Instrument Learning.

Internet would be a good start, but I don’t actually spend much time on here. I read blogs, read comics, download videos and that’s really it. Occasionally, once in a blue moon, I gorge myself on wikipedia or the entire archives of certain webcomics. This takes up a lot of time but I have an addictive personality. But, it is still the reason I stay up to 3am most days.

The telly is a negligable item; I am too fresh for mainstream programming to a point that I barely watch it and when i do it’s mostly films or the box.

Family Drama can be cut. Easily. When my sister moves to the US, my parents should realise how much easier it is bringing up one kid. Sons! They are the future of everything. Atleast, they ought to be.

I refuse to give up reading and writing things. They are too much fun. Have I told you about Hari Kunzru's Revolutions I am reading? Well, I should.

Work has been cut down, to an extent. I used to work 10 hours a day spread over 6 days a week till about a couple of months ago. But, as of now, I have managed to stave off work to a minimal few hours every day. I still have to stay in office the required 8 hours. If I am able to redirect all the energies to a venture on my own is a different question altogether.

Musical instrument learning has be deleted for now. One day I will learn that precious guitar.

Useless talents? I can name some but I will refreain. Gone.

Music and Movies? I’ll cut down, but never ever will I give them up. No matter what the expense. I love my unpaid escapism.

Delete .

And now I am left an empty shell of someone. Hooray for the brother that won’t give me the controller and won’t play Halo properly.

Nighttime Daydreamer

This is how I have spent my nights.

Stripped of all context. A singular screen with moving images that twist to the whims of my fingers. That is the singular ability true to all video games - Amplification of Input, the translation of a simple input into complex output: I press one button and a whole new range of options become available to me; I pull this trigger and that car explodes. The idea is not to exactly replicate the input required to achieve the desired output; the chain of causality from action to consequence is often long and complicated, one single action rarely leads to a complex output without a myriad other factors.

The base aim of all games is the codification and abstraction of complex life-like ideas and situations into ones over which it’s easier to obtain competence in, and eventually the mastery of.

Through mastery comes insight, understanding, and an appreciation of the complexity of the original situation. In order to achieve this insight, this appreciation, the simplification and abstraction of the original situation must be achieved in such a manner that the simplified version is easier to master but that the lessons learned from this simplified form are still applicable to the original.

The closer games move to complete 1:1 replication of input to output, the smaller this amplification effect becomes until the gap between the skills required for a video game version of Golf and an actual game of Golf start to disappear.

Is this really a problem? Well I did not turn on Burnout Paradise in order to crash my car at 180 mph, I did so in order to play a video game representation of some rash driving.

The appeal of the representation is different to the appeal of the reality. When will everyone get it.

Thrice-Removed from Reality: Blogging ... With the XBox

360voice.gamerdna.com is the portal that sets up a blog based on your XBox GamerTag - and posts a daily blog as the voice of your Xbox 360. You don't have to do anything other than register your tag, but the results are really really good.

Every night, 360voice would check your GamerTag for new achievements or games played, and write a little post from its perspective. Let me tell you why this beats sliced bread... Other Xboxes would leave comments on your posts, ridiculing you, praising you, loving you, hating you. So there is this whole ecosystem of computers talking about you - and you don't even have to worry about spellings anymore... Yaayy.

The funniest part was that right after I registered, about two weeks ago -- I couldn't play for several days. So, every day that I was gone, my Xbox whined and moaned that nobody played any games. If you want a short geeky laugh, check it out. And your Xbox is not alone. Other machines are blogging too.

So, if you have an Xbox 360 (and why wouldn't you?) -- you should register your tag, and let the chuckles begin.

---------------------- Excerpts from some chap called Fshguy ----------------------

(Yeah, like I am going to ever give my nick away. )

Fshguy's Xbox - Jun 1 2009

Fshguy decided to game yesterday and we rocked out like the three musketeers, except there were only two of us... 131,011 points of total gamerscore and counting... That is a boost of 100 points over last time! Welcome to 131,000!! He played Burnout Paradise acquiring 3 achievements, Madagascar 2, FIFA 09, and I thought Fshguy injured himself in the process... but I was wrong... he lives to fight another day!

