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One Man's Two-Year Quest Not to Finish Final Fantasy VII (newyorker.com)
Simon Parkin, writing for The New Yorker: In 2012, David Curry, a thirty-four-year-old cashier from Southern California, came across a post on an online forum by someone who went by the handle Dick Tree. It contained a herculean proposal: Tree planned to play the 1997 video game Final Fantasy VII for as many hours as it took to raise the characters to their maximum potential, without ever leaving the opening scene, which unfolds in a nuclear reactor. Final Fantasy VII is a role-playing game, a form popularized in the nineteen-seventies by Dungeons & Dragons, in which players' feats -- beasts felled, maidens wooed -- are quantified with "experience points." Accrue enough of these points, and your character ascends a level, at which point it confronts stronger opponents worth more points. Curry estimated that, even playing for a few hours every day, Tree's attempt to raise a character to Level 99 by fighting only the game's weakest enemies would take more than a year to complete. Nevertheless, Tree attracted a following of forum users, including Curry, who cheered the project on and watched it unfold in sporadic posts. Over time, Curry told me recently, Tree's updates became more infrequent. After two years, Tree stopped altogether. "I got fed up with Dick Tree," he said. "So I declared that I would do it myself." Curry had first played Final Fantasy VII several years after its debut, but had set the game down after a few hours, underwhelmed. Although he had participated in a few Web endurance projects -- he once provided commentary on twenty-three seasons' worth of "The Simpsons" -- he had never undertaken a video-game marathon before. "I don't consider myself anything more than a casual gamer," Curry said. But then, on January 18, 2015, he switched on his PlayStation and loaded the game disk. "After that first session, I felt confident that I could complete the challenge," he told me. "I was also confident that I would teach Dick Tree a lesson about finishing what you start."
Soooo did he manage to do what Dick Tree could not? It would be nice if the summary told me instead of making me RTFA.
That will be a few years on doing nothing particularly productive. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No such thing as a kid job or summer job. People can't till summer to eat you idiot.
"They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didnâ(TM)t stop to think if they should."
I just really don't get why grinding away pointlessly at a low level of an RPG and getting level 99 is some kind of worthwhile. Even in the "playing Desert Bus" kind of way. I guess it's a generation gap: I didn't get why lying down and having people take photos of you "planking" was such a big deal, either. It makes sense to someone, for some reason.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Dude, that's nothing. I didn't finish it twice, and I'm considering not finishing it again later this year.
In 2012, David Curry, a thirty-four-year-old cashier from Southern California, came across a post on an online forum by someone who went by the handle Dick Tree. It contained a herculean proposal: Tree planned to play the 1997 video game Final Fantasy VII for as many hours as it took to raise the characters to their maximum potential, without ever leaving the opening scene, which unfolds in a nuclear reactor. Final Fantasy VII is a role-playing game, a form popularized in the nineteen-seventies by Dungeons & Dragons, in which players’ feats—beasts felled, maidens wooed—are quantified with “experience points.” Accrue enough of these points, and your character ascends a level, at which point it confronts stronger opponents worth more points. Curry estimated that, even playing for a few hours every day, Tree’s attempt to raise a character to Level 99 by fighting only the game’s weakest enemies would take more than a year to complete.
Nevertheless, Tree attracted a following of forum users, including Curry, who cheered the project on and watched it unfold in sporadic posts. Over time, Curry told me recently, Tree’s updates became more infrequent. After two years, Tree stopped altogether. “I got fed up with Dick Tree,” he said. “So I declared that I would do it myself.”
Curry had first played Final Fantasy VII several years after its début, but had set the game down after a few hours, underwhelmed. Although he had participated in a few Web endurance projects—he once provided commentary on twenty-three seasons’ worth of “The Simpsons”—he had never undertaken a video-game marathon before. “I don’t consider myself anything more than a casual gamer,” Curry said. But then, on January 18, 2015, he switched on his PlayStation and loaded the game disk. “After that first session, I felt confident that I could complete the challenge,” he told me. “I was also confident that I would teach Dick Tree a lesson about finishing what you start.”
