Waiting

I. Cannot. Wait.

I’m generally a very patient person. It might not seem it at first, as I’m pretty direct and prone to speaking frankly and bluntly, but that’s simply expediency. It allows me to get the most out of what I am saying in the most efficient way possible. Today, however. is not that day. As I sit typing this, I know that Game Stop, across the street, likely has a growing line around the building. The displays are being built and the store is getting ready to sell a PILE of copies of Fallout 4.

But I am not there. I am here, and once I get done writing, I am going to go to bed, wake up, and go to work.

Which, while being moderately disappointing, is not going to break my heart. What is going to grate my last nerve is this screen here:

That, good sirs and Madams, is likely to make me an irate and irritable bastard. I got a free trial of Amazon Prime because you said that I would get it launch day, not two days out!

To be fair, though, I won’t be able to play it Tuesday anyway. Its my standard Warmachine and D&D night, and I know that people are going to still want to play: Not the whole world shuts down for Fallout Release, though I wish it would.

Instead, a Wednesday delivery means that I get to play it Thursday evening, and that’s OK for me, as I then get to play out over four evenings and Nap Times on the weekend. I’ll get a solid 20% through the game in those 20 hours, if all things hold together.

With the release of such a huge and popular game, though, I want to talk a little bit about spoilers, how they are ruining the fun of games, and how I would like to be able to talk about them as freely as possible while not ruining the game. This thought is brought on directly by a fellow gamer in this post. This guy is very good at putting his thoughts onto the written and spoken word, and I really like what he writes about, though I don’t always agree with the topic or conclusion.

The Post on spoilers really got me thinking about how, in the grand scheme of things, the experience of a video game travels two separate, conflicting paths. One, the main path that is obvious and easy to comprehend, is the path of the player. You move through a game and experience it, at least I do, in order to feel the emotions that it elicits, both good and bad. This contrasts with the strong community element that thrives even in small groups of friends. Everyone wants to tell their tale, but no one wants to destroy the other persons immersive experience.

This leads to a strange dance-like discussion about any game right after release, as the participants jockey the conversation to find, without revealing anything about the game, who is the farthest along. That person becomes some form of a sage, telling stories about how they handled each of the encounters that is mentioned by the person with the least amount of game play, and each other person chimes in on how they handled the situation.

I will say this, that dance gets a bit exhausting. It is a lot of fun to share the experience, but trying to figure out where each person is so as not spoil something that happens in the game is  very hard. Each person is trying to preserve the others game experience while also reveling in the shared story that they are all going through at a similar pace. Its also not something that everything has a similar viewpoint on. Some people love spoilers of any type, others only want certain things spoiled, and other don’t even want you to whisper the name to a friend.

My Take

after thinking about the concept for a while, I really want to be able to talk about the game with my friends and anyone who reads this. To that end, I want to be perfectly clear what I consider spoilers, what I do not, and what I am going to talk about, because I intend to talk about it.

First: What do I consider spoilers. Honestly, this is pretty cut and dry: Story, and locations that can give away story by their name, and location contents. These are pretty self explanatory: the game is based on relaying a story in a unique and individual way, and I like to experience that for myself.

Now, things I don’t consider Spoilers: Game Mechanics, Character Names, Locations that are no-story line, ect. This is actually a pretty large list of stuff, when you consider it. If you told me you were gearing up to play a character who was going to be a Missile Launcher type aiming for Grim Reapers sprint, and you’d just hit 7 Luck and picked up Bloody Mess, we could have a really cool conversation on how cool it was that bloody mess exists, how fun it is to chase a high level perk, and how much fun a Missile Launcher is. We could share stories about how you blew up a pair of Mercs with missile that missed, but hit the wall behind it and killed em anyway, and I could tell you how I had a similar thing happen with my grenades. Together, in person, we could have that really cool discussion about our characters and what we’ve done.

I expect to talk a lot about the game, my experiences, and what I both enjoy and dislike. I am also going to try very hard to figure out how to do spoiler-text that only enlarges on a click, so that I can have a discussion with friends about story, without forcing story elements on those who don’t want to read them.

I look forward to playing the Irish Ninja out of Boston, and I look forward to hearing your stories and discussing all the things that happen in Fallout 4: Releasing in 7 minutes, as the clock says now.

Till tomorrow!