Noobs With Keyboards

I had a lovely weekend playing WoW. My troll is in officially “Superior” gear, I did 25 person raiding and a little bit of 10-raiding, and although there was minor guild drama, the dust seems to be settling and most of the extremely emo have left the guild, leaving the rest of us to pwn things in peace and harmony.

And yesterday morning I came across this piece in Wired by some noob who lacks a character high enough level to explore Northrend and therefore gets all of his wrong information secondhand. And here I thought Wired had relatively high journalistic standards. It’s no wonder the game haters tend to think we’re all sociopaths with crap like this in circulation. But buried deep within the murk of inaccuracy are a couple of interesting thoughts waiting to be fished out and rinsed off.


The whole column seems to concern this quest
and as you can see, a little of the controversy spills over into the comments.

The quest is quite optional. You can skip it entirely, tell the quest giver “no thanks” and be on your merry way (to do other quests where you get to slaughter herds of animals, murder people, steal things and other WoW-type activities).

And a lot of other comments appear in the Wired piece, correcting, among other things, the author’s less-than-nuanced statement that the Alliance is good and the Horde is evil.

Even though his demands that Blizzard change the game engine around to train us in ethical decision making are sort of typical for a noob that can’t even make it to level 70, he seems unaware that the consequences feature has been explored in many other games, most notably Ultima and KOTOR.

So anyway, after reading this noob’s awkward transition from rantwriter to game critic, a little later on I found this piece about the recent gender change announcement in WoW,

“a disclaimer: I have never played "World of Warcraft," or any other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMPORG) . . . As someone who can't even begin to imagine what a "Blood Elf" might be . . . So this is where I turn the discussion over to you, "World of Warcraft" players. What, if anything, is important about the sex-change option?”

This lady isn’t even a noob! She goes out of her way to make this plain several times during her brief allotment of paragraphs – she’s much too cool to ever set foot in a MMORPG, so cool that she can’t even conjecture that a blood elf might be an elf that has something to do with blood.

I suppose these uninformed people writing about what we should be noticing or discussing in WoW are a slight improvement over the kinds of pieces their colleagues were writing in the not too distant past, about how MMOs make people fat and violent and those wanting to be pious and self-congratulatory should avoid them.

Anyway, these smug noobs who can’t be bothered to research the pieces they’re getting paid to write irk me. Why are they working when thousands of worthy decent souls are trying to celebrate the winter holidays including Christmas with their meager unemployment checks? Which editors and/or publishers are they sleeping with to secure these gigs, and can they pitch my article about astrophysics? I know nothing about astrophysics, of course, but I could probably come up with several paragraphs of unrelated fluff rolling my eyes over anyone unhip enough to actually get an astrophysics degree, and I could ask the readers to tell me what (if anything) is important about astrophysics at the end.

Anyway, since I’m free from the kind of word count limitations that affect these noobs, in an effort to help reduce global cluelessness, I’ll answer their questions.

Did I do the quest? Sure did.

As far as prompting discussions re politics and the ethics of torture – when people write bristly editorials about how displeased they are that other people are playing videogames, reading about Britney Spears’ antics or staring vacantly into space when they SHOULD be obsessing on whatever issue is keeping the author of the piece from sleeping, all I see is a big fuss involving someone with a naturally anxious and obsessive brainstyle fretting because they’re not typical, with a slight layer of “I’m better and smarter than you because I am thinking serious thoughts right now, neener neener.”

Did the quest inspire people to suddenly stop grinding and engage in a discussion re Bush-era interrogation tactics? If this happened, I didn't see it.

Did the quest make me feel like alt+F4ing out of WoW and calling my old scribe buddies to recant the error of my shallow pleasure-seeking ways while begging them to include me in whatever anxiety-stimulating links they’re currently forwarding each other? Not hardly. I might write a check for the local soup kitchen though, there are lots of hungry people this year, and although it’s presumptive of me to say so, you should too.

As far as whether people in MMOs get together and discuss RL political issues, for the most part, when the subject arises, people moan and say “hey, I’m playing this game to get away from that stuff, so shuddup before I put you on ignore.” Occasionally a politically related insult slips out. A few of my guildies cheered when Obama got elected, and right now they're snickering about the guy who threw his shoes at Bush. That's about the extent of it.

