A Life Well GG’d

2080 hours. Doing 40 hours in each of the 52 weeks a year, it is roughly the amount of time someone will devote to a full-time job. A job that will at worst hopefully provide enough money to see them through the year, at best provide that but also be on a project they really care about that will hopefully pay off. Maybe they spent a year perfecting a wine bottle with a built in vibrator, who knows. 2080 hours is a lot of time to devote to something is what I’m getting at.

I have put 2274 hours into DOTA 2 in 4 years.

There’s a British comedy radio series called “That Mitchell & Webb Sound” which features a sketch where a 29 year old man dies and goes to heaven. Meeting St Peter at the pearly gates, he is told that in achieving his life’s work, the final result is 7,345 out of a possible 128,312. Confused, he asks for clarification to be told that this is the amount of times he “beat his computer at solitaire”. Miffed at this being seen as his life’s work, the man exasperatedly blurts out that it was just meant to be something to pass the time. St Peter responds with “Well, look on the bright side. It worked!”.

I’m not sure how I came to play so much to be faced with such a stark number, but thanks to the magic of video game stat tracking I can see exactly when I put those hours in.

The bigger the blob, the more games played on that day. If it’s green, it means I won more than I lost, and vice versa for red. Some of those big blobs represent anywhere between 4 to 8 games played. Did I mention, a game of DOTA 2 is most often around 30 minutes to an hour, if not sometimes longer?

I can look at that graph, and though the games are mostly forgotten, by the concentration of blobs I can roughly put together the bad events in my life I was trying to numb myself to at the time. A death here, a girlfriend splitting up with me there, moving back in with my parents as I wasn’t paid for work at that bit.

In December 2015, my then girlfriend’s dad was very suddenly diagnosed with cancer. The bubbles get bigger as I don’t know how to help. The biggest red blob in January 2016, where I played 10 games in one day, is the day he died in the morning. I don’t remember doing that. Maybe it helped me cope with being powerless and seeing a person I loved in so much distress after such a life-shattering event.

My times in DOTA weren’t always lonely. Having moved to a town by myself whilst young, then moving back to my parents in the isolated countryside, I made all sorts of good friends whilst playing. Some who I’d never even get to meet in real life, were relaxing evening companions after a day working and saving my money rather than going out. These were odd-working, busy but isolated men and women from all around Europe. I could ask all the questions I wanted about Norwegian and Danish culture one evening, then another be taken through life as an atheist in Egypt. All whilst clicking little magic spells at icons and watching colourful explosions.

In the world of online gaming, the day someone stops showing up you don’t quite notice it at first, then a month down the line you might wonder what happened to that person. You could miss talking, but if they don’t come online again all you often have to go by is a first name and a gamer tag. Suddenly this year, all those fun friends I played with just stopped showing up online. Or they’d be playing new games, that weren’t really my jam.

It’s strange online when this happens. You don’t stop becoming friends with that person, yet it’s sort of like going to a pub when The Football is on and you don’t watch The Football, but all your friends there really want to watch The Football. There’s some conversation, sure, mostly though it’s hard to engage with people when the rest of them are talking and focusing on an experience you can’t see. When this happens during all the time you’d normally be hanging out together, you find that instead you’re the one who stops turning up.

I never stopped liking DOTA, weirdly. I’ve had friends before who’ve found that it was a very toxic influence on their life, it made them destabilisingly angry or upset when they shouldn’t be and had to kick it. This year I started playing solo, and the weird zen-like concentration of focusing on the game not as a social tool but as a mechanically rewarding one helped me keep calm. Yet, though seeing my win percentage for the month rocket up to 70%, I felt there was some key part of me that had outgrown it.

DOTA 2 is a game, but it feels like a separate hobby. I could have described my interests as “I game, and also play DOTA 2”. There are over a hundred mechanically diverse and challenging heroes to master, that all combo in unique ways with the others on your team. It could be over a hundred hours till you’ve even played one game as each of them. The meta-game psychology and efficiency can change from patch to patch, keeping up with such things rewards you with hard-fought victory. I’ve studied and honed my mind, instincts and knowledge down to be able to recognise situations and react as best I can within a second whilst playing.

Yet, none of this knowledge is transferable. Like any good hobby I suppose. But when I could’ve learnt to program, found out and really taught myself how to be a better video editor, I instead invested enough time for a second job into a game that by its nature will probably render my knowledge of it obsolete in 6 months or less. It’s a bit painful to think of that wasted time, but as I’ve come to write this post I don’t think it was truly wasted. The experiences might not be universally understood when I come to talk to others, but the calmness, fun memories and people I met during my time with DOTA 2 are worth something to who I am as a person going forth.

This month, November 5th 2016, I decided to stop playing. No big ceremony, no bad rage inducing game, just a calm decision made in strength even though I liked it still.

Three days later my girlfriend left me. That’s not really related, I just thought it was an good  red herring to grab your attention and lead you into the conclusion.

I don’t think I’ll ever boot up DOTA 2 now, apart from maybe a one-off nostalgia with old gaming friends. But you don’t tend to take up fly fishing at a time when you need to be working on yourself, your career and socialising in a city. I feel pretty decent at DOTA 2 now, and know I could even master it to a degree, but that’s a crazy time investment that only a teenager/student can afford to do really and expect to see a career in esports as the payoff. It’s best for me to walk away now, with my happiness in the game high, and take that confidence of knowing the steps to mastery into the more positive things demanded of me in life. GG Dota, you were well played.

Tokyo Drift: Food

I wonder if you know, how they live in Tokyo, if you’ve seen it and you mean it then you know you have to go, unfazed and curious.

I recently went to Tokyo for 6 days. The only Japanese words I knew were “hello”, “excuse me” and “cat”. Also futanari, but I had no intention of using that one. Though not quite enough language knowledge to sit and appreciate a 40ft scroll of Japanese poetry, it did get me an amused bow and smile from an old man when I pointed at a cat and went “Neko!”. I’m 26.

Since coming back I’ve found it hard to answer the question “What was Tokyo/Japan like?” other than with some wanky summary like “An energetic serene juxtaposition” that has everyone nodding with assuaged wisdom. So I’m going to try to break it down here into categories. First up, eating.

THE FOOD

Every single person I spoke to before leaving had similar advice here. “The food is amazing, you’ve got to have an open mind and try everything”. Then I’d mention I don’t like fish and pork smashes my digestive system in twain, plus I was travelling with a vegetarian. The response would be “Good luck”.

