Unconsoleable #45: It's For Drunks!

It's always a lot of fun when Anna and Jessica invite me to come hang out on Unconsoleable, and this episode is no different. And nothing is more fun than tearing apart yet another "Apple needs to" article, and trying to figure out why Comcast thinks that anyone wants to control a streaming mobile game on their TV via a tablet when you could just play that same game on the tablet.

You can also have fun counting the number of times I talk about Hearthstone without actually talking about Hearthstone. (Spoiler: It's a large number.)

Not Here to Make Friends: How Toxicity in Heroes of the Storm Affected Me

I've been playing a lot of Heroes of the Storm lately. I'm not really sure what's drawn me to the game other than it's similar enough to Diablo that I was able to pick up the mechanics fairly quickly, and I've got enough nostalgia for Blizzard's characters from all the years of playing their games that it's appealed to me in a way that something like DOTA or League of Legends hasn't. The fact that the games are generally shorter tends to help, too; I rarely have an hour to dedicate to a multiplayer online game, but I can find 15-20 minute chunks in the evenings and weekends easily enough.

One of the things that had me nervous about playing a game like this was the toxicity that I've heard of in games of this type (MOBA, which is short for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena). You don't need to spend a lot of time searching online to find stories of people turning on their teammates when things go poorly and yelling at them for not playing well enough. And this is on top of the general nastiness that tends to happen online. I decided to try to put that aside given the positive things I'd heard about the game, especially since all the communication is done via either text or pings on the map, as opposed to voice, where a lot of the worst types of harassment tends to happen.

I've been playing the game for about two weeks now, and I've gotten at least the basics down. I know what characters I'm good with and those that I'm not, but one of the things that Heroes of the Storm strongly encourages is playing enough games with a character to get them up to level 5, where you get a bonus of in-game gold. This typically takes somewhere between five and ten matches, depending on how often you win and what bonuses are in place at the time. This incentive is usually enough to figure out how to play a character strategically, as well as whether it's a character you're interested in buying, either with in-game gold or real money. The game also encourages you to play games against other players, as opposed to against AI opponents, by offering more experience for games against human opponents, and it gives out "daily quests" to encourage you to play with specific kinds of characters.

I'm saying this all to explain that when I went into a quick match against human opponents today with Diablo, who is a character that I'm not particularly comfortable with, I did so both because I'm close to level 5 with him and there was a daily quest that could only be completed with a character from the Diablo series. Diablo is a melee character, and I hate playing melee because it's not my strong suit. I've got other characters who I'm much more comfortable with, but I wouldn't make much progress jumping into a game with them. (See how these incentives work?) So I went into quick match with random people to try to level him up as quickly as possible, so I could ultimately move on to a different character.

And then this happened.

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I've been kind of waiting for this shoe to fall for a while now, but I've played so many games where nothing really toxic happened that it surprised me how much it affected me when it did. I responded that some of us are newer and there's no reason to be rude, and I was told to go back and play AI and stop wrecking the game for them. I did report the person after the game, which is why I blocked out the names in the screen shot; I'm letting the system work how it's supposed to, assuming it does work at all.

I'm surprised about how much this one encounter has completely changed my feelings about the game, though. I thought I'd be able to shake it off and go right back in, but I really don't want to right now. I've written at length about my self-esteem issues and how I usually deal with them; putting me into a situation where I'm upset enough at myself for playing poorly, compounded with other people on my team telling me to kill myself because I'm not up to their standards, is something that isn't fun for me. I thought I could deal with it when it inevitably happened. At least in the time since that match ended, it turns out I can't.

This is a big problem for MOBAs in general. They have a reputation for being terrible experiences because you can control everything in the gameplay, but you can't control players' behavior. Hearthstone manages this by reducing communication to predefined emotes, but Heroes of the Storm requires teams to coordinate, so that's not an option. League of Legends has some automated solutions to this problem, so hopefully this won't be an issue in a couple of years. In the present day, though, for as many people play these games, there are many more who either get turned away like it feels like I am, or who won't approach them in the first place for fear of this kind of experience. The time up to now where I've played the game has been great, but I honestly can't recommend it to anyone without a lot of caveats because of exactly this problem.

Will I go back in to Heroes of the Storm again? I don't know. Maybe I will, with friends or at least friends of friends who I can trust. Maybe I'll get up the courage to go in solo again. (It's worth mentioning that for every encounter like this, there have been two or three where I've apologized for making mistakes or having a bad game and my random teammates were extremely understanding, but those fade quickly.) But this single experience has completely overshadowed any enjoyment I've had with Heroes of the Storm over the past two weeks.

For now, I'm going back to Hearthstone for a while. At least there, the only person I can disappoint is myself.

Less Than Or Equal #47: Steve Lubitz

I've written a lot on this site about my journey of learning that I have ADD in my mid-thirties, and discovering what that means for the person I've become and where I want to go from here. My friend Aleen Sims had me on her podcast Less Than or Equal this week to discuss what that journey has been like for me, six months in. If you've been curious about the experience of being diagnosed with ADD in adulthood or you think it's possible you might have ADD yourself, I think this is an important discussion to listen to.

Plus, I educate Aleen about the importance of Dunkin Donuts and we geek out about Splatoon for a bit, so there's that also.

Going To The Source

I first learned to code when I was four years old. My parents ended up buying a Commodore 64 despite the fact that it cost nearly as much as a car at the time, and I was immediately in love. (This despite the fact that my early exposure to it involved a lot of attempts at getting me to like Cave of the Word Wizard, which is easily one of the creepiest educational games of all time.)