Do people discuss politics in game using the sci-fi/fantasy framework to explore RL issues without insulting anyone? Oh hell yes, all the time, and in fact this is one of the main functions of imaginative fiction – to veil current events in a mythic framework so people can discuss them without the immediacy and reactionary anger politics tend to invoke. Talking about whether the Alliance is reprehensible for putting the orcs in concentration camps is one thing; talking about the US’s detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII is entirely another (and there’s a chance that the people you’re talking with might have families with personal experience relating to that).

If Tolkein had written a non-fiction book saying Let’s Go Kick Hitler’s Ass during the forties instead of Lord of the Rings, would it have sold as many copies? Or if George Orwell had written The Folly of Stalinism instead of Animal Farm? How about if C.S. Lewis had written My Reply To The Atheists And Utopians instead of the Narnia series? Sci-fi/fantasy is capable of transporting political debate to an entirely different level, and isolating the essence of a particular stance on an issue so that people today can relate to the necessity of kicking Sauron’s ass without getting bogged down in facts relating to 1930’s geopolitics has produced a timeless story about standing up to tyranny instead of yet another history book about Hitler.

So my answer to the first noob is: you know, if you log into your game, grind a few levels, talk to your guildies, you have an opportunity to communicate with and understand the opinions of a diverse population. People who currently read your stuff are not a diverse population. They are people about your age and income level who already agree with you. Once you get to know this diverse population, you can even discuss socio-political issues within game context, and have conversations about whether the Horde is evil, or whether the torture quest is a good idea, without even resorting to red state/blue state partisanship. The discussion you want is there waiting for you. You're just doing an inept job of looking for it.

Or, if you just want to talk about politics and torture IRL, try Second Life, which has plenty of political and BDSM enclaves.

To the second noob: gender in WoW only raises issues when you’re in a pick up group with naïve and young males from regions where calling someone “gay” is an invitation to a fight. There are a lot of them in WoW, or at least it seems like there are because they are vocal, unless you’re on a RP server with mods keeping the lid on objectionable public speech. Personally, I always picture them with meth scabs all over their faces, wearing flannel shirts with holes in the elbows, their keyboards propped up on stacks of official notices that they’re failing school, while their mom screams in the background about someone stealing the last wine cooler out of the fridge. Yeah, it’s probably not true in all cases, but that’s just what I visualize.

Anyway, if you play WoW with friends, family, an established guild or people sophisticated enough to read a news website, these guys aren’t an issue. To illustrate, one of my guildies did a gender change when they first allowed it. I didn’t even notice for several days, until another guildie pointed it out. To me, all the cartoon characters look basically like walking piles of mismatched armor, except of course for the curvy and feminine troll maidens, and the cows that shapeshift into bears and trees (note: the bears and trees appear identical regardless of gender, which made me happy when my druid got bear form, because I was afraid it would have long eyelashes or something). Some of the best players in my guild are dudes playing girls. Nobody gives them the slightest amount of grief over it. They might attract some if they joined a random pick up group full of scrubs, but one of the benefits of being in a big guild full of power gamers is that you never have to do that unless you really want to.

Since I’ve been in the competitive guilds I’ve seen occasional surprise when a buff orc turns out to have a girly voice on vent. As far as the girly toons that turn out to have bass voices, that ceases being a shock quickly.

I can (and have) go on for pages about WoW issues in perceived gender, in gender-related insults, in the gender of the gender most frequently found yelling obnoxious mean things about the other gender in public spaces, about how my guild has a refreshing standard where the guys all say flirty things to each other and pretend like they’re having passionate love affairs with each other, and how I think this is funny and definitely less unpleasant than being surrounded by the kind of people who are constantly denouncing language, graphics, music, movies and speech patterns that they deem unmasculine.

As far as cartoon character gender? Not really an issue. There haven’t even been that many forum threads about it, certainly a very small number in contrast to the number of threads about “girls can’t play WoW.” Most MMO players are accustomed to the concept by now, and gender swapping is only news when it happens IRL. In virtual reality, meh, who cares? If you don’t like your gender, go get a new one, noob.

Microtransactions?

Yesterday I heard some rumors that SOE is incorporating microtransactions into their games and the new KOTOR mmo will be microtransaction based.

KOTOR management swiftly backpedaled and came up with an Official Nevermind.

