Haven’t touched WoW in a couple weeks. Not since the patch with the raid finder and Darkmoon Fair. It seems very pointless. Maybe I’ll return to my overachiever troll someday, but not today. And SWTOR launches Tuesday (what an excellent time to burn up the rest of my vacation days).
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Heroes of Might and Magic VI. It’s kind of yes-and-no. It’s the classic game with lots of updates, some of which are very much appreciated. For instance, now, when you conquer a castle, all the mines around it automatically change ownership, so you don’t have to repetitiously go click each one. However, somehow this update resulted in extremely long games, and the way to win them is by sheer numbers. So you wind up with a lot of situations where you attack your computer-generated foe, discover he’s got 800 level 1 troops and 400 level 2s while you’ve got only 400 and 200; this means you have to spend some game weeks clicking “next day” rapidly until you close the gap some more, assuming you can produce more units per week than the enemy. Hence, some of the campaign games I’ve been playing take hours and hours to finish. Not sure how this will pan out in online play, and I note that online is “e-z mode” where you get all kinds of buffs and achievements for everything you do.
I’ve played around with Skyrim. I’m not a total Bethesda noob, having played the hell out of Daggerfall, a delightfully sandboxy game set in the same world. I’ve never gotten too far with Skyrim, though. My most accomplished character, a sullen looking little mage, basically ran around the country stealing horses and galloping around checking the scenery. I was disappointed to find no way to sail south to the warmer lands where the cat people live. Something about all that frozen northern European countryside just makes me want to get in a boat and head south (it’s a genetic thing). I may thrash Skyrim to the point where I get nicer looking clothes some day, but for now, did you know that if you jump off a cliff on a stolen horse, the horse will suck up all the damage and die, but you’ll be able to walk away and go pilfer yourself another nag?
And I play Angry Birds, Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my phone, but so far none of them interests me as much as the Kindle app, or asking Siri offensive questions.
I’ve been reading about games. Slate had an interesting series about a bunch of guys playing games I mostly haven’t touched, except for Skyrim.
I’ll comment a little bit on that whole series. One, there are a few references to whether gaming is exclusively a hobby for the rich. Personally, my wholehearted embracing of the gamer lifestyle has resulted in my savings account being healthier than it ever has, thanks to my tendency to want to play games rather than go outside and spend money.
And two, not all gamers are alike. These people who play cut-scene, first-person games, for example. Usually when you encounter games in mainstream journalism they are talking about this sort of experience. However, when I’d talk to other gamers in WoW, we spent a lot of time talking about games that are “pure” games – strategy, football, pattern recognition stuff like Angry Birds and Bejeweled. Not protagonist-identification type games with cut scenes.
I realize the people who are mainly into first person games are out there, mainly because they sell articles, probably because those articles are more accessible to non-gamers who think the entire experience is about being led through some kind of movie-like narrative, and get all confused or derisive when encountering something that tickles a different set of brain cells. One of the reviewers in the series discusses not “finishing” games, and several of them talk about the cost of constantly getting new ones. That tells me they’re approaching the issue in a linear, movie-like fashion. Finish one, on to the next. I think I approach games more like music – “I’m in an XXX mood today, so I think I’ll play a few songs by band XXXX.” It’s not like “ooh, I bought a new album but first I need to listen to that last one I bought.”
Which is how music reviewers listen to albums. Not normal people. Which leads to the question: do game reviewers play their games the same way as normal people? I think it would be interesting to have an article about several “types” of people describing how they interact with games. Not just upper middle class red-breasted robins tweeting from the trees, trying to make sure they attract flocks of likeminded red-breasted robins to peck at the bird feeders while simultaneously chasing off the bluebirds and mockingbirds and whatever all kind of birds y’all mainland people have – I’m not too clear on them, having grown up in the land of the Blue Footed Booby.
I'm throwing the mainland vs. islander slant at it because sometimes it feels similar. The main thing non-mainland people notice about mainland people is how much mainland people are convinced they are the Default Setting for All Of Life’s Experiences. You can chalk it up to imperialism or confirmation bias or whatever, and it does indeed get strong and concentrated in the Northeast and a lot more dilute toward the left edge of the map. This bleeds over into what I’m talking about. A mainlander-style gamer journalist will say something like “These are the types of games people play, and XXX is a good one, while YYY is not a good one.” Someone outside this perspective will say “This is the game that I play, and I think it rocks, but my cousin Jasper didn’t like it so much, he plays LLL, and my sister really likes MMM but her boyfriend thinks it sucks. I dunno, your mileage may vary. But anyway, we all played XXX for this article, and we all had some different opinions.” You can see a little of both in the Slate series, but occasionally there's that fit of "I live in a tiny room full of mirrors and affirmations" creeping in.
Speaking of different opinions, I found myself wallowing in the games-and-gender trenches briefly, when I read a re-direct on Jezebel to this bloggage responding to a gamer article.
A subject that refuses to die.
Here’s my current take on the whole mess. Gamers attract the intellectually competitive. I realized when I was looking through SWTOR guilds that as a whole, gamers like to toss confrontational topics and arguments around, but when I do that in certain crowds, they burst into tears and accuse me of being Satan. I’m insulated in a little bubble of confirmation bias because I work with lawyers, and one thing I’ve noticed about law firms is that they are very inhospitable environments for the kinds of people who hate to be challenged. In fact, I’ve got a standing assignment from one of the partners to try to drag one of his associates into stupid arguments because we’re trying to train him not to rise to the bait when the bad-guy lawyers try that particular tactic. (Then, while you’re distracted by the stupid argument, they waltz you around and try to get away with stuff.)
This frequently means that I fail hard when encountering the confrontation-averse. Now, lots of women are confrontation-averse. For example, if you go check out some feminist sites, you’ll see a lot of official “trigger warnings” right before gruesome rapes/murders/acts of meanness are discussed. This is a consensus cultural practice based on the theory and/or observation that sometimes, people get upset and emotional when triggers are triggered, and that it’s a good idea to aim towards not doing that.
When the very sensitive and the very confrontational interact, well, things don’t bode well for the former. The latter will waltz them around and try to get away with stuff. Because they’re mean, insensitive pigs? No, because it’s a successful tactic – especially against the kind of people who claim they’re being fair-minded before throwing down the guilt trip card. Which, admittedly, can also be a good tactic, except it works better on highly sensitive persons than it does against gamers.
The thing is, gamers are sensitive too. In fact, from the comments on the original article, a lot of guys were reacting with instant hostility towards even the merest suggestion they were being reprimanded by a feminist (i.e. rising to the bait).
In Northern Slobovia, people play loud dance pop when they’re happy and sit quietly when they’re sad. In Southern Slobovia, people listen to loud death metal when they’re angsty and when they’re in good moods, take quiet, reverent hikes while appreciating the beauty of nature. How long can these two countries get along before cultural misunderstandings work their way up to nasty ethnic stereotypes and physical violence?
Feminists come from a perspective of wanting to help make everybody equal. The cosmic nerf bat.
The last thing gamers want is equality. Maybe at the starting line, but if everybody’s at the same place when you get close to the finish line, you’re not doing it right.
And at the same time, gamers can clearly see the value in having opponents who live to fight another day. That’s why we make a point of only killing each other with pretend swords and guns (and it also benefits us if lots of people can afford the pretend swords and guns, because an unlimited flowing supply of worthy opponents is what gets gamers all hot and bothered). We can also see the value in having friendships and romantic relationships with other gamers, because teammates are for the win.
And through writing my games-n-gender blog, I started seeing that I shifted more towards a “let’s everybody have some good competition!” perspective than the “let’s all be equalized” one. In a greater, meta-political sense, I do think certain financial industries need a good hard smack with the nerfbat, because they have forced a large percentage of my potential worthy opponents to be so lacking in funds they cannot afford to play games online. And I think the knee-jerk sexists need to STFU and dial the d-baggery down because it benefits all of us gamers to have more opponents (and consider that if you’re the type of person who really hates women – or any other subset of humanity -- by not being a d-bag in public, you’d be encouraging more of them to play, and you could be stalking them in pvp right now instead of whining about your unfulfilled rage urges like some fail-hearted noob who can’t manage to find a port for his keyboard).
