(Click for larger — you’re going to want larger…)

The second of my multimedia TMIs. Actually, it’s my third if you include the frozen-peas-down-boxer-shorts (though that might be pushing towards ‘dude… enough now, really.’)

As with last week, take it with a pinch of salt. But not too much salt… er, um… cough.

I believe there are other pictorial TMIs over on Lilu’s blog this week too, so be sure to check them out!

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Alternatively, if you're new here, you might want to find out more about me, the author. Or perhaps you want to hear a posh Brit rant on about anything and everything (podcasts), or you want to read something more serious?

[Continuing in the vein of games-related posts, today I'm going to tell you a dark, embarrassing story from my teenage years. For more stories of a similar ilk, check out Lilu's blog.]

I haven’t always wielded eight and a half inches of steam-piston, woman-slaying man meat. I was actually a very late bloomer.

Which is a little odd, considering how early my fuzzy moustache came through and how rapidly my voice broke at the age of thirteen. But I didn’t kiss a girl until after I turned 18.

I’d been close to only one girl before that, when I was 16 — but truth be told, I had no idea what to do with her, or myself. I was scared stiff — so, just as things were hotting up, I ran. I ran fast.

I ran all the way back to my darkened bedroom, to my bank of glowing screens, consoles and computers. Back to my true love and her soft bosom and warm, muscly embrace.

I ran back to… Lara Croft.

Only, back then, when I was 16, she looked like this:

To my geeky, hormonal eyes, those cylindrical legs, twiggy arms, funnel-like breasts and glass-cuttingly perky nipples were more erotic than watching Pamela Anderson bound mystifyingly along a sun-drenched beach on Saturday afternoon.

Lara Croft was my first love.

If I shut my eyes I can still hear her grunts. Ohhh the grunts! I would lean back in my computer chair, legs akimbo, one hand on my mouse, the other between my legs — and make her grunt. Lara Croft, when she exerts herself or walks into a wall, grunts — hngh! — and I would do it over and over and over.

Hngh! hngh! hnnngh! hnnnNGH!! That last grunt would be me, unable to hold it in any longer, overcome. Three or four Lara Grunts were usually more than enough to topple my weak, teenage sensibilities.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! Sorry. The recounting of the tale is almost as intense as being sixteen again and back in that stuffy, musty room.

So… I had a method, as every guy does. A particular path to masturbatory Nirvana, and through the first level of the game, that I could navigate with just one hand. It took exactly eight minutes and twelve seconds, which was definitely pushing it back then (if anything, one of the most important stories that Lara — Miss Croft — taught me was that patience, endurance, holding off, is a virtue. My lovers probably don’t realise how indebted they are to a video game…)

After those eight minutes of navigating packs of wolves and solving simple puzzles — though not so trivial when your mind is trying to work out once and for all if Lara’s a C or D cup –  I would arrive at the target: a tight corner, one that could elicit an infinite stream of grunts, only limited by my perseverance.

But, more importantly, there was a ledge.

Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, repetitive digital grunting was nothing compared to the handstand. I can’t find any photos to prove it, but I recall as if it was only yesterday, she would go into the splits before reaching the vertical. She would lift herself slowly, using her strong, supple arms into an inverted split. There she would pause for a moment, tantalisingly, allowing my vigorous, ruthless, pubescent imagination to quickly tear those tight shorts from her toned but resolutely feminine legs.  But alas she would not linger long enough for me to climax, and up into the vertical handstand she would go.

On a good day I would get through maybe two corner-grunt-leg-split-handstand repetitions. Once I made it from corner to ledge four times. Four times! My mother never did find out why I suddenly needed a new monitor and keyboard.

So, Sandra, if you’re reading, that’s the reason I twisted my way out of your tentative grasp back in the summer of 1999 with a bulge in my pants. I ran back to my room. Back to Lara.

