OddballGreg - Immortality On The Internet

This wonderful screenshot, slightly edited for the privacy of everyone that isn't me, is from that website everyone's always talking about these days... what was it? Oh yes. www.facebook.com

Do you suffer from questions of the "existential crisis" variety? Do you often question what people will remember about you after you die? If so, rest easy knowing that provided no apocalyptic event brings down the human race and it's technology, then your online footprint will immortalize your memory... possibly forever.

A statistic I read a few years back discussed the great many people that will be outlived by their Facebook accounts. While the original article is long lost to all but my vague memories, I did find a similar article which corroborates my memories and substantiates the topic. blog.1000memories.com spoke here about how many ghosts there are on Facebook, and how many there would be by 2015 in a American-centric but world inclusive look at the statistics of death and Facebook user by age. While mathematics is more JovialJman's forte than my own, their work seems solid enough to at least conjecture that currently, there may be around 40 million Facebook accounts whose owner has since passed on. For interesting point of comparison, the average amount of people you can maintain a proper relationship with is about 300, and on average will meet roughly a less than a 3000 people in your lifetime. (Basically, there are more dead people on Facebook than you will ever know, as astounding as that sounds. Also, apparently i'm good at being sarcastic to myself.)

So what do these statistics have to do with Immortality? Consider every biography or account of a person's actions you have ever read. How it dictated their lives and actions. Our Facebook accounts, and Twitter, Myspace, blog's, etc, all these things on the internet that we pour our lives into will stand as memorials to our lives when we are no longer alive. Every relationship you had, every heartbreak, and accident, success and failure. Your frustrations, inspirations and painful jokes will all stand and represent who you were and what you lived for to those who wish to know. In the future, your great-grandchildren might not peruse an old newspaper when they want to know who you were, they will look for your memorialized online footprints, and see first hand just what kind of person you were.

It's as equally frightening a prospect as it is exciting to those who wonder why it is that they do what they do. To be remembered by the world after you are gone by every silly picture and inspirational quote you thought was worth sharing. A long time ago I heard the quote that "A legacy is not the things that you leave behind, but the story's that people will tell about you when you can no longer hear what they have to say." Perhaps that quote is now truer than ever? Or perhaps it is slowly become a debatable point as the evidence of our existence in the form of pictures, statuses, videos, tweets, instagrams, blogs, websites and comments stand as potentially ever present examples of who we were.

So I suppose the question is, what kind of legacy do you wish to leave behind for those to personally see for themselves on your Facebook accounts. Do you like that people will have such an in-depth view of your life based on what you shared, or do you think that it really doesn't matter since you're going to be dead anyway? If so, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Live how you want to be remembered my friends.

OddballGreg - Playing Games Your Own Way

Irony is using a picture of a game that hasn't changed in hundreds of years to talk about playing games with your own rules. (Teehee)

Have you ever done a no-save run or created some arbitrary rule for yourself or your friends to play a certain game by? If so, you already know what I'm talking about. How adding these additional rules or simply playing the game differently to the way it was intended can make it so much more fun. Lets talk about that.

What I'm talking about is by no means a new thing, from as far back as the first board and card games, to the era of Tabletop Gaming and Dungeons and Dragons, house rules have been something made up and played with by people for... well centuries. (If one wishes to hazard potentially being wrong. I accept the risk.)

You could certainly argue that this destroy's the purpose of the game, that by not playing as it was intended removes the value of the experience. I, on the other hand, would disagree with that statement, that changing the rules can breath new life into an experience that has grown old and tedious with repetition, or simply make what would have been a good experience into a truly awesome one.

My brother, myself and JovialJman recently started playing Payday: The Heist, (My review of which is pending a gaming night for me to take screenshots over.), which is quite simply a truly a fantastically entertaining game. However, there is a certain mission in the game that requires you to stealthily steal various precious gems and hack the building's security systems while remaining undetected. Unfortunately, the odds of success are ridiculously small, which led to multiple failed attempts at stealth by our unfortunate trio. Rather than going through a lengthy and very painful assault by the police while we did an absurdly long list of things to open the vault, the three of us eventually decided to have a little fun and skip the lengthy heist which we had done before. 

Our goal was to get doing things stealthily correct, and so, for an entire evening, we continually retried the mission while promptly doing absolutely ridiculous things whenever we failed. "Let's get 100% accuracy for the heist." Off we went to take one shot at a guard each and then jump off a balcony. "Want to collect all the sapphires for the achievement?" Sure. We got pretty close, but this idea was largely responsible for our repeated jumps off the balcony to death. This wasn't helped by the fact that there was an achievement for doing just that called: "I've fallen, and I can't get up." Suffice to say, this event was highly humorous.

Of course, Payday: The Heist was not the first videogame we have played that had resulted in us playing by our own house rules. Call Of Duty, the (in)famous First Person Shooter, is notorious for entire servers both online and at lans breaking out into "Knife Only Matches", in which they trade the hectic bullets flying constant death for the intense, timing based bloodbath of using knives only to win the match. Use a gun? Get kicked from the server. But for those willing to balance the game on the edge of a blade, they're in for what is one of the funniest and most difficult games you can play. Diving, crouching, sprinting. People do some absolutely strange things to get the upper hand on their enemy in a match where the first person to press the button at the right distance wins.

Then, there is even the truly brilliant RPG: Dishonored, which blew my mind as to just how different an experience you can get by playing with a simple rule. Dishonored's story changes based on how many people you kill and how you deal with the game's main antagonists, with one of the interesting questions being asked from the start is if you're a mass murdering monster, or a caring savior of the city. You could say that the game was designed with this rule in mind and thus isn't really a valid argument in terms of the topic, but on the other hand, there is never anything stopping your from doing these things but yourself. How happy are you to doom a civilization by simply painting the city with blood by your choice alone. 

The game doesn't punish you for your choice, but the story does change based on your behavior, which can become a meaningful thing to you. After playing nearly the entire game without killing a single soul, the immense guilt I felt at accidentally murdering a couple guards in the final level was an astonishing feeling considering they were nothing more than nameless figures in a game. Either way, deciding whether you will kill or save was a personal house rule that greatly changed the story you would experience.

If you're still unsure of just how different these house rules can be, perhaps go watch some of the many brilliant playthrough's of games from Many A True Nerd, ranging from the "You Only Live Once" playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas in which all healing items may not be used and radiation is considered permanent, to the wonderfully psychopathic "Kill Everything" run of Fallout 3 that has been featured on this blog before. (Not that I can remember for the life of me when.) He also does other interesting runs like "No shield" or "No Oxygen" runs of Faster Than Light. In general, he's just very entertaining to watch, and a great example of how a game can change with a simple house rule.

Of course, some of you may disagree, or have an opinion of your own about why you should/shouldn't change games or the way to play them that you would like to share. If so, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy gaming my friends.