Traveling as a geek means that you’ve got to do what amounts to twice the preparation for twice the convenience later. Sure, in the olden days, one could truly unplug and get away from the tech that they normally carry around with them, but not so today. No, in a world where geekery needs to keep up on the latest news on meaningful and relevant subjects (you know – games, computers, how many kills someone got in a game of TF2), you can’t be not wired, even on a business trip.

Packing your laptop, external drives, and USB sticks might seem like overkill to some people who like to travel light, but for a geek, it’s simply a desire to stay connected to the things they normally do when they’re home, no matter how cumbersome it is. Chances are if you see someone furtively trying to find a power plug so their laptop won’t die, or Twittering with one device while checking mail with the other, that they’re probably a traveling geek.

This is even worse when, like me, you work with computers as your job. In that case, being wired is not only a convenience, it’s an absolute necessity. If I couldn’t do what I needed to in a moment of crisis, things would probably go worse than hiring a scary, angry robot with lasers instead of a friendly clown for a kid’s birthday. For some geeks, forgetting an ethernet cable is worse than forgetting to pack underwear.

There are some people out there who view all this dependence on technology, even during travel, as a detriment to travel as a whole. I dunno though – I think that I call it being as productive as possible no matter where you are. Besides, if there wasn’t a need for all this convenient, portable tech, there wouldn’t be so many prevalent smartphones, netbooks, game devices, and whatnot out there for us to devour. If I can stave off a long, boring layover with a few blog posts and some laughs at the best (and worst) of the Internet, then that’s just good for everyone, because trust me – bored geeks are dangerous geeks.

Anyone who’s played an MMO before knows that there is an end, a top, a pinnacle to be reached that everyone aspires to and works towards.  It could take the form of a level cap, the best gear in the game, being ranked number one in killing squishy cloth-wearing classes, or something else entirely. It’s the sort of “cream of the crop” that MMO tourists never really get close to and many powerlevelers race to achieve first.

Me? I’m somewhere in the middle – a journeyman who tends to tough it out whenever possible, and sometimes reaches the top of the mountain climb. I watch the tourists fade away into obscurity and the powerlevelers fade away into distant heights. As someone who has less playtime than the average gamer, my schedule sometimes prevents me from getting to that mythical MMO peak.

This, however, is not one of those times. In Aion, my current game of choice, I’m close to level 50, the current cap of the game. Now, many of you who are reading this know that if I’ve gotten near Aion’s cap, that means that I’ve grinded, literally, hundreds of millions of experience points to get there. I’ve probably suffered through tons of instances gone bad and death penalty bills that have flattened my virtual wallet. Sure, the crippling experience curve makes trying to walk straight up a wall less of an effort and it seems odd that a PvP advancement system takes away more ranking points than a supermodel breaks hearts, but I manage to have soldiered on.

The secret, it seems, is people. Everyone plays an MMO for their own reasons, but at least one of those reasons involves other people – whether to stand alone at the top of the MMO mountain in front of an audience or to play with others and have a grand old geeky MMO time. I’m doing the latter – running with an extremely small but dedicated bunch of people who have been climbing the steep mountain of Aion along with me. It’s funny how a few laughs over getting low-quality items from bosses makes the game a little bit easier to bear. Along the way, I’ve gotten to know new people, snicker at the usual community chat hilarity, and generally try to mask the fact that I’m climbing the MMO mountain. It’s probably part of the reason why I’ve managed to get as far as I did, and I think that if more people realized that, they’d be more apt to stick with an MMO.

Now to get that 125+ million experience to get to the cap…

I do have to say that seeing viral marketing work properly – that is to say, overt but not obvious, teasing but not condescending – is entertaining business. If you check the thread, you can see people have brought those cryptography and puzzle-solving talents to bear, figuring out an interpretation of the sounds and then the image data within hours. The fact that Valve has also been notably tight-lipped about helping is also a great way to increase the mystery and keep the high interest going.

Having something to speculate about is one thing – I mean, people have been asking for what might be Portal 2 and of course, Half-Life Episode 3 for quite some time now. But having something to speculate about along with a breadcrumb of data idly dropped by a developer? That makes the process of waiting just a little bit more exciting if not good marketing. People remember decently good viral campaigns, because they are both complex in their planning but simple in their execution. Obviously, if a game doesn’t live up to the marketing, you might think that the virus might not have done its job, but from a certain perspective, if it’s created the kind of buzz and short term exposure needed to make people aware, it just might have.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the results of the image data (all very curious pics, you should definitely check them out) as well as the big reveal that Valve might have up its sleeve with all this. I hope you are too!