The food IS amazing. Small little 5-30 person eateries are jammed everywhere in Tokyo, all cooking delicious smelling things or attacking anything seafood related like it slept with their wife then invaded their home planet. It’s an amazing spectacle and one that should be enjoyed with no more than 4 of your senses.

Cute deserts are a common artform in Tokyo.

The downside is that you will find close to zero Vegetarian friendly Japanese dishes on offer. Most places will not even be able to do a boring veg option to placate your Vegetarian companion as you go crazy over the 60,000 ways to try meat & fish. Even if they say they do a meat free option, Tokyo will hide animal in everything.

Tofu & vegetable noodles? Cooked in a chicken or pork broth. Tomato sauce? Made from fish oil. Simple coffee? Gelatin sweeteners dissolved in it. Sweet red cabbage & rice sushi roll? Surprise salmon. At one stage we even bought a pot noodle that translated to “spicy tomato” with only tomato and pasta listed on the ingredients. Got it home, poured kettle water in and was ready to eat when the discovery was made that there were bacon bits in it.

Japan has no understanding of vegetarianism as a concept. There is literally no word for “vegetarian” in the Japanese vocabulary. The closest is the term “Shojin ryori” which is the term given to the diet pursued by Buddhist monks in Japan. Only, it’s about not eating meat when you really want to eat meat to be more spiritual, and even then Buddhism allows you to snack down on your animal friends if you want. Saying it in a restaurant is not a request for vegetarian options, but a very specific religious meal set that is done only in rare places that costs your second-born’s kidnap ransom for some fancily prepared veg & nuts. Asking for it in any other restaurant and it’d be like going to a pub and asking for the Holy Communion.

Despite appearances and description, plus asking, this was not actually vegetarian. Tasty though.

It’s vaguely seen in Japan that any dish is improved by adding meat & fish to it, so if you’re eating out why not have it in there? It’s like telling a western chef to not use any spices when cooking. Even asking English speaking staff if you can replace the chicken/beef/fish in a dish with Tofu or even have it without is as confusing as if you’d politely requested to sneeze on their car’s wing mirrors.

How does somebody with a pacifistic gullet survive in Japan then? Japanese home cooking will sometimes be vegetarian, more out of dint of it being affordable than it being the interesting option. But that’s not a choice when staying in a hotel room. Of the 4 times we researched vegetarian friendly Japanese cuisine restaurants in Tokyo, it involved a 30 minute journey across the city just to find that each one had closed down/wasn’t open.

There was even one with the owners dogs dressed in outfits that stopped serving at 7:00pm we found out, walking in at 7:30. Their regularly updated Facebook page gave their opening hours as 10am-10pm, and there were two groups sat eating already, but who can tell the whims of small businesses. I got to see the dogs though so I can retroactively be content, rather than the tired and hungry state I was in at the time that could’ve happily eaten the dogs.

The wonders of Korea-town veg-friendly dining.

Basically, full Japanese food is out as a vego. To eat vegetarian in Tokyo your choices are: Italian, Indian and Korean. This sounds a let down when you’re in Japan, but Tokyo doesn’t hold back on cooking amazing dishes even when they’re not the nation’s own. I had some of the best cooked and flavoured dishes of all those categories whilst out there, to the point that I only slightly regret not having been able to sample more national cuisine.

Another thing to note about Japan is that Breakfast isn’t that big a meal there, with most eateries not really opening till 11. Somedays I would end up eating the cooked chicken skewers that you can get behind the counter of 7/11 just to have something to chow down on on the move in the morning. Which I found is not really a done thing in Japan, maybe because it’s like the UK 40-50 years ago where street eating was frowned upon or maybe it’s because-

Continued in Part 2, THE PLACE.

EGX Rezzed 2016

Last year I came, I saw, I forgot then I wrote about some of the games I played at EGX Rezzed 2015. Oops, I did it again, I played with your heart, got lost in the game. These games to be precise.

TOKYO 42

I was pretty intrigued about this one after seeing the slick announcement trailer put out just before the show. It looked like a modern take of Syndicate with a little bit of Fez styling, and that’s exactly how it played too. There were also nudists, which I don’t remember in either of those games.

The movement feels right, the fighting is fresh and interesting. Really all this needs is more levels added as the ground mechanics and aesthetic themes are pretty solid right now. The devs seem very eager to focus on a multiplayer mode, which at once seems exciting but I’m personally wary of due to how much extra work that’ll be. I’d hate for it to distract from them delivering the full potential this game has as a single-player experience.

THE WORLD IS FLAT

The Leftfield collection is a great space at Rezzed that does lots of non-traditional development and game interaction. Last year there was a coffin, this year there was a knife that chopped at people’s fingers.

But the knife machine was broken every time I went over to try it out, so I ended up confirming how shit my geography is. The World Is Flat is controlled using a giant exercise ball, which you spin around as your “world prop” to find whatever country you’re prompted to within a time limit. It was actually good fun, and I think it has real educational possibilities.

I mean, I can now tell you where fucking Burkina Faso is for one.

OVERCOOKED!

There were lots of local co-op games this year at Rezzed, a trend I quite like to give more variety to a party than Gang Beasts and Mount Your Friends. Lacking the swinging dicks of the latter title, Overcooked is great for turning your friends into swinging dicks.

It’s Cook, Serve, Delicious! only now with multiple people helping to prep each dish as it comes up for order. So up to 4 people now have to juggle chopping, cooking, cleaning and plating dishes which can either lead to a lot of shouting and chaos, or one time when I played with 3 strangers a strange harmonious silence where we nearly beat the top score. More often setting the kitchen on fire and shouting though.

JUST CAUSE 3: SKY FORTRESS

I’m not sure what a DLC expansion to a AAA release was doing at a primordially Indie event. There was a whole room dedicated to Just Cause 3: Sky Fortress, a room that was nearly the size of the ENTIRE Indie Games section. Here it is by comparison on the supplied map.

At no stage do I understand how this was worth it for Square Enix. It felt out of theme for the rest of the event celebrating PC/Indie/VR/Alternative Gaming, plus was the only area with lots of unplayed consoles at any time. I went up to try a version, and it was merely the full Just Cause 3 with no indication on how or where to start the DLC bit. It was odd and confusing anomaly in an otherwise excellent show. I got a fridge magnet though so 9/10 GOTY + Best in Show + I Accept Wire Transfer.

