Infinite Lives

Look, I realize that Mac gaming is, on the whole, an oxymoron, like ‘jumbo shrimp,’ ‘diet cake,’ and ‘libertarian.’ And if you want to play on your Apple laptop, why, you’re even worse off—seemingly relegated to ports, casuals, freebies, and castoffs. Until recently, even Apple admitted you were better off dual-booting into XP.

But you bought a MacBook Pro anyway, knowing full well what you were signing onto. “It’ll be a dedicated workstation,” you told yourself. “I’ll only do work on it; I’ll be careful with disk space and RAM; I’ll spend all the rest of my days trying not to covet PC gaming.” But one morning you woke up and you realized iMovie wasn’t cutting it anymore. I need to download ten games that are totally ideal for my MacBook Pro. That’s what you said. That’s what you sound like.

Fortunately, I was sitting at my word processor when I distinctly heard your cry of despair. And your cry of despair coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Mac, erm, two weeks ago.

What luck, then, that I’ve made this list of ten games! Each one is downloadable, every one, ideal for MacBook gaming. Enjoy!

I’ve seen Pong as a text adventure. I’ve even seen Pac-Man as a text adventure. But—this one was totally new to me—what about Pac-Man as a MUD?

The Pac-Man Dungeons calls itself “interactive fiction,” but it’s a classic MUD, through and through, right down to the fake telnet window (“You may chat with a ghost that is not more than 2 steps away,” the help file dutifully instructs).

Adorable.

• Masswerk – The Pac-Man Dungeons (via)

In keeping with this blog’s current trending toward pictureless confessionals and ridiculous ruminations on avatars, here’s more of the same.

I wasn’t allowed to play RPGs as a kid.

More specifically, I wasn’t permitted to play computer games in which you could create or alter your own character. Sometime, maybe a year and a half ago, I mentioned this fact on a podcast which, along with my semi-lyrical overuse of the word “totally,” seemed to arouse some bafflement and curiosity. “Why wouldn’t her mom let her play role-playing games?” some folks wanted to know. I hadn’t elaborated—I’d only mentioned it offhandedly—and perhaps that caused some people to be discouraged.

Of course, I was surprised by their surprise. Do these people not know, I wondered, that playing fantasy games will turn you into a warlock and your bedroom closet into a portal to hell?

I obviously have some lingering issues.

The power of urban myth

I was born in 1982, and I spent almost all of my childhood in a small, conservative town in Texas, during what I’ve now heard called the “Satanic Panic.”

The late 70s and early 80s are banner years for contemporary legend anthropologists. Urban myths—the likes that get a foothold among small-town Christian fundamentalist communities—were running amok. In 1977, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s allegedly copped to being a member of the Church of Satan. Fact. And in the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that Cabbage Patch Dolls themselves were possessed by demons. Duh.

One variation on the Cabbage Patch legend held that Xavier Roberts signed the buttocks of his doll-progeny to signify that he had blessed each one in the name of Satan. These bits of trivia were pronounced at the tables of our elementary school lunchroom as cold, hard evidence that evil dolls could, in fact, murder you in your sleep, if they wanted to.

This is what I’m doing right now.

My Second Life avatar is sitting in my stead, attending the fourth-ever Living Game Worlds symposium, streaming live from Georgia Tech. And right now, Raph Koster is speaking. The symposium focuses on the interplay between, and I quote, “multiplayer games and virtual worlds.”

You too can attend Living Game Worlds via Second Life (fitting!), if only you click here. Of course, if you wouldn’t be caught dead in Second Life, you may also participate by opening the live streaming video in one window and keeping IRC open in the other.

I think I want to talk more about this soon, but right now I’m really just enjoying it.

edit: It’s over! Until tomorrow.

What’s really neat is, the IRC channel and the theater in Second Life are ‘bridged,’ so that everything the kids say in IRC pop into Second Life, and at the same time, Second Life users appear as users in the chat room. Neato.