The news is the latest coup in a string of validating successes for the musical-drama-comedy hybrid, and even if I wasn’t a fan of Glee I’d have to nod my head and give it props. The thing with Glee, as I’ve written before, is that it’s taken a lot of the formulaic stuff from various shows and turned it on its head, creating an original show that’s able to stand on its own. With accolades from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, anda dedicated, rabid fanbase, Glee is set to continue its successes in 2010. Heck, when you can get the attention of the First Lady to provide a performance, you know you’ve made it big.

There are a few musical acts out there that aren’t as good live as when they’re in the studio, but musical performances almost always come up aces “IRL”. The reason, among others, is the need to have strong performance presence in a theater production that doesn’t go through much, if any soundbooth editing and tweaking. Musical performers have to have the standout talent to entertain people live, and if you’ve watched or listened to anything Glee has to offer, you know the cast has the chops to get the job done. Aside from that, the mere fact that a show about geekery outcasts is good enough to get live performance requests is validation of the potential success geeks have in a world that sometimes shuns them.

Glee returns with the second half of their first recording run in April, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the story progresses after the success of the club after sectionals. Will they get too big for their britches? Will rival club Vocal Adrenaline become a menace to be feared? The longevity of the show will be challenged depending on how the writers and producers handle the aftermath of formulaic geek success and keep us Gleeks entertained. I’ve got confidence and optimism though (big surprise), and I can’t wait to get my fix back – both on the TV and live.

Playing as Kratos and doing the things he does to keep going in the game got me thinking about the whole violence and video games argument that you see floating around the Internet every so often. Typically this tends to surface when you see some incident related to someone taking a game just a bit too seriously and carrying it over into their real lives. It’s certainly a debate that gamers like myself might sometimes tire of having with those who believe that there is some kind of correlation between the depiction of video game violence and real acts of a similar vein in reality.

Aside from the normal arguments that apply against any notion that violence in video games translates over into real violence, I think that the mere fact that violence is presented, at times, in a completely crazy and absurd manner helps the gamers’ side of the argument. When you watch Kratos, for example, as he rips bodies in half, yanks enemies off of rope ladders after slamming them, and uses heads for weaponry, you can’t help but feel the sense that this is just a bit absurd. No real person actually has the strength to impale giant sea monsters or slice a person to bits just by swinging. No person actually would come to work as Kratos either (though I suppose I wouldn’t put it past some people in the right circumstances). The point is, Kratos and what he does, while ultra-violent, is also ultra-unrealistic and sensationalist as well. Knowing that, it’s difficult to really take it seriously enough to say it influences people it shouldn’t.

As if to prove my point, I seem to recall that last year at E3 we were treated to some gameplay footage for God of War III, which was what actually piqued my interest in the series as a whole. In it, among other things,  I believe I recall one particular monster, the Chimera, suffering an unfortunate fate by getting dismembered and stabbed in the eye with its own ripped off horn. I honestly had to laugh and cringe at the same time at the insanity of that violent act – and I think others had a similar reaction to watching the footage. None of us, I think, felt the need to go out of our way to do the same to a fellow human. Instead, I might have gotten more popcorn. The point is – if violence in video games can actually have value as absurd entertainment and crazy visuals, then I have a feeling most gamers wouldn’t have a problem understanding that it stays exactly like that after they turn off the console. It’s probably one of, if not the, only good things about seeing (virtual) violence done at all.

So, a bit over a year ago, I decided to stop bringing a knife to a gun fight and get myself a weapon. I picked up the Blackberry Storm, and while it’s had its fair share of criticism from various circles, I managed to finally keep up with my fellow geeks. Email, multimedia, browsers, and apps – these were now all at my disposal on my new phone, and I finally felt like I had a handle on the whole cellphone thing.

Cut to a year later, and I’m now behind again in the arms race. This time, I have a gun, but several people have rocket launchers in the form of Droid-powered goodness and iPhone generational hotness, with new models like the Nexus One just waiting for people to popularize them. I’m doing passably well, but the veritable Swiss Army knife of apps from GPS finders to barcode scanning nonsense has me being run around in circles yet again.

Honestly though, I’m not really saddened by this – not surprisingly, I’ve learned to laugh if not adapt to the whole hilarity of it all. Why is this? Well, as a geek myself, I’m well aware of the arms race of technology, and it’s not just limited to phones. Computers are seemingly not the new hotness after mere months, video game systems have become increasingly advanced with the amount of power they can deliver, and household devices such as TVs and appliances get better and better. The continuous need to upgrade or keep up is a sign that the market for tech is alive, well, and not willing to sit on its heels, and the extreme competition has only served to benefit the consumer, because they get to try out all the new toys.