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER

I love Warhammer. Back in my teen days hanging out at Games Workshop, Warhammer Fantasy was the more thoughtful and mature game about big men with weapons hitting big creatures compared to the more populist Warhammer 40K’s big space men with weapons hitting big space creatures. When 16 year olds around me were discovering other people could touch their genitals for them and go to gigs I was very excitedly hoping to roll a misfire on the first barrel then a six for the Hellblaster Volley Gun.

I’d hoped to get a little play of this in, but I’m terrible at being patient at these expos as I want to fit lots of things in. The one machine I sat down at to try it out had frozen so I gave up, but the bits I watched of other people playing this game makes me very excited. It’s looking to be a very good Total War game with Warhammer Fantasy daftness thrown in that the teen me always wanted (and installed mods trying to replicate).

General Event Thoughts…

Tobacco docks is still a brilliant venue, light and airy plus when you get tired of it all you’re a short walk away from all the cool things and food London has to offer. I don’t think I’ll bother with the main Eurogamer Expo again now it’s moved to Birmingham, being trapped on a show floor 30-60 minutes away from the City Center’s bars and good food last time killed the social reason I go to these events.

I met some great and lovely journos, devs and people this year, but some of the press side seemed especially cynical of the whole event and games in general. Back when I did it proper, Games Writing was lowly paid and highly competitive, a situation that has become worse. I can’t help but be a bit saddened over hearing folk seeing PR as their only way ‘out’, but that’s not too different to 5 years ago looking back on it. Still, when I’m job hunting myself and games continue to seem a fun thing to cover, it’s a mood killer seeing people in fortunate jobs feeling trapped there or that they can’t go on to other fun things due to the pressures of getting older.

Speaking of press at these events it feels weird to see barely any Print Journos about any more. Instead, there’s swathes of Youtubers pointing cameras whilst rollicking around the show floor that don’t interact with the traditional/online press in any form. It’s as though the Press side has a disparaging view of this medium and shuns them as unprofessional, whilst the Youtube side are either ignorant of the role of press or equally dismissive of them in turn as an outdated/’corrupt’ old guard. I’m just talking out of my arse here really.

All the VR stuff looked really exciting but I couldn’t be fucked with queuing or signing up to an appointment, and a show floor felt the wrong place to  fumble about in so it’ll be a mystery unchecked for now. I will say though that for Expos, the wet-wipeability of the HTC Vive and Playstation VR are a big plus compared to the fabric fitting of the Rift. 250+ people’s sweat all mingled together, a nice little sponge for your forehead.

I’m happy that an event like Rezzed exists where punters and small-time Indies can interact, and though I grumbled a bit about Just Cause 3’s presence I think having a few big ‘mainstream’ titles there helps ticket sales so long as they’re not dominating. If more people come to play those, then stick around the rest of the day to discover the other brilliance on offer then I think that’s a good thing.

Why I Rage-Quitted 2016’s Most Relaxing Game

Stardew Valley is the surprise hit of 2016. Within 12 days of launch, it sold roughly 425,000 copies making its talented solo-creator Eric Barone a sudden millionaire by estimate. It’s meant to be a relaxing farm simulation role-playing game with a heavy Harvest Moon influence. Friends lulled me into playing it with sweet whispers of its meditative and calming powers, that it was a massage for soul and mind.

Instead of finding a good massage I felt like I’d found a bad ureteroscopy. It was one of the most stressful gaming experiences I’ve had this year, but it’s all my fault.

Me playing Stardew with the HTC Vive.

I knew I was starting to get in over my head when a cat turned up in the morning to live with me. I think it’s meant to be a sweet and adorable moment, but all I could think was this little furry bastard was another spanner in the works of my super-efficient country life dreams. I was already spinning too many plates in an ever increasing daily To-Do list. At this rate of burden on my finances and time I’d always live in a shack, a small shitty shack in the country.

Reflecting this new threat to my farming existence I tried to name the cat Chariman Meow, but as this was too long I settled in calling it Meowist. No time to dwell, as I’d accumulated 50 crops that needed tending on a daily basis. My Cauliflowers had been growing for 11 days and would be ripe to pick and sell for a big profit that could be re-invested tomorrow. I walked up to the first one, got my watering can ready and instead accidentally swung a pickaxe and destroyed it.

I stood for a moment dumb founded, before slamming ALT+F4 to quit the game. Then for the first time in my life I uninstalled a game not out of boredom but because, really, it had broken me. A single lost Cauliflower hadn’t caused this much emotional turmoil since the last Brassicaphile convention.

Having never played Harvest Moon back in the 90’s, I lack grounding for something like Stardew Valley. Most of my gaming time recently has been taken up with competitive multiplayer games like DOTA 2 and CS: GO, or intense single player experiences like XCOM 2. There’s really one common theme across my gaming repertoire of late; that if you don’t use your time well then when it comes to the late game, you’re going to be more fucked than a sperm bank’s communal fleshlight.

Stardew Valley starts with inheriting your Grandad’s old farm and you leaving your soul-crushing job at the game’s vague antagonist corporation, Joja. Only once you get to the farm you find it’s more crap-laden than the hall space at Crufts after a mass laxative spiking incident. Clearing out all the stones, trees and overgrown grass on the farm takes time and energy, and as you only have a limited energy bar and a ingame clock to contend with a whole day spent toiling away can often feel like very little was achieved.

Pictured: A Farm.

Ontop of this the game starts to breadcrumb numerous trails to all the things you can do in it, often in the form of pleasant messages and gifts in your mailbox each morning. As the only things I’ve ever received in the real life mail from friends is 10kg of hot chocolate and a toothbrush, this is a novelty in of itself. Nice though these quests might be, I was soon losing head space to keep track of all the things I should be doing. Having mentally mapped out how much space could be cleared, where to explore and what needed to be bought & planted the next day it was soon tossed aside each time I woke up to a new letter.

A message came through saying that the mines had opened up. When checking it out, I was handed a sword and told to clear my way down to level 5. I was now playing a lite dungeon crawler RPG, fighting monsters and huffing the only thing I had in my inventory at that point for health; foraged dandelions. I don’t know where this fitted into my owning a farm. Having grown up in the Yorkshire countryside, my theory is you’re not allowed to be a full farmer till you’ve taken up a weapon and killed the shit out of something small and slightly edible. Probably. It might not have to be edible, I’m not sure.