Sometimes Curry played every day, and sometimes he went weeks without picking up the controller. Sessions might last one hour or twenty-four. As time passed, the forum users rallied behind him. At one point, Tree reappeared, claiming to have, in fact, completed the challenge already, without telling the group. “He couldn’t back up his claim with any sort of evidence, so we went on in spite of him,” Curry said.
A few months into his endeavor, Curry bought some hardware that allowed him to record his activity. He started uploading the footage to YouTube, then broadcasting it live on the streaming service Twitch. In April, a full two years after he had embarked on the project, his characters reached Level 98. “When the final session first started, mostly what I felt was pain,” Curry recalled. He had recently undergone surgery on his arm, which was still heavily bandaged and resting in a sling. Using his free hand, Curry began the fifty-six-minute session that would take him past the finish line. “It didn’t take very long for the Twitch chat to fill up with far more people than usual,” he said. “Before the finale, I would struggle to keep five viewers, but that day I had around fifty. Just keeping up with reading and responding to comments took most of my attention.” When the moment came, Curry met it with an appropriate sense of ceremony. “I’m going to hit the button and we’re going to get that glorious half a second where it says ‘Level up,’ ” he says in the video, his voice quivering. “I want us to savor that level-up, because it is the last one . . . Brace yourselves.”
The human predilection for combining tenacity and tedium goes back a long way; in the early twentieth century, for instance, there was a fad for pole-sitting, in which practitioners would sit atop flagpoles, often for days at a
Seems as those "not finishing" might be right in this dude's wheel house.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Don't post shit from The New Yorker for god's sake. What an inane article about such a pointless endeavour. Reminds me of one sibling of mine who wasted hours levelling up in Zelda 2 by killing the blobs that gave you 2 XP or whatever. Excruciating.
The guy did actually get his characters to level 99 at the first area. That was the goal, so he's done.
Probably doesn't change anything for you.
It didn't for me.
The old Slashdot slogan used to be "News for nerds, stuff that matters." Most Slashdot articles fall into both categories. It is rare to see an article which more so unambiguously falls into one category and not the other. Still, a very impressive feat.
Lives in southern California. Doesn't have a tech job. What a fucking loser this guy is. Even creimer has a tech job and creimer is 13 years older and 200 pounds fatter. Hard to believe there's a loser out there who is worse than creimer.
Abe Lincoln once said "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". It doesn't matter that Dick Tree postponed his/her/xir goal. All that matters is that he/she/xe tried.
That's pretty much all you can get with a BS CS from state these days. My company doesn't even bother going there to recruit. We only recruit from Tech.
They will find stuff like this and wonder how humans survived for so long, being so ignorant. Living lives with no merit. No point. No True Accomplishment.
Dick Tree can eat a bag of ... oh, wait.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Did he manage to free Jessie on the stairs?
There are hundreds of thousands of games I don't finish all the time.
I don't even try that hard.
"People can't till summer to eat"
True.
People till the ground, plant something, grow it, then eat it. But it usually starts in spring.
I salute his effort to accomplish the impossible. I myself have been playing a game of Space Invaders for the past 12 years, washing my hands 27 times a day, spending 30 minutes pumping my gas so I can achieve maximum compression in the gas tank and engine, carefully examining my tuna sandwiches with a magnifying glass for any sign of lettuce, pickle, or tomato (which I hate), and cleaning my teeth with a special dental instrument I stole from the dentist office.
Tell us the name of your company so bums who graduated with BS CS from Sac State can have a sit-in to protest your refusal to hire.
It's been a while, but wasn't the master plan to stay in the forest killing boar's until the reached the maximum level?
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
The entire game is basically the same thing as what he did.
Soooo did he manage to do what Dick Tree could not? It would be nice if the summary told me instead of making me RTFA.
He did it, just to be contra Dick Tree.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Abe Lincoln once said "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
Abe Lincoln also said, "You can't believe everything you read on the internet"
You have a strange way of spelling Karl Marx by the way.
I just really want to know where people get all this damn time. I'd be willing to buy a lot of it if the price is right.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So they are in the process or remaking FF VII and that is still a few years away. That was the last line of the article; hey newspaper important things first.