The competition-versus-equality thing at the essential heart of the whole discussion is what needs to be balanced, in my humble opinion. The ideal state for it is somewhere in the middle because it's hellish on either extreme. Dragging sex and gender into it is a distraction.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Looking for SWTOR Guild
I haven’t played very much WoW lately. I started avoiding WoW in the spring, and I never quite returned, although I did have a brief episode of Extinction Burst where I did a bunch of server transfers and leveled a new character and ran around exploring areas of the game I had previously ignored and joined a new guild, all in an attempt to recapture whatever it was that kept me logging in. Didn’t work. I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling as far as WoW is concerned.
I haven’t given up on games. I’m still constructing Sims 3 houses, and I’m enjoying the Pets expansion, which has removed a lot of the worst features from the pets expansions in the two previous Sims games. Plus it has horsies, and you can not only race them, you can paint them any color you want. I’ve also been playing Angry Birds and Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my new iPhone, which I got basically to replace my dead Kindle and my dead camera. It does those things plus play games and make phone calls, so I approve. The games so far are your basic twitch; not sure if there will ever be a huge complex strategy and/or sandbox game I can play on my phone, but they’re fine for a few minutes of instant distraction when I’m waiting for my PC games to load.
I’ve already signed up for SWTOR, which starts next month, and so DarthBunnywabbit will be turning into a SWTOR blog, assuming I still feel like writing it. Right now I’m looking for a SWTOR guild. They put in a feature where you can join a guild before joining the actual game, so I posted in the recruiting forum and am currently weeding my way through tons of websites for guilds that responded. Hardcore guilds, multi-national guilds, fanfic writing guilds, overachiever guilds, roleplay guilds, guilds that formed in Everquest and guilds that formed yesterday.
One thing I have learned from my past gaming history – relying on random chance means you lose more often. I like being in a guild with people who like to communicate by typing. I like having guildies that don’t feel the need to sling assorted varieties of hate around like dogs marking trees. The random method pretty much guarantees I’ll wander into an enclave of the other type, so I’m pre-screening. I’m not quite going to turn into one of those sheltered orchids who balks at interaction outside the circle of protection, or at least I hope not. I do know that I’ll probably be investing some time in this new game, and I don’t want to spend that time watching crackers with low IQs exchange misspelled insults. I want a congenial-pub kind of environment where I can exchange wisecracks with people I know on a superficial level, so I’m going to go find a promising group to start out with rather than relying on the Fickle Fairy of Random Chance to assign me to a server full of witty repartee where I will magically find a random guild with no d-bags in it.
Actually, I learned a few things from my misspent years as a WoW addict. Navigating guild applications is only one of them. And here, I’ll give you the standard anti-guild applying rant: “Why should I have to apply to a guild, this makes it too much like a job, how artificial and unnatural, blah blah blah.” To which my informed answer is something like, well, of course you apply to a job. You’re going to be spending some time there. It’s a good idea to make sure you’re not going to be spending that time assembling aircraft engines when your real expertise is brain surgery. Sure, you could always go apply for a job that nearly everyone can do, such as preparing french fries. It’s going to suck if you were looking forward to spending lunch discussing brain surgery with other brain surgeons, however.
People sometimes get all quasi-spiritual about randomness – it’s destiny, karma, part of the divine plan, natural. But those same people don’t take random jobs and friends and spouses without going through a selection process. That’s why I’m checking out all these guild websites and crossing off ones with too few members, or too many typos, or unsubstantiated boasting, or d-bags saying d-baggy things in public with nobody telling them to dial it back.
Prowess is another consideration. Some of these prospective guilds are run by people with good track records at winning games. Others are run by people who brag about how they’re going to clean up all the server firsts yet don’t cite any kind of experience doing that. From my experience, every guild will brag internally about its awesomeness, regardless of the amount of fail actually present. That’s a human nature thing. We humans like to sort ourselves into little groups so we can discuss our superiority to all the other groups amongst ourselves. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger Effect, we are all above average (or at least, we perceive ourselves to be above average). Since all guilds claim to be way above average, distinguishing a guild that is pretty good at gaming from one that is pretty good at boasting can be a challenge.
Just by virtue of being in a guild, I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of discussion with my new guildies about how awesome we all are for having the good taste to be there, all of us being above-average together. The dark side of all this hyper competency involves talking smack about everybody else. WoW has made me very conscious of this tendency. If a group is focused too much on staying ahead of the guy behind them, rather than looking forward toward the finish line, you wind up with a cultish sort of experience, with lots of activity policing and loyalty tests and other BS. There’s a very subtle difference between “our guild will excel in this game” and “our guild will pwn all the other guilds in this game.” The first guild is more likely to have achievers in it. The second is more likely to be full of bullies with confidence issues.
I’m getting dangerously close to portraying myself as some kind of paragon of correct behavior, so I thought I’d mention my mean sense of humor. I’m not going to list all my virtuous achievements to reassure you that I’m not really a mean person. I’m occasionally mistaken for one though, especially when I’m laughing at something foul and distasteful. Plus I like to play villainous characters. Which brings us to the Sliding Scale of Virtual Morality.
I’m really tempted to go into some anecdotal experience here, about the disconnect between people who spend their days saving lives and/or being nice to people and their nights saying outrageously mean things in raid chat. And the other disconnect, between people who are constantly eager to denounce others for saying mean things … then you talk to them for a while and learn they’re pretty much jerks in real life. To further complicate matters, sometimes people are stone cold d-bags in real life but are friendly and cooperative in game. Or maybe they are partisans on some issue the pundits regularly paint in shades of black and white – politics, religion, and so on – whether they rant about it at every possible opportunity or whether they keep their mouths shut until directly challenged. It might even involve the degree to which intra-group insulting is tolerated – whether it’s an abrasive kind of place or one where everybody needs to be on their best Care Bear behavior at all times.
There are no clear lines on the SSVM. It basically involves walking a tightrope between “will the group laugh or report me for this joke?” and “will my comment to Player X about her lack of DPS cause her to log out in tears or laugh and tell me to shove it?” As someone who is even more addicted to wisecracks than gaming, understanding whether my mean sense of humor can be openly displayed in public is an important consideration. And at the same time, there are certain kinds of wisecracks that set my teeth on edge, such as endless repetition of “that’s what she said.” I want to be in a wisecracking guild, but it has to be the right kind of wisecracks.
I’m actually leaning toward this one guild that has a frequently-posting member who actually has a picture of himself, naked, in his signature file. It’s a pretty unflattering picture, and nothing NSFW is on display, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it. It’s pretty clear there wouldn’t be a lot of walking-on-eggs-so-as-not-to-disturb-the-easily-disturbed in that guild.
Another guild made mention in their code of conduct that they do not tolerate racism … unless it is in-universe racism. Go ahead, call people nerfherders and refuse to allow droids in your drinking establishment all you want. That’s something I tend to really enjoy in virtual realities; bigotry toward alien races. It preserves all the amusing parts of being a bigot, adds the enjoyment of improvised acting, and has absolutely no negative repercussions whatsoever. Nobody is getting denied any jobs or scholarships or apartments or anything of tangible value. No little kids will be tormented on any playgrounds for physical characteristics outside their control. No bodily injury will be inflicted. Instead, humor will be enjoyed, and people will laugh. They may even reflect on how stupid it sounds when people take bigotry seriously.
It's going to be tough choosing, and the fact that so many of these SWTOR guilds have websites full of text and posts by people who clearly enjoy typing and reading and talking warms my heart. I think maybe I'll find the SWTOR crowd far more to my liking than the WoW playerbase.
I haven’t given up on games. I’m still constructing Sims 3 houses, and I’m enjoying the Pets expansion, which has removed a lot of the worst features from the pets expansions in the two previous Sims games. Plus it has horsies, and you can not only race them, you can paint them any color you want. I’ve also been playing Angry Birds and Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my new iPhone, which I got basically to replace my dead Kindle and my dead camera. It does those things plus play games and make phone calls, so I approve. The games so far are your basic twitch; not sure if there will ever be a huge complex strategy and/or sandbox game I can play on my phone, but they’re fine for a few minutes of instant distraction when I’m waiting for my PC games to load.