As things were starting to get truly overwhelming a Wizard told me I needed to save nature, then I collapsed from exhaustion next to a pond and somebody robbed me in my sleep. It was now at the stage where I felt there were too many elements introduced for me to master even one effectively let alone several. Not knowing what skills or crops would be needed to pass later challenges, who I should’ve met or when I’d have to do so as the calendar marched ever forwards. All this culminated in my destroyed Cauliflower breakdown. I was beset by stressful challenges and micromanaging where others had described relaxation and gaming therapy. I tapped out.

37 Friends can be wrong

Having retreated to a game of DOTA and a beer to calm me down, it nagged me that Stardew Valley didn’t click with me. Talking to friends about it again, they were having the time of their lives setting up sprinklers, naming baby cows and harvesting turnips. I’d not been so eluded by the benefits of getting into green crops that zoned out all my friends since secondary school. Mentioning how worked up trying to keep on top of everything had made me, it was a comment from a friend that made me consider that maybe I’d been trying to make the game click on entirely the wrong terms.

“You know it doesn’t matter if you miss something right dude? It just rolls around again the next year, it’s always going to be there. Like, you don’t have to do everything. Just take it at your own pace”. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that it didn’t matter about missing events, that the game had no grand set win or fail state. There was no need to get to the top of all the vocations as quick as possible. If I couldn’t socialise with a game nor master then beat it, what was the point of it?

Fishing.

In my crazy juggling of tasks, fishing had really struck a chord with me when playing the game. Testing myself, I cautiously reinstalled it (thankfully it’s a small download) and decided bollocks to everything going on, I’m going to get my rod out and play with myself tonight. It’s a strangely satisfying minigame, fishing in Stardew, and it’s all I did for 2 hours apart from a little light watering of my remaining cauliflowers. A daily walk to whatever bit of water I wanted, then spending the day calmly getting better at reeling fish in. It was the most relaxed I’d felt for weeks with a game, allowing myself to take this time to do not very much at all but appreciate the charming atmosphere.

That’s when I truly ‘got’ Stardew Valley’s appeal. It really is a magical zen space where you become one with nature, cordon it off then dig it up and sell it. The hints of new areas and things to do are just that, hints. Not secret or urgent content you need to unlock, merely new space there for when you feel ready for a change. No high scores, no competition, nowhere you need to press on to be just a sweet open story and carving out a space just for yourself.

After getting my rod all fishy I eventually put it and my tackle away, then picked up my hoe again and took a relaxed approach to the rest of the game. Rather than focusing on a singular task I was playing on whims. One day I might decide to chop down trees, the other I could try and win people over by giving them week-old Spaghetti. Soon I was managing all sorts at once, but destroying a Cauliflower or two didn’t matter at all because at last, I was at ease.

I had to unlearn every gaming instinct I’d unknowingly built up over the years on how to approach a game when it came to Stardew Valley. Here was a title that didn’t ask you to ‘game’ it in making it break to your will & skill, merely that you play it. It’s not stopped me seeking and enjoying challenge in new games mind. What it has done is made me pause and consider having a more malleable mindset to appreciating experiences outside my comfort zone, on their own terms. That’s the beauty of play that games can bring out which, if it wasn’t for some gentle coaxing by friends, I might have entirely missed out upon in Stardew due to my usual approach.

EGX Rezzed 2015

I went to EGX Rezzed. During this I spent some time in the press room, enjoying free cups of water.

This was truly how the other half lived.

One journalist in a corner putting together a list of games that were nothing to do with the show, Mike Bithell over there on twitter. Ten people sat around the altar of phone charge. To be worthy of this space I’d have to do something, and my 4 year old credentials from a year at PC Gamer weren’t going to cut it. I would have to write something brilliant, transcendent, inspiring and insipid. An article worthy of my name, nay lineage.

Here’s some games I half-remembered playing at Rezzed.

MAIA

The offspring of Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress, this is a game about being in space but on a planet, in space. Or it might have been a moon. I think it’s a moon as people are wearing space suits which is a thing you do on moons I’m pretty sure. You build rooms whilst a bit lost about what to do and command Marvin the depressed robot to mine walls. Then monsters come along and you build a glowstick in defense.

It’s early days still really, with a big 0.50 patch coming soon. Progress so far looks like it will actually get to a stage of being more complete and satisfying than Spacebase DF-9 ever was. A showroom floor with people busy queuing behind you and a demo with no clear end in sight is entirely the wrong place to play it mind. I was given a physical glowstick though so it gets a 9/10.

AVIARY ATTORNEY

Phoenix Wright, but everyone’s an animal in Victorian times and it’s drawn in a lovely ink engraving art style and fantastic music. Lots of animal puns. Game of show. Must buy.

TRI: OF FRIENDSHIP AND MADNESS

The person I was with wanted to play a game near to this, and I felt like a sit down and this game was nearby with nobody currently playing it. You can’t sit infront of something and not play it, that would be rude. My friend finished their game to go to the bathroom soon after I started this negating the need to play it, but I felt I hadn’t played it for long enough with the dev standing behind me so felt obliged to carry on.

It’s a first person puzzle platformer game with a story about god foxes, which means you can draw triangles to solve levels. It felt like a well done HL 2 mod and was a bit slow to get on with things, but I found myself genuinely enjoying it. If it came out for a fiver I’d spend an afternoon relaxing to it.

EDIT: It’s been pointed out to me it was already released late last year, and is currently on sale at around a fiver. I’m really good at research and fact-checking.

TAPHOBOS

Known colloquially as “that game with the coffin”, it was a game with a coffin. And a 30 minute queue. One person played a first person platformer trying to find the coffin, the other laid in a coffin then had a VR headset showing them inside of a coffin and would have clues to read out.

A lot of potential for a great claustrophobic experience, sadly rendered useless. The game isn’t randomised, so if you see someone ahead of you playing it you know exactly where to go. Rather than having clues etched onto the lid of the coffin, instead *spooky* white text flashes up with cheesy clues. The other player doesn’t even need the clues, as the game is one long corridor meaning most experiences lasted under 5 minutes. Not really the impression they were going for by any means and as it’s a student project, I doubt they’ll have the time/money/inclination to continue with it. Bloody students.

It was quite comfy to lay down in though.

