The best defeats in Hearthstone

Hearthstone, Blizzard's online CCG, is a phenomenon. It's the first CCG to really and truly embrace the possibilities offered by the virtual space. Blizzard have consistently created mechanics and effects that would either be difficult or impossible to achieve in a physical card game and solve some of the issues that plague Magic the Gathering's computer adaptations. It's a sleek game of fast decision making with only 75 seconds to take you turn and no direct interaction with the other player when it's their turn. This limited interactivity really ramps up the tension, especially towards the end of the game. It's a great game, easy to learn, hard to master with a high skill ceiling. It's also free to play so if you like that sort of thing there's no harm in giving it a spin to see if you like it. It also, and I can't stress this feature enough, has very limited ways to communicate with your opponent. You can even silence them if you don't want them to be able to communicate at all. You can't reach through the screen and slap them in their stupid face but I remain optimistic that this will be added in a future patch.

I stopped playing Hearthstone for a while due to anxiety issues but I got sucked back in yesterday by the hype around the new expansion, The Grand Tournament. It got me playing Hearthstone's super casual Tavern Brawl mode, where literally anything can happen and the rules change on a week to week basis. After that I played some games on ladder with my current favorite Warlock deck. I was going through the motions a little bit, it's a deck I know reasonably well, and having not played  most of the month I was languishing in the depths of the ladder and playing mostly newer players with less extensive collections. I cued up into a Warlock mirror match and got my backside utterly handed to me.

I know it doesn't look it but this is thrilling

I thought I knew most of the main archetypes of the Warlock deck but this was a new one. It played a little like a handlock (a deck that builds up a big hand in order to discount or buff certain cards) with whole bunch of dragon synergies added. It ran a bunch of really big dragons to close out the game. After being schooled I immediately went to look at some decklists on the internet and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to learn how to play the deck with some success.

I don't know of any other game where I can feel better about being beaten. I've played some Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's answer to the MOBA) and being beaten there feels like reading the warning on a cigarette packet. I've played a limited amount of online shooters and being beaten feels in these usually feels like being beaten by a feral child who has learned to communicate only in racial slurs and headshots. I've been beaten at poker which somehow always leaves me with the sense that a man with a city in his name is going to break my legs and steal my television because I got in too deep.

In Hearthstone every defeat teaches me something. Usually it teaches me that I suck and should go back to playing Zelda: A Link to the Past for the fifth time. On rare occasions it teaches me that there's an entirely new way to build a deck and I should totally give it a try. It's possible that my ability to face defeat with a shrug and a smile is due to the large numbers of sedative drugs in my system. At this point I feel like I could greet Michael Gove with a a mere grimace of despair rather than the usual mixture of project vomit and screams so I'm obviously very chilled right now. Still, I do feel that defeat has less of a sting in Hearthstone compared to other PVP games. Check it out and see if you agree. If you want to play with me and put my laid back attitude to the test you can hit me up on twitter @hjdoom and I promise faithfully not to put rabid weasels through your letter box if you win.

Don't forget that I also have a book out on kindle. It's called This is not a Lovesong. It's a horrible, horrible book about horrible, horrible people and you can buy a copy here. I also have a facebook page which you are encouraged to like. Think about it, what's the worst that could happen?

Batman: Arkham Asylum and the depressing truth about immersion

Batman: Arkham Asylum is pretty good game, sometimes even a great game. There's plenty of problems but the scale and ambition of the title is such that I'm content to overlook the padding that tries to hide the relative simplicity of the game underneath all the shiny.

What's strange to me about Arkham Asylum is that when Batman is being awesome I don't feel like I'm Batman. I idly flick a couple of buttons and Batman pummels one guy, blocks another and then executes a perfect kick on a third. I feel like I'm making suggestions and Batman is following them up, as and when he feels like. I spectate and marvel at his amazing skills, much like I do when reading a comic.

The times that I do feel like Batman are the intervals between the action. The times when I, and by extension Batman, don't really know what we are doing. This is a Batman that's taken one too many punches to the head and is feeling groggy and slightly confused. This is a Batman who can't find the door that he just came in through and spends five minutes anxiously running in small circles while trying to find it.

"Batman stood motionless for several minutes while he tried to remember how to jump"

Batman is very good at doing awesome things even when you aren't controlling him. He's fucking in charge and has his shit very much together. He can call in a Batplane to deliver him a gadget that he knows he's going to need any minute now. When Batman is being is being controlled by me he develops strange tics, a sudden need to find the secret area that he knows must be around here somewhere, despite the fact that the Joker has made it very clear that time is of the essence if Gotham is ever to be saved. At a critical moment in the plot Batman inexplicably decided to enter completely the wrong building and fuck about in crawlspaces, trying to piece together the secret history of Arkham Asylum. He honestly thought he was in the right building too which just made it worse.

It's strange and jarring that, for me, the immersion is highest when Batman gets incompetent, fixated and a little bit mad. I feel like I'm doing the Joker's job for him, embracing that madness and the chaos that the Joker espouses, just in a much smaller and sadder way than he might have expected. I feel that the ultimate Batman game would be one of those QWOP games where all you have to do is get Bruce Wayne out of bed and dressed for a business meeting. It would be impossible to achieve, you'd inevitably end up with toothpaste in your ear and trying to put both legs into one arm of your shirt. Eventually Alfred would put you out of your misery with a tranquilizer dart. The message would be very clear - you are not Batman, you aren't even Bruce Wayne getting out of bed. You aren't the hero, you're the reason it takes the hero fourteen attempts to kill the final boss. You are a disease afflicting the hero, an inner ear condition, a sudden stroke, a bilious attack and Batman would be much better off if this wasn't a game but a comic book. You never read an issue of Batman where he couldn't get out of bed properly and you never will. You aren't a superhero and you never will be.

New novel out today!

This is not a Love Song is the book I've been writing for the past 18 months on and off. It seems strange to be releasing this into the wild whilst I'm signed off work with chronic depression and a hatred for humanity that means I can't bring myself to leave the house but, given the topics covered in the novel perhaps that is appropriate. It's one of the bleakest things I've ever written but I also think it's one of the best, all the better for being written very slowly, and redrafted several times.

I've always been drawn to the darkness, to dark themes, and I've always been fascinated by people operating a long way outside the usual conventions of society, people who almost seem like aliens among us. Murderers and psychopaths are the obvious examples but I've also always been drawn to people who expressed their weirdness in a much quieter fashion. One of my heroes is Henry Darger who spent his whole life meticulously working on a 15,000 page unfinished novel that expressed themes that mattered only to him, mostly those involving androgynous children. I wish I had his staying power.

This is not a Lovesongis my attempt to get some strange ideas of my own out of my head and onto the page. It's the first thning I've felt really comfortable sharing with people, not because I think people will like it, I'm sure some people will but I'm sure many, many more won't, but because I feel like it captures something I've been working towards for a very long time, since I first started trying to write more than short stories. I've written three novels before this one, and even shown the texts to a few people but they were never things I felt inspired to make widely available. This is the one that captures who I am, or who I was, as a writer.

During a bout of chronic depression might even be a good time to release this nasty little piece into the world. I don't really care about it being out there because I don't really care about anything much right now apart from staying indoors and playing videogames. I hope some people like it but it's not a problem if no one does. I write for recreation, not for money. If I wanted money I certainly would have written a very different book, probably involving a dystopian future populated by feisty teenagers who defy the social order. Actually, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Perhaps that'll be the next one I work on.