My game, Star Wars Galaxies, is unusual for having three distinct eras. I wrote about this a little when I was talking about my guild feud but I thought I’d lay it out in more detail for nonSWGers, because we got hosed in a way unique in video game history, and new game developers need to make sure this never ever happens in their game.
When SWG first came out, the general vision of the game was set down by Raph Koster. It was to be a virtual world where people could live first, and gameplay came second. And so there were 32 interdependent professions, and you could master any two of them (and portions of a third).
Although most of these professions were all about combat, a lot of them weren’t. Image Designers could change your avatar’s skin color, size and physical features. Dancers and musicians had an extensive variety of performance pieces, and musicians can play different parts at different levels – making it possible to get together an orchestra with twenty people each playing a different part of a song, from brass to bass to keyboards to xylophone. A lot of people who just like to hang out and chat played musicians and dancers.
Then there were the crafters, and many players didn’t even bother with combat, spending their game time manufacturing armor, weapons, medical supplies, clothes, furniture, spaceships, vehicles, food. These players were into the detailed economic simulation part of the game.
Everything took a group back then, which is why I was stuck with that rotten guild. And if you went to war with the other players, all the professions came into play. You not only needed a diverse fighting force with tanks and healers and damage dealers, you needed dancers and musicians to give them their morale bonus, armorsmiths and weaponsmiths to make their supplies, bioengineers to make enhancements used by chefs and tailors so that their products gave combat bonuses, architects to make and furnish the houses where they gathered prior to attacking.
Eventually I got a second account myself, so I could have a doctor. Back then everyone needed constant medical attention, to remove wounds as well as provide these extremely high enhancements that would allow you to wear the deluxe armor and fight things more powerful than yourself. If you actually had a doctor in combat with you that was great, they could revive you if you died. And if you didn’t have your own doctor, you were stuck paying the doctors that set up shop in large cities doing enhancements for pay.
All of this interdependence led to a large and thriving community, where people logged in because they were always “needed” in some fashion. That plus the newness of the game kept people steadily logging in.
But it had a dark side too, one I’m also seeing with high level WoW players: the death of casual play. The hardcore powergamers who had hours to spend on line, frustrated by their inability to attack the high level content without a big group, would set up these pyramid-type schemes with the newer players, where they couldn’t have the good equipment unless they committed to spending a lot of time in game following orders.
I’ve always played under the theory that RL comes first, and that a fellow gamer’s spending time with his mom or his wife or his kids or his co-workers overrules his obligation to help me get high level stuff. That right there made me unpopular in THEM, who used to throw out all kinds of patriotism and loyalty based reasons why people should log in every night to unquestioningly follow their orders.
A lot of power tripping and manipulation went on, and you couldn’t really play the game without participating in some of it. A newer character without resources couldn’t possibly expect to achieve autonomy without spending about a year working on it, assuming that you found a guild generous enough to allow you to work on your own goals instead of being locked in constant service to the upper levels.
Then there were the jedi. If you were a total power gamer, eventually you wound up with a jedi. The jedi started out being extremely overpowered and extremely handicapped. There were other players, bounty hunters, who could hunt them if they had too much public visibility, such as showing off their lightsaber in a crowd. In the early days, jedi could be permanently killed, but that was soon changed due to player outrage.
A jedi did have a little more autonomy though, because you could go to a smaller guild with few jedi and be treated like a king, since they needed you to get through the more difficult encounters.
Naturally, just about everybody wanted a jedi.
Now in Star Wars, there are two sides: the empire and the rebels. Most people play rebels. The heroes in the movie are on the side of the rebellion. With the addition of rebel jedi, this meant that PVP was extremely unbalanced. The empire would bring ten guys and one jedi, the rebels would bring ten guys and ten jedi and proceed to clean house.
Not to mention that players talk. If player A on server A suddenly discovers a loophole where he can win a fight in three seconds, he’ll talk to his friends, who are often on vent with players on server B and server C, who talk to their friends, and so on. So the most connected players had a storehouse of knowledge about how to quickly acquire the power balance, and since there is no “manual” for the game, newer (or un-connected, or subject to language/time zone barrier) players could only stumble on the “secrets” if they were lucky.
A lot of the players more concerned about winning than playing a game became rebel jedi. You could find packs of them in most starports. I remember a newer player, a friend of mine, that had her first encounter with them when she went out with her pvp switch accidentally activated. Suddenly, some Luke Skywalker wannabe knocked her character down, jumped on top of her, did some humping simulation and declared that all she needed was some violent sex.
Great, welcome to virtual reality, where you can be raped by trash-talking undefeatable gangs of Luke Skywalker clones.
There are a lot of players from this era who get very emotional about how much they loved the game and the interdependence and the socializing.
Most of these proto-users are gentlemen, and ladies, with regard to social interaction. They don’t grief, they don’t power trip, they don’t rape the noobs. They don’t understand why a small percentage of antisocial jerks can seize the upper hand. A lot of them are sincere idealists convinced that this new democratic form of social interaction will lead to a better and more peaceful RL.
And a lot of them are bullies themselves. Reading threads by people pining for the old days, I’ve come across stories about people who took costly revenge for being snubbed or disrespected, people who took a lot of pleasure disrupting player events, people who bragged about getting rich from market exploits.
In response to the numerous complaints about imbalance, SWG made the first of two drastic changes. Combat was changed to a level system, and the once-mighty jedi were busted down to being 1.5 times as strong as a regular fighter.
This was my favorite era of SWG. I’ve written about how it changed my character from being an apprentice to an equal, and how I was suddenly able to accumulate my own wealth. Instead of the old 20 man groups, groups were now limited to 8. Enemies were adjusted from being 20x stronger than you to being 8x stronger than you, and if you’re good at gaming, something 8x stronger than you is more of a challenge than an obstacle.
I got truly addicted to the game at this point and worked hard on getting my character up to jedi. My guild shifted to being mainly about helping each other get to jedi. I got there. And suddenly my ingame life changed. I could go to parties and roleplay and socialize now that I wasn’t locked into grinding. But since I wasn’t grinding, I was missing out on the social experience of it.
Plus I kept running into anti-jedi players, who didn’t understand why putting in a few solid months of grinding should entitle one to be indispensable in these fights. There were some enemies that couldn’t be beaten unless you had a jedi there to tank them.
So the game turned from being about large scale social interaction and world simulation to an arms race, and the jedi population on the server grew larger and larger, until it was a ridiculous parody of Star Wars.
I was a full jedi for a whole month before the next change happened: the NGE.
I’m going to do my best to be impartial about the NGE, even though it’s a controversial subject. So rather than telling you how I feel, I’ll tell you what it did.
Crafting and entertaining (dancers, musicians) were for the most part eliminated, although they are the next and pending phase of the NGE updates. I have a crafter character that is a little over a year old that I started at the NGE. She has made about fifty things all together, most of it for décor, none of it for retail. Entertainers were relieved of all in-game function other than decoration, although later they were grudgingly given the ability to heal a sickness that could also be cured by a 5k credit donation to a droid, which most people use instead, because the droids are more conveniently located.
The thirty two professions were cut back to nine, and crafter and entertainer are two of them, leaving seven combat professions. One of them is jedi, so instead of spending a year working on becoming a jedi, you can now be a jedi from day one. The gameplay itself used to be turn-based, like a fast round of chess or Magic: The Gathering, but the NGE turned it to an arcade/console style dexterity based interface. No problem for me, I can do that too, but then I can also type 100 words a minute and play Jimi Hendrix riffs. The players with ordinary manual dexterity who had loved being able to fight in a methodical turn based way got hosed.
Interdependence is gone. Looted things are much better than crafted ones, and most crafters function primarily as merchants. There are about three things in the game I can’t solo, but I can usually beat them with one or two other good players.
This was intended to balance the economy, but let me tell you how it personally affected me. In preCU, I was middle class. I had a few good pieces of art, some almost-uber weapons and some non-uber-but-still-good items, and most of my money was spent on anti-decay devices to keep them from deteriorating when I died.
During the CU, I got richer, because I hung around with people who could acquire the loot that was hard to get to. So I became upper middle class, with all the latest gadgetry.
During the NGE I became a billionaire. I did this through speculation, through inheriting assets from quitters, by spending countless boring hours of my game time farming rare things because there was not much of a social scene left, through selling rare antiques from the preCU that were no longer being made. None of it was about productivity, making and selling things, doing jobs for a price, teamwork. My server is currently known for its out of control economy. And curiously, you can do fine in this game without even buying very much. My cross-server players typically go and loot farm one of the rarer items from the Death Watch Bunker and sell it, which they can sell for enough credits to get them the best armor and weapon available.
It has taken a year to get the combat players rebalanced. I’ve been around for that entire year. During the rebalancing, a lot of the NPCs were ridiculously easy to solo, so I did a fair amount of that, selling the proceeds later when they were difficult again.
And as for PVP, I actually love what they’ve done. Instead of the massive group operations of the past, for PVP you now fly to the city of Restuss and go charging into the city, and you’ll find it.
But one thing is clear – they took a game that bore a strong resemblance to old school Dungeons and Dragons, with multiple classes and combinations, and turned it to a game that resembles Doom, where you basically roam around shooting things and getting points.
And people responded with overwhelming emotion. They quit en masse. They got worked up to a level that makes the Bush-Kerry election look tame. A year later, they spread negative PR wherever they can, and there is a project to make an unauthorized “emu” (short for emulator, a bootleg version of the game).
I’m a passionate fence sitter. I’ve been playing the game all through the changes, uninterrupted, even while the game itself was barely playable, because the changes themselves and their effect on my fellow players fascinated me. I’m friends with a lot of “dissidents,” players and ex-players who passionately hate Sony for destroying their virtual world. I’m also friends with a lot of people who are addicted to what SWG has to offer, and I believe I’m one of them myself.
Which leads to my decision to make my jedi a rock star.
She’s currently ¼ of the way through mastering the entertainer profession. I realized that, while I love my stormtrooper, and in fact took her out for some glorious PVP this evening in which I nailed 99 insurgents with my acid launcher and lava cannon, and have been oppressing fleets of NPC spaceships with her spiffy new TIE Oppressor, Easter Durni is my main character.
And she has nowhere to go, other than changing careers.
Therefore, character development must be either sacrificed to or twisted to accommodate game mechanics.
And Easter Durni, Dark Durni of the Sith, has decided that all her efforts to get Emperor Palpatine to listen to her precognitive hunches about the Ewoks from a dark jedi perspective have been in vain, and in order to get her message across, she needs to become an extremely successful rock star. Because that’s where the real power is. Then she can throw Save Endor From The Ewoks music festivals.
Kind of ironic, because I entered this game as a musician taking a break from RL art, and my first character was a musician. I spent my first ingame week jamming. Then I realized that was too much like RL and went out to make a career out of murdering NPCs instead.
Now I’m back to a frivolous, barely useful profession that nevertheless adds a lot of atmosphere, and so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
There is usually something to enjoy about the game no matter what stage it’s in.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Rabbits
First, I think I’ve solved my gaming dilemma. I’m going to have my main character, Easter Durni, give up her lightsaber and become a rock star. But more about that later. First a not-entirely-game related post about rabbits.
Hanging above my desk is a Japanese print showing five rabbits in a bamboo forest, and on the shelf near it are several small stuffed rabbits, and there’s a rabbit mouse squeezie perched on top of my monitor, and I’m at work. At home I have a real rabbit, and he’s the inspiration for all of my rabbit-related handles and character names.
My boyfriend and I acquired him under unsavory circumstances, back when we used to have a pet 7' boa constrictor (courtesy of an ex of mine, who dumped her on me when he had to suddenly move in with his snake-phobic mother-in-law). One day the excellent reptile supply store where we bought all her supplies, East Bay Vivarium, ran out of her main food source, live large rats. My bf, sent out to pick up snake dinner, returned home with a live medium rat and a live baby rabbit.
Although I am harsh and unsentimental enough to keep a live-feeding snake in the first place, I fell in love with the rabbit. He was the first rabbit I had ever handled who was brave and didn’t panic, not even when facing a glass window with a very large snake on the other side of it (when he grew a little older, he used to lie outside the cage staring at her) and when he fell asleep on my lap with his lop ears flopped over my arm, I decided to keep him as a pet, without even knowing whether rabbits made good pets.
Fortunately my ignorance was soon remedied when I found the House Rabbit Society at www.rabbit org, and learned they could indeed be housepets, and what to feed them, and that they should be spayed or neutered, and that I should cover all the cords in my house with gnaw proofing because rabbits like to chew on them, possibly electrocuting themselves and starting fires. So I bought a case of spiral cable wrap, and a rabbit litterbox, and a deluxe rabbit condominum to keep his litterbox in (it has a door that closes but I usually keep it open unless I’m doing something like moving furniture and don’t want him underfoot).
And I learned a very important thing about rabbits: they are social creatures.
Cats aren’t normally social creatures. They sometimes live in colonies but are solitary hunters deep down. Dogs are pack animals who organize around an alpha and are quick to cut low ranking members from the team if the pack grows too large.
Rabbits, when wild, live in large colonies. Cats are solitary drifters and dogs are clannish villagers but rabbits are urbanites, and so am I, despite the fact that I’m contemplating a move to something more rural and slow in a couple of years.
They have a complex language of gestures and signals, even though they don’t normally make any noise. http://www.muridae.com/rabbits/rabbittalk.html
They have complicated relationships with others. They pair bond, they fall in love at first sight, they also fall in hate at first sight and will fight to the death if nobody intervenes. They are sticklers for routine, propriety and status. They have a lot of variation in personality. After spending some time with my rabbit, I flashed back to reading Watership Down as a child, with its different colonies of rabbits – some adventurers, some artists, some militaristic.
Or, to use a gaming metaphor, cats are solo games, dogs are team games like football that are sometimes played against another team, and rabbits are MMOs.
As I later found out, I wound up with a tyrannical dictator of a rabbit who hates females (of his own species) and brooks no insubordination from males. For some reason I never get along with male humans with that type of personality, but it’s sort of endearing in a seven pound fluffy bunny with lop ears. For his first year or so he was extremely needy, constantly begging for petting and attention, rarely leaving my side. I had to go out of town a couple of times and boarded him at the House Rabbit Society; he’s okay for up to a week but longer than that and he gets depressed and loses his appetite.
I tried matching him up with several rabbits – as I mentioned, they are picky. He hated all the female rabbits he met and instantly attacked them. He found a nice little male rabbit that he was best buddies with for a couple of months, but then one day decided his new pal had committed an unforgivable breach of status by approaching a human when he was supposed to be submissively grooming the boss, and suddenly all they wanted to do was fight, and I had to separate them.
So I finally got him a cat, and the two of them get along fine.
It’s interesting to watch the two of them react differently to the same things. For example, the cat goes nuts over the laser pointer, and loves to chase the red dot. The bunny enjoys watching the red dot but the idea of chasing it and pouncing it never occurs to him. If I give them a box, the cat immediately gets inside. The bunny is more likely to head butt it around until it’s in just the right spot, then try to shred it. The cat loves to be picked up and cuddled. The rabbit despises it. However, if bribed with raisins and petting, he will sit on my chest while I’m lying in bed, but only if he climbs up there himself and isn’t picked up. He loves conversation, and if I’m sitting and talking to another person, he’ll come over and sit between us and just enjoy being part of the group (the cat, on the other hand, will try to take over the encounter by strutting through demanding attention).
Last February my rabbit came down with a life threatening condition, an abscess on the side of his face. I paid for the surgery, even though the vet gave a guarded prognosis. He responded well, and so the vet put him on an antibiotic regime. But since he hates being picked up and hates having things forced in his mouth even more, he gets injections in the scruff of his neck, every other day. He actually would rather have that than be picked up. He also would rather come willingly for his shot, walking on his own four feet, rather than be caught.
They have a lot of dignity, rabbits. People think of them as timid, but you would be too around something 40 times bigger than you that might eat you, like a tyrannosaurus rex. When relaxed, rabbits are actually routine-bound control freaks with a pleasant and urbane sense of humor who enjoy being talked to. And ever since I made my home into the kind of place where rabbits can feel relaxed, I’ve enjoyed being there much more.
Unfortunately the abscess destroyed his tear duct on one side. So he gets discharge from that eye, and I have to clean it daily or the tears dry on the side of his face. He doesn’t trust just anybody to do that, only me. And the condition that brought on the abscess is chronic, incurable and contagious. So I can’t board him with other rabbits any more, it has to be at the vet, all antiseptic like. This means I will be spending the rest of his life without any vacations or extended visits out of town, but I think I can handle it (although moving is going to be an adventure). He turned five this week (birthdate approximate). With good care, he could live up to another seven years.
I’m mentioning him here for three reasons. The first is that I like him a lot, he’s that one pet I’ve had that stands above all the rest, although I’ve loved them all. None of my cats have ever inspired me to make video game characters and blogs named after cats. And the snake, well, she was adorable and I did name one of my SWG characters after her, but I rehomed her, she was just a temporary foster.
The second is that I think they should be more common as pets, even though they have their drawbacks and some (like mine) can be high maintenance. For one thing I want the spiral cable wrap industry to take off, that way more colors and varieties would be available. Not only that, but rabbit-knowledgeable vets would be easier to find, as would rabbit food and supplies. And maybe they’d come up with a better cure for pasteurella if more people had rabbits.
But the third is that living with a rabbit has opened up a world of social insights for me. If you’ve ever had your dog go through a full butt-sniffing introduction to another dog, it’s easy to compare that to a couple of humans meeting and asking each other things like “so, what kind of job do you have?” Same thing with cats being catty, or jealous that you’re petting another animal. Or dogs barking at each other in much the same way as two gamers announcing that they are uber and will wtfpwn each other if they were to duel.
Rabbits are a whole new level of social interaction. Although far too many of them are kept in hutches and small pens instead of deservedly lounging around on the couch, they are hardwired to have the kind of complex social life that most people live these days, especially if they are in a crowded online warren like SWG or WoW instead of the small hunting packs of DDO and the solitary laser-pointer chasing of console games.
Sometimes people ask me if rabbits are more like cats or dogs, but the answer is neither, they’re like rabbits. Maybe closer to bees, or cows. They don’t learn as fast as the carnivores but they tend to memorize their environment in extreme detail, so that when they’re racing around the living room at 30 mph they know where to turn in order to zip between the chair legs rather than run into the couch (my rabbit gets very angry at me when I move furniture and does a full inspection afterwards, rubbing his chin on everything as he learns its new position). They’re not competitive but they do get upset if something upsets their social hierarchy. They obsess on things (like digging one particular section of the floor) and then move on to something else. They pick up on your mood and do things accordingly. When they run and jump, they’re not trying to catch something, they’re playing, or getting out of the way. They are human-like in ways that dogs and cats aren’t.
When I’m being a catlike gamer, I’m prowling through a standalone game, looking for things to pounce, evaluating the NPCs on what they can do for me.
