Week in review: Week to 3 May
May. 5th, 2025 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I'm pretty happy with the outcome of an election, for once.
. At board game club, we played Kemet, a strategy game with an ancient Egyptian theme. A few rounds in, one of the players – the one with the most prior experience of playing the game – nearly won outright, at which point the rest of us formed a loose alliance to prevent him from getting the last victory condition he needed and keep the game going. Later, I made some good enough moves that I found myself the focus of another loose alliance aimed at preventing me from getting the last victory condition I needed. I won in the end, but I couldn't have done it without the help and occasional advice from the other players who, when it came down to it, would rather risk me winning than let the more experienced player trounce us all.
. I've now read or re-read all the plays in the Oscar Wilde omnibus I was working my way through. The Importance of Being Earnest is even better after reading Wilde's three earlier drawing-room plays in close succession, because I had a basis for understanding how he kept the form of the genre while abandoning any pretense of taking the subject matter seriously. The scene where Gwendolen and Cecily laud Jack and Algy for their noble self-sacrifice is a beautiful send-up of the kind of scene that Wilde himself was still doing relatively straight as recently as his previous play.
. I've played Battletech a bit more and I'm... not not enjoying it, but I don't often feel the urge to play it and when I do play it I'm kind of coasting down paths of least resistance instead of getting engaged with the subtleties of the game mechanics.
I do think I was somewhat unfair in saying last week that the player character is a blank; the game does provide opportunities for characterisation in the story bits between missions. I don't believe I've encountered a story scene yet where the player's dialogue choices can lead to the main character choosing any course of action other than the one the plot requires, but they can determine things like how enthusiastic the character is about it and which of the various pros and cons they consider the important ones. And I'd been forgetting that at the start of the game you're asked to choose from a set of backstory options which not only determine the player character's starting stats but influence what dialogue options become available in the story scenes. (My character, for instance, has mentioned a few times that he really doesn't want to go out the way his parents did, and at least once that he'd rather not see any of his teammates go out that way either, which has influenced my developing impression of him as someone who is motivated by the wellbeing of his teammates.) None of this characterisation matters a jot during the main gameplay, but it's something.
. I haven't played Ingress all week, and so far I'm not missing it. I've always used it primarily as a motivator to get out and go for a walk regularly, and lately it hasn't been pulling its weight in that department; in the absence of any opposition, I'd locked down everything within walking distance, so there was nothing to do in Ingress when I went for a walk (and the more I got into going on long bike rides, the more irritating it was to have to remember to stop and do Ingress things along the way). I was obliged to come up with other motivators, and lately I've been getting pretty good at going for a walk or a bike ride just because it's something I feel like doing. In that context, doing the daily challenges had become a chore that I had to remember to complete, and then last weekend there was a day when I couldn't complete the daily challenges because there was some kind of server outage. It occurred to me that I didn't actually much care whether I completed the challenges, and indeed that if the server outage never ended I wouldn't be particularly put out – and I haven't touched Ingress since.
. At board game club, we played Kemet, a strategy game with an ancient Egyptian theme. A few rounds in, one of the players – the one with the most prior experience of playing the game – nearly won outright, at which point the rest of us formed a loose alliance to prevent him from getting the last victory condition he needed and keep the game going. Later, I made some good enough moves that I found myself the focus of another loose alliance aimed at preventing me from getting the last victory condition I needed. I won in the end, but I couldn't have done it without the help and occasional advice from the other players who, when it came down to it, would rather risk me winning than let the more experienced player trounce us all.
. I've now read or re-read all the plays in the Oscar Wilde omnibus I was working my way through. The Importance of Being Earnest is even better after reading Wilde's three earlier drawing-room plays in close succession, because I had a basis for understanding how he kept the form of the genre while abandoning any pretense of taking the subject matter seriously. The scene where Gwendolen and Cecily laud Jack and Algy for their noble self-sacrifice is a beautiful send-up of the kind of scene that Wilde himself was still doing relatively straight as recently as his previous play.
. I've played Battletech a bit more and I'm... not not enjoying it, but I don't often feel the urge to play it and when I do play it I'm kind of coasting down paths of least resistance instead of getting engaged with the subtleties of the game mechanics.
I do think I was somewhat unfair in saying last week that the player character is a blank; the game does provide opportunities for characterisation in the story bits between missions. I don't believe I've encountered a story scene yet where the player's dialogue choices can lead to the main character choosing any course of action other than the one the plot requires, but they can determine things like how enthusiastic the character is about it and which of the various pros and cons they consider the important ones. And I'd been forgetting that at the start of the game you're asked to choose from a set of backstory options which not only determine the player character's starting stats but influence what dialogue options become available in the story scenes. (My character, for instance, has mentioned a few times that he really doesn't want to go out the way his parents did, and at least once that he'd rather not see any of his teammates go out that way either, which has influenced my developing impression of him as someone who is motivated by the wellbeing of his teammates.) None of this characterisation matters a jot during the main gameplay, but it's something.
. I haven't played Ingress all week, and so far I'm not missing it. I've always used it primarily as a motivator to get out and go for a walk regularly, and lately it hasn't been pulling its weight in that department; in the absence of any opposition, I'd locked down everything within walking distance, so there was nothing to do in Ingress when I went for a walk (and the more I got into going on long bike rides, the more irritating it was to have to remember to stop and do Ingress things along the way). I was obliged to come up with other motivators, and lately I've been getting pretty good at going for a walk or a bike ride just because it's something I feel like doing. In that context, doing the daily challenges had become a chore that I had to remember to complete, and then last weekend there was a day when I couldn't complete the daily challenges because there was some kind of server outage. It occurred to me that I didn't actually much care whether I completed the challenges, and indeed that if the server outage never ended I wouldn't be particularly put out – and I haven't touched Ingress since.