I’ve already signed up for SWTOR, which starts next month, and so DarthBunnywabbit will be turning into a SWTOR blog, assuming I still feel like writing it. Right now I’m looking for a SWTOR guild. They put in a feature where you can join a guild before joining the actual game, so I posted in the recruiting forum and am currently weeding my way through tons of websites for guilds that responded. Hardcore guilds, multi-national guilds, fanfic writing guilds, overachiever guilds, roleplay guilds, guilds that formed in Everquest and guilds that formed yesterday.
One thing I have learned from my past gaming history – relying on random chance means you lose more often. I like being in a guild with people who like to communicate by typing. I like having guildies that don’t feel the need to sling assorted varieties of hate around like dogs marking trees. The random method pretty much guarantees I’ll wander into an enclave of the other type, so I’m pre-screening. I’m not quite going to turn into one of those sheltered orchids who balks at interaction outside the circle of protection, or at least I hope not. I do know that I’ll probably be investing some time in this new game, and I don’t want to spend that time watching crackers with low IQs exchange misspelled insults. I want a congenial-pub kind of environment where I can exchange wisecracks with people I know on a superficial level, so I’m going to go find a promising group to start out with rather than relying on the Fickle Fairy of Random Chance to assign me to a server full of witty repartee where I will magically find a random guild with no d-bags in it.
Actually, I learned a few things from my misspent years as a WoW addict. Navigating guild applications is only one of them. And here, I’ll give you the standard anti-guild applying rant: “Why should I have to apply to a guild, this makes it too much like a job, how artificial and unnatural, blah blah blah.” To which my informed answer is something like, well, of course you apply to a job. You’re going to be spending some time there. It’s a good idea to make sure you’re not going to be spending that time assembling aircraft engines when your real expertise is brain surgery. Sure, you could always go apply for a job that nearly everyone can do, such as preparing french fries. It’s going to suck if you were looking forward to spending lunch discussing brain surgery with other brain surgeons, however.
People sometimes get all quasi-spiritual about randomness – it’s destiny, karma, part of the divine plan, natural. But those same people don’t take random jobs and friends and spouses without going through a selection process. That’s why I’m checking out all these guild websites and crossing off ones with too few members, or too many typos, or unsubstantiated boasting, or d-bags saying d-baggy things in public with nobody telling them to dial it back.
Prowess is another consideration. Some of these prospective guilds are run by people with good track records at winning games. Others are run by people who brag about how they’re going to clean up all the server firsts yet don’t cite any kind of experience doing that. From my experience, every guild will brag internally about its awesomeness, regardless of the amount of fail actually present. That’s a human nature thing. We humans like to sort ourselves into little groups so we can discuss our superiority to all the other groups amongst ourselves. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger Effect, we are all above average (or at least, we perceive ourselves to be above average). Since all guilds claim to be way above average, distinguishing a guild that is pretty good at gaming from one that is pretty good at boasting can be a challenge.
Just by virtue of being in a guild, I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of discussion with my new guildies about how awesome we all are for having the good taste to be there, all of us being above-average together. The dark side of all this hyper competency involves talking smack about everybody else. WoW has made me very conscious of this tendency. If a group is focused too much on staying ahead of the guy behind them, rather than looking forward toward the finish line, you wind up with a cultish sort of experience, with lots of activity policing and loyalty tests and other BS. There’s a very subtle difference between “our guild will excel in this game” and “our guild will pwn all the other guilds in this game.” The first guild is more likely to have achievers in it. The second is more likely to be full of bullies with confidence issues.
I’m getting dangerously close to portraying myself as some kind of paragon of correct behavior, so I thought I’d mention my mean sense of humor. I’m not going to list all my virtuous achievements to reassure you that I’m not really a mean person. I’m occasionally mistaken for one though, especially when I’m laughing at something foul and distasteful. Plus I like to play villainous characters. Which brings us to the Sliding Scale of Virtual Morality.
I’m really tempted to go into some anecdotal experience here, about the disconnect between people who spend their days saving lives and/or being nice to people and their nights saying outrageously mean things in raid chat. And the other disconnect, between people who are constantly eager to denounce others for saying mean things … then you talk to them for a while and learn they’re pretty much jerks in real life. To further complicate matters, sometimes people are stone cold d-bags in real life but are friendly and cooperative in game. Or maybe they are partisans on some issue the pundits regularly paint in shades of black and white – politics, religion, and so on – whether they rant about it at every possible opportunity or whether they keep their mouths shut until directly challenged. It might even involve the degree to which intra-group insulting is tolerated – whether it’s an abrasive kind of place or one where everybody needs to be on their best Care Bear behavior at all times.
There are no clear lines on the SSVM. It basically involves walking a tightrope between “will the group laugh or report me for this joke?” and “will my comment to Player X about her lack of DPS cause her to log out in tears or laugh and tell me to shove it?” As someone who is even more addicted to wisecracks than gaming, understanding whether my mean sense of humor can be openly displayed in public is an important consideration. And at the same time, there are certain kinds of wisecracks that set my teeth on edge, such as endless repetition of “that’s what she said.” I want to be in a wisecracking guild, but it has to be the right kind of wisecracks.
I’m actually leaning toward this one guild that has a frequently-posting member who actually has a picture of himself, naked, in his signature file. It’s a pretty unflattering picture, and nothing NSFW is on display, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it. It’s pretty clear there wouldn’t be a lot of walking-on-eggs-so-as-not-to-disturb-the-easily-disturbed in that guild.
Another guild made mention in their code of conduct that they do not tolerate racism … unless it is in-universe racism. Go ahead, call people nerfherders and refuse to allow droids in your drinking establishment all you want. That’s something I tend to really enjoy in virtual realities; bigotry toward alien races. It preserves all the amusing parts of being a bigot, adds the enjoyment of improvised acting, and has absolutely no negative repercussions whatsoever. Nobody is getting denied any jobs or scholarships or apartments or anything of tangible value. No little kids will be tormented on any playgrounds for physical characteristics outside their control. No bodily injury will be inflicted. Instead, humor will be enjoyed, and people will laugh. They may even reflect on how stupid it sounds when people take bigotry seriously.
It's going to be tough choosing, and the fact that so many of these SWTOR guilds have websites full of text and posts by people who clearly enjoy typing and reading and talking warms my heart. I think maybe I'll find the SWTOR crowd far more to my liking than the WoW playerbase.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Guild Drama
The guild I was in from March 2008 to about May of 2011 just folded, and the leader retired his account. We were the number one 25-raid horde guild on the server for a while there.
I recently gave Blizzard more money than they probably deserve to transfer my toons off my server of origin. My main, the troll priest, is in a social guild I found via a blog I like, where I leveled my shaman. By the time I got the shaman to level 85, I was so blown away by the fact that guildchat was in complete, intelligible sentences – and didn’t consist primarily of whining, posturing and hate speech – that I transferred even more toons to that server, just to hang out and watch guildchat crawl while pursuing whatever Azerothian obsession had me hooked at the moment.
I didn’t say goodbye before I left. I could easily come up with a big whiny rant about how they were mean and froze me out of the only viable group of 10 they had going, but to be honest, there was quite a lot of “I’m not going to heal that guy because he’s a hate-spewing d-bag and I’d rather /mock his corpse” going on from my end.
10-raids are intimate. There was nobody in that guild I really wanted to be intimate with. And we couldn’t pull 25-raids off any more because we always ran with about 15 core people and 10 who claim they watched a youtube video once, and previous raids were amenable to that.
When I joined it, there was one control freak of a guild leader, Decade. He worked in academia (/eyeroll) in the psych department (/eyeroll), specializing in addictionology. He was one of the biggest WoW addicts on the server.
Now. I might have mentioned his personal style of keeping everyone in check was to pretend every guy in the guild was gay and was having a massive gay orgy and affairs with everyone, and to claim various guys left their pants at his house, or were servicing him under his desk, or chained up in his back room like the geek. This definitely kept the hate speech down, but in kind of a twisted way. And the more I raided with other guilds, the more I realized that this “Polk Street bathhouse in the ‘70s” style of management was unusual. There have been gay people just casually talking about their relationships in every guild I’ve been in, but this was this weird layer of roleplay inserted between WoW-talk and RL-talk.
