Darth BunnyWabbit

Between MMOs, twitch twitch

2011-12-14T20:30:00.000-08:00

Haven’t touched WoW in a couple weeks. Not since the patch with the raid finder and Darkmoon Fair. It seems very pointless. Maybe I’ll return to my overachiever troll someday, but not today. And SWTOR launches Tuesday (what an excellent time to burn up the rest of my vacation days).

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Heroes of Might and Magic VI. It’s kind of yes-and-no. It’s the classic game with lots of updates, some of which are very much appreciated. For instance, now, when you conquer a castle, all the mines around it automatically change ownership, so you don’t have to repetitiously go click each one. However, somehow this update resulted in extremely long games, and the way to win them is by sheer numbers. So you wind up with a lot of situations where you attack your computer-generated foe, discover he’s got 800 level 1 troops and 400 level 2s while you’ve got only 400 and 200; this means you have to spend some game weeks clicking “next day” rapidly until you close the gap some more, assuming you can produce more units per week than the enemy. Hence, some of the campaign games I’ve been playing take hours and hours to finish. Not sure how this will pan out in online play, and I note that online is “e-z mode” where you get all kinds of buffs and achievements for everything you do.

I’ve played around with Skyrim. I’m not a total Bethesda noob, having played the hell out of Daggerfall, a delightfully sandboxy game set in the same world. I’ve never gotten too far with Skyrim, though. My most accomplished character, a sullen looking little mage, basically ran around the country stealing horses and galloping around checking the scenery. I was disappointed to find no way to sail south to the warmer lands where the cat people live. Something about all that frozen northern European countryside just makes me want to get in a boat and head south (it’s a genetic thing). I may thrash Skyrim to the point where I get nicer looking clothes some day, but for now, did you know that if you jump off a cliff on a stolen horse, the horse will suck up all the damage and die, but you’ll be able to walk away and go pilfer yourself another nag?

And I play Angry Birds, Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my phone, but so far none of them interests me as much as the Kindle app, or asking Siri offensive questions.

I’ve been reading about games. Slate had an interesting series about a bunch of guys playing games I mostly haven’t touched, except for Skyrim.

I’ll comment a little bit on that whole series. One, there are a few references to whether gaming is exclusively a hobby for the rich. Personally, my wholehearted embracing of the gamer lifestyle has resulted in my savings account being healthier than it ever has, thanks to my tendency to want to play games rather than go outside and spend money.

And two, not all gamers are alike. These people who play cut-scene, first-person games, for example. Usually when you encounter games in mainstream journalism they are talking about this sort of experience. However, when I’d talk to other gamers in WoW, we spent a lot of time talking about games that are “pure” games – strategy, football, pattern recognition stuff like Angry Birds and Bejeweled. Not protagonist-identification type games with cut scenes.

I realize the people who are mainly into first person games are out there, mainly because they sell articles, probably because those articles are more accessible to non-gamers who think the entire experience is about being led through some kind of movie-like narrative, and get all confused or derisive when encountering something that tickles a different set of brain cells. One of the reviewers in the series discusses not “finishing” games, and several of them talk about the cost of constantly getting new ones. That tells me they’re approaching the issue in a linear, movie-like fashion. Finish one, on to the next. I think I approach games more like music – “I’m in an XXX mood today, so I think I’ll play a few songs by band XXXX.” It’s not like “ooh, I bought a new album but first I need to listen to that last one I bought.”

Which is how music reviewers listen to albums. Not normal people. Which leads to the question: do game reviewers play their games the same way as normal people? I think it would be interesting to have an article about several “types” of people describing how they interact with games. Not just upper middle class red-breasted robins tweeting from the trees, trying to make sure they attract flocks of likeminded red-breasted robins to peck at the bird feeders while simultaneously chasing off the bluebirds and mockingbirds and whatever all kind of birds y’all mainland people have – I’m not too clear on them, having grown up in the land of the Blue Footed Booby.

I'm throwing the mainland vs. islander slant at it because sometimes it feels similar. The main thing non-mainland people notice about mainland people is how much mainland people are convinced they are the Default Setting for All Of Life’s Experiences. You can chalk it up to imperialism or confirmation bias or whatever, and it does indeed get strong and concentrated in the Northeast and a lot more dilute toward the left edge of the map. This bleeds over into what I’m talking about. A mainlander-style gamer journalist will say something like “These are the types of games people play, and XXX is a good one, while YYY is not a good one.” Someone outside this perspective will say “This is the game that I play, and I think it rocks, but my cousin Jasper didn’t like it so much, he plays LLL, and my sister really likes MMM but her boyfriend thinks it sucks. I dunno, your mileage may vary. But anyway, we all played XXX for this article, and we all had some different opinions.” You can see a little of both in the Slate series, but occasionally there's that fit of "I live in a tiny room full of mirrors and affirmations" creeping in.

Speaking of different opinions, I found myself wallowing in the games-and-gender trenches briefly, when I read a re-direct on Jezebel to this bloggage responding to a gamer article.

A subject that refuses to die.

Here’s my current take on the whole mess. Gamers attract the intellectually competitive. I realized when I was looking through SWTOR guilds that as a whole, gamers like to toss confrontational topics and arguments around, but when I do that in certain crowds, they burst into tears and accuse me of being Satan. I’m insulated in a little bubble of confirmation bias because I work with lawyers, and one thing I’ve noticed about law firms is that they are very inhospitable environments for the kinds of people who hate to be challenged. In fact, I’ve got a standing assignment from one of the partners to try to drag one of his associates into stupid arguments because we’re trying to train him not to rise to the bait when the bad-guy lawyers try that particular tactic. (Then, while you’re distracted by the stupid argument, they waltz you around and try to get away with stuff.)

This frequently means that I fail hard when encountering the confrontation-averse. Now, lots of women are confrontation-averse. For example, if you go check out some feminist sites, you’ll see a lot of official “trigger warnings” right before gruesome rapes/murders/acts of meanness are discussed. This is a consensus cultural practice based on the theory and/or observation that sometimes, people get upset and emotional when triggers are triggered, and that it’s a good idea to aim towards not doing that.

When the very sensitive and the very confrontational interact, well, things don’t bode well for the former. The latter will waltz them around and try to get away with stuff. Because they’re mean, insensitive pigs? No, because it’s a successful tactic – especially against the kind of people who claim they’re being fair-minded before throwing down the guilt trip card. Which, admittedly, can also be a good tactic, except it works better on highly sensitive persons than it does against gamers.

The thing is, gamers are sensitive too. In fact, from the comments on the original article, a lot of guys were reacting with instant hostility towards even the merest suggestion they were being reprimanded by a feminist (i.e. rising to the bait).

In Northern Slobovia, people play loud dance pop when they’re happy and sit quietly when they’re sad. In Southern Slobovia, people listen to loud death metal when they’re angsty and when they’re in good moods, take quiet, reverent hikes while appreciating the beauty of nature. How long can these two countries get along before cultural misunderstandings work their way up to nasty ethnic stereotypes and physical violence?

Feminists come from a perspective of wanting to help make everybody equal. The cosmic nerf bat.

The last thing gamers want is equality. Maybe at the starting line, but if everybody’s at the same place when you get close to the finish line, you’re not doing it right.

And at the same time, gamers can clearly see the value in having opponents who live to fight another day. That’s why we make a point of only killing each other with pretend swords and guns (and it also benefits us if lots of people can afford the pretend swords and guns, because an unlimited flowing supply of worthy opponents is what gets gamers all hot and bothered). We can also see the value in having friendships and romantic relationships with other gamers, because teammates are for the win.

And through writing my games-n-gender blog, I started seeing that I shifted more towards a “let’s everybody have some good competition!” perspective than the “let’s all be equalized” one. In a greater, meta-political sense, I do think certain financial industries need a good hard smack with the nerfbat, because they have forced a large percentage of my potential worthy opponents to be so lacking in funds they cannot afford to play games online. And I think the knee-jerk sexists need to STFU and dial the d-baggery down because it benefits all of us gamers to have more opponents (and consider that if you’re the type of person who really hates women – or any other subset of humanity -- by not being a d-bag in public, you’d be encouraging more of them to play, and you could be stalking them in pvp right now instead of whining about your unfulfilled rage urges like some fail-hearted noob who can’t manage to find a port for his keyboard).

The competition-versus-equality thing at the essential heart of the whole discussion is what needs to be balanced, in my humble opinion. The ideal state for it is somewhere in the middle because it's hellish on either extreme. Dragging sex and gender into it is a distraction.

Looking for SWTOR Guild

2011-11-15T15:28:00.000-08:00

I haven’t played very much WoW lately. I started avoiding WoW in the spring, and I never quite returned, although I did have a brief episode of Extinction Burst where I did a bunch of server transfers and leveled a new character and ran around exploring areas of the game I had previously ignored and joined a new guild, all in an attempt to recapture whatever it was that kept me logging in. Didn’t work. I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling as far as WoW is concerned.

I haven’t given up on games. I’m still constructing Sims 3 houses, and I’m enjoying the Pets expansion, which has removed a lot of the worst features from the pets expansions in the two previous Sims games. Plus it has horsies, and you can not only race them, you can paint them any color you want. I’ve also been playing Angry Birds and Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my new iPhone, which I got basically to replace my dead Kindle and my dead camera. It does those things plus play games and make phone calls, so I approve. The games so far are your basic twitch; not sure if there will ever be a huge complex strategy and/or sandbox game I can play on my phone, but they’re fine for a few minutes of instant distraction when I’m waiting for my PC games to load.

I’ve already signed up for SWTOR, which starts next month, and so DarthBunnywabbit will be turning into a SWTOR blog, assuming I still feel like writing it. Right now I’m looking for a SWTOR guild. They put in a feature where you can join a guild before joining the actual game, so I posted in the recruiting forum and am currently weeding my way through tons of websites for guilds that responded. Hardcore guilds, multi-national guilds, fanfic writing guilds, overachiever guilds, roleplay guilds, guilds that formed in Everquest and guilds that formed yesterday.

One thing I have learned from my past gaming history – relying on random chance means you lose more often. I like being in a guild with people who like to communicate by typing. I like having guildies that don’t feel the need to sling assorted varieties of hate around like dogs marking trees. The random method pretty much guarantees I’ll wander into an enclave of the other type, so I’m pre-screening. I’m not quite going to turn into one of those sheltered orchids who balks at interaction outside the circle of protection, or at least I hope not. I do know that I’ll probably be investing some time in this new game, and I don’t want to spend that time watching crackers with low IQs exchange misspelled insults. I want a congenial-pub kind of environment where I can exchange wisecracks with people I know on a superficial level, so I’m going to go find a promising group to start out with rather than relying on the Fickle Fairy of Random Chance to assign me to a server full of witty repartee where I will magically find a random guild with no d-bags in it.

Actually, I learned a few things from my misspent years as a WoW addict. Navigating guild applications is only one of them. And here, I’ll give you the standard anti-guild applying rant: “Why should I have to apply to a guild, this makes it too much like a job, how artificial and unnatural, blah blah blah.” To which my informed answer is something like, well, of course you apply to a job. You’re going to be spending some time there. It’s a good idea to make sure you’re not going to be spending that time assembling aircraft engines when your real expertise is brain surgery. Sure, you could always go apply for a job that nearly everyone can do, such as preparing french fries. It’s going to suck if you were looking forward to spending lunch discussing brain surgery with other brain surgeons, however.

People sometimes get all quasi-spiritual about randomness – it’s destiny, karma, part of the divine plan, natural. But those same people don’t take random jobs and friends and spouses without going through a selection process. That’s why I’m checking out all these guild websites and crossing off ones with too few members, or too many typos, or unsubstantiated boasting, or d-bags saying d-baggy things in public with nobody telling them to dial it back.

Prowess is another consideration. Some of these prospective guilds are run by people with good track records at winning games. Others are run by people who brag about how they’re going to clean up all the server firsts yet don’t cite any kind of experience doing that. From my experience, every guild will brag internally about its awesomeness, regardless of the amount of fail actually present. That’s a human nature thing. We humans like to sort ourselves into little groups so we can discuss our superiority to all the other groups amongst ourselves. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger Effect, we are all above average (or at least, we perceive ourselves to be above average). Since all guilds claim to be way above average, distinguishing a guild that is pretty good at gaming from one that is pretty good at boasting can be a challenge.

Just by virtue of being in a guild, I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of discussion with my new guildies about how awesome we all are for having the good taste to be there, all of us being above-average together. The dark side of all this hyper competency involves talking smack about everybody else. WoW has made me very conscious of this tendency. If a group is focused too much on staying ahead of the guy behind them, rather than looking forward toward the finish line, you wind up with a cultish sort of experience, with lots of activity policing and loyalty tests and other BS. There’s a very subtle difference between “our guild will excel in this game” and “our guild will pwn all the other guilds in this game.” The first guild is more likely to have achievers in it. The second is more likely to be full of bullies with confidence issues.

I’m getting dangerously close to portraying myself as some kind of paragon of correct behavior, so I thought I’d mention my mean sense of humor. I’m not going to list all my virtuous achievements to reassure you that I’m not really a mean person. I’m occasionally mistaken for one though, especially when I’m laughing at something foul and distasteful. Plus I like to play villainous characters. Which brings us to the Sliding Scale of Virtual Morality.

I’m really tempted to go into some anecdotal experience here, about the disconnect between people who spend their days saving lives and/or being nice to people and their nights saying outrageously mean things in raid chat. And the other disconnect, between people who are constantly eager to denounce others for saying mean things … then you talk to them for a while and learn they’re pretty much jerks in real life. To further complicate matters, sometimes people are stone cold d-bags in real life but are friendly and cooperative in game. Or maybe they are partisans on some issue the pundits regularly paint in shades of black and white – politics, religion, and so on – whether they rant about it at every possible opportunity or whether they keep their mouths shut until directly challenged. It might even involve the degree to which intra-group insulting is tolerated – whether it’s an abrasive kind of place or one where everybody needs to be on their best Care Bear behavior at all times.

There are no clear lines on the SSVM. It basically involves walking a tightrope between “will the group laugh or report me for this joke?” and “will my comment to Player X about her lack of DPS cause her to log out in tears or laugh and tell me to shove it?” As someone who is even more addicted to wisecracks than gaming, understanding whether my mean sense of humor can be openly displayed in public is an important consideration. And at the same time, there are certain kinds of wisecracks that set my teeth on edge, such as endless repetition of “that’s what she said.” I want to be in a wisecracking guild, but it has to be the right kind of wisecracks.

I’m actually leaning toward this one guild that has a frequently-posting member who actually has a picture of himself, naked, in his signature file. It’s a pretty unflattering picture, and nothing NSFW is on display, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it. It’s pretty clear there wouldn’t be a lot of walking-on-eggs-so-as-not-to-disturb-the-easily-disturbed in that guild.

Another guild made mention in their code of conduct that they do not tolerate racism … unless it is in-universe racism. Go ahead, call people nerfherders and refuse to allow droids in your drinking establishment all you want. That’s something I tend to really enjoy in virtual realities; bigotry toward alien races. It preserves all the amusing parts of being a bigot, adds the enjoyment of improvised acting, and has absolutely no negative repercussions whatsoever. Nobody is getting denied any jobs or scholarships or apartments or anything of tangible value. No little kids will be tormented on any playgrounds for physical characteristics outside their control. No bodily injury will be inflicted. Instead, humor will be enjoyed, and people will laugh. They may even reflect on how stupid it sounds when people take bigotry seriously.

It's going to be tough choosing, and the fact that so many of these SWTOR guilds have websites full of text and posts by people who clearly enjoy typing and reading and talking warms my heart. I think maybe I'll find the SWTOR crowd far more to my liking than the WoW playerbase.

Guild Drama

2011-08-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

The guild I was in from March 2008 to about May of 2011 just folded, and the leader retired his account. We were the number one 25-raid horde guild on the server for a while there.

I recently gave Blizzard more money than they probably deserve to transfer my toons off my server of origin. My main, the troll priest, is in a social guild I found via a blog I like, where I leveled my shaman. By the time I got the shaman to level 85, I was so blown away by the fact that guildchat was in complete, intelligible sentences – and didn’t consist primarily of whining, posturing and hate speech – that I transferred even more toons to that server, just to hang out and watch guildchat crawl while pursuing whatever Azerothian obsession had me hooked at the moment.

I didn’t say goodbye before I left. I could easily come up with a big whiny rant about how they were mean and froze me out of the only viable group of 10 they had going, but to be honest, there was quite a lot of “I’m not going to heal that guy because he’s a hate-spewing d-bag and I’d rather /mock his corpse” going on from my end.

10-raids are intimate. There was nobody in that guild I really wanted to be intimate with. And we couldn’t pull 25-raids off any more because we always ran with about 15 core people and 10 who claim they watched a youtube video once, and previous raids were amenable to that.

When I joined it, there was one control freak of a guild leader, Decade. He worked in academia (/eyeroll) in the psych department (/eyeroll), specializing in addictionology. He was one of the biggest WoW addicts on the server.

Now. I might have mentioned his personal style of keeping everyone in check was to pretend every guy in the guild was gay and was having a massive gay orgy and affairs with everyone, and to claim various guys left their pants at his house, or were servicing him under his desk, or chained up in his back room like the geek. This definitely kept the hate speech down, but in kind of a twisted way. And the more I raided with other guilds, the more I realized that this “Polk Street bathhouse in the ‘70s” style of management was unusual. There have been gay people just casually talking about their relationships in every guild I’ve been in, but this was this weird layer of roleplay inserted between WoW-talk and RL-talk.

As it so happens, one of my good buddies was actually inside Polk Street bathhouses in the ‘70s, then during the ‘80s he was an overworked grief counselor and activist, and now he’s this middle aged guy who looks like somebody’s dad hanging around Home Depot deciding what kind of brackets to get. I asked him once if he knew why straight guys roleplayed being over-the-top and he had no idea. I think at some level it can be like a dominance thing, an attempt at public humiliation to test whether your rival will freak out or play along. However, I note that guys have an immensely wide vocabulary in that particular department and can center it around football, business, politics, fandom, musical tastes, pretty much any damn thing you can think of, dudes will find a way to compare size over it. I further note that when people vocalize regarding gay sex every thirty seconds or less, it tends to mean they are both interested in the subject and not engaging in it. I even furtherer note that, from personal experience, you can spend an entire dinner at Chow on Castro Street up to and including the gingerbread with pumpkin ice cream dessert (which I recommend) and not hear a .001th as many references to gay sex as one would hear in one of my guild's average raids. Yeah, yeah, I’m unique and cloistered and I live in a city renowned for gayness, but this whole situation was a total headscratcher for me, a hippie anthropologist wandering into deepest darkest flyover territory. The horror, the horror. And truthfully, I haven’t seen it in any guild since.

So part of my raid addiction, actually, was trying to figure Decade out. Was he a closeted straight? A gay dude living in some island of heterosexuality who could only express his true nature in sideways fashion? A conservative trying to be funny? Was he actually cruising guildchat, looking for naïve young men to chat with in private? All I could really gather was he was a neurotic control freak with an ironclad addiction to the game, or actually, to winning the game. I never saw any indication he was into lore, or goofing off with vanity items, or PVPing. He just wanted to win, and anyone could hang out with him as long as they didn't present obstacles to his winning.

After I initially started raiding with these guys, I went through a “that was nice, now let’s find another distraction” stage, back when I leveled my druid. I took a month off, reappeared in Decade’s guild, and every night, without fail, a raid invitation would pop up on my screen. I never asked, but I nearly always accepted.

They were always invitations to 25s. I severely miss 25s sometimes. There was enough peer pressure so that anyone trying to clog up the proceedings with attention-getting antics got smacked down fast, and there was always at least one really good wisecrack per night.

The main addictive part, for me, was watching how people worked together to accomplish things, or fail. Some nights, everything flowed like music, fights were effortless, conversation was funny and everybody scored new shiny things. Other nights, fail after fail would occur, followed by blamestorming and raging. Things were complicated by the fact we rarely had the same crew twice. The really, really addictive part was Finally Winning That Fight after working hard at beating it. That's just an incomparable rush.

In addition to the camp roleplaying, Decade was a memorable and colorful rager. He could rant in that special way of fussy control-freak guys. I think having an excuse to rage out was part of the game’s appeal for him too. Unfortunately, especially towards the end or when he got drunk, a lot of his rage would be based on bad data. He would be upbraiding people for failing at something they did last week, when someone would remind him that half the people from last week weren’t there, and this crew had never done it before.

One of my favorite examples was this particular fight in Ulduar where he used to rearrange the raid groups. The healers hated this, because we all use addons that move our bars around, so something like “group 2 will go left” is useless if you’ve got people arranged in a different order. And Decade, being massively impatient, would rant about what bad healers we were for making him wait around while we reconfigured.

Toward the end of Wrath, he rolled a druid, and decided to try to heal. This amused me; I was raiding as a resto druid on my ally toon at the time. We got to the aforementioned fight, and the raid leader – Decade couldn’t raid lead while healing, he quickly discovered – rearranged the groups. This sent him into a total panic attack, and I didn't see him play his resto druid much afterwards.

I wrote about this tendency toward misdirected rage on the guild forums once, and got back some hysterical in-game email accusing me of being the worst WoW player ever. All I can do about that is shrug; I rarely asked for an invite, I nevertheless got one every night, and I appear in about 90% of the progression kill screenshots over the time we were raiding, from BC through Wrath. And from running instances, I’m well aware of the fact that my status as most awesome healer in the universe can quickly change to feeblest player to ever get past the login screen, depending on who I’m randomly assigned to. I logged a ridiculous amount of raid hours during those three years. All from trying to figure out that mysterious “successful group” versus “imploding nebula of fail” magic.

Decade abruptly quit the game last year (then he came back and changed his name and made a new guild, then he abandoned that guild). One of the guys who had assumed some authority under Decade’s rein took over, Chaos. He was this scientist dude who liked to PVP, and was the sort of guy who would take up leadership due to a sense of responsibility but probably wouldn’t seek it out. He merged with another surviving 25-raid guild on the server towards the end of Wrath, to try to keep the magic going. He also brought in a bunch of PVPers, and soon guildchat was full of typos and guys accusing each other of buggery.

The whole locker room roleplay pretty much ground to a dead halt after Decade left. Unfortunately, it turned into more of a “ur so ghey!” “cut it out f*!” kind of world, and I was already on the record for being a snobbish liberal beyotch from the land of Harvey Milk. Fortunately, by this time I had been raiding in various groups on my various other toons and realized that yeah, actually the norm is to have a situation where people are in fact talking about how to successfully win the game rather than sex.

Around the time my bunny passed away, I took a break. When I came back, I started transferring all my toons. I’ve got my mage and warrior off on different servers, and my main’s in a social guild in a place where I can pug raids. I thought of finding another guild to raid with, but I’m not even sure I like this game enough to want to devote that kind of attention to it any more.

SWTOR’s coming soon. I’ve already paid for my limited edition digital download.

Better Than Sex

2011-07-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today on that endless fountain of hard hitting news (Jezebel): survey indicates women enjoy online gaming more than sex.

*raises hand*

A lot of gamers are into talking about sex. Which always kind of creeps me out, as I imagine a lot of gamers are not people I find sexy.

Now I've had sex, and in fact I live in the sex capital of the US. Even my neighborhood grocery store is a hotbed of wild sex

The Marina Safeway supermarket is particularly notable for its swinger scene — it is frequently listed as one of the city's best pick-up spots and is affectionately known as the "Singles Safeway" or more recently, "Dateway." This concept was first popularized by the San Francisco author Armistead Maupin in his late 1970s novel "Tales of the City", a television mini-series which has been broadcast on PBS.

