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helpfulsnowman's review
3.0
Interesting blend of fantasy role-playing and fiction classes taught by Gordon Lish. Worlds collide here. My big piece of advice, if you are setting out to read this one having never played Baldur's Gate, read a little plot synopsis and character bios first. My big struggle was keeping track of the characters and what was going on.
Okay, this isn't my favorite of the Boss Fight Books, but that has a lot to do with me and not the book.
Confession, I played about an hour of Skyrim last night. I wouldn't say I loved it.
Bethesda made Baldur's Gate and then Bioware later went on to make Skyrim, which I understand to be the pinnacle of the sandbox-y, swords and sorcery games. And in a lot of ways, it was pretty cool. Of course it looks good. The only games that don't look amazing anymore are the ones going for a cheaper look on purpose. The controls are fine, and you're able to slide between a first and third person perspective, which I liked a lot.
But it had all these aspects I just don't care for.
First off, these new-fangled RPG's are in love with customizing characters. I experienced this in Mass Effect, where I decided to make the ugliest possible ugmo of all time as my main character.
If I'm being really open and honest about it, I started trying to make the guy look like me. And then it was kind of hideous, and I went with it, ending up with what I'd describe as a real-life version of Popeye after a couple decades of drinking so hard that the only thing keeping him alive was the futuristic medicine of the Mass Effect universe.
It was distracting. I didn't realize how jarring it would be to see an ugly protagonist.
Anyway, the next thing I didn't like so much in Skyrim, man is there a lot of picking up shit and rearranging armor and weapons and stuff.
I had this buddy who was really into World of Warcraft. He's actually a real person, not a stand-in for me. I'm reading books about video games on the regular. I don't have anything to hide as far as being cool.
This buddy, when I went to his (mom's (sorry, but it's true)) house, he was always showing me his new WoW armor. And then he would ask me questions like, "This one is slightly more powerful. But THIS one looks cooler. Which one do you think I should pick."
Admittedly, I was worthless on that front. I just figured you'd use whatever was best. Sort of like how everyone was shitting on Marty McFly's Barbie hoverboard. I always thought, "Fuck that! If I had a hoverboard, it could be imprinted with a picture of my naked grandmother, I'd still ride that thing around." But I wasn't all the way invested in the world of Warcraft, so a decision that was easy for me was difficult in the context of the game.
This buddy also described to me, in detail, a "date" he had in-game where he and another person watched the sunrise on horseback and chatted.
I don't say these things to embarrass this buddy. What I'm saying is I understand that these games, with their dragons and their loot and their questing, they appeal to a lot of people, and appeal on a deep level I don't always reach.
For me, I just don't get into it. I find the characters boring, usually one of a few, stock fantasy types. The idea of a dragon isn't all that thrilling to me. Swordfights are sort of unexciting too.
I really WISH I enjoyed it because there's such a depth of stuff you can experience if you're into fantasy. But I'm just not.
Oh, there's one other thing too, which makes Skyrim and this book less fun, to be completely honest.
You make the storyline.
It's a thing lots of games were doing for a while, and Bethesda and Bioware are both really into it. You, as the player, can kind of do whatever the hell you want within the game. The advantage, you can end up feeling a lot of player agency. The disadvantage, a lot of that agency is kind of cast off in order to zip things up at the end so that most players experience one of a few different scenarios. Also, it takes away an element of gaming I really enjoy, which is the light touch you feel from a game designer here and there.
In a game like Super Mario Bros., you can see it. You can feel the places where a designer really looked at what the game could do and said, "If Mario can jump this high, a player who is running at this spot would hit a hidden block if running at full speed. Then that block would knock the player into a pit." It's a cool way for a dialogue to happen between the designer and player. The player wants to sprint through the game, the designer wants to slow her down.
It's something that happens in writing too. For example, you can use a long, complicated word to slow a reader down. You can make paragraph and line breaks to set the pace. You can vary your sentence length. Repetition. All ways that you can turn your work into a back and forth.
When a game is a total open world sandbox, I don't get that feeling in the same way. The designers do cool things, but it's up to you as the player to make sure you're experiencing them.