FRACTURED SPACE

Dota 2 meets Star Trek Online. 5vs5 lane pushing but with spaceships. I didn’t play this one but it looked cool. 10/10.

TITAN SOULS

I’ve never played Shadow of the Colossus. I hate/am bored by Dark Souls. This was great though, basically a boss rush game where both you and the boss die in a single hit, and you only have one arrow. I was shit at it. Eurogamer Gold Badge/10.

EVERY OTHER GAME I PLAYED AT THE SHOW

There were some other really good and bad games I played, but I can’t be bothered to draw any more. They’re all probably 7/10 and roughly 50% had kickstarters attached to their flyers.

EGX Rezzed was a good experience with nice games and passable people, with the Tobacco Docks being an excellent venue and the relaxing opportunity to informally chat to devs whilst playing their game is an experience that should not be passed upon. If you hate the soulessness & sweaty cramped conditions of other expos this was a refreshing change, though as it lacked a decent pub nearby I give it 1/10.

Breaking Space Station 13

Space Station 13 is a 2d online role-playing game that involves up to around 60 players all acting out menial & exciting jobs on a vastly interactive futuristic station, in rounds that generally last between 30-60 minutes. It is bonkers. Many stories have been posted about it elsewhere, some amazingly written. I want to talk about a particularly peculiar but interesting experience for me, from a game that is seemingly notorious for them.

For this round I’d rolled a Detective. Rolled in the D&D class sense of the word, not that I’d accosted a sleeping officer. One useless gimmicky thing the detective spawns with (aside from the ability to play the YEAHHHH sound effect from CSI Miami when putting on sunglasses) is a pair of “Virtual Reality” goggles. Putting them on transports a virtual representation of your character to a relaxing beach, whilst your actual character is rendered immobile and vulnerable in the real game world until you take them off again. Normally these are thrown in the trash at the very start to make way for more useful items, but before this could be done a voice entered my head.

“HEY DEVILISH”

Direct admin chat was being addressed to me (my character was called Devilish Whiskers, named so as I’d given him a fine moustache). Normally the shadowy behind-the-scenes admins only talk directly to you to punish you for breaking the spirit of the game’s rules or to ascertain if someone has messed you about. To be messaged at the start of the round I was a little bit worried.

“Hello?”
“Can you do me a favour real quick?”
“Sure?”
“Put on your VR goggles”

I picked them up and placed them on, and sure enough my character was transported to the sunny but useless beach. Not sure what the voice wanted me to do next, I picked up a volley ball and splashed in the sea for a little bit. For the look of the thing.

“Hang on a sec, going to try something and see if it breaks the game”
“Okay. I’ll carry on splashing for you till then”

Suddenly, a portal appeared on the beach. Stepping into randomly appearing portals in SS13 is usually a bad idea. They can either transport you to somewhere useful or off-limits 5% of the time, or there’s a 75% chance you’ll transport into the abyss of space to suffocate and freeze to death. The other 20% is teleporting into a wall and instantly dying which on the whole is a risk best worth avoiding.

“Step in”

Not wanting to disobey Game God I did as I was duly told. The portal ended up taking me not to the darkness of space but instead to my own Detective’s office. Next to my character who was wearing the VR goggles still and who was completely immobile.

“Cool! That worked.”
“What do I do now? What happens if I take the goggles off?”
“I don’t know. Try it!”

I took them off and the Virtual version of me vanished for me to take control of my original character again. I put the Goggles back on and stepped through the portal on the beach to end up in the office once more. Important questions raced through my mind.

“If I die as a virtual hologram, does my body die as well?”

Knowing if I was in a forgettable Bruce Willis movie was a top priority after all.

“I don’t think so, nope! Infact, strip your body”
“Excuse me?”
“Strip your body of all your detective stuff, and hide your body in your office’s locker.”

I ended up stripping my original character down to his underpants whilst I put on his clothes and took his items, before rolling my stiff detective body into an ID locked locker and securing it away. I rolled a Detective.

“Okay, you’re now a virtual detective. Go solve crimes but remember, keep your body safe!”

The voice left me behind and I tried to get back into the swing of SS13. I mean, I was still playing as a Detective, but only I knew what weirdness I’d just endured in the past 5 minutes and why I was a hologram walking about the station. My virtual status was a subject of much bemusement to everyone that I met, who were busy being wrapped up in the weirdness of their own rounds to suddenly have a holographic detective turn up and try to solve crimes. It didn’t matter to them that I was more useful than a garden strimmer and quite a swimmer.

Shrivelled up corpses had started appearing in the maintenance ducts around the station which meant a Changeling; a player who looks like just a normal character up until they assault you and drain your life essence after which they can morph into you. Tracking them down is hard and the corpses were piling up, but I felt fairly safe in that a changeling wouldn’t be able to kill me as a hologram. Well, possibly wouldn’t be able to kill me. And so long as I kept my body safe.

“HEY DEVILISH”

Admin God was speaking again after 15 minutes of no contact. I was in the middle of chasing a suspicious looking character through the dark maintenance area that I had a hunch could be the monstrous changeling. It looked like generic genetic crime would have to wait.

“I want to try something else. Go and get the locker with your body in and drag it back to here”

Hideous shape-shifting monster forgotten in order to feed my curiosity about what was going to happen next I dragged my body-locker halfway across the station. A security officer questioned me on the way about why I was acting suspiciously, but I told him it was fine officer I was just dragging my own body with my virtual body because a higher power told me to. This was accepted. I arrived back where I was originally contacted in Maintenance.

“Okay you know where the garbage chute is?”
“Yeah, I think so. It’s just south of here”
“I want you to take your body and throw it in the grinder”

The Grinder is just as it sounds. A conveyor belt leads to it which all the trash chutes on the station deliver garbage onto, that is then fed into the Grinder. Bodies that go through it tend to come out as a red gooey gibbed mess usually, but I placed trust in the voice.

Grabbing my naked body with my virtual one, I threw it onto the conveyor belt and watched it edge its way towards the grinder. It hit the grinder and became a fine red mist, but my virtual self didn’t vanish.

“Oh.”
“Cool!”
“That was my body wasn’t it?”
“Yeah but you’re still here! I didn’t think it’d work. Right, can you put these VR goggles on now?”

Still trying to process the fact I’d just murdered myself but was alive enough to regret it, a pair of VR goggles magically appeared out of the air next to me. I put them on and took control of a Virtual-Virtual version of me that was on a flashing blue neon map. Another portal appeared and I just walked through it, to end up next to my Virtual body. A spectator had come along at this point who simply said “The fuck is going on”. I couldn’t answer.