It wasn’t you. It was all me…

[These 'thoughtful' posts are usually much more free-form and a-wandering than my other blog entries. You are more than welcome to jump in and finish a particular train of thought, or challenge something you think is false. This is as much about me getting my head around something as it is for you! You probably want to read yesterday's entry on 'Single-Player Immersion' before you read this.]

We know that our imagination is powerful — it is as powerful or more so than actual reality. Sure, it can’t physically take us places, but do people really claim that being scared by a horror film isn’t equivalent to being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac? (OK, don’t think about that one too much — just go with it!) And then there’s the matter of time-travel: our imagination can take us back in time! Through the media of books, films and games our infinitesimally short life-span can be expanded and extended to include different places and worlds from throughout history. Magical.

Why though must all of these virtual worlds exist outside the realm of reality? Can you imagine ‘losing yourself’ in the contemporary world — while reading the morning paper? No. You lose yourself while reading about the culture and creepy rites of Ancient Egypt. You readily find yourself escaping to alternate realities where vampires and undead exist, roaming and scheming under the cover of darkness. After that scene in The Matrix, did you stop to consider if it really is air that you’re breathing? I did.

Why can’t we be immersed in real life? Why can’t we attack and question our surroundings in real life with the same fervor?

A quick change of tack: yesterday, I mentioned how immersion can also occur to groups of people. The obvious examples here are table-top role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons and the like), Internet forums and online games. This ‘multi-player shared reality’ is nearly always cooperative, towards some common goal. They take the same form as real-life teams and groups, only… they are virtual. Or rather, their sphere of influence is virtual (though their real-world impact can be quite significant too — some people get married in a virtual world,  and later in real life too).  The inhabitants of these shared, imagined illusions are avatars, projections of one’s self upon the fundament of a virtual world.

This won’t make a lot of sense if you’ve never been part of such a shared reality, but take my word for it: community and social bonds form a lot more readily in virtual spaces. It’s like… necessity throws people together, and somehow… it sticks. Not entirely without conflict, but generally these communities stick it out. This might be stretching it a little, but it’s a little like arranged marriages: you are thrown together, perhaps against your will, but for a variety of external reasons, you are compelled to try your best. Without other choices available, you are forced to survive and succeed (not a bad thing, really?) Those of us in the West look on in disgust at these teenagers being married off without their consent. We think our system is so much better. But their system does seem to work, no?

Anyway…

My point is this: if you think you’ve been immersed in a book or film or game, it is nothing compared to group immersion. It is nothing compared to running around with other people that also think they’re vampires or piloting the same spaceship as you. It’s nothing compared to working together with hundreds or thousands of like-minded friends in an online virtual world.  By sharing the world with others, your imagination is being validated. By occupying the same world as someone else, it’s no longer ‘imaginary’ or ‘just in your head’, it’s actually — holy shit! — real.

So what about FarmVille? It’s a primitive game, sure, but it is a virtual world; a world full of rosy-cheeked, benevolent farmers that spend half their time harvesting, and the other half helping out other farmers. The level of immersion (or ‘gameness?) is limited at the moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to group up with other farmers appeared soon. And that then is only one step away from building a town in the middle of a clutch of farms… and then cities and counties and…

Why can’t we be as immersed in real life? What stops us from enacting our imagination in reality? Is it just merely fear of failure? Or… something else?

I’m looking for a real-world analogy here, and again I’m thinking of the New World, America. A bunch of individuals lumped together in a new, harsh environment where the only way out of trouble (and death!)  is teamwork. Are we simply ’stuck’ here in the mundanity of real life because there is no necessity to try any harder?

I am just trying to work out why it feels so damn good to form a group in an online game and work together towards a common goal. I wonder why we so rarely do it in real life. Why is it every man for himself in London, while we readily cooperate in virtual worlds?

Historically, were we more immersed? When it was harder to survive and teamwork was a necessity, did we have to become more involved? I wonder if we need something dramatic like another war to force us back into our own lives, and our own world.