So I’ll be waiting to see what comes to pass. The idea of KOTOR being entirely microtransaction based turns me right off and makes me want to not play it. It sounds like it would be full of action figure collector types bragging about their super-rare limited edition R2D2 electric toothbrush to each other while angry frustrated griefer types who can’t afford even a Jar Jar Binks t-shirt rage in general chat. Hell with that.

I want my game status symbols to reflect that I did something unusual and noteworthy. Typing a credit card number into a form is not unusual and noteworthy, no matter how much the people who want you to type your credit card number onto their form pile on the flattery. And having to work twenty hours at a dollar per to get a Sword of Lethal Death when my guildie just charged fifteen of them to his card would definitely make me not want to play those twenty hours.

Microtransactions are annoying, but then again so is the status quo.

STATUS QUO:

Gold selling is against the rules and you can be banned for it, so transactions are clandestine.

Gold sellers have been plaguing WoW with spam for their services for some time, but at the moment there is a plague of keylogging throughout the land – I could probably name ten people I know who have been keylogged recently without pondering very much. Keyloggers steal passwords and then loot the victim accounts, probably because this is quicker and easier than old fashioned gold farming, and since the gold farming market is getting large and competitive, progressing from the minor crime of gold selling to the slightly larger one of hacking is more of a business decision than an ethical one.

The elites: people with lots of time on their hands to farm gold, people with connections.

The items the elites buy with their gold are mostly for show but someone with a lot of gold can hasten the boring repetitious parts. Showing evidence that you are successful at teamwork is what actually earns respect – although with enough gold, you might be able to pay people to carry you through either.

IF WOW HAD MICROTRANSACTIONS:

There would be no more gold farmer or leveling service spam (a risky proposition where you give your login info to the farmer so they can play your video game for you while you’re at work or school, which to me sounds a lot like paying someone to eat my dessert for me).

Instead of spammers, there would be a lot of lamers standing around demanding people admire all the stuff they bought and pitching fits when they learn that the other players still don’t want to hang out with them.

Griefing and hacking and keylogging would probably escalate, with real money at stake. “Paypal us a hundred dollars and/or seventeen Swords of Lethal Death, chump, or we’ll keep standing here making it impossible for you to click the clickies.”

It’s hard to say what might happen to the current class of elites. Right now, if you have 60 hours of free time a week to play WoW, you have an edge on someone who only has 10, which means that a lot of the more powerful people in WoW come from segments of the population who have a lot of spare time – younger people, people from rural areas, people with undemanding jobs, people who stay at home taking care of elders or children.

This can sometimes work out just fine, but it can also lead to people with very little maturity or management skills trying to direct people who are too busy exercising those skills on a daily basis to plan raids. (No, I’m not currently fantasizing about strangling that condescending thirteen year old rogue, what makes you ask?)

Possibly they’ll be replaced by people with lots of disposable income who would love to be raiders, who are focused and can keep to a schedule, yet who just didn’t have the time to play endgame in its previous state. But maybe not. Maybe there would just be more impatient people having fits because Target Objective didn’t get accomplished within their thirty-seven minute time block because a thunderstorm in Idaho keeps making the offtank disconnect. Having been exposed to these “even more competitive than me” type players at the start of the expansion, I have developed the opinion that for the most part, these guys are no fun.

Due to the way that WoW sorts players according to equivalent skill and gear, things would probably stratify even further. All the rich kids whose parents will cheerfully buy them 20k gold to get a mammoth to ride will be in one place, and all the kids whose parents love them and would rather interact with them instead will be somewhere else. And all the grownups who can afford their own darn mammoths will be somewhere different (probably far away from the grownups who would have to skip dinner a couple times in order to afford a down payment on one). Then there’s the matter of area. I live in an inflated area where I could probably afford more WoW subscriptions than a player with a similar occupation in Kentucky or Detroit. In a microtransaction-based world, would the people living in apartments in overpriced cities be virtually richer than those who live on palatial ranches in cash-starved areas?

I have a weird sort of bias against buying gold, even though paying someone to do a couple hours of repetitious clicking for me while I’m at work earning the funds to pay for it makes sense.

Although I have never bought gold, I bought SWG credits once. My justification: I took a couple months off and when I got back, due to a game mechanic that I didn’t understand very well (and which was eliminated not long after), all my assets were gone and I didn’t even have the equipment it would take to go out and grind more wealth and replace them. I felt that since the game had robbed me, violating the terms of use in order to set things right was excusable.