You can't even get a pizza around here without sex all over it.

It's what you call a sex positive town. We're in favor of everyone having all the sex they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. It's not the kind of place where everyone's all up in your business, telling you what you should like, and when, and with who. And, contrary to what some might expect, we manage to get along this way without a lot of death, tragedy, madness, etc., which could possibly imply that no, the universe will not implode if you have culturally unusual sex.

So in this utopia of tolerance, I identify as an unsexual. Due to tangential medical issues, I have no fertility cycle or reproductive capacity or any of that troublesome stuff for several years (and don't miss it), and I have a bad back that would get in the way of actually having sex assuming I had the desire to. My last romantic relationship peacefully dissolved about the same time these issues arose, and I really didn't see the point in finding a new partner to not have sex with, especially if they might try to get me to do housework or all those other things we tend to forgive our partners for if the sex is good. I've had lots of great sex in the past, but I refuse to discuss it because kissing and telling is tacky.

I've always been straight, despite certain peoples' best attempts to convince me otherwise, but my total lack of enthusiasm was leading me to describe myself as a "nonpracticing heterosexual" or "retired." I wondered if maybe I was an "asexual", until I found out there was such a thing as the "asexual community" and it seemed to be every bit as annoying and dramatic as all those communities that involve sex. So I think I'm coming out as an unsexual.

Being an unsexual is probably not grounds to complain about marginalization because we really aren't. Some unsexuals probably marry each other for cover in places where power tripping sexuals will give them a hard time if they don't, and occasionally one of us marries a sexual and prompts long whiny letters to advice columnists. But it's not like anyone really discriminates against us. They don't even seem to mind when we go around parading our lifestyle via our clothing choices (baggy sweaters, reasonably priced jackets, flat shoes, underwear concealed beneath outerwear).

I probably couldn't relate as well to unsexuality back when I was younger and sexual, and assumed everybody else was bobbing around in a similar hormonal tide. If they weren't, they were "repressed" -- a sneaky Freudian way of saying "I'm normal and you're either like me or screwed up, nyah nyah." I see that at work in games all the time, where Player A brags about the alleged superb sex it just had in an attempt to make Players B and C feel loserly and frustrated.

For some reason (probably sexual competition), sexuals like to pretend that everyone is just as sexual as they are. They like to represent that their sex adventures would cause everyone else to be be consumed with jealousy, revealing a curious point scoring method built into their own experience of sex. Some of them no doubt read the Jezebel headline that inspired this and thought "no way!"

Since you can't actually have sex in an online world, the subject of sex is basically tactical. It can involve group bonding (occasionally through exclusion as straights gang up on gays or boys gang up on girls), greed (I'll make my avatar dance naked on the mailbox if you give me some gold), demoralizing opponents, inflation of social status (hai guyz I posted pr0n on guild forums o.o), or the kind of super-below-the-belt insulting that goes online where you can't see other peoples' faces and have to escalate somehow.

It's entirely possible that watching sex conducted in entirely tactical fashion, with all the visual and aesthetic pleasure edited out, pushed me towards being the proud unsexual that I am today, but I'm more of a "born this way" person than an "environmental influence" person.

So my answer to the question of whether online gaming is more fun than sex is a resounding "hell yeah!" And I suspect that's true for a lot of people.

Cert Granted – Supreme Court Rules Video Games Covered by First Amendment

2011-07-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

I have, so far, had one “argument” IRL regarding the recent Brown v. EMA decision, with some friend of a friend at a friend’s house (since I stopped raiding I occasionally can be seen at friends’ houses, although they can’t come inside mine until I do something about that floor).

It ended quickly. The FOAF said something along the lines of “so, do you approve of little children buying pornography?” I looked him right in his aging ‘70s-kid eyes and said “buy pornography?” With my eyebrow raised (see illustration above) in its default position. As in, c’mon, it’s 2011, most people don’t buy pornography, or violent imagery either for that matter. I’m pretty sure that you know how to find all that stuff, since you can figure out how to access a blog. The convenience store might have all its copies of Playboy hidden on a special rack that might obscure any scary cleavage on the front cover, to protect children, but any kid that knows how to run around on the internet, or has a friend that does, has already seen plenty.

A lot of people against the decision seem to be mainly concerned about how the US restricts access to sexual imagery more than violent imagery. The motion picture ratings boards will indeed put a higher age restriction on films showing nekked people performing the old in and out (that’s a Clockwork Orange reference, regarding a film that was rated X for violence when it first came out) than they will on films showing mean people committing creative forms of murder. The ESRB, I think, is a little bit more balanced, as well as being fully voluntary. Parents who don’t want their kids playing anything naughty can screen the games their kid buys. Negligent lazy parents can continue drinking beer while their kids watch porn and death on youtube. Nobody is obliged to step in for the lazy parents and say “I’m sorry child, you may not purchase this media for six more years, at which time you will be psychologically equipped to handle it.”

I read a history book recently where there was an account of some kids orphaned under gruesome circumstances I won’t digress into, and the contemporary reporter said something like “thank heaven they are all so young, they’ll get over it, someone older might have been scarred for life.” Which is the opposite approach we take these days.

Regardless of the relationship between psychological resistance to shocking images and one’s 18th birthday, what this decision really represents is a solid, judicial, “No. That is incorrect.” with regard to the theory that video games are some kind of super duper new media with the mysterious power to turn law abiding kiddies into depraved serial killers. The Supremes found absolutely no truth to the theory that playing video games warps a child any more than various kinds of unregulated or laxly regulated media such as video, popular songs, comics, manga and novels. In fact, this whole anti-video game argument is taken right from the pages of the ‘50s crusade against unwholesome comic books, which were represented as also having super duper child corruption powers.

But the proponents of this super duper theory can’t prove it in court. The opinion mentions the junk science they introduced, noting a lot of it consists of correlation studies that have nothing to do with causation.

Now if only science could figure out why certain people are compelled to waste thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer money pursuing junk science claims under a concern troll halo, and why those people have such a tough time admitting they're wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their wrongness.

The Death of Star Wars Galaxies

2011-06-24T23:46:00.000-07:00

Another death. This time it’s Star Wars Galaxies.

Here’s an interview with Smedley.

And a few words from Raph Koster.

And Sony’s apparently having a bit of market difficulty these days too. Maybe all those combined bad vibes from NGE discontents so many years ago worked their way through the ectoplasm plane and laid down a severe case of dark side of the force on their doorstep. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of a bad strategic decision which drove us gamers nuts, sort of like watching a blackjack player draw to nineteen when he’s betting the money he owes you.

Smedley’s right though. It was THE sandbox game. And it makes me sad to think that all the virtual spaces I frequented will soon no longer exist. The pink fields of Dantooine, the creepy overcast peaks of Dathomir, the sandy expanses of Tattooine, the tropical beaches of Yavin. As well as my billion credits, nightsister armband, rare lightsaber crystals and art collection. And the romantic café where my avatar spent hours cuddling with my last ex’s avatar, between the move and the breakup.

It’s a different era than nearly a decade ago, when I had a rabbit bouncing around inspiring my gamer handles and MMOs were something daring and weird that teenagers and hardcore nerds played which would probably turn them all into fat serial killers. The technoluddites are still around, posting comments about how oh dear, computers will destroy our children and give us all herpes, on the internet, but these days nobody pays attention to them and the New York Times has a video game page where it reviews games.

Games themselves, meanwhile, are still sort of stuck. Having learned there is big money in games, corporate types seem to be focusing on one summer blockbuster at a time rather than five hundred B movies that will all find their niche. The main sellers are leaning more in a narrative, theme park direction than the sandboxy-type stuff I personally cherish. Everyone (including me) is sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for SWTOR.

It was crazy back then in the wild wild west, though. You could tool around in pink spaceships playing in a band. I did that. I’ve still got some of those songs in my head today, and I hope someone preserved it all on youtube somewhere in case I feel nostalgic.

And unfortunately (or fortunately in some cases) I’ve sailed in different directions than every single person I connected with in SWG, although I made a good try at continuing the relationship – except Lifa. I’m looking forward to seeing ya in SWTOR one of these days, Lifa. I have fond memories of the time you and I were both up at dawn doing jedi quests. And our first server first.

I might have some screenshots somewhere, if they weren’t all on the computer with the hard drive that assploded. And if I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the little café my Ithorian chick set up to do her banking and selling, wearing her tight 70’s-ish bellbottoms. There was a front room with couches for waiting customers and a glass case full of pies. There was a tiny bar covered with lightsaber crystals and bottles, where I did esoteric things with holograms to give it moody blue lighting. And there was the restaurant itself, with waitress and busboy and chef vendors all reciting their lines, and a row of tables, each carefully set by me, with me-fabricated food bearing custom sarcastic names.

All soon to perish in a great unplugging. I feel a vast disturbance in the force.

OMG Is This A Pet Blog Now??

2011-06-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

I’m still seriously missing the little guy. Thanks everyone for the nice comments and sympathy. He was just a little rabbit but at the same time he had a gigantic personality, and having him gone left a large void in my life.

My cat was grieving too, so I had to get a second cat. That’s the short version.

Here’s the (too) long version: rabbits bond strongly to other beings and have a hard time just sitting around being alone. Some beings are fine with sitting around being alone, such as myself. Of course, I can just get on the computer, if I want to talk to people. Animals, especially the needy bonding-prone variety, need constant social stimulation, and so I figured another needy animal would be a perfect bunny companion.

So I got a Ragdoll cat, after doing some breed research to find out what breed of cats have minimal prey drive. Absolute lack of agro was at the top of my list, followed by neediness, and Ragdoll DNA is rich in both. They also happen to be the largest breed of domestic cat, and are rumored to be part space alien.

I contacted the official breed organization, assuming they would point me toward people actually interested in furthering that particular breed, as opposed to being interested in trying to make a quick buck raising animals under heinous conditions. I could rant further, at the risk of turning this into one of those animal rights blogs, but if you’re getting an animal intentionally (as opposed to the regular way where you find one or somebody gives you one with no warning), please do some research.

Anyway I ended up with a little baby kitten, Tallulah, which I successfully introduced to the bunny. Theirs was a relatively smooth relationship. They never got to the public displays of affection bunnies go for, but they were fond of each other. The cat would hug the bunny, and swat him gently with her claws non-extended, and lick his cute little bunny face. They would eat blueberry yogurt together from the same dish. If it got really cold, they might curl up with their backs touching each other.

The bunny was mean and domineering and imperious to the cat, although he did like her in general. I went through this whole bunny-cat introduction process where I ceremoniously fed them on the same platform, except bunny’s was a little higher, and he got served first. That’s because bunnies are rule-worshipping, status-conscious little fascists, and need social recognition. And also because cats are lazy anarchist stoners who need constant repetition of a rule before they internalize it, and I wanted her to recognize him as alpha and not try to eat him.

She loved him despite all the torture, and never harmed him, even though she grew up to weigh 14 pounds to his 6. Once he started getting old and frail and had to live out the last of his days in a cage, Tallulah got more and more anxious. That bonding thing. Yowling, clinging, pacing in circles, losing weight.

So I started thinking about getting Tallulah a pet of her own, to keep her company. Not another rabbit, Varmint had an infectuous bunny thing (pasteurella) and the vet advised against getting a new bunny for a while, just to make sure it’s cleared up.
And not a dog, because I’m too lazy to walk one, plus they’re loud.

So another cat. Not only that, another cat with a complimentary personality. A cat that wouldn’t teach her how those front claws work. A needy, bonding cat. Another Ragdoll, and a male one, since Tallulah seems to prefer boy animals to girl ones, based on a limited number of introductions. But one from the shelter, a grownup one. Purebreds get surrendered too, and I wasn’t about to do the kitten thing again.

I wasn’t going to introduce another cat to stress Varm out during his last days. I figured I’d start looking while we were grieving and life was upside down anyway.

On his very last day, while fidgeting and waiting for the hour of death, i.e. vet appointment, to arrive, and feeding Varm his last meal of a strawberry cupcake with a side of banana walnut muffin, I went to petfinders.com, which is a database that lets you search for adoptable animals using all kinds of filters. People from shelters/rescues post there. I did a search for all the adult Ragdolls within 100 miles. Several popped up.

One caught my eye. Male, a year younger than Tallulah, looked exactly like her … except the same color scheme as the bunny. This cat looked like their mutant love child.

Not only that, but he happened to be declawed. I’ve never had a declawed cat before, and wouldn’t declaw one, since it’s mean, but somebody else already did the dirty deed. Here was a perfect match for my wimpy bunny-snuggling girl cat. And, y’know, if I decided to someday get another bunny, perhaps, he would be extra low risk.

So after the vet visit of doom, I cried and drank vodka and rearranged the furniture and contacted the rescue that had this cat and started pathetically begging for him, and a few days later I drove down to get him. He was even bigger than I expected. Nearly 18 pounds and fluffy. Tallulah’s a pretty big girl, weighing in around 14 pounds, but this guy is seriously large, with a personality not unlike Dude in The Big Lebowski. So I named him the big Kahuna.

I did an elaborate introduction process, starting with separate rooms, gradually getting them used to each other, complete with lava lamps, Barry White and cat pheromone dispensers. They’re doing pretty good, occasional cheek rubs and chasing, but no real agro. Tallulah’s a lot calmer. Kahuna’s got his own armchair next to my computer chair, because he doesn’t fit in my lap, and also this way I can pretend I’m Han Solo and tell him to fix the warp drive.

I had a lot of that creepy depressed heart-turned-to-cement bereavement thing going. Dunno if I’ll want to touch Medieval Sims again because I’ll always associate it with bunny hospice care, but I’ve been playing WoW again, sporadically, and I’ll write more about that later.

In Memorium

2011-04-28T23:18:00.001-07:00

Varmint Silverthief Von Lopp died today, at the age of 9 years, several months. I don’t actually know how many months. When he came into my life,he was the size of a guinea pig. I counted backwards from puberty and decided he was born in mid-December of 2001, and later on when he started getting injections every other day, I gave him Keith Richards’ birthday, December 18.

He came into my life in convoluted fashion. Without getting into too much gruesome detail, my housemate returned from an errand to fetch dinner for our pet snake with a guinea-pig sized, gray and white, lop eared bunny instead, informing me it was the only small gray rabbit in a cage of large white rabbits, being sold as food. It charged out of the cardboard box and glared ferociously at the snake lurking behind the glass.

Faced with this tiny combination of adorability, vulnerability and hardcore attitude, I fell in love.

Shortly afterwards I found myself shopping for a large rabbit cage, and some rabbit food, and a rabbit brush, and rabbit water bottle, and several rabbit toys. I had decided that there was some mistake, that this was actually a Pet Rabbit accidentally sold as a Food Rabbit. There really is no difference. White lab rabbits, dwarf rabbits, lop eared rabbits. All the same species, all descended from European stock. But I figured I had a big guinea pig or something that could live in a cage, with a gravity bottle and an exercise wheel.

I didn’t even know if they could be kept as housepets. I soon discovered that yes, there were such things as House Rabbits. And that I was being incredibly naïve with this “cage” business. And that keeping an animal capable of speeds of up to 30 mph trapped in a box was … bad.

And I also learned that there were a great many rabbits in shelters, and that way too many people get them at Easter and then dump them after deciding they’re not worth the effort. There are groups, rabbit rescues, that try to save as many as they can that are dumped at animal control and find new homes for them. But usually they get euthanized.There aren't a lot of people who want to deal with rabbit lifestyle accommodations. I decided I was going to be one of those people. Once you decide you're gonna do something, do it all the way.

So I kept Varm in his box only when he wasn’t being supervised, and proceeded to wrap every wire in the house with gnaw-proof spiral cable wrap. I ordered a case of this stuff from Radio Shack. Applying it gave me blisters. It worked pretty good though, and Varm eventually gave up on even trying to gnaw wires, and gave me a break on gnaw-proofing new appliances.

Meanwhile, he ran around. He watched TV and listened to music. He went through a period of stealing things – shiny silver things – and we found little stashes around the house of dropped chains and bits of foil wrappers. He occasionally hopped three feet straight up, just for the hell of it. He spent several days carefully practicing a hop with midair reverse.

He was litter trained, and used his box faithfully. I wish I could say he didn’t destroy a lot of stuff around the house, but he did; couple thousand bucks worth of oriental rugs, various newspapers and books. I finally just started giving him his own texts to deconstruct so he’d leave mine alone. It was sort of satisfying watching him zealously shred a bad novel or election pamphlet.

I had him neutered about a week after puberty. Until then, no dangling arm was safe. He would lurk in the hall waiting for passing ankles, and he got jealous of my boyfriend and demonstrated the rabbit special ability of peeing on someone while running past them at high speed. Another one of those unique rabbit body language communication deals.

They communicate in body language. Quite expressively, I might add. Makes up for the fact they don’t vocalize, unless they’re in major pain. They also can’t throw up. This means you have to be careful to not let them eat anything unwholesome. This was rough because Varm was quite a gourmet, in addition to being a music lover.

Seriously. He would lie on my lap licking my arm at the tempo of the music that was playing. He liked things with lots of notes: bluegrass picking, surf guitar, slack key, Mozart. When he was small I used to regularly have guitar jams, and if we hit just the right peppy groove, he’d go nuts and start hopping around. He did the same thing when there were touchdowns on TV, or fanfares. Clearly he missed his calling as a celebrity, although he did get to be a Disapproving Rabbit once (during a failed attempt to take festive Christmas pictures).

As far as being a gourmet, Varm was spoiled with fresh organic produce. Cilantro was his favorite, although he also enjoyed carrot tops, and parsley. After he was eight or nine I started relenting a bit with the junk food, and during his last year, when he had trouble maintaining his weight, he got all kinds of decadent things (in small quantities): girl scout cookies, banana cream pie, cupcakes.

Here are some of the awesome things he did:

For several years, when I went to bed, he would come running at full rabbit speed into the bedroom, do a flying leap onto the bed, climb on top of my chest and lick my nose until I fed him a raisin. I can’t say this is the absolute best thing anybody’s ever done to me in bed, but it’s up there.

He taught everybody rabbit body language,including the cat. For example, when a rabbit wants to inform you that you suck, it will get your attention, then conspicuously turn its back on you. The cat learned this quite easily. Then there’s the one where they carefully regard something, then run away from it while shaking their back feet as though they’ve stepped in something disgusting. And the confrontational head butt, which is a little different than the pet-my-ears-now head butt.

He challenged vacuum cleaners. He would run right up and put his front feet on it like some kind of crazed environmental activist protecting the dust bunny sanctuary.

He growled. Since bunnies don’t normally vocalize, this was basically an aspirated sound, like saying “rrr” without touching your palate with your tongue. He first growled when the housemate left a mostly-empty box of Cheez-Its on the floor. Young Varm proceeded to wedge his head into the box while pursuing Cheez-Its and got stuck. He ran around panicking for a couple of seconds, probably with salt and/or crumbs in his eyes, until he escaped. For a very long time after, he would growl when he saw anything that looked like a red rectangular Cheez-Its box. Housemate had this red notebook he would hold up and Varm would bellow “rrr!”and charge straight at it.

He could throw things. He threw toys and other items he disapproved of, grabbing them in his teeth and flexing his powerful neck. The most memorable time was when he disapproved of my lack of promptness in cleaning his litterbox, and threw the litterbox scoop at me.

He forced one boarding place to do a redesign in the way they kept boarded rabbits. That was when he figured out how to climb and/or hop over a 3’ pen. On one occasion, he invaded the neighbors, chased them into their hide box and stole their food. On another, he made it all the way into the front office, perhaps to call for a pizza.

He had massive separation anxiety. When he was younger I could board him for a week or so at a time, but the second week he would get depressed and stop eating. Towards the end,when he needed his shots every other day, he had to stay with the vet, and I couldn’t leave him 48 hours without him going on a hunger strike and needing IV fluids. Bunnies pair bond for life. He bonded with me. And I bonded with him.

He loved people. He would come out to greet the grocery delivery guy, and when I took him out in public on a few occasions, he was always friendly to anyone who wanted to pet him. I even took him on public transit a few times, for non-urgent vet visits. He typically wound up with a crowd of admirers gazing through the pet carrier door.

He was gay. Every girl rabbit I tried to introduce him to provoked intense fury. Then I tried a boy rabbit, Jack. It was love at first sight, and they could barely stop kissing and cuddling and flopping down next to each other. After a couple months, things turned violent. Suddenly teeth were embedded in flesh. I separated them,hoping it would chill out, but it didn’t. After a few near misses and a couple painful bites, I took Jack back to the rescue.

And got Varmint a cat companion instead. A female cat. They got along fine. Not exactly cuddly, but they’d eat from the same plate and chase each other, and the cat liked to hold the bunny down like a kitten while licking his head.

He never bit me. Not when I was irrigating his wound post surgery. Not when I was tube feeding him during a couple of upset stomach periods. Not when I gave him his injections every day for several years, including a few screwups where I had to make a couple attempts. Not when I repositioned him at the end, to change a layer or two of the three layers of puppy training pads underneath him, and the spots on his hip that were just beginning to get raw were touched. He knew he could bite me, if he wanted to. He scraped the edge of his teeth against my flesh a few times. He bit Jack, and I saw him nip the cat a couple times, although he didn’t draw blood. But he never,ever bit me.

He used to lie around on the floor with his legs straight out behind him. He was a minilop, and they are bred to look stocky, chunky, solid. Underneath the fur they are actually slender and graceful and streamlined. He would lie all stretched out when the weather was hot – he hated hot weather – his stubby little legs sticking straight out behind, his lop ears stretched out on the floor, a sulky look on his face.

He had a very expressive face. Disgust, delight, jealousy, sadness, boredom, love, fury. He could communicate all that and more with a few gestures and a flash of his eye.

For the last few months he smelled like pee, and I got pretty much desensitized to rabbit pee. Toward the end he was drinking half his weight in water every day, and peeing constantly. I was bathing him in the sink every couple of days, then carefully blow drying him, low setting, warm, several inches away – it took at least an hour. Then he'd pee all over himself again. But before he smelled like pee, he had this clean dusty scent, like a plush toy from a carnival booth – a little scent of hay, a little scent of basil or cilantro or whatever greens he’d been eating, a little bit of house dust from communing with the dust bunnies under the furniture. He’d put up with me holding him and burying my face in his fur for approximately 30 seconds before going into macho non-cuddly mode.

He’s partially responsible for my addiction to WoW. Chronic medical care, separation anxiety, um, yeah, I’ll be available to raid every night. Actually yeah, all my characters are named after rabbits.

He’s responsible for ending my addiction to WoW. I haven’t really logged in much in the last few weeks, while doing my intensive care stuff. During that time I’ve pretty much reflected on whether I really care about continuing with it. My social group morphed into something different (the other night I noticed they even took the bunny off the tabard). I’m not really tied to the house as much now the bunny is gone. So I dunno what I’m going to do about WoW, but I think the party may be over.

He saved me from moving to a place I really didn’t want to move to, with snow and stuff. I mean, I really seriously thought about it. But I had this little fragile rabbit with a medical condition, and so I stayed here. Good call. I like it here.

He taught me that having a house so peaceful that rabbits feel perfectly at ease lounging around in the open with their legs out behind them is far, far, far better than living in a house where there’s lots of arguing and drama and loud (see ex-husband).

He taught me that, in fact, a rabbit can be far preferable to a husband/boyfriend type person. For one thing, rabbits don’t talk a whole lot, and besides that, they’re cute. I had always been so busy being in relationships that I hadn’t really had a chance to see what it’s like not being in one. And you know, if everybody realized how great it is to be single, the species would die out, and that’s why we have all this peer pressure to pair off. Of course, if I had always thought this way, I would never have had an ex who unexpectedly dumped a boa constrictor on me in the first place.

