Congrats, It's a Puppy

I know that there are certain advantages and disadvantages to having been raised on a farm. Sure, I couldn't get a group of neighborhood kids together for a game of football, but I had a quiet area to call home and could pee outside without worry about being arrested. One of the things that I might not have appreciated as much as it deserved was being surrounded by animals and creation. There were birds galore, deer walking through the front yard, dairy cows providing fresh milk, more felines than you could swing a cat at, and a variety of dogs at various points. We had a Scottish terrier, a stray collie that hung around for a while, a cocker spaniel, and some little mutt of a dog. My wife, Anne, grew up in the city and never had a dog. She had a cat, but her mom drew the line at feline. Yeah, that line was on purpose. I'm sorry.

Anyway, as years of our marriage have gone by, it became very obvious that eventually, we'd be adding a dog to our family. Anne keeps claiming that it was part of our marriage license that I signed. I'm still going over the fine print. Because of Anne's personality, she researched the different breeds of dog in order to find one that fit our family. I tried looking on Consumer Reports, but didn't find much.

This past Thursday, we finally took the plunge in to dog ownership. She's a tiny (around three pounds) King Charles spaniel named Shelby. We've been working hard to keep the kids calm around her which is nearly a full-time job in and of itself. The kids have really gotten a kick out of having a puppy and none of them have crushed her yet. I consider that a victory.

All of my shoes remain intact for now and the poop has been confined to linoleum, thankfully. Anne is certain that eventually, I will consider Shelby to be part of the family and have more enthusiasm for having a dog. For now, I remain my normal, ambivalent self. At the same time, though, I find myself trying to understand things from my wife's perspective. This whole "owning a dog" thing is completely new to her. There's a newness about it that's almost like a breath of fresh air. Oh wait, that was just the dog. Gotta go clean that up.

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Today's Gaming Tip: Don't be a Dink

Here's a confession: I'm not a very high-level gamer. Sure, I enjoy playing video games and spend quite a bit (too much?) of time playing them, but I'm not very good. In a real-time strategy (RTS) game, I tend to "turtle" or hang out in my primary base building up my forces, fending off the paltry attacks that the computer brings to bear until I'm ready to break out and demolish them. In a first-person shooter (FPS), I walk very slowly and carefully, making sure to uncover every thing possible in a room before moving on just in case there's that extra health pack or ammo laying around that could make a difference in the next room. Neither of those practices is conducive to playing these games online. The people online playing an RTS have the first five minutes of any match mapped out to the point that they know exactly what each character will be doing, what will be built and what forces they need. It's like playing Axis and Allies against my brother (old-school geeky reference). The people playing FPS games online have obviously been bionically enhanced to heighten their reflexes so that the commands sent through their FIOS connection (to make sure that they have minimum ping) are exactly the right move at the right time. That or they have ESP so that they know exactly where to fire the rocket so that it splatters my virtual self all over the floor. But I'm not bitter.

Here's the thing, though: I know I'm not good. I'm OK with that. What I'm not OK with is a player who is more advanced being a dink. Let me give you a couple of examples.

I had been playing WarCraft 3 with a friend of mine online. Both of us were not very good. We both acknowledged that fact. We would play 2 vs. 2 battles against other people that the WC3 service would deem as being "on our level." We were playing one such match and completely got our butts kicked. As we're congradulating our opponents on a well-done match, one of them makes the comment that they created new accounts to play against lower-tier players. In other words, they were "slumin' it." So much for the match-making service.

Lately, I've been playing a bunch of Team Fortress 2. This is a completely online FPS, so there isn't a single-player campaign to get your feet wet. You're immediately thrown to the wolves, trying to learn the ropes. I was momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer number of servers on which you can play when by happy chance, I stumbled on a server marked as being just for someone like me: a complete Newbie. I was over-joyed. I was still noticably worse than the other people on the server, but I felt like I was among my own, for the most part. Then, tonight as I was playing, I asked what I thought was the fairly innocuous question of what control I use to activate the cloak for the spy, since I hadn't much experience running the spy before. Someone voice chats, "Don't tell him! Because then he'll play the spy and suck. Read the manual, noob!" In fairness, could I have looked at the keyboard layout in the options menu to find out? Yes, of course. It just didn't occur to me at the time. However, I didn't expect such a response on a server marked as being for people who aren't completely up to speed on the game. Silly me.

Destructoid had a very good tongue-in-cheek article about online gaming. One of the best lines in there, using the ever-interesting second person point of view, is "You, however, were never a noob. You were playing games online before the Internet was even invented." Let's try to remember, folks, that we all had to start somewhere. I'm starting with TF2. I'm trying to get better, and I think that I have. For one thing, I'm not trying to be a front-line soldier with my medic any more. That was just silly.

My name is Jeff Kamp, and, for now, I'm a newbie. So if you see my spy fumbling with his cloaking watch, please pause for just a second before killing me. I'm sure I'll give you ample time to actually take me out. Thanks.

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