More Art, and Guild Politics

Recently a couple of interesting (to me, anyway) exhibits started up in town and so I guess I will be spending some time afk wandering over to see them.

First there’s The Sims: In The Hands of Artists

I’m wondering if any of the student artists are extensive Sims modders. I mean, you can introduce any texture you want as a Sims set, and if you can’t draw no doubt you can photoshop it or download it somewhere. You can also make sims look like any actor you want. You can mod the props, although if you need a Maltese Falcon or a Rosebud sled for your Citizen Kane remake, they’re already included (“Rosebud” was the money cheat in classic Sims). You can find fansites where you can get 9 million copies of Johnny Depp’s pirate outfit, or all the Gone With The Wind dresses, or anything else based on existing art, if you want to make a remake the way it should have happened. So I’m looking forward to seeing if the student artists are taking Sims as far as it can go, or if most of the exhibits will be boring derivative repetitions of “human culture is bad” symbolized by unmodded sims screaming in a room full of consumer electronics or something I’ve seen way too much of already.

Then there’s Osamu Tezuka, who invented anime and manga.

Many people in the US have never heard of him but he was hugely influential. Especially on me, because when I was 6 and 7 I was hooked on his cartoon Princess Knight, about a sword-swinging girl. My little brother was hooked on another Tezuka creation, Speed Racer. When I was doing a weekly column I named it after a Tezuka character. So I intend to show up for this homage, and also to whip out my rarely-used credit card and take home any and all Princess Knight swag I find in the giftshop.

I shall report after I have dragged myself to these exhibits.

Anyway, now I’m moving onto guild politics, which is not something I really wanted to delve into but last night while I was discussing it with Lifa while simultaneously dealing with guild drama in guildchat/officerchat, I realized it was at the forefront of many gamers’ minds. And since I’m sometimes pretty good at fiction, drama, roleplaying and fibbing, I thought I’d try to put down everyone’s perspective.

THE POWER GAMER

I’ve devoted many hours to grinding away and now I’m level 70, or nearly there. What next? Get a different game? Hell no, I want to see the end game!! All the new instances!! Epic flying mounts!! Bling!! Swag!! Excitement!! Adventure!! That’s what I’ve put in all these hours for, right? Wahoo, 70, where’s my victory parade?

Not tonight. Guildchat is full of lazy noobs demanding that other players drop everything and go escort them through baby quests. The other high levels are off in their cliques with their friends. The casuals are dismissing everyone who levels faster than them. Instead of being asked to join in the exciting high level dungeon, people just want me to help them. So much for all that effort.

(And not only that, some of those people demanding help are infuriating to me, a power gamer who sizzles through quests at lightning pace – they want to go through extra slow, they don’t like risks, they don’t like chaotic high energy situations, they get mad at the whole group if they die, they use boneheaded strategy and then have a fit when it doesn’t work.)

(Not to mention that some of us power gamers are into having a bunch of mods and using voice chat, the same attitude that snotty blogger had towards art students that don’t use custom sims content – elitist, I know, but sometimes it can feel like being an Olympic athlete toddling along with the special eds and assuring them that yes, everybody is important – hey, I’m a competitive fiend and I know it, and that’s why I’m playing a competitive game instead of making dresses for sims. Go bitch about it to the NFL, see if you can get them to start playing with hugs instead of tackles and letting unathletic people be on their teams, just because that’s what .000001% of the audience wants.)

All of a sudden, here’s some guy from another guild that wants good players – omg, he must mean ME – and they’re guaranteeing to get me to max level immediately plus give me 10000000000 gold and a flying epic mount and a decent relationship and a job that doesn’t suck and eternal happiness. Woot! My potential has been realized! My gaming excellence has been acknowledged! These slow gamers never really noticed, but my fellow elitists do! Cowabunga, I’m out of here!

THE CASUAL GAMER

Due to my job/kids/relationship/jet set lifestyle I can’t spend 18 hours a day in here like some of these losers. All I want is two or three hours of companionable gaming a couple times a week. Yeah, so it’ll take me a year to get to 70, at least I’m enjoying the ride.