As it so happens, one of my good buddies was actually inside Polk Street bathhouses in the ‘70s, then during the ‘80s he was an overworked grief counselor and activist, and now he’s this middle aged guy who looks like somebody’s dad hanging around Home Depot deciding what kind of brackets to get. I asked him once if he knew why straight guys roleplayed being over-the-top and he had no idea. I think at some level it can be like a dominance thing, an attempt at public humiliation to test whether your rival will freak out or play along. However, I note that guys have an immensely wide vocabulary in that particular department and can center it around football, business, politics, fandom, musical tastes, pretty much any damn thing you can think of, dudes will find a way to compare size over it. I further note that when people vocalize regarding gay sex every thirty seconds or less, it tends to mean they are both interested in the subject and not engaging in it. I even furtherer note that, from personal experience, you can spend an entire dinner at Chow on Castro Street up to and including the gingerbread with pumpkin ice cream dessert (which I recommend) and not hear a .001th as many references to gay sex as one would hear in one of my guild's average raids. Yeah, yeah, I’m unique and cloistered and I live in a city renowned for gayness, but this whole situation was a total headscratcher for me, a hippie anthropologist wandering into deepest darkest flyover territory. The horror, the horror. And truthfully, I haven’t seen it in any guild since.
So part of my raid addiction, actually, was trying to figure Decade out. Was he a closeted straight? A gay dude living in some island of heterosexuality who could only express his true nature in sideways fashion? A conservative trying to be funny? Was he actually cruising guildchat, looking for naïve young men to chat with in private? All I could really gather was he was a neurotic control freak with an ironclad addiction to the game, or actually, to winning the game. I never saw any indication he was into lore, or goofing off with vanity items, or PVPing. He just wanted to win, and anyone could hang out with him as long as they didn't present obstacles to his winning.
After I initially started raiding with these guys, I went through a “that was nice, now let’s find another distraction” stage, back when I leveled my druid. I took a month off, reappeared in Decade’s guild, and every night, without fail, a raid invitation would pop up on my screen. I never asked, but I nearly always accepted.
They were always invitations to 25s. I severely miss 25s sometimes. There was enough peer pressure so that anyone trying to clog up the proceedings with attention-getting antics got smacked down fast, and there was always at least one really good wisecrack per night.
The main addictive part, for me, was watching how people worked together to accomplish things, or fail. Some nights, everything flowed like music, fights were effortless, conversation was funny and everybody scored new shiny things. Other nights, fail after fail would occur, followed by blamestorming and raging. Things were complicated by the fact we rarely had the same crew twice. The really, really addictive part was Finally Winning That Fight after working hard at beating it. That's just an incomparable rush.
In addition to the camp roleplaying, Decade was a memorable and colorful rager. He could rant in that special way of fussy control-freak guys. I think having an excuse to rage out was part of the game’s appeal for him too. Unfortunately, especially towards the end or when he got drunk, a lot of his rage would be based on bad data. He would be upbraiding people for failing at something they did last week, when someone would remind him that half the people from last week weren’t there, and this crew had never done it before.
One of my favorite examples was this particular fight in Ulduar where he used to rearrange the raid groups. The healers hated this, because we all use addons that move our bars around, so something like “group 2 will go left” is useless if you’ve got people arranged in a different order. And Decade, being massively impatient, would rant about what bad healers we were for making him wait around while we reconfigured.
Toward the end of Wrath, he rolled a druid, and decided to try to heal. This amused me; I was raiding as a resto druid on my ally toon at the time. We got to the aforementioned fight, and the raid leader – Decade couldn’t raid lead while healing, he quickly discovered – rearranged the groups. This sent him into a total panic attack, and I didn't see him play his resto druid much afterwards.
I wrote about this tendency toward misdirected rage on the guild forums once, and got back some hysterical in-game email accusing me of being the worst WoW player ever. All I can do about that is shrug; I rarely asked for an invite, I nevertheless got one every night, and I appear in about 90% of the progression kill screenshots over the time we were raiding, from BC through Wrath. And from running instances, I’m well aware of the fact that my status as most awesome healer in the universe can quickly change to feeblest player to ever get past the login screen, depending on who I’m randomly assigned to. I logged a ridiculous amount of raid hours during those three years. All from trying to figure out that mysterious “successful group” versus “imploding nebula of fail” magic.
Decade abruptly quit the game last year (then he came back and changed his name and made a new guild, then he abandoned that guild). One of the guys who had assumed some authority under Decade’s rein took over, Chaos. He was this scientist dude who liked to PVP, and was the sort of guy who would take up leadership due to a sense of responsibility but probably wouldn’t seek it out. He merged with another surviving 25-raid guild on the server towards the end of Wrath, to try to keep the magic going. He also brought in a bunch of PVPers, and soon guildchat was full of typos and guys accusing each other of buggery.
The whole locker room roleplay pretty much ground to a dead halt after Decade left. Unfortunately, it turned into more of a “ur so ghey!” “cut it out f*!” kind of world, and I was already on the record for being a snobbish liberal beyotch from the land of Harvey Milk. Fortunately, by this time I had been raiding in various groups on my various other toons and realized that yeah, actually the norm is to have a situation where people are in fact talking about how to successfully win the game rather than sex.
Around the time my bunny passed away, I took a break. When I came back, I started transferring all my toons. I’ve got my mage and warrior off on different servers, and my main’s in a social guild in a place where I can pug raids. I thought of finding another guild to raid with, but I’m not even sure I like this game enough to want to devote that kind of attention to it any more.
SWTOR’s coming soon. I’ve already paid for my limited edition digital download.
I recently gave Blizzard more money than they probably deserve to transfer my toons off my server of origin. My main, the troll priest, is in a social guild I found via a blog I like, where I leveled my shaman. By the time I got the shaman to level 85, I was so blown away by the fact that guildchat was in complete, intelligible sentences – and didn’t consist primarily of whining, posturing and hate speech – that I transferred even more toons to that server, just to hang out and watch guildchat crawl while pursuing whatever Azerothian obsession had me hooked at the moment.
I didn’t say goodbye before I left. I could easily come up with a big whiny rant about how they were mean and froze me out of the only viable group of 10 they had going, but to be honest, there was quite a lot of “I’m not going to heal that guy because he’s a hate-spewing d-bag and I’d rather /mock his corpse” going on from my end.
10-raids are intimate. There was nobody in that guild I really wanted to be intimate with. And we couldn’t pull 25-raids off any more because we always ran with about 15 core people and 10 who claim they watched a youtube video once, and previous raids were amenable to that.
When I joined it, there was one control freak of a guild leader, Decade. He worked in academia (/eyeroll) in the psych department (/eyeroll), specializing in addictionology. He was one of the biggest WoW addicts on the server.
Now. I might have mentioned his personal style of keeping everyone in check was to pretend every guy in the guild was gay and was having a massive gay orgy and affairs with everyone, and to claim various guys left their pants at his house, or were servicing him under his desk, or chained up in his back room like the geek. This definitely kept the hate speech down, but in kind of a twisted way. And the more I raided with other guilds, the more I realized that this “Polk Street bathhouse in the ‘70s” style of management was unusual. There have been gay people just casually talking about their relationships in every guild I’ve been in, but this was this weird layer of roleplay inserted between WoW-talk and RL-talk.
As it so happens, one of my good buddies was actually inside Polk Street bathhouses in the ‘70s, then during the ‘80s he was an overworked grief counselor and activist, and now he’s this middle aged guy who looks like somebody’s dad hanging around Home Depot deciding what kind of brackets to get. I asked him once if he knew why straight guys roleplayed being over-the-top and he had no idea. I think at some level it can be like a dominance thing, an attempt at public humiliation to test whether your rival will freak out or play along. However, I note that guys have an immensely wide vocabulary in that particular department and can center it around football, business, politics, fandom, musical tastes, pretty much any damn thing you can think of, dudes will find a way to compare size over it. I further note that when people vocalize regarding gay sex every thirty seconds or less, it tends to mean they are both interested in the subject and not engaging in it. I even furtherer note that, from personal experience, you can spend an entire dinner at Chow on Castro Street up to and including the gingerbread with pumpkin ice cream dessert (which I recommend) and not hear a .001th as many references to gay sex as one would hear in one of my guild's average raids. Yeah, yeah, I’m unique and cloistered and I live in a city renowned for gayness, but this whole situation was a total headscratcher for me, a hippie anthropologist wandering into deepest darkest flyover territory. The horror, the horror. And truthfully, I haven’t seen it in any guild since.