When I’m being a doglike gamer, it’s all about the team, and defeating rival teams, and keeping my territory safe from intruders.
But when I’m being a rabbitlike gamer, I’m hopping over here, chatting with these folks, now I’m running over there, don’t like these rude people, they’re too forward and familiar, dash over there to run a race, hop over here to lie around quietly staring for a few hours until I decide what needs to be moved around, meet some new people – take an instant dislike to one, go do something repetitive for a couple hours, meet some more new people – take an instant liking to one, join a conversation, become offended by someone and share a few nonverbal disapproval signals with them and so on.
A game designer that wants to attract hundreds of players would do better watching rabbits than playing with cats and dogs, in my opinion. A game with a hundred cats playing would be fun for about as long as it took to either catch Tweety Bird or realize that you are never going to catch Tweety Bird unless you continue playing for 90 more hours. A game with a hundred dogs playing would see them separating into teams and competing to see who is the greatest team of all, with rivalries and territorial skirmishes everywhere.
But a game with a hundred rabbits playing would have treaties and love affairs and a caste system and status rankings and lots and lots of practical jokes being played on the Fudds, and a little bit of incidental game playing too.
And, what a coincidence, it seems like some of the most successful games are organized along that particular style.
Hanging above my desk is a Japanese print showing five rabbits in a bamboo forest, and on the shelf near it are several small stuffed rabbits, and there’s a rabbit mouse squeezie perched on top of my monitor, and I’m at work. At home I have a real rabbit, and he’s the inspiration for all of my rabbit-related handles and character names.
My boyfriend and I acquired him under unsavory circumstances, back when we used to have a pet 7' boa constrictor (courtesy of an ex of mine, who dumped her on me when he had to suddenly move in with his snake-phobic mother-in-law). One day the excellent reptile supply store where we bought all her supplies, East Bay Vivarium, ran out of her main food source, live large rats. My bf, sent out to pick up snake dinner, returned home with a live medium rat and a live baby rabbit.
Although I am harsh and unsentimental enough to keep a live-feeding snake in the first place, I fell in love with the rabbit. He was the first rabbit I had ever handled who was brave and didn’t panic, not even when facing a glass window with a very large snake on the other side of it (when he grew a little older, he used to lie outside the cage staring at her) and when he fell asleep on my lap with his lop ears flopped over my arm, I decided to keep him as a pet, without even knowing whether rabbits made good pets.
Fortunately my ignorance was soon remedied when I found the House Rabbit Society at www.rabbit org, and learned they could indeed be housepets, and what to feed them, and that they should be spayed or neutered, and that I should cover all the cords in my house with gnaw proofing because rabbits like to chew on them, possibly electrocuting themselves and starting fires. So I bought a case of spiral cable wrap, and a rabbit litterbox, and a deluxe rabbit condominum to keep his litterbox in (it has a door that closes but I usually keep it open unless I’m doing something like moving furniture and don’t want him underfoot).
And I learned a very important thing about rabbits: they are social creatures.
Cats aren’t normally social creatures. They sometimes live in colonies but are solitary hunters deep down. Dogs are pack animals who organize around an alpha and are quick to cut low ranking members from the team if the pack grows too large.
Rabbits, when wild, live in large colonies. Cats are solitary drifters and dogs are clannish villagers but rabbits are urbanites, and so am I, despite the fact that I’m contemplating a move to something more rural and slow in a couple of years.
They have a complex language of gestures and signals, even though they don’t normally make any noise. http://www.muridae.com/rabbits/rabbittalk.html
They have complicated relationships with others. They pair bond, they fall in love at first sight, they also fall in hate at first sight and will fight to the death if nobody intervenes. They are sticklers for routine, propriety and status. They have a lot of variation in personality. After spending some time with my rabbit, I flashed back to reading Watership Down as a child, with its different colonies of rabbits – some adventurers, some artists, some militaristic.
Or, to use a gaming metaphor, cats are solo games, dogs are team games like football that are sometimes played against another team, and rabbits are MMOs.
As I later found out, I wound up with a tyrannical dictator of a rabbit who hates females (of his own species) and brooks no insubordination from males. For some reason I never get along with male humans with that type of personality, but it’s sort of endearing in a seven pound fluffy bunny with lop ears. For his first year or so he was extremely needy, constantly begging for petting and attention, rarely leaving my side. I had to go out of town a couple of times and boarded him at the House Rabbit Society; he’s okay for up to a week but longer than that and he gets depressed and loses his appetite.
I tried matching him up with several rabbits – as I mentioned, they are picky. He hated all the female rabbits he met and instantly attacked them. He found a nice little male rabbit that he was best buddies with for a couple of months, but then one day decided his new pal had committed an unforgivable breach of status by approaching a human when he was supposed to be submissively grooming the boss, and suddenly all they wanted to do was fight, and I had to separate them.
So I finally got him a cat, and the two of them get along fine.
It’s interesting to watch the two of them react differently to the same things. For example, the cat goes nuts over the laser pointer, and loves to chase the red dot. The bunny enjoys watching the red dot but the idea of chasing it and pouncing it never occurs to him. If I give them a box, the cat immediately gets inside. The bunny is more likely to head butt it around until it’s in just the right spot, then try to shred it. The cat loves to be picked up and cuddled. The rabbit despises it. However, if bribed with raisins and petting, he will sit on my chest while I’m lying in bed, but only if he climbs up there himself and isn’t picked up. He loves conversation, and if I’m sitting and talking to another person, he’ll come over and sit between us and just enjoy being part of the group (the cat, on the other hand, will try to take over the encounter by strutting through demanding attention).
Last February my rabbit came down with a life threatening condition, an abscess on the side of his face. I paid for the surgery, even though the vet gave a guarded prognosis. He responded well, and so the vet put him on an antibiotic regime. But since he hates being picked up and hates having things forced in his mouth even more, he gets injections in the scruff of his neck, every other day. He actually would rather have that than be picked up. He also would rather come willingly for his shot, walking on his own four feet, rather than be caught.
They have a lot of dignity, rabbits. People think of them as timid, but you would be too around something 40 times bigger than you that might eat you, like a tyrannosaurus rex. When relaxed, rabbits are actually routine-bound control freaks with a pleasant and urbane sense of humor who enjoy being talked to. And ever since I made my home into the kind of place where rabbits can feel relaxed, I’ve enjoyed being there much more.
Unfortunately the abscess destroyed his tear duct on one side. So he gets discharge from that eye, and I have to clean it daily or the tears dry on the side of his face. He doesn’t trust just anybody to do that, only me. And the condition that brought on the abscess is chronic, incurable and contagious. So I can’t board him with other rabbits any more, it has to be at the vet, all antiseptic like. This means I will be spending the rest of his life without any vacations or extended visits out of town, but I think I can handle it (although moving is going to be an adventure). He turned five this week (birthdate approximate). With good care, he could live up to another seven years.
I’m mentioning him here for three reasons. The first is that I like him a lot, he’s that one pet I’ve had that stands above all the rest, although I’ve loved them all. None of my cats have ever inspired me to make video game characters and blogs named after cats. And the snake, well, she was adorable and I did name one of my SWG characters after her, but I rehomed her, she was just a temporary foster.
The second is that I think they should be more common as pets, even though they have their drawbacks and some (like mine) can be high maintenance. For one thing I want the spiral cable wrap industry to take off, that way more colors and varieties would be available. Not only that, but rabbit-knowledgeable vets would be easier to find, as would rabbit food and supplies. And maybe they’d come up with a better cure for pasteurella if more people had rabbits.
But the third is that living with a rabbit has opened up a world of social insights for me. If you’ve ever had your dog go through a full butt-sniffing introduction to another dog, it’s easy to compare that to a couple of humans meeting and asking each other things like “so, what kind of job do you have?” Same thing with cats being catty, or jealous that you’re petting another animal. Or dogs barking at each other in much the same way as two gamers announcing that they are uber and will wtfpwn each other if they were to duel.
Rabbits are a whole new level of social interaction. Although far too many of them are kept in hutches and small pens instead of deservedly lounging around on the couch, they are hardwired to have the kind of complex social life that most people live these days, especially if they are in a crowded online warren like SWG or WoW instead of the small hunting packs of DDO and the solitary laser-pointer chasing of console games.
Sometimes people ask me if rabbits are more like cats or dogs, but the answer is neither, they’re like rabbits. Maybe closer to bees, or cows. They don’t learn as fast as the carnivores but they tend to memorize their environment in extreme detail, so that when they’re racing around the living room at 30 mph they know where to turn in order to zip between the chair legs rather than run into the couch (my rabbit gets very angry at me when I move furniture and does a full inspection afterwards, rubbing his chin on everything as he learns its new position). They’re not competitive but they do get upset if something upsets their social hierarchy. They obsess on things (like digging one particular section of the floor) and then move on to something else. They pick up on your mood and do things accordingly. When they run and jump, they’re not trying to catch something, they’re playing, or getting out of the way. They are human-like in ways that dogs and cats aren’t.
When I’m being a catlike gamer, I’m prowling through a standalone game, looking for things to pounce, evaluating the NPCs on what they can do for me.
When I’m being a doglike gamer, it’s all about the team, and defeating rival teams, and keeping my territory safe from intruders.
But when I’m being a rabbitlike gamer, I’m hopping over here, chatting with these folks, now I’m running over there, don’t like these rude people, they’re too forward and familiar, dash over there to run a race, hop over here to lie around quietly staring for a few hours until I decide what needs to be moved around, meet some new people – take an instant dislike to one, go do something repetitive for a couple hours, meet some more new people – take an instant liking to one, join a conversation, become offended by someone and share a few nonverbal disapproval signals with them and so on.
A game designer that wants to attract hundreds of players would do better watching rabbits than playing with cats and dogs, in my opinion. A game with a hundred cats playing would be fun for about as long as it took to either catch Tweety Bird or realize that you are never going to catch Tweety Bird unless you continue playing for 90 more hours. A game with a hundred dogs playing would see them separating into teams and competing to see who is the greatest team of all, with rivalries and territorial skirmishes everywhere.
But a game with a hundred rabbits playing would have treaties and love affairs and a caste system and status rankings and lots and lots of practical jokes being played on the Fudds, and a little bit of incidental game playing too.
And, what a coincidence, it seems like some of the most successful games are organized along that particular style.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Video Games Help Children Suffer Less
And I think that right there says it all.
If there's one thing probably 99.99% of humanity can agree upon, it is that the suffering of children is a bad thing and less of it should occur.
Don't you think?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061215/tc_nm/column_pluggedin_dc
If there's one thing probably 99.99% of humanity can agree upon, it is that the suffering of children is a bad thing and less of it should occur.
Don't you think?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061215/tc_nm/column_pluggedin_dc
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Raph Koster: a wise d00d
Well the good thing with the game was getting Kungg Foo involved in decorating the Ewok prison, because he really got into it and came up with this great concoction of Ewok-proof blast doors and Ewok-seeking laser turrets and a dungeon strewn with bones
The bad thing was that on the past two nights, I’ve logged out of the game in frustration due to a bug, and the one tonight was a doozy triple whammy bug that wasted a couple hours of time (but, on the other hand, gave me a chance to hang out with Kungg, he’s a good guy despite being a youth).
But still, a few more nights like that and I might log out and go write a novel or something.
I think I have figured out part of what’s driving my game identity issues – the mechanics of the game itself are forcing me to not be my main character. And this after I spent some serious game time getting her to be powerful enough to where she could wear street clothes to fight in, like some kind of jedi superhero, and developing her character.
When I start thinking about character development in games and other fuzzy subjects I tend to think of Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/comments.shtml
He’s got some interesting notions about this entire subject.
Although I’ve bitched about the hippies time after time in this blog, understand that it comes from overexposure, and that I deliberately put myself at ground zero by living in San Francisco.
But anyway, here’s Koster’s take on the MMORPGs of today:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/24/what-are-the-lessons-of-mmorpgs-today/
and he’s being cynical as hell, but as a pink and yellow evil jedi named after the Easter Bunny who has somehow morphed into a stormtrooper, all I can say is Word.
The bad thing was that on the past two nights, I’ve logged out of the game in frustration due to a bug, and the one tonight was a doozy triple whammy bug that wasted a couple hours of time (but, on the other hand, gave me a chance to hang out with Kungg, he’s a good guy despite being a youth).
But still, a few more nights like that and I might log out and go write a novel or something.
I think I have figured out part of what’s driving my game identity issues – the mechanics of the game itself are forcing me to not be my main character. And this after I spent some serious game time getting her to be powerful enough to where she could wear street clothes to fight in, like some kind of jedi superhero, and developing her character.
When I start thinking about character development in games and other fuzzy subjects I tend to think of Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/comments.shtml
He’s got some interesting notions about this entire subject.
Although I’ve bitched about the hippies time after time in this blog, understand that it comes from overexposure, and that I deliberately put myself at ground zero by living in San Francisco.
But anyway, here’s Koster’s take on the MMORPGs of today:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/24/what-are-the-lessons-of-mmorpgs-today/
and he’s being cynical as hell, but as a pink and yellow evil jedi named after the Easter Bunny who has somehow morphed into a stormtrooper, all I can say is Word.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Here's one of those guys
I've been complaining about. Hahahahaha.
http://www.break.com/index/angry_german_kid_with_subtitles.html
http://www.break.com/index/angry_german_kid_with_subtitles.html
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Chilling with my enemies
I acquired my last ewok, for fifty million credits. The buyer was someone I hadn't seen in a while. She used to be in THEM, in fact I think she was a founding member, and then she left. Something to do with an ex cruelly stealing her game account during a bad breakup.
When we were hanging around I didn't like her at all. She was snarky in this obnoxious sitcom-kid kind of way, and it came off as bitchy whether or not she intended that. Plus she was one of those women who constantly wants attention, interrupts a lot. Her original character was a shape shifter, so there was a lot of "look at me! look at me now! look at me again, I'm different!"
But she had her good side too, and was genuinely creative, and did have at least some sense of humor, so I was glad to see her. She was very glad to unload her ewok for fifty mil, which is way more than I ever had in my pocket at the time she left the game, so it must have seemed like a fortune, and in some ways it is. For that much you can set yourself up like a king. We have kind of a weird economy, and I'll go into that later, but from my perspective, I got a great deal, because the price can only go up on those things, they're already rare.
But when I finally went to set up my masterpiece, there was a bug getting in my way when I tried to move furniture.
A note to those of you who play games where everybody's homeless: in SWG you can buy houses and decorate them, and this is what we do to try to impress each other when we're not killing each other. Some people have some definitely amazing creative talent when it comes to rearranging game items, and there are enough props to make whatever kind of set you feel like doing.
I've got a shop that's set up as an alien restaurant, both so people can come increase my wealth by buying things and so they can chill and roleplay a scene where the smuggler finally meets the mysterious bounty hunter in a dive restaurant, or the girl meets the guy in a small intimate bar with blue glowing lights, or whatever.
Then I've got my main house, that's got all kinds of sets, the opulent living room, the organic nature-y dining room, the office, the library, the bedroom, the bar.
So basically what I'm building here is the SWG equivalent of a decorated sim house, for other characters to use as sets for their imagination. Except I can't move the freaking furniture. So someone must die.
I run out to the battlefield and who do I run into but a band of THEM, including one of the guys I got in a fight with. So in between killing people, he's explaining to me that he didn't do anything wrong, etc.
But as we talked, it got surprisingly more real. I told him he was being a bully and I hate that. He explained that the player he was trolling had messed with him too, but I told him he had let her push his button and had taken it too far, to the point where he might think he was blameless but obviously the objective observers hadn't.
By the way, there are other ways of fighting in-game other than blasting at each other with laser guns. Business is one of them. And both the harasser and the harass-ee are billionares too. So it's not like the fight centered around someone scamming a noob out of their life savings.
Basically he thought she was in the wrong for trying to buy things cheap. But the deal is, she's a social player. Not a fighter. She brings a lot to the community other than whacking NPC's upside the head with a lightsaber and stealing their lunch money. She's a business woman. Of course she's going to haggle.
Just to throw out the dreary gender theme again, someone told me there was a spot on 20/20 last night (I dont' watch TV but people insist on telling me what's on it) where they had a woman and a man actor, each going in a restaurant with bratty kids (also actors). Nobody dared approach the man, but when the woman had the kids, everybody felt free to tear into her. And as an ex-writer, I can vouch that women get 10x as much hate mail for opinion pieces than men do.
But anyway, me and my enemy are killing enemies together, and speaking of THOSE enemies . . .
I share a mutual chat room with my ex-guild, who I'll call OG for Original Guild; they split at one point so everyone hangs out in a non-guild chatroom, which I am thinking is vastly superior to vent; you've got a peer-moderated common area but you don't demand exclusivity from everyone the way a player association does. THEM could never do this, they're control freaks. In fact the guy I was having private convo with was spamming orders to everyone to immediately get into their vent channel.
Some of the people in this mutual chat are rebels, i.e., the enemy. And in fact, they were fighting on the opposite side.
I kind of lightly roleplay that my imperial guild are bored government agents monitoring their communications, and we all understand that basically nobody's going to use anything said to their advantage to screw up somebody's day.
So basically I was doing this:
Private chat to THEM guy (he's the one who called me a carcastric edicute, by the way): So it's not that I hate you personally, it was that you let her push your buttons to the point where you got in trouble over it, and that's not wise.
Group chat with THEM group: incoming
(Race ahead firing space opera weapon that looks like a giant sparkplug and shoots molten lava. Notice a guy from OG aiming a gun at me.)
OG Chat, me: Hey dude, howya doing?
OG Chat, enemy soldier: good evening.
(he fires back at me but THEM guy charges over and smacks him and I hose him with molten lava while someone else shoots an electric bolt gun at him. He dies.)
OG Chat, me: cya later.
OG Chat, friend: but he's still logged in.
Private IM to OG friend: just killed him in pvp while we were talking
Reply from OG friend: LOL nice
THEM guy: Well yeah, but she just posts all those crappy posts, and it makes me just wanna ...
Me to THEM guy: don't read them if you know she's gonna push your buttons and make you lose it. If you can't control your reaction, control your exposure.
THEM group: "hi new group member" x 6, myself included
THEM guy to THEM group: everyone get on vent. everyone get on vent. everyone get on vent.
Group member: don't have it, new computer.
Group member: my parents said no vent, they don't want to hear all those voices.
Me: ugh, vent.
(notice a confused noob come cruising in on his bike. Fire at him. THEM guy charges at him with a lightsaber. Noob makes a very hasty u-turn. Exchange "lols" with THEM guy.
Someone outside group: Over here! on the roof!
(imperial army locates a nest of insurgents on the roof of a nearby building! Stormtroopers and Anakin wannabes charge up to the roof. Digital carnage ensues amidst billowing clouds of particle effects simulating various toxic substances. OG guy, resurrected, is with them.)
Me, in OG chat: wb dude!