I mean, if I’m spending a block of time – and I have a limited supply of those – on an activity, it needs to be satisfying in and of itself. Not dangling the prospect of satisfaction in front of me and conditioning it upon my spending 7 nights a week playing this thing until three hours past bedtime. Because my RL comes first, it’s simple as that.

Now that we have a basic understanding on this issue, some more things. I don’t want to deal with the immature. I don’t want to deal with the stupid. In fact, I don’t want to deal with too many people, or people who are too different from me, period.

I also don’t want a lot of competition, because the winners of these games are the people (with no lives) who can devote the most hours to them. So I don’t want to be around a bunch of people who are all manic from adrenalin and bragging about their epic loot and pvp scores. And neither do I want to babysit a bunch of immature players – if I wanted to deal with children I’d go afk. I guess I basically want a leisure activity with other adults like me.

THE NOOB

OMG this is complicated. OK I’m a cartoon character and I type to talk, but if I accidentally hit the wrong button I end up attacking things I didn’t mean to attack and getting killed and falling off cliffs. Wow, there are other cartoon characters all around me. Oh no, that one just called me a “noob” – she must be another player! Wow, it’s a beautiful woman! Her name is NottiHottiAFK, that’s a strange name, maybe she is a foreign player. Oh no, what do I say to her? Oops I died! I wonder how this works? Do I have to make a new cartoon character now?

I need some better equipment. I’ll just ask some of these people for some of the play money they use in here. Wow, that was rude! Yikes, now he wants to duel! I’m going to get killed! I had better run away from this city and stay in the small towns until I get the hang of this game. Oh no!! Level twelve bats!! Aieeee!!!

Hooray, this guy is saving me from the bats! Now he wants me to join his guild, and I’ve never even met him. Well okay, I’ll just join. I wish I could ask them what all these strange words mean: lfg, gtg, rfd, afk. Hey that last one must mean “away from keyboard” – aha, maybe that’s why that elf wouldn’t talk to me! She sure was beautiful though.

Hi guildchat! Hi guildchat! Hi guildchat! Oh, that’s how that works. Sorry I did not mean to spam. You want to what? What does that mean? Could someone help me with this dungeon I found? I get killed whenever I go in. Well, yeah, I am only level 3. I need to grind? What’s that?

(Oh no, this is so confusing, I don’t understand what they’re all talking about and they do it so fast. They must be kids, people younger than me are so good with these computer games. Or maybe they’re older than me, that must be it, they’ve all been playing MMOs for twenty years. I’ll never catch up. Dammit, they’re all laughing at me, I just know it.)

***

We all start out as noobs, but it seems eventually we either head into the yin of casual gaming or the yang of power gaming, where we bond with our fellow gamers by disrespecting the people who made the opposite choice. I think that happens in many areas of life, people boosting their social position in their subgroup by demonizing and dismissing the opposition, competing to see who the most loyal Shark is by trashing the Jets (without even any of the entertaining singing and dancing that was also in West Side Story).

As far as guilds, I suppose if the majority lists to the yin, the guild becomes a leveling guild, i.e. a daycare center. And if it leans yang, the guild morphs into a lean mean mob of Spartans that no longer has any use for losers that game less than 10 hours a day and refuse to use mods and voice interface and still insist on typing in chat and looking at the pretty sunsets and other suspected homosexual behavior.

And I’m on the fence here again, a place I often wind up in life. I’d rather socialize with the mature and laid back casuals, interspersed with episodes of doing really hard things as fast as possible.

So last night in the guild we had one of those power gamer types, the one Rose didn’t like. As expected, he ran off to a power gamer guild after reaching a high enough level, because they recruited him and fed his ego, and because (due to his own abrasiveness), he wasn’t getting the help and attention he craved from the rest of us. In fact, the night before he left, he was begging for help in Outlands, and several of us who didn’t like him made a little group and went around through Outlands helping each other instead. We even had an empty space in the group.

He also took another gamer with him, a female player that most of us liked. She had been finding fault with the guild lately. She thought we needed an entrance exam, and her last straw was when we let a rather dramatic 15 year old girl be a guild officer.