So part of my raid addiction, actually, was trying to figure Decade out. Was he a closeted straight? A gay dude living in some island of heterosexuality who could only express his true nature in sideways fashion? A conservative trying to be funny? Was he actually cruising guildchat, looking for naïve young men to chat with in private? All I could really gather was he was a neurotic control freak with an ironclad addiction to the game, or actually, to winning the game. I never saw any indication he was into lore, or goofing off with vanity items, or PVPing. He just wanted to win, and anyone could hang out with him as long as they didn't present obstacles to his winning.
After I initially started raiding with these guys, I went through a “that was nice, now let’s find another distraction” stage, back when I leveled my druid. I took a month off, reappeared in Decade’s guild, and every night, without fail, a raid invitation would pop up on my screen. I never asked, but I nearly always accepted.
They were always invitations to 25s. I severely miss 25s sometimes. There was enough peer pressure so that anyone trying to clog up the proceedings with attention-getting antics got smacked down fast, and there was always at least one really good wisecrack per night.
The main addictive part, for me, was watching how people worked together to accomplish things, or fail. Some nights, everything flowed like music, fights were effortless, conversation was funny and everybody scored new shiny things. Other nights, fail after fail would occur, followed by blamestorming and raging. Things were complicated by the fact we rarely had the same crew twice. The really, really addictive part was Finally Winning That Fight after working hard at beating it. That's just an incomparable rush.
In addition to the camp roleplaying, Decade was a memorable and colorful rager. He could rant in that special way of fussy control-freak guys. I think having an excuse to rage out was part of the game’s appeal for him too. Unfortunately, especially towards the end or when he got drunk, a lot of his rage would be based on bad data. He would be upbraiding people for failing at something they did last week, when someone would remind him that half the people from last week weren’t there, and this crew had never done it before.
One of my favorite examples was this particular fight in Ulduar where he used to rearrange the raid groups. The healers hated this, because we all use addons that move our bars around, so something like “group 2 will go left” is useless if you’ve got people arranged in a different order. And Decade, being massively impatient, would rant about what bad healers we were for making him wait around while we reconfigured.
Toward the end of Wrath, he rolled a druid, and decided to try to heal. This amused me; I was raiding as a resto druid on my ally toon at the time. We got to the aforementioned fight, and the raid leader – Decade couldn’t raid lead while healing, he quickly discovered – rearranged the groups. This sent him into a total panic attack, and I didn't see him play his resto druid much afterwards.
I wrote about this tendency toward misdirected rage on the guild forums once, and got back some hysterical in-game email accusing me of being the worst WoW player ever. All I can do about that is shrug; I rarely asked for an invite, I nevertheless got one every night, and I appear in about 90% of the progression kill screenshots over the time we were raiding, from BC through Wrath. And from running instances, I’m well aware of the fact that my status as most awesome healer in the universe can quickly change to feeblest player to ever get past the login screen, depending on who I’m randomly assigned to. I logged a ridiculous amount of raid hours during those three years. All from trying to figure out that mysterious “successful group” versus “imploding nebula of fail” magic.
Decade abruptly quit the game last year (then he came back and changed his name and made a new guild, then he abandoned that guild). One of the guys who had assumed some authority under Decade’s rein took over, Chaos. He was this scientist dude who liked to PVP, and was the sort of guy who would take up leadership due to a sense of responsibility but probably wouldn’t seek it out. He merged with another surviving 25-raid guild on the server towards the end of Wrath, to try to keep the magic going. He also brought in a bunch of PVPers, and soon guildchat was full of typos and guys accusing each other of buggery.
The whole locker room roleplay pretty much ground to a dead halt after Decade left. Unfortunately, it turned into more of a “ur so ghey!” “cut it out f*!” kind of world, and I was already on the record for being a snobbish liberal beyotch from the land of Harvey Milk. Fortunately, by this time I had been raiding in various groups on my various other toons and realized that yeah, actually the norm is to have a situation where people are in fact talking about how to successfully win the game rather than sex.
Around the time my bunny passed away, I took a break. When I came back, I started transferring all my toons. I’ve got my mage and warrior off on different servers, and my main’s in a social guild in a place where I can pug raids. I thought of finding another guild to raid with, but I’m not even sure I like this game enough to want to devote that kind of attention to it any more.
SWTOR’s coming soon. I’ve already paid for my limited edition digital download.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Better Than Sex
Today on that endless fountain of hard hitting news (Jezebel): survey indicates women enjoy online gaming more than sex.
*raises hand*
A lot of gamers are into talking about sex. Which always kind of creeps me out, as I imagine a lot of gamers are not people I find sexy.
Now I've had sex, and in fact I live in the sex capital of the US. Even my neighborhood grocery store is a hotbed of wild sex
You can't even get a pizza around here without sex all over it.
It's what you call a sex positive town. We're in favor of everyone having all the sex they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. It's not the kind of place where everyone's all up in your business, telling you what you should like, and when, and with who. And, contrary to what some might expect, we manage to get along this way without a lot of death, tragedy, madness, etc., which could possibly imply that no, the universe will not implode if you have culturally unusual sex.
So in this utopia of tolerance, I identify as an unsexual. Due to tangential medical issues, I have no fertility cycle or reproductive capacity or any of that troublesome stuff for several years (and don't miss it), and I have a bad back that would get in the way of actually having sex assuming I had the desire to. My last romantic relationship peacefully dissolved about the same time these issues arose, and I really didn't see the point in finding a new partner to not have sex with, especially if they might try to get me to do housework or all those other things we tend to forgive our partners for if the sex is good. I've had lots of great sex in the past, but I refuse to discuss it because kissing and telling is tacky.
I've always been straight, despite certain peoples' best attempts to convince me otherwise, but my total lack of enthusiasm was leading me to describe myself as a "nonpracticing heterosexual" or "retired." I wondered if maybe I was an "asexual", until I found out there was such a thing as the "asexual community" and it seemed to be every bit as annoying and dramatic as all those communities that involve sex. So I think I'm coming out as an unsexual.
Being an unsexual is probably not grounds to complain about marginalization because we really aren't. Some unsexuals probably marry each other for cover in places where power tripping sexuals will give them a hard time if they don't, and occasionally one of us marries a sexual and prompts long whiny letters to advice columnists. But it's not like anyone really discriminates against us. They don't even seem to mind when we go around parading our lifestyle via our clothing choices (baggy sweaters, reasonably priced jackets, flat shoes, underwear concealed beneath outerwear).
I probably couldn't relate as well to unsexuality back when I was younger and sexual, and assumed everybody else was bobbing around in a similar hormonal tide. If they weren't, they were "repressed" -- a sneaky Freudian way of saying "I'm normal and you're either like me or screwed up, nyah nyah." I see that at work in games all the time, where Player A brags about the alleged superb sex it just had in an attempt to make Players B and C feel loserly and frustrated.
For some reason (probably sexual competition), sexuals like to pretend that everyone is just as sexual as they are. They like to represent that their sex adventures would cause everyone else to be be consumed with jealousy, revealing a curious point scoring method built into their own experience of sex. Some of them no doubt read the Jezebel headline that inspired this and thought "no way!"
Since you can't actually have sex in an online world, the subject of sex is basically tactical. It can involve group bonding (occasionally through exclusion as straights gang up on gays or boys gang up on girls), greed (I'll make my avatar dance naked on the mailbox if you give me some gold), demoralizing opponents, inflation of social status (hai guyz I posted pr0n on guild forums o.o), or the kind of super-below-the-belt insulting that goes online where you can't see other peoples' faces and have to escalate somehow.