Someone else, in OG chat: he didn't go anywhere.
THEM group: regroup over by the NPCs.
Guildie with new video card: hi! how's it going tonight?
Me, to guildie: pretty good, I'm pvping.
Guildie: ok.
Me, to guildie: how's the new video card?
Guildie: it rocks!
Me, to guildie: cool.
OG chat: aww there's too many of you guys. I think we're gonna go kill the giant scorpion.
Me, in OG chat: no, come back, we're lonely.
(naturally it was a ruse, a couple of moments later a horde of enemies came thundering in but we still had the numbers so they all went down, kinda nice since it had gone the other way the previous night)
THEM group: ok, this is kinda boring, who wants to go to space?
THEM group: in fighters or in guild spaceship?
Me, to THEM group: Alright, this is a guild activity so I'm outta here, you all have a pleasant evening.
THEM group: wishes me well and etc., as I dive out of that chat channel.
Me, in OG: too one sided, I'm gonna go decorate.
(charge into a group of enemies outside the starport including two OG members, die hideous death.)
OG guy, in OG Chat: Oops, that was you, sorry about that, I'm just killing everybody in pvp mode.
Me, in OG Chat: it's cool, I wanted to get killed because I hate logging out in pvp mode and getting killed is the quickest way to disable it. Was I worth a lot of points?
OG guy: I didn't notice.
Me: damn!
In WoW, a far inferior game, they don't let you chat with your enemies on the opposite side while you're fighting, just your enemies on your own side. Now how lame is that? Also in WoW the fighting takes far too long, in our world it gets intense fast and continues until we're bored, maybe an hour or two, because we're gamers and have short attention spans.
What a civilized way to make war. In fact, many soldiers that I've known definitely prefer it to the real thing. You get to get your aggro groove on, help your teammates win, set symbolic enemies on fire or shoot lighting out of your hands at them. It's green, doesn't harm the planet, keeps youths from driving around on drugs and hubbies out of topless bars, people learn to handle their anger better. In my opinion, this kind of improvement in warfare is long overdue.
When we were hanging around I didn't like her at all. She was snarky in this obnoxious sitcom-kid kind of way, and it came off as bitchy whether or not she intended that. Plus she was one of those women who constantly wants attention, interrupts a lot. Her original character was a shape shifter, so there was a lot of "look at me! look at me now! look at me again, I'm different!"
But she had her good side too, and was genuinely creative, and did have at least some sense of humor, so I was glad to see her. She was very glad to unload her ewok for fifty mil, which is way more than I ever had in my pocket at the time she left the game, so it must have seemed like a fortune, and in some ways it is. For that much you can set yourself up like a king. We have kind of a weird economy, and I'll go into that later, but from my perspective, I got a great deal, because the price can only go up on those things, they're already rare.
But when I finally went to set up my masterpiece, there was a bug getting in my way when I tried to move furniture.
A note to those of you who play games where everybody's homeless: in SWG you can buy houses and decorate them, and this is what we do to try to impress each other when we're not killing each other. Some people have some definitely amazing creative talent when it comes to rearranging game items, and there are enough props to make whatever kind of set you feel like doing.
I've got a shop that's set up as an alien restaurant, both so people can come increase my wealth by buying things and so they can chill and roleplay a scene where the smuggler finally meets the mysterious bounty hunter in a dive restaurant, or the girl meets the guy in a small intimate bar with blue glowing lights, or whatever.
Then I've got my main house, that's got all kinds of sets, the opulent living room, the organic nature-y dining room, the office, the library, the bedroom, the bar.
So basically what I'm building here is the SWG equivalent of a decorated sim house, for other characters to use as sets for their imagination. Except I can't move the freaking furniture. So someone must die.
I run out to the battlefield and who do I run into but a band of THEM, including one of the guys I got in a fight with. So in between killing people, he's explaining to me that he didn't do anything wrong, etc.
But as we talked, it got surprisingly more real. I told him he was being a bully and I hate that. He explained that the player he was trolling had messed with him too, but I told him he had let her push his button and had taken it too far, to the point where he might think he was blameless but obviously the objective observers hadn't.
By the way, there are other ways of fighting in-game other than blasting at each other with laser guns. Business is one of them. And both the harasser and the harass-ee are billionares too. So it's not like the fight centered around someone scamming a noob out of their life savings.
Basically he thought she was in the wrong for trying to buy things cheap. But the deal is, she's a social player. Not a fighter. She brings a lot to the community other than whacking NPC's upside the head with a lightsaber and stealing their lunch money. She's a business woman. Of course she's going to haggle.
Just to throw out the dreary gender theme again, someone told me there was a spot on 20/20 last night (I dont' watch TV but people insist on telling me what's on it) where they had a woman and a man actor, each going in a restaurant with bratty kids (also actors). Nobody dared approach the man, but when the woman had the kids, everybody felt free to tear into her. And as an ex-writer, I can vouch that women get 10x as much hate mail for opinion pieces than men do.
But anyway, me and my enemy are killing enemies together, and speaking of THOSE enemies . . .
I share a mutual chat room with my ex-guild, who I'll call OG for Original Guild; they split at one point so everyone hangs out in a non-guild chatroom, which I am thinking is vastly superior to vent; you've got a peer-moderated common area but you don't demand exclusivity from everyone the way a player association does. THEM could never do this, they're control freaks. In fact the guy I was having private convo with was spamming orders to everyone to immediately get into their vent channel.
Some of the people in this mutual chat are rebels, i.e., the enemy. And in fact, they were fighting on the opposite side.
I kind of lightly roleplay that my imperial guild are bored government agents monitoring their communications, and we all understand that basically nobody's going to use anything said to their advantage to screw up somebody's day.
So basically I was doing this:
Private chat to THEM guy (he's the one who called me a carcastric edicute, by the way): So it's not that I hate you personally, it was that you let her push your buttons to the point where you got in trouble over it, and that's not wise.
Group chat with THEM group: incoming
(Race ahead firing space opera weapon that looks like a giant sparkplug and shoots molten lava. Notice a guy from OG aiming a gun at me.)
OG Chat, me: Hey dude, howya doing?
OG Chat, enemy soldier: good evening.
(he fires back at me but THEM guy charges over and smacks him and I hose him with molten lava while someone else shoots an electric bolt gun at him. He dies.)
OG Chat, me: cya later.
OG Chat, friend: but he's still logged in.
Private IM to OG friend: just killed him in pvp while we were talking
Reply from OG friend: LOL nice
THEM guy: Well yeah, but she just posts all those crappy posts, and it makes me just wanna ...
Me to THEM guy: don't read them if you know she's gonna push your buttons and make you lose it. If you can't control your reaction, control your exposure.
THEM group: "hi new group member" x 6, myself included
THEM guy to THEM group: everyone get on vent. everyone get on vent. everyone get on vent.
Group member: don't have it, new computer.
Group member: my parents said no vent, they don't want to hear all those voices.
Me: ugh, vent.
(notice a confused noob come cruising in on his bike. Fire at him. THEM guy charges at him with a lightsaber. Noob makes a very hasty u-turn. Exchange "lols" with THEM guy.
Someone outside group: Over here! on the roof!
(imperial army locates a nest of insurgents on the roof of a nearby building! Stormtroopers and Anakin wannabes charge up to the roof. Digital carnage ensues amidst billowing clouds of particle effects simulating various toxic substances. OG guy, resurrected, is with them.)
Me, in OG chat: wb dude!
Someone else, in OG chat: he didn't go anywhere.
THEM group: regroup over by the NPCs.
Guildie with new video card: hi! how's it going tonight?
Me, to guildie: pretty good, I'm pvping.
Guildie: ok.
Me, to guildie: how's the new video card?
Guildie: it rocks!
Me, to guildie: cool.
OG chat: aww there's too many of you guys. I think we're gonna go kill the giant scorpion.
Me, in OG chat: no, come back, we're lonely.
(naturally it was a ruse, a couple of moments later a horde of enemies came thundering in but we still had the numbers so they all went down, kinda nice since it had gone the other way the previous night)
THEM group: ok, this is kinda boring, who wants to go to space?
THEM group: in fighters or in guild spaceship?
Me, to THEM group: Alright, this is a guild activity so I'm outta here, you all have a pleasant evening.
THEM group: wishes me well and etc., as I dive out of that chat channel.
Me, in OG: too one sided, I'm gonna go decorate.
(charge into a group of enemies outside the starport including two OG members, die hideous death.)
OG guy, in OG Chat: Oops, that was you, sorry about that, I'm just killing everybody in pvp mode.
Me, in OG Chat: it's cool, I wanted to get killed because I hate logging out in pvp mode and getting killed is the quickest way to disable it. Was I worth a lot of points?
OG guy: I didn't notice.
Me: damn!
In WoW, a far inferior game, they don't let you chat with your enemies on the opposite side while you're fighting, just your enemies on your own side. Now how lame is that? Also in WoW the fighting takes far too long, in our world it gets intense fast and continues until we're bored, maybe an hour or two, because we're gamers and have short attention spans.
What a civilized way to make war. In fact, many soldiers that I've known definitely prefer it to the real thing. You get to get your aggro groove on, help your teammates win, set symbolic enemies on fire or shoot lighting out of your hands at them. It's green, doesn't harm the planet, keeps youths from driving around on drugs and hubbies out of topless bars, people learn to handle their anger better. In my opinion, this kind of improvement in warfare is long overdue.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
My Feud (and Dysfunctional In-Game Marriage)
Back in winter of 2004, my bf and I met this dark jedi, whom I’ll call Prince of Darkness (POD for short). Back then jedi were rare, and very powerful. We both started hanging around with him, and at some point he and I just “clicked.” We had a really good rapport. We could hang out IMing for hours, talking about nerdly stuff like sci fi, and the game itself, and games in general.
At the time I was in a player association that had gone inactive since most of the players in it were several months ahead of me and had already seen and done everything. So I decided to join POD’s guild, which I’ll call THEM, and so did my bf.
In my rant about women gamers I mentioned my encounter with the guildleader’s in-game wife. That encounter got even more dramatic when the guild put up a base, and one night it was attacked, and Mrs. Guildleader was having some kind of sexual encounter in guildchat and didn’t show up to defend it. My bf did, but wasn’t much use alone, and so together we watched it blow up on his screen.
The next day, Mr. Guildleader was upset at the loss of the base, so Mrs. Guildleader attempted to put all the blame on my bf by claiming he was having cybersex with the rebels that destroyed the base, and he either was thrown out of the guild or quit, I can’t remember which.
We realized we were dealing with someone a few fries short of a Happy Meal and decided to “game it out.” We pretended, for Mrs. Guildleader’s benefit, that we had
broken up IRL over the incident, which seemed to give her lots of pleasure. We told Guildleader, POD and several others that we were flat out lying to her because she’d been a bitch to us. They didn’t have a problem with the deception. We had a lot of fun for a couple of months, with him spying on the rebels and me observing the imperials, watching the resulting battles enfold on two monitors from two points of view.
While he was touring the rebel alliance and meeting all the different guilds there, I was
meanwhile having a different experience. I already mentioned Vent.
Due to POD’s high standing in THEM (he was their only jedi), he pulled strings to get me into management, and I believe my title was Role Playing Officer, or something similar. So I took it to heart and started busily posting on their forums. Then they demanded I get on Vent with them and instituted a requirement that all officers use Vent.
Already told you how I feel about Vent. I resigned as officer.
Next, we got into a project involving destruction of enemy bases. This was the main form of PVP at the time. Rebels and Imperials would buy bases and set them down, and the bases were vulnerable every few days, for two hours. During those two hours you could send in five different specialists to each hit a terminal and blow the base up. I volunteered to be one of the specialists, and trained my medic alt in the necessary profession, Squad Leader.
I spent several evenings blowing up bases before finally getting fed up: with losing my expensive equipment when ordered to charge directly into fire and get killed, with having their guys spam conflicting orders at me and give me hell no matter which I followed, with just spending that much time with them. I’m normally pretty easy to get along with and hit it off fine with two of their main officers, one of whom had admirable taste in the songs of Blue Oyster Cult, but there were two others that were constantly making sexual references whenever they talked to me, demanding I tell them my age/location and post pictures, etc. At one point I made an official fuss about it, and others came forward mentioning things like hearing some guy bragging on Vent about date raping a teenage girl, or some of the NC17 stuff that went on in guildchat. So they cleaned it up, made guildchat PG-13, put a special section on their forums for, uh, “mature” conversation.
I remember a conversation I had with another officer where I was complaining about one of the crude guys, and the other officer said “Well, I just think he’s not used to dealing with intelligent women.”
No doubt.
Things escalated when this kid I’ll call Cheezy joined the guild. He was sixteen or so, not too bright and into porn. He was one of the main ones that occasioned cleaning up guildchat. I complained about him to THEM’s officers and was told “give him a break, he’s just a kid,” but after he started asking me questions about my pubic hair in the middle of fights, I told him I was going to report him if he didn’t chill.
Due to all of this, I became the official persona non grata, and I actually did report Cheezy once, so many of them quit talking around me, because I was obviously report-happy and had no sense of humor. Which was fine with me, because I had mainly joined the guild to hang out with POD, which I still did, in between doing my solo missions that brought me closer to jedihood.
I learned a lot about a lot of things from POD. For one thing, he was extremely red state, and I’m extremely blue, yet we both crossed the color line on a lot of issues. And we both have lots of IRL friends who despise the other side and gave us grief for even knowing any of “the enemy.”
I’ll write more about politics eventually, but for right here and right now, I’ll just say that, while some might expect that all the imperials would be flag waving neocons and all the rebels would be flag burning progressives, that’s not exactly accurate. There are both on both sides, and because there are also Europeans and Australians and Canadians and Costa Ricans and other non-Americans playing, there are various shades of purple and green and red and you name it. There are a lot of SWG players with informed and interesting political opinions. I’ve had some great conversations with one particular rebel, with whom I am in a conspiracy to shut down another rebel who likes to post links to sites that flirt with anti-Semitism. I do know a lot of players who are very political and shoot imperials/rebels because they’d like to shoot liberals/conservatives IRL, but feel that would be wrong. Me, I like to set really sexist guys on fire and watch them burn, but fortunately virtual reality makes it safe and fun for all involved (so I can do it over and over again, hehe).
Most of the members of THEM, at the time I was involved, were way redder than POD, and while it would be easy to write off the friction as being solely red/blue, it was a major factor. There were a few women in THEM but, like me, they tended to stay in the background doing their own thing.
Members of THEM like to claim they are more like a family than a guild, and I think that’s at the root of it. If you grew up in a family with an authoritarian dad with a tendency toward drinking and ranting, where disagreement was treason and dealing with outsiders discouraged, you’d probably feel right at home among them.
I didn’t. My parents don’t drink and are a lot more willing to listen to opposing views. Dad was a red voter from California and Mom is a blue voter from Texas (like POD). They taught me it’s okay to stand out, if you feel strongly about a particular issue.
So when I first encountered members of THEM telling me angrily that I should ONLY socialize with the guild, or that I should ONLY post in the guild forums and not the original forums, or that I should NEVER question the leader’s orders even if he’s (a) drunk and (b) so impressed by my alternate strategy that he’s copying it himself within a week . . . I thought I had stumbled into Valley of the Dinosaurs when I was supposed to be playing Star Wars Galaxies.
I still liked POD though, and took to socializing with him on his “secret” alts that were not members of THEM. We did pilot together on one of them.
Other things I learned from him had to do with exploits.
I learned how to run two accounts at once. How to write macros and loop them, so I could grind experience AFK. I learned about fight clubbing, something the old school jedi used to do, where you team up with another jedi or several and take turns killing each others’ bounty hunter alts, thus raising your rank and making it look like you’re a PVP god. I learned how PVP worked under the old system, or didn’t work.
One thing that gamers will do is test a system to its stress point. They will seize on any advantage accidentally programmed in and before long, all of them are doing it.
At that point in SWG history, the battle went to the collectors of loopholes. Obscure attacks that could only be countered by a character with a particular skill set, fabulous equipment that cost more than an ordinary person could earn honestly in a year, all added to the factor that keeps PVP permanently weird in SWG: most people want to play the heroic rebels, so the overwhelming might of the empire is frequently outnumbered by armies of Luke Skywalkers.
A PVP fight back then consisted of lots of secret networking and planning, then logistics to get your 20+ fighters to a base, where they faced perilous attacks from NPCs which must be dealt with in order to hit the five terminals and blow it up, and at any time during it, a huge army of rebel players might show up with three fighters to your one, and ruin your whole day.
POD’s a bright guy in many ways. He could deconstruct game mechanics in his head faster than … me, so I respected him.
Our relationship expanded to include Yahoo Messenger, and telephone. All about the game. I won’t lie, there were a few times earlier in our relationship where we basically typed erotica at each other while our characters fell in love and got married. It was fun and usually just made me want to drag my boyfriend into the bedroom. He engaged in it a few times too, and occasionally we’d watch each other. But ultimately cyber sex in a video game is just … weird. Neither one of us developed a serious affection for it, and after a couple of experiments, I think we both decided it was lame.
Once our characters had their wedding rings equipped, we settled down to a comfortable routine. He’d log in, I would say “how was your day, dear?” and sympathize with him, and then sometimes we’d go socialize and I would take his side if anyone threw down, and sometimes we’d wander off doing separate things. I also would fire my shotgun at bounty hunters if they tried to murder him, which happened pretty much every time he left the house. Sometimes I’d tease him by writing an /agree macro for one of my characters and having her follow him around while I was playing some other character doing something somewhere else. He in turn would buy me in game presents, and help me kill things that were out of my league.
My issues with the guild were what broke us up, but we were due for it anyway, having already exhausted conversation, not interested in anything romantic, and I was finding the phone and IMing to be boundary crossers. My character was happily married to his, but our RL selves didn’t get along as well as they did, and my RL self was in a relationship. In fact I can almost thank him for making us realize that we were in one, we thought we were just hanging out.
Then the combat upgrade happened. Overnight, fighting changed dramatically. Groups became smaller. Power imbalances diminished. Suddenly places like Death Watch Bunker, or activities like PVP, formerly requiring massive amounts of planning and coordination, became things small groups could do on the spur of the moment.
All of a sudden, I was capable of making real money in game.
And at the same time, POD’s fortunes plummeted. Inflation hit, and as it turned out he wasn’t so wealthy any more. I, meanwhile, had found this other guild while out getting rich. This other guild consisted of intelligent guys with a good sense of humor who could interact with women without being offensive and, most importantly, could do some of the most precise teamwork on the server.
Now that teams were 8 people instead of 20, this was a much more important consideration. My bf joined this new guild first. Then I put my alt in it – which required lots of diplomacy and negotiation, because THEM usually insisted that all their members be in THEM too (something POD flagrantly disobeyed in secret). And then, finally, I made the break and joined the new guild with my main. I’m still in that guild. It’s been about a year and a half since I joined them.