So I went to a website, entered my credit card info, talked to a Chinese person (judging from the lettering in their email header) and some toon I had never heard of met me in the starport and handed over the cash. I didn’t get keylogged, I didn’t get busted, and I never did it again. A RL friend of mine who played the same game bought credits a few weeks later, when he (a) wanted the One Weapon Everybody Good At PVP had so he could pvp without being The One Guy With The Crappy Weapon Who Gets Attacked First; (b) didn’t have the gold for one, being that he was a casual player and this amazing weapon cost an amount that would probably take a month of repetitious play to earn (either that or a few hours of dubious business dealings, but that takes startup capital); and (c) had a credit card.

I’ve also had forum buddies who have confessed to buying virtual cash, usually for similar reasons – they want some essential thing that would take many repetitious hours to acquire, and those hours can be erased for a price. Which is the same reason people buy things like computers and merlot and prescription drugs rather than making them at home.

In a certain sense, living in MMOs is a personal rebellion against consumerism. There are no ads other than text-based ones composed by your fellow players and you’re free to put them on ignore if they keep pestering you. We all pay the same subscription fee regardless of whether we’re rich or poor, and unless you’re one of those boring people that insists on constantly talking about their RL status symbols, nobody knows (or cares) about your net worth. Wealth only becomes an issue when your computer has trouble keeping up with the other computers, or when you’re too busy working for real money to play games.

And with regard to WoW in particular, the best stuff in the game is not purchased, it is acquired from teamwork, and the good teams value experience. I frankly can’t picture my guild accepting a new player with purchased gear and no indication that they’d ever been inside a raid instance any more than I can envision someone who likes to play doctor convincing a hospital to accept a cash donation in lieu of a medical degree and board certification.

It’s sort of like how punk rock started out. Want to play music but can’t afford an expensive producer in a leisure suit and an attorney to make sure that there are no brown M&Ms in your dressing rooms for your stadium gigs?

No problem. Punk is for you, only three chords required. Want to wear something fashionable while listening to those three chords but can’t afford that either? No problem, punk fashions can be acquired at secondhand stores.

Want to visit a punk rock enclave to promote your new brand of diet cola-flavored beer? Prepare to be spit on, because punks hate marketing, and branding, and slickness, and anything that looks like you paid some corporate marketing department to be creative rather than Doing It Yourself (DIY), the punk credo.

For a complicated set of reasons, some of which have to do with the DIY ethic, I’ve been on a mass media fast for the last couple of years, about the time I started playing MMOs. At one time I was one of those dreary hipster types who raced around seeing new movies, reading new books, listening to new music. I might have missed five or ten decent movies, books and songs since I started this, I can catch them up later.

This means I have a hard time having conversations with people who love their media so much that it’s difficult for them to communicate without trading pop culture references. However, it’s also helped me to learn how to write for and talk with a more-or-less general audience. Which is something that is an annoying side effect from most writing-for-pay gigs, where you’re locked into a marketing sector and will feel the almighty wrath of the editors if you, for example, put references to the Grateful Dead and Dethklok in the same paragraph, or if you use twenty-something Saturday morning cartoon references for a thirty-something target audience.

I get a strong feeling that a game with microtransactions would shatter that harmony and once again, I’d be stuck with my whiny, complainy compadres, trading references to MTV videos from the eighties while listening to rants about “those young boys wear their pants baggy and their underwear shows!” or “these kids speak in grammatically unorthodox lolspeak!” Personally, if I never hear the word “nowadays” again, particularly from someone whose hair is not gray yet, it’ll be cause for rejoicing. But anyway, there I’d be, with my demographic-appropriate status symbols, listening to people bleat “our subgroup good, other subgroups bad” endlessly, and if I wanted to do that, I’d leave the house.

Besides, many of my demographic peers are too, um, digitally challenged to provide a satisfactory mutual gaming experience. Meanwhile, a lot of my guildies can also type 100+ wpm, but we’ve got a lot of gaps regarding age and income and education. In a virtual world, who are my “real” peers?

My fascination with MMOs lies in the fact that artificial boundaries are rearranged. Money is probably the biggest artificial boundary in most peoples’ lives. I could live with microtransactions if they provided a way for people to bypass the boring parts in exchange for a fee, or if they were merely superficial and let people get different mounts and clothes and other things they can show off (WoW just today announced that now you can change your gender, for a small fee). I can even understand why some people buy cash, especially when the game itself throws you some virtual injustice.