It's entirely possible that watching sex conducted in entirely tactical fashion, with all the visual and aesthetic pleasure edited out, pushed me towards being the proud unsexual that I am today, but I'm more of a "born this way" person than an "environmental influence" person.
So my answer to the question of whether online gaming is more fun than sex is a resounding "hell yeah!" And I suspect that's true for a lot of people.
*raises hand*
A lot of gamers are into talking about sex. Which always kind of creeps me out, as I imagine a lot of gamers are not people I find sexy.
Now I've had sex, and in fact I live in the sex capital of the US. Even my neighborhood grocery store is a hotbed of wild sex
The Marina Safeway supermarket is particularly notable for its swinger scene — it is frequently listed as one of the city's best pick-up spots and is affectionately known as the "Singles Safeway" or more recently, "Dateway." This concept was first popularized by the San Francisco author Armistead Maupin in his late 1970s novel "Tales of the City", a television mini-series which has been broadcast on PBS.
You can't even get a pizza around here without sex all over it.
It's what you call a sex positive town. We're in favor of everyone having all the sex they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. It's not the kind of place where everyone's all up in your business, telling you what you should like, and when, and with who. And, contrary to what some might expect, we manage to get along this way without a lot of death, tragedy, madness, etc., which could possibly imply that no, the universe will not implode if you have culturally unusual sex.
So in this utopia of tolerance, I identify as an unsexual. Due to tangential medical issues, I have no fertility cycle or reproductive capacity or any of that troublesome stuff for several years (and don't miss it), and I have a bad back that would get in the way of actually having sex assuming I had the desire to. My last romantic relationship peacefully dissolved about the same time these issues arose, and I really didn't see the point in finding a new partner to not have sex with, especially if they might try to get me to do housework or all those other things we tend to forgive our partners for if the sex is good. I've had lots of great sex in the past, but I refuse to discuss it because kissing and telling is tacky.
I've always been straight, despite certain peoples' best attempts to convince me otherwise, but my total lack of enthusiasm was leading me to describe myself as a "nonpracticing heterosexual" or "retired." I wondered if maybe I was an "asexual", until I found out there was such a thing as the "asexual community" and it seemed to be every bit as annoying and dramatic as all those communities that involve sex. So I think I'm coming out as an unsexual.
Being an unsexual is probably not grounds to complain about marginalization because we really aren't. Some unsexuals probably marry each other for cover in places where power tripping sexuals will give them a hard time if they don't, and occasionally one of us marries a sexual and prompts long whiny letters to advice columnists. But it's not like anyone really discriminates against us. They don't even seem to mind when we go around parading our lifestyle via our clothing choices (baggy sweaters, reasonably priced jackets, flat shoes, underwear concealed beneath outerwear).
I probably couldn't relate as well to unsexuality back when I was younger and sexual, and assumed everybody else was bobbing around in a similar hormonal tide. If they weren't, they were "repressed" -- a sneaky Freudian way of saying "I'm normal and you're either like me or screwed up, nyah nyah." I see that at work in games all the time, where Player A brags about the alleged superb sex it just had in an attempt to make Players B and C feel loserly and frustrated.
For some reason (probably sexual competition), sexuals like to pretend that everyone is just as sexual as they are. They like to represent that their sex adventures would cause everyone else to be be consumed with jealousy, revealing a curious point scoring method built into their own experience of sex. Some of them no doubt read the Jezebel headline that inspired this and thought "no way!"
Since you can't actually have sex in an online world, the subject of sex is basically tactical. It can involve group bonding (occasionally through exclusion as straights gang up on gays or boys gang up on girls), greed (I'll make my avatar dance naked on the mailbox if you give me some gold), demoralizing opponents, inflation of social status (hai guyz I posted pr0n on guild forums o.o), or the kind of super-below-the-belt insulting that goes online where you can't see other peoples' faces and have to escalate somehow.
It's entirely possible that watching sex conducted in entirely tactical fashion, with all the visual and aesthetic pleasure edited out, pushed me towards being the proud unsexual that I am today, but I'm more of a "born this way" person than an "environmental influence" person.
So my answer to the question of whether online gaming is more fun than sex is a resounding "hell yeah!" And I suspect that's true for a lot of people.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Cert Granted – Supreme Court Rules Video Games Covered by First Amendment
I have, so far, had one “argument” IRL regarding the recent Brown v. EMA decision, with some friend of a friend at a friend’s house (since I stopped raiding I occasionally can be seen at friends’ houses, although they can’t come inside mine until I do something about that floor).
It ended quickly. The FOAF said something along the lines of “so, do you approve of little children buying pornography?” I looked him right in his aging ‘70s-kid eyes and said “buy pornography?” With my eyebrow raised (see illustration above) in its default position. As in, c’mon, it’s 2011, most people don’t buy pornography, or violent imagery either for that matter. I’m pretty sure that you know how to find all that stuff, since you can figure out how to access a blog. The convenience store might have all its copies of Playboy hidden on a special rack that might obscure any scary cleavage on the front cover, to protect children, but any kid that knows how to run around on the internet, or has a friend that does, has already seen plenty.
A lot of people against the decision seem to be mainly concerned about how the US restricts access to sexual imagery more than violent imagery. The motion picture ratings boards will indeed put a higher age restriction on films showing nekked people performing the old in and out (that’s a Clockwork Orange reference, regarding a film that was rated X for violence when it first came out) than they will on films showing mean people committing creative forms of murder. The ESRB, I think, is a little bit more balanced, as well as being fully voluntary. Parents who don’t want their kids playing anything naughty can screen the games their kid buys. Negligent lazy parents can continue drinking beer while their kids watch porn and death on youtube. Nobody is obliged to step in for the lazy parents and say “I’m sorry child, you may not purchase this media for six more years, at which time you will be psychologically equipped to handle it.”
I read a history book recently where there was an account of some kids orphaned under gruesome circumstances I won’t digress into, and the contemporary reporter said something like “thank heaven they are all so young, they’ll get over it, someone older might have been scarred for life.” Which is the opposite approach we take these days.
Regardless of the relationship between psychological resistance to shocking images and one’s 18th birthday, what this decision really represents is a solid, judicial, “No. That is incorrect.” with regard to the theory that video games are some kind of super duper new media with the mysterious power to turn law abiding kiddies into depraved serial killers. The Supremes found absolutely no truth to the theory that playing video games warps a child any more than various kinds of unregulated or laxly regulated media such as video, popular songs, comics, manga and novels. In fact, this whole anti-video game argument is taken right from the pages of the ‘50s crusade against unwholesome comic books, which were represented as also having super duper child corruption powers.
But the proponents of this super duper theory can’t prove it in court. The opinion mentions the junk science they introduced, noting a lot of it consists of correlation studies that have nothing to do with causation.
Now if only science could figure out why certain people are compelled to waste thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer money pursuing junk science claims under a concern troll halo, and why those people have such a tough time admitting they're wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their wrongness.
It ended quickly. The FOAF said something along the lines of “so, do you approve of little children buying pornography?” I looked him right in his aging ‘70s-kid eyes and said “buy pornography?” With my eyebrow raised (see illustration above) in its default position. As in, c’mon, it’s 2011, most people don’t buy pornography, or violent imagery either for that matter. I’m pretty sure that you know how to find all that stuff, since you can figure out how to access a blog. The convenience store might have all its copies of Playboy hidden on a special rack that might obscure any scary cleavage on the front cover, to protect children, but any kid that knows how to run around on the internet, or has a friend that does, has already seen plenty.
A lot of people against the decision seem to be mainly concerned about how the US restricts access to sexual imagery more than violent imagery. The motion picture ratings boards will indeed put a higher age restriction on films showing nekked people performing the old in and out (that’s a Clockwork Orange reference, regarding a film that was rated X for violence when it first came out) than they will on films showing mean people committing creative forms of murder. The ESRB, I think, is a little bit more balanced, as well as being fully voluntary. Parents who don’t want their kids playing anything naughty can screen the games their kid buys. Negligent lazy parents can continue drinking beer while their kids watch porn and death on youtube. Nobody is obliged to step in for the lazy parents and say “I’m sorry child, you may not purchase this media for six more years, at which time you will be psychologically equipped to handle it.”