Goodbye, little rabbit. You will be severely missed. I could tell you were right at that point where you just couldn’t get comfortable, and it was only going to get worse. I will keep your memory alive by growling at things that need to be growled at, and by continuing to use rabbity aliases wherever possible.

There will be no formal memorial service; his ashes will be scattered in Hawaii. If this very long ramble – fueled by several inches of vodka, and if that fires up a migraine, bring it on, maybe it’ll distract me from being sad—has amused, or touched, or affected you, consider giving a couple bucks to a rabbit rescue in his memory. Or just basically be a person who is nice to animals.

So ... I haven't logged into WoW in over a week ...

2011-04-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

Part of it has to do with Darth Bunnywabbit’s beloved bunny, who is very old and getting progressively more paralyzed. Which means that when I get home, I might have to spend a couple hours cleaning him up and giving him his various meds and making sure he’s comfortable rather than immediately logging in to raid.

Part of it has to do with Sims Medieval, which I am very close to thoroughly defeating on platinum level, and still enjoying immensely. A strategy game where you can take a break from strategizing to hang out in the tavern swilling ale, or redecorate the palace. What a great concept.

To be honest, the vast majority of it has to do with being thoroughly annoyed with the playerbase. And as I’m writing this, the top thread in the guild/raid leading forum has to do with people being annoyed by the incessant flow of homophobic insults in guilds, and in the general forum there is a lengthy thread started by a “secret” disabled person who keeps it in the closet, due to haters. So it’s not a matter of Darth Bunnywabbit being subjective and oversensitive and needing to relax and lighten up (and all the other stuff haters tend to say when you call them on it, as opposed to what they say when you aim some hatred in their direction, which is usually very different).

And frankly, yeah, I’m a snob. I’m better than people who spend their time hating on others for being gay, or disabled, or ethnic, or religious, or female. No, I do not need to relax and lower my standards to please them, because they are insignificant people who lack power. They never have to worry about having their comments taken out of context by the media, or having their employees sue them. That’s because the media really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them above and beyond selling them various permutations of highly processed corn, and haters with employees go broke from paying settlements, assuming the CEO who outranks them doesn’t boot them out the door. It’s hard for me to imagine a habitual smack talker being entrusted with anything more complex than a cash register or a broom. Sometimes homophobes are a little more prosperous, depending where they live, but science shows they’re all a bunch of closet cases anyway, and I usually assume they have miserable lives faking straight, punctuated by brief, panicked encounters at truck stops. And all the haters who demand I tolerate their lifestyle choice can just deal with my opinions (and relax, and chill).

I’m also having a “should I stay or should I go?” moment with my guild. I’ve been in the guild for over 3 years now, most of it raiding constantly, and I’ll save the full blown guild drama whining for another blog post. Because to be honest, some of it is them being clueless, and some of it is me being passive aggressively hostile, like when I let that redneck chump with the obnoxious porn references die repeatedly in heroics. Some people seeing that might assume I’m an incompetent player. Nope, just a silent and hostile one. Arguing with these people takes valuable energy that I could devote to productive things, so I tend to treat the bulk of my shallow in-game relationships in a spectatorly way. If the content is annoying, I wander off to another distraction. Change the channel.

Besides, if I did wander off, I’d have to find another guild. I’ve done that twice, the result being that I have one alliance toon in a guild that isn’t really motivated enough to raid, and another toon in a guild that raids before I get home from work. I could engage in the whole boring and time consuming guild interview process frequently recommended by WoW in response to these type complaints, but that opens up a whole new can of worms. How do I find people that are (a) playing the game at the level I want to play while (b) interacting the way I want to interact? What if I find a guild with no hate speech whatsoever where I still can’t get along with them? Compatibility rests on more than shared values. In fact, I've had pretty good gaming experiences with people who definitely don't share my values, but are diplomatic enough to shut up about it long enough to cooperate on the mutual goal. And I've had horrible times gaming with perfectly nice people who lack the humility, or edge, or strategic talents to get anything accomplished.

(I’m thinking of an raid I did with another guild where a couple of their "star" players dominated vent with fail strategies. I could have taken over with a “listen, the 27 times I did this successfully we did A, B and C.” But that would have led to drama over usurping dominance.)

(Plus it costs twenty five bucks to transfer a toon, and if I moved my main somewhere, I’d probably also want to move her staff of alts that do all the mining and herbing and enchanting, thereby saving me from spending the hours necessary to earn enough gold to buy all that stuff.)

(Then there's the Big Question: do I still want to raid? I've already proved to myself that I can, and the only thing really standing between me and videogaming excellence is my failure to find the right group. I have to admit, having my evenings free is definitely nice, and I should probably get off my butt and write, or clean house, or something.)

(And one more thing -- from encountering them in pugs, the good players with compatible values are definitely interested in keeping to themselves. Especially if they've been around for a long time. A lot of them purposefully avoid chat, forums, the greater world. They recruit by word of mouth. Sometimes I actually find these types too insular, and find myself longing for all the energy that comes with having a bunch of caffeined-up college studentscracking jokes.)

After a brief frenzy of rolling yet another toon on a server full of WoW bloggers while trying to advance even more toons, I arrived at the “or I could just stop playing this blasted game for a while” solution, which so far is serving me well, although I miss the interaction. Frankly, what I miss is the interaction with a group of 25. My guild stopped doing them, and is currently only doing 10 person raids. I like 25s because there are enough people there intent on the purpose that nobody really gets to cause distraction without being 86’d by the group. In a 10, there’s always somebody who wants to keep everybody waiting while they go find supplies, or spends half an hour talking about some BS I’m not interested in, such as their sex life.

I think what I was really aiming at with this post is how the game defines the players. For example, basketball is played by tall people. Short people can still play it, just not competitively. Football is played by great big heavy people. Sumo wrestling is played by even bigger people. Women’s volleyball is played by women. Blackjack is played by people who can count up to 21. Tennis is played by people physically capable of seeing tennis balls. Good poker players need to be able to lie, or at least conceal their thoughts. The activities required to win the game progressively weed out people who inherently can’t perform them, for whatever reason, and the nature of the game restricts certain people from even participating on a basic level. This is not really discrimination because there are plenty of games, and if your genetic gifts aren’t suited to one, there are plenty more to choose from.

When I first started playing them, online games required a lot more social finesse. Even in WoW, until late last year, to get to the finish line you had to play nice with 24 other gamers. And they still had problems with virulent trolls, to the point where they policed the forums more, and (mercifully briefly) came up with the idea of tagging everyone with their real name, an idea that could only occur to a guy. In fact, there was one GM who responded to the anti-real name complaints by posting his real name and daring the trolls of WoW to do their worst. Moments later they were posting his Facebook pix and his home phone number and other personal details everywhere. That’s not as likely to happen to a hockey referee, but in order to play WoW, you need at least rudimentary computer skills, and the players are more likely to cyberstalk you than throw cups of beer. So that’s one way the game defines its player base.

WoW victory now rests on the ability to bond in (increasingly) small groups. As I mentioned, it costs twenty-five bucks to move, and Blizzard has definitely noticed they can make more money if players are constantly transferring around looking for a small group to call their own. There is actually a statement in their current terms of use forbidding players from creating their own matchmaking services. I had wondered why there aren’t any really good third-party sites dedicated to that and now I know why. There are a few old stale ones sitting around still trying to recruit people to kill Arthas, and there is the official guild recruitment forum, which is sort of like what would happen if you collapsed all the Craigslist jobs ads into a single category, then halfway disabled the search filters. They want you to move around, yet at the same time, they want it to be sort of difficult. Maybe so you’ll move again, and again.

In any event, the advantage is moving away from people-mellow-enough-to-tolerate-large-raids toward people-who-can-find-small-cliques. This seems, to me, in my subjective unscientific opinion, to have increased the hostility. Considerably. They’re basically incentivizing the narrowly-social players while throwing the broadly-social players a handicap. Possibly this is a good thing, and will eventually result in less people having to put up with crap to get their gaming jollies, but at the moment, it seems to be inspiring a lot of people to quit, jump servers or complain.

Consider two games, both very similar. To get to the end of one, you need to outcompete other players -- be there first, hit buttons the fastest, outstrategize, whatever. To get to the end of the other, you have to get four other people to cooperate with you for about an hour (sort of like a WoW heroic pug). Doesn't take a degree to assume the players of the first game will be a lot more caustic than the players of the second. WoW is sort of morphing in that general direction.

The more independent a game becomes, the less cooperative the player base. Conversely, if you force the players to constantly depend on each other, you get a lot of drama and anger, and complaints demanding that antisocial players (who pay the same fees as the social ones) be given an avenue to accomplish everything the social players do. So there's a fine balance involved in keeping both the antisocial misfits and the manipulative drama mongers from taking over.

Meanwhile, I'm quite occupied with my paraplegic bunny and my medieval sims and my kindle. Maybe I'll figure out my WoW dilemma before SWTOR launches. Maybe not.

The Sims Get Medieval

2011-03-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

My WoW guild is collapsing. I’ll whine at length later, maybe, but the short answer is that after a brief spurt of searching for anything fun that remains – rolling on new servers, gearing different toons, putting up with dubious guildies and puggers, I was ready to spend an evening logged out, alternating between investigating these new medieval sims while taking care of my rabbit. He’s a very old rabbit who needs increasing amounts of care, which is also making me re-think my raid addict lifestyle. Hey, three years, it was fun, I learned things and quit smoking and met a bunch of people who for the most part can not have my RL contact information under any circumstances, and kept myself amused for a long time at bargain prices. Right now, I’d rather groom the bunny while listening to Moonlight Sonata. And playing a pause-able, stand-alone type game.

I was prepared to hate Medieval Sims for the same reasons I didn’t like the Sims 3 travel expansion. I envisioned the same elderly non-gaming suit(s) who thought making Sims more like Indiana Jones had decided to try making Sims more like World of Warcraft – put in some armor and quests and dragons! So I was expecting an experience sort of like visiting a bakery owned by diabetics, or a bar owned by Alcoholics Anonymous. “We would never, ever touch these terrible products but we decided to vent our hostility toward those of you who do by taking your money.”

But it’s not quite like that, despite the fact this game tries to mash together Sims, WoW and something resembling Civilization all at the same time.

After a longwinded preamble in which Captain Picard explains that you are a god, and after realizing that people suck, you decided to roll up your sleeves and lend them a helping hand, you get to create a royal person of your choosing. After playing through a rather invasive tutorial, your monarch unlocks various other kinds of buildings where you can install more player characters – priests, mages, warriors, rogues … I mean spies. You have neighboring kingdoms, which you can presumably subjugate, although I’m not at that stage yet. You can set various victory conditions, because unlike regular Sims, this game has an end, although you can disregard your quests and focus on things like breeding a castle full of princes and princesses if you feel like it.

The game engine is modified somewhat with medieval sims, with fewer personality traits to choose from, and a required “fatal flaw” negative trait that you can eventually get rid of by going on a quest. In fact, the whole game is simplified considerably. There is no building at all, and all the characters come with furnished homes, which you can upgrade if you want. I think one of the problematic directions Sims 3 was heading in had to do with too many customization options. Spending hours customizing your sims’ outfits and landscaping their lawns and decorating/furnishing their homes can be a chore, especially when the game’s own limitations discourage you from building a large populated neighborhood where all your creations can interact.

So yeah, you can’t build a castle. If you want to do that, you’ll have to go back to Sims 3, and risk exposing yourself to anachronisms like cell phones and hot tubs. And you don’t really need to build a castle, there’s a nice one all ready for you, complete with NPCs hanging around expecting you to adjudicate their goat ownership claims.

There are quests. These are long and involved, and sometimes have you playing multiple sims. You acquire extra sims when your monarch levels and adds new buildings, and you can customize them too (or be lazy and use pre-made characters). When I built my cathedral (per a request from the gravedigger), I got the option of a quest where my gluttonous yet eloquent ruler, Queen Madeleine, could work with the resident monk to minister to his subjects better, thus increasing his level. Yes, there is religion in this game, and your clergy can pray, and convert heathens, and deliver sermons – but the subject of their adoration is … you, which should confuse, confound or please people with opinions regarding religion in general. You get a choice between two different sects, which preliminarily look like a heavy-handed group of gloomy inquisitors and a more uplifting, Franciscan-style group that seems mainly involved with making people happy. My monk belongs to the latter and his quest involved interviewing all the townspeople to find out what they wanted in a religion, and then supplying it.

There is fighting, complete with health and stamina bars. And gear. Queen Madeleine has only had to get medieval on another sim once, when a poacher annoyed her in the forest while she was gathering wood and wildflowers; after summarily dispatching him with her sword she had him arrested and put in the stocks, where she joined with the townspeople in pelting him with eggs and tomatoes. If only WoW had that function. The fighting is more “push this button to invoke animations” than twitch based; as this is a zero-twitch-skill game suitable for the elderly, the uncoordinated, and people trying to play video games while grooming rabbits. (I note that rabbit meat is for sale in the village market, and I further note that Queen Madeleine will have you thrown in the pit if you try serving it at her palace.)

We Americans have a strange fascination with the medieval. I think it comes from the fact that so many of us had our histories revised and/or deleted or obscured due to the empiricist optimism of the last couple centuries. It’s probably different when you live down the street from historic monuments decorated with carvings of people who look like the ones you see at extended family get togethers. Instead, we have a wide array of tropes involving knights, dragons, bards, swords and etc. that figure heavily in videogames and pulp fiction. This game does a nice job of summoning all that without straying too far from history.

And speaking of departures from history … at one point, Queen Madeleine got a romantic quest which offered her a choice between a hunky bard … and a lady trader. I haven’t played it out yet, but I’m assuming that in this medieval society, you’re free to populate the kingdom with GLBT characters. And all I'm going to say about race is that it's wide open for player characters, NPCs include everything from gingers to Moors, and the name generating engine is loaded with diverse celt and gaul and iberian names that you might find in Shakespeare plays or history books, which doesn't stop you from overriding it and naming your people Raylene and Toranaga and xxloldeathknightxx.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of animosity that I was going to unleash on EA for basically trying to mash together several different games in a marketing-oriented way. I think I’ll save it for Blizzard, who lately is recreating the medieval experience mainly in the sense of “how would you like to work for a bunch of dim-witted, semi-literate, violent youths in a world before labor laws?” Sims Medieval exceeds my expectations. I’m not sure about replayability, but for now it seems like there are many hours of content to explore. Including the intriguing “parents were eaten by a whale” character trait, and of course, the dire chinchillas.

Video Games: A Republican Plot

2011-02-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know. I said I wasn’t going to write about gender and games any more, and I had even tapered off about writing about gamer-hating press. But this article was so ridiculous it lured me back.

As to the actual premise, about liberals playing games like conservatives, I don’t doubt that, and I think if the author had stuck with that thought, she might have explored the notion of people getting to express their alternate reality sides through games, exploring with different looks and genders and values.

But she didn’t. Instead she offered up her experience playing a handful of games while making a facepalmfest of factual errors and pole vaulting to conclusions.

I’ll focus on The Sims since I’m pretty familiar with it, I did play Civ in versions I’ve since forgotten, getting both aggressive and pacifist victories.

The author gives out a lot of incorrect, outdated and misunderstood information about Sims. This annoys me because Sims is one of the few games that desperately strives to get it right. If you’re playing the latest version, 3, you could in theory populate a whole neighborhood with vegetarian, recycling, bicycle riding gay/lesbian married couples who earn their living making clay statues of dolphins and writing about feminism. They occasionally bog down in wrongness, such as when that elderly suit told them to make it more Indiana Jones-like, but you could in theory also make the populations of France, Egypt and China as politically correct as possible, right down to the Birkenstocks. Find me another video game where you can do that.

This essay made me think of two people I met in Sims Online. One was a girl at some group gathering who was telling someone “Oh yes, I played Sims once, and after I made a perfect house with a perfect family there was nothing else to do and I got bored.” It was in a chat box, but you could just picture her making that smug little expression some women do when saying something outrageously stupid yet clearly expecting applause for it. I always assume women like that spent a lot of time working as strippers in countries where they don’t speak the language, but I could be wrong.

The other was a gay kid from some flyover town. What he did was make a sim of himself and one of Brad Pitt and had them run around through town, making out in broad daylight. Gasp.

I daresay that a sandbox game like Sims is worth a couple of thousand official copyrighted psychological multiple choice tests, as far as gauging how particular individuals decorate their inner life. So are MMOs, for that matter, and they actually tend to sieve out the personalities and herd like minds into the same guilds.

So from my particular angle, this woman is doing the equivalent of blaming Microsoft Word for the fact she likes to write romance novels.

I will cheerfully agree that a lot of shooters, for example, would probably appeal to a more conservative crowd. War games in general are frowned upon by certain pacifistic types, and since games in general have to do with conflicting strategy among multiple humans, if you’re going to be that Amish maybe you should just leave the games alone and go bake a nice shoofly pie (and then FedEx it to me). What about music games though? What about Tetris, the infinitely catchy game from the ashes of the Soviet Republic? What about Mario? He’s a carpenter, and presumably union, which would in theory make him liberal, although the way certain liberals have been abandoning unions these days could open that subject up for debate. What about Plants Versus Zombies, where your fragrant ecologically correct flowers defeat the mindless march of dittoheads … uh, inarticulate undead guys?

WoW players seem pretty evenly split with regard to the US culture war, amazingly enough, and since they’re not limited to the US, people get to find out firsthand that there is life beyond the artificial two-party division we’re locked into here. Even more amazing, individuals with opposing political views frequently get along just fine in raids. And as far as Sims, all I know about what other Simmers do alone with their computers comes from my exposure to what they post on the official site, and the fan sites they set up. This has been eye opening.

Some players like to re-enact movies or novels. Some download anatomically correct skins and do porn. Some copy themselves and their families. Some obsess on making buildings. Some make machinima videos, and some tell stories on the official forums. Some freeze time and have legions of never-aging beautiful people running around displaying awesome hair and clothes, and never worry about the baby-having whatsoever.

And this writer can’t think of anything to do but play legacy families and raise babies.

Legacy families are fun. I’ve got one going at the moment in Sim Francisco, because I wanted to build a drop dead awesome mission style mansion and the best way to do that is to have people living in it. I took a break from that to see if I could get a photographer sim that has every single photography accomplishment (I have all but four, one is a bug and the other three were going to take too freaking long). And that was a break from my main neighborhood which picked up a bad lag bug, not sure if the last patch fixed that. Next I want to do an all musician neighborhood.

I will agree with the author that it is easiest to raise sim children with a stay at home parent. Especially if you have the nightmare-inducing triplets. But ya know what else? You can get a nanny. Either a NPC babysitter (who takes care of the younglings on autopilot), or make one yourself in Create-A-Sim, and move her or him in. Once the sprouts get to puberty, you can kick the nanny out. Or you can have gramma and grampaw sim hanging around to change diapers. Or you can make a freaking robot babysitter. The whole notion that Sims “forces” the female sim to stay home and raise the rugrats irritates me. She goes to the hospital, gives birth and gets maternity leave -- is it sexist to insist she shouldn't? Her partner(s) (in case she's bi or polyamorous or something) can call in sick from work and hang out with her changing diapers. No, it's not automatic, is that the chief political incorrectness here?

This just led me to wondering if you can use a cheat code to force pregnancy in male sims in 3 the way you could in Sims 2, when they got impregnated following alien abduction, and whether they’d get maternity leave. Interesting conundrum.

I’ll make a couple of observations though, which can be sort of dispiriting. Yes, baby-having could be a reason female sims’ careers don’t move as fast, or generate as many simoleons. That probably is reflected in real life. Although, sims also do not ever get spousal support payments, and stay at home sims can make ridiculous amounts of cash via stay at home careers like gardening or painting.

And, although you can play a legacy family as either a patriarchy or a matriarchy … if you’re focusing on boys, you have a lot larger window to find a mate, since it’s perfectly fine for a male sim to father children a day before he hits his elderhood birthday, but elderly lady sims can’t make babies any more. I doubt if all the culturally constructed social engineers in academia could do much with that set of facts. Until we can get robots to do all our gestating for us, we’re kind of stuck.

But y’know, you could always try having your sims have sex in the time machine … Or just freeze time in young adulthood until finding some fair maiden desperate enough not to care that you're a Grumpy Slob Couch Potato with a haunted attic.

Grown Up Gamers

2011-01-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

A couple of Salon pieces that appeared today caught my eye.

First, one of their established columnists gave a resounding sneer to a campaign for a new EA game that promises to shock your mom. While pointing out that the majority of gamers are women in their 40s.

And at the same time, there was a sweet article about a woman in her 40s getting through her divorce with a little help from WoW.

No, I’m not on Salon’s payroll. However, these articles made me wonder if the time has finally arrived to pitch my “how WoW helped me quit smoking” article. For the record, this June will be three years of freedom from cigarettes. I am still addicted to nicotine gum, and if you try to take mine away I will poke you with my letter opener. And I don’t exactly shun smokers, although at some point in that three years I realized smokers smell bad, and there is no way I would let one move in with me given my personal susceptibility to the habit. I credit raiding, for giving me something more entertaining to do with my hands.

Speaking of aging decrepit middle aged people, I was pondering Indiana Jones recently while running my third WoW character through the quests in Uldum. Given the fact the last movie about him tanked, and Harrison Ford is now a senior citizen, it’s pretty apparent that Indiana Jones is a generational thing. So why do game designers still seem to think he’s an object of fascination for all gamers?

First Sims 3 was annoying me by insisting I send my sims to a disturbingly depopulated version of Cairo to steal antiquities from law abiding citizens’ basements. Now, WoW thinks I want to get my jollies beating up on . . . um, German-accented goblins while stealing artifacts with “Harrison Jones” – a character who had a couple of cute quest moments in BC and Wrath, but apparently has taken over most of Cataclysm-Egypt, and if you want to be level 85, you have to spend serious amounts of time with him rescuing you while calling you kid.

My toons are not kids. They are a voodoo priestess, and an undead elf with a large battle axe, and a former bank officer turned evil mage. Plus there’s a new one now, a werewolf chick who summons demons. None of them are kids desiring mentorship with Mr. Jones. The death knight might date him, but she’d probably summon an army of ghouls to eat his face if he tried to avoid paying the check. The mage would definitely polymorph him into a rabbit, while laughing. The voodoo priestess would control his mind while making him walk off a cliff. Enough Indiana, game designers! Retire him!

Maybe gaming is growing up and getting respectable or something. Seems like only yesterday gamers were being blamed for being distant friends with violent lunatics. Oh wait, that WAS yesterday, in the NYTimes. They’ll probably catch on any day now. At least they don’t seem to be under any delusions that Indiana Jones is still popular.

Pug Rage and Neuroscience

2011-01-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

Many other bloggers have been complaining lately about the quality of people you find in pugs. As a major pugger, I feel qualified to comment. I even kept a pug diary over the weekend to record my experiences, for posterity or science or whatever, 4 pugs on my priest and 4 on my mage. But then I ran a few with my guildies and screwed up the experiment.

Anyway, most of the pugs were benign. Some had geared and skilled players, and a couple had players learning the ropes – there was a bear tanking for the first time who had a rough time with the 3rd boss in Stonecore, and we patiently wiped and encouraged until we got it on the fifth try. For the most part, we achieved our goals, wished each other well and went on our way.