But for major virtual reliance on RL economy, I’m imagining Corporate Cola World, where you spend all your time grinding so you can get virtual logo-covered merch for your virtual friends and where every five or ten minutes, your eyeballs are confronted with sales pitches. There would be no game whatsoever, because that might alienate customers who lose at video games. And communication would be heavily censored because the presence of people with opinions might reflect poorly on public relations.

Yeah, sign me right up for that. Lol.

Whoa, WotLK has been out for over a month

I’ve just been playing the hell out of WoW lately. In summary: I like WotLK, and I think it’s fun. As far as the details . . . since you asked . . .

THE QUESTS

I’ve got a level 80 who is going back to check out all the quests I skipped while leveling up. Yeah, actually, the fact that if I get the “do everything in Northrend” achievements I get to learn how to make awesome purple things as a tailor does factor into that, and so does the fact that it’s an easy way to make gold while being entertained.

And part of it is that the quests really are imaginative. I did a long chain in Dragonblight that culminated with a cut scene. The cut scene happens when you get to a village. When you start the quest the village is quiet, but along the way something happens to the village which changes it. So far as I can tell, after you do the quest, the village will always look different. I also noted that there was a lot less lag flying over it, now that I can see it in its changed form.

I did an Alliance quest organized along similar principles, one of the ones having to do with exactly why there are insane vikings all over Northrend trying to kill you. For that one, you get to go into the spirit world (which makes everything black and white with misty edges), and at one point I was trying to find my buddies but couldn’t because we were occupying the same space on the map, however, they were in the spirit world.

So apparently Blizzard can now isolate players and put them in a virtual delusion. Or half the party can be observing a reality exclusive to them while the rest of the party is observing something else. I think this is sort of novel. There is also much better use of vertical space, so a particular area might have a canyon, a castle and a mountain top in the virtual space it took to place one in vanilla WoW. Add the illusion-worlds on top of that and you get several times as much playable area within the same map coordinates.

There are also different types of quests. Become a dragon and burninate things. Search for the correct ingredients in the alchemist’s lab. Escort quests where the NPC you’re escorting is bigger and tougher than you are, or where you have a squad of NPCs to back you up. You still get sent out to fetch ogre kneecaps and missions to kill ten bad guys, but that’s easier to take in smaller quantities.

THE RAIDS AND INSTANCES

I’m wearing a pair of tier 7.5 pants. Yeah, yeah, they’re shadowpriest pants, but there was no shadowpriest in the raid so I won the roll. This is from a raid boss in a battleground. We got him on the second attempt. That has been my only 25 person raid so far, as the guild is still having a few problems getting a full group together. The raid boss was pretty easy as far as raid bosses go, the fight was still fast paced and exciting.

We are now doing 10 person raids, or rather my guild is; I am mostly running the 5 person instances. I don’t really like the 10raids as much. The ones I’ve been to are easier than the Burning Crusade ones, with a lot less of the “spend forty-five minutes trekking through a long hallway killing trash mobs” type filler.

My first exposure to the instances came right after I hit level 80, when I found myself in a group of Highly Competitive Individuals. Sure, no problem, I’m one myself, right? Well, not this kind. These guys seemed sort of dismayed that I hadn’t done all the instances before in beta, or when they were on test realm, and that I hadn’t studied all the video clips and strategies, and mostly, everyone was in severe denial over the fact that we had gone from extremely good gear to extremely average.

Next, I found myself in a group of guildies that were suffering from similar angst but seemed a little more inclined to express themselves and have tantrums and quit after the first roadblock. And finally, I found myself running with pugs, where I was able to actually get things done.

The instances themselves, including the raid ones, are much improved. Better set decoration, they don’t take as much time and the actual encounters seem faster and more like playing a video game than setting up a long line of dominoes and hoping they fall down in the right direction.

One new development I particularly like is the adjustment to the dreary reputation grind. Instead of doing the same instance over and over, you can wear the tabard for whatever faction you want at the moment and all the reputation you gain in heroic dungeons will convert to that faction.

THE PLAYERS

All the guilds on my server are recruiting, since the expansion seemed to make a lot of people go insane and/or quit playing, or change their character class, or maybe they didn’t feel like racing to level 80 as fast as possible, or maybe they got to 80 immediately and then exploded with frustration because their guildies didn’t share their dedication.

According to popular myth, WoW is now incredibly easy and you can beat it in a couple of days.