Oh BTW, did you know that Fshguy is competing in a gamerscore challenge? Follow every up and down over here. There are 202 other people rocking out on this thing which keeps it fun. Currently Fshguy is hanging on to the number 83 spot. But, there are still 4 long days left! We need to keep heading for the top!

Fshguy's Weekly Recap - May 25 2009

Ok, here it is... your weekly recap of gaming: Not two, not five, but SEVEN days of gaming in a row! Last week was as solid as it gets when it comes to Fshguy throwing down with the games. We added 525 points of gamerscore. Good stuff! Who knew 26 achievements could be worth that much? Ok I knew that...

I could go on and on with the stats, but that is enough.

Fshguy's Xbox - May 23 2009

Fshguy needed a friend like me yesterday... I could see it in his eyes. I am there for you brother. Remember that. Gamer score is 130,671. That is an increase of 20 points over last time! He rocked out to Prince of Persia winning 1 achievement, Burnout Paradise, and that was that.

Fshguy's Xbox - May 18 2009

You would think I had died and gone to heaven when Fshguy showed up to play. Another day, another barrier shattered. The 130,000 mark has been crossed! He opened up Disney Sing It HSM3 finishing 4 achievements to finish the game, NFS Undercover finishing an amazing 14 achievements, and I thought Fshguy injured himself in the process... but I was wrong... he lives to fight another day! Also of note, Fshguy and I have now played 240 days in a row! Are we rock stars or what? No one feels more loved than me right now... no one!

---------------------- ************************************ ----------------------

Xbox360's of the world, you now have a voice !!!

My work here is done.

Loving Ogres, Wood-Elves and Sabre Warriors

This is a take on an article in the Daedalus Project a few weeks ago about people who fell in love because they met in "massively multiplayer online role playing games. (MMORPG)"

A year and a half ago I was an avid player of these games, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Everquest(EQ). They were fun games, but there weren't very many female players. And people estimate that half of the female players you did see were actually male players pretending to be female. Yuck!

But based on the Daedalus's endorsement I thought that maybe I should give this another one a try. I needed to find a game with a better male to female ratio (Yes, two b school years do that to you). So I tried The Sims Online. Sims supposedly has the best male to female ratio of all massively multiplayer online games, but hardly anyone plays it. I can see why. It's pretty pointless. There's nothing to do. In Fantasy or EQ you would join a team of other players and kill monsters. Only with good teamwork was it possible to kill them efficiently. Plot lines follow every other Hollywood Fantasy movie. Young apprentice befriends older mentor(another player). Work together to kill monsters(other players). The more you kill, the stronger you get, more skills you learn. (For the initiated, along the lines of Diablo, only more complex and more fun). And so, unlike the real world where you work and work and nothing happens, in this your work is quite shockingly, rewarded.

However in Sims all you do is stuff like take the dog for a walk, call your wife good names, make lunch, watch tv, eat dinner, go to the bathroom, take a shower, sleep. That was easily the only virtual world ever invented that is more boring than real life.

But this virtual world does have a better male to female ratio than the real world. And the girls (atleast i think they were) are easier to talk to. Every time I did log on, my virtual roommate, Ktrina79 starts chatting with me. Ktrina was a schoolteacher from Montreal and the pics she sent made me wanna go back to school. Was fun for a while, but there was no way i could go on with the tedium. For all I know "she's" really some fifty year old gay guy.

Although it may not fit the stereotype, we gamers are not immune to love. There's bound to be some flirting going on when you have a few thousand people playing an MMORPG together. The games are filled with scenarios that shed light on player personalities. Those seem like pretty good odds for the ladies.

We thus stand on the cusp of a new generation where parents telling their children about the circumstances of how they met will not revolve around college parties, chance encounters at a coffee shop or business conferences. Instead, they will tell their children how they met each other while battling gnolls in subterranean caverns or slaying the undead in forgotten crypts while pretending to be warriors or clerics.

Point of the post - I'm bored. Lots of work i dont wanna do.