“Now I want you to throw your Virtual body in the Grinder”
“Haven’t I killed enough?”
“Trust me”

I repeated the process of stripping and murder that had gone on with my real body and threw my original hologram body into the grinder. Another pair of VR goggles appeared and before even being told I put them on to be transported to the same neon plane of existence and popping into the real world again as a Virtual-Virtual-Virtual Devilish Whiskers. My name was beginning to be a bit of a mouthful.

“Shouldn’t I just be Neo or something by this point? I seem to have conquered death in a virtual world.”
“Hey, you’re right! Give me a moment”

Before my eyes, my character’s clothes were replaced with a black trenchcoat and garments along with dark sunglasses, and my long name was changed to simply read “THE ONE”. A personal teleporter was also dropped into my inventory, allowing me to port around the station on a whim.

I was frankly amazed by the unravelling of all this. Space Station 13 has always been a inventive and mad place but it was impressive to see first hand an example of how game code and assets could be inserted during a round. Sometimes this creativity won’t be for any technical reason but because the admins themselves are bored gods wanting to tinker with their live creation. It was like watching a film be changed around you whilst having a direct conversation with the director, which I find is such an incredibly interesting & powerful avenue for games to explore.

I later asked the admin what he was doing and he said he was changing the code that linked the player character to their virtual one, and wanted to see how many extensions it could go through without breaking the game. He also had to draw quickly the black trenchcoat and create a whole new map level plane to transport the Virtual-Virtual version of myself to. All whilst a round with 45 other players was playing out around me, all of whom were none the wiser to this going on.

It’s for reasons like this that Space Station 13 has been such a strongly creative game. It is undeniably ugly and hacked together at times, but because of this it is incredibly robust to build upon. Crazy ideas can be tried out on a whim and scrapped without too much lost development time, plus fresh admins and creators are easily able to come in and add their ideas too. New things are still being added on a near-weekly basis even. The Space Station 13 you play today is the result of nearly 6 years of this collective mad bodging and stripping. It is the beauty of Sleep is Death but in an interactive game world, and the scope of Dwarf Fortress personalised.

I spent the rest of my holographic round porting around the station, trying to find people to confuse with my new almost deity status. By this point though the station had fallen into anarchy with a deadly uncaught changeling running around and all the security dead so the escape shuttle had been called. Using my new found powers I teleported to infront of the escape shuttle and walked onboard.

“BEHOLD. FOR I AM THE ONE.”

My panache for being a dramatic dickhead was rewarded by 3 people wearing paper hats robusting me around the head with fire-extinguishers until I fell into unconsciousness, then farting on my head just as the round ended. Which is as ever an important lesson – just because someone powerful in a world has taken an interest in you doesn’t mean other people have to indulge you if they don’t feel like it.

Bad Sci-Fi Short Story Jam

For those who might not know, Andy Kelly is running a story jam for bad science-fiction short stories. Awful writing is a secret pleasure of mine, as it’s either hilarious or educating me on how to be less shit at this writing lark.

In more recent times we’ve had the infamous THE EYE OF ARGON to entertain us, but bad writing and the enjoyment of it is an old artform. There’s the case of Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose writing was so awful that J.R.R Tolkien and friends would try reading aloud her works and see who could go the longest without laughing. There’s even a place in my heart for bad fanfic too, like My Immortal or the notorious Half Life: Full Life Consequences.

I encourage everyone to enter, the email address and very loose rules can be found at the site proper here where I look forward to reading your intended shitty writing.

In turn below is my magnum opus, entitled SPACE OF ADVENTURE IN SPACE. I took an hour out to do it and had good fun, if it gets a few laughs then it was totally worth my time.

READ SPACE OF ADVENTURE IN SPACE AT YOUR OWN BEHEST.

Road Rage: Flipping the Bird

Back in 2009 when I was living in Newcastle, I’d make the trip back home to Doncaster once a month or so for the delights of a non-coin operated washing machine and proper nutrition. The journey itself is a nice and straight forward one; 2 hours and a bit down the A1 with only a small slowing section of average speed check cameras. A pretty mundane route, that would’ve remained so until it created one of the most terrifying and psychotic driving experiences of my life.

For reasons far too complex and lazy to describe, I decided to start my journey down at 10 o’clock on a Friday evening. I enjoy the tranquility of night time driving and the sheer bliss of empty roads to cruise down, so it wasn’t that unusual for me to do. I was basking in the relaxing drive down so much I decided after about an hour and 20 minutes to spice up the mundanity of the A1 and head to country roads for the rest of the voyage home.

I prepped the satnav and told it to avoid the motorway, and made to pull off at the next exit and see where it would take me. Coming off the ramp & roundabout the route immediately became a village with a 30mph speed limit, which I was happy to stick to. The only problem was that soon a mystery set of headlights would come up the same ramp as I and then take issue with a 30mph speed limit, take issue with me obeying it, take issue with the existence of life and take issue over people with any general sanity.

Most of us have come across road rage and whilst I wouldn’t say I’m the Dalai Lama of driving, I’m only ever a grump at most behind the wheel. I however have never seen anything close to this car (that I like to refer to as Headlight Cunt) in terms of sheer, inexplicable anger. Coming off a motorway into a 30mph zone at 11:20pm must really have galled them, as the first thing they did was drive 2 meters behind my rear bumper and start banging on the horn and flashing their lights for 5 seconds. Incensed by my refusal to drive faster through a tight village that I didn’t know in pitch black conditions, they amped up the tempo by leaving their full beams on and escalating the pipping for the next 5 seconds.

At this point in the space of 10 seconds I have gone from peaceful reverie to hounded by the biggest cock-end of a driver. I’m part confused why he hasn’t overtaken me, part pretty miffed about their behaviour and so decide to do what in hindsight was a pretty silly thing; I threw up my middle finger at them. It wasn’t a meditated ‘roll down the window and stick your hand out’ flipping off, more done so offhandedly in the interior of my car so they could see my silhouette.