I read a history book recently where there was an account of some kids orphaned under gruesome circumstances I won’t digress into, and the contemporary reporter said something like “thank heaven they are all so young, they’ll get over it, someone older might have been scarred for life.” Which is the opposite approach we take these days.
Regardless of the relationship between psychological resistance to shocking images and one’s 18th birthday, what this decision really represents is a solid, judicial, “No. That is incorrect.” with regard to the theory that video games are some kind of super duper new media with the mysterious power to turn law abiding kiddies into depraved serial killers. The Supremes found absolutely no truth to the theory that playing video games warps a child any more than various kinds of unregulated or laxly regulated media such as video, popular songs, comics, manga and novels. In fact, this whole anti-video game argument is taken right from the pages of the ‘50s crusade against unwholesome comic books, which were represented as also having super duper child corruption powers.
But the proponents of this super duper theory can’t prove it in court. The opinion mentions the junk science they introduced, noting a lot of it consists of correlation studies that have nothing to do with causation.
Now if only science could figure out why certain people are compelled to waste thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer money pursuing junk science claims under a concern troll halo, and why those people have such a tough time admitting they're wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their wrongness.
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Death of Star Wars Galaxies
Another death. This time it’s Star Wars Galaxies.
Here’s an interview with Smedley.
And a few words from Raph Koster.
And Sony’s apparently having a bit of market difficulty these days too. Maybe all those combined bad vibes from NGE discontents so many years ago worked their way through the ectoplasm plane and laid down a severe case of dark side of the force on their doorstep. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of a bad strategic decision which drove us gamers nuts, sort of like watching a blackjack player draw to nineteen when he’s betting the money he owes you.
Smedley’s right though. It was THE sandbox game. And it makes me sad to think that all the virtual spaces I frequented will soon no longer exist. The pink fields of Dantooine, the creepy overcast peaks of Dathomir, the sandy expanses of Tattooine, the tropical beaches of Yavin. As well as my billion credits, nightsister armband, rare lightsaber crystals and art collection. And the romantic café where my avatar spent hours cuddling with my last ex’s avatar, between the move and the breakup.
It’s a different era than nearly a decade ago, when I had a rabbit bouncing around inspiring my gamer handles and MMOs were something daring and weird that teenagers and hardcore nerds played which would probably turn them all into fat serial killers. The technoluddites are still around, posting comments about how oh dear, computers will destroy our children and give us all herpes, on the internet, but these days nobody pays attention to them and the New York Times has a video game page where it reviews games.
Games themselves, meanwhile, are still sort of stuck. Having learned there is big money in games, corporate types seem to be focusing on one summer blockbuster at a time rather than five hundred B movies that will all find their niche. The main sellers are leaning more in a narrative, theme park direction than the sandboxy-type stuff I personally cherish. Everyone (including me) is sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for SWTOR.
It was crazy back then in the wild wild west, though. You could tool around in pink spaceships playing in a band. I did that. I’ve still got some of those songs in my head today, and I hope someone preserved it all on youtube somewhere in case I feel nostalgic.
And unfortunately (or fortunately in some cases) I’ve sailed in different directions than every single person I connected with in SWG, although I made a good try at continuing the relationship – except Lifa. I’m looking forward to seeing ya in SWTOR one of these days, Lifa. I have fond memories of the time you and I were both up at dawn doing jedi quests. And our first server first.
I might have some screenshots somewhere, if they weren’t all on the computer with the hard drive that assploded. And if I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the little café my Ithorian chick set up to do her banking and selling, wearing her tight 70’s-ish bellbottoms. There was a front room with couches for waiting customers and a glass case full of pies. There was a tiny bar covered with lightsaber crystals and bottles, where I did esoteric things with holograms to give it moody blue lighting. And there was the restaurant itself, with waitress and busboy and chef vendors all reciting their lines, and a row of tables, each carefully set by me, with me-fabricated food bearing custom sarcastic names.
All soon to perish in a great unplugging. I feel a vast disturbance in the force.
Here’s an interview with Smedley.
And a few words from Raph Koster.
And Sony’s apparently having a bit of market difficulty these days too. Maybe all those combined bad vibes from NGE discontents so many years ago worked their way through the ectoplasm plane and laid down a severe case of dark side of the force on their doorstep. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of a bad strategic decision which drove us gamers nuts, sort of like watching a blackjack player draw to nineteen when he’s betting the money he owes you.
Smedley’s right though. It was THE sandbox game. And it makes me sad to think that all the virtual spaces I frequented will soon no longer exist. The pink fields of Dantooine, the creepy overcast peaks of Dathomir, the sandy expanses of Tattooine, the tropical beaches of Yavin. As well as my billion credits, nightsister armband, rare lightsaber crystals and art collection. And the romantic café where my avatar spent hours cuddling with my last ex’s avatar, between the move and the breakup.
It’s a different era than nearly a decade ago, when I had a rabbit bouncing around inspiring my gamer handles and MMOs were something daring and weird that teenagers and hardcore nerds played which would probably turn them all into fat serial killers. The technoluddites are still around, posting comments about how oh dear, computers will destroy our children and give us all herpes, on the internet, but these days nobody pays attention to them and the New York Times has a video game page where it reviews games.
Games themselves, meanwhile, are still sort of stuck. Having learned there is big money in games, corporate types seem to be focusing on one summer blockbuster at a time rather than five hundred B movies that will all find their niche. The main sellers are leaning more in a narrative, theme park direction than the sandboxy-type stuff I personally cherish. Everyone (including me) is sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for SWTOR.
It was crazy back then in the wild wild west, though. You could tool around in pink spaceships playing in a band. I did that. I’ve still got some of those songs in my head today, and I hope someone preserved it all on youtube somewhere in case I feel nostalgic.
And unfortunately (or fortunately in some cases) I’ve sailed in different directions than every single person I connected with in SWG, although I made a good try at continuing the relationship – except Lifa. I’m looking forward to seeing ya in SWTOR one of these days, Lifa. I have fond memories of the time you and I were both up at dawn doing jedi quests. And our first server first.
I might have some screenshots somewhere, if they weren’t all on the computer with the hard drive that assploded. And if I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the little café my Ithorian chick set up to do her banking and selling, wearing her tight 70’s-ish bellbottoms. There was a front room with couches for waiting customers and a glass case full of pies. There was a tiny bar covered with lightsaber crystals and bottles, where I did esoteric things with holograms to give it moody blue lighting. And there was the restaurant itself, with waitress and busboy and chef vendors all reciting their lines, and a row of tables, each carefully set by me, with me-fabricated food bearing custom sarcastic names.
All soon to perish in a great unplugging. I feel a vast disturbance in the force.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
OMG Is This A Pet Blog Now??
I’m still seriously missing the little guy. Thanks everyone for the nice comments and sympathy. He was just a little rabbit but at the same time he had a gigantic personality, and having him gone left a large void in my life.
My cat was grieving too, so I had to get a second cat. That’s the short version.
Here’s the (too) long version: rabbits bond strongly to other beings and have a hard time just sitting around being alone. Some beings are fine with sitting around being alone, such as myself. Of course, I can just get on the computer, if I want to talk to people. Animals, especially the needy bonding-prone variety, need constant social stimulation, and so I figured another needy animal would be a perfect bunny companion.
So I got a Ragdoll cat, after doing some breed research to find out what breed of cats have minimal prey drive. Absolute lack of agro was at the top of my list, followed by neediness, and Ragdoll DNA is rich in both. They also happen to be the largest breed of domestic cat, and are rumored to be part space alien.
I contacted the official breed organization, assuming they would point me toward people actually interested in furthering that particular breed, as opposed to being interested in trying to make a quick buck raising animals under heinous conditions. I could rant further, at the risk of turning this into one of those animal rights blogs, but if you’re getting an animal intentionally (as opposed to the regular way where you find one or somebody gives you one with no warning), please do some research.
Anyway I ended up with a little baby kitten, Tallulah, which I successfully introduced to the bunny. Theirs was a relatively smooth relationship. They never got to the public displays of affection bunnies go for, but they were fond of each other. The cat would hug the bunny, and swat him gently with her claws non-extended, and lick his cute little bunny face. They would eat blueberry yogurt together from the same dish. If it got really cold, they might curl up with their backs touching each other.
