Gamer Revelations

Here are some thoughts that have emerged as a consequence of my month plus game immersion.

First, SWG is dead. There might be something similar in the future but it won't be SWG. And what I miss about SWG most is incidental to the very nature of gaming.

Games are elitist and exclusive. You don't hear about any campaigns to make football or basketball more inclusive by allowing short skinny guys to play them. The fact that they are hard makes them challenging and therefore desirable, and the fact that they have scores makes them games, rather than activities or hobbies or pastimes.

Game companies are democratic and inclusive, because they want to maximize profit. So they try to make the games accommodate every potential gamer.

SWG was exclusive and elitist. You needed a mighty computer to run it, and once you logged in you needed to be able to handle a complex ruleset as well as interaction with other sci fi loving computer nerds, who would show no mercy if your spelling was bad or an in joke went over your head.

SOE tried to make it more like some kind of socialist basketball, in which short people were welcome to participate but were forever doomed to score fewer points than the seven foot tall guys who could slam dunk. Meanwhile, the tall people all got random taxes and penalties in a feeble attempt to level the playing field, which put them in the position of lab rats who get random rewards and electric shocks, which tends to make all the sane rats stomp out in protest.

WoW on the other hand does a better job of accommodating the short and tall basketball players. Which is why my WoW guild has a few of the intense power gamers that I like to run around with as well as a lot of weaker players who sit in guildchat begging for someone to hold their hand, inspiring endless complaints from the power gamers, who get tired of short dudes begging for piggyback rides so they can win right now, immediately, because they're accustomed to social scenarios where elitism is discouraged and every child gets a sticker and an A+ just for showing up.

And I must admit that the inclusiveness, of having us all performing an activity together rather than having 96% of us sit on the couch watching the 4% power athletes race each other to the slam dunk, has its virtues. Even if it's not a very sporting idea. But there are outlets for the insanely competitive too, such as battlegrounds, so theoretically everybody can find some activity to make them happy.

Now, the gender thing. I'm tired of it. It's fun to write about once in a while, but I really have to admit that female gamers can be just as unsporting as male gamers. Annoying Teenage Girl, for example, was several times as annoying as many of the annoying teenage boys who wander in and out of guildchat, but she got a lot more second (and third, and fourth) chances (a female gamer friend remarked that she had more chances than Michael Jackson had nose jobs).

I've seen both male and female gamers fly off the handle at trivial slights, or try to win through manipulation and power plays as opposed to through actually playing the game, or sit around passively whining for other people to hold their hands and help them win -- this has become our guild's biggest complaint, whiny freeloaders who demand that we drop everything and help them right now. The angry smacktalkers tended to come in the male gender, the needy ones are both male and female, so the problem has become one more about character than aggression style.

I hear the complaints about wives that hate the games and would rather watch soap operas and I wonder if this particular marriage is based more on factors other than intellectual compatibility. And is there anything wrong with that? Not really. It doesn't make the game sexist. It does mean that some individual marriages might be ones where the husband is bright and competitive and the wife is more of a social type, and their interests lie elsewhere. In which case, WoW's a good way for him to get his gaming stimulation while she does something else.

I have noticed that people who get into these traditional types of relationships are more likely to have firm views about what men do and what women do. I've also noticed that in MMOs they come in contact with people who hold different views and learn how to either work cooperatively with them or lose. In that sense, MMOs are basically a big lab project in getting diverse humans to work cooperatively together despite differences, and drawing a bunch of lines about the unique needs of female gamers, or handicapped gamers, or gamers of different races defeats the purpose.

It doesn't necessarily when you're talking about standalone games where all the heroes are white dudes and all the villains are, say, black women with dreadlocks. MMO players probably wouldn't go for that kind of thing however, and I've yet to see one where a particular race and gender of toon always wins (or always is defeated).

So anyway, I'm tired of tackling MMOs from a separated-gender perspective. I've made a new blog for ranting about Sims 2 and one for talking about WoW, and I'll probably keep this one going in case I feel the need for some miscellaneous editorial verbalizing.