If I’d thought about how crazy this person was in the 10 seconds our paths had met, I would’ve thought better than trying to provoke them. As soon as I did that, they overtook me. Before I could even think “Thank christ” and enjoy the rest of my drive they swerved back infront of me and slammed on the brakes. My reactions are pretty fast, but even slamming on my own brakes as I did I still crashed into the rear of their car. Just as I’m recovering from the shock of someone deliberately causing a crash 20 seconds after being on the road with them out jump two guys, slamming the doors behind them on what I can see now is a black Subaru Impreza.

They seem like they’re in their mid-30’s, one looks like a 6ft bald stocking over-stuffed with too many muscles and the other is a lankier but still pretty stocky guy carrying a tyre iron. They’re moving fast. I’m 19, out of shape, 140lbs and don’t have a weapon so in 0.2 seconds I decide “Fuck this for a lark” and slam the car in reverse. Adrenaline is pumping through my body and I don’t think I have enough time to spin the car around on a narrow lane and I don’t want to crash whilst reversing, so after backing out of their rear spoiler I punch it into first and drive past them.

The meat-stocking jumps out of the way and I blitz on past and see in my mirror them scrambling back into their car. It’s now about 30 seconds since I met these people. A number of things are pounding through my mind right now. Firstly, ESCAPE. Secondly, what the fuck is going on. Thirdly, holy crap I just drove my car at a guy.

I’m out the village now but I’m barely 5-10 seconds away before they’ve caught up to me as I’m only driving a 1.2 litre Ford Fiesta. The following minute I’ve yet to find a more terrifying drawn out experience in my life, as I’m thinking of a way I can use my abilities and manipulate their reckless driving & speed into a way that will enable me to escape from this situation. The car chase has me keeping to a steady 60mph, any faster and I fear I won’t have the grip or maneuverability to avoid them nor survive the crash they seem intent on causing. They try to pit me once (shunt the back edge of my car to make it spin) , but I go onto the grass just next to the fields either side of me to avoid them. The next three attempts they seem to start being aware of not wanting to crash and damage their vehicle anymore, so try a repeat trick of burst speeding past me then slamming on the brakes hoping I’d go into the back of them. Each time I dodge and get into the lead once more, but I know my luck is running out.

As they make for a 4th attempt we enter the edge of a small town and I see my chance on the satnav; a road turning off. I let them power by as they overtake to slam on the brakes again, only I bank a hard right and go plummeting down a narrow winding 1-car width lane with bushes either side. There’s some houses down the lane, and I throw myself into the open gates of one of the courtyards then kill my lights. What felt like an age but probably no more than a minute later I hear the Subaru roar on past, obviously thinking I was further ahead.

Not wanting to wait incase they realised their mistake and came hunting, I immediately head back down the way I came and through the village to the A1, before having a nerve-wracking drive down the motorway fearful about what I’d see in my rear-view mirror. I tried visualising the licence plate, but I was too busy panicking to remember it so reporting them to the police was out. When I got home slightly shaken and after checking to see if the front of my car was damaged I told my parents and older brother about this, who simply told me it was my fault for antagonising them and didn’t seem too worried. “They were probably coke heads” one of my family opinions.

Even though this was a freak experience with psychotic individuals, I did learn things I still apply to my regular road use. Now if somebody seems a completely insane or unreasonable driver on the road I don’t do anything, even if I’m annoyed, simply try to let them by as soon as possible. Antagonising people who seem to lose all reason & clarity when driving a car can end up with you injured or killed. Another thing I worry about from this is whilst I’m slightly proud of my quick reaction times and escaping abilities, what if the guy on the road hadn’t jumped out of the way? I’m not sure where I’d be legally with that. The main consequence of all this though is I’ve never flipped anybody off since, in or out of the car.

Till now ┌∩┐.

Documentary Quest – Part One

I’m going to make a documentary on the Games Media. This is going to be my open chronicle about all the stresses and behind the scenes thinking for anyone that likes that kindof stuff. You weirdo.

Why?

Over the past 5 years I’ve sat in and outside of Games Media in positions more boring than a Christian sex chronicler’s wildest dreams. Whilst this means I’m barely even a cupboard-hold known name and am remembered as fondly as a pane of glass, I have had the privilege of getting to know this industry from many different perspectives. I’ve worked on magazines, websites, digital publishing & video. I’ve had friends and colleagues set up their own brand names whilst others still have circumvented the traditional routes entirely and embraced youtube, crowdfunding or ‘other’.

I think it’s a weird, fun, underpaid & nonsensical industry with a low-entry point that is misunderstood by many on the outside and which many on the inside struggle to explain. There’s been the semi-wanky but fantastically engrossing “Indie Game: The Movie” shedding light on small-time games development, but the closest the Games Media side has come is to that narrowly focused and off-putting Polygon founding documentary.

I believe in the adage “if you believe you can do better, then do it” so I thought bugger it, I’ve needed a good project for a while and I’m in a good position in my life to make this happen (semi-employed, without a family & masturbating too often). I want to make something informative and enjoyable to watch, that might get people to think and appreciate or change this industry for the better.

But really, it’s mainly about making everybody look at me.

The Plan

So how the fuck am I going to pull this off? (as the nun said to the priest etc.). The basics so far is that I’m going to interview approximately 10 people from various roles in Games Media industry around the UK; travelling down to wherever they live and filming about an hour-long interview with them. Then once I’ve got my 8-15 hours of interview footage, I’ll then script probably about five 15 minute long episodes where I intersplice interview footage with host segments either explaining different facets or setting up a section of aforementioned interview clips.

Basically think of it like a shittier version of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe only with me as a much worst host, no budget and more focus on the people interviewed. At the moment I’m focusing on getting decent interviewees and covering as many angles as possible without feature creeping or losing focus. There’s no point hard-locking in what I’ll say in my host segments, as I want to be free to react to what might come out of the interview process.

I should also clarify by when I say Games Media, I don’t mean PR or other erstwhile areas. I’m focusing more on the places that cover gaming news, reviews and thought as part of their bread and butter. I’m only touching on it briefly in this documentary but in the future I would like to cover how the Games Media interacts with PR and actual Publishers/Devs and their perspectives, but I think that makes my focus too broad for now especially considering what I have in my budgetry range.

I’ll place the finished product on Vimeo/Youtube probably around the end of March. It’ll be free for all to watch, as I fully don’t expect to even make a single penny back let alone break even. If this kindof thing was profitable, someone in the industry proper would’ve commissioned it already.