I’m going to sum it up real quick – POD’s friendship was based on him mentoring me through the game. Then the balance changed. Since I played it more, I was suddenly more knowledgeable about the game. His wealth was evaporating and mine was growing. He didn’t like the shift in power. He got ugly, started sabotaging me. It ended with him spying on me, me finding out and getting pissed, my boyfriend getting involved, ultimatums being issued and my relationship solidifying, so I can’t say it was entirely bad, although it sucked dealing with all the drama. I think my BF called in some favors and issued some parting hostilities, I just cut everyone in TRM off and went full speed ahead toward getting my jedi up to level.
But anyway, one of the things he had done toward the end was try to start trouble between me and my original guild, which plan was swiftly nipped in the bud because my original guild hasn’t got much patience for that kind of thing, and he also had this friend who had joined my guild after having some issues with THEM who tried to start drama with my new guild, which culminated in my guild leader and the leader of THEM exchanging hostilities and declaring that our guilds wouldn’t contact or assist each other. There was animosity between them to begin with, from something guys from THEM had pulled while I had been grinding pilot with POD, and they didn’t like the spying bit either.
It went on like that until the NGE. Most of THEM quit. New people joined, including some old friends. I continued to refuse to have anything to do with THEM. Until a guy that I’m going to call Strife appeared. He’s now a legend on Sunrunner.
Strife was a great guy at first. He was very energetic and did lots of work toward getting the PVP coordinated and raising morale. He was always doing posts in the forums, writing walkthroughs and such. He was a veteran from way back who had taken a long break. I didn’t really come into contact with him much until the Battle of Restuss, which was a player event thing where we had to coordinate with the others on our faction, and I was out there grinding away with him getting the work done.
Then he joined THEM.
I told him I had lost all respect for him.
Got into a flame war over that with the rebels, who were demanding that we all work together to advance the battle to the next phase so we could all resume killing each other. But it was the truth.
Things continued icily until this one day when the PVPers were running one of their “you are so gay!” type arguments and I stepped in and said it took a lot more guts to be gay than it did to pvp on the side with all the numbers, which earned me some notoriety among some players, who were betting large sums on whether I was a guy IRL, and the gay players, who privately thanked me.
But Strife was horrified. He immediately ceased having anything to do with me, and when we ran into each other in game, he was usually with a band of THEM and they’d start chanting gay-related insults, like school kids. So I hung out with everyone else – and met some good people that way.
The THEM group started focusing on loot farming, under Strife’s power gaming direction, and soon succeeded in pissing off all the other imperials who were getting beat up because Strife’s crew would abandon fights in search of more loot.
Strife was a loot hungry fellow, and suddenly started getting temporary bans for trying to make large sums exploiting.
They finally pissed off one of my members when they claimed that only people on THEM’s Vent were allowed to hog the wealth, and so I chased Strife down in the forums and demanded an apology.
Then came the wedding.
There’s a female player on the rebel side who puts a lot of energy into PVP. I’d probably like her if she wasn’t trying to kill me all the time. But I kill her a lot too, it’s mutual. She decided to throw a wedding to another female toon. I have no idea (nor concern) whether it was a male or female player behind the character. And I missed the wedding due to RL.
But as I later found out, Strife had come to the wedding and parked himself running a macro about the evils of same sex weddings, with a few choice Nazi quotes thrown in. In German. Strike is a pretty weird dude politically, he’s a Stalinist who voted for Bush. But this was too weird for everybody and all of his accounts were banned, and for a while even mentioning his name would get you in trouble. The CEO of the company even mentioned him in HIS blog, I think he called him “Hatemonger.”
Exit Strife. Enter Beavis. Beavis is another leadership-type person in THEM. Beavis got personally offended by a different female player (noticing any patterns here?), this one a non-PVPing merchant. He thought she was offering to buy things for too low. He responded to this by trolling her threads, and copying her colorful HTML style posts into posts in the general forums bitching about her.
On his first attack, I jumped into the argument and told him to quit trolling her, she can post whatever ads she wants. So I got a load of personal attack unleashed on me, in which Beavis at one point lost control of the ability to type and called me a “carcastric edicute,” an insult I cherish.
He chilled for a while. Then last night he popped up doing it again, and this morning he’d been banned. He then reappeared posting on an elder account that he had taken over (and purportedly, was using that character to “fight club” (see definition above) and farm points) (I’ve seen pretty good evidence this is true). There was the usual few paragraphs of “what did I do? I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”
Strife actually put up an “I wasn’t doing anything wrong, the game was suppressing my political rights!” website and tried to get Fox News to interview him but they didn’t go for it.
SO, then I made some remark about more consistent behavior from THEM and another one of THEM went ballistic and started castigating me for the crime of objecting to their behavior. I responded that they should quit misbehaving. And at some point I dared them to go six months without any of their boys causing trouble. Which is sort of where it stands. And naturally they had to flame a few forum threads immediately after to prove I’m not the boss of them, or something like that.
And that lengthy background was sort of necessary for my post today, because when I logged in, I ran into an old pal – scored another ewok from him – who informed me that POD had come back into the game.
So I’m kinda wondering whether they can go six months without causing trouble.
But other than that I just chatted all night, and I need to coordinate a photo shoot of all my alien guildies because a really good graphic artist who does a lot of work with the role playing guilds is going to make us a banner for our website. And I met some noobs. And a drunk belligerent guy playing a female toon running around down town trying to pick fights while wearing a dance leotard.
Hung out with this one ingame friend. He’s 15, but bright. Scary bright. Wants to be a game designer. We just hung out downtown for a long time, talking about stuff, video games, school, creepy old dudes my age who play strategy games, guys playing girls looking for cybersex with guys, all the weird things in the world. At one point there were four of us, widely different ages and geography. All talking about how much we love these games. How we want to work in them somehow. Make them better. Invest ourselves in them. Because where else could four people such as ourselves have the good conversation we were having in the first place?
Stuff like that really does make it worth running into all kinds of carcastric edicutes.
At the time I was in a player association that had gone inactive since most of the players in it were several months ahead of me and had already seen and done everything. So I decided to join POD’s guild, which I’ll call THEM, and so did my bf.
In my rant about women gamers I mentioned my encounter with the guildleader’s in-game wife. That encounter got even more dramatic when the guild put up a base, and one night it was attacked, and Mrs. Guildleader was having some kind of sexual encounter in guildchat and didn’t show up to defend it. My bf did, but wasn’t much use alone, and so together we watched it blow up on his screen.
The next day, Mr. Guildleader was upset at the loss of the base, so Mrs. Guildleader attempted to put all the blame on my bf by claiming he was having cybersex with the rebels that destroyed the base, and he either was thrown out of the guild or quit, I can’t remember which.
We realized we were dealing with someone a few fries short of a Happy Meal and decided to “game it out.” We pretended, for Mrs. Guildleader’s benefit, that we had
broken up IRL over the incident, which seemed to give her lots of pleasure. We told Guildleader, POD and several others that we were flat out lying to her because she’d been a bitch to us. They didn’t have a problem with the deception. We had a lot of fun for a couple of months, with him spying on the rebels and me observing the imperials, watching the resulting battles enfold on two monitors from two points of view.
While he was touring the rebel alliance and meeting all the different guilds there, I was
meanwhile having a different experience. I already mentioned Vent.
Due to POD’s high standing in THEM (he was their only jedi), he pulled strings to get me into management, and I believe my title was Role Playing Officer, or something similar. So I took it to heart and started busily posting on their forums. Then they demanded I get on Vent with them and instituted a requirement that all officers use Vent.
Already told you how I feel about Vent. I resigned as officer.
Next, we got into a project involving destruction of enemy bases. This was the main form of PVP at the time. Rebels and Imperials would buy bases and set them down, and the bases were vulnerable every few days, for two hours. During those two hours you could send in five different specialists to each hit a terminal and blow the base up. I volunteered to be one of the specialists, and trained my medic alt in the necessary profession, Squad Leader.
I spent several evenings blowing up bases before finally getting fed up: with losing my expensive equipment when ordered to charge directly into fire and get killed, with having their guys spam conflicting orders at me and give me hell no matter which I followed, with just spending that much time with them. I’m normally pretty easy to get along with and hit it off fine with two of their main officers, one of whom had admirable taste in the songs of Blue Oyster Cult, but there were two others that were constantly making sexual references whenever they talked to me, demanding I tell them my age/location and post pictures, etc. At one point I made an official fuss about it, and others came forward mentioning things like hearing some guy bragging on Vent about date raping a teenage girl, or some of the NC17 stuff that went on in guildchat. So they cleaned it up, made guildchat PG-13, put a special section on their forums for, uh, “mature” conversation.
I remember a conversation I had with another officer where I was complaining about one of the crude guys, and the other officer said “Well, I just think he’s not used to dealing with intelligent women.”
No doubt.
Things escalated when this kid I’ll call Cheezy joined the guild. He was sixteen or so, not too bright and into porn. He was one of the main ones that occasioned cleaning up guildchat. I complained about him to THEM’s officers and was told “give him a break, he’s just a kid,” but after he started asking me questions about my pubic hair in the middle of fights, I told him I was going to report him if he didn’t chill.
Due to all of this, I became the official persona non grata, and I actually did report Cheezy once, so many of them quit talking around me, because I was obviously report-happy and had no sense of humor. Which was fine with me, because I had mainly joined the guild to hang out with POD, which I still did, in between doing my solo missions that brought me closer to jedihood.
I learned a lot about a lot of things from POD. For one thing, he was extremely red state, and I’m extremely blue, yet we both crossed the color line on a lot of issues. And we both have lots of IRL friends who despise the other side and gave us grief for even knowing any of “the enemy.”
I’ll write more about politics eventually, but for right here and right now, I’ll just say that, while some might expect that all the imperials would be flag waving neocons and all the rebels would be flag burning progressives, that’s not exactly accurate. There are both on both sides, and because there are also Europeans and Australians and Canadians and Costa Ricans and other non-Americans playing, there are various shades of purple and green and red and you name it. There are a lot of SWG players with informed and interesting political opinions. I’ve had some great conversations with one particular rebel, with whom I am in a conspiracy to shut down another rebel who likes to post links to sites that flirt with anti-Semitism. I do know a lot of players who are very political and shoot imperials/rebels because they’d like to shoot liberals/conservatives IRL, but feel that would be wrong. Me, I like to set really sexist guys on fire and watch them burn, but fortunately virtual reality makes it safe and fun for all involved (so I can do it over and over again, hehe).
Most of the members of THEM, at the time I was involved, were way redder than POD, and while it would be easy to write off the friction as being solely red/blue, it was a major factor. There were a few women in THEM but, like me, they tended to stay in the background doing their own thing.
Members of THEM like to claim they are more like a family than a guild, and I think that’s at the root of it. If you grew up in a family with an authoritarian dad with a tendency toward drinking and ranting, where disagreement was treason and dealing with outsiders discouraged, you’d probably feel right at home among them.
I didn’t. My parents don’t drink and are a lot more willing to listen to opposing views. Dad was a red voter from California and Mom is a blue voter from Texas (like POD). They taught me it’s okay to stand out, if you feel strongly about a particular issue.
So when I first encountered members of THEM telling me angrily that I should ONLY socialize with the guild, or that I should ONLY post in the guild forums and not the original forums, or that I should NEVER question the leader’s orders even if he’s (a) drunk and (b) so impressed by my alternate strategy that he’s copying it himself within a week . . . I thought I had stumbled into Valley of the Dinosaurs when I was supposed to be playing Star Wars Galaxies.
I still liked POD though, and took to socializing with him on his “secret” alts that were not members of THEM. We did pilot together on one of them.
Other things I learned from him had to do with exploits.
I learned how to run two accounts at once. How to write macros and loop them, so I could grind experience AFK. I learned about fight clubbing, something the old school jedi used to do, where you team up with another jedi or several and take turns killing each others’ bounty hunter alts, thus raising your rank and making it look like you’re a PVP god. I learned how PVP worked under the old system, or didn’t work.
One thing that gamers will do is test a system to its stress point. They will seize on any advantage accidentally programmed in and before long, all of them are doing it.
At that point in SWG history, the battle went to the collectors of loopholes. Obscure attacks that could only be countered by a character with a particular skill set, fabulous equipment that cost more than an ordinary person could earn honestly in a year, all added to the factor that keeps PVP permanently weird in SWG: most people want to play the heroic rebels, so the overwhelming might of the empire is frequently outnumbered by armies of Luke Skywalkers.
A PVP fight back then consisted of lots of secret networking and planning, then logistics to get your 20+ fighters to a base, where they faced perilous attacks from NPCs which must be dealt with in order to hit the five terminals and blow it up, and at any time during it, a huge army of rebel players might show up with three fighters to your one, and ruin your whole day.
POD’s a bright guy in many ways. He could deconstruct game mechanics in his head faster than … me, so I respected him.
Our relationship expanded to include Yahoo Messenger, and telephone. All about the game. I won’t lie, there were a few times earlier in our relationship where we basically typed erotica at each other while our characters fell in love and got married. It was fun and usually just made me want to drag my boyfriend into the bedroom. He engaged in it a few times too, and occasionally we’d watch each other. But ultimately cyber sex in a video game is just … weird. Neither one of us developed a serious affection for it, and after a couple of experiments, I think we both decided it was lame.
Once our characters had their wedding rings equipped, we settled down to a comfortable routine. He’d log in, I would say “how was your day, dear?” and sympathize with him, and then sometimes we’d go socialize and I would take his side if anyone threw down, and sometimes we’d wander off doing separate things. I also would fire my shotgun at bounty hunters if they tried to murder him, which happened pretty much every time he left the house. Sometimes I’d tease him by writing an /agree macro for one of my characters and having her follow him around while I was playing some other character doing something somewhere else. He in turn would buy me in game presents, and help me kill things that were out of my league.
My issues with the guild were what broke us up, but we were due for it anyway, having already exhausted conversation, not interested in anything romantic, and I was finding the phone and IMing to be boundary crossers. My character was happily married to his, but our RL selves didn’t get along as well as they did, and my RL self was in a relationship. In fact I can almost thank him for making us realize that we were in one, we thought we were just hanging out.
Then the combat upgrade happened. Overnight, fighting changed dramatically. Groups became smaller. Power imbalances diminished. Suddenly places like Death Watch Bunker, or activities like PVP, formerly requiring massive amounts of planning and coordination, became things small groups could do on the spur of the moment.
All of a sudden, I was capable of making real money in game.
And at the same time, POD’s fortunes plummeted. Inflation hit, and as it turned out he wasn’t so wealthy any more. I, meanwhile, had found this other guild while out getting rich. This other guild consisted of intelligent guys with a good sense of humor who could interact with women without being offensive and, most importantly, could do some of the most precise teamwork on the server.
Now that teams were 8 people instead of 20, this was a much more important consideration. My bf joined this new guild first. Then I put my alt in it – which required lots of diplomacy and negotiation, because THEM usually insisted that all their members be in THEM too (something POD flagrantly disobeyed in secret). And then, finally, I made the break and joined the new guild with my main. I’m still in that guild. It’s been about a year and a half since I joined them.
I’m going to sum it up real quick – POD’s friendship was based on him mentoring me through the game. Then the balance changed. Since I played it more, I was suddenly more knowledgeable about the game. His wealth was evaporating and mine was growing. He didn’t like the shift in power. He got ugly, started sabotaging me. It ended with him spying on me, me finding out and getting pissed, my boyfriend getting involved, ultimatums being issued and my relationship solidifying, so I can’t say it was entirely bad, although it sucked dealing with all the drama. I think my BF called in some favors and issued some parting hostilities, I just cut everyone in TRM off and went full speed ahead toward getting my jedi up to level.
But anyway, one of the things he had done toward the end was try to start trouble between me and my original guild, which plan was swiftly nipped in the bud because my original guild hasn’t got much patience for that kind of thing, and he also had this friend who had joined my guild after having some issues with THEM who tried to start drama with my new guild, which culminated in my guild leader and the leader of THEM exchanging hostilities and declaring that our guilds wouldn’t contact or assist each other. There was animosity between them to begin with, from something guys from THEM had pulled while I had been grinding pilot with POD, and they didn’t like the spying bit either.
It went on like that until the NGE. Most of THEM quit. New people joined, including some old friends. I continued to refuse to have anything to do with THEM. Until a guy that I’m going to call Strife appeared. He’s now a legend on Sunrunner.
Strife was a great guy at first. He was very energetic and did lots of work toward getting the PVP coordinated and raising morale. He was always doing posts in the forums, writing walkthroughs and such. He was a veteran from way back who had taken a long break. I didn’t really come into contact with him much until the Battle of Restuss, which was a player event thing where we had to coordinate with the others on our faction, and I was out there grinding away with him getting the work done.
Then he joined THEM.
I told him I had lost all respect for him.
Got into a flame war over that with the rebels, who were demanding that we all work together to advance the battle to the next phase so we could all resume killing each other. But it was the truth.
Things continued icily until this one day when the PVPers were running one of their “you are so gay!” type arguments and I stepped in and said it took a lot more guts to be gay than it did to pvp on the side with all the numbers, which earned me some notoriety among some players, who were betting large sums on whether I was a guy IRL, and the gay players, who privately thanked me.
But Strife was horrified. He immediately ceased having anything to do with me, and when we ran into each other in game, he was usually with a band of THEM and they’d start chanting gay-related insults, like school kids. So I hung out with everyone else – and met some good people that way.
The THEM group started focusing on loot farming, under Strife’s power gaming direction, and soon succeeded in pissing off all the other imperials who were getting beat up because Strife’s crew would abandon fights in search of more loot.
Strife was a loot hungry fellow, and suddenly started getting temporary bans for trying to make large sums exploiting.
They finally pissed off one of my members when they claimed that only people on THEM’s Vent were allowed to hog the wealth, and so I chased Strife down in the forums and demanded an apology.
Then came the wedding.
There’s a female player on the rebel side who puts a lot of energy into PVP. I’d probably like her if she wasn’t trying to kill me all the time. But I kill her a lot too, it’s mutual. She decided to throw a wedding to another female toon. I have no idea (nor concern) whether it was a male or female player behind the character. And I missed the wedding due to RL.
But as I later found out, Strife had come to the wedding and parked himself running a macro about the evils of same sex weddings, with a few choice Nazi quotes thrown in. In German. Strike is a pretty weird dude politically, he’s a Stalinist who voted for Bush. But this was too weird for everybody and all of his accounts were banned, and for a while even mentioning his name would get you in trouble. The CEO of the company even mentioned him in HIS blog, I think he called him “Hatemonger.”
Exit Strife. Enter Beavis. Beavis is another leadership-type person in THEM. Beavis got personally offended by a different female player (noticing any patterns here?), this one a non-PVPing merchant. He thought she was offering to buy things for too low. He responded to this by trolling her threads, and copying her colorful HTML style posts into posts in the general forums bitching about her.