And there were two memorable ones. On my mage, I zoned in after a wipe to meet a control freak tank that insisted I fight using some bizarre counter-intuitive strategy that he thought was “proper.” He told me about this while typing it during the fight (causing a wipe). He then gave me a choice between (1) doing the fight in the “proper” way or (2) being votekicked. I chose option (3), insulted him soundly and dropped group.

And also on my mage, I got stuck in Grim Batol with this drunk tank who wanted to talk about sordid details from his sex life. Since it pains me to take away potential revenue from desperate sex workers who actually get paid to listen to that sort of crap, and since I’m not about to provide that service for assholes too cheap to engage professional services, I left.

You have to know where your line is. And, once it’s crossed, to end the encounter swiftly. Back in the olden days, that might mean decapitating someone with a battleaxe, but these days you can accomplish much the same thing – never encountering that person ever again – by hitting alt-F4. People who remain in a situation after their line has been breached are responsible for their own resulting rage. And there are a great many people who run instances for the sole purpose of pissing other people off.

Now, speaking of pissing other people off, I was reading about this guy Loughner. The media is busy trying to figure out whether drugs, video games or violent political rhetoric caused him to nut out and murder a bunch of people. Note the video game references.

Frankly, he doesn’t seem all that different from a lot of people I encounter in pugs or in trade chat, except for the “actually shooting people” part. The same kind of incoherent postmodern rage, rebelling against women, language, politicians, good taste, common sense and genocidal community colleges. In fact, there’s much to be said for the fact that all those people are inside the house playing video games rather than running around outdoors.

I’m too lazy to go back and find all those neuroscience articles about how rage basically reinforces itself, like focusing on working out a particular group of muscles. I’ll go a step further and note that some people are born with a greater propensity for it, the way other people are born with a dislike for broccoli or perfect pitch. And I’ll take that a step further and note that there are very few of us alive today who don’t have bloodthirsty warriors cleaving their way into the family tree if you go back enough generations. Many people can rage. Some can’t contain it. Sort of like alcohol – many people drink, for some it becomes a problem.

Now meanwhile, Wired had a cool neuroscience article about oxytocin, which was publicized a few years back as the “cuddle chemical” that helped people bond and fall in love and et cetera. Turns out that it also plays a role in bigotry. Oops.

One of the many unique things about our modern world is the fact that lots of us have become accustomed to rage-bonding. Go into a public space and start ranting about how you hate conservatives, or liberals, or Justin Bieber, or Twilight (things that teenage girls like are especially popular targets), or whatever, and you’ll get attention. Maybe even followers, or buddies, or people who think you’re an amazingly hilarious comedian. Put up a “I hate XX” Facebook group, or make a viral video of you expressing your dislike in a unique and interesting way.

Stands to reason that some people might get used to getting their social strokes – their reassuring bursts of oxytocin telling them that yes, they are part of the in-group, just like all their friends, despising the out-group with all their might – from raging. Especially people with pronounced rage propensities to begin with. And in turn, all the ragers who have just been identified as belonging in the out-group counter rage, making rage-bonding communities of their own.

Meanwhile, the folks behind WoW have put together this swell, colorful game, with challenges. In order to meet those challenges, you have to work with other people, and a lot of those other people are high on rage.

I think eventually MMOs will evolve into a caste system, once they get out of the feudal stage. There will be a top tier of extremely polite people to whom a good reputation is everything. There will be a middle class that draws the line at racist humor but appreciates a boob joke now and then. And there will be an underbelly full of angry young men, who will probably pride themselves in being the real genuine secret ruling class while exchanging foul sayings amongst each other.

I'm raiding again. Yay.

2011-01-05T14:07:00.001-08:00

We got a 25 raid boss. The first one in Bastion of Twilight, the guy who hangs out with a bunch of drakes. So I am happier. The guild leader, who also likes 25s, decided to schedule one to see what would happen. There are a few guildies who have been overplaying the difficulty of Cataclysm encounters and predicting that all the other guildies are too inept to handle them, and there has been much talk of weeding out the baddies, and benching them, and requiring everyone to do hours of preliminary study, and of machismo. But when we actually got inside, good gamers turned out to be good gamers.

One of these days I’m going to do a blog rant about terminology that needs to exist for virtual interactions, such as “people who overestimate difficulty in order to inflate their authority/machismo/competence” – this has been occurring a lot.

I am pretty much surrounded by angst. The player caterwauling has gotten so bad there have even been Blizzard posts today regretting the fact healers are getting blamed for everything that goes wrong, and contemplating fixes of the looking for group system to eliminate some of the griefing and exploiting players have already figured out how to do. Impatient players hate the wait. Good players hate being yoked to bads; bads hate elitists telling them how to play. Griefers do things like sign up as tank/heals when not equipped for it, just because it’s a shorter wait, or kick people for flimsy reasons. Entitled players think their invested time should allow them to have the experience they want, on demand.

I’ve mentioned my own brief excursion into bad behavior, when I deliberately wasted some peoples’ time because they were talking hater talk, but that was responsive bad behavior. I don’t think I’ve initiated any, although I have walked out for various reasons, some trivial. For example, if some underperformer starts getting condescending, or if performance is so subpar that I can tell nothing’s going to happen, plus I’ll probably get raged at if I start pointing out deficiencies. On the other hand, if people are civil and are earnestly trying, I’ll hang in there for many attempts trying to get them through it, which is not always possible. I spent about an hour last weekend trying to carry an undergeared tank through the cyclone boss in Vortex – it didn’t work, and after the tank and 2 of the dps left, we got some more experienced people who breezed through it. Amazing how a personnel change can shift things from night to day.

Some of the posts have blamed the playerbase, noting correctly that other games require a whole lot more effort for a whole lot less reward, and people gladly and cooperatively plug away towards the prize. At times it does seem like you’re surrounded by grown-up versions of every toddler who ever pitched a fit while you were trying to eat in a restaurant or watch a movie.

Mr. Moneybags came back. I haven’t spoken to him (except once, when he was on a new alt and I hadn’t realized it was him yet). I’ve realized I have a very low tolerance for emo behavior, and until I learn how to conduct myself in a way that makes them run when they smell me coming, I’m trying to avoid acknowledging them. That hasn’t stopped him from raging, complaining, accusing me of getting carried by my guild or speculating that the people who keep abandoning him in pugs are doing so because they are trying to farm loot.

I’ve even gotten into a mixup with my former guildleader, who took offense to my posting something about how he used to yell at players for screwing up on their first attempt, confusing them with people who had been present at a previous successful attempt.

I’ve even been wondering if this particular game has jumped the shark. From a solo standpoint, it’s much better, with the revamped quests and graphics. However, I’m surrounded by bad behavior. I think the creeps have realized Blizzard is deliberately trying to make them obsolete, and are hollering back as loud as possible.

I’ve also been wondering if I need to find different people. My guildies aren’t bad for a randomly picked crew from my random server, and I like the tabard, and the guild is up to level 9, and since we started doing 25s again I have hope for the future. Still, sometimes I have fantasies about finding some mature-acting players that don’t talk trash or have tantrums. Or even about logging out of this ridiculous yet addictive game and doing something productive.

The 25 raids are fun though. Fast paced and complicated like the dungeons. More of that tonight. I’m looking forward to it.

Cataclysmic addiction

2011-01-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

As you may have guessed, I’ve been playing Cataclysm.
At frenzied, massive-addiction levels. I took a week off work when it launched, spent the holidays with it and the giant cracked gamer callous on my thumb is well on its way to healing. My priest is all decked out with the best gear I could get for her outside of raids.

Since I haven’t been raiding.

And my mage is starting to gear up, and my goblin banker is safely dwelling in the bank, and my warrior and DK have gone up a few levels just from farming. Haven’t touched my allies yet. Created a new goblin on Zangarmarsh and haven’t played it. Ditto for the cow pally. But my second druid (/eyeroll) is level 42. I wanted a troll one, plus I wanted to check out the new quests from a noob POV.

But let’s talk more about this “haven’t been raiding.”

My guild is officially Not Doing 25s, which brings great sadness to my heart. I haven’t been able to get into the 10s either, which is run by the Clique I’m Not In (“CINI”). Much of the CINI plays from Brazil and prefer to start raiding about the time I’m leaving work. There isn’t really a Clique I’m In, unless you want to count the major raid addicts. I could build one, but that’s a level of involvement I’d rather not have, so I try to settle for being reliable, with a high baseline. I’m nice to atypical people, and I’ve been known to deny heals to asshats while laughing at their death throes.

True story: I got a random dungeon group and wound up with a pretty decent pally tank (I still feel guilty about him) and Larry, Curley and Moe for DPS. LC&M immediately share that they’re in the same room and let loose with some jokes about gay people and AIDS. We do a few fights with me healing the tank only, as I explain that I wouldn’t want my San Franciscan heals to contaminate them. Finally I let them all die and advised them that perhaps they could get Rush Limbaugh to heal, and dropped group, thereby wasting a good hour of their time.

I was much nicer before Cataclysm. When I ran into rude jerks I somehow mentally categorized most of them as being some kind of subspecies of mob programmed to talk smack, and mostly I ran around with guildies. Cata, however, has made everybody mean.

This is because the dungeons are hard again. Not even as hard as they were when Wrath came out – these suckers are Burning Crusades difficult, with insidious mechanics and a wide array of interesting floor patterns to not stand in.
From that standpoint, I am in gamer Valhalla. Finally! A videogamelike experience, as opposed to a ritualistic performance!

But not everybody shares my opinion, apparently. The forums, and WoW Insider, and trade chat, are all full of rage as people discover the difficulty of finding other people who know what they’re doing. The bads are raging because nobody wants to be their friend any more. The goods are raging because they keep getting stuck in random instances with bads. DPS have to wait 40 minutes or so for their queue.
Healers, however, are the new tanks. We get queues right away. We also get the usual amount of blame and unfairness like getting votekicked because the mages couldn’t stay out of the tornadoes, or because the group’s guildie couldn’t heal that particular boss but wants in for the last one. This leads to a certain amount of arrogance, like my above anecdote illustrates.

I get humbled frequently though too, and random instances involve bouncing from situations where people are treating you with extreme deference to places where idiots are screaming at you over their mistakes. This kind of frequent wide polarity shift is good for me at some level, even if sometimes annoying.

So I have been surfing the random seas of randomness in the random group finder, because I am not in the CINI and I kept getting stuck in guild runs with persistent annoying types who want to be carried to greatness right now, or after they go afk for 20 minutes to smoke a cigarette, and who then pitch tantrums worse than any pug whenever things go wrong due for reasons they don’t understand. So I take my chances with strangers.

Fortunately I ran across some pretty cool strangers. Other inhabitants of videogame Valhalla, who were getting off on the fact there were no Official Stand Here And Press Buttons In The Following Order type strategies, and we actually have to think on our feet.

And a few raging bads too, of course. And mixed bags, like the guy who queued as a tank but is no way geared for it and is wasting everyone's time, yet still is polite and reasonable. Or the good player that rages at everyone for not being his idea of good, and gets into extended arguments with DPS. As for people with abrasive personalities, life’s too short to spend time with them, especially if they’re dps.

And because the learning curve has shifted drastically . . . we’re no longer raiding in 25 groups. Withdrawal from raiding definitely left me edgier and sharper tongued and more likely to respond with a “see here now, you fool!” rather than a “whoa, you’re agro, that’s weird, I’ll just wander away.”

How’s the game? Gorgeous. They put a lot of work into the expansion, which revamps most of the world, and allows you to fly over it. The quests have been overhauled and are nowhere near as grindy. I actually have an issue with the easy quests. Nothing remotely challenges you. My old practice of doing the hardest quests to level faster is gone, these days you have to stay on the little car with rails, just like Disneyland. Everything is colorful and entertaining. Some of the quests – I’m looking at you, Welcome To The Machine -- are hilarious. There are cut scenes all over the place, and shiny new bling to hoard and overcharge for.

And then when you get through with those the group stuff starts, and it’s tough, and requires coordination, and thorough knowledge of all the pretty icons in your spellbook other than the basic “hit stuff” command you’ve been spamming for the past 85 levels.

Tomorrow, raiding resumes. I guess I’ll be doing a 10, with the B team. We’ll see how that goes.

Supreme Court Judges vs. Video Games

2010-11-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

If you're the kind of person who enjoys dry, snarky, judicial humor, you may be the kind of person who reads this blog. If that's the case, you might appreciate Dahlia Lithwick's piece about the Supreme Court arguing about whether Sitting Governor Schwarzenegger (who got replaced in the election tonight by a guy named Moonbeam who used to date Linda Ronstadt in the 70s) can slap an age limit on consumption of violent video games.

Click here for extreme snark.

I haven't been really covering video game litigation because we won, there are 12 million of us playing WoW alone, Justice Sotomayor's clerks all pwn at Mortal Kombat, that creepy lawyer in Florida went away, and the guardians of moral turpitude are swiftly learning they should STFU if they don't want their stupid utterances to go viral in today's exciting world of internets.

The day after I posted my exuberance about Sim Francisco with assorted links (in the comment) to various San Francisco songs, our baseball team won the world series. So I wore team colors today. Not because I like baseball, I can't be bothered to watch that stuff. It's more because I like victory :)

Sims 3 After Dark – If You Are Going to Sim Francisco, Be Sure And Wear A Flower Mesh In Your Hair

2010-10-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

WoW is, at the moment, vastly boring. All I do in there is bother Anzu, and the guys in Zul Farrak that drop the tiger and raptor mounts, and help kill the Lich King again whenever the guild needs my assistance. The boredom shall continue up through the next month when the expansion comes out. That makes it a perfect time for a Sims expansion, and I must say, this is my favorite one yet.

That’s probably because it is completely San Francisco-centric.

In the last two incarnations of Sims, your out-of-town areas were linked to your main suburb, but that’s not the case for the new Sims 3 urban environment, which stands on its own, although it has its own France, China and Egypt attached for your sims that feel like wandering around France picking up stray diamonds off the ground, or wrestling mummies. So while you do get a few suburban standalone houses in the Richmond/Sunset and Sausalito areas, your urban sims live in high rise apartments. I wouldn’t mind moving a few of my suburban sims to Sim Francisco, but that would mean abandoning their painstakingly created houses.

I love sim apartments. Building a sim house to my perfectionistic standards can take agonizing hours adjusting the wallpaper shade, but redecorating an apartment is no big deal, plus you don’t have to deal with landscaping because everything has a default awesome view of the bridge and the other skyscrapers.

Sim Francisco is different from World Adventures in that the designers have obviously been here, rather than the ones who designed Egypt based on old Indiana Jones films. The map is loaded with obscure little jokes calculated to appeal to locals. The greasy spoon diner corresponds roughly to Mission Rock Café, and there’s a dive bar right by Zeitgeist’s approximate location, and sims zip around town by taking a subway with a logo suspiciously similar to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which is much better than the real-life BART, which basically hauls suburbanites in and out of downtown rather than giving urbanites a way to run across town without getting rained on.

And the art museum makes an appearance – a few years ago I attended an exhibition at the art museum that was tied to an exhibition at a lot decorated to look like the museum in Sims Online, where patrons could chat with the Sims Online toons running around the virtual version. I wore a red dress. Then I went home, logged into Sims Online and sent my toon to the virtual museum, wearing a red dress. Now I can send various Sims 3 sims to the “same” museum in red dresses. Yay, art.

While life in the suburbs is heavily involved with landscaping and procreating, in the city what’s important is celebrities. They come in a range from one star to five, and the more you party with them, the more celebrity points you accumulate. Until the day arrives when manufacturers give you free luxury goods and you can afford to buy a house in Sausalito where you can display them. This is a lot like how the real San Francisco works. There are careers too, which you will need to afford the down payment on your ridiculously overpriced suburban paradise (just like the real ones!), but underachieving sims are perfectly capable of living a life devoted to haunting dive bars while writing just enough pulp fiction to keep the bills paid.

Also in this expansion are the long-awaited vampires. The first character I made, in fact, was a vampire, Mr. Edgar Sparklie, a writer of trashy fiction who has bleached blond hair and a soul patch. Getting vampirized wasn’t tough at all, he just befriended a vampire and asked. Then all his bars turned purplish, he developed a sunshine debuff and he began living on plasma from the refrigerator. He also drank blood from a few sims before the celebrity gossips caught on and trashed his nightlife reputation for a few days. Damn you Perez Hilton!

If I had to whine anything, actually I’d whine first about suburbia, which has given me all sorts of technical glitches lately. For example, I was dumb enough to make a houseful of robots, and whenever they go outside, all the townspeople stand around going “omg! A robot!” and refuse to leave whatever lot they’re on, until they build up a big laggy mob of looping reaction emotes. Urbanites are more sophisticated; when they see a vampire they just leave.

This expansion also brings back many fun things from the past: bubble blowers (which now have a variety of bubble flavors to give you various buffs ranging from +romance to extra funny jokes), hot tubs, dance floors, and band instruments. I have a sim band now, grinding away in the decrepit ex-factory rehearsal studio I built them in Soma. All the instruments skill at different rates, so don’t try asking the guitar player to sit in for the drummer. Plus there are fountains, and elevators, and probably a few more build items I haven’t found yet. And burrito trucks.

I’ve got quite a bit of love for my hometown. I’m very pleased at our baseball team’s recent pwnage, and I can go on at length about subjects like Emperor Norton, or the evil Pacific Heights lawyers with their neighbor-eating dogs, or the Pan Pacific Exposition, or the Summer of Love. Or the over nine thousand reasons why San Francisco is far more awesome than New York

(a city which was very popular in the 1920’s, currently seems to be mainly inhabited by self-referential journalists in denial, Wall Street thugs and people who aren’t cool enough to live on the Jersey Shore).

This expansion isn’t perfect on the geography, but it definitely gets the spirit right. In fact, I’m very strongly tempted to just avoid that other game, World of Rare Mount Farming or whatever it’s called, and spend the night leveling the Grateful Airplane. What I need now is a Keith Richards hair mesh . . .

Moneybags Returns

2010-10-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here’s something to share.

I’ve written previously about my (former, I guess) gamer buddy Mr. Moneybags. In Star Wars Galaxies, he was an obsessive collector and merchant. If I were a shrink, I’d probably think the dude probably has some level of OCD, given his fascination with collecting things; IRL he’s got a thriving business collecting and selling vintage toys and artifacts on E-Bay, and in virtual life (IVL?) he’s pretty good at working the auction house. In SWG, where you could have virtual buildings to display your goods, he built meticulous museums.

He started playing WoW before me, and was anxious to show me the ropes, but as I’ve written about myself, I’m one of those people who has to get in there and figure it out at my own pace. So I was the one who joined a large guild, and got him in as an officer, and then moved into a raid guild, where he didn’t follow. He’s a virtual merchant, I’m a virtual explorer.

The deal with Moneybags is that nobody tells him what to do. Certainly something I can relate to, but he takes it to some really uncooperative extremes. It got to the point where I wouldn’t do anything game-related with him because he would screw it up while barking (incorrect) orders. And then there would be a lot of tension and anger, and it was easier to just let him go do his whatever, at his own pace.

Moneybags never could find anybody to group with until the LFG system came on board, and then he started running around in heroics. Frequently, he would pop up in our chat channel complaining about extremely rude players who kicked him out of groups, or just left themselves. One memorable time, he got both the tank and the healer to log out of the game in disgust. Occasionally, someone would break through and explain to him some of the little game mechanics that could make his life a bit easier, but it was a struggle.

He quit over one of the holiday achievements that involved battlegrounds. Control freaks hate battlegrounds; the thought of losing in PVP is too degrading. And I’m tolerant to a degree, because some people just really don’t like the adrenalin, and there are plenty of other things for them to do. I’ve walked several people through that particular achievement myself, and have done it on six different characters.

Moneybags didn’t want a handholding, though, because that would just underline the fact that he wasn’t the all-knowing expert. He complained about the achievement, continuously and at length, and toward the end I said something like “look, I’m pretty good at getting these achievements, but I suck at listening to complaining.” And he didn’t ask “hey Darth Bunnywabbit, could you give me a hand if I promise not to be bossy and temperamental?” No, he quit the game – after blowing up at me and accusing me of being carried everywhere by my guild.

Which annoyed me, because I did the bloody achievement solo, every time.

He reappeared recently, just after the patch. He made sure to advise me that the game was being ruined, just like the NGE, and he was only reactivating his account because his wife asked him to, because she wanted some glyphs from his scribe, because he would never, ever enjoy a horrible, evil game such as this one. And after slinging some verbal abuse and wrath around, he vanished from the chat channel. Later dude. Sigh.

I Survived The Patch

2010-10-15T00:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been playing WoW extra-obsessively since the patch, and here’s what’s shaking.
The only toon that I’ve gotten into a playable condition so far is my holy priest. My tank has a spec I made up without consulting anything, and my mage has one of her specs, I reforged her gear and changed her gems, and she’s nearly ready to burninate things. My hunter and druid are too scary, I’ll leave them alone for the moment. My death knight is busy making runes for all the others.

First night, I focused on getting the priest all fixed up. On a mad whim, I changed most of her gems to haste. Rabbits like haste. She’s holy, I’ll deal with disc later, or maybe I’ll try shadow again. Truthfully, I don’t really like disc. Disc is for conservative, stand-by-your-tank types, and holy is for large flamboyant healsplosions and lightning-fast spot heals. And I don’t need a shadow priest when I have a mage; then I don’t have to toggle the healer UI on and off.

I’ve been chasing achievements lately, so I thought I’d go run around doing that to test drive the new improved WoW. I discovered Holy Nova is now faster and – catch me – hardly eats any mana at all. It’s the new spammable instant heal, like Circle of Healing used to be. Plus nothing was doing me much damage at all. So I novaed my way through all my dailies: the puppymen in Scholazar (2 more exalted reps and I get an achievement!) and the stupid Argent Crusade again, after getting all their mounts (I need 2 more tabards, so maybe 9 more days with those guys).

I tried a random battleground and got WSG. Once I got in there, I tried to click a flag to return it and crashed, as in lockup crash, restart your computer because it’s not going to do anything crash. I tried to capture a flag, same thing. I tried to join a big fight and suddenly I got 86’d from the battleground with a deserter buff. Sigh.

My favorite thing so far: I got free flying mastery, because I already had a 310% speed mount, along with my druid and warrior. Looks like my hunter, mage and death knight will have to pay 5k each – for the hunter and dkp, that’s solely because they got screwed on the random number generator for last year’s Halloween loot achievement, despite my efforts. Sucks to be them. But anyway, my priest (and warrior, and druid but big deal because she only flies around in bird form) can now ride any mount at top speed, instead of just the 310% mount, so I’ve been cruising around rapidly on my other flying mounts, like the Azure Drake from Malygos 25.

The next night, I got the tank marginally set up and 2boxed ZG. I’m trying for the tiger mount before it gets discontinued. ZG was slightly tougher, it seemed like the beasties were hitting harder, but my priest has more damage now (thanks to her mighty smite chakra) and they all fell down, without dropping any loot. Troll gods, I will sacrifice 1000 gnomes to you if I get that mount to drop before the next patch discontinues it.

Then I went raiding. Hooray. I sort of even have incentive to raid again because now we get points for everything, like Blizzard DKP, and I’ll probably want lots of those to get new gear after Cataclysm. Before I was just buying primordial saronite and selling it. The raid itself was a catastrophe of sorts, with people crippled by bugs and lack of functional addons. With my shiny new haste gems, I blew away the healing meters. I run out of mana by the time the boss is about 20% from dead, but that’s okay, usually by then we’ve got him, and everybody’s usually alive except for the people who stand in fire.