It feels like an epic novel, but one where there's no room for interpretation within the text. There's no back and forth. It's the creator's world, you're just walking through it.
The best parts of Skyrim, for me, would be the parts where I felt like it was a game meant to be played. That's what I like. I don't mind the feel of something being a game.
The best parts of this book were not the video game parts, but the parts where Bell talks about his fiction writing and the shame of writing a Dungeons & Dragons novel. I won't elaborate because that's the best part, and why ruin the best part?
Baldur's Gate, like Skyrim, is so open and free, and there are so many narrative possibilities that it's not all that interesting to hear about the story. Every turn comes with a big fat, "Now, if you didn't do X, you won't experience this."
I figure this book took a couple hours to read, so I can give Skyrim the same amount of time. See what happens. But overall, just not for me.
Okay, this isn't my favorite of the Boss Fight Books, but that has a lot to do with me and not the book.
Confession, I played about an hour of Skyrim last night. I wouldn't say I loved it.
Bethesda made Baldur's Gate and then Bioware later went on to make Skyrim, which I understand to be the pinnacle of the sandbox-y, swords and sorcery games. And in a lot of ways, it was pretty cool. Of course it looks good. The only games that don't look amazing anymore are the ones going for a cheaper look on purpose. The controls are fine, and you're able to slide between a first and third person perspective, which I liked a lot.
But it had all these aspects I just don't care for.
First off, these new-fangled RPG's are in love with customizing characters. I experienced this in Mass Effect, where I decided to make the ugliest possible ugmo of all time as my main character.
If I'm being really open and honest about it, I started trying to make the guy look like me. And then it was kind of hideous, and I went with it, ending up with what I'd describe as a real-life version of Popeye after a couple decades of drinking so hard that the only thing keeping him alive was the futuristic medicine of the Mass Effect universe.
It was distracting. I didn't realize how jarring it would be to see an ugly protagonist.
Anyway, the next thing I didn't like so much in Skyrim, man is there a lot of picking up shit and rearranging armor and weapons and stuff.
I had this buddy who was really into World of Warcraft. He's actually a real person, not a stand-in for me. I'm reading books about video games on the regular. I don't have anything to hide as far as being cool.
This buddy, when I went to his (mom's (sorry, but it's true)) house, he was always showing me his new WoW armor. And then he would ask me questions like, "This one is slightly more powerful. But THIS one looks cooler. Which one do you think I should pick."
Admittedly, I was worthless on that front. I just figured you'd use whatever was best. Sort of like how everyone was shitting on Marty McFly's Barbie hoverboard. I always thought, "Fuck that! If I had a hoverboard, it could be imprinted with a picture of my naked grandmother, I'd still ride that thing around." But I wasn't all the way invested in the world of Warcraft, so a decision that was easy for me was difficult in the context of the game.
This buddy also described to me, in detail, a "date" he had in-game where he and another person watched the sunrise on horseback and chatted.
I don't say these things to embarrass this buddy. What I'm saying is I understand that these games, with their dragons and their loot and their questing, they appeal to a lot of people, and appeal on a deep level I don't always reach.
For me, I just don't get into it. I find the characters boring, usually one of a few, stock fantasy types. The idea of a dragon isn't all that thrilling to me. Swordfights are sort of unexciting too.
I really WISH I enjoyed it because there's such a depth of stuff you can experience if you're into fantasy. But I'm just not.
Oh, there's one other thing too, which makes Skyrim and this book less fun, to be completely honest.
You make the storyline.
It's a thing lots of games were doing for a while, and Bethesda and Bioware are both really into it. You, as the player, can kind of do whatever the hell you want within the game. The advantage, you can end up feeling a lot of player agency. The disadvantage, a lot of that agency is kind of cast off in order to zip things up at the end so that most players experience one of a few different scenarios. Also, it takes away an element of gaming I really enjoy, which is the light touch you feel from a game designer here and there.
In a game like Super Mario Bros., you can see it. You can feel the places where a designer really looked at what the game could do and said, "If Mario can jump this high, a player who is running at this spot would hit a hidden block if running at full speed. Then that block would knock the player into a pit." It's a cool way for a dialogue to happen between the designer and player. The player wants to sprint through the game, the designer wants to slow her down.