(The dramatic 15 year old girl is someone I generally avoid but I voted in favor of her being an officer, because I think these games are about wish fulfillment in a big way, and if she really wants to be a responsible leader, there’s no better place to learn.)

I liked the player that left, though. I have a lot of respect for her because she can type in Chinese, among other things, and she has always been very competent.

And that’s sort of the bottom line in the yin-yang split. You could almost call it the advanced and the remedial classes, except that’s not entirely accurate. There are some power gamers that suck at the game, but by following orders and running the approved macros, they can run through a tough encounter with the heavy hitters. And there are some casuals – like many of my friends – that, although they lack a lot of the power gamer arrogance and adrenalin-lust, could solo most of the midrange content with their pinky toes, while chatting.

Then there’s the prosthetic-assisted power gamers. They read and memorize walkthroughs and make extensive use of mods and voice chat. I avoid those guys, although I do hang out with the ones that write the walkthroughs for them. They are the equivalent of someone who learns to sing a song in a foreign language, phoenetically, without actually learning what the song means. A lot of these guys are the raid junkies that abandon their families, or the unimaginative ones that diss immersion and text chat and roleplayers. They are not REAL gamers, because they don’t know about things like “to hit” tables and hexmaps and MUSHes. They’re like those guys that go hunting bear and deer using high powered scopes and GPS devices and radar. Or the ones that take helicopters up near the top of Mt. Everest so they can pose for pictures.

These are the ones who are the most arrogant about their “gaming ability” and therefore they are the ones who are the most vulnerable to power gamer pyramid schemes run by gamers who are like me except more evil and motivated.

Anyway, here’s my current statement of intent with regard to yet another stupid artificial division of humanity vis a vis guild intent.

I like my current guild, mainly because I got some of my favorite people from my last game to come over here and join it, and because I like a lot of the new people that I’ve met. But I also like active guildchat, even if it’s sometimes just a pack of clueless noobs. There are other people in it that I like and respect, and even noobs can be amusing or can provide content for blogrants. And I also like having the ability to just say things like “anyone know where’s the boss ogre?” or “does anyone have a stack of leather I can buy?” or “did anyone else see that youtube clip?” or whatever.

That’s because I like random interactions with strangers. Even if they’re unpleasant, because those are sometimes funny. I don’t like or understand playing MMOs just to selectively hang out with your eight best friends badmouthing everybody else.

Two anecdotes: I did another pickup group in the Sunken Temple last weekend, with people I didn’t know. Good players, but handicapped by their lack of a priest. So they just basically searched for all the nearby priests and asked them, and I joined. While I was in there, some really nice armor dropped. A couple of them claimed need (giving them priority at looting it), while I assumed everyone was being democratic and hitting greed instead, which distributes randomly. Two of the group who were apparently friends were encouraging each other to do that. This is known as being a “loot ninja” – wait for everyone to vote greed, then claim you need it and pocket it. We’ve thrown people out of my guild for ninja complaints.

At first I was furious. I took a nice long AFK break getting myself a drink and a snack and watching them ask each other how long the priest was going to be gone. They weren’t moving until I returned. I decided I'd just get back into it, because a group has to be really terrible for me to abandon them and other than the looting these guys were pleasant and skilled. But I intended to hit “need” on the next interesting thing that dropped, and I did, first to respond. Woot, a nice belt. I won it even though the ninjas also claimed a need, and they stopped doing anything remotely abrasive, and we wiped the place clean. So it was a mostly pleasant adventure compared to the group I ditched, who were polite and fair but just couldn’t manage to work together.

Second anecdote: I was in Orgrimmar when I noticed someone frantically spamming general chat for a healer. Well whaddya know, that’s me. I answered the guy. He ordered me to “come!” “follow!”

Well, you all know how much I love being ordered around, but I was curious by the urgency of his request. He was only level 5 or so. I accepted his group invite and noticed that the group also included a deceased female toon named Hottie-something or other. The guy – who also had kind of a dumb name – tried to direct me where to find her but I could see her on the map, she had fallen off the zeppelin and died. She was low level too. The guy followed me to her side as I told him how to find your group members on the map, and when we got to her he said “help. Please fix her.”