Karl Marx also said: "Where is my Cowboy Neal option on the poll!?"
|=u(k ¥€$, $14$#d0+, |=u(k ¥€$!
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Let me get this right ... this fellow spent two years of his spare time in focused effort trying to accomplish an otherwise meaningless goal when he could have been using the same amount of focused effort to, oh, learn a new spoken language, get a 2-year degree, acquire the skills to get a better job, earn money through consulting, start and run a mail-order business, egad, who KNOWS what.
And instead of improving himself on any of these off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions, he doubled down on what amounts to wanking with a hand tied behind his back and standing on one foot.
There is no hope for mankind.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
goat
Are you sure? I thought Karl Marx was the "Cows say moo" guy, or was he the "Only appity apps can app apps" one?
shame modern games stop giving you xp after like a 4 level difference.
I spent the last two years not even making the attempt.
They do? Only if they have means to either rent or buy property. There used to be an alternative - work on farm of other people but that seems to be less and less needed thanx to automation (or whatever that is called in farming). There used to be other jobs but if one is believe this than there is much less summer jobs now than in the past.
Although I haven't heard of this particular challenge before, many games/communities have specific, alternate ways of playing (usually to increase the difficulty). This one doesn't sound particularly fun to me, but it takes all kinds. It's another way of extending the life of a game and improving enjoyment, so I approve :-)
CDs are compact discs.
Not to be confused with 8" and 5.25" floppy disks, 3.5" floppy diskettes, or hard disks.
Read a goddamned book for fucksake.
Seriously, it's hard to me to grind my character in some games.
No need for a half-assed summary of what a rpg is.
...but as a cashier, you can have a till all year round!
Tis is like us running from one side of Dereth to the other for no reason other than we could.
We've run a 40 lap race in an online game that only supported 10 laps by all turning around and going backwards. Oval track with 4 checkpoints, takes 4 laps backwards to hit all 4 in the right order to count as a lap :)
We also used to play kill the bus there. One bus in a field of small cars, if the bus finishes race he wins. Death by a thousand stings :)
I believe that's called "illegal immigrants."
Yeah I know, it's good thing that all the stores close down during school hours and late at night. Gotta keep those jobs open for students only, because who could possibly ever need to buy something during normal working hours of the day..?
It's tedious enough just grinding at the endgame. The last time I played it, I got all the Master Materia; my takeaway from the experience was that it was a gigantic waste of time and I will never do it again. (Maybe just Yellow. That one wasn't so bad.)
What we're talking about here is way, way more tedious.
You know it is possible to just change a few values in the save file and boom, quest complete. You saved a couple of years and also learned a valuable computer skill.
...I really can overlook all issues of pointlessness and "WTF was he thinking" etc. in favor of this one question. Why, on SLASHDOT of all places, does TFS quote the segment of TFA that describes in detail (and with semi-bad analogies) how a JRPG leveling system works? Did you really think anyone reading this site *doesn't know that already*?
Max level in the first area!
I feel like it would have been more interesting to build a small robot to wiggle the stick and press A repeatedly (which after the first few levels up would be all that's needed) and if your time is worth anything at all it would have been cheaper, too.
Truth.
You left out my pronouns, but unfortunately they require unicode.
maybe thats why there is only video of the last battle :-)
To say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious
Tell that to people dedicated enough to spend two years of their life advancing some field of human knowledge to benefit all people.
“It taught me perseverance, of course,” he said. “But more important than the ability to finish what you start is what I now see as the moral goodness of finishing what you start.” Curry has already moved on to another endurance challenge, set in the preceding game in the series, Final Fantasy VI
So instead of using the lesson he learned from wasting his time on a pointless endeavour, he is going to waste more time on it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
/. or ..
David Curry:
1). Discover others have a pointless objective;
2). Adopt that pointless objective for yourself;
3). Complain when others don't accomplish the pointless objective;
4). Crow when you do accomplish the pointless objective;
5). Proclaim yourself the winner of Nothing!
fuck dick tree