The computer itself was so expensive that we didn’t get a floppy drive right away, since that was easily several hundred dollars more at the time. We had a couple of games on cartridges that plugged into the back of the C64, but most of what I did with the computer back then came from magazines. At the time, there was a magazine called Compute!'s Gazette, which had the source for programs in the back of the issue that you could enter into the computer and run. Since the operating system for the C64 was effectively BASIC, you could type the source directly in without running any additional software, run it, and have a game to play until you shut the computer down.

So I was primarily using the computer to play games, but I was also learning, at a really early age, what it takes to get a program to run. What's more, this was something that I could do by myself if I took the time to learn it, which I did. I was awesome at coding infinite loops to fill the screen with repeated text. When we eventually got a 300 baud modem and a subscription to Q-Link later on, I'd download public domain text adventure games and dump the source when I got stuck to see what to do next. This was the closest I could get to actual magic as a kid, and that feeling followed me through college and into a job where I get to make something out of nothing on a daily basis.

The thing is, I was lucky for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that I happened to be a boy. In the 80s, computers were very much marketed as something for boys, so it was an easy choice for my parents to go to the store and drop a significant amount of money on it for me to have. If I was a girl, I'd like to think my parents would have been progressive enough to still get the Commodore 64, but statistics say that's considerably less likely. Things have improved since then, but still not enough.

This has been on my mind lately because I'm in the process of figuring out how to introduce my oldest daughter to programming over the summer. She's close to a year ahead in math, so it seems like it's the right time to expose her to programming and see if it's something she likes to do. If she doesn't, that's fine, but it's important that she has that opportunity to be exposed to it and determine for herself if it's something that she could enjoy and be good at, just like I did at an early age.

My daughter is lucky, though, even though she doesn't know it, because most girls aren't in a situation where they can get that exposure early on. Programming is still seen as something "for boys" despite all the change that's happened of late, so there are a lot of girls out there who could be awesome at programming but might not ever end up getting a chance to try it; they might not have parents who are able to help them get started, and signing up for a course either in or out of school can be intimidating if it means potentially being the only girl in the room. (This is true even before harassment becomes a concern; one of my twins, despite our best efforts, bristles at trying anything she considers a "boy thing", and she's six.)

That's where App Camp For Girls comes in. This is a fantastic organization that puts on one week camps exclusively for teenaged girls, with exclusively women instructors, and gives them the opportunity to design and build an app from start to finish in a comfortable environment. They do fantastic work, and right now they're trying to raise funds to expand their efforts to more cities across the U.S. and Canada to be able to help more girls get the start they need to make a living coding. It's a cause that's really important to me, having three daughters who have the potential to do amazing things with technology if they want to, and if you feel the same, they could really use your support right now.

If you're interested in learning more about App Camp For Girls, my friend Aleen Simms has a fantastic interview with their founder, Jean MacDonald. After that, please go to App Camp For Girls' Indiegogo page and donate what you can. If we keep leaving girls' prospects in technology up to luck, things will never improve.

The Wizards

I take it back. I take it all back.

I had my reservations about the Nintendo World Championships. I felt like it was a vapid grab at nostalgia. I said it was crapping on my childhood. I thought it was going to be a disaster. I was so, so wrong.

I didn't start watching from the beginning, so I missed the Splatoon matches and the new weird robot soccer game that Nintendo debuted. When people on Twitter started talking about the competition turning to Super Metroid, I gave in and started up the stream. Watching five people battle against Mother Brain simultaneously was definitely worth watching.

Nothing prepared me for the final round, though, which had Nintendo's Treehouse team craft four of the most devious Mario levels I've ever seen, courtesy of the upcoming Super Mario Maker. The two finalists had to traverse these levels, having no way to prepare for them beyond the natural skill at platforming that they brought with them. This was an absolute sight to behold, both in terms of the downright evil contraptions the Treehouse team was able to dream up, as well as the amazing skill that the two finalists demonstrated by completing them on a time limit in front of a live audience.

Seriously, if you have any warm feelings for a 2D Mario game in your heart, you need to take the time to watch the final round. Not only was this immensely entertaining, but it made me a fan of Super Mario Maker when I was lukewarm at best about it before last night.

E3 is always an exciting time, but the trend has been for a lot of the games to be gritty, and violent, and dark. The Nintendo World Championships was a reminder that games can be fun. They should be fun. And for a few hours, they were incredibly fun. I don't think I've been that invested in watching something other than the Super Bowl in a long time. For 45 minutes, it felt like the Internet came together to watch something completely unexpected, and it was a blast.

I've been fairly skeptical of eSports up to now, but seeing that exhibition of mastery of skill at least partially converted me; it was on the level of any exciting football game I've ever watched. It might even be more impressive to me because I know what's involved in clearing a really difficult level in a platform game, and I know that what I just saw was well outside of my abilities. I have no idea what it takes to really catch a 30 yard forward pass or hit a 90 MPH fastball because I've never done it. I've played a hell of a lot of Mario though, so when I see a chain of five jumps across short platforms with buzzsaws above each one, I know exactly how difficult it is to execute even with hours of practice, let alone sight unseen. I cheered out loud the way I do when my football team scores a long touchdown, and I legitimately rooted for these people I'd never heard of an hour before.

In a year when it seems like so many announcements are being leaked ahead of time that it's hard to get too excited about the keynotes, Nintendo gave us something that we could get legitimately excited about. We got to see two people be exceptional with a controller against a team of people who were exceptional with a set of tools to build the most ridiculous challenges they could dream up. It was entertaining, and completely unexpected, and I desperately want more of it. I may or may not remember any of the games announced this week years from now, but I know I'll remember watching that final round for a really long time.