Immersion is the act of being plunged, sometimes without us fully realising, into another place; another world. Be it via book, film, video game or any other form of media, our imagination lends itself readily, eagerly, to immersion in other worlds. It can be a very visceral experience, the new world plucking you from your present reality and sucking you through some kind of warping wormhole with a pop. Or it can be less obvious, the new world’s tendrils slowly creeping up and wrapping themselves around you until, before you know it, it feels like you’ve always been there — only you’re not quite sure how you got there.

And it’s healthy. Immersion is healthy. With immersion comes understanding and with that, eventually wisdom. When we’re immersed in a subject matter, be it vampires or the history of British monarchs (or the overlap of both!), we become dedicated to that cause. In reading a good book we often find ourselves identifying with a character and championing their thoughts and emotions. Hell, many people attribute entire shifts in viewpoint and way of life to books! The same can be said of films and video games too — if a book can be life-changing, so can a game!

‘Life-changing’ is the key phrase with immersion. When we enter into another person’s world — for that’s what we’re doing — we are assuming a new role, a new point of view; in essence, a new body. We glance around with the steady, fresh gaze of the newly birthed, curious and forever analysing. We’re actually granted a fresh set of senses which, depending on the story might vary in purpose or intensity — free, wild; sad, caged — but they are new! New, never-before-experienced senses! Just like that, the senses and experiences we carry with us in life can be dropped: prejudice, fear, pain, stress — gone. At least for a little while. Without leaving the library or even rolling out of bed we are able to live through a gamut of emotions and sensory experiences that might, were it not for immersion in a new world, go unused.

The problem, if there is one, is that that the virtual frontiers to which we are exposed are entirely governed by the author of the book, film or game. If the artist wants us to feel scared or fascinated or mystified, we will be. The author or director takes us on a journey, a tour of their imagination. We see and smell and hear their fears and torments, we feel their passions. We experience the joy, elation and pain of their first love, kiss and heart break.

It seems that, irrespective of how wild or terrifying or unreal a world is to us, we want to immerse ourselves. We want to be deeply involved. We want to be an important part of the world. We want, dare I say it, a world that can revolve around us — even if that world only exists in our own head, on loan from the creator and decorated by imagination for our own needs and wants.

You can be under your duvet with a good book and grinning like a fool or sweating and torturously scared — but entirely unable to put it down because that world — your world — would cease to exist, and you’re never quite ready for that to happen. And this is just single-player immersion! Some people aren’t content with being alone in these fleeting, imaginary worlds that disappear when we turn the last page or finish the film.  Just as sitting in your room reading a book or playing a game can get a little lonely: sometimes it’s better to stomp around a virtual, imaginary world with other immersed people in tow, with companions, with comrades… with friends!

And that is when you log into an Internet forum and find fellow Twilight fans. Or, if you have a penis, install World of Warcraft.

* * *

More tomorrow on immersion for Thoughtful Tuesday!

If you’re reading this after midday, UK time, go and check out week 4 of ‘52 Weeks’ — it’s a good one.

I’m going to tell you a story that, a few years ago, would read like an urban legend. While it certainly isn’t a common occurrence today, three years ago this simply wouldn’t have happened. Unless you’re me. Three years ago this made me a God amongst my gamer friends.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I made love to a beautiful woman while playing World of Warcraft. If you don’t want a basic intro on what World of Warcraft is, skip down the page a bit.

For this story to make sense I need to explain a little about what World of Warcraft (WoW) is: it’s a Massively-Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). Massively-multiplayer means hundreds and thousands of players share the same virtual world as you: while you run around killing monsters, there are other people also running around killing the same monsters! Sometimes they get in the way — in which case you kill them! — and sometimes you group up to kill bigger monsters that you can’t kill on your own.