It's something that happens in writing too. For example, you can use a long, complicated word to slow a reader down. You can make paragraph and line breaks to set the pace. You can vary your sentence length. Repetition. All ways that you can turn your work into a back and forth.
When a game is a total open world sandbox, I don't get that feeling in the same way. The designers do cool things, but it's up to you as the player to make sure you're experiencing them.
It feels like an epic novel, but one where there's no room for interpretation within the text. There's no back and forth. It's the creator's world, you're just walking through it.
The best parts of Skyrim, for me, would be the parts where I felt like it was a game meant to be played. That's what I like. I don't mind the feel of something being a game.
The best parts of this book were not the video game parts, but the parts where Bell talks about his fiction writing and the shame of writing a Dungeons & Dragons novel. I won't elaborate because that's the best part, and why ruin the best part?
Baldur's Gate, like Skyrim, is so open and free, and there are so many narrative possibilities that it's not all that interesting to hear about the story. Every turn comes with a big fat, "Now, if you didn't do X, you won't experience this."
I figure this book took a couple hours to read, so I can give Skyrim the same amount of time. See what happens. But overall, just not for me.
gengelcox's review
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This is the best Boss Fight book yet—at least, the best written, although I learned a lot about the game, which I had not played, as well. The pleasure here is to be found in Bell’s wonderful exegesis of his childhood and coming-of-age as a writer, in prose that is often surprising and even lyrical at times. This is not faint praise (see my reviews of other books in the Boss Fight or 33 1/3 series). Your mileage may vary: it may be that Bell’s experience and struggles with coming to terms with his geek childhood and his adult aspirations simply hit home with me, as I’ve debated these same issues with myself over the past three decades.
I have to use some examples to illustrate how good this book is. At one point, Bell reflects on his childhood: “By my senior year of high school, I knew I was sheltered, restricted, kept safe, a kid of chaotic good alignment not because I had chosen to be good but because I hadn’t been given much room to be bad.” I understood this completely. I wrote a story a few years ago called “One of the Band” where I explored the same concept, except in my case I used music and alcohol as the jumping off point for exploring danger. He explains how his love for D&D video games filled his days, giving him an escape and letting him explore being dark and dangerous safely, but in retrospect he now realizes it was a very limited experience. “What does it mean to look back on your life and realize it must have been worse than you thought? What is the opposite of nostalgia, where in hindsight objects and events can only diminish?”
Unlike his brother, who shared his childhood forays into fantasy, Bell put that aside as he went to college, focusing instead on trying to write what was expected of an English and Creative Writing professor, the fantasy of realism. At one point, a conversation with his friend, Matthew Simmons, turned to the subject of D&D, as Matthew had met an editor at Wizards of the Coast, who owned the rights at the time, and who had invited Matthew to pitch a book. Matthew proposed they collaborate, resulting in a successful pitch and advance for The Last Garrison. In order to better understand the current D&D environment, Bell joins a campaign run by his brother who games with his wife and another family member. In the family D&D campaign, Bell’s wife has to drop him off at his brother’s as well as pick him up at the end of the session, one night showing up before they had finished, to her chagrin:
I looked up occasionally to see my wife watching aghast from across the room. On the way home, I burned with embarrassment whenever she looked over at me, an increasingly bemused expression on her face. She’d seen too much and we both knew it. Finally, she joked, “You know this is going to make you unfuckable for a few weeks, right?” And so in many ways playing D&D as an adult wasn’t different than playing it as a teenager.
Bell also uses the advance money to pay for a workshop with Gordon Lish, the famed editor who chopped away at Raymond Carver’s work. “It felt like a fateful bit of luck that the financial cost of Lish’s class was exactly the same as my advance from Wizards of the Coast. And so my advance made it possible for me to attend without too much financial burden, most likely making me the only person ever to pay for one of Lish’s classes with money earned writing about elves..” The experience forced him to confront his anxiety about his past and what he wanted from the future:
Another wound I continue to carry is the deep shame I sometimes feel about who I was and what I was interested in when I was a child, as a teenager, as an adult: how the fantasy novels and the role-playing and the video games don’t match cleanly to the image I’ve tried to cultivate as a ‘serious’ man, as a writer of fiction, a professor, and an editor….This book you’re holding is one way for me to say, This is who I was. It is also, in almost every important way, still who I am.”