Limitations

Money. Money money money. I don’t get my kicks for free. All of the equipment, travel, editing software, hospitality for me and 1-2 other people on the small crew I’ve got together is coming out of my pocket. A round trip to London (where most UK media is based outside of a few outlying places like Bath) driving down costs me around £80 in fuel alone, and if I can’t cram as many interviews as possible into the Weds-Sun slot I have each week it’s going to start mounting up.

It also means I can’t do the rest of the world’s Games Media any justice, as frankly I cannot afford to pay my own airfare and travel around the US or EU let alone for 1-2 others. I’ll try to cover some of the cultural differences between say the US and UK Games Media, but it’s going to be difficult to give it proper credence. I’m going to have difficulty enough making sure UK Games Media people are free and open to interview on a compatible timetable during the timeframe I want to film (Feb-March).

Another thing I fear is that on the 9th person I interview they raise a really interesting point that I’d really want to go back and ask all the other people before them. I’m just going to have to accept it as one of those things sadly, and hope the prep work and questions will be adequate. I’m also terrified that my host segments will drag the whole piece down, and writing a clear concise script that focuses on the key points I want to make on how Games Media works, why people choose to go into it & the past, present and future of it is a daunting task.

Why not Crowdfund?

The big thing I keep being asked when I mention this project is “What about Crowdfunding?”. Well, I have little to no social media presence and my mixed-insider/outsider status means I have difficulty getting others to view my work, let alone chip in money to an unknown & unproven person. Secondly I also feel that even if I did have a big following, crowdfunding makes me feel uneasy. In my mind (even though many cases have proven it otherwise) it doesn’t feel like a money for product service, but instead telling your audience “Could you chuck me some of your hard-earned cash to indulge my own dreams? Nothing’s guaranteed about what I’ll produce”. Some are comfortable with that idea, I’m personally not.  It’s why I’ve saved up my own money to make this project happen, so I don’t feel beholden to anyone.

A third issue is that I cannot for the life of me think of any decent pledge awards that doesn’t mean a fuckload of extra work for a one-man operation to organise. All I really want to do is focus on the creating side plus massive volume of filming and editing ahead of me, not ordering body-sized pillows with custom decals.

Open to Suggestions

I’ve never done anything even close to this scale before, and whilst I think I’ve got a grip on the basics of it I am still very welcoming of advice, ideas and importantly help (locations, places to stay, props) at this stage before anything is properly set in stone and I’ve approached people to interview. To reach me either give me a prod on twitter @EGTF, or email me at egtfenning (at) googlemail (dot) com.

Alzheimer’s

For all the times I’ve sat infront of a keyboard and monitor, I don’t think I’ve truly ever written something personal. I come from a caring line of people, but the way we deal with hurt or grief outwordly is to not complain but joke about it and move on, or grin and bear it till you can. Plenty of dark humour. Don’t succumb to getting wrapped up in yourself. It explains a lot about my writing style, but for once I’d like to share something intimate without detracting from the emotion with constant jokes.

When I was 6, my Grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I was too young to notice the signs let alone what the disease was, but apparently for the  two years before the diagnosis she’d been subtly behaving odd. Now, when you see Alzheimer’s on tv you tend to see an elderly person in a home, forgetting their own name every now and again but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. Growing up with a relative with the condition it… wasn’t like that, really.

She was an intelligent woman from what I’ve been told, playing backgammon and chess regularly. But being too young and naive to know her as that, I didn’t really realise how this person was changing. A person with Alzheimer’s doesn’t sit about idly in a chair forgetting about conversations they just had, they start to get scared or not realise what they’re doing and operate on base instinct. As the condition progressed routine and impulse started to take over from rationality, such as her stacking objects endlessly then not remembering doing it or why.

As she got worse, she’d start to wander from the house. One example that sticks out in my mind is that she used to do the shopping for her and my Grandad on a routinely basis. One time when she walked out the house she picked up her laundry hamper/bag, walked to the local shop and just started putting everything she could in the bag. Once she got to the counter the instinctive part realised that something was meant to be handed over, so she reached into her hamper and pulled out one of her bras, placing it on the till before walking out to the baffled clerk that knew her.

It’s funny to joke about now and it makes it easier to look back on, but it’s a scary thing seeing someone be slowly lost piece by piece like that. She was aware something was wrong, but didn’t know what. It ended up that she first couldn’t travel to anywhere unfamiliar as she’d want to escape and be home. A memorable incident of this is a family holiday where in the middle of the night she became frightened and confused, so started to run around the halls of the hotel half naked with my Grandad and parents chasing after her.

The life expectancy after diagnosis is roughly seven years with Alzheimer’s, so you get to see those afflicted with it shuffle off with some sense of themselves still there. My Grandad on the other side of the family had dementia, which isn’t easy to see or live with but comes as more a slow softening of the faculties and when he died, I knew he was still there in some way. By the time I was 15, my Grandmother was still alive but not really speaking or moving that much. She could still do a little of both but she’d forgotten me and her other grandchildren’s names, though would stare with familiarity, and just liked to be sat there in a chair whilst we all talked.

When I was 17 roughly, she stopped being able to walk or use words and my Grandad started paying for round-the-clock carers with a special adjustable bed, hoist and sitting chair for their home. This is the part of her condition that affected me the most, as so much of her had been lost. It wasn’t a stage of blissful peace like some seem to suggest, (though maybe she was past the point of self-awareness) as she’d still operate on instinct and get scared by things or lash out. She couldn’t feed herself or go to the bathroom, and could only communicate through noises. The doctors gave her a year at best.

Throughout all of her condition and these latter days especially, my Dad, his siblings and Grandad were amazing. I can only hope to be at least half the people they were if faced with such a situation. Not once did my Dad shirk off going to see her, going morning and night to help my Grandad feed her, clothe her, care for her. Together they sung little dittys they’d make up, over which she’d stop fidgeting and start to smile, moving her feet along with the songs. Those were the parts that gave me hope that a part of who she was still remained, however small, and it was through this care they showed that she continued to live, far past expectations.

She should have died by the time I was 14 according to estimates. She actually died only last month, when I’m now 22. It was only through such love I believe she kept going, and though it wasn’t easy to see at times I’m glad she stayed with us this long. I can’t say how much she was aware towards the end, but if you ever sadly have to deal with someone close to you having Alzheimer’s it’s worth caring for them and easing their suffering. From my experience no matter how far they seem gone, how little appears to still be there they can always be made to smile and when they do, you know it’s all worth it.