On his first attack, I jumped into the argument and told him to quit trolling her, she can post whatever ads she wants. So I got a load of personal attack unleashed on me, in which Beavis at one point lost control of the ability to type and called me a “carcastric edicute,” an insult I cherish.
He chilled for a while. Then last night he popped up doing it again, and this morning he’d been banned. He then reappeared posting on an elder account that he had taken over (and purportedly, was using that character to “fight club” (see definition above) and farm points) (I’ve seen pretty good evidence this is true). There was the usual few paragraphs of “what did I do? I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”
Strife actually put up an “I wasn’t doing anything wrong, the game was suppressing my political rights!” website and tried to get Fox News to interview him but they didn’t go for it.
SO, then I made some remark about more consistent behavior from THEM and another one of THEM went ballistic and started castigating me for the crime of objecting to their behavior. I responded that they should quit misbehaving. And at some point I dared them to go six months without any of their boys causing trouble. Which is sort of where it stands. And naturally they had to flame a few forum threads immediately after to prove I’m not the boss of them, or something like that.
And that lengthy background was sort of necessary for my post today, because when I logged in, I ran into an old pal – scored another ewok from him – who informed me that POD had come back into the game.
So I’m kinda wondering whether they can go six months without causing trouble.
But other than that I just chatted all night, and I need to coordinate a photo shoot of all my alien guildies because a really good graphic artist who does a lot of work with the role playing guilds is going to make us a banner for our website. And I met some noobs. And a drunk belligerent guy playing a female toon running around down town trying to pick fights while wearing a dance leotard.
Hung out with this one ingame friend. He’s 15, but bright. Scary bright. Wants to be a game designer. We just hung out downtown for a long time, talking about stuff, video games, school, creepy old dudes my age who play strategy games, guys playing girls looking for cybersex with guys, all the weird things in the world. At one point there were four of us, widely different ages and geography. All talking about how much we love these games. How we want to work in them somehow. Make them better. Invest ourselves in them. Because where else could four people such as ourselves have the good conversation we were having in the first place?
Stuff like that really does make it worth running into all kinds of carcastric edicutes.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
A curious video
I’m too lame to figure out how to link videos, but here’s one anyway.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9136575504838642038
It was posted in a non-game related forum by a woman who was very excited to get her Wii on releaseday. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s smashing it right now. She was way angry. I found it tonight while checking in with all my bookmarks before bedtime. I’m on an ungodly amount of forums these days. But that’s okay, I like typing.
In case the link goes stale, you can probably find it under PS3 v. Wii. It’s a Nintendo ad – hard to say whether legit or, parody -- video of two women against a blank white background, one is fat and stern and wears glasses, the other is wearing a sleazy little outfit and gyrating around, feeling herself up, explaining how she is like Wii, while the fat one is like PS3.
It’s stuff like this that compels me to write this blog.
Somehow I doubt that’s real Nintendo, it smells of hackery, but if it is, it’s just alienated a lot of the market (and even if it isn’t, no doubt at least some people will assume it is).
I’m going to confess to a wee bit of snobbery here: console games are for dumbasses. Even though I’ve acquired my fair share of button calluses, even though I have a console sitting three feet away from me (it’s a PS2 and I use it as a DVD player since the DVD player died) (my beloved plays it – but he also plays real games on a computer).
Do I find the video offensive? Well, in the same way I find a pet offensive if it pees all over the carpet because it doesn’t know any better. I identified with both chicks, but then I didn’t because they’re console gamers (and what’s the smart chick doing mashing console buttons anyway? Can’t even figure out how to install WoW?)
I have a dream.
Which is why I desperately want you business types reading this to make a game for everyone EXCEPT the kind of people who would be targeted by an ad such as this assuming it were legit, reap a phenomenal profit, have seventeen clones of the hot chick from the video at your beck and call to refill your Jolly Rancher dishes or perform any other tasks you might need performed.
Just so you can pwn your dim witted rivals in the marketplace, just as though you had your boot on the back of the head of whoever thought up this ad and were grinding their face into the mud. In a virtual sense, of course.
I want to see the fat chick and the hot chick peacefully playing their online game together, and all the expansions, and with several accounts (because girls like to shift characters a lot).
Meanwhile, your competition will be left with a market comprised entirely of angry, testosteroney, sexually unsatisfied (because all the women are busy gaming) PVP-addicted dorks who can’t use a keyboard. How’d ya like to be in customer service over there? “YOU #!$)##@% MY GAME LAGGED OUT WHEN I WAS HAVING AN IMPORTANT DOOL TO PROVE MY MANHOOD AND I’M COMING OVER THERE TO KICK UR A$$!!!11!!”
They’d be hacking and sploiting away at each other.
We’d be clicking and chatting and working on our community events webpages (and to be perfectly honest, some of us would be having virtual catfights, but that would only serve as live entertainment for the majority of us – saves having to write content).
Eventually, the cool guys would figure out that hanging out with a whole lot of friendly women is more fun than playing “who’s is bigger?” with youths who are unusually dedicated to proving theirs is.
And there’s the tipping point, you’ve got 51% of the market, how’s that? Mmmm mmm, I can smell the Lexus interior from here.
But enough about dumb commercials, back to my gaming. Tonight I logged in and slaughtered a few things in space using my new fancy ace pilot ship: the Imperial Oppressor. I was oppressing left and right with it, alternately chortling over my vast evil and chatting with my guildies, who were kinda bored too. When suddenly I realized that I had an actual group, or part of one, so I summoned everybody to the planet Mustafar to kill the evil robot HK and a couple hundred of his friends and appliances (for non SWGers, this is The Toughest PVE Thing, you need from two to eight depending on which two and which eight).
And FINALLY I got my coordinated-teamwork-gaming fix, we beat the damn thing and got rare loot at the end, something my friend has been trying to obtain for months. Near the end I got an urgent call from a player who was lying dead in the far reaches of the planet, so after I got out of there I medivac’d over and revived him. And he showed me some cool tricks with medic expertise I hadn’t discovered yet. We hatched a plot to send out a team of eight medics against the enemy some day. There would be no stopping us, because we can revive each other when we die. Plus blind them with our obnoxious medic bombs and poison gas clouds.
It was a pleasant evening of gaming.
The kind that keeps me logging in.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9136575504838642038
It was posted in a non-game related forum by a woman who was very excited to get her Wii on releaseday. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s smashing it right now. She was way angry. I found it tonight while checking in with all my bookmarks before bedtime. I’m on an ungodly amount of forums these days. But that’s okay, I like typing.
In case the link goes stale, you can probably find it under PS3 v. Wii. It’s a Nintendo ad – hard to say whether legit or, parody -- video of two women against a blank white background, one is fat and stern and wears glasses, the other is wearing a sleazy little outfit and gyrating around, feeling herself up, explaining how she is like Wii, while the fat one is like PS3.
It’s stuff like this that compels me to write this blog.
Somehow I doubt that’s real Nintendo, it smells of hackery, but if it is, it’s just alienated a lot of the market (and even if it isn’t, no doubt at least some people will assume it is).
I’m going to confess to a wee bit of snobbery here: console games are for dumbasses. Even though I’ve acquired my fair share of button calluses, even though I have a console sitting three feet away from me (it’s a PS2 and I use it as a DVD player since the DVD player died) (my beloved plays it – but he also plays real games on a computer).
Do I find the video offensive? Well, in the same way I find a pet offensive if it pees all over the carpet because it doesn’t know any better. I identified with both chicks, but then I didn’t because they’re console gamers (and what’s the smart chick doing mashing console buttons anyway? Can’t even figure out how to install WoW?)
I have a dream.
Which is why I desperately want you business types reading this to make a game for everyone EXCEPT the kind of people who would be targeted by an ad such as this assuming it were legit, reap a phenomenal profit, have seventeen clones of the hot chick from the video at your beck and call to refill your Jolly Rancher dishes or perform any other tasks you might need performed.
Just so you can pwn your dim witted rivals in the marketplace, just as though you had your boot on the back of the head of whoever thought up this ad and were grinding their face into the mud. In a virtual sense, of course.
I want to see the fat chick and the hot chick peacefully playing their online game together, and all the expansions, and with several accounts (because girls like to shift characters a lot).
Meanwhile, your competition will be left with a market comprised entirely of angry, testosteroney, sexually unsatisfied (because all the women are busy gaming) PVP-addicted dorks who can’t use a keyboard. How’d ya like to be in customer service over there? “YOU #!$)##@% MY GAME LAGGED OUT WHEN I WAS HAVING AN IMPORTANT DOOL TO PROVE MY MANHOOD AND I’M COMING OVER THERE TO KICK UR A$$!!!11!!”
They’d be hacking and sploiting away at each other.
We’d be clicking and chatting and working on our community events webpages (and to be perfectly honest, some of us would be having virtual catfights, but that would only serve as live entertainment for the majority of us – saves having to write content).
Eventually, the cool guys would figure out that hanging out with a whole lot of friendly women is more fun than playing “who’s is bigger?” with youths who are unusually dedicated to proving theirs is.
And there’s the tipping point, you’ve got 51% of the market, how’s that? Mmmm mmm, I can smell the Lexus interior from here.
But enough about dumb commercials, back to my gaming. Tonight I logged in and slaughtered a few things in space using my new fancy ace pilot ship: the Imperial Oppressor. I was oppressing left and right with it, alternately chortling over my vast evil and chatting with my guildies, who were kinda bored too. When suddenly I realized that I had an actual group, or part of one, so I summoned everybody to the planet Mustafar to kill the evil robot HK and a couple hundred of his friends and appliances (for non SWGers, this is The Toughest PVE Thing, you need from two to eight depending on which two and which eight).
And FINALLY I got my coordinated-teamwork-gaming fix, we beat the damn thing and got rare loot at the end, something my friend has been trying to obtain for months. Near the end I got an urgent call from a player who was lying dead in the far reaches of the planet, so after I got out of there I medivac’d over and revived him. And he showed me some cool tricks with medic expertise I hadn’t discovered yet. We hatched a plot to send out a team of eight medics against the enemy some day. There would be no stopping us, because we can revive each other when we die. Plus blind them with our obnoxious medic bombs and poison gas clouds.
It was a pleasant evening of gaming.
The kind that keeps me logging in.
Sunday, December 3, 2006
Damn Hippies
Star Wars Galaxies is quiet this afternoon. I have acquired three ewoks to torment, and later tonight when maybe there are more people on I'll try to score some more.
Sims2 is frustrating me because it takes forever to load my teeming metropolis, and after I get it loaded I just stare at it and contemplate building a whole new city that would be smaller and tighter and load faster. There’s a fine line between building a game up to a complex stage and letting it get so convoluted that it’s a pain to play.
So I thought I’d rag on the hippies some.
Check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Games-Book-Foundation/dp/038512516X/sr=1-2/qid=1165181912/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-5314648-6255100?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Wins-Cooperative-Games-Activities/dp/0865711909/sr=1-3/qid=1165181912/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-5314648-6255100?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Cooperative-Games-Sports-Activities-Everyone/dp/0736057978/ref=pd_sim_b_3/104-5314648-6255100
When I was a young lass in the 70’s, books like these (especially the top one) were in all the school libraries. But nobody ever played the games. We played regular games like softball and basketball and dodgeball.
That’s because non-competitive, cooperative, community-building, self-esteem promoting games are boring as hell. Look at the general lack of reviews and sales for all these titles.
No doubt someone out there enjoys them, perhaps Hacky Sack aficionados,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footbag
But the hippie dream of replacing all competitive games (which supposedly encourage and/or cause such hippie sins as nationalism and war) for the most part fell as flat as a leaky hacky sack.
I’ve run into a lot of ‘60’s values type people who seem to feel that games are generally immoral. According to the best selling ‘60’s pop psychology classic, Games People Play, games are what psychologically immature people do instead of interacting.
http://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-transactional-analysis/dp/0345410033
Summed up by a reviewer:
Dr. Berne shows we play "games" taught us by our warped childhood, or the world and culture. Rock-bottom: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him." Specifically, Berne says we should discard bad psychological games (based on invalid old life-scripts from the past), in favor of the better social games. (And indeed, the games seem giddily-toxic, especially "Look How Hard I've Tried," "See What You Made Me Do," and "I'm Only Trying To Help You")
So alas, for the intimacy-fearful MANY people, the goal-in-life is to cure the "sick" games, and then just play the non-pathological ones. But, for a FEW fortunates, the open-calm-easy-natural responsiveness of truer psychological maturity IS possible. Berne names it "autonomy." It comprises awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.
I just thought I’d throw out as an aside that I’ve know an awful lot of gamers with degrees or specialized knowledge in psychology, and I’ve had some incredibly emotional intense intimacy in game related context.
Recently there was an incident on my server where a player had given her password to friends (a common practice actually, players who like and trust each other enough frequently share identities with them). These friends turned on her and deleted her characters on that account, after pillaging their possessions. The player is one of the leaders/organizers on the “good guys” side. Fortunately officials from the game company were able to recover them
In the forum thread discussing the incident, people said things like
That is the most cruel and stupid thing someone can do!! This is a game and whoever did this I really hope that you feel so bad that you leave the game, because this doesnt belong anywhere!! (from a player on the “enemy” side)
This is the kind of point where things have officially gone too far. . . I'm sorry you're dealing with this . Is everything being restored? (from another “enemy”)
thats pretty low, just dont understand what joy do people get from doing this (from one of the player’s peers)
That's horrible . . . I'm really sorry to hear about this. I hope you can get things straightened out. People who do these things...... that's just wrong.... (another “enemy” who happens to be a rather decent person)
It really sucks that some people need to stoop to pathetic lows. I am glad you got your stuff back and I hope the individual was identified. Though this should be one of those things where public shame is a part of the punishment (on top of a permaban) so everyone knows who can resort to such crappy tactics. (a peer)
. . . it was a childish, irrational act. . . .
My suggestion to EVERYONE is to change your passwords for all mmorpgs you play. . . 2-3 of my WoW guildies had their accounts hacked within 2 weeks span....and a few friends of mine had their accounts hacked & attempted to be sold on gold/credit farmer sites. . . . The account hacking has become an epidemic across the mmorpg world. . . .
Take care of yourselves....and each other.
Then a particularly unpopular guy came in with his two cents:
why would someone go to the lengths they did to wreak this situation apon you ? Especially since it seems this wasn't a hack. . . . I'd even go as far to say , that someone was already seeking revenge for something you might have done to them. ? . . . You reap what you SOW I suppose. . . . I am only speculating here of course. . . .Yet from tie to time you do get quite flippant with your lips . . . I have a feeling you have been a very bad person in some ones view point. /shrug, again I am just speculating here. I am not trying to justify the actions of this person, yet I cant totally blame this person from going to this angle of a maneuver either. It always takes 2, to tango. And there are always 3 sides to a story, yours, theirs, and the total truth.
But he wasn’t typical. According to the victimized player:
Thanks to everyone for their concern and support. I keep getting a bazillion IMs from everyone askin' me if I'm okay and if there's anything they can do for me.
And according to the players who responded to the diatribe of Mr. “Reap what you SOW”
Not that I'm commenting on what one party did or didn't do but it is the escalation that is the crux of the matter. When does the retaliation become grievous? When it spills out of a quarreling tete-a-tete to a criminal offense. Civil disagreements do not include criminal behavior. To say that the victim of the crime had it coming to her/him is to say that we live in a uncivilized society. Some may say that but the majority of us do not.
This came in from a guy who has a life threatening medical condition and is recovering from major surgery:
Your argument is scary, it reminds me of people saying "she deserved to get **edit** for dressing like that". . . . People never need a reason to be a **edit** to other people, it is human nature to hurt others. Often if someone feels hurt and inflicts hurt back in retaliation, they take it to the next level (and then some). . . . Common response to emotional pain by the emotionally immature . . . Uncivilized behaviour is NEVER acceptable.
Another guy hit him with this:
There is never a time when someone can come and take your stuff and destroy it. For you to imply that there are times when this action is justified shows a lot about your character as well.
The person I’ve had the biggest flame war with in game so far (now resolved, we made peace, the conflict had to do with RL politics in our home town rather than anything game related) said this:
I wouldn't dwell on it or anything, because that's what these creeps want. Idiots do things like this for some kind of lame personal gratification, so don't give them any.
In some ways, MMOs are true democracy. Every indeed is created equal, and although the authorities will come in to resurrect dead murder victims and recover stolen property in extreme situations like this, most community problems are solved by the community, like the incident I mentioned last night where we all gathered to face down the disruptive kid. When someone has a big problem, they turn to their peers and ask “does the community find this acceptable?”
And I dare say that these gamers are a damn sight better at dealing with anger and conflict than the general population. And I would even go so far as to suggest that they’re better at interpersonal communication than, say, the guy who wrote the Games People Play review, above.
A lot of sixties types are into denying conflict, or blaming it on bad nurturing, or attributing it to those they deem “unevolved,” or otherwise looking at it the way Victorians looked at sex.
In response, their children have made violence a fetish, and have made violent games an even more profitable industry than violent movies, which still account for the major percentage of box office profits. And I think, like the author of the article about RL violence rates dropping that I quoted in my Youths rant, that to a certain extent, violent games act as a shunt for violent impulses, which might lead to violent acts if carried out IRL.
I do think, however, that some people enjoy it a lot more. I’ve had situations where I’ve been in intense gamefights where I get charged up, adrenalinized, into my fight or flight groove, and I love it, to me that’s as good as getting in a flow state of creativity, or maybe equivalent to .097% of a good sexual experience. Then afterwards when talking with people who were there with me, I hear things like “OMG that was horrible, my heart is beating too fast, I think I’m going to throw up.”
I’m convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s an innate genetic thing going on with regard to adrenalin junkies, and that gamers are a subset that has figured out a relatively harmless way to get their fix without endangering others.
And if I’m right, there are also a lot of people with a very low tolerance for it. They might find a gentle game of hacky sack more soothing than a couple of hours of trying to kill pixels.
There’s an underlying belief with sixties types that “real” is always better. Organic food is better than potato chips. Singers with acoustic guitars are better than overproduced dance tunes. Earnest, emotionally intense face to face conversations are better than social games. “Letting it all hang out” is better than being “repressed.”
But in the case of violence, and conflict, and competition, fake is a definite improvement.
Because trying to use “cultural conditioning” to try and transform it into some kind of Star Trek fantasy of benevolent cooperation didn’t work. Aggression is as real as hunger and lust, no matter how compelled a person might feel to proclaim that they’re king of the mountain because they’ve evolved beyond the need for aggression and everyone else can just kiss their uber pwnzoring a$$ 111eleventy1!1! (I think I pvp with the children of the Games People Play reviewer, or maybe it was his kid running around setting off bombs the other night).
And if you take aggression out of games, nobody wants to play them.