WoW is in essence, a team game. You can play it on your own, and a lot of people do, but it is the allure of playing with — and competing against! — other people that is the main unique selling point. Because it’s a team game, it is also highly social (this is where most of the the ‘cool’ reality-TV-watching people (girls?) snort derisively and say ‘How can a video game be SOCIAL?!’)  It is not uncommon for WoW players to spend hours talking to their friends and enemies every night! Yes, these are real people, even though it’s a video game! Do you know how little people communicate nowadays? How many minutes on average we spend talking every day? For men, it’s about half an hour. Women, an hour or two. So playing WoW or other online games is social. Let’s get that straight. (I’ll write more on this topic another day.)

Anyway… now for the story. For more TMI stories, visit Lilu’s blog!

It was dark outside and I was playing WoW. Behind me on my bed lay a naked, blushed-pink girl. My girlfriends tend to be the understanding type; they might not all be gamers, but they at least understand my love for games — and bless them, they give the games a go! But there’s definitely something to be said for the lack of female hand-eye coordination… More on that another day.

She was restlessly ‘making waves’ on my water bed — and whining. Whining in that piteous way that only horny girls have truly mastered.

‘Seeeeebbbby.’

Perhaps ‘yearning’ is a better word. But I wasn’t going to be so easily won over. Only a few nights before, I’d tried the same routine, bouncing dangerously on my bed and begging. She’d resolutely stayed at my desk, finishing some email she had to write. I can only assume she thought I liked her a whole lot more than I actually did. In fact, girls seem to think that the moment you start going out with them, they are catapulted to the top of your priority list. So not true!

Call me a utilitarian, or just plain sensible, but if 25 people are relying on me to lead them to greater glory in WoW, it is wrong to just abandon them to screw a girl, right? Their needs are greater than my carnal desires. The writhing, whining, naked girl can wait! Those 25 people, those 25 friends, connected from all over Europe, cannot. I guess its real-world analogy is ‘abandoning your mates at the club to go home with a girl’ — you just don’t do it, unless it’s a pre-arranged go-out-and-get-laid thing!

And so, clicking frantically with my mouse and focusing intently on my screen, I tried my luck.

‘Get your ass over here, bitch.’

Yeah, I actually said that. There was the most disturbing, pregnant pause ever. It could go either way, I knew. We’d been together for a while, so I didn’t think she’d dump me. But there was the risk that there might be days or even weeks of no nookie for Sebby. She was silent and I was busy staring at my monitor, focusing on WoW. The fact that I couldn’t see her was driving me insane, with nerves, with curiousity. And then I heard her giggle. And then she slithered off the bed.

I could hear footsteps behind me.

Ahead of me, the dragon was only half dead.

Was I really about to live out the greatest geek fantasy of all time?

‘Your… bitch… is here.’ The words coming from her mouth sounded understandably foreign. She was no one’s bitch, but you have to give the girl credit for going with the flow. ‘Do you need my help to kill the dragon?’

A mumbling, murmuring grunt escaped my lips. It was all I could do to keep my focus on the computer. I could smell her as she kissed the side of my neck. Focus… focus Sebastian… focus! The dragon was almost dead! Just two more minutes…!

Then she straddled me. She reached down, unzipped, deftly extracted and plunged.

But I didn’t lose my cool. I kept my focus. We killed the dragon and I threw that bitch from my lap and onto the bed. I proceeded to screw her brains out until she whined piteously for entirely different reasons.

* * *

I know what you’re thinking: A happy ending to a Too Much Information story?! Well, I’m going to go one step further…

Gentlemen: Do you want to know the secret? Do you want to know how to bone beautiful, big-breasted women and play video games at  the same time? If so… come a little closer.

The trick… the key… the secret…

Get a big wide-screen monitor or TV. That way you can still see around her when she’s sitting on your lap. They think they have your full attention but they don’t. Works every time.

… it’s because I’m busy playing video games.

If, for some Godforsaken reason, you still don’t play video games, let me tell you something: Winter is gaming season. The summer blockbusters have been and gone. The warm, hazy friend-filled nights spent outdoors have dissipated with the first chills of September. Slowly but surely we retreat to our warm, cosy caves, fall to our sofas, plump our pillows and… turn on the TV! Autumn is when most big games and TV shows are released — no big surprise, considering that’s when the biggest, voluminous-backside-on-seat audience is available!