I’ve been doing heroic ToC every day too, for more tabard credits. The one on patch night was funny. I zoned in to see 4 people from the same server/guild, two with Kingslayer titles. I put on my Kingslayer title. The tank was stuck in the doorway and every time he clicked the lance he locked up, like I was doing with the flags in WSG. Then one of the dps started disconnecting. It took us like 10 minutes to get through the jousting part. Then everything ran smoothly and it probably took less than 10 minutes to finish the rest of it, and everybody was remarkably civilized. And we all apologized to each other for the bugs. Go figure.

Tonight I went raiding again. For some reason I am having major audio aggravation. Wav files will loop, for example, I’ll still be hearing combat effects and the boss’ ranting after the fight is over and people are rolling on the loot. Or, worst of all, the casting sound hangs in the middle and won’t shut off, which sounds sort of like having seventy hair dryers running while I’m trying to play. It’s making me realize how much I rely on audio in this game, the direction things are coming from, what spells other people are casting.

That and I couldn’t get a raid frames addon that works right so I’ve been using the default. They improved the default a little but I still hate it, it’s way too big, shows too much stuff I don’t need to see and not enough about stuff I’m interested in. And tonight they ALL were stacking haste, so I didn’t dominate the charts quite so much, but part of that was also because I was going crazy trying to fix the audio.

And we got a hard mode achievement. Which made me a happy troll.

The Looming Patch

2010-10-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

So tomorrow, WoW is getting severely changed around. Sort of like what they did to Star Wars Galaxies before I quit. This is different, though. People are excited. Hell, I’m excited. I’ve been way bored with WoW lately, and when I play, I’ve been chasing achievements. Blew up 5 bombs in a battleground. Did all the quests in Zangarmarsh. Spent several hours grinding reputation. Things like that. Part of me wanted to use this time to wander off and find a better clique, but my troll won out, and I decided to focus on making her the best troll ever. I’m trying to hit 8000 achievement points by Cataclysm, and I’m less than a hundred away.

I mentioned that I was going to write something about what I’ve gotten out of all these years of WoW, and I kept going off on these Big Idea tangents.

One thing that did occur to me is brevity. Long ago, I decided to do my IT help desk tasks while using the fewest syllables possible. That’s because walls of text scare and intimidate users. I’ve carried that on to other areas, like WoW. Where if you say “don’t stand in green” your chances of succeeding peak, compared to “excuse me, I don’t mean to be presumptuous by giving you advice, but the green stuff on the floor makes your health bar turn into a popsicle on a hot day, and if I have to choose between letting the tank drop and sacrificing you, o lazy hunter that can’t be bothered to move a few yards to the left, well, I’ll see you in the afterlife.”

So anyway, my Minimal Syllable Rule has been finely honed in WoW, and at the same time, it’s been great for my career and personal life, although maybe it’s cut down on my blogging some. Convey information in as tight a package as I can wrap, without a bunch of useless cultural signifiers and dominance-submission games and honorifics clouding the waters.

And the best of my Big Ideas had to do with aggression. WoW, and actually the whole internet combined with aggression, is sort of like the invention of reliable birth control and sex. For the first time in human history, we have a way to exercise a primal and innate drive without necessarily doing life-changing things to others.

My generation dealt with aggression the way the Victorians dealt with sex: treat it as some unnatural foreign impulse that should be conditioned right out of us (thus leading to many impassioned hippie editorials about how we should censor violence, not sex). More current generations spend a lot of time simulating killing each other and then laughing about it. It’s my opinion we, as a species, would benefit greatly from learning more about our tendencies toward aggression, and how to satisfy them in harmless ways.

I’m still playing Sims 3. My Sims are vexing me lately. In my painstaking effort to recreate my Sim-Fu master Long Wang, who was killed in the great hard drive failure of 2010, I discovered that one of the skins I had downloaded – through the official sim site – was writing copies of a couple of ladies’ outfits to the guys’ and kids’ files, thus resulting in random men with huge gazongas or toddlers with scary distorted adult torso meshes floating above them and no chests of their own. The last straw was when little Long was born with a strange mutant fleshtone, thus screwing up all that work it took to get his mother to seduce that Chinese guy long enough to conceive him.

So I did a major search and destroy through my downloads while cursing the noob customizer who inflicted this upon me. At least with previous versions of Sims I could just go delete the offending file, but nooooo, Sims 3 makes you deal with the launcher interface, and won’t really let you go poking around in the files to see which one is getting on your nerves.

THEN, I discovered that a couple of sims I had created inadvertently used custom skins. When I deleted the downloads, they turned an unappetizing shade of . . . charcoal. After some internet research I found the only way around this is to either (a) download a 3rd party hack that lets you change things like that, or (b) make the sims over again.

Sims 3 keeps interfering with my enjoyment of Sims 3. I feel like I’m spending more time recreating stuff that’s gone bad. My current family keeps having an audio bug where a couple minutes after loading, either all the sound cuts out or some annoying background sound – crickets, passing cars – loops. Why do I keep attempting to play the wretched thing? Well, on the rare occasions when things are going smooth, it can be very entertaining.

Hopefully the WoW patch will be smooth too. Let’s cross our fingers.

What I've Been Up To, Lately

2010-08-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

First, books. I liked For The Win so much that I went out and bought Cory Doctorow’s other book, Little Brother, and found it mostly enjoyable. It’s the most accurate depiction of the San Francisco that I know that I’ve seen in print, anyway, especially the parts about the Mission burritos and the vampire LARPers.

Also, the third and final book in the Hunger Games series just came out. I’m a little ways into it, and shan’t spoil, and my copy has at least one prospective borrower waiting for me to finish. If you haven’t read it, Hunger Games is a dystopia tale featuring a protagonist who plays, basically, a game. With very high stakes. The author, Suzanne Collins, has a knack for pacing and suspense. Check it out, you’ll probably like it.

It looks like YA is where the fiction’s at these days. The grownup section is still haunted by late 20th century balderdash, but I’m gleefully watching my least favorite collapse literary fads collapse. Even the curmudgeons at the NY Times agree.

People like reading books for the stories, and the pacing. More than they like reading about angsty people stumbling numbly through subjective, nonlinear whine tastings.

Second, computers. My hard drive tragically died, taking a lot of typing and sim houses with it. After all was said and done I only really lost a few months, but still, it was painful. Especially the part where I was forced to raid on my notebook at 2 frames per second. Plus there’s been minor guild drama, and pre-expansion drama. Then when I got rebuilt there was a heat wave. I love heat waves. So I’ve been away from the gamerverse a bit, while reflecting on it from a distance.

I’ve been contemplating the question: So . . . What Exactly Have I Gotten Out Of My Extended WoW Addiction? And it probably warrants a veritable great wall of text to answer. Which I’m in the process of doing, now that I have a brand new hard drive to fill up (and a better backup system, cough).

So there’s your warning. Incoming wall of text! And also, that’s what I’ve been up to. Lately.

How Much Raiding Is Too Much Raiding?

2010-08-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

So! My priest/main is about as geared as she’s going to get. She slew the king and got her Kingslayer title, she’s sporting four pieces of T10 with-the-regular-25-token-but-not-the-heroic-token, items below item level 264 do not touch her virtual skin, gearscore is 6100+. She’s currently bogged in heroic achievements, which require 24 other people to show up on time and be competent, which has been confounded by guild reorganization plus the summer lull.

My mage is also mostly geared (5800+), but since the alt runs haven’t gone for the past couple weeks (see guild reorganization + summer lull), she doesn’t do a lot these days. Maybe run that daily with the polar bear mount, or go farm some frozen lotuses and fish. And my death knight is also mostly geared (5400+), I could grind out 50 more emblems and upgrade something, maybe, if I felt like it. I’ve been working on my warrior, hunter and druid (all 5200+). The warrior steadfastly tanks dailies so that she can be geared in case anybody ever lets me tank ICC or something, which probably won’t happen soon, sigh. The hunter is slightly gimped by her poor dps output – dps runs on gear to a far greater extent than healers and tanks. And the druid has discovered that if I log her in on Monday nights 6 to 8 hours before server reset, I can often find an ICC 25 pug desperate enough to let her in. I’ve gotten five pieces of 264 gear doing that the last couple weeks.

My “sort of goal” (because it depends to a large part on luck and other people) is to have six kingslayers by the time the expansion launches. One down, five to go.

Last night, I found myself in an interesting situation. My priest was on raid standby for the ICC hard mode stuff, and one of the reasons I have two accounts is so that I can park one toon somewhere while my brain is alt-tabbed on the other side, having adventures and the like. Keep your ADHD comments to yourself. One thing I love about MMOs is that I can let my atypical brain run free without having typical brains lecture me about being more like them. So anyway, the healer is sitting around outside ICC in case the raid needs her, and my brain is over on my hunter. Alliance side, same server. I had just gotten the hunter into a guild-run VOA when I heard my name mentioned over vent as my guildies decided they needed my presence on Sindragosa.

So I did what any normal person would do in that situation . . . well no, I did what I would do in that situation. Throw ‘em both into windowed mode, drag one window onto monitor 2 to obscure the vent window (most of the time I only use monitor 2 to see whose voice is annoying me at the moment). Hunter runs forward (while healer surreptitiously throws /follow on another player). Healer furiously spams all-purpose healing macros (bound to the S and D keys), click hunter window, furiously spam dps macros (F5 and F7 – my all purpose dps keys). Before long I had this rhythm going, alt tab, F5/F7, alt tab, S/D, repeat.

Eventually the hunter died trying to shoot frozen orbs, leaving me able to focus on the healer for about a minute and a half, not that it helped. End result: the healer’s raid wiped (not my fault though, and I did a few last-second saves) and the hunter’s raid triumphed (although we got yelled at for poor DPS and dying), and I scored some T10 gloves and offered up a bogus “gee, I’m really lagging tonight” excuse. Then the hunter ported out to the crowded city of Dalaran, which was enough to make my poor computer lock up and crash me out of one account entirely.

Of course, I can’t tell my guildies on either server my 2boxing different raids story, because they’ll get mad at me for risking their virtual lives. And in fact I probably shouldn’t tell any WoW players at all, because my raid credibility would plummet if this got out. Although it’s debatable whether it would plummet faster than the failed Naxx 10 weekly I did on my tank a little earlier, where I taunted the wrong thing and we died and I logged out of shame. I could easily blame “bad/missing instructions” but I hate being incompetent, whether or not there’s an excuse. And while I wasn’t totally incompetent while 2box raiding, I’d be lying if I claimed it didn’t compromise my performance. And since I pulled this off without being detected, drawing attention to it would defeat my purposes.

I got a really shiny adrenalin rush out of the whole experience though. Maybe this means I’m hardcore. Maybe this means I’ve beat WoW and it’s time for a new game. Maybe the expansion and/or Old Republic online will be out soon.

Anyway, if you were patient enough to make it this far – don’t tell my guildies. And don’t worry, I won’t pull this trick on raids with you . . . probably. Unless you expect me to stand around staring at the screen waiting for extended periods of time. I have a hard time with that. And also, here’s an interview with Cory Doctorow about For The Win, which I recently praised. Enjoy!

Reading Writing by Writers (with review of For The Win, by Cory Doctorow)

2010-07-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

Mea culpa is Latin for “my bad.” And today Roger Ebert came up with one, in his blogged apology for declaring games cannot be art.

Which makes me admire Ebert even more. He’s already my favorite film critic, mainly because he’s such a great writer that reading his reviews is sometimes a better experience than sitting through two hours of movie. And while I was ready to slide him a few curmudgeon points for being too old to get it, I think he just proved he actually does get it.

Another great writer: Cory Doctorow. I’ve nearly finished For The Win, a story about gold farmers, unions, gamers, economics and virtual realities. Reading it here and now gives me the same chills up and down my back that reading Neuromancer did when I first read it by the feeble light of a glowy amber display, back before computers had pictures, and color. If you’re reading this blog, trust me, you’ll like For The Win.

It’s about: some awesome characters, including a talented girl from the slums of Daravi, India who goes by the handle of General Robotwallah, a Chinese audioblogger reporting on issues concerning factory girls, a nice Jewish boy from the OC who comes up with a clever way to smuggle game cards into China after his parents try pulling an ill advised military school intervention, an economist and a professional gold farmer hunter and a tank who goes directly from an assault by some head-busting anti-union goons – in the PRC – to becoming an underground celebrity. All dealing with various facets of the interesting new virtual economy, while facing obstacles such as old people who don’t know how to text. These people all feel like they live in the same world where I live, as opposed to characters from many other novels.

You will learn things from this book, about economics and virtual worlds and game theory and pyramid schemes and psychology and Chinese dumplings, but none of the textbooky stuff overwhelms the action, which is frequently triumphant, as one might expect from an author who knows a thing or two about games. You will ask yourself questions like “how do labor unions figure into a global virtual economy?” and “now that we are all in touch via the internet, do borders really matter?” and “wow, what if there really was a Mad Magazine virtual world, would that be awesome or what?” And since it’s a YA novel, there’s a refreshing lack of ladies being dissected in basements.

And Cory’s old man, E.L. Doctorow, who wrote Welcome to Hard Times and Ragtime (two of my favorite novels), is pretty damn good himself.

I wish there were more writers I liked, because the fact that two (2) of them have come out with linguistic spillage worth of an official Darth Bunnywabbit salute reminds me how bleak the last few years have been from a print addiction standpoint. All those Derrida fans monopolizing the print outlets with their endless bleak tales about how The Mute Numb Protagonist feels disconnected angst while witnessing The Obligatory Heinous Abuse of Some Innocent Child and/or Some Hot Girl. In between writing agonizing op-eds about how Computers and/or Gamers Are Ruining The World.

For example, Steigg Larson’s Millennium Trilogy, aka The Girl Who Sold A Boatload Of Novels. I’ve read the first one in the series. It was engaging, despite the fact I was prepared to hate it -- I'm not a fan of either mysteries or thrillers, and it's both. The abuse of children and/or hot girls is present, to serve convention, but there is also a kickass Aspergerian nerdgirl who uses it as momentum to kick major ass, and the pacing works just fine.

The whole issue of “pacing” reminds me of playing music. Many people think they like a particular song because the singer is pretty or they agree with the lyrics. In fact, they like that song because the producers, as well as the musicians who play non-foreground instruments such as bass, did such a damn fine (yet invisible) job. And maybe they even like that song because someone with an appreciation for invisible craftsmanship played that song in a place where the listener created some fond memories.

Larsson’s writing is like that. They went here. They did this. The rug was green. She wore a black shirt and blue jeans. The chair came from Ikea. It’s the equivalent of a sinuous bass riff winding throughout, keeping the time, distinguishing it from the mountain of other murder mysteries and nerdgirls and asskicking and bass riffs and Ikea chairs already cluttering up the planet. Try singing haunting jazz lyrics over the bass riff of some fatfingered spastic who can’t stay on the beat and you’ll see what I mean.

Recently I was thinking about J.K. Rawlings and J.T. Leroy. These are both pen names, belonging respectively to Joanne Rawlings and Laura Albert. Both are middle aged ladies aware of the fact that using initials instead of a first name will rescue you from the dreaded Chick Lit Curse that can confine your writings to a (horrible) girly pink readership instead of a (wonderful) manly readership (notwithstanding the fact most people who read and buy books are female).

Both J.K. and J.T. wrote about teenage boys going through extraordinary experiences. J.K., a single mom fortunate to live in a country with a social safety net (yes, there’s my subliminal political statement woven two pages into the text – don’t you think this is worlds better than drawing some line in imaginary sand and then shrilling about it?) wrote about Harry Potter. You may have heard of him.

J.T., who found herself in hipster-infested late 20th century San Francisco (territory I know well), gave her teenage boy protagonist the name of an actress from Andy Warhol’s factory and made him a transvestite truck stop prostitute (with abusive childhood). And because she came from a milieu where authenticity was nearly as esteemed as dark edgy explicitness, she actually got a friend to play her seemingly-autobiographical character for public appearances, thus fleecing many rock stars, writers and hipsters. Then later on her cover was blown and these days she’s known more for her deception than her writing.

Which makes you wonder what she might have come up with if she hadn’t had to work it quite as hard to achieve literary success. Or whether Harry Potter would have been written at all in America, if J.K. had been shuffling through various sales-motivated tropes in an attempt to make a living at this writing thing. Or whether I would have ended up writing the same kind of crap if I hadn’t vanished into my apartment to devote my life to playing video games. Or whether Cory Doctorow's awesome talent would have surfaced without his dad's genes and guidance.

And meanwhile, how are the games going? Meh, my guild still hasn’t killed Arthas, and my sims are popping up with random tattoos, now that the game includes tattoo artists. Fortunately they’re all erasable. And I have decided I want my sim town to include a row of California-esque type bungalows. If you’ve ever driven down 19th Avenue in San Francisco you know the kind of house I mean, all approximately the same size and with the same floor plan, but different facades – this one Spanish, that one modern, the next one Victorian, the next one with columns, the next one with an interesting concrete planter. You can find them in LA too, all up and down the coast. An architectural style that apparently doesn’t get a lot of love from coffee table books or websites, compared to that boring row of Vics on Alamo Square that you will see endless pictures of if you Google San Francisco architecture. I might have to actually leave the house in order to get some good photos of same. Fortunately it’s summer, and the weather’s nice out. Hope it’s likewise where you are. If not, go get that Cory Doctorow book and curl up with it for a couple of days. It’s a damn fine read.

My Review of Sims 3 Ambitions

2010-06-22T14:05:00.001-07:00

Hi neglected blog,

My dog, er, bunny ate my blog posts, and then I left them in the sun and they melted, and, um, hackers deleted them. That too.

WoW has been frustrating. My guildleader vanished on April Fools Day and hasn’t logged in since, and another officer stepped up to the leadership role. And we still haven’t killed the Lich King on 25s, although we finally got Sindragosa the other night. And I’m still inclined toward some kind of a change to some other guild/server/game, but since I’m not sure what I want, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until I figure it out. Meanwhile, I’ve got several toons with nice, high gearscores, and I’m starting to favor the mage.

Meanwhile, a new Sims 3 expansion came out, Ambitions. I’ve been steadily playing it. I still have a few core issues with Sims 3; the unwieldiness of changing characters, and the way they tend to wander off on their own after you do change characters, so that your astronauts end up getting jobs selling fast food and your linebackers jog themselves slender, and my empress of evil character, who lives in a copy of the house from Psycho, acquired a baby when I accidentally left aging on for two or three minutes. Way to go, EA. Maybe next you can make a word processing program that rewrites all your documents while you’re sleeping, in case anyone says anything bad about your games.

Anyway, Ambitions is part of the “let’s force players to play some other kind of game even though they specifically purchased a sandboxy, dollhouse type sim!” marketing strategy. You may recall my rants about how the previous expansion assumed we’d all rather be playing Tomb Raider, visiting exotic foreign countries to steal artifacts while staying in decrepit youth hostels (just like James Bond and Lara Croft always do, bunking down next to tourists with khaki cargo shorts and backpacks /sarcasm) until we’ve already played it through and can actually acquire additional houses/lots to remodel.

Ambitions is actually more of a step in the right direction. It allows more customizing of the towns, and gives you the sculpting skill so you can make statues of your favorite sims, and the ability to give the NPCs makeovers and tattoos. Plus there’s a consignment store so your sims can sell things to each other, and washing machines and dryers, so your sims can frantically do laundry every 20 minutes. And I believe they’ve finally locked up jobs so your politician sim doesn’t decide to become a classical musician the minute you turn your back.

In fact, this review is a little premature because I haven’t even touched a few of the functions. City planner for example, which lets you alter the town. And investigator – I just have never really cared for detectives.

I’ve got a fireman though. He even has a husband – I don’t know if this is a bug, but previously I couldn’t even get my lesbian soldiers to even go steady, which caused a bit of annoyance when I stopped playing them and discovered one-half of the couple was lusting over half the town. Seriously, every time I made a new sim, she’d be out there on the front porch trying to get to know them better – the game wasn’t recognizing the fact she was already in a relationship and was treating her like a single sim. Now, in an unheralded footnote, same gender sims can marry. They don’t change names, but their status changes to husband/husband or wife/wife, and they have a little wedding ring icon. So now I’ve got a couple of married women soldiers (take that, don’t ask don’t tell) and my hunky fireman is married to a twinkie doctor and drives a lavender fire truck.

To get the fire truck, which you can paint any color you want, you have to work your way up through the fire fighter career. Which is sort of fun. You hang around the fire station maintaining the alarm and playing chess with your co-workers until an alarm comes in, then you go visit one of your other sim houses. You might even get to break open the doors with axes to rescue trapped sims.

The whole idea was to have sims’ careers be playable. According to some designer interview I read, this was an effort to tempt players who refuse to come out of build mode into playing the game differently. Why is it BAD to play the game like it was intended, and why do we need to coerce them into playing some other game – does this mean the EA sports games are going to follow the same tactic and try to get us to spend time decorating players’ houses while discouraging us from working on the World Cup and/or Super Bowl?

Anyway, as you might have guessed, Ambitions careers are fun if you want to play a single sim, and not so fun if you want to play a houseful of them, because it’s difficult to control two career sims at the same time, because the careers take place in realtime. The freelance careers, fishing and gardening and inventing and so on, now require your sim to register at city hall, and then they get 10 levels of moderately amusing titles to progress through, receiving rewards of medals and (identical) trophies at intervals. I understand the investigator career is playable like the firefighter career, but most of the rest seem to follow the same hastily-slapped-together freelance treatment.

But there are other features that are more promising, proving that not everyone on the EA development team is a clueless profit-focused non-gamer who neither understands nor respects the playerbase.

For example, inventing. An inventor sim can make lots of widgets, which are useless yet interesting bits of décor. They can also make time machines. Yu can’t exactly accompany your sim on a trip to the past like you can follow them to work at the fire station. They enter the time machine, it shimmers while some repetitive text about their adventures appears, and then they come out, sometimes with money, or books, or even a new outfit (so far I’ve seen caveman/woman, and knight in armor/ren faire lady, with standard spandex jumpsuits for future time travelers). Once you unlock outfits, you also get extra wardrobe slots. A nice bonus.

Then there’s the whole notion of using the time machine to have babies. You entice your beloved into getting in the time machine for some past or future woohoo, and a few days later, your offspring pops out of the time machine, ready to join the family unit. My past child came out as a teenager, my future children both came out as elderly. I’ll leave it up to the sim physicists to explain why that happens. It’s still kind of cool, especially if you want your sims to procreate without turning aging on and possibly causing your supervillains to become single parents.

Another thing inventors can do is dig up the yard for minerals and metals using a craftable backhoe. This usually creates a gaping hole, and you can explore it and have wild adventures with underground gnomes (again, you don’t actually go there, you get text balloons and possibly a reward). After it’s explored, you can use it as a quick transport to other areas. Which I haven’t done yet, and I don’t know if you’re restricted to the main property, but it’s an unusual way to move sims around the lot.

And they get robots, at max level. Robots aren’t quite like the old Tom Servo model. They are independent sims who never have to shower, but they do eat and sleep, and pee. They come in male and female models, and they won’t make babies, although you can woohoo in the time machine with them. Don’t ask me why you’d want to do that.

So in summary, Ambitions is a great expansion, but not for the reasons it thinks it is. Of course, if they had pitched it as “now with gay marriage, extra wardrobe slots, backhoes and time machine sex,” probably nobody would have bought it but me.

Now if they’d only bring back Seasons and let me do something about the relentless Truman Show-esque cheeriness of my little seaside resort town. Which, to this particular native of various resort-y type places adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, is over-the-top, even despite the grim industrial section I just built for my robot factory and tattooed biker family (oh yeah, you also get an official mesh for motorcycles, woohoo). That place could use some rain and fog.