Sims2 is frustrating me because it takes forever to load my teeming metropolis, and after I get it loaded I just stare at it and contemplate building a whole new city that would be smaller and tighter and load faster. There’s a fine line between building a game up to a complex stage and letting it get so convoluted that it’s a pain to play.
So I thought I’d rag on the hippies some.
Check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Games-Book-Foundation/dp/038512516X/sr=1-2/qid=1165181912/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-5314648-6255100?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Wins-Cooperative-Games-Activities/dp/0865711909/sr=1-3/qid=1165181912/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-5314648-6255100?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Cooperative-Games-Sports-Activities-Everyone/dp/0736057978/ref=pd_sim_b_3/104-5314648-6255100
When I was a young lass in the 70’s, books like these (especially the top one) were in all the school libraries. But nobody ever played the games. We played regular games like softball and basketball and dodgeball.
That’s because non-competitive, cooperative, community-building, self-esteem promoting games are boring as hell. Look at the general lack of reviews and sales for all these titles.
No doubt someone out there enjoys them, perhaps Hacky Sack aficionados,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footbag
But the hippie dream of replacing all competitive games (which supposedly encourage and/or cause such hippie sins as nationalism and war) for the most part fell as flat as a leaky hacky sack.
I’ve run into a lot of ‘60’s values type people who seem to feel that games are generally immoral. According to the best selling ‘60’s pop psychology classic, Games People Play, games are what psychologically immature people do instead of interacting.
http://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-transactional-analysis/dp/0345410033
Summed up by a reviewer:
Dr. Berne shows we play "games" taught us by our warped childhood, or the world and culture. Rock-bottom: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him." Specifically, Berne says we should discard bad psychological games (based on invalid old life-scripts from the past), in favor of the better social games. (And indeed, the games seem giddily-toxic, especially "Look How Hard I've Tried," "See What You Made Me Do," and "I'm Only Trying To Help You")
So alas, for the intimacy-fearful MANY people, the goal-in-life is to cure the "sick" games, and then just play the non-pathological ones. But, for a FEW fortunates, the open-calm-easy-natural responsiveness of truer psychological maturity IS possible. Berne names it "autonomy." It comprises awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.
I just thought I’d throw out as an aside that I’ve know an awful lot of gamers with degrees or specialized knowledge in psychology, and I’ve had some incredibly emotional intense intimacy in game related context.
Recently there was an incident on my server where a player had given her password to friends (a common practice actually, players who like and trust each other enough frequently share identities with them). These friends turned on her and deleted her characters on that account, after pillaging their possessions. The player is one of the leaders/organizers on the “good guys” side. Fortunately officials from the game company were able to recover them
In the forum thread discussing the incident, people said things like
That is the most cruel and stupid thing someone can do!! This is a game and whoever did this I really hope that you feel so bad that you leave the game, because this doesnt belong anywhere!! (from a player on the “enemy” side)
This is the kind of point where things have officially gone too far. . . I'm sorry you're dealing with this . Is everything being restored? (from another “enemy”)
thats pretty low, just dont understand what joy do people get from doing this (from one of the player’s peers)
That's horrible . . . I'm really sorry to hear about this. I hope you can get things straightened out. People who do these things...... that's just wrong.... (another “enemy” who happens to be a rather decent person)
It really sucks that some people need to stoop to pathetic lows. I am glad you got your stuff back and I hope the individual was identified. Though this should be one of those things where public shame is a part of the punishment (on top of a permaban) so everyone knows who can resort to such crappy tactics. (a peer)
. . . it was a childish, irrational act. . . .
My suggestion to EVERYONE is to change your passwords for all mmorpgs you play. . . 2-3 of my WoW guildies had their accounts hacked within 2 weeks span....and a few friends of mine had their accounts hacked & attempted to be sold on gold/credit farmer sites. . . . The account hacking has become an epidemic across the mmorpg world. . . .
Take care of yourselves....and each other.
Then a particularly unpopular guy came in with his two cents:
why would someone go to the lengths they did to wreak this situation apon you ? Especially since it seems this wasn't a hack. . . . I'd even go as far to say , that someone was already seeking revenge for something you might have done to them. ? . . . You reap what you SOW I suppose. . . . I am only speculating here of course. . . .Yet from tie to time you do get quite flippant with your lips . . . I have a feeling you have been a very bad person in some ones view point. /shrug, again I am just speculating here. I am not trying to justify the actions of this person, yet I cant totally blame this person from going to this angle of a maneuver either. It always takes 2, to tango. And there are always 3 sides to a story, yours, theirs, and the total truth.
But he wasn’t typical. According to the victimized player:
Thanks to everyone for their concern and support. I keep getting a bazillion IMs from everyone askin' me if I'm okay and if there's anything they can do for me.
And according to the players who responded to the diatribe of Mr. “Reap what you SOW”
Not that I'm commenting on what one party did or didn't do but it is the escalation that is the crux of the matter. When does the retaliation become grievous? When it spills out of a quarreling tete-a-tete to a criminal offense. Civil disagreements do not include criminal behavior. To say that the victim of the crime had it coming to her/him is to say that we live in a uncivilized society. Some may say that but the majority of us do not.
This came in from a guy who has a life threatening medical condition and is recovering from major surgery:
Your argument is scary, it reminds me of people saying "she deserved to get **edit** for dressing like that". . . . People never need a reason to be a **edit** to other people, it is human nature to hurt others. Often if someone feels hurt and inflicts hurt back in retaliation, they take it to the next level (and then some). . . . Common response to emotional pain by the emotionally immature . . . Uncivilized behaviour is NEVER acceptable.
Another guy hit him with this:
There is never a time when someone can come and take your stuff and destroy it. For you to imply that there are times when this action is justified shows a lot about your character as well.
The person I’ve had the biggest flame war with in game so far (now resolved, we made peace, the conflict had to do with RL politics in our home town rather than anything game related) said this:
I wouldn't dwell on it or anything, because that's what these creeps want. Idiots do things like this for some kind of lame personal gratification, so don't give them any.
In some ways, MMOs are true democracy. Every indeed is created equal, and although the authorities will come in to resurrect dead murder victims and recover stolen property in extreme situations like this, most community problems are solved by the community, like the incident I mentioned last night where we all gathered to face down the disruptive kid. When someone has a big problem, they turn to their peers and ask “does the community find this acceptable?”
And I dare say that these gamers are a damn sight better at dealing with anger and conflict than the general population. And I would even go so far as to suggest that they’re better at interpersonal communication than, say, the guy who wrote the Games People Play review, above.
A lot of sixties types are into denying conflict, or blaming it on bad nurturing, or attributing it to those they deem “unevolved,” or otherwise looking at it the way Victorians looked at sex.
In response, their children have made violence a fetish, and have made violent games an even more profitable industry than violent movies, which still account for the major percentage of box office profits. And I think, like the author of the article about RL violence rates dropping that I quoted in my Youths rant, that to a certain extent, violent games act as a shunt for violent impulses, which might lead to violent acts if carried out IRL.
I do think, however, that some people enjoy it a lot more. I’ve had situations where I’ve been in intense gamefights where I get charged up, adrenalinized, into my fight or flight groove, and I love it, to me that’s as good as getting in a flow state of creativity, or maybe equivalent to .097% of a good sexual experience. Then afterwards when talking with people who were there with me, I hear things like “OMG that was horrible, my heart is beating too fast, I think I’m going to throw up.”
I’m convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s an innate genetic thing going on with regard to adrenalin junkies, and that gamers are a subset that has figured out a relatively harmless way to get their fix without endangering others.
And if I’m right, there are also a lot of people with a very low tolerance for it. They might find a gentle game of hacky sack more soothing than a couple of hours of trying to kill pixels.
There’s an underlying belief with sixties types that “real” is always better. Organic food is better than potato chips. Singers with acoustic guitars are better than overproduced dance tunes. Earnest, emotionally intense face to face conversations are better than social games. “Letting it all hang out” is better than being “repressed.”
But in the case of violence, and conflict, and competition, fake is a definite improvement.
Because trying to use “cultural conditioning” to try and transform it into some kind of Star Trek fantasy of benevolent cooperation didn’t work. Aggression is as real as hunger and lust, no matter how compelled a person might feel to proclaim that they’re king of the mountain because they’ve evolved beyond the need for aggression and everyone else can just kiss their uber pwnzoring a$$ 111eleventy1!1! (I think I pvp with the children of the Games People Play reviewer, or maybe it was his kid running around setting off bombs the other night).
And if you take aggression out of games, nobody wants to play them.
Saturday, December 2, 2006
Disjointed highlights and musings from the past few days
I've mostly been in SWG, except for today, I'm a little burnt on it at the moment and paused to string this together while watching a film called Stay Alive, about an evil console game where the NPCs kill players IRL. Not too bad a film if you've got low expectations to begin with, even though it's from a genre that makes me sigh: "the horror movie about the dangers of rampant technology featuring awesome technologically rendered special effects." Like Jurassic Park. If you want to do a movie celebrating the awesomeness of being a Luddite, fine, but no SFX department for you, only props hand made by Amish people and hippies.
Call it a byproduct of being a nethead, but it's hard for me to devote all my attention to a movie any more, unless it's a really good movie.
I like to watch movies in my house and not in theaters. Ever go in a theater and find loud unattended children running around? I hate that. It happens in virtual reality too.
THE PROPER HANDLING OF UNATTENDED CHILDREN
I’m hanging around downtown wheeling and dealing and gossiping, and one of the youths I wrote about last blogspew is hanging around setting off this new medic attack which consists of a blinding white flash of light plus an obnoxious sound effect which is currently mixed way too high, jumping 20 or so db above the regular ambient while making epilepsy inducing white strobes.
I was peacefully performing in a musical trio of stormtroopers, as the go go dancer, while chatting up other buyers and sellers and old friends, and this little turd is setting off his crap as often as he can.
But ya know, I’m a stormtrooper commando, and I have my own arsenal of obnoxious special effects, and I can turn your entire field of vision into a lag-inducing blur of orange flame for until I feel like taking my finger off the mousebutton, so that’s finally what I did to the kid, and of course others came to see what was up, and when they found out we had an idiot in our midst, suddenly there were officers calling in airstrikes on top of him, and scary looking aliens with high tech weapons standing around him challenging him, and my soothing flamethrower aiming psychedelic pixels at his head. So he chilled.
Only in virtual reality can you take a flamethrower to an obnoxious kid running around making noise and have it effectively peace out the situation.
FEAR MY MIGHTY FIREWORK GUN!
I’m pvping in a small group and the leader has to bail, and a new leader whose name seems vaguely familiar takes over. Suddenly we are moving as one smooth unit. Nothing is passing us. Communication is swift, clear, minimal and intelligent, done by IMs and gestures.
We are kicking ass.
At one point I take out my commemorative anniversary gift pistol, which shoots colorful fireworks and does five points of damage (real weapons do 1000+), and assassinate enemy officers with it. We were doing that good.
I haven’t had teamwork this smooth in a while. Everybody knowing what they’re doing and doing it well. .
I compare it to that episode with the de facto officer I mentioned previously, the guy who uses Vent and is kind of a control freak, how he was barking orders and calling targets and berating people and overcontrolling.
Then we charged in and the leader – whose name seemed familiar – called out the name of her main character. And bang, that’s right, she was that dancer who used to perform in the cantina at Coronet all the time. So I hollered the name of my main character, since I’m practically a full time freaking stormtrooper now, and we stopped and gave each other a high five.
It gave me a flashback to a game in Sims Online that involves fast typing. I was playing with another woman and two men. The men were constantly bragging about how amazingly fast we all were, and declaring that we were the best, and so on. And we were doing a damn sight better than the average.
Then both the men had to go. So we got two other women. As we later discovered, all of us had been secretaries at some point in our lives. We could all type like … really fast secretaries. I’ve worked with a lot of secretaries in my law office adventures, and about 2% of them that can hack the demands of legal emergency typing are male. I’m working with one now. He thinks “through” is spelled “thru.” Not in lazy online vernacular, which I use all the time, but in formal dreary law memos. And he’s one of the best I’ve seen.
And our little cult of former secretaries proceeded to descend on that game like a cloud of fast-typing locusts. Like Mavis Beacon’s worst nightmare. And we scored 50% OVER what we had scored in the mixed group. And with no self-congratulatory BS until after we had won.
ACE PILOT
After getting through the perilous third level and the monotonous fourth level of piloting, I was finally ready for my final exam.
The first part involves taking out thirty spaceships one level higher than me. Big deal. I’m using a hulking Darth Vader TIE fighter with some decent parts.
The next part involves killing a Corvette. The Corvette is the ship that’s in the first Star Wars movie, the one at the very beginning where Princess Lei is captured. It’s like a battleship, and our little TIE fighters and X-Wings are like jet skis. It has eight guns, all of them large, and if they all hit you at once, you’re dust.
This is my fifth trip toward ace and I’ve never soloed one. I’ve always had help, or in one case, I found one floating around wounded and finished it off.
So I’m determined to get this thing on my own, because then I will feel as though I deserve the title of Ace.
I’m working away at it, after taking out the two formidable gunboats that were guarding it. It’s halfway down. And then suddenly it vanishes.
No way!
Damn game.
I hyperspaced off to Deep Space, where you’re attackable by enemies. There used to be a bug where you could kill a Corvette there and get credit for killing it on your ace mission. I am not typically a sploiter, BUT, in certain circumstances I feel justified in reclaiming an advantage when faced with a technical obstacle.
There I found another Corvette. I started working away at the thing, keeping my distance, strafing it, calling in NPC bombers to keep the guns busy. It’s halfway down when suddenly … other pilots appeared, shooting at it.
But they invited me to their group, and when they blew it up we all got points. Yet I didn’t get my ace qualification.
I explained to them what had happened, and one of them reported that the bug had been fixed. So I said I was going to head back to Kessel to see if it had reappeared. They all came with me. And it had reappeared (in full health), right outside of the space station, and all the ace pilots descended on it and the two new gunboat guards in a blaze of pyrotechnics. Before long it was space dust and I was an ace.
I ran back to the admiral in Theed to get my title and my helmet and … my medal. There used to be a bug about female pilots not getting medals. In fact, I hadn’t gotten my previous squadron’s medal until I quit and signed up with the Imperial squadron. But this time, I got my medal, and my ace title, and the little notch on my character sheet.
The next day, I decided to try to kill a Corvette again. There was one that is part of a quest, and if you nail it you get a nifty red TIE fighter. So I headed out to kill that one and … one of my guild’s two most amazing pilots (among those currently playing) had logged in. He loves space. That’s what he mostly does in the game. So when I told him I was off to bag a Corvette, he was enthusiastic, and I realized I could at least watch him take it out and learn how to better do it myself.
So we went up there and killed the Corvette together, and I got to see the angle from which he attacked it. And I got a red TIE fighter.
But I still hadn’t REALLY soloed my Corvette. So today I went up there and found one, alone and unattended, at full health. I kicked its ass. I can now solo a Corvette.
But it wasn’t nearly as much fun as blowing them up in the company of other people.
THE GREAT BALANCING
Here’s a thing that drives me bats about my game.
I’m a gamer first, a role player second, and in fact I use the mechanics of the game as a creative exercise to think up justifications for my characters. A springboard.
When I switched my stormtrooper character to commando, I had strategic reasons: I didn’t want to waste all those hours working on officer rank on a subsidiary lizard character or a flamboyant jedi character who wouldn’t look right as officers, and currently this is the only game goal I haven’t gotten yet, so fine, looks like I’ll be grinding GCW points with everyone else.
My stormtrooper’s backstory is: like my medic Livia, she is one of Easter Durni’s cloned “children,” this one sired by Easter’s jedi mentor and in-game ex-husband. Except, of course, since Easter uses a discount clone lab, her clones always turn out to look nothing like her. She does spring for the optional artificial aging, which speeds them up to age 18 rapidly,
So my stormtrooper, Lonne, has no childhood, no memories, and no upbringing. Just a lot of informational brain chips and accelerated programming, and, of course, midichlorians (if you’re a Star Wars geek you know what those are, if not, you have to watch that horrible Episode 1 with Jar Jar Binks again, haha).
I played her for the first month as my “secret alt” and made her an ace pilot before revealing her to the community and branding her with my guildtag and being seen in public with my cohorts with her A secret alt is one that nobody knows is you, a lot of people use them to get some peace and quiet. So, with regard to her personal story, her transport from the clone planet was sabotaged by her jealous older sister, and then her delivery ship got attacked in space, and she was the only survivor due to her innate pre-programmed piloting skills. So I had her land in Theed penniless and memoryless and confused, and she took the first job available to her that fit her skills: pilot for the Royal Space Force.
The first time I made pilot, with Easter, I went around with a friend who had also just made pilot, wearing our pilot jackets and doing the “bmoc” gesture all the time (kind of a fratboy type finger point thing) and being arrogant, because that’s what pilots do. So I figured Lonne would naturally become arrogant as her piloting skills became apparent, and in fact she’s the best pilot of all my characters. It’s very weird how that works. Some are good at making money, some are luckier than others with the loot, and this one has a knack for flying around in space shooting things.
As for her ground career, I had already decided she would be a bounty hunter, because back in the days when bounty hunters hunted jedi, it was strategically a good idea to have one of each, so you could tell where you were on the most wanted list. For her subspecialty, I made her a smuggler, because then she could manufacture illegal drugs (“spice” – a kind of power up with a huge short term gain and a harsh come-down penalty) for me to sell.
So again I had to think about why, as a character, she would do that. It doesn’t matter if the explanation is far fetched, this is fantasy after all. But it helps me if there is some kind of logic to her actions. I really can’t get into playing insane people, or people who are motivated solely by points.
So I decided her arrogance as a pilot had led her to believe she was above the law. Everyone in this game is a psychotic mass murderer at some level, because that’s how you gain levels. My dark jedi murders people because they are bad for the environment, my medic sees it as excising tumors before they create more damage to the surrounding tissue, my lizard kills because it pleases her Goddess.
My stormtrooper, then, feeling that she is above the law, decides to take the law into her own hands, due to her desire for stability regarding her weird yet brief childhood. But due to not really having a sense of right and wrong, she doesn’t see any problem with building meth labs or shooting her bounties on sight rather than arresting them and giving them fair trials. She’s your basic bad cop. A good villainous archetype to get to know, I felt.
Then where does the stormtrooper armor fit in? Well, she traded some drugs for an illegally manufactured suit of it. And once she put it on and realized she looked just like all the other stormtroopers, and could get away with all kinds of shady activity while impersonating an officer, her personality sort of clicked.
Then they changed the game around. No more bounty hunter/smuggler. Of all the new professions I tested, the one I liked best was spy, because spies had an ability that my jedi had lost which I severely missed: walking around invisible. So Lonne became a spy in stomrtrooper armor – a perfect cover for a spy. Luke and Han pulled it off in fact. She was still a bad cop, but rather than roughing up suspects, she was now claiming she worked for the Intelligence Division and had a 00 license to kill.