Now, historically this time of year wasn’t a problem — far from it! There used to only be 2 or 3 big games a year. I could stagger them and start one every few months. But now with the industry ballooning and game budgets growing to the size of feature films — because they are that profitable — there’s simply too many games. There used to be one big FPS a year, one or two RPGs, a sports simulator and… that would be it. There’d be other oddball games that could entertain you for a few hours, but nothing big. Some years you might not even play a single stand-out game!

That’s not the case nowadays though, and I suppose it never will be again. Just in September alone, I have the following games that I need to play through: Guitar Hero 5, Rockband: Beatles (well, I might give this one a miss…) AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (really a game), Murumasa and Batman: Arkham Asylum. That’s just on the PC and Xbox360. If I include the DS/Wii… well… you would probably never see me again. I’ve never been able to pull myself away from the Cake Mania series of games…

October’s even worse, but I won’t bore you with the specifics. All I’m trying to say is: if you’re the kind of person that keeps track of at least five TV shows a week (or four, if you’re a True Blood fan and you’ve just watched the finale — please don’t spam me with comments on how you want to have Cullen’s babies. Wait, that’s Twilight! Ahh, I can’t keep up…) — anyway… if you watch a lot of TV, perhaps you will now understand why it will almost feel like hard work being a games player this Autumn. Think about it: an average, big-budget game takes between 20 and 60 hours to finish. That’s the same length as a standard 24-part drama season on the short end, and three seasons on the long! And I have to play three games a month if I want to keep up with all of the releases this Autumn/Winter! That’s a minimum of 60 hours a month, or as much as 180 — or 8 solid days of gaming…

But the best thing? The caveat and saving grace? It doens’t even make me a nerd any more! Video games are now part of popular culture. They are as much a consumable commodity as movie DVDs or TV box sets. In fact, I laugh derisively at those people with LoveFilm or NetFlix subscriptions! HAH!

The point of this entry was actually to warn you that you may get an awful lot of games-related blog entries over the next few weeks and months. But that’s healthy. I’ve been ignoring the gamer side of me for much too long. And there are actually a lot of gamers that read this blog: so these months are for you, gentlemen (and lady).

* * *

Incidentally, if you’re not a gamer, but you are interested in playing them, you should read my guide: A Beginner’s Guide to Gaming. It will walk you through from the very beginning (it doesn’t tell you how to hook up a console to your TV, but everything else!) Think of gaming as ‘interactive TV’, or ‘entertainment for the intellectual’, where you give a little of yourself to make it a much more interesting (and sometimes fulfilling!) experience.

There is a reason it’s the only growing segment of the media industry.

(I submit this report to you, loyal reader, while I am still at the LAN. I may yet not make it back home — 2 a hour drive separates me from my usual abode. A 2 hour drive in a car full of dribbling and slavering sleep-deprived goons. Hopefully, service will continue as normal tomorrow!)

(This is Seb’s friend, Daniel, writing this introduction. ‘Dr Sebbykinspoopoo’, as he insists on being called now, has seemingly… left the building. I took the liberty of posting his report — it seems complete, but being just a mere gamer, and not medically trained, it might not be accurate. I hope Seb will be better tomorrow, to finish his report… I will let you know.)

(This is the continuing report of my cousin’s LAN party experience. It is now day 2, and things have started to… slide. This report has been recorded as accurately as humanly possible, though some ’seepage’ is inevitable. This report is being kept in the hope of one day better understanding the ‘LAN Party Phenomena’ — I hope to draw up some suitable conclusions after the LAN… but 2 days still remain… will my cousin — or I – make it?)

Just a small introduction to the doctor that’s performing this strict, empirical analysis on his cousin through the 4 days of LAN party.

I’d write more, but I need to play in a tournament… Meanwhile, enjoy my… anime hair… I knew that late-night shower was a bad idea.

The day 2 report is coming soon… ish!