[Footnote: well, if you start out with the best gear obtainable from the last expansion, and if you have more than twenty-five people who are all extremely motivated and willing to forego sleep for a couple of days, and if those people were in beta, and on the public test realm, learning the content while it was still bug infested, sure, you can beat it in two days. For the other 99.99%, including myself because I don’t make a practice of providing free beta testing to people I already paid to entertain me in the first place, maybe it’ll take a little longer than two days.]

[I realize this is a departure from my usual frenzied power gaming. I’m looking for a balance between enjoying myself and winning, which hopefully incorporates both. I get irritated both by the impatient power gamers shrieking with frustration over things like sound effects and graphics slowing down their rush to the top and by the people who piddle around in the early stages forever, complaining that everyone who is ahead of them is cheating.]

So if you haven’t beaten it yet, that can only mean you suck, or maybe you’re just fine, it’s the people around you. Which could be the reason for the extraordinary amount of bad behavior I’m seeing lately. Guys that were accustomed to being mighty warriors or powerful mages or whatever, decked out in their Burning Crusade purples and softened by the easification of patch 3, are now gimped, and a great many of their previously reliable tanks and healers have decided to be death knights, or damage dealers, or in some cases, ex-gamers.

For my priest, the nerf bat hit around level 76. Suddenly, the damned monsters were hitting hard, and the quest reward gear had even better stats than my purple stuff, and life was dangerous once again. Things are a lot more balanced playing my druid, who had terrible gear to begin with, but for my previously overpowered priest, becoming mortal was tinged with sadness. But hey, that’s the experience I WANT, correct? A game? Not an easy walk through a lavishly decorated theme park?

I’m spending a lot of time solo, and so far the problem seems to be solving itself as the more reasonable people attain 80 and there are people to run with who aren’t throwing tantrums because they want to WIN right NOW.

IN SUMMARY

I’m enjoying the hell out of this expansion. I haven’t even looked at other games since I installed it, and I haven’t conquered all the content yet, not even close. Everything from graphics to sound to quest writing seems to be improved, as though Blizzard went down a checklist of everything in the game and tweaked each item to be just a little bit better.

It’s easier than “filler WoW” – the game where you had to run the same instance twenty times and then spend another ten hours killing the same mob over and over.

But that's fine with me, overall it's a far more pleasant experience.

Curing Book Addiction

I found this interesting Nick Yee article about the news story yesterday, the addictionology expert in Europe saying “never mind, videogame addiction isn’t really addiction after all.”

So I thought I’d link it for y’all. I especially liked the “book addiction” comparison. As a recovering book addict myself, I thank games for helping me conquer my problem. I've gone from having bookshelves three tomes deep to occasional use of paperbacks while commuting, lunching alone or waiting around in airports, and it's all because of online video games.

Well, games and the fact that my psyche is in disharmony with the current literary cliché.

(I’m talking about the one where a personality-less, affect-less, often nameless protagonist floats aimlessly through a narrative where the timeline is frequently disrupted for arbitrary reasons, witnessing the standard requisite and heavy-handed acts of cruelty, typically animal abuse as a foreshadower to child sexual abuse, and contemplating the meaningless agony of existence until the end-of-book payoff, usually a sloppily written action scene which seems to have been scribbled together while the writer was visualizing endorsing checks.)

(Sometimes I want to blame word processing software for the abundance of novels I don't like, and sometimes I blame the corporate types who run publishing and apparently bulldoze anything quirky into the requisite formula, then double space it and blow the font a little larger so it’s nearly as fat as Gone With The Wind, because apparently books that don’t contain a lot of wasted paper don’t sell as well. But I think it’s probably one of those multiple cause issues, and possibly even a subjective one, because many people seem to enjoy the current stuff.)

I’m wondering if books will start to resemble videogames now that they make more money than movies. Which brings us full circle. Videogames owe a lot to action movies, and action movies are the cinematic translation of glorious old fashioned pulp fiction and dime novels from a distant time when “literature” and “storytelling” were just starting to head in two different directions.