She was a spy for a while, then an engineer for a little bit, making robots and jetpacks and such, out of stormtrooper armor for a change. Then back to spy. And then, when I decided that I wanted to go about getting points as my stormtrooper, I made her a commando.
From a character driven standpoint, why is she turning from a bad cop to a renegade spy to a heavy weapons specialist? Another tough one. I decided she had infiltrated the Imperial army and was now becoming a career soldier in an attempt to become even more legit. Her desire for stability has become a psychopathic compulsion to do mass damage to anything even remotely suggesting disorder. Hot damn, now there’s a villainess! Sort of like a neat-freak housewife, except with flamethrowers instead of oven cleanser. No annoying Freudian childhood (btw, I hate Freud, I like Jung a lot better) to explain her evil – just a vacuum over which she projects her overwhelming primal needs. No dysfunctional relationship with her mother – they’re on the same account and I can only play one at a time, so have never met. Mommy is a shadowy dark jedi that supplies her with anything expensive she might need. Daddy is long gone. Her only relative is her sister, a blue alien that doesn’t really like her (sometimes I amuse myself by having them duel while I’m running them both, or slap each other and pull each others’ hair).
Now there’s a character I could write the hell out of.
I mentioned Jung, and might have gone over his concept of your shadow, your “evil twin,” in the Star Wars universe, the frightening vision of his father that Luke faces when he attempts to be a jedi. Some people play themselves or their ideals or their ideal mates in games, I’m playing my enemies.
But since I’m gaming and not writing, I’m collaborating with a fickle universe that frequently downsizes me, promotes me, pushes me into different career paths than I would normally select – it’s sort of how I interact with real life (insert internet humor-indication icon here).
The game is balanced now, they have made all of the combat classes more or less equivalent, with their specialties, and Lonne’s still at her most advantageous with her flamethrower and other clean-up tools, so she can stay a commando for a while.
And I do like the creative challenge of dealing with changes in game mechanics as plot twists, as long as they make some sense.
What I don’t like is when the changes are so wide-ranging and arbitrary that they make my characters’ plots difficult to rationalize. Why is that person standing in that one spot, repeatedly waiting for someone to appear there and killing them? Why is this person suddenly forgetting all their medical training and instantly becoming proficient in intergalactic smuggling? Why would a drug-manufacturing corrupt cop shift to front line combat?
I started my evil Easter bunny as a dark jedi, and although she’s been a sniper and a tailor and a bounty hunter along the road to becoming one, she has always had that goal in mind. My medic had a couple of lapses, but she was created with a definite intent to be a medic character, and I’ve always played her as one, and she’s a nice change of pace from my murderous psychos.
It’s good for a game to allow you to create a character that is consistently “in character” throughout the game experience.
It’s also good if a game lets you create a character that experiences “personal growth,” changing specialties in response to experiences or revelations or whims.
What’s bad is if the game decrees that if you want to play it effectively, you have to put your characters through all kinds of absurd plot loopholes.
There was a poll in the forums last week about things that break immersion for gamers. I already mentioned Vent, and griefers/youths, and the third one I mentioned in the poll was something having to do with ambient sound.
But if there’s ever anything that REALLY breaks a game for me, it’s when the game gives me a choice between effective strategy and plausible character development and demands I pick one.
AND FINALLY,
ADVENTURES IN MODERN MEDICINE
On Tuesday night I went into the Death Watch Bunker with three fighters and my medic. We all got slaughtered before we were halfway through. The reason for that is something called “healer hate,” which is a feature the “mobs” (monsters/people/whatever NPC is trying to kill you) have.
If you’re fighting humans (and if they’re any good), they’ll probably try to take out the medic first, because the medic can keep reviving dead players. Next they take out the commando because it does the most damage. Then they pick off the little weak players.
Mobs are programmed to choose their targets in that order, and the extent to which they do it varies from patch to patch. So last Tuesday, everything in the Death Watch Bunker hated my healer so much that they all went out of their way to kill her, which meant she couldn’t revive the others and they were doomed.
After the new leveling patch, I took my medic in there and declared residency in the damn place, and accompanied by three fighters got all the way through to the bottom and achieved our objective of getting a non-combat jetpack engineer down there alive to manufacture a jetpack.
It was great to be powerful again. Hooray for the combat rebalance and the great leveling. But, and similar to the above thought, here’s the deal:
My medic is basically a humble doctor who runs into enemy fire to save people.
On Tuesday, she was despised by the NPCs, and accordingly weak, and needed to be guarded and protected.
On Thursday, she could walk right up to the NPCs and slap them and then seal them up in a stasis field, while detonating poison nerve gas in their face and shooting them and using her medical abilities to boost her accuracy and increase her overall health (in addition to keeping the rest of the party alive).
My character, in two days, went from pathetic to superhuman. But all she really wants is to be the doctor frantically rushing to suture wounds and perform CPR in the face of overwhelming doom.
My spy, meanwhile, had this gig going on deep in a cave, where she had kind of turned into Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and was all one with her Goddess, far from civilization. But she suddenly turned into a wimp. Instead of being able to muscle her way all the way in, she now depends on the kindness of passing strangers.
Which, I’ll admit is fun, because with a few exceptions, doing things with other people is more fun than alone.
Their professions haven’t changed but their abilities and their relative strength in the world have been drastically revised. I get depressed playing my lizard now because the only plot justification I can think of is that she’s convinced her Goddess hates her, and the last thing I want to spend my recreation time doing is wallowing in reptilian angst.
And meanwhile, why does my humble doctor suddenly think she’s invincible a few days after feeling more like a battered wife? Has she been mixing up special prescriptions for herself in the lab?
My jedi has gone through numerous revisions in relative power and I adjusted her character accordingly, more paranoia and nervous twitches, more Col. Mandrake-like absurd speeches about saving our precious bodily fluids from ecodisaster.
And what’s really funny is that throughout all these changes of in-game power, the same players tend to wind out on top, because they’re obsessive about games, and they help each other and share information.
Our alter egos, however, are the ones that suffer, and it’s hard to tell whether they need therapists or script doctors.
Call it a byproduct of being a nethead, but it's hard for me to devote all my attention to a movie any more, unless it's a really good movie.
I like to watch movies in my house and not in theaters. Ever go in a theater and find loud unattended children running around? I hate that. It happens in virtual reality too.
THE PROPER HANDLING OF UNATTENDED CHILDREN
I’m hanging around downtown wheeling and dealing and gossiping, and one of the youths I wrote about last blogspew is hanging around setting off this new medic attack which consists of a blinding white flash of light plus an obnoxious sound effect which is currently mixed way too high, jumping 20 or so db above the regular ambient while making epilepsy inducing white strobes.
I was peacefully performing in a musical trio of stormtroopers, as the go go dancer, while chatting up other buyers and sellers and old friends, and this little turd is setting off his crap as often as he can.
But ya know, I’m a stormtrooper commando, and I have my own arsenal of obnoxious special effects, and I can turn your entire field of vision into a lag-inducing blur of orange flame for until I feel like taking my finger off the mousebutton, so that’s finally what I did to the kid, and of course others came to see what was up, and when they found out we had an idiot in our midst, suddenly there were officers calling in airstrikes on top of him, and scary looking aliens with high tech weapons standing around him challenging him, and my soothing flamethrower aiming psychedelic pixels at his head. So he chilled.
Only in virtual reality can you take a flamethrower to an obnoxious kid running around making noise and have it effectively peace out the situation.
FEAR MY MIGHTY FIREWORK GUN!
I’m pvping in a small group and the leader has to bail, and a new leader whose name seems vaguely familiar takes over. Suddenly we are moving as one smooth unit. Nothing is passing us. Communication is swift, clear, minimal and intelligent, done by IMs and gestures.
We are kicking ass.
At one point I take out my commemorative anniversary gift pistol, which shoots colorful fireworks and does five points of damage (real weapons do 1000+), and assassinate enemy officers with it. We were doing that good.
I haven’t had teamwork this smooth in a while. Everybody knowing what they’re doing and doing it well. .
I compare it to that episode with the de facto officer I mentioned previously, the guy who uses Vent and is kind of a control freak, how he was barking orders and calling targets and berating people and overcontrolling.
Then we charged in and the leader – whose name seemed familiar – called out the name of her main character. And bang, that’s right, she was that dancer who used to perform in the cantina at Coronet all the time. So I hollered the name of my main character, since I’m practically a full time freaking stormtrooper now, and we stopped and gave each other a high five.
It gave me a flashback to a game in Sims Online that involves fast typing. I was playing with another woman and two men. The men were constantly bragging about how amazingly fast we all were, and declaring that we were the best, and so on. And we were doing a damn sight better than the average.
Then both the men had to go. So we got two other women. As we later discovered, all of us had been secretaries at some point in our lives. We could all type like … really fast secretaries. I’ve worked with a lot of secretaries in my law office adventures, and about 2% of them that can hack the demands of legal emergency typing are male. I’m working with one now. He thinks “through” is spelled “thru.” Not in lazy online vernacular, which I use all the time, but in formal dreary law memos. And he’s one of the best I’ve seen.
And our little cult of former secretaries proceeded to descend on that game like a cloud of fast-typing locusts. Like Mavis Beacon’s worst nightmare. And we scored 50% OVER what we had scored in the mixed group. And with no self-congratulatory BS until after we had won.
ACE PILOT
After getting through the perilous third level and the monotonous fourth level of piloting, I was finally ready for my final exam.
The first part involves taking out thirty spaceships one level higher than me. Big deal. I’m using a hulking Darth Vader TIE fighter with some decent parts.
The next part involves killing a Corvette. The Corvette is the ship that’s in the first Star Wars movie, the one at the very beginning where Princess Lei is captured. It’s like a battleship, and our little TIE fighters and X-Wings are like jet skis. It has eight guns, all of them large, and if they all hit you at once, you’re dust.
This is my fifth trip toward ace and I’ve never soloed one. I’ve always had help, or in one case, I found one floating around wounded and finished it off.
So I’m determined to get this thing on my own, because then I will feel as though I deserve the title of Ace.
I’m working away at it, after taking out the two formidable gunboats that were guarding it. It’s halfway down. And then suddenly it vanishes.
No way!
Damn game.
I hyperspaced off to Deep Space, where you’re attackable by enemies. There used to be a bug where you could kill a Corvette there and get credit for killing it on your ace mission. I am not typically a sploiter, BUT, in certain circumstances I feel justified in reclaiming an advantage when faced with a technical obstacle.
There I found another Corvette. I started working away at the thing, keeping my distance, strafing it, calling in NPC bombers to keep the guns busy. It’s halfway down when suddenly … other pilots appeared, shooting at it.
But they invited me to their group, and when they blew it up we all got points. Yet I didn’t get my ace qualification.
I explained to them what had happened, and one of them reported that the bug had been fixed. So I said I was going to head back to Kessel to see if it had reappeared. They all came with me. And it had reappeared (in full health), right outside of the space station, and all the ace pilots descended on it and the two new gunboat guards in a blaze of pyrotechnics. Before long it was space dust and I was an ace.
I ran back to the admiral in Theed to get my title and my helmet and … my medal. There used to be a bug about female pilots not getting medals. In fact, I hadn’t gotten my previous squadron’s medal until I quit and signed up with the Imperial squadron. But this time, I got my medal, and my ace title, and the little notch on my character sheet.
The next day, I decided to try to kill a Corvette again. There was one that is part of a quest, and if you nail it you get a nifty red TIE fighter. So I headed out to kill that one and … one of my guild’s two most amazing pilots (among those currently playing) had logged in. He loves space. That’s what he mostly does in the game. So when I told him I was off to bag a Corvette, he was enthusiastic, and I realized I could at least watch him take it out and learn how to better do it myself.
So we went up there and killed the Corvette together, and I got to see the angle from which he attacked it. And I got a red TIE fighter.
But I still hadn’t REALLY soloed my Corvette. So today I went up there and found one, alone and unattended, at full health. I kicked its ass. I can now solo a Corvette.
But it wasn’t nearly as much fun as blowing them up in the company of other people.
THE GREAT BALANCING
Here’s a thing that drives me bats about my game.
I’m a gamer first, a role player second, and in fact I use the mechanics of the game as a creative exercise to think up justifications for my characters. A springboard.
When I switched my stormtrooper character to commando, I had strategic reasons: I didn’t want to waste all those hours working on officer rank on a subsidiary lizard character or a flamboyant jedi character who wouldn’t look right as officers, and currently this is the only game goal I haven’t gotten yet, so fine, looks like I’ll be grinding GCW points with everyone else.
My stormtrooper’s backstory is: like my medic Livia, she is one of Easter Durni’s cloned “children,” this one sired by Easter’s jedi mentor and in-game ex-husband. Except, of course, since Easter uses a discount clone lab, her clones always turn out to look nothing like her. She does spring for the optional artificial aging, which speeds them up to age 18 rapidly,
So my stormtrooper, Lonne, has no childhood, no memories, and no upbringing. Just a lot of informational brain chips and accelerated programming, and, of course, midichlorians (if you’re a Star Wars geek you know what those are, if not, you have to watch that horrible Episode 1 with Jar Jar Binks again, haha).
I played her for the first month as my “secret alt” and made her an ace pilot before revealing her to the community and branding her with my guildtag and being seen in public with my cohorts with her A secret alt is one that nobody knows is you, a lot of people use them to get some peace and quiet. So, with regard to her personal story, her transport from the clone planet was sabotaged by her jealous older sister, and then her delivery ship got attacked in space, and she was the only survivor due to her innate pre-programmed piloting skills. So I had her land in Theed penniless and memoryless and confused, and she took the first job available to her that fit her skills: pilot for the Royal Space Force.
The first time I made pilot, with Easter, I went around with a friend who had also just made pilot, wearing our pilot jackets and doing the “bmoc” gesture all the time (kind of a fratboy type finger point thing) and being arrogant, because that’s what pilots do. So I figured Lonne would naturally become arrogant as her piloting skills became apparent, and in fact she’s the best pilot of all my characters. It’s very weird how that works. Some are good at making money, some are luckier than others with the loot, and this one has a knack for flying around in space shooting things.
As for her ground career, I had already decided she would be a bounty hunter, because back in the days when bounty hunters hunted jedi, it was strategically a good idea to have one of each, so you could tell where you were on the most wanted list. For her subspecialty, I made her a smuggler, because then she could manufacture illegal drugs (“spice” – a kind of power up with a huge short term gain and a harsh come-down penalty) for me to sell.
So again I had to think about why, as a character, she would do that. It doesn’t matter if the explanation is far fetched, this is fantasy after all. But it helps me if there is some kind of logic to her actions. I really can’t get into playing insane people, or people who are motivated solely by points.
So I decided her arrogance as a pilot had led her to believe she was above the law. Everyone in this game is a psychotic mass murderer at some level, because that’s how you gain levels. My dark jedi murders people because they are bad for the environment, my medic sees it as excising tumors before they create more damage to the surrounding tissue, my lizard kills because it pleases her Goddess.
My stormtrooper, then, feeling that she is above the law, decides to take the law into her own hands, due to her desire for stability regarding her weird yet brief childhood. But due to not really having a sense of right and wrong, she doesn’t see any problem with building meth labs or shooting her bounties on sight rather than arresting them and giving them fair trials. She’s your basic bad cop. A good villainous archetype to get to know, I felt.
Then where does the stormtrooper armor fit in? Well, she traded some drugs for an illegally manufactured suit of it. And once she put it on and realized she looked just like all the other stormtroopers, and could get away with all kinds of shady activity while impersonating an officer, her personality sort of clicked.
Then they changed the game around. No more bounty hunter/smuggler. Of all the new professions I tested, the one I liked best was spy, because spies had an ability that my jedi had lost which I severely missed: walking around invisible. So Lonne became a spy in stomrtrooper armor – a perfect cover for a spy. Luke and Han pulled it off in fact. She was still a bad cop, but rather than roughing up suspects, she was now claiming she worked for the Intelligence Division and had a 00 license to kill.
She was a spy for a while, then an engineer for a little bit, making robots and jetpacks and such, out of stormtrooper armor for a change. Then back to spy. And then, when I decided that I wanted to go about getting points as my stormtrooper, I made her a commando.
From a character driven standpoint, why is she turning from a bad cop to a renegade spy to a heavy weapons specialist? Another tough one. I decided she had infiltrated the Imperial army and was now becoming a career soldier in an attempt to become even more legit. Her desire for stability has become a psychopathic compulsion to do mass damage to anything even remotely suggesting disorder. Hot damn, now there’s a villainess! Sort of like a neat-freak housewife, except with flamethrowers instead of oven cleanser. No annoying Freudian childhood (btw, I hate Freud, I like Jung a lot better) to explain her evil – just a vacuum over which she projects her overwhelming primal needs. No dysfunctional relationship with her mother – they’re on the same account and I can only play one at a time, so have never met. Mommy is a shadowy dark jedi that supplies her with anything expensive she might need. Daddy is long gone. Her only relative is her sister, a blue alien that doesn’t really like her (sometimes I amuse myself by having them duel while I’m running them both, or slap each other and pull each others’ hair).
Now there’s a character I could write the hell out of.
I mentioned Jung, and might have gone over his concept of your shadow, your “evil twin,” in the Star Wars universe, the frightening vision of his father that Luke faces when he attempts to be a jedi. Some people play themselves or their ideals or their ideal mates in games, I’m playing my enemies.
But since I’m gaming and not writing, I’m collaborating with a fickle universe that frequently downsizes me, promotes me, pushes me into different career paths than I would normally select – it’s sort of how I interact with real life (insert internet humor-indication icon here).
The game is balanced now, they have made all of the combat classes more or less equivalent, with their specialties, and Lonne’s still at her most advantageous with her flamethrower and other clean-up tools, so she can stay a commando for a while.
And I do like the creative challenge of dealing with changes in game mechanics as plot twists, as long as they make some sense.
What I don’t like is when the changes are so wide-ranging and arbitrary that they make my characters’ plots difficult to rationalize. Why is that person standing in that one spot, repeatedly waiting for someone to appear there and killing them? Why is this person suddenly forgetting all their medical training and instantly becoming proficient in intergalactic smuggling? Why would a drug-manufacturing corrupt cop shift to front line combat?
I started my evil Easter bunny as a dark jedi, and although she’s been a sniper and a tailor and a bounty hunter along the road to becoming one, she has always had that goal in mind. My medic had a couple of lapses, but she was created with a definite intent to be a medic character, and I’ve always played her as one, and she’s a nice change of pace from my murderous psychos.
It’s good for a game to allow you to create a character that is consistently “in character” throughout the game experience.
It’s also good if a game lets you create a character that experiences “personal growth,” changing specialties in response to experiences or revelations or whims.
What’s bad is if the game decrees that if you want to play it effectively, you have to put your characters through all kinds of absurd plot loopholes.