Will I succumb to the Droid when my contract is up in a few months? Perhaps – and even if it too becomes a bit old and crotchety in a manner of months, there’ll always be something new to look forward to. Besides – a lifetime of the same stuff is just so boring, right? The ever-changing tech that’s in front of me will always be endearing to me.

Well, never fear, Overly Positive is here with yet another Case of the Mondays Cure. This time around, I found this really neato article off of a co-worker’s post in Google Buzz (see, it’s useful already). Apparently, one professor out there has a pretty strict policy on gadgets and tech devices in class, including laptops. But how do you prove that you might enforce such a policy with brutal efficiency? Simple – a visual aid:

Well – I’m convinced. Notebook and pen it is!

• What things keep you listening to a podcast?
• What kind of content do you like to hear in a podcast?
• Do you prefer a freeform discussion with few topics or a structured format?

I have a few podcasts in my feed, and might be looking to add more, so I’m curious about which podcasts you like to listen to as well.

Sometimes I feel for Jim, because unlike someone as optimistic and annoyingly sunny as me, Jim receives plenty of negative impressions in his reviews and his notions. When they come out, they come out in a way that is inevitably insulting to some portion of the gaming populace. It leads to a lot of need to clarify and repeat. Definitely not fun all the time. In my own way, I think I’d like to help by providing my own impressions of what he thought.

Really, I think the main point that’s being put across is not that art games suck, or that indie games suck, but that a game being “artsy” and only “artsy” as a selling point of success sucks. We all know that games themselves are an amalgamation of parts, and the presentation, of which art is a part, is only one portion of making a successful game. I love games that make me think, present me a theme, show me something that is controversial and out there. In fact they’re a welcome alternative to the mainstream stuff I sometimes play when I don’t need a brain to play. But as much as we need “art” in games sometimes, we also need the accompanying gameplay and sensible logic to go with it. This is pretty much, I think, the crux of Jim’s argument.

If people thought that gameplay was the only thing that could make a successful game, we wouldn’t see half of the interesting twists and turns that some games are adventurous enough to take. If people thought that art was the only thing that could make a successful game, then we’d have plenty more games that were out there and well-known that tried to send more of a thematic message than play well. The fact is, we need both art and gameplay to make a good game, and one without the other is like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the bread.

The mere fact that games have a smaller, indie market to create titles that are a bit “out there” (like The Path) is a good thing. The expansion of the games market and the target audience to include people who take a more artistic tack on media is really only a good thing overall, and not a bad thing. Really, I think the point is that the fundamentals should not be forgotten when making a game, no matter what message or thought you want to send with it. More significantly, one part of creating a game should not make the game an automatic success, whether that is the more “artsy” ideas of what message/theme you’re trying to send, or the fact that you can turn on a dime with the analog sticks and shoot backwards or upside down. Judging games as a whole should be based on all the factors, not just one which gives it a free pass to evaluating everything else it does. I personally look forward to seeing what art can be done in games – as long as I’m able to make sense of it at the same time, too.

For the uninitiated, Threadless is a small, Chicago-based t-shirt company that sells their wares based on community-driven submissions, scoring, and other such items. The best of the best get printed for sale and the designers get a cut. It’s that simple, and that fun. Scoring designs and reporting that you did, by the way, nets you possible benefits too. So without further ado, I thought I’d highlight a few designs regularly that I think are worth your attention.

Honey Money – http://www.threadless.com/submission/256219/Honey_Money
I really liked this one because cutesy images are always good – and when they involve a bit of creative effort making cashola, they’re even better. Got no doubt this one’s going to the printers, honestly.

Alphabet Soup – http://www.threadless.com/submission/255855/Alphabet_Soup
Every so often, one of the slogans that makes it onto a shirt makes me giggle. I won’t spoil this one for you, but I will say that I thought it was ingenious and thoughtful. Kudos to the designer!

S’morched – http://www.threadless.com/submission/255815/S_morched
There’s something to be said about practicality – especially when it involves dragons. Dragons are always cool no matter how you slice it. Definitely puts a spin on the whole traditional hero story you see involving them.

Locked and Loaded Potato – http://www.threadless.com/submission/255340/Locked_amp_Loaded_Potato
You gotta love it when you take a well known icon and you put them in a situation you thought you’d never see them in. Takes creativity to put this old favorite toy into this situation, but I do have to say – any action hero would be hard-pressed to deal with this Potato.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Even - http://www.threadless.com/submission/256214/Don_t_get_mad_Get_even
Classic. And it involves games, too. Not a bad combination for a shirt with something simple on the front of it. Frankly, the times when I did have an opportunity to get even in this game, it was more than a little bit of a thrill to turn the tables.

That’s it for this week, guys and gals! Be sure to sign up for an account at the Threadless site so you can score your own stuff!