There’s much more here including an exploration of what it means to see yourself through a game avatar, the difficult choices forced upon you to meet game goals, and how even games like those by BioWare, which try to explore moral choices, still fail because everything is still regulated by numbers and random dice rolls. The fact that our imaginations can make these characters live and breath—in both video games and books—is a testament to our empathy, and one of best aspects of humanity.
nickfourtimes's review
adventurous
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
3.0
1) “In a role-playing game, you start life already a hero. Or at least a hero in the making, guaranteed only to improve. Every scenario is designed and structured with your eventual success in mind, every storyline shaped to match your character arc. Everywhere you go there are obstacles but they are all intended to be overcome. None of your failures will be permanent, and unlimited second chances are always only a reload away.”
2) ”It is sometimes difficult to determine correct pronouns when discussing an RPG like Baldur's Gate II, where Gorion's Ward—the player character—can be of variable gender, race, and occupation. Who is the character and who am I? How separate are these entities? When writing about in-game experiences, are they happening to my version of Gorion's Ward or are they happening to me, the player? What should we call the character at the heart of our story? Sometimes I will say I, and mean either the character or me. Sometimes I will say you, and mean either my character, your character, myself, yourself, or some generalized ideal player. Sometimes I will speak of Gorion's Ward in the general sense, rather than in my specific case. There is no one right answer, and all these modes have their own nuances useful for the purposes of discussing the ‘role-playing’ part of an RPG: Who are we when we begin such a game, and who do we become as the game proceeds?”
3) “Here again is the difficulty of crafting a story in games that lets you wander off the main storyline. In a more traditional narrative, the characters would never spend all this time acquiring equipment and solving minor territorial disputes before launching their rescue attempt. What good is there in delaying Imoen's rescue, in letting a friend suffer unnecessarily? Presumably none. But because this is a game and because the game world necessarily revolves only around my character, Imoen will be no worse for wear when I arrive. There is no true narrative urgency except the player's interest. Wherever I go, the world bursts to life. When I leave, the world waits for me to return. Imoen is being tortured by a man I've sworn to kill but she will not be tortured any more or less based on how quickly I arrive.”
4) “Despite my creeping misgivings during the writing of The Last Garrison—despite similar misgivings about writing this book you are reading—I now suspect that one way to end the injury I did to myself by hiding what I loved is to reveal the shame I felt publicly, to put that admission into writing and to make it public.
This book you're holding is one way for me to say, This is who I was. It is also, in almost every important way, still who I am.”
whatdotheyknowaboutfriends's review
3.0
The author's personal story was interesting, but didn't always mesh very well with the game exposition. Some worthwhile thoughts though on how players react to lush or sparse stories, visual effects, etc. Love the series!
grahamiam's review
5.0
Echoed so many of the things going on in my head with regards to video games: their limitations, my shame, the unique satisfaction possible, storytelling potential, etc etc. Loved this, even though it gave me no desire to replay BG2.
drewsof's review
5.0
As ever, this might not be the sort of book that appeals to you if you don’t know the game – but, also as ever, I’d encourage readers who are even a little curious (because they’re intrigued by the hamster and armored man on the cover [Minsc! and Boo!], because they like Bell’s work, because of something else entirely) to pick this up and give it a try. It’s about a videogame, yes – but it’s also about a writer coming to terms with his love of fantasy, of geekery, of the things that formed and molded him into the writer he is today. There’s no shame in writing something fantastical or set in space or full of robots – something it took me quite a while to learn, too. Something I’m maybe still learning. It was nice to see that an author I respect quite a bit is still learning it too and willing to be so honest about it.
Now, about finding a CD-ROM drive…
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/drew-reviews-baldurs-gate-ii.html
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/09/09/baldurs-gate-ii/
Now, about finding a CD-ROM drive…
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/drew-reviews-baldurs-gate-ii.html
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/09/09/baldurs-gate-ii/
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