There was a poll in the forums last week about things that break immersion for gamers. I already mentioned Vent, and griefers/youths, and the third one I mentioned in the poll was something having to do with ambient sound.
But if there’s ever anything that REALLY breaks a game for me, it’s when the game gives me a choice between effective strategy and plausible character development and demands I pick one.
AND FINALLY,
ADVENTURES IN MODERN MEDICINE
On Tuesday night I went into the Death Watch Bunker with three fighters and my medic. We all got slaughtered before we were halfway through. The reason for that is something called “healer hate,” which is a feature the “mobs” (monsters/people/whatever NPC is trying to kill you) have.
If you’re fighting humans (and if they’re any good), they’ll probably try to take out the medic first, because the medic can keep reviving dead players. Next they take out the commando because it does the most damage. Then they pick off the little weak players.
Mobs are programmed to choose their targets in that order, and the extent to which they do it varies from patch to patch. So last Tuesday, everything in the Death Watch Bunker hated my healer so much that they all went out of their way to kill her, which meant she couldn’t revive the others and they were doomed.
After the new leveling patch, I took my medic in there and declared residency in the damn place, and accompanied by three fighters got all the way through to the bottom and achieved our objective of getting a non-combat jetpack engineer down there alive to manufacture a jetpack.
It was great to be powerful again. Hooray for the combat rebalance and the great leveling. But, and similar to the above thought, here’s the deal:
My medic is basically a humble doctor who runs into enemy fire to save people.
On Tuesday, she was despised by the NPCs, and accordingly weak, and needed to be guarded and protected.
On Thursday, she could walk right up to the NPCs and slap them and then seal them up in a stasis field, while detonating poison nerve gas in their face and shooting them and using her medical abilities to boost her accuracy and increase her overall health (in addition to keeping the rest of the party alive).
My character, in two days, went from pathetic to superhuman. But all she really wants is to be the doctor frantically rushing to suture wounds and perform CPR in the face of overwhelming doom.
My spy, meanwhile, had this gig going on deep in a cave, where she had kind of turned into Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and was all one with her Goddess, far from civilization. But she suddenly turned into a wimp. Instead of being able to muscle her way all the way in, she now depends on the kindness of passing strangers.
Which, I’ll admit is fun, because with a few exceptions, doing things with other people is more fun than alone.
Their professions haven’t changed but their abilities and their relative strength in the world have been drastically revised. I get depressed playing my lizard now because the only plot justification I can think of is that she’s convinced her Goddess hates her, and the last thing I want to spend my recreation time doing is wallowing in reptilian angst.
And meanwhile, why does my humble doctor suddenly think she’s invincible a few days after feeling more like a battered wife? Has she been mixing up special prescriptions for herself in the lab?
My jedi has gone through numerous revisions in relative power and I adjusted her character accordingly, more paranoia and nervous twitches, more Col. Mandrake-like absurd speeches about saving our precious bodily fluids from ecodisaster.
And what’s really funny is that throughout all these changes of in-game power, the same players tend to wind out on top, because they’re obsessive about games, and they help each other and share information.
Our alter egos, however, are the ones that suffer, and it’s hard to tell whether they need therapists or script doctors.
Friday, December 1, 2006
Youths
A quick quiz:
You are walking down the street late at night. Up ahead are six guys between 15 and 25 (I’m going to call these 15-25 year old guys “youths,” per My Cousin Vinny, a great movie if you haven’t seen it) listening to some loud music and passing something around.
a. Change direction.
b. Walk right past them.
c. Go up to them and ask if you can have some of whatever they’re passing around.
You are traveling in a foreign country and have lost your way and are in an area of town full of locals. You need to ask one for directions back to your hotel. Who do you ask?
a. A grandfather with a gray beard.
b. A little girl selling flowers.
c. A pack of youths.
Who is judged by insurance companies as most likely to have a bad accident so have to pay much higher premiums?
a. Single moms.
b. Middle aged guys in convertibles.
c. Youths.
You’re an attractive 19 year old girl, going door to door collecting donations for cancer research. The door you’ve just knocked on opens to reveal nine youths and a case of beer. They invite you in. Do you go?
a. Yes, I’m sure they just want to discuss cancer research.
b. Hell to the no.
You’re a youth, and you’re wearing a blue jacket. Coming towards you are seven youths wearing brown jackets. Do you:
a. Ask them for video game recommendations.
b. Admire their fashion sense.
c. Change direction.
It’s hot outside and you’d like a nice cold beer. You have two bars to choose from: one has a mixed crowd and the other is full of youths. You choose:
a. The mixed crowd.
b. A six pack from the convenience store.
c. The bar full of youths.
Who commits most violent crimes?
a. Grandmothers.
b. Professional women in their thirties.
c. Youths.
You’re a business traveler and you’ve just found out that the current number one band among youths is also staying at the hotel you checked into, on the same floor. Do you:
a. Knock on the door, introduce yourself and let them know that you have a meeting first thing in the morning so hopefully they won’t be up too late.
b. Change floors.
c. Change hotels.
You’re a soldier, and someone is shooting at you. They are most likely to be:
a. Middle aged guys with combovers.
b. Tap dancing nuns.
c. Youths.
Most people would prefer to time hanging out with:
a. Their friends.
b. Interesting people with similar interests.
c. A bunch of youths that they don’t know very well.
Most computer gamers:
a. Have full time jobs and are over age 25.
b. Are more likely to have spent their teenage years with computers than hanging out with a gang of youths (or if they did, they were other computer nerds).
c. Are lawless violent youths wearing gang colors who will mess you up if you disrespect them.
You’ve probably gotten my heavy handed point by now. Nobody really wants to hang out with youths except for other youths in their clique, because youths tend to be antisocial. Sometimes even violent, and while that’s nothing to be afraid of in virtual reality where death is a minor inconvenience, it sort of extends to all the other antisocial behavior primarily engaged in by youths, taunting and trolling and harassing and doing their absolute best to piss others off. A generation of concentrated attempts at social reorganization by the baby boomer generation doesn’t seem to have made much improvement. Historians and sociologists and biologists will all confirm that there’s a pretty consistent pattern in most mammalian species for males around mating age to be possessive of females and territory and resources, and aggressive with anyone they think might be invading.
Here’s a synopsis of a study:
It is easy to dismiss video games as pointless activities that only teenagers indulge in. The truth is that the average age of MMORPG players is around 26. In fact, only 25% of MMORPG players are teenagers. About 50% of MMORPG players work full-time. About 36% of players are married, and 22% have children. So the MMORPG demographic is fairly diverse, including high-school students, college students, early professionals, middle-aged home-makers, as well as retirees. In other words, MMORPGs do not only appeal to a youth subculture.
The wide appeal of MMORPGs is all the more striking because of usage data that shows how strong that appeal seems to be. On average, MMORPG players spend 22 hours a week in these environments and usage is not correlated with age. In other words, older players spend the same amount of time playing these games as younger players. Also, the strength of this appeal is further highlighted by the finding that 60% of players report having played an MMORPG for at least 10 hours continuously.
Another caricature of video gamers is that they are solitary hermits, but the data on MMORPG players show that 80% of MMORPG players play with someone they know in RL (a romantic partner, family member, or friend)on a regular basis. Thus, MMORPGs are in fact highly social environments where new relationships are forged and existing relationships are reinforced.
From http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html
Here’s Mr. Yee’s paper on the subject, in pdf: http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20-%20MMORPG%20Demographics%202006.pdf
And here’s some algebra:
Most gamers are not youths.
Most people do not want to be around unfamiliar youths because they engage in a disproportionately huge share of antisocial and aggressive behavior.
Not necessarily violent behavior, and in fact here’s a great article (thanks Kenshu) about decrease in violent behavior of youths exposed to video games.
http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/articles/violence/violence.htm
But just about all youths want you to THINK they are violent, and heterosexual, and powerful, because their DNA tells them they're more likely to replicate if they act that way. So if they aren't those things, they front, and people believe it.
The general public tends to associate any pastime associated with youths with encouraging violence and lawlessness. If youths are reading comic books, it’s the comic books’ fault. If they are wearing hats and beating up guys wearing different colored hats, clearly the hats are to blame. Do they sit around watching TV? Let’s blame MTV. Do they sit around listening to heavy metal when they’re feeling depressed and suicidal? Sue the band! Never mind the fact that youths in cultures (and animal species) that don’t engage in that particular pastime also tend to form packs and go around strutting their stuff and challenging rivals.
And the general public believes, INCORRECTLY, that the primary consumers of video games are youths.
Apparently, so do the game design companies, even though you’d think occasionally they get some input from people who know how to do marketing. So do a lot of gamers around and above that median age of 26, who think they are exceptions in the gaming world when they’re more like the rule.
In fact, much of the time when you’re playing a videogame, your avatar is a youth, and engaged in youthful activities like beating up rival youths and trying to have productive conversations with youth women that are showing a lot of cleavage.
Isn’t there a significant number of players like the ones I mentioned last rant, who would rather play gorgeous young girls than youths? Well, yeah, in fact there is, but you could never build a game around that kind of thing because all the youths would think it’s gay.
You could, in theory, make a game that appeals to the non-youth market, something involving creativity or history or cute cartoon-like graphics or complicated strategy. Some companies have, in fact:
Super Mario Brothers
The Sims
Myst
Pokemon
Age of Empires
Civilization
Tetris
Flight Simulator
Legend of Zelda
Sim City
Coincidentally, those are also the best selling games of all time.
So why do people assume computer gaming is all about the youth market? And why do youths (or people who act like them) dominate so much of the advertising to the point where non-gamers assume those are the only people who play them?
Simple. Youths tend to take over a space and chase everyone else away. And they will never, ever consume a product that might make them appear female or gay or old or babyish (or anything other than an extremely manly and powerful youth), so many game designers kowtow to this fickle market. Maybe it’s trickle down baby boomer marketing. For the boomers, you could make bushels of cash peddling youth rock stars and youth fashions and youth films to a general audience. But those days are over, and these days nobody really consumes youth media except other youths. And I have a strong suspicion that youths don’t have nearly as much available cash as, say, people over 25 who work full time.
This blogrant started out to be a lot of complaining about the different types of obnoxious men I encounter in game, similar to my rant about obnoxious women, but you know what? For one thing, writing about the obnoxious women made me realize how much I miss a lot of the other female players. A lot of them moved on when they thought the game was starting to cater to the youths.
For another thing, I don’t really mind most youths at all. I just have a problem dealing with them in packs or on Vent or any place where it’s all about them. In a balanced community where there are other demographics present they don’t turn into jerks as readily.
And, other than the occasional thirty-something who acts as though he still hasn’t dealt with his Inner Fratboy, ALL complaints I hear from other gamers regarding annoying people center around younger guys (or guys who act so much like them they are perceived to be teenagers) behaving badly. The complaining is so uniform that I couldn’t even come up with entertaining profiles for each of them.
Youths need a niche of their own in games (so the other customers don’t constantly get irritated by them). A place with some NPC bimbos with large gazongas who constantly giggle and provide other assurances of their manliness. A place where they can retreat and spend their time playing Whose Is Bigger with their own kind.
You are walking down the street late at night. Up ahead are six guys between 15 and 25 (I’m going to call these 15-25 year old guys “youths,” per My Cousin Vinny, a great movie if you haven’t seen it) listening to some loud music and passing something around.
a. Change direction.
b. Walk right past them.
c. Go up to them and ask if you can have some of whatever they’re passing around.
You are traveling in a foreign country and have lost your way and are in an area of town full of locals. You need to ask one for directions back to your hotel. Who do you ask?
a. A grandfather with a gray beard.
b. A little girl selling flowers.
c. A pack of youths.
Who is judged by insurance companies as most likely to have a bad accident so have to pay much higher premiums?
a. Single moms.
b. Middle aged guys in convertibles.
c. Youths.
You’re an attractive 19 year old girl, going door to door collecting donations for cancer research. The door you’ve just knocked on opens to reveal nine youths and a case of beer. They invite you in. Do you go?
a. Yes, I’m sure they just want to discuss cancer research.
b. Hell to the no.
You’re a youth, and you’re wearing a blue jacket. Coming towards you are seven youths wearing brown jackets. Do you:
a. Ask them for video game recommendations.
b. Admire their fashion sense.
c. Change direction.
It’s hot outside and you’d like a nice cold beer. You have two bars to choose from: one has a mixed crowd and the other is full of youths. You choose:
a. The mixed crowd.
b. A six pack from the convenience store.
c. The bar full of youths.
Who commits most violent crimes?
a. Grandmothers.
b. Professional women in their thirties.
c. Youths.
You’re a business traveler and you’ve just found out that the current number one band among youths is also staying at the hotel you checked into, on the same floor. Do you:
a. Knock on the door, introduce yourself and let them know that you have a meeting first thing in the morning so hopefully they won’t be up too late.
b. Change floors.
c. Change hotels.
You’re a soldier, and someone is shooting at you. They are most likely to be:
a. Middle aged guys with combovers.
b. Tap dancing nuns.
c. Youths.
Most people would prefer to time hanging out with:
a. Their friends.
b. Interesting people with similar interests.
c. A bunch of youths that they don’t know very well.
Most computer gamers:
a. Have full time jobs and are over age 25.
b. Are more likely to have spent their teenage years with computers than hanging out with a gang of youths (or if they did, they were other computer nerds).
c. Are lawless violent youths wearing gang colors who will mess you up if you disrespect them.
You’ve probably gotten my heavy handed point by now. Nobody really wants to hang out with youths except for other youths in their clique, because youths tend to be antisocial. Sometimes even violent, and while that’s nothing to be afraid of in virtual reality where death is a minor inconvenience, it sort of extends to all the other antisocial behavior primarily engaged in by youths, taunting and trolling and harassing and doing their absolute best to piss others off. A generation of concentrated attempts at social reorganization by the baby boomer generation doesn’t seem to have made much improvement. Historians and sociologists and biologists will all confirm that there’s a pretty consistent pattern in most mammalian species for males around mating age to be possessive of females and territory and resources, and aggressive with anyone they think might be invading.
Here’s a synopsis of a study:
It is easy to dismiss video games as pointless activities that only teenagers indulge in. The truth is that the average age of MMORPG players is around 26. In fact, only 25% of MMORPG players are teenagers. About 50% of MMORPG players work full-time. About 36% of players are married, and 22% have children. So the MMORPG demographic is fairly diverse, including high-school students, college students, early professionals, middle-aged home-makers, as well as retirees. In other words, MMORPGs do not only appeal to a youth subculture.
The wide appeal of MMORPGs is all the more striking because of usage data that shows how strong that appeal seems to be. On average, MMORPG players spend 22 hours a week in these environments and usage is not correlated with age. In other words, older players spend the same amount of time playing these games as younger players. Also, the strength of this appeal is further highlighted by the finding that 60% of players report having played an MMORPG for at least 10 hours continuously.
Another caricature of video gamers is that they are solitary hermits, but the data on MMORPG players show that 80% of MMORPG players play with someone they know in RL (a romantic partner, family member, or friend)on a regular basis. Thus, MMORPGs are in fact highly social environments where new relationships are forged and existing relationships are reinforced.
From http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html
Here’s Mr. Yee’s paper on the subject, in pdf: http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20-%20MMORPG%20Demographics%202006.pdf
And here’s some algebra:
Most gamers are not youths.
Most people do not want to be around unfamiliar youths because they engage in a disproportionately huge share of antisocial and aggressive behavior.
Not necessarily violent behavior, and in fact here’s a great article (thanks Kenshu) about decrease in violent behavior of youths exposed to video games.
http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/articles/violence/violence.htm
But just about all youths want you to THINK they are violent, and heterosexual, and powerful, because their DNA tells them they're more likely to replicate if they act that way. So if they aren't those things, they front, and people believe it.
The general public tends to associate any pastime associated with youths with encouraging violence and lawlessness. If youths are reading comic books, it’s the comic books’ fault. If they are wearing hats and beating up guys wearing different colored hats, clearly the hats are to blame. Do they sit around watching TV? Let’s blame MTV. Do they sit around listening to heavy metal when they’re feeling depressed and suicidal? Sue the band! Never mind the fact that youths in cultures (and animal species) that don’t engage in that particular pastime also tend to form packs and go around strutting their stuff and challenging rivals.
And the general public believes, INCORRECTLY, that the primary consumers of video games are youths.
Apparently, so do the game design companies, even though you’d think occasionally they get some input from people who know how to do marketing. So do a lot of gamers around and above that median age of 26, who think they are exceptions in the gaming world when they’re more like the rule.
In fact, much of the time when you’re playing a videogame, your avatar is a youth, and engaged in youthful activities like beating up rival youths and trying to have productive conversations with youth women that are showing a lot of cleavage.
Isn’t there a significant number of players like the ones I mentioned last rant, who would rather play gorgeous young girls than youths? Well, yeah, in fact there is, but you could never build a game around that kind of thing because all the youths would think it’s gay.
You could, in theory, make a game that appeals to the non-youth market, something involving creativity or history or cute cartoon-like graphics or complicated strategy. Some companies have, in fact:
Super Mario Brothers
The Sims
Myst
Pokemon
Age of Empires
Civilization
Tetris
Flight Simulator
Legend of Zelda
Sim City
Coincidentally, those are also the best selling games of all time.
So why do people assume computer gaming is all about the youth market? And why do youths (or people who act like them) dominate so much of the advertising to the point where non-gamers assume those are the only people who play them?
Simple. Youths tend to take over a space and chase everyone else away. And they will never, ever consume a product that might make them appear female or gay or old or babyish (or anything other than an extremely manly and powerful youth), so many game designers kowtow to this fickle market. Maybe it’s trickle down baby boomer marketing. For the boomers, you could make bushels of cash peddling youth rock stars and youth fashions and youth films to a general audience. But those days are over, and these days nobody really consumes youth media except other youths. And I have a strong suspicion that youths don’t have nearly as much available cash as, say, people over 25 who work full time.
This blogrant started out to be a lot of complaining about the different types of obnoxious men I encounter in game, similar to my rant about obnoxious women, but you know what? For one thing, writing about the obnoxious women made me realize how much I miss a lot of the other female players. A lot of them moved on when they thought the game was starting to cater to the youths.
For another thing, I don’t really mind most youths at all. I just have a problem dealing with them in packs or on Vent or any place where it’s all about them. In a balanced community where there are other demographics present they don’t turn into jerks as readily.
And, other than the occasional thirty-something who acts as though he still hasn’t dealt with his Inner Fratboy, ALL complaints I hear from other gamers regarding annoying people center around younger guys (or guys who act so much like them they are perceived to be teenagers) behaving badly. The complaining is so uniform that I couldn’t even come up with entertaining profiles for each of them.
Youths need a niche of their own in games (so the other customers don’t constantly get irritated by them). A place with some NPC bimbos with large gazongas who constantly giggle and provide other assurances of their manliness. A place where they can retreat and spend their time playing Whose Is Bigger with their own kind.
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