A State of A Union.

The Constitution of the United States demands that from time to time the President inform the Congress of the state of the union and lay out goals and policies the administration plans to pursue.

Given the current administrator, it's very tempting to sum up everything simply as "Lies, Dammed Lies, and Statistics" and call it a night, there's always the possibility that something useful will be present and need commentary.

This is also in the context of the impeachment process still occurring at that moment, although the day afterward would be the vote to acquit the current administrator of the charges bright against him. By this point in time, the Republicans of the Senate had already signaled their complete unwillingness to treat the charges as anything other than partisan decisions. Because of that decision, and all the other ones that have been made that prove the Republicans put their party and their selfish interests above that of that nation, I wouldn't be opposed to that group of Republicans obtaining the title "the treacherous Republicans" or possibly even "the traitorous Republicans." (With the exception of Willard "Mitt" Romney, who did more than lip service to his professed faith in a speech and then voted to convict on the abuse of power article.)

( Let's begin )

Electric Challenge 2020 Stage 3: Multiplayer Options

A thing I was exposed to, thanks to someone else on my list participating, is the electric_challenge, a video-games focused challenge in the same vein as snowflake_challenge and sunshine_challenge.

Stage 1 was making friends.

Stage 2 was talking about your origin story with games, which was several different components of the December Days postings that I taking about. I selected the one about Adventure Games, as that one had the biggest amount of things that I played when I was younger and the computers involved.

Stage 3 asks us to talk about our communities for games and gaming, wherever they may be. Whether online or off, having people to play games with is a really nice thing.

Except, if you read the entries there (and this one, too), and some of the entries in December Days, it becomes pretty apparent that community and games is a rare thing. Which isn't from a lack of communities existing on Dreamwidth and elsewhere. Or from a lack of multiplayer elements online that will cheerfully match you with others to play games, either with or against each other. Heck, MMOs and the team shooters are basically insisting that you play with others to accomplish anything regarding fun and success in their games.

One of the problems, though, is the one I talked about in December Days - the culture surrounding video games is the one that it inherited from the tabletop scene, and the tabletop scene has long since been the domain of gatekeepers and persons who believe in the No True Scotsman fallacy, to the point where they felt no shame in excluding anyone that didn't match their particular vision of what games and gaming were. That same attitude came across and was engendered some by the console wars early on as the manufacturers sought to keep players on their system alone. And, of course, along with gatekeeping, there's always been a component of trash talking among friends (or not at all friends who get together because they have to if all the roles need to be filled). And then the Internet happened, and it suddenly became possible to bring all of those attitudes unchecked into multiplayer game space, first in text, then in full glorious audio (and being on the same team as someone who wants to talk trash about anyone they think isn't performing well is no shield from their vitriol). For people who can (or believe they can) handle that environment and just let it all slide off, or who actively want to contribute to that environment, they stick around. And now you get the popular conception of who plays video games online - 13-18 year old boys who use slurs frequently and indiscriminately in a context of swears and poor behavior (including ragequits) that, if left unchecked, will escalate to caling in hostage situations and otherwise trying to get the people they are playing against killed. Over something that was, in theory, supposed to be (harmless) fun.

Of course, that wouldn't stop fannish communities from forming and talking and doing their transformative bits, but it turns out that a lot of the games that got big enough to go that route end up doing a lot of slash. That's not a bad thing in any way, and frankly, there are a lot of very slashable characters in things like Square RPGs. But because I came to fandom late, and I didn't have a complete idea of what kinds of stories fandom could tell. So mostly, what I saw was people slashing Sephiroth and Cloud, and Axel and, well, everybody, really, but mostly Roxas, and I still didn't understand that slashing could be romantic and didn't need to have graphic sex to count. So I missed out on a lot of the heyday of many of those fandoms, and, well, these days, visuals are pretty important over text, and art and fic seem to be more important than meta or discussion posts. (And being on Dreamwidth means a little more activation energy and effort getting put into finding other people to talk with.)

So, my groups are small, and composed of people I know well, and instead of playing big twitch-shooters or MMOs together, we play things like the various offerings from Jackbox Games (with a few house rules here and there that make it less about trying to play the game seriously and more about making sure that we get the best comedy available from the get-go). I used to have a group at university where we'd play various Capcom-style 2D fighters, where I was terrible, and now, I've had a semi-group of various teens who I play Smash Brothers with when they need another person and I don't have other things I have to do at the afterschool event.

I'd like to talk more games with more people. And hopefully, we'll find that we have similar game types or similar ideas about games in common to talk with.