So I rezzed the hottie. She was only a few steps from the graveyard, but apparently was so new that she didn’t know about WoW death yet. Or maybe she was a roleplayer. Either way, her boyfriend was extremely concerned. After being reanimated she got to her feet and I left the happy couple clumsily exchanging emotes (he thanked me several times, she was too shy).

All that noobish devotion was very touching. While I don’t think I would like to necessarily hang out with this couple, sometimes encounters like that make my day.

Anyway, both those encounters sort of illustrate why I hate it when people dictate who I can hang out with. The guild I didn’t get along with in SWG was that way. “We are better, everyone not in our group is a loser, if you were truly loyal you would only talk to us.” A lot of these power gamer guilds are like that, I hear. It sounds like something that would appeal much more to ex-cult members, people from mean authoritarian families, gangbangers, supremacists and other little clots of hostile antinomians blindly following control freaks. Uh, no, I don’t have a lot of strong feelings on the matter.

I like high level content, but I don’t need it immediately, because I’m new to WoW and still haven’t seen all the old content. Hence instead of getting twitchy because I was the first to make it to 70 and now there was nobody to help me with the high level stuff, I turned around and started building a new 70. She’s up to 57 now, woot.

I hate hanging around with gamers that depend on in-game prosthetics, although I have known a few gamers with prosthetics IRL who were hella cool. And while dyslexics my sympathy have, lrn2type if me you hang out with want to.

I love watching small groups of good players beat the crap out of groups of feeble players marching in lockstep to the orders of some control freak, and hope to be part of one of the former some day, even if I have to wait around for that to happen.

I do not like power leveling people whose time would be better spent playing it through and learning the strategy (see previous rant re: helping others). I also don’t like power leveling people who order me around, or doing anything with them, in fact. But I don’t mind power leveling people who know what they’re up to. If my guild turns into one solely focused on babysitting, I’ll drift off to my clique and/or leave entirely.

I love some of the power gamers, but if we’re going to start booting people for lack of ability – or worse, forcing me to put up with assholes just because they have good eye-hand coordination, I am so gone.

I love some of the casual gamers, but if we’re going to start sneering at the power gamers and championing the slow and ineffective and chasing away everyone in the top levels – or worse, nagging me to slow down my pace in order not to wound their egos, I’m even more gone. (Note: the guy who just left used to do that, he’d actually get mad at me for leveling faster than him, and he got a party I was in wiped over an ego battle about my higher level -- his new guildies are going to love him, I can just tell.)

If me and some of my friends want to do some cooperative epic loot hunting, awesome.

If some pyramid structure wants me to devote X number of hours per week helping their leader get epic equipment while being assured I’m no. 113 on the list for my own epic stuff, talk to the hand.

And, while I’m all about maintaining a civil environment, I’m still angry about a very good player who left the guild after the player who just ran off to join the power guild came down on him for saying “damn” twice. He’s the one that inspired me to codify the guildchat protocols in the first place, because there is a fine line between upholding public decency and overbearing censorship carried out by power tripping bullies, and my guild crossed it in this case.

So far, I think the guildleader and I are on the same page. We’re both good players that like to socialize with all kinds of people, and we both survived the train wreck that was SWG.

I am looking forward to checking out the organized raid scene at some point, and doing more with the battlegrounds. I think after I level my priest I’m going to go through all the other classes up to level 20 or 40 or so and see if there’s one I really enjoy playing more than the others, and make that one my main as far as the PVP and elite loot hunting goes.

So, basically I intend to keep on proceeding the way I have been, socializing with the people I like while having random encounters with others, and power leveling because if I wasn’t doing that with my hands I’d be knitting zeppelin covers or something.

Although lately I am thinking of writing a book again, just because this blog has helped me get a lot of my writing groove back, but if I do that I’m not going to write about it, because why write about a book when you could be writing it?

Even so, I shall remain in WoW, in my current WoW guild, for as long as I still have friends there and am enjoying myself.