Blog Refocusing Time

I found this gender & games article, which I’m posting because it’s blogrelevant, and draw your attention not to the article but the comments. Which speak for themselves. We have developers weighing in alongside the “that’s why I’m too morally pure to debase myself with games” and “I had a traumatic game experience so I think they should be banned” and other such lobotomized aughties responses.

I note a few things. Developers are saying “relax, we took it under consideration.”

And ya know, if you remove the players, WoW is an incredibly gender neutral experience. Same deal with Sims. But those are the games I play. Of course, as the comments reflect, that “game” means many things to many. It can mean Nintendo, Rock Band, Halo, Mario Brothers, those movie cut scene games where you play through a protagonist (if the dude bragging about being in a meeting is legit, my theory that the people who greenlight these monstrosities are clueless business majors who have never touched a game stands, and developers are losing money by keeping these aging fossils on staff).

I think, from the comments, there has been general a shift in focus regarding entertainment, games, media in general and, by logical extension, art despite the media’s best attempts at convincing us technology is evil and dangerous and warps children. From where I sit, in the near future people will be able to make all the movies and music and games they want while sitting at their computer (and able to download millions of hours of same if they’re too lazy to make their own). The best ones will have the rest of us clicking away at their creations. Maybe they’ll be working for a huge corporation, and maybe they’ll be a bunch of nerds in a garage.
So, is it time to stop writing about this crap, and time to start focusing on these collaborative 3D visions? I’ve been looking at how I’ve changed throughout the course of this blog and my developing WoW addiction (and my shift from omnivorous gamer to monogamous WoWhead, with a little Sims).

A few things have come to mind. First, let me tell you a little about WoW’s looking for group interface. You can now look for a five-“man” (I still keep wanting to say “five person” thus marking me as a citizen of granolaville) instance any hour of the day or night. The mighty Bliz computers calculate your relative ability (via achievements and gear) and plop you into a situation with four random strangers, where you have to perform for twenty minutes (if you’re good) to an hour or more (if you’re not). You no longer have to do your own group organizing.

Although you’re cooperatively interacting with these four people for a precious half hour of your life, you don’t really have to talk to them. In fact, after a couple of weeks of use, social conventions have developed around them to the point where talking is bad form. Talking might get on someone’s nerves and get you Ignored.
If you are Ignored, you are not matched in future groups with people Ignoring you. This limits your possibilities at enjoying this new system to funnel yourself piles of gold and loot while having your twitchy reflexes stimulated constantly.
You can also be voted out of a group if you annoy everyone in it. This is brutally swift. The computer then swiftly supplies you with a new virtual co-worker. Everyone is teleported right in, no annoying travel time.

If you’ll recall my previous complaining, the loot used to be gated by obnoxious folks with gamer skills terrorizing the casuals. You had to go through them to get to the shiny things, and a lot of the time you were forced to deal with a domineering personality with Aspergerian social skills to win the game, which made it sort of an endurance contest.

Now the loot is gated by the (literally) silent majority, who say little but are swift to kick you out if you don’t perform.

What kind of antisocial behavior arises? Oh, the usual, people trying to freeload or see how pissed off they can make other people in twelve minutes. Sometimes you get a thoroughly incompent player. Eventually, once they’re on enough ignore lists, the truly hostile will find themselves only able to group with other creeps, with long waits in the penalty box between runs, and a corresponding lack of loot and wealth and pwnage and power. Fabulous, in my opinion.

Being bad? Well, my old friend, about whose badness I have previously complained, loves the new system because now he can actually complete heroics and get gear. Then again, sometimes he complains because the other players get mad at him and log out. Either way, he gets to see more of the game than before.

Since three out of my five main selves are awesome, I can carry a certain amount of badness, as long as they’re not acting like jerks. And I love LFG, because I can run instances on demand. The social structure is already starting to dissolve because now we only need each other for raids, and there’s even a raid LFG if we want to take our chances raiding with unknown types who might be awesome and then again, might be bad. And who knows, they could be Ozzy Osbourne, or your mom, or your next soulmate. It’ll be interesting to see if this has any effect on game socializing or guild formation.

Anyway, this revolution in decreased exposure to asshats was achieved not by social movements to reprogram the asshats, or by fascistic coercion. It was done by redesigning the fences and pastures, by changing the incentivized behavior. Possibly, the whinings and carryings on of myself and others like me influenced the gamekeepers to attract more revenue by de-incentivizing asshats. You can’t make them go away, but you can turn their mic off.

I feel sort of similarly about the gender-games issue. The tools are there, we just need to wait for the people to grow into them. The game companies have apparently given up on gender and are aiming for cross-gender personality types instead, which makes me happy. I’m much happier hanging out with the fast-typing adrenalin junkies than either men or women.

As the cliché goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two groups, and those that don’t. Those that do appear to be operating from a “dialectic will lead to progress” type standard, and they won’t be the first to try to impose their philosophical views on an unwilling reality, which is too bad, because it seems to have led to a lot of discontent and backlash.

Anyway, until I either think of a better focus or get to work on some kind of book or other creative product, this blog is now just about me, and my rantings revolving around playing video games, primarily World of Warcraft, and whatever else crosses my mental railroad tracks while I'm waiting for a train of thought to arrive.

Happy twenty-teens and may they suck far less than the aughties!