And no, I don’t mean novels based on the World of Warcraft mythos, which so far I have successfully avoided. I mean novels where setting is more important than subjective narrative (because in a game, subjective POVs are a dime a dozen while place takes on even more importance). Where people take their magic/technology for granted, the way we do, without having to waste pages having a professorial type explain in faux technospeak why we should suspend our disbelief. And where the characters use their technology in intelligent ways – thus avoiding the “uh oh, we’ve established that they have cell phones and/or psychic communication but now we need to come up with a reason they can’t communicate because it’s time for everyone to get split up and run around in the dark getting chased by monsters while having miscommunications” syndrome. Where the plot doesn’t seem as though it were structured around the screenplay it presumably will become, and the characters have character instead of being bland shells for the box office sensations from the near future to inhabit, or symbols for the author's bold statements about heated controversies such as "bigotry is bad" or "cruelty is bad" or "cruel bigoted people are bad.")

And speaking of protagonists. The fashion I’m complaining about goes for bland protagonists with a one-size-fits-all perspective. They rarely do things, they spend more time watching dispassionately as things are done to them. This is in contrast to past fashions for protagonists as heroes slash role models, or as quirky individualists struggling against conformity.

In a game, you are the protagonist. Which complicates things a bit, and hands the game designers the challenge of making a story where the outcome is pretty much the same whether the protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara or Boo Radley or Holden Caulfield or Ignatius J. Reilly. They are plot driven by necessity, in a time when literature appears to have decided that plot is vulgar and should be avoided by anyone striving for literary excellence.

I vaguely recall a sci fi series I read in my teens where basically different people got put through the same drill, smart and powerful aliens send them to an unfamiliar planet to accomplish some goal. There were forty or fifty pages of exposition that were identical to each novel in the series, explaining why these wise aliens have chosen this particular forgettable person for this vastly important mission before launching them into their assigned planets. I can’t remember whether they all succeeded, or whether each one went about it differently, or even who wrote it. But I do remember that recycled exposition, and my irritation with it. It might have made sense in a character driven story with completely different outcomes, but in a plot-driven “hey, let’s save the galaxy!” sci fi adventure, it came across as lazy contempt for the readers, like two fingers of soda served in an extra-large cup of ice.

Perhaps this is why so many people in online games strive to distinguish themselves, sometimes by having more status symbols than everyone, sometimes just by being the person saying the most obnoxious things in general chat at the moment. Perhaps the games should allow for this. Certainly that seems to be the approach WoW is taking, with its new sets of goals for cooperative (raiding), oppositional (arena) and solo (PVE quest) play, so that you can be the queen of PVE without ever having to cross paths with the rajah of raiding or the chief asshat of PVP. That seemed to also be what people loved most about the old version of SWG. Similar things are going on in console, with games such as Final Fantasy and KOTOR treating you to altogether different stories around the click action, depending on how you play.

Possibly in a decade or so (sigh) when the games lose that whiff of subversiveness they won't take such pains to focus on the most violent, politically incorrect, and antisocial themes they can find. The music simulator games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are already bridging the gap between the subversive traditions of rock and "fun for the whole family" games where parents and kids can gather around listening to old Journey hits together as they click their controllers.

Books are way past the point of being considered subversive. From older, uh, books that I’ve read, apparently there was a time when lots of people didn’t quite approve of them. Just like games, novels were once condemned as being an immoral influence, and there apparently people in isolated areas that didn’t hold with “book learning” and even into the twentieth century, you often find the idea that “bookish” people are malfunctioning and need to be initiated into the joys of fresh air, sunshine and interpersonal contact.

But now, as the commenter points out, books are considered to be an investment in your education, and the populace rejoices when something like Harry Potter gets kids excited about reading, and the idea that they should be reading something with “literary merit” (whatever that is) instead of popular fiction seems quaint and weird.

Anyway, I commend Mr. Bakker for having an open mind and a change of heart. He even leaves a comment to Mr. Yee’s article. I could make further snarky comments about a rather media-conscious addictionologist sabotaging his profits because he sincerely cares about peoples' happiness and well being, not to mention taking part in an intelligent discussion about the merits of his livelihood in the first place, but I'm too glad it's happening to elaborate further. More of this, please.

Down With Venting (And Other News)

Hey! Mooselips left a comment!! Mooooooooose, come baaaaaaaack!!!! Just get a trial acct and message me, I’ll send you links to places where we can chitchat.

And now the news. Here are some recent stories that I haven’t linked before because I’ve been too busy playing WotLK:

First, my local paper says

“ . . . children who gab on Facebook or play online games are gaining valuable social skills and learning some technology basics, according to a study to be released today”

And here’s some news from the addictionologists that specialize in video games

Keith Bakker, the founder and head of Europe's first and only clinic to treat gaming addicts -- the Smith & Jones Centre in Amsterdam -- says . . . close to 90 percent of compulsive gamers, people with a serious problem affecting their lives, are not addicts.”