Blogs are digital bulletin boards

2010-04-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Not going to whine excessively, just noting that I'm home sick with a fever which COULD be from the cold (which I caught March 20th and still hasn't gone away) or COULD be from my emergency dental work week before last.

Aren't you glad you're not me right now?

But anyway, I found this article while searching the web in my delirium that cheered me up because it seemed to indicate there was someone else obsessing over one of my pet obsessions (technology's affect on literature) so I'm tacking it to my virtual corkboard here in case anyone else is interested, or so I can find it later when my temperature drops.

Tanks and Healers and DPSers

2010-04-23T16:25:00.001-07:00

Right now, I’m not running a lot of heroics. Or raids, but that’s a complaint for another day. I’ve got five toons at level 80 (druid, warrior, hunter, death knight and priest), and working on my mage, who is up to level 75. My warrior only tanks, my druid and priest only heal, and my death knight is only for DPS. As is my hunter, but you knew that..

They’re all mostly geared. The priest is in the best gear, mostly T10, gear score nearly 6k. Everyone else ranges from 4800ish to 5200ish, and they’ve all done all the heroics, and several raids too. I got them geared by running many, many heroic instances, some days on all five of them. Now I’m mostly trying to get that stupid scorpion trinket on my DPS toons (19 scorpion-less runs so far on my death knight), and my druid needs to go grind out a whole set of feral gear – I’m in denial about that, because I also need more tree gear. Having a hybrid means gearing twice. Which is annoying, and is why I tend to go for single purpose toons.

The game is a different experience from each of these perspectives. I’ve heard lots of comments from people who only play one type of toon. Sometimes they complain they have it rougher than anybody else, or that all people who play X have Y type of personalities, or whatever. Since I play all three, I think I’ve got a few things to say on the subject, so here I go.

DPS

The first rule of DPS is that your position is precarious. There is always another DPS that does more damage per second than you. Also, you are very easy to replace. If you are the 10k DPS rogue you might be a little harder to replace than the 3k DPS death knight, but not much.

This tends to lead to a cut throat, backstabbing mentality among the dps. In a five “man” group there are three of you. In a raid, depending on the encounter, there could be 16 of you. All wanting to prove “look, I have massive numbers, this means I’m the most important DPS here!! If you need to toss someone out, it should be someone other than me!”

You are also expendable, and the healer will sacrifice you to save the tank, or themselves, if it comes to that. If they’re a decent healer anyway. Healers who let the tank die to save the DPS aren’t very good. Which sometimes comes as a shock to the individual DPSer who assumes their life is at least as valuable as those of the other players.

So your game time, as a DPS, once you finally get into a group (it can take 20 minutes through the looking-for-group interface, unless you cultivate friendships with healers and tanks), is spent walking a fine line between trying to top everybody else and getting killed because you cut your margins too close in an attempt to top everybody else.

People are more forgiving of inadequate DPS than they are of bad healers and tanks, assuming they don’t go out of their way to pull player agro. You can stand there in the background wearing your greens and blues, struggling to put out 1k of DPS while the hotshots stomp all over your meager numbers, and people will most likely smile indulgently, and might even offer you sage advice.

Unless, of course, you try to step above your station in virtual life by doing things like ordering people around, or attacking mobs that aren’t being tanked. Then you can expect lots of abuse, as well as getting kicked out of groups, which can result in sitting in the penalty box for half an hour waiting for your debuff can go away so you can stand in line for 20 minutes again.

Eventually you will get to the point where you do good DPS, maybe even the best DPS in your group, which is extremely relative. My death knight has been both highest and lowest DPS on the same evening, depending on who the randomizer selects for my party.

Being a good DPSer in a sea of bad and average ones can definitely put a swagger in your step, and make you more acceptable to impatient and demanding players, such as raiders. They will then expect you to do your marvelous DPS while dancing out of fire, void spots, poison novae, frost waves and other hazardous things (and competing with other DPS who can do all of that while doing more DPS than you).

The game is centered around DPS players, so you’ll have a comparatively easy time doing all the PVE chores required for raiding, such as earning enough gold from daily quests for your repair bills. You’re the average guy, the cog that makes the wheels turn, the face in the crowd, distinguished only by your skill and gear (and possibly by whether you can make reliably funny wisecracks, or whether you chose an annoying name for your toon).

Healers

Healers are the reactive role. Reactive means that what you do depends mostly on what the other players do. If they choose to go stand somewhere dangerous with monsters biting at their ankles, you get to follow them, while repeatedly casting spells that basically boiled down to “that didn’t happen.” Battleaxe swing at the tank’s head? Didn’t happen. Mage took an arrow to the chest? Nope, not today. Hunter pulled agro and forgot how to feign death? Well, it all depends on how much you like that hunter. Maybe it did happen, actually.

As the healer, it’s all up to you. But before you get drunk with your mad power to control the game, consider the flip side of the equation: anything other than success is probably your fault. Maybe it is your fault, as in “oops, gave the tank a stamina buff rather than a heal.” Too bad, everyone will die and blame you. Maybe it’s not, as in “hey, where did everybody go while I was replenishing my mana?” Too bad, they’ll still die, and still blame you.

Healers don’t normally get a lot of respect despite controlling the game, mainly because it’s always their fault when something goes wrong. It also could be that “reactive” part. Proactively charging into mobs, like the tank does, is manly, and brave, and assertive. Reactively casting “that didn’t happen” is feminine, and weak, and cowardly. Don’t blame me for those stereotypes, I didn’t make them up, and I don’t really like them either. The player base, which is not very sensitive toward individual feelings, has decided that healing is somehow equivalent to “mom, could you follow me around and make sure nothing harms me while I play my video game?” It’s very typical to encounter couples where the guy tanks while his girlfriend follows him around keeping him alive. It is not at all typical to find a role reversal, where she tanks while he stands in the background patching things up. Maybe it has to do with that reactive versus proactive thing.

The healer game can look a lot different from the game everybody else is playing. They’re all facing down a bloodthirsty ogre or a fearsome dragon. You’re staring at a bunch of health bars, trying to figure which button to hit to keep them all approximately the same length. I’ve heard it compared to tetris, or whack-a-mole. Sometimes you get what’s called tunnel vision, where you’re so busy staring at those bars that you don’t notice the dragon is munching on your leg. Then everyone will die (and it’s your fault).

Most of the time it takes a healer two or three minutes to find a group. Usually you will be appreciated by your fellow players, unless you develop a reputation for constantly healing things where everyone dies (which might not be your fault, but if you continue to hang around with people who fail hard enough to get a bad reputation, not ditching them to find more competent friends is probably your fault).

Being an undergeared healer is playing the game on hard mode, unless your tank and DPS are overgeared enough to make your life less difficult. I’ve had situations where the game moves away from being “exciting, adrenalin-packed adventure” to “incredibly stressful exercise in rationing your magical healing powers among deranged suicidal noobs constantly flinging themselves into mortal peril.” Especially if you get into a raid full of tanks and DPS that have no idea how to play healers, and assign too many targets, or make you responsible for conflicting emergencies. Being an overgeared healer means you have to spam fewer buttons, and can sometimes even watch the fight rather than the health bars.

Tanks

Tanks are the most valuable players in the game. I know this is true because when my tank enters LFG, I get a group instantly. Not only that, but they all defer to me, and expect me to lead them. They sit there patiently waiting for me to start the action, and then they all work together to give me the illusion that I’m soloing everything, by healing all my damage and covering up my weak DPS.

In return, I have to scoop up all the mobs and get them to stand in the same place, focusing on me. This is harder than it looks, unless you’re a paladin with your magical “look at me, everybody!” spell. I tank with a warrior, who has to do a little more work yelling insults while stomping my feet in a fit of pique. And sometimes the mobs insist on going for healers (especially if they start healing me before I attract the mobs’ attention) or DPS (especially if they are also pretending they’re soloing everything and took a potshot at mob C while I was busy yelling at mobs A and B).

I’m also expected to know everything when I play a tank. DPSers and healers just basically follow me around, helping me with whatever I attack. Responsibility for knowing where to go, what to hit, and what (if any) unusual things they’ll do when hit is all mine. Yes, yes, all tanks go through encounters for the first time, but most players are in denial about that. The tank is the de facto leader. Before the recent patch that let everybody mark mobs, party leadership (as well as control of loot, and kicking people out) was automatically handed over to the tank, as soon as one joined.

This could have something to do with the reason why tanks are comparatively rare. Hardly anybody wants that burden. And not only that, but tanks are absolutely required to know enough number crunching to assure they never get hit with a critical strike, and to gear themselves to prevent that from ever happening. This takes some knowledge, and investment of time and money. I used to compare gearing my tank to restoring an obscure sports car that you only drive on weekends. You aren’t going to want it for everyday use, because repair costs are huge and it’s not that versatile.

Although you can play a tank every day, and usually find a group, or even a guild, without any trouble at all. The repair bills still cost, oh, over a hundred gold if you get completely red. Which means that most tanks end up being elitists to some extent. Unless you like spending a fortune to have the dents removed from your shield after dying twenty or thirty raid deaths because your pals are playing like people whose repair bills are much smaller. It’s easy to find a group; what’s hard is finding a group that will make your life easier (by healing and DPSing you through encounters where you can find even better tank gear, without failing).

Griefing and Abuse

Many mono-role players like to whine about how their role is the hardest, because you run into asshats all the time. I can vouch that all three roles attract asshats, but they don’t all inspire the same kinds.

Tanks are vexed by healers that don’t, as well as DPS that try to steal their agro. As tank, all the agro rightfully belongs to me, and if some upstart DPS thinks they can share my burden, they’ll probably die, with the healer laughing at them. Many DPS don’t understand this and think your job is to follow them around distracting the mobs they annoy.

Healers are vexed by tanks that go too fast, or too slow. Pally tanks in particular have a super speed buff that allows them to zip out of range and get mortally wounded while you’re still scurrying over to assist. Some healers get mad when tanks refuse to slow down and let them replenish their mana. Not me, I’m usually overgeared, plus I’m accustomed to playing with maniacs, so I’ll be dispatching shadowfiends or replenishing myself or sneaking a hit of leftover eggnog during my .37 seconds of downtime. When I was undergeared, though, I needed to replenish, and I used to get pretty cheesed when tanks failed to take that under consideration.

DPS just want to win and get the prize, and tend to resent anybody who adds additional slowness or thought to the process. Especially DPS with suboptimal numbers who facepull mobs. For some reason, a DPS player is usually sassier when inexperienced. Although good DPS can be pretty saucy too, especially if the tank is undergeared and can’t hold agro over their eleventy-k onslaught or if the healer is undergeared and having a hard time keeping the tank going without sacrificing some of the more careless DPS.

“Your class is easy!”

Meh, if you want a really complicated game, WoW might not be your cup of tea. But as far as WoW goes, being a healer is the hardest. Until you’re overgeared, and your job consists of hitting F2 every thirty seconds.

Being a tank is also the hardest (especially a warrior tank, which can involve hitting several buttons, as opposed to pallies and bears, which only have to hit a few) because you have to find special gear, learn how to herd mobs and then find a guild that is desperate enough to let you tank while still being skilled enough to avoid death most of the time.

And being a DPS is really hard, because you have to convince people to let you into their raid and not the thousands of other DPS whose numbers are just as good as yours (although actually playing the game as a DPS is easysauce). Then you have to negotiate with all the other DPS egos while outperforming at least some of them, without alienating the healer or the tank.

That One Person

2010-04-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

That One Person

Yeah, I haven’t been blogging for a while. For many reasons. Per my post-post-modernism epiphany last bloggage, a lot of things in the world that inspired me to spew inches and inches of text have morphed into far less objectionable forms. For example, this blog sort of started out aimed at games and gender; and while the situation isn’t utopia yet, we now have lots of facebook games and iphone games and female gamer communities, and more gender balance in WoW. And there are far less media scares blaming online gaming for the decline of civilization. Which you probably wouldn’t realize from reading a lot of more alarmist-centric journalists, who have moved on to complaining about other things than writing pieces about “hey, you know how we were complaining about this back in ’02? well, things have gotten better!”

It’s basically the industry. If you can write a piece from an “omg! read this or you’ll die!” angle, publishers will write you checks while incorporating your message into “pay attention to this publication or you’ll die!” buttressing the line between “freelance journalist” and “opinionated person who can type.”

There are plenty of subtopic areas, like “omg, that harmless-seeming, mainstream activity is actually bad!” and “omg, people with scary ideology are conspiring!” Reminds me of an old interview with Stephen King, back when he could write a decent book, talking about how he found a way to make irrationally being scared of everything profitable. Given the properly neurotic mindset, some authors can turn a trip to the grocery store three blocks away into a soul-shattering voyage of doom. But do we really want to give all the microphones and soapboxes to the chronically terrified, or depressed, or alienated?

Even this is changing as I type. I read an interesting editorial from Craig of Craigslist today about how credibility and fact checking are the new journalistic gold standard, and media outlets that manage to refrain from hysteria will be able to take that reputation to the bank (plus some of the non-working journalists might be able to find new careers as fact checkers).

And meanwhile, some of these journalists have (finally) read their comments and discovered meanness on the internet. There is plenty of talk about disabling comments on news sites, or journalists reacting to internet toxicity, like this recent one in the NYTimes, in which the author explains that she is not “evolved” enough to take the negative comments with a grain of salt.

(Thus providing a hint to why so many people would rather believe that Jesus partied with dinosaurs than accept evolution. In my decidedly unhumble opinion, people need to start separating science from quasi-mystical ideology that makes just as little sense as Joseph and Mary riding to Bethlehem on a triceratops. Can we get a fact checker in here to figure out if there are any desperately unemployed evolutionary psychologists out there asserting that evolution brings less sensitivity to insults in print – maybe with some accompanying studies involving newts and rhesus monkeys?)

I’ve written many square feet of text about rude internet behavior before, and I hear about internet meanness all the time, in WoW. On the forums there are many threads each day that start out with “I ran into this random stranger, and he said something mean/dumb/uninformed/rude to me!” Talking to my friends and guildies, there are plenty of occasions where somebody encountered a person who gave wrong advice, or said something thoughtless or clueless. I’ve definitely been subjected to it a few times. Have I performed any myself? Only in retaliation (like the other night when that hunter kept talking smack about blood elves, inspiring me to mock his feeble damage, which was below the tank).

But it’s not just in WoW. It’s also in the New York Freaking Times. “OMG! Someone said something mean to me!” Never mind the hundreds of people who didn’t say anything mean at all when encountered.

And I can sort of get behind that sentiment too. After getting pickpocketed on public transit a couple of times, I’m still doing cloak and dagger stuff like carrying my bank card and cash and keys separately, despite the fact that the vast majority of times I’ve ventured out in public, nobody has robbed me. All those reasonably law-abiding citizens out there suddenly got displaced by the two bad apples.

Granted, some of the mean-thing-sayers are pretty mean (and running around replacing your ID after some creep steals it sucks big time). It’s probably wise to guard yourself against people with an unusual personal definition of “boundaries.”

And moderation is something that didn’t occur to the early internetters, in their safe enclaves like Compuserve, and WELL, where it was safe to assume that everybody was a nice person. It didn’t occur to the designers of SWG when they allowed player housing without realizing how many players would just use it as a chance to post rude billboards. It didn’t occur to the designers of Sims Online that players would spend more time copying trademarks and thinking of creative censor-defeating ways to spell naughty words on their roofs. It didn’t occur to Craig that disgruntled exes would post fake ads inviting stupid people to non-existent orgies, and nobody even guessed in their wildest science fiction dreams that four chan would ever “evolve” (does that make them more advanced than science fiction? can we get that evolutionary psychologist back?) It didn’t even occur to the makers of Spore that all the user generated content they seemed certain would be gaming’s Next Big Thing would consist of crudely rendered wangs ‘n gazongas. Visionaries usually don’t travel in the same circles as thugs (except for the visionary thugs, see four chan).

And it doesn’t occur to a lot of writers that their tone isn’t universally palatable. For instance, I’m harping on the NYTimes author’s use of “evolved.” Which is a popular usage, especially in California. In other locations, a writer might say something about not being Christian enough to turn the other cheek, or mature enough to shrug off playground insults, or phlegmatic enough to withstand conflict with the ragingly sanguine. Or whatever.

I think this has to do with the nature of being able to sit on your butt in your living room talking to the whole world. It ain’t natcheral. And when one of your billions of planetmates casts Aura of Doubt on your own perceptions, it’s tempting to take it with the same amount of seriousness as you might take your significant other’s criticism of your cooking or bathroom habits.

And it’s everywhere. Mainstream newsblogs frequently fill up large amounts of editorial space with extended meditations on “OMG, some celebrity/rural mayor/blogger in New Zealand/anonymous commenter said this!” With every bit as much outrage as some WoW player posting about what some rude shaman said to him in a pug the other night. In fact, I was just reading a blog about WoW, WoW Insider, which usually takes a metagaming approach to similar complaints, and found a diatribe that boiled down to “I was in this pug, and some tank told me I wasn’t doing a good job, and we wiped, OMG!”

That One Person.

Here you were, cheerfully going about your day, when That One Person appeared. They unleashed a string of syllables, letters or pictures – usually a small one, comparatively. I mean, you don’t see as many impassioned editorials about “OMG, this guy wrote a whole 300 page book saying outrageous things!” or “OMG, I find that every song Britney Spears has ever done is an insult to life itself!” No, it’s always That One Person, destroying your faith in human goodness with a caustic sentence or two. Inspiring you to vent your outrage so you can attract responses like “OMG, I know how you feel, the other day this warlock told me to stand more over to the left!”

Ladies and gentleman, that one person is an asshat. And might even be wrong.

It still doesn’t mean people won’t take their asshattery to heart. Especially, well, people who have an inflated opinion of themselves and their opinions. Or people who are accustomed to be treated with deference due to their age or wealth or education or fame that step into an environment where all that is masked. Or, to be more charitable, people who are innocently doing their best and are blindsided by sudden bursts of rude negativity. That One Person and their offhanded remark can easily consume way more attention than they merit; some speculate that this is the whole reason they became That One Person in the first case.

My own theory is that most sudden outbreaks of outrageousness come from people who are acclimatized to it. Packs of dudes especially seem to delight in constantly pushing each others’ buttons, or trying to. Some families like to insult each other back and forth. In some WoW guilds, saying something like “your dps is bad” brings tears and woundedness. In my guild, the proper reply is “your face is bad” (and the proper reply to that is “your face is a face”).

And some outrageousness is indeed over the top. We all agree about that. What we don’t agree is where the lines are. Some societies have dealt with this conundrum through censorship, and some operate under an informal “you must have skin this thick to go on this ride” policy. Maybe ours needs more moderators to ease the transition.

Happy Easter!!

2010-04-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve been writing. Haven’t been playing WoW much, although no doubt I’ll be logged in for lots of the Easter holiday forcing my toons that haven’t got the title yet to hunter Easter eggs. And no, I’m not going to talk about what I’m writing (much), because people who talk about what they’re gonna write aren’t writers.

Also (a pet peeve of mine) people who aren’t typers aren’t writers either. They’re like carpenters who can’t use hammers, or cooks who can’t be bothered to turn on the oven. People who say things like “I’d be an awesome writer if I could just get someone to do all the typing because that’s hard work” are like me saying “Architects don’t know nothin’ because I can build a fabulous sim castle so I can do their job.” Which I wouldn’t say. Not even if I were drunk, assuming I drank.

But anyway. Having harped on for years about how postmodernism and Marxism and all that aughties stuff is full of stale and fail, and it’s going to be all about brains and evo psych, finally the NYT got around to vindicating me.

Took them long enough, and I had to deal with many a surly and ill humored deconstructor with their grubby fingers firmly clenched around the status quo. It’s also amusing because that’s in the vein of what I’m trying to write, something with a lot of presumptions going on in the backstory and very little 20th century pop psych. I mean, you didn’t think I’d be writing a weepy pseudoautobio about my tragic childhood sexual exploitation by demented fundamentalist penguins or some kind of crap like that, did you?

(Pause for a moment while I dance on postmodernism’s grave.)

So anyway, let me pause the writing and talking about writing for some brains, because brains are fashionable right now.
We have supertasker brains

and gamer brains

and no doubt “grumpy people who freak out about technology” brains, but they’re too scared to sit under the brain scanning machine to let anyone know what’s malfunctioning in their particular case.

And no, I am not a supertasker. I’m not good at combining audio with visual/motion. It took me over a decade to learn how to play guitar and sing at the same time, although I’m pretty good at both when I focus. I wouldn’t drive and talk on the phone, personally. I can’t even game and talk on the phone very well.
I’m pretty sure I have a gamer brain though, and I deliberately give it frequent workouts to reinforce it.

Now let’s just fantasize for a moment, and pretend that supertasking and gaming are marketable skills. Maybe in a few generations they will be. Can't supertask? No heavy equipment license for you.

And while we’re there, let’s just unplug the whole “all brains start life exactly alike and are made different by nutrition and experience” machine and hang a “do not resuscitate” sign on it. And assign all the new age gurus who promise that anybody’s brain can be made into a supertasking or gaming brain given enough vitamin supplements and chanting, as well as the old age preachers who promise that gay brains can be made into straight brains given enough behavioral conditioning and prayer. And all the other people who want to declare all the brains alike, rather than letting them bloom at their particular subspecialty.

Are the supertaskers going to decide that since they’re making the most creative use out of a kewl new form of technology, that they own the planet and will enslave us all? Possible. It’s happened before.

And will there be liberals to stand up for the averagetasker brains who get fired when a supertasker resume arrives with brain scan attached? Or conservatives insisting that if you were born rich in brain cellular activity, it must be because God likes you more and doesn’t want you to pay taxes, and people with non-supertasking brains should pull themselves up by their own medullae oblongata?

Because, ya know, all these post-Enlightenment theories about equality seem to imply we have a metaphysical *something* which is equivalent, and which both political parties agree should be constrained in some ways and given free reign in others.

It’s not the base chemicals in our bodies, because then fat people would be worth more. It's not the particular strain of DNA; the Enlightenment was a reaction against the tyranny inherent in a world where station was determined by birth. Are we heading back into one, where wee toddlers are scanned and then sent accordingly to Harvard or pre-rehab? How can you argue that people who can’t read a textbook have a right to study brain surgery? And maybe they shouldn't, but does that justify locking them in a poverty-level existence because their particular brainstyle is better at, say, troubleshooting obsolete assembly line machinery or hunting with bows and arrows than customer service? Or only giving medical insurance to the ones whose brains are harmonious with computer skills? Where is this subversion of both Rousseau's noble savages and Hobbes' natural wickedness going to lead?

If we’re not “scientifically” equal, any equivalence or commonality between us must be based on culture, philosophy or religion. Or art. Or facebook page. And these subjects are moving in very interesting new directions.

I realize a lot of people are still upset because postmarxstructuralism recently collapsed (), but I'm of the opinion that the advent of the virtual world has turned philosophy in an interesting sideways direction. And that's sort of what I’m wrapping my brain around these days, so I'm a little focused.

It’s a holiday for many. It’s specifically Easter. I’m fond of Easter, and I went by that handle for some enjoyable years.

Be nice to the bunnies, and don’t encourage the bastards who sell them to impulse buyers.

Because rabbits are awesome pets ONLY FOR INSANE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO HAVE EVERYTHING IN THEIR HOUSE GNAWED AND PEED ON WHILE PAYING ASTRONOMICAL VET BILLS (like me) (plus they disapprove of everything you do).

