Week End – WHO Pitch Forks

Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week.

In The News

There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches. I personally think any gamer who is actually honest with themselves can probably remember a time when they made a choice to play a game instead of doing something more important instead, so denying that a “gaming disorder” could exist to the point that it impairs a person’s life seems silly to me. Of course someone could hurt their life by playing too many games. I think in this case it’s largely an argument over semantics. Addictive personalities and compulsive disorders are definitely a real thing, but whether you’re addicted to gaming or something else is probably irrelevant, so I imagine the objection here is singling out “gaming” as more of a trigger than anything else.

ArenaNet released a trailer for Episode 3 of Living World Season 4. I haven’t watched it, because it’s not like I’m going to be deciding whether to play it or not based on a trailer. I’ll play it eventually, but probably not for a while, unless I need a relaxing break from Dark Souls. Ha! It’s funny because I consider Guild Wars 2 to be the Dark Souls of MMORPGs, and Living World content is not relaxing at all.

Those lockbox rulings that were going to change everything didn’t change anything. It’s a bit more punitive of a response than I expected, but it’s not at all surprising that the path of least resistance for the publishers is to simply disable the lockboxes in the affected countries, while leaving them enabled everywhere else. I imagine the loss of revenue from those countries and/or the loss of players angry that they can’t get their loot anymore, is little more than a rounding error to the publishers.

Steam is having another sale. However I feel like gamers’ willingness to drop so much money on lockboxes and cosmetics and preorders has done an excellent job of showing publishers that there’s no need for sales anymore. There’s so little to get in these sales these days that it’s become a Twitter meme. Unless you want to pick up something like a 20-year-old Fallout 1 or 2 for 75% off you’re not likely to get many deals. (In this case I actually do want to get Fallout 1 and 2 for $2 each hehe.)

My Week

My gaming week was Dark Souls, Dark Souls, and more Dark Souls, the Remastered edition. Some people disappear down a rabbit hole with games like Skyrim or Dragon Age, but for me it’s Dark Souls games. Every time I play it feels like there’s something new to learn or discover. I’m hoping to finish the game this weekend, which I’m guessing would put me at around 60 hours total which would definitely be my fastest playthrough hitting all bosses and all areas of the game.

I’m working on a couple of blog posts but they’re turning into super-long missives and I just hate those. To followup on my blogging post, another thing that’s time-consuming about blogging is editing 5000-word novels down to tighter 1000-word blog posts. Plus, you know, there’s Dark Souls to play!

I mentioned not getting to GW2. That’s because my rough schedule of future gaming looks like this: Finish Dark Souls Remastered, then perhaps try to finish my Dark Souls III The Ringed City DLC Blind Playthrough video series while I’m in a Souls mood (which means playing through all of Dark Souls III again to create a suitable character), then perhaps play Demon’s Souls on the PS3 for the first time, then perhaps play Bloodborne on the PS4 for the first time. By then I’m sure I’ll be thoroughly burned out on games for the rest of the year.