Playing Games Rather Than Reflecting on Them

Blizzard came up with a great new anti-spam message that has brought an end to the constant IMs from gold farmers and leveling services. This has made WoW much more pleasant. My priest is up to level 48 now.

The other day I wound up doing a mission with Whoured’s alt. He was looking for a random-spawning quest item and so I grouped with him and showed him the three places where it appeared, and we killed all the monsters guarding it together. It wasn’t until we were nearly done that he confessed he was Whoured and that he had gotten kicked out of my guild over the name.

I told him all people have to base their opinion of you on is your handle, and that some people don’t want to deal with rude handles because they assume rude people are behind them. He actually accepted that without putting up an argument on, say, why being offensive is really a good thing.

Rose, meanwhile, did a blog piece on a player named Zeamon, who is getting on her nerves due to the name. I’m on the fence there, since I’ve never run into a conflict with the dude and since I probably have different opinions on what words are objectionable.

One thing that sometimes gets on my nerves, even though it’s not intended to, is when the guildleader or others remind the members that they need to keep their language clean due to the presence of girl gamers.

Yes, it’s true that we often object to crude teenage-boy type humor regarding poo and sex. I don’t like the implication that we’re so timid that we need to be shielded from it either, though, or the implication that this is a normal way to act except when “those people” are around. I mean, what if I were in a guild where there were constant reminders to not make racist jokes because some of “them” were members? And quite a lot of my guildies who object to foul language are guys.

However, this is WoW, and judging from Barrens chat and from the conduct of some of the kids that play, I think frequently they DO need to be reminded that their fellow players are different kinds of people, particularly the self-absorbed sense-of-entitlement youths that are the problem. Sometimes I think this is a side effect of having a limited number of avatars. If I’m a fourteen year old boy playing an orc and I hang around with other teenage boys playing orcs, it’s not going to immediately occur to me that another orc might actually be a middle aged guy or a mom with kids or anything other than another teenage boy.

Anyway, censorship has a lot of gray areas anyway. Very few people like it when communication is either so open that you’re constantly exposed to “can you top this grossout?” competitions or so closed that you can’t express an opinion without incurring the wrath of the censorship police. And most people can’t quite agree on the gray areas. I don’t mind Zeamon’s name as much as I object to a handle used by another guildie, a methamphetamine reference, but the dude himself is okay and doesn’t talk about meth (or type like someone under the influence of it). And my main objection there is to the people I’ve encountered under the influence of it, I don’t really take notice of people whose names refer to pot or booze or other mind altering things.

Just as a weird aside, there are a lot of people with booze and drug related names in MMOs. And, as I said before, there are quite a lot more people on heavy painkillers due to some injury than one tends to run into IRL. Amazingly, they often manage to interact harmoniously with the more straightedge types, who frequently miss the double entendre names. I’ve known more than one gamer who has used MMO addiction to successfully transition out of some more harmful addiction, and I think it’s sort of cool that these days people can socialize around their various intoxicants instead of making them the focus of their social activities, with the smoking party over here and the non-smoking party over there and the beer party out back and the caffeine party out front and the pain killer crowd lying in bed and so on. I remember dealing with a guitar player who was in one of my bands when he quit drinking and realized he had no more social life because all his friends and activities had centered around bars and people who hang around in them. But in WoW, you might have people working on sobriety running in the same group with a bunch of drunks, and as long as the drunks aren’t too wasted to type or fight, there’s no real friction.

Not to mention there’s a lot of drinking as game content. Characters drink rum with pirates, beer with dwarves, and there’s a hilarious series of quests in the expansion lands that have to do with alcoholic ogres who have a special attack that makes your screen all blurry if you don’t bribe them with tankards of their favorite ale.

And, while I can recall an oblique reference to a troll hookah as part of the same quest series, even though there are no explicit references, everyone knows the trolls are a bunch of ganja smoking Rastafarians. The male trolls even used to have a joke that parodied the pothead anthem “Smoke Two Joints” – “I smoke two joints in time of peace, and two in time of war, I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints, and then I smoke two more.” Except with “smoke joints” replaced by “kill dwarves.” They took that out before I started playing though.

I’ve also been playing Sims 2 again, under stricter rules. No more mods, no downloaded items, no money hacks. While I do sort of miss weirdness like my Sims copy of my Star Wars Galaxies house and characters, I must admit that it actually makes the game more fun to play it as designed rather than just endlessly building sets. I have six or seven buildings up now, including my new city hall and zoo and a woodsy cabin for my werewolf guy, who can now support himself by farming and fishing rather than working at a nine to five. The cabin looks especially cool in the winter, covered with snow.