A Window, A Light...

Autumn is always the time I associate most strongly with my late high school years so, like it or not, so I often end up with flashbacks to sitting in a small, white room listening to downloaded music on an outdated PC and working on updating my primitive website while the trees slowly turn orange and yellow outside the window. It's also around this time that I start having trouble waking up, when the daylight through the window ceases to issue forth and the temperature drops.

Anyhow, what's on the plate? I'm trying to go virtual at work, because I've had more then enough of driving on 270 West. The hassle isn't worth the socialization. The advantages of working from home include a better diet and more comfortable environment, as well as increased access to things like my bank and lowered gas expenses. It's almost 100% win. My supervisor's got my name in.

I'm not running Mage next Tuesday. Too much generally going on, and too many people competing for time means that I'd have to dump what marginal social life I've got and spend most of my last week and days coming up onto Tuesday updating webpages, filling in Concilium social structures and actually writing the game. Which I like doing, but I don't need that to become everything that I do, though I have recieved some flak for it.

"We ran through everything I prepared." I explained.
"But hardly did anything last game!"
"That's because that was the last game, we were basically running on side notes and wrap-ups."

I write journal entries while I'm at work, but I write them in fractions and they require little overall concentration and almost never any research. I write them because they require little sustained attention. Mage and, for that matter, fiction or essays don't function the same way. I need to be able to concentrate for more then two minutes without being interrupted by the need to fix someone's Outlook.*

Reading Blame!, playing Persona 4, ect, et al. That is mostly it. And writing.

I've been playing Minecraft, which is hard to describe as a game. It certainly is an environment, where enjoyment comes primarily from emergent properties in the setting. I had spent some time in a few generated worlds, then settled on one where I was dumped on a beach and, very close by, are these massive spires that are held up - in some places - by a column only a single block wide. Obviously, real structural integrity isn't critical in a program where blocks, if removed from all other supporting structures, will literally float in the air, but it's an impressive enough site that it kept me there. I was able to find stone, coal, and sand easily and so just dug a whole in the nearest hill and used that as emergency residence. A few interesting things stemmed from this.

Boring thing #1 : My home is mostly comprised of dirt with a foundation of stone.
Irritating thing #1 : The monster known as a 'Creeper' spawns in high quantities near where I had chosen to reside randomly.
Irritating thing #2 : Creepers are basically creepy green suicide bombers. They get close to you and explode. This leads to a number of surprising deaths.
Interesting thing #1 : This leads to a home which is basically a war zone, and a crater-studded landscape.

In MineCraft, enemies come out at night and catch fire during the day, thus dying and ridding you of that potential problem. Even in the day, though, when I leave my hobbit hole, I take my blocky life in my hands. If I were playing Iron Man, where a death means you delete the world, I would have died so much I would have had to uninstall the game. I am dying constantly. This ties into something else. Partly for kicks and partly because of my need for stone blocks (in order to build my sky bridges), I tunneled deep into the earth in a stair step pattern. I eventually broke through into a cavern which was packed with monsters. Skeletons, zombies, slavering spiders and deadly creepers.

I had tunneled into a dungeon.

Monsters spawn at random in low light areas, but dungeons are particularly dangerous. The possess a fiery cage in the middle which cannot  be moved and which dramatically increases spawn rates. One can tell the presence of a dungeon by mossy cobblestone blocks which are, incidentally, able to be mined. This leads to :

Interesting thing #2 : Emergent dungeon crawl.

On paper, it sounds terribly boring, but the goal is to acquire materials with which to build. Caverns are the locations where veins of ore and coal are easiest to locate, and where water and lava are available for harvesting via iron bucket (resulting in obsidian, if utilized correctly). Basically, the best stuff is found in the most dangerous places. This creates a situation where you can either venture forward into the dark to quickly harvest rare and useful materials or you can carefully build yourself a preserve. Room by almost-non-nonsensical room created only to block off the dangerous, untamed caverns from your safe-if-haphazard, well-lit mines.

Some of these caves are huge in size and range in all three dimensions, creating situations where I've had zombies and creepers fall en masse from ceilings once I've been detected. The result? One of the best video game D&D experiences I've ever had with the best rationale for delving along with the best rationale for weird and unusual dungeon construction.

Meanwhile, in the world above, I've barely even started my sky bridge.

* A valid problem, but one that keeps me from focusing.