For the record, my guildleader has an advanced degree in addictionology (oh, ok, psych), and can be found online leading raids most nights. Since I run into so many people with psych degrees in online games, I’m almost ready to consider gaming a form of therapy.

That mean old Lori Drew got some of what was coming to her. Here’s a grim little note from Slashdot linking to a discussion of an amicus brief with a teaser that says:

unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer.'

Sorry, I’m not convinced. The fact that fraud and libel and harassment are illegal doesn’t mean free speech doesn’t exist. For example, look at this jerk here
who wrote all kinds of trash on Craigslist and now is whining about censorship and claiming he was “just venting.”

Time for one of my periodic vents re venting. I don’t believe in “venting.” I think “venting” is a metaphysical and irrational belief rather similar to speaking in tongues or conducting exorcisms. It is based on a flimsy belief structure that holds that:

(a) spiritual purity is based on a lack of external influences (you know: natural is better than processed, undisciplined kids are more psychologically sound than well mannered ones, undeveloped fields are more noble than buildings);

(b) since humans are incapable of ugly features like rage and aggression in their pure, natural state, if they experience unpleasant emotions they obviously have been inflicted by some external source;

(c) if this should occur, it is crucial that the person experiencing them find a neutral party, such as a therapist or Craigslist, and complain/rage/whine/bitch/moan until they collapse from exhaustion. If they don’t do this, they will retain the negativity forever and suffer crippling psychological injuries.

I think this is a crock, and that angry people are born that way, and that explosions of negativity are rude, and if people want to find likeminded individuals who share their belief in “venting” and practice their little metaphysical rituals together, that’s fine with me, maybe they can sublet a storefront church when the snake handlers aren’t using it. Just don’t aim your heresy at me. I don’t care. I’ll ignore you, possibly say unkind things before ignoring you, and later I’ll laugh about it with all my friends. Get a blog, maybe it'll help you find likeminded folks who will vent back and forth with you all day long, but don't come crying to me.

And if some lawyer sues you because you had to “vent” on Craigslist because I wouldn’t listen, I’ll cheerfully give depositions for the other side about your struggles with anger management and your mystical belief structure. Further, if you’re that guy who started randomly “venting” because the 49 Van Ness was two minutes late last week, yes, I did give you wrong directions, and your delay and discomfort amuse me.

Anyway, those are words from someone who has been watching a great many dudes get all emo and have little breakdowns over the new WoW expansion. I am now on a vent-free diet. Go tell your troubles to your priest, er, therapist. I ain’t interested. As far as legal issues, the First Amendment doesn't permit you to commit slander, fraud, harassment or similar crimes in RL either, kthxbai.

As you might surmise from my anti-venting vent, I’ve also been reading the WoW forums. The “casual v. hardcore” debate rages steadily on. People accustomed to slinging around terms like “noob” have been working hard to get back in a state of overpoweredness so they can resume lording it over everyone. Including me. I hate being underpowered, and for being blamed for the failings of the similarly undergeared.

The game itself though . . . the new instances are a blast. Creative, fun, and best of all, short enough to beat in an hour. I’ve done some 10-person Naxx, and I’ve started to rebuild my epic collection with a couple of sweet introductory purples. My warrior and druid and hunter and two death knights are sitting around idle because I’m having too much fun playing my priest. I made a flying carpet last night, woot. It’s only the slow one, I need a few more points before I can make the good one, but it’s still very cool flying around on my little rug, and I have lots of quests and content I haven’t even touched yet.

This expansion could have been a disaster, considering that it was basically what Star Wars Galaxies was trying to accomplish when it crashed and burned. Alphas have been leveled, classes have been balanced, gear has been devalued and the whole game engine is faster and twitchier. There are differences though. Blizzard has done a reasonable job at treating everybody with respect and handing out enough shiny distractions to keep us all going “ooh” and “aaah” instead of leaving us to fumble around in a half-completed transitional world while being fed promises of the utopian one they’d get around to fixing someday. The annoyances from BC – such as the perpetual time sink of having to run the same overlong instance fifty times, and the terrain designed more around color scheme than geography – have been eliminated.

So far, I approve.