The bunny was mean and domineering and imperious to the cat, although he did like her in general. I went through this whole bunny-cat introduction process where I ceremoniously fed them on the same platform, except bunny’s was a little higher, and he got served first. That’s because bunnies are rule-worshipping, status-conscious little fascists, and need social recognition. And also because cats are lazy anarchist stoners who need constant repetition of a rule before they internalize it, and I wanted her to recognize him as alpha and not try to eat him.
She loved him despite all the torture, and never harmed him, even though she grew up to weigh 14 pounds to his 6. Once he started getting old and frail and had to live out the last of his days in a cage, Tallulah got more and more anxious. That bonding thing. Yowling, clinging, pacing in circles, losing weight.
So I started thinking about getting Tallulah a pet of her own, to keep her company. Not another rabbit, Varmint had an infectuous bunny thing (pasteurella) and the vet advised against getting a new bunny for a while, just to make sure it’s cleared up.
And not a dog, because I’m too lazy to walk one, plus they’re loud.
So another cat. Not only that, another cat with a complimentary personality. A cat that wouldn’t teach her how those front claws work. A needy, bonding cat. Another Ragdoll, and a male one, since Tallulah seems to prefer boy animals to girl ones, based on a limited number of introductions. But one from the shelter, a grownup one. Purebreds get surrendered too, and I wasn’t about to do the kitten thing again.
I wasn’t going to introduce another cat to stress Varm out during his last days. I figured I’d start looking while we were grieving and life was upside down anyway.
On his very last day, while fidgeting and waiting for the hour of death, i.e. vet appointment, to arrive, and feeding Varm his last meal of a strawberry cupcake with a side of banana walnut muffin, I went to petfinders.com, which is a database that lets you search for adoptable animals using all kinds of filters. People from shelters/rescues post there. I did a search for all the adult Ragdolls within 100 miles. Several popped up.
One caught my eye. Male, a year younger than Tallulah, looked exactly like her … except the same color scheme as the bunny. This cat looked like their mutant love child.
Not only that, but he happened to be declawed. I’ve never had a declawed cat before, and wouldn’t declaw one, since it’s mean, but somebody else already did the dirty deed. Here was a perfect match for my wimpy bunny-snuggling girl cat. And, y’know, if I decided to someday get another bunny, perhaps, he would be extra low risk.
So after the vet visit of doom, I cried and drank vodka and rearranged the furniture and contacted the rescue that had this cat and started pathetically begging for him, and a few days later I drove down to get him. He was even bigger than I expected. Nearly 18 pounds and fluffy. Tallulah’s a pretty big girl, weighing in around 14 pounds, but this guy is seriously large, with a personality not unlike Dude in The Big Lebowski. So I named him the big Kahuna.
I did an elaborate introduction process, starting with separate rooms, gradually getting them used to each other, complete with lava lamps, Barry White and cat pheromone dispensers. They’re doing pretty good, occasional cheek rubs and chasing, but no real agro. Tallulah’s a lot calmer. Kahuna’s got his own armchair next to my computer chair, because he doesn’t fit in my lap, and also this way I can pretend I’m Han Solo and tell him to fix the warp drive.
I had a lot of that creepy depressed heart-turned-to-cement bereavement thing going. Dunno if I’ll want to touch Medieval Sims again because I’ll always associate it with bunny hospice care, but I’ve been playing WoW again, sporadically, and I’ll write more about that later.
My cat was grieving too, so I had to get a second cat. That’s the short version.
Here’s the (too) long version: rabbits bond strongly to other beings and have a hard time just sitting around being alone. Some beings are fine with sitting around being alone, such as myself. Of course, I can just get on the computer, if I want to talk to people. Animals, especially the needy bonding-prone variety, need constant social stimulation, and so I figured another needy animal would be a perfect bunny companion.
So I got a Ragdoll cat, after doing some breed research to find out what breed of cats have minimal prey drive. Absolute lack of agro was at the top of my list, followed by neediness, and Ragdoll DNA is rich in both. They also happen to be the largest breed of domestic cat, and are rumored to be part space alien.
I contacted the official breed organization, assuming they would point me toward people actually interested in furthering that particular breed, as opposed to being interested in trying to make a quick buck raising animals under heinous conditions. I could rant further, at the risk of turning this into one of those animal rights blogs, but if you’re getting an animal intentionally (as opposed to the regular way where you find one or somebody gives you one with no warning), please do some research.
Anyway I ended up with a little baby kitten, Tallulah, which I successfully introduced to the bunny. Theirs was a relatively smooth relationship. They never got to the public displays of affection bunnies go for, but they were fond of each other. The cat would hug the bunny, and swat him gently with her claws non-extended, and lick his cute little bunny face. They would eat blueberry yogurt together from the same dish. If it got really cold, they might curl up with their backs touching each other.
The bunny was mean and domineering and imperious to the cat, although he did like her in general. I went through this whole bunny-cat introduction process where I ceremoniously fed them on the same platform, except bunny’s was a little higher, and he got served first. That’s because bunnies are rule-worshipping, status-conscious little fascists, and need social recognition. And also because cats are lazy anarchist stoners who need constant repetition of a rule before they internalize it, and I wanted her to recognize him as alpha and not try to eat him.
She loved him despite all the torture, and never harmed him, even though she grew up to weigh 14 pounds to his 6. Once he started getting old and frail and had to live out the last of his days in a cage, Tallulah got more and more anxious. That bonding thing. Yowling, clinging, pacing in circles, losing weight.
So I started thinking about getting Tallulah a pet of her own, to keep her company. Not another rabbit, Varmint had an infectuous bunny thing (pasteurella) and the vet advised against getting a new bunny for a while, just to make sure it’s cleared up.
And not a dog, because I’m too lazy to walk one, plus they’re loud.
So another cat. Not only that, another cat with a complimentary personality. A cat that wouldn’t teach her how those front claws work. A needy, bonding cat. Another Ragdoll, and a male one, since Tallulah seems to prefer boy animals to girl ones, based on a limited number of introductions. But one from the shelter, a grownup one. Purebreds get surrendered too, and I wasn’t about to do the kitten thing again.
I wasn’t going to introduce another cat to stress Varm out during his last days. I figured I’d start looking while we were grieving and life was upside down anyway.
On his very last day, while fidgeting and waiting for the hour of death, i.e. vet appointment, to arrive, and feeding Varm his last meal of a strawberry cupcake with a side of banana walnut muffin, I went to petfinders.com, which is a database that lets you search for adoptable animals using all kinds of filters. People from shelters/rescues post there. I did a search for all the adult Ragdolls within 100 miles. Several popped up.
One caught my eye. Male, a year younger than Tallulah, looked exactly like her … except the same color scheme as the bunny. This cat looked like their mutant love child.
Not only that, but he happened to be declawed. I’ve never had a declawed cat before, and wouldn’t declaw one, since it’s mean, but somebody else already did the dirty deed. Here was a perfect match for my wimpy bunny-snuggling girl cat. And, y’know, if I decided to someday get another bunny, perhaps, he would be extra low risk.
So after the vet visit of doom, I cried and drank vodka and rearranged the furniture and contacted the rescue that had this cat and started pathetically begging for him, and a few days later I drove down to get him. He was even bigger than I expected. Nearly 18 pounds and fluffy. Tallulah’s a pretty big girl, weighing in around 14 pounds, but this guy is seriously large, with a personality not unlike Dude in The Big Lebowski. So I named him the big Kahuna.
I did an elaborate introduction process, starting with separate rooms, gradually getting them used to each other, complete with lava lamps, Barry White and cat pheromone dispensers. They’re doing pretty good, occasional cheek rubs and chasing, but no real agro. Tallulah’s a lot calmer. Kahuna’s got his own armchair next to my computer chair, because he doesn’t fit in my lap, and also this way I can pretend I’m Han Solo and tell him to fix the warp drive.
I had a lot of that creepy depressed heart-turned-to-cement bereavement thing going. Dunno if I’ll want to touch Medieval Sims again because I’ll always associate it with bunny hospice care, but I’ve been playing WoW again, sporadically, and I’ll write more about that later.
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