Have a very happy Easter, whether you spend it in church, playing WoW, doing heathen rites in the woods, sleeping late or eating chocolate.

Legal Notice to All Comment Posters

2010-03-10T22:13:00.000-08:00

[But first a note to the rest of you: had to turn comment moderation on, it was getting thick.]

Welcome to my blog, Darth BunnyWabbit. Comments are now moderated, but that's okay, you can still post your links to keylogger sites, ponzi schemes and hawt videos of emo boys

WITH THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONS.

By submitting a comment to this blog, the Commenter ("Commenter") (i.e. you) agrees to the following terms and conditions as set forth herein by blog author Darth BunnyWabbit (hereinafter "DBW"). This contract applies only to Commenter(s) posting links in Unacceptable Format, as defined herein. All definitions herein shall take precedence over any definitions found in dictionaries, spellcheck utilities or applicable local, federal and international statutes. "Unacceptable Format" as used herein shall mean all links to keylogger, phisher, spammer, hacker, malware and other malicious sites, as well as any site DBW does not like, along with any url that does not have the word "roflcopters" or a Shakespeare quote in between the dot and the terminating multi-letter url suffixy-ish thing.

By posting said comments in Unacceptable Format, Commenter hereby agrees that Commenter is a bottom dwelling scum sucking lowlife criminal. Commenter agrees that it is guilty of criminal acts in the State of California, the United States of America, the City and County of San Francisco and all applicable jurisdictions. Commenter waives all rights to trial by jury or court trial and by accepting this contract by posting a comment with a link in Unacceptable Format, Commenter accepts all guilt, responsibility and liability for commission of said criminal acts, as well as any other acts which might be made illegal by statutes passed in the future. Commenter further agrees to waive all applicable statute(s) of limitations. Commenter agrees that DBW is entitled to full and complete ownership of any bank accounts, real property and especially computers that Commenter owns or in which Commenter has vested or unvested interest. Commenter agrees to pay all legal fees incurred in determining whether or not this contract is enforceable, for any parties who care to read a lengthy legal research memo, including friends and business associates of DBW, and said research memos are to be completed in not less than fifty billable hours, and are to contain tables of contents and authorities. Commenter further agrees to hire legal professionals of DBW's choosing to incur billable hours determining whether the previous research memoranda were any good. Commenter agrees that it is a satanic junkie pedophile whose mother performs all sex acts listed in Urban Dictionary daily. Commenter agrees that any mediation, arbitration, or other alternative dispute resolution of this matter must only be conducted by a trier of fact wearing a tie or scarf with a blue and green pattern, and any findings by trier(s) of fact not suitable attired shall be null, void and unenforceable, unless DBW agrees that they seem fair.

TO ACCEPT THIS CONTRACT FULLY AND WITHOUT RESERVATION, post your comment containing links in Unacceptable Format below. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Your gearscore is a little . . . low

2010-02-26T13:55:00.000-08:00

Recently I found this article from Slate outlining a brief history of hysteria over new communication methods. I’d summarize it but all my exposure to the internet has turned me into a drooling idiot barely capable of summoning even
the most fleeting cognitive spasm.

I lied. Actually I think all that internet exposure has made me snarkier, although I was pretty snarky to begin with. It’s also made me different in a few ways. For example, pre-internet I might spend an evening gathered with a few humans, snarking about some movie and eating food, with all of us in the same room. I still do that, except for the “same room” part, and due to my ongoing media diet I can only snark about old movies. Although Netflix is begging me to come back to their fold, which could change things if I take them up on it.

Anyway, pre-internet, these humans would all be local, so a lot of what we’d talk about would be things like where to get the best pizza. And all these humans would be about my age and share my approximate media tastes, which is likely how we became friends in the first place. So we might all agree that “terrible movie version of kiddie show from our era” is a superlative homage to the sentimental joys we once experienced, while “terrible movie version of kiddie show from our little brothers’/sisters’ era” is more proof that people Not Like Us are stupid.

But now it’s different. For one thing, locality had to go, because if I brought up a discussion of “where do you go for the best pizza?” among my gamer friends or my forum friends, things could easily get sidetracked to “where do you get the best poutine in Alberta?” Because we live all over the place. And not only that, but we come from different age groups and subcultures, so we can’t even talk about things like popular music (note to my fellow old people: remember when Everybody watched the same TV shows and listened to the same top 40 songs? Those days have ended. And don’t whine to me about it, I’m rather pleased with this development. However, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that sometimes, people way out of your demographic group like the same tunes and movies as you. That kid quoting Journey or Beatles lyrics might have learned them from a video game rather than a live performance, but he still likes them.)

Because of this fragmentation, people Not Like Us have become even harder to define.

And so gamer subculture has to devise its own. Currently, if you look at the WoW forums, there is a massive debate between the hardcores and the casuals, although hardly any posters fit into either category and prefer to call themselves a “casual hardcore” or a “former hardcore who is now a casual” or a “casual who still likes to raid.” The distinction is either how many hours one plays, or how seriously one takes the game, but there are no dividing lines. We also engage in our own homegrown forms of racism and bigotry, against gnomes, or night elf hunters, or death knights with unimaginative names. Plus now we have the gearscore mod to tell us what social class everybody is in.

The gearscore mod tabulates a point value representing everything a particular toon has equipped. So if they’ve been running around slaying the newest monsters, they might have a gearscore that shows up in formidable red (over 5500) rather than inferior purple (4000-ish) or noobish turquoise (about 3k). I believe the highest possible is around 5900, my main has an impressive 5700+ and all my level 80 alts are around 4800. While gearscore is not absolutely reliable, and you can probably get near 5k just piddling around in 5 person instances without ever going near an actual raid, it’s a good ballpark estimate of your capabilities.

And as such, has spawned a “skill matters more!” faction (consisting largely of people who don’t want to invest the time gearing up to do over 3k dps in a place where you need 4k to beat the timer, joined by a few high gearscore people claiming that they actually got their gear by having skill) and a “I refuse to have any dealings with low gearscore scum” faction (which often leads to people crying about being excluded from activities by people who refuse to invite people who haven’t already done them).

In my main guild, people Like Us all have high gearscores, from raiding all the time. Unfortunately, there are now quite a few unguilded people who got their high gearscores through hard work or luck. So the current fashion calls for gem snobbery. Much of that gear can be decorated with magic jewels that grant you various stat increases. A player who pays attention to sites like Elitist Jerks, or who socializes with high gearscore snobs, is usually well aware of which stats clash with their class and spec and playstyle, while someone who is just stabbing in the dark is likely to use jewels to make mages muscular, hunters smart and healers more capable of using deadly force. Which is counterproductive for people who play specialized roles in groups.

To be fair, it is very frustrating to encounter someone with great gear and lousy technique. Gear used to make several statements about the player owning it. I can conduct myself in a large group of people without drama. I have enough status in that group to demand a share of the spoils. I am probably used to discussing technique and accepting criticism, and won’t have a meltdown if someone tells me that putting strength gems on my mage is lame. I can do complicated video game things like shoot dragons while avoiding standing in the fire. I can play this game on “hard” setting.

There were always exceptions, like the main tank’s uncoordinated yet lovable girlfriend, the guy who illegally bought an account from someone else who did all the hard work, the kid who took over his brother’s toon after he got bored and quit. But they were few.

Now they’re all over the place. Proudly sporting epic gear they got from pugs. Misleading you into assumptions like “hmm, that guy has 5200, he probably knows better than to stand in the toxic green clouds.”

While at the same time, there are players who constantly insist that their gearscore is low because they have a fabulous life/a lack of patience with Blizzard’s dumb gearing procedure/amazing eye-hand coordination and excluding them is sheer bigotry. They point out that top guilds can bring down the hard bosses while wearing swimsuits and ballet slippers (without noting that the players in these guilds have already invested lots of hours in being able to coordinate at that level). And they accuse people who rely on gearscore of being mainly interested in “e-peen stroking” (aka vanity).

A few anecdotal experiences.

I went on a raid with my druid guild, in ICC 10. We had gearscore from about 4500 to 5200. The main tank was one of the mid-forties. Everyone there was skilled, but not with this particular fight. So people had trouble positioning themselves, and that mid-forties tank could take about one and a half hits where a more geared tank could take two or three. This would not be a problem if the choreography was precise, but since we were also doing a lot of re-positioning, we wiped a few times before calling it off.

I went on the same raid with my hunter, different server and guild. This guild is a serious progression guild. My gearscore was probably around 4600, and there were a few others in that range, but the tank was well over 5000, and not only that, they were very used to working together. I don’t raid with them often, but I’m used to raiding. We got the beastie down on the first attempt.

I landed in a random instance where everyone’s gearscore was bright red. Should be a piece of cake, right? Wrong. All three of the dps managed to run straight into the arms of danger right at the start, and the tank and I kept it afloat by ourselves for a minute before quitting in disgust. And many times I’ve landed in an instance with people with low gear scores who are actually alts of raiders and know very well how to conduct themselves, yet have an attitude because people like these three dps have insulted them.

In the meantime, I get to listen to my guildies say things like “omg, that warrior has a crit gem in his T10 chest, which is different from the strength gem in my T10 chest! I think I’m going to vomit!”

As you may have guessed, I not only have gearscore installed, I use it. Not really to disparage people, unless they’re people from my first WoW guild, who will never catch up to me, ever, because they are lame. I use it to make snap judgments. Such as “you guys are biting off more than you can chew, so it’s time for me to log out and make more coffee.” Or “my tank is 4800 and yours is at 5100, so you’re main tank for this fight and I’ll stand over here and intercept the large bugs.” Or “sorry, you can’t join my group because your gearscore indicates your dps is around 2k, and we already have too many people in the 2k range and not enough people in the 8k range, and unless we throw an average of 5k at the monster it will go berserk and kill us all.”

And I use it to do a ballpark estimate of how awake I’ll have to be through an instance run. If everyone’s rocking a low gearscore but me, I’ll be clicking a lot more buttons.

And sometimes I’ll just show off. I have this crazy staff that comes from Deathwhisper, one of the bosses in ICC. It’s pretty terrible as far as gear goes, and has a silly bonus that makes a flying valkyrie appear to smite your enemies. For a long time it was dropping every week and several of us got them and then had a little competition to see who could put the worst, most ineffective gems on them. I chose a stat that Blizzard has confirmed doesn’t really do anything and will soon be phased out. However, the staff has a really high gearscore, and by parading it around, my numbers go dark red and I instantly become one of the most powerful toons on the server – if you’re going strictly by gearscore, anyway.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been gearing my hunter and my death knight at roughly the same pace. Both have been carried through a few raids, and both have done major amounts of instance running in order to get full suits of gear (right now they both need new shoes, but are otherwise raid-worthy). And both were doing about the same amount of damage at equivalent gearscore levels. It’s a reasonably good benchmark. I’ve also seen encounters change from almost impossible to boring once enough players acquire another hundred points of gearscore.
And I’ve seen this whole videogame scenario before too. Eventually the more dedicated players become undefeatable juggernauts, and the game company then introduces nerfs, expansions and adjustments to try to keep things challenging for most. Sort of like when they significantly neutered Illidan just before Wrath came out. Or when my SWG jedi was running around soloing the toughest baddies.

They keep moving the finish line, and we keep putting artificial ones in to separate the winners from the losers.

From all this, I conclude that humans have a really hard time correlating proficiency and social status. I doubt if that problem will be solved any time soon.

Oh, and one final note: my comments have been invaded by bots that post stupid comments which include links. I’m pretty sure the links will take you to evil places full of keyloggers and malware. And that the people who thought of this marketing tactic are probably running around with spell pen gems in their low-number gear, or the RL equivalent (I’m not quite sure what that would be – ten year old fashions? Designer knockoffs? Fleece parkas in the summer?).

Haven't seen Avatar . . .

2010-02-01T22:40:00.000-08:00

Maybe when it’s out on DVD, I’m still in non-movie-watching mode. However, I have gathered a few facts about this particular blockbuster: the guy responsible for it, James Cameron, plays WoW. Somehow he came up with an idea where a disabled guy animates an avatar and runs around in the body of a large blue creature. There have been a few posts in the WoW forums about whether the blue creatures look more like draenei, night elves or night elf druids in catform, all three could be considered “artistic inspiration.” As far as the plot, apparently it’s Pocahontas. As far as the scenery, it takes place in Nagrand via Hawaii. As far as the 3D, supposedly it’s very well executed. As far as the subtext, it’s about an anti-imperialist white guy. As far as the tropes, here ya go.

(Thank you TV Tropes for saving precious hours of my life having to watch the same plot over again, after age 30 you start to get impatient with that.)

As far as I’m concerned . . . well, has anybody ever made a cowboys and native americans movie where the native americans, as opposed to being actual humans, are NPCs that can be animated and controlled by the cowboys? Uh, no. It’s kind of creepy, when you think about it. “Other people aren’t real, but I’m real, and if I possess their bodies, I can show them how to be real like me.” I mean, I’ve seen that particular point of view in movies before, like Silence of the Lambs, and the Exorcist.

I’ve got issues with the whole “mind in a different body” (MIDB) plot device anyway. It’s an appropriate mental state for playing video games, acting, reading novels, whatever. Plus it allows actors to show off by pretending to be other actors.

But we could have just as easily wound up with a metaphysical system where we’d be watching movies about “character A’s heart in character B’s body” or “character A swaps talents with character B.”

MIDB is one of those philosophical notions that you could waste many theses discussing. It’s at least as old as the notion of life after death, it’s well established in the dominant culture’s metaphysical zeitgeist. It's more philosophy than science, though. If extremely focused, you could also connect it with the sort of extreme hubris found in sociopaths, “I am real and others are but empty shells for me to inhabit.” Which would make sense, if you’ve ever spent time around successful Hollywood types, who are often difficult to distinguish from sociopaths. Rule one, write about what you know.

My own brain is far too feeble to come up with any kind of definitive resolution to all this. However, a couple of notes.

The concept behind Avatar creeps me out. Plus it’s another multigazillion dollar art-restating media with an underlying theme of “technology is dangerous and bad.”
In the same sense, a self-deprecating egomaniac who bores you with talk about his failings is far more tiresome than the regular kind of egomaniac who wins your attention by entertaining you.

So I haven’t seen it yet. I understand the effects are very nice though.

In my computer world, let’s see. I got a new notebook, which is powerful enough to play WoW and cost about half as much as I’m used to paying for a computer. I’m not going to tell you the brand, not sure I like their weird UI overlay enough to plug them.

I got it because my desktop was down for a couple of days, which was intolerable, and I found myself actually sort of missing Sims 3, even though their latest “EA download manager” has infected my os like a virus and is now spamming ads at me on startup. I actually need to do graphically creative stuff after running around in WoW slaying. Sims works for now. I’m fleshing out my town with various local characters and enjoying watching them befriend and flirt with each other.

In WoW, I have a warrior, hunter, death knight and druid over gear score 4000, my priest is around 5500ish and my mage just hit level 65. And I still have complex love-hate feelings for my guild.

In other words, same old thing :)

Blog Refocusing Time

2010-01-11T22:07:00.000-08:00

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!

Plenty of Room on This Bandwagon

2009-12-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

Well here we go: the last bit of the Slate piece dives right into this “why do so many games have a women-alienating adherence to a culture constructed around adolescent male tropes” notion I’ve been blogging about here, complete with links to blogrants on the subject other than my own.

So, woot. Other people appear to have noticed. What now?

I finally found mentions of the only games I play in the Slate comments section, where people note that Sims and WoW are hugely popular. I also found a brief “I hate sports games” confessional somewhere in the linkage (further evidence of this rift between game-players-looking-for-a-movie-substitute and game-players-looking-for-a-game), and another link blaming Spore’s disappointing performance on various factors.

I’ve been lately offended by a couple of marketing campaigns, one for Windows and one for some other computery thing, might be Yahoo. Anyway, both campaigns feature people who look like they’d be high-maintenance complainy attention-sponges going on about how finally their favorite computer corporation realized they are the only person in the world and tailored their products exclusively around them. The one that caught my attention today had some guy in an impeccably razored goatee asserting that Windows made their OS faster because he told them to.

Something about both campaigns feels extremely clueless and conciliatory. “All you test market focus groups who didn’t like our earlier ads, fine! Here’s our new campaign, it’s about how everything’s all about you, and I hope you’re happy now, asshats.”

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if computers, the internet, video games and everything had been invented in a different era. Like say, the fifties. All the games would be about cowboys and Indians, with maybe a few daring-edgy-topical games about WWII. Games for men and women would be segregated . . . sort of how they are now, but with less jiggling boobage and more subtle entendre. And there would be no token female NPCs standing around with assault rifles and broadswords.

Or how about the sixties? It’s hard to tell whether the whole psychedelic drugs and flower power thing would have involved computers, a lot of the proponents of that scene seem a little math-impaired. Still, computers can help produce psychedelic light shows and mix acid rock, so might have been glommed onto by futuristic early adopters to email Grateful Dead mixes all over the place. And if computers had been around in the sixties, they probably also would have picked up a dubious taint of association with hippies. “Oh come on grampaw, not the computer again, Hendrix is old school and those light shows cause seizures.”

The seventies would have been great for computers. I mean, consider that all those disco hits were mixed in labor-intensive analog (you know, where you have to splice audio by making actual cuts to the storage medium, with a razor blade) (also . . . they frequently used real orchestras, not just samples). And George Lucas might have been able to get the FX right the first time in Star Wars. There was also a fad for organic and unprocessed things, which might have led to an anti-computer backlash (much sci fi from the period is about humans rebelling against a large omnipotent computer trying to control them), and might also have led to computers in plastic cases with factory-applied wood-grain painted on (like an alarm clock I had when I was a small child; I also had some headphones that were covered in blue denim, so maybe all the laptop bags would have been made out of old jeans).

I had computers in the eighties, but most people didn’t, they were still pretty primitive, especially in the graphics department. There were Nintendos and Ataris for console fun, and coin-ops were very popular as they had lots more dedicated processing power. And the games then . . . the field was wide open and hadn’t been fenced off into genre corrals, so you could make a video game about smashing asteroids in space or being a yellow smiley face fleeing ghosts through a maze without a lot of assumptions about what players wanted. The creativity far outweighed the technology, and there were many games around asking you to suspend your disbelief long enough to pretend that the low rez brick on your screen was a person, or a dragon, or a treasure chest. And people played them, enthusiastically.

You could even say the same for the nineties, and in fact, people are still playing retooled versions of nineties hits like Warcraft and Sims and Civilization and Diablo. Then the turn of the century happened and games became Serious Business, and the idea of a little company (like say, Bullfrog) putting out genuinely entertaining little snarky games became unthinkable – to unleash a game, now you need a Cecil B. DeMille like cast of thousands, backed by many corporate dollars, under the helm of . . . some guy who has no clue whatsoever about games, and thinks female-friendly franchises like Sims need to be fixed by introducing Indiana Jones.

And the games developed this serious boys club atmosphere that had previously been lacking, back when if you didn’t want to play a soldier firing at civilians it was okay, there were a thousand other games to choose from. Ms. Pac Man was basically the same as Pac Man, and didn’t need a lot of pink packaging and buzzword-filled hyperbole about “girls are wired for social networking and boys are wired for pwnage.”

Since there are lots of factors involved, and since computer games are new, and since they are also lucrative enough to inspire clueless management types to try to force them to comport to previous standards for products such as movies, it’s hard to tell whether the gamerverse will be the same in ten years. Or whether the playerbase will be for that matter. Maybe there will be a backlash, which would be nice. Maybe the “thousands of little games” environment which morphed into “you may have a product from a limited selection produced by huge multinational corporations” will be something entirely different in 2015. The medium itself pretty much begs for the end-user to tweak and rewrite it despite the fervent longing of late 20th century types for a world where everyone shops at the same store for the same top ten movies while wearing the same brand of jeans. That paradigm is gone and will never be back (woohoo).

And even now, the situation is changing to “the meager selection of available corporate games is misogynistic and depressing despite large budgets and colorful graphics so I think I’ll just go get another iPhone app instead.”

Time for a sidetrack. I fussed around with the beta version of the Sims “create a world” utility this weekend. I’m pretty good at this computer stuff, and it confused me, so I’m going to leave it alone until it’s out of beta, although I’m sure the fine folks that have been producing Sims hacks for the rest of us, such as More Awesome Than You, will be diving in and creating all kinds of worlds, and maybe even writing more user-friendly interfaces to re-customize them.

I did read the manual though. The emphasis seems to be on helping players to create small, download-friendly sim neighborhoods that can be shared. I’m someone who likes to create huge places filled with custom content (and someone who looks down their nose at lazy designers trying to get players to do the creative work – if customers went to a movie and were treated to fifteen minutes of a director going “well, we’ve got a romantic male and female lead but nobody could figure out if they like each other or not so ushers will be passing out notebooks for you to write the rest of the story” there would be rebellion).

But from an artistic standpoint . . .

Let’s get back in the time machine, and this time, let’s bring Harper Lee to ten-years-or-so-from-now, to re-write To Kill A Mockingbird (which is one of those books that Everybody Has Read, so if you haven’t, you’re out of step, go read it, or at least the Wiki summary). Instead of narratively leading young Scout through her neighborhood, meeting Boo Radley and Dill, watching her dad’s case enfold in court, Ms. Lee could create a virtual version of the town (Macon, if I remember right), and build the important houses, complete with the hollow tree near the school. Then you, as the player, could go into that world, meet the characters and decide what you want to do there, whether it’s hanging out with Atticus in his law office after hours or helping the kids make their costumes for the school pageant.

You’d be trading narrative flow for detail. You’d also be taking the chance that some antisocial players might prefer staying in the house with Boo Radley, or cheering for the evil characters in the courtroom drama.

There still might be a story in there, however . . . remember the people in the Slate article who had no use for the campaign scenario and just wanted to group up with other players for some pwnage? What if most of the Virtual To Kill A Mockingbird players wanted to ignore Scout entirely and hang around in Macon’s red light district drinking moonshine and sexually harassing women? What if the lynch scene became the focal point of the game, with players competing to stop the lynch mob (and griefers joining the lynch mob just to mess with the “nice” players), and all of the carefully delineated character development went by the wayside?

If there is art in that kind of scenario, especially art that has to peacefully co-exist alongside people who are only there for the adrenalin, it would take a different kind of mind to bring it forward and make it time-independent enough so that narrative no longer takes the focus.

Maybe those are the sort of “novels” our grandchildren will encounter, with the details waiting in the background for those patient enough to discover them while the masses stampede through in their quest for immediate distraction.

It intrigues me, though. Maybe I should stop fussing over my ideas regarding the novel I’d like to write and try something a little more experimental, and see exactly what a creative and formerly-writerly person can do with a three dimensional town simulacrum as opposed to a sheet of paper and a narrative trajectory.

And as far as the “boys club” dilemma, people are talking about it, which makes me think that more people want to make large amounts of money by solving it. Until they get there, I still need twenty-three more levels on my mage, and my DK and hunter need some better gear, and my priest needs to learn jewelcrafting, plus I’m going to need a whole lot of abyss shards. Did I mention I really love the new looking-for-group interface? Best WoW invention yet. There are several “oh no, I accidentally wound up in a social environment with a jerk” defenses such as blacklisting and “voting them off the island” and most people seem to have figured out that being a jerk will cut them off from the free-flowing supply of gold and shiny things. Most of the complaints I’ve heard are actually from abrasive people moaning about how they can’t force people to put up with them any more. My heart bleeds for them . . . well, actually, no, it doesn’t.

Incentivize the desired behavior. Penalize the antisocial behavior. Duh. About time these game designers figured that out.

Of Mummies and Men

2009-12-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

Slate has been running an interesting piece on games and gamers this week, and it’s touched on several themes I’ve ranted about so here’s the link.

There’s discussion about narrative versus games (the writers, being writers, are predictably focusing on the narrative and sometimes have derisive things to say about the “sports gamers” who prefer strategy to lore, or the heathens who ignore all those cut scenes and focus on the team play). There’s some riffing on the demographics, the overwhelming white-male-ness of games.

[By the way, white males, I’m aware that some of you read this blog, and that some of you take offense at white-male-bashing, which is sometimes justified and sometimes isn’t. Personally, I like white males about as much as I like any other general category of humanity, and I’m not really interested in vengeance, or in making you go away. I’m just getting tired of you acting like it’s all about you. The rest of us gamers would really prefer it if you would STFU and make some game products that don’t irritate the crap out of the majority of the population, thereby increasing revenue. So would all those downsized people from EA.]

And there’s some talk about “moral” games, which always reminds me of the old Ultima games, where you got niceness points for giving cash to beggars and meanness points for doing mean things, which eventually had an effect on your character once you built up enough morality or lack thereof. I expect this to be discussed even further once KOTOR comes out.

Because the current model of game, for the most part, is predicated on the theory that gamers all want to spend their gaming time seeing life through the eyes of a really awesome charismatic dude who can slaughter all kinds of mobs without any kind of remorse or repercussions or speculation on how this behavior will later affect his life or anything wussy like that, mostly solo, in a simulated world where laws are not only unenforced, you get points for breaking them.

A profile that accurately reflects only a small percentage of the population, and when you add in the idea that this awesome charismatic dude exists in a land where 80% of the population is white and male, the reality gap grows a little steep.

While on the other hand, if you make a game that reflects some diversity, like say, Madden Football, or Sims, or even WoW with its rainbow of skin hues and accents, all kinds of people play it, and your audience is not limited to mainstream journalist types trying to review it while crying about the fact that other players don’t give a rat’s ass about the plotline while longing for games to be as awesome as Mad Men.

Anyway, I mentioned Sims again, and I’m still playing Sims 3. It got patched yesterday, which I thought was interesting because the patch included more background music, and hopefully less crashing-to-desktop. It also included a direct ingame link to the website where you can buy more Sims loot with real dollars. No doubt thought up by the same (empathy-lacking, grandiose, relationship-impaired, “you’re not the boss of me”) asshat who came up with the notion that Sims players all secretly want to be playing Atari Raiders of the Lost Ark. And no doubt that this asshat, who probably charmed his way into the job in the first place, will treat his employers with the same warmth and kindness as is shown in his preferred style of play (loot everything then move on, leave the place a mess, others are only there for your amusement).

But there are some non-asshats working on Sims 3, and you can see their work all over the place, in the detail on the trees waving in the wind, and the restrooms conveniently placed in dungeons, and the snarky merchandise names, and the Egyptian spy base that’s run by three techno-listening ladies, two plump and one skinny, all in headscarves.

And the mummies.

I had heard vague references to “mummy ghosts” and thought the dungeon mummies (which walk around going “mmmm” and assault you unless you know kung fu) were all this game had to offer in the mummy department But no, one of my sims actually became a living mummy. She no longer has to sleep or go to the bathroom, and can stay up all night writing mummy romances instead of sleeping.

(Sims 3 sleeping seems proportionately longer than it did in past sim games. I usually play Sims at high speed; still, the “staring at the house for a minute or two without building or clicking or doing anything while my sim’s sleep bar goes green” part is really annoying, and I’ve been giving sims the “super fast sleep” talent and the deluxe beds as a first priority.)

My mummy got that way from combining a collection of canopic jars with a sarcophagus. I haven’t found a way to cure her mummification, but that’s cool, she’s more interesting as a mummy. This is the girlfriend of my official Indiana Jones sim, by the way. He met her in France, and I wanted to see if he’d get extra visa points from marrying a citizen, but alas, they took away her citizenship instead, and they’re not even legally married. Yeah, I know, he flirts with both men and women, but the French girl was the first sim that actually responded to his advances. He’s cleared all three countries, but I can’t even remember if the asinine quest chain ever came to a conclusion

Then I decided it would be cool to have an even bigger mummy presence in town, so I made a sim called Abdul Al-Hazred (insane, evil, bookworm) whose goal in life is to become a mummy, and start an evil mummy cult. And voila, Sims 3 is interesting again. And Mr. Al-Hazred is an ideal character for running around in foreign countries stealing antiquities; he’s mean and crazy, duh. As soon as he gets mummified he’s going to steal my first mummy away from her fiance, just because he’s a jerk.

And hopefully, this hypothetical EA guy I’m bashing is trying to call his sweetheart right now. But all he gets is voicemail, because she has her phone turned off and is in a hotel room with Tiger Woods, and there’s a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the doorknob.

What I've been up to

2009-12-07T20:44:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you’re saying to yourself “Darth Bunnywabbit, you lazy non-writing slug, you took a whole week off to lie around the house playing videogames and eating turkey, what’ve you got to show for it?”

Well, I’ve got a few inches of words to spraypaint on the virtual wall, or I will when I finish typing.

I suppose part of the answer is I’m doing other stuff besides videogames, or trying to, anyway, and another part of the answer is that my two favorite games, WoW and Sims, just aren’t doing it for me at the moment.

Sims especially. I actually felt guilty for trashing it so hard in my review. But hey, that’s the beauty of being an advertising-free blogger.
You never have to suck up to the sponsors. If a company puts out a stupid product, you can call them on it. With no middle-class anxieties about “ooh, there goes my cred in the industry not to mention my free mouse-hand squeezies with logos on them.”

Anyway, I did note that some of the stuff in the expansion was actually stuff I had wanted in the game, had blogged about. For example, the locally-flavored locals, none of whom so far are platinum blonde black people named Jose Torunaga. And more wacky supernatural occurrences.

So I decided to play the damn thing through, i.e., get my country acceptance level maxxed in each country, while leveling winemaking, uh, NECTARmaking and photography. Because that’s how I play games. Like a freight train, heading toward The End.

After getting Mary Sue, my first expansion sim, through most of the quests, I got to the point where I despised her and couldn’t play her any longer, something that happens frequently in Sims 3 after I’ve spent nine hours of clicking to build my toon an acceptable house or patiently waited for them to grow perfect cheese and steak plants. So I sent one of her neighbors on a journey to China only to discover . . . that rat Mary Sue already looted all the tombs, sprung all the traps and made off with the gigantic-boulder-smashing-hammer I’d need to pwn the tombs in Egypt. Game over.

So I made my next toon, or toons, I should say: the Jabberwocks. I put them in their own virgin neighborhood with no tombs yet plundered. I made them as fat as possible and addicted to key lime pie. She turned out to be a brilliant surgeon despite my intent to have her be a stay at home mom or a cook, so for a while I was enjoying watching my sim with a BMI of about fifty dress up in her surgical scrubs and run off to save lives. They also looked cute on the bicycles and scooters one is forced to use in remote countries like France and Egypt, because those countries apparently don’t have cars yet, just a lot of ruins to loot and jewels lying around on the ground.

I tried questing both the Jabberwocks but stopped at the point where I realized that their quests might be solo but their instances were shared. For example, if Mr. Jabberwock got the quest to “go in the snake cave and get the icon of doom” and Mrs. Jabberwock had plundered that cave earlier in the day, Mr. Jabberwock was out of luck. So that was how Mrs. Jabberwock became a brilliant surgeon, I started just parking her at the chessboard to learn more logic while her valiant hubby went pedaling through the hills of China.

For the Jabberwocks, it all stopped when they had kids. The first one was sort of cute, a boy. Their first reaction was to run off to China, at which point a warning popped up that I couldn’t take Junior because children are not allowed out of the country apparently, and a Cruella de Ville-ish nanny popped up to tell me not to worry, Junior would be just fine.

Because I’m evil that way, I had the Jabberwocks conceive yet another child on their first day of vacation. And it took, the little “you’re knocked up, sim woman!” lullaby played. But she didn’t even start hurling until she got back home – just to ensure that no sims are born on foreign soil, I guess.

No, I haven’t tried shipping a pregnant lady sim out of the country. Yet.

So anyway, now the Jabberwocks had two boys. Which required a lot of work, and they didn’t make it out of the country again until the boys were teenagers. At which point . . . I had three inert sims to sit around the “base camp” while daddy went a-tombing. Granted, travel is “free time” and you don’t have to accomplish anything, your sims can take a free week in another dimension studying really hard or working out before reappearing at home refreshed and leveled. But four sims is too much. And I didn’t really like the dad sim to play him without his family.
On to the next sim. And I figured that if the game wants me to be an action-oriented boy whose great desires are to be Indiana Jones while winning martial arts championships – if there is a little girl out there with those two obsessions, buy her this game, and then go get therapy because I think you’re projecting heavily – I made a dude character named Erik Chimera who is max muscular, very slender, and wears a rakish beret over his cherry-cola-colored hair, along with a gray set of “Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee Time Travel To The Eighties And Shop At Banana Republic” adventure-wear.

This is how you bastards at EA WANT me to play your game, right? Oh, by the way, he’s bisexual and flirts with everyone. I want to see how that goes over in Egypt when he steals someone’s husband.

Anyway, my new sim Erik looks sort of like an emo Che Guevara, and when he’s not tending his garden, he’s working out with his martial arts dummy. He’s a master martial artist in fact. The animations for master martial artist look a lot like the ones for the noob martial artist. I think a high martial arts score will always beat a low one, but I suppose I’ll have to make a whole fight club to confirm that. Maybe Elitist Jerks will link me if I make a spreadsheet.

Erik has never really had a legitimate job, but he can fish. So far he’s made about fifty grand in the tomb plundering business. He’s welcomed with open arms in China, he’s got some scary looking cougar in France that keeps sending him on bogus errands and he’s never been in Egypt. He’s also free of the “mummy’s curse” so far, which has afflicted my two previous explorer sims, but I could never quite find out what that does or whether it’s even bad.

He also lags really bad. Move move move pause. It’s on a count of four. Step step step freeze. I tried adjusting my video card settings. I checked my other sims – the Jabberwocks are all fat and happy, and they have way more objects on their lot.
I copied Chimera’s house and moved him to a fresh neighborhood. No lag. But also, the tombs were still locked up, I’d have to start over. Can’t put him in my main neighborhood, Mary Sue already trashed the tombs there. Apparently you get one (1) quest toon per neighborhood, preferably male. Got that, all you girly-game-players? No more weddings, it’s time to pillage primitive countries like France.

Wonder if the Chinese government will ban it? Lol.

So if I ever get through this stupid last minute “quests in Sims” crap I’ll let you know. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying building stuff with basements and koi ponds when I’m not staring at Erik Chimera’s chiseled abs, and yeah, I feel dirty about the fact that I’m enjoying the parts of it I’m enjoying. But I’ve been feeling kinda antisocial, and it’s cold, and building sim houses is fun on a cozy winter night.

Meanwhile in WoW, or maybe this is why I’m feeling antisocial:

I’m, um six people, not counting the bank alts.

First, I’m my main. On rare occasions. My main has all the gear she needs, along with a colossal sense of resentment towards another faction in the guild that I’ve complained about before. So she brings out her magical overpoweredness only during progression, of which there isn’t much. We finally got the beasts of Northrend down in heroic the other day, after a great many failed attempts. We also had a problem with people only appearing for the free ride raids, not for the heroic 25s where you have to work and might leve empty handed, so the guild officers took up this stupid “heroic 25 at a moment’s notice!” project by scheduling raids for “whenever the 25 people they felt were best suited were all logged in at the same time.”

I’m also a tank. Sort of. My tank has acquired 3/5 T9 (the ordinary set, my main has the trophy set). I had to veer off and get a couple pieces of damage gear. This is because I was showing up for raids only to have a preponderance of tanks, so they’d tell me to go dps. Except I didn’t have dps gear. Whenever I roll on dps gear, one of the people from the aforementioned faction of asshats pipes up “but that’s an alt off spec, you should give that to the new dk who just joined and will /gquit before the end of the week.” So my dps numbers would come out terribad, and then they’d tell me my playing sucked, and as dps, they’re right. And frankly, I resisted efforts to shove me towards doing tanking and dps on the same toon. I would rather have four specialists than two dual specs. Damned if I’m going to gear my warrior for dps and then turn around to get the exact same stuff on my death knight. They're finally coming around and letting me tank stuff like Onyxia without asking me to switch. But speaking of death knights. . .

I’m also my death knight. Having finally hit level 80, I’m waiting for the cross-server looking for group thing to start up . . . because I’m really really bad. Absolutely awful dps. I’ve been carried through Onyxia and a couple heroics, and I think I’m going to gear this toon some place where people don’t know me. I still do better DK dps than I do on my warrior though.

And I’m my blood-elf-turned-draenei hunter, checking out the alliance on my server. I’m in a great guild, which has carried me through some Ulduar achievements, and like the DK, I’m also waiting for the patch before I go into maniacal instance running mode and get geared. So far it’s been easier to get groups as a bad hunter than as a bad death knight, but both of them need carrying and I hate being carried, so my noob 80s will be doing a lot of heroics before I let them play with the grown ups.

I’m a level 55 mage now. I can portal to everywhere, but most importantly, when a death knight death grips me, I can freeze him in place, then teleport away and nail him with frost bolts – usually my teleport will be up by the time he staggers frozenly over to finish killing me. When a rogue gets the drop on me I die really fast, but when I notice him, or even because I thought I might’ve heard the “invisibility” noise, I can make a big annoying blizzard that freezes him in place and keeps him from vanishing until people in real armor arrive to beat him up. Paladins still give me a little trouble but hunters stop annoying you really fast when you sheep their pet and start spewing magic at them. In fact, sheeping is about the most awesome thing ever, and in five more levels I’ll be able to turn stuff into bunny rabbits – the whole reason I’ve been grinding this toon, she looted a tome with that particular spell. My mage has done less than 200 quests but she has a whole lot of honorable kills, and is well on her way to her second battleground epic mount. This could very well end up being my next favorite toon. She is down with the spirit of the bunny – treachery, speed, escaping, sneaking around causing mischief, avoiding the Fudds.

And then there’s the druid. Her guild doesn’t raid, so if she’s going to finish getting geared she needs to run heroics. But she’s on a tank-shortage server. I figure once the patch comes through I’ll be able to crank out up to five heroics a night on my toons that need gear, or probably two or three instance runs in less time than it would take to watch a bad movie. It just seems more efficient to gear everybody later rather than now, and focus on . . . hiding behind that tree in the middle of the field in WSG waiting for a self-important death knight with an incorrectly spelled name to stomp past, and turn him into a little lamb. Baaaah!

And now, back to see if Erik Chimera is still lagging.

If he is, it’s gotta be tied to the level of quest-completion. Otherwise, a clone of him in a virgin neighborhood would lag, and that doesn’t happen. And by the way, there have been some gruesome crashes with the new sims, several of which have resulted in a full system restart and one of which knocked my video card out of commission for several horrible moments after seizing up. Maybe the game isn’t really finished, they’re gonna patch it later, and maybe they designed it to hang whenever you get near the end.

And if I can’t handle the lag any longer, all the blood from all the paladins and rogues and death knights and gnomes and other evil creatures I slay in Alterac Valley tonight will be on EA’s hands.

Oh All Right, I'll Give It Another Chance

2009-11-24T23:46:00.000-08:00

As it so happens . . .

My WoW server has been crashing over the past couple of days. So I went back and gave Sims World Adventures a little more attention.

Like any video game, it’s a collaboration between the art people and the story people and the code people and the brain dead suits. And while a lot of the concept is still kinda dumb IMO, the art people did an awesome job, and there really is a different feel to each of the countries, and I applaud the way the locals look and dress local without a lot of stereotyping (nobody is actually wearing the coolie hats that I’ve seen yet).

The quests and dungeons aren’t too bad once you get beyond the "We Are The World" meets "Temple of Doom," kicks it in the knee and takes its lunch money atmosphere and sit down for a refreshing breakfast of ice cream with a roomful of other adventurers dressed like Indy, also enjoying a breakfast of ice cream. It makes me want to create a country of Elvises who eat nothing but pancakes, or gorilla suit people who live on key line pie.

Apparently a big architectural feature with this expansion is the ability to do multilayered dungeons, which is actually pretty awesome. The quests are on more or less a straight chain – start with China, off to Egypt and then France for the expert level. Once your sim gets a visa level of 3 (requiring lots of quests) you can buy a vacation home to display all the stuff you’ve been looting.

I’m not sure how it would work with multiple sims – if they can stay as long as the longest visaholder in the family or what. The quests are definitely designed for one sim at a time.

And I had a great moment when I finally made my way down the hall past a bunch of traps and opened a door to find: a bathroom, with toilet and sink and tub. Straight out of the sims. And convenient, because my sim needed a bio break right around then.

I still have a bit of that “my favorite sandbox has been invaded by a psycho bully boy who demands we all play Indiana Jones because that’s what he wants to play” outrage but there are bright spots. Breaking boards with sim fu is fun. The koi carp ponds are amazing. There are a few build mode things, not as many as I’d hoped, and some scary new fashions. Owning houses in multiple countries gives me four (4) active lots to vandalize and decorate.

Oh yeah. There’s wine. I mean “nectar.” You can store it in your dungeon on wineracks, and although I haven’t got involved in it yet, apparently you can now run a whole sub game as a vineyard owner. This sounds intriguing.

Sims 3 Wanders Around The World Getting Lost (a review)

2009-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

Amazon is fast. My pre-ordered copy of the new Sims expansion arrived on release day.

I ordered it before I saw in the news that EA fired a whole bunch of people before the holidays. I’m not sure if I would have boycotted it had I known, but I will allow that this downsizing makes me angry, especially in connection with . . . all the stuff I’ve been noting for all the years, about how game companies are frequently clueless with regard to what the customers want, and now there will be a bunch of hungry children on Christmas due to EA’s business failings in this regard.

However, if the downsized employees contain the team responsible for Sims 3, and specifically this new expansion . . . maybe EA figured this out on its own and will now resume making quality products. One can hope, anyway.

So I installed the expansion (which annoyed me by patching the main game and then patching the expansion – on release day!) and created a brand new sim, Ms. Mary Sue Manticore. True to the Mary Sue spirit, she’s wearing a black hoodie over a red shirt with jeans and converses, much like the ones you’d find piled up on my bedroom floor, and she has red hair and green eyes. Unlike me, she is a productive writer, having started out with a memoir entitled “My Childhood Sucked” before working her way to a successful sci fi series about pirates with lasers. She is also gainfully employed as a journalist (lol), which doesn’t quite pay enough for extended vacations in the expansion’s three official countries: China, Egypt and France (China costs the least, France the most). So I used the cash cheat (ctrl+C, kaching, enter).

Note that the expansion comes with a few new hairstyles and outfits, along with new personality traits. Oh, I’m sorry, did you want to make your main Mary Sue a world traveler? You don’t necessarily have to start over, because now there’s an aspiration reward that lets you change your sim’s personality around and substitute, say, a love for adventure and photography for previous traits like insanity.

Many of the new hairstyles and outfits seem to focus on Indiana Jones, including many Indiana Jones outfits for women sims who enjoy cross-dressing. I am positive the middle-aged executard who greenlighted this project has no clue whatsoever that this forty-year-old movie franchise doesn’t exactly resonate with today’s youth, and I’d know that even if I hadn’t been yelled at by a Noo Yawk editor for name checking Indy back in the ‘90s when writing for a demographic in its 20s.

It’s telling, though. Apparently, EA thinks now video games should be about excitement, and adventure, not about kicking back building sim houses and arranging furniture. And once your sim saves up the 1300 minimum in travel expenses (not including souvenir t-shirts and restaurants), you can click on the computer and export your sim to a land of . . . well . . .

First you get a long loading screen while a cheery melody featuring some of the less frequently used MIDI voices plays. I can just hear the composers chortling with glee over finally being able to use “shamisen” and “tabla,” and I predict that I’ll have the “mute music” box checked again before too long.

Mary Sue made it into only two foreign countries last night. France costs too much, and it was getting late. A visit overseas takes place in the same time warp that may be familiar to vacationers from previous sims games – if you go on vacation at 7:00 p.m. Friday, you can spend several days at your destination before returning home at 7:01 p.m. Friday.

Once you get past the loading screen, you get a panoramic view of yet another sim landscape, with trees and a river. In Egypt they were palm trees, in China bamboo and maple. Buildings abound, created with several new build-mode elements – pagoda roofs, tiled fountains. This part at least is intriguing. Rather than having to choose a hotel, as in the past expansion, Mary Sue immediately arrived at a “base camp.” This is your only option until you get rich enough to buy a vacation home.

A word about visas. For your first trip, you only get a three day visa. As you do more things in the country, you earn points to unlock more visa days. This means it will take your sim multiple visits to get to the coveted “I saw all the content!” stage. To each country. And while you are there, you have to . . . well, let me ease into this.

At the Egyptian base camp I briefly wondered why I was staying in a tent, when I know for a fact that Cairo has hotels, some of which even have room service and wi-fi. I’m presuming I’m in Cairo due to the proximity of things meant to represent the sphinx and the great pyramid. And yet, I’m staying at what appears to be an architectural site outside town. In China I at least got what looked sort of like a youth hostel.

While Mary Sue was wandering around looking at the tents, I noticed a shiny, sparkling bulletin board. I thought “hey, that looks like something from WoW!” because the sparkle effects were identical to the ones that appear on WoW quest items. This was a recent addition to simplify things for people who had trouble seeing items they were supposed to click and weren’t as smart as my colorblind friend who would just sweep the area with the mouse and look for cursor changes.

I moused over the sparkly bulletin board. A little WoW-style gear appeared. I clicked the gear and the bulletin board gave me a quest.

After a little interface bar appeared to tell me that my job was now to go talk to some dude, I clicked it, and this sent Mary Sue bicycling off to the dude in question. He sent her to get some relic from a tomb, which I’ll describe in a bit, and after that, he sent her to collect four gemstones. Then I had to chat up the townspeople about some nefarious corporation, but I got deported in the middle of that.

That’s right, Sims 3 now has WoW quests. However. Since Sims doesn’t really have fighting, you just go over where the gemstones are lying on the ground (helpfully indicated by large pointing arrows on the map) and grab them, which is even more boring than fighting and looting mobs. More about this in a bit too.

First I want to talk about this tomb. There are several tombs, in fact, and if you want those visa points, you need to visit them, and steal, uh, liberate, uh, discover and remove artifacts inside. The tombs are a series of rooms with locked doors, and to open them you have to shove stone pillars onto helpfully lit-up squares of floor tile, Lara Croft-style. Except this is the freaking Sims, not Tomb Raider, so you have to position yourself just right next to the stone block, and mouse around until you get a direction arrow, and then choose “push” or “push far.” And you need to do most of this “action” part of the game fast, before your sim’s bars go red and it collapses from exhaustion. You can buy tents (along with survival rations and “shower in a can”) to take into the tombs so you can camp there, assuming you find a room large enough to pitch your tent.

The person who came up with this idea is a flaming moron.

I dunno, your mileage may vary. You might be one of those Sims players who sits around thinking “you know, now that I’ve got this mansard roof scaled just right with the balconies, I wish I could just run into the tomb next door and steal a few gigantic rubies sitting around on endtables for that purpose.” You might even be the kind of freaking dense Sims player that doesn’t understand that you could just hit the old alt-F4 and actually play Tomb Raider, WoW, or something else that is pretty much focused toward helping you have a satisfactory questing and loot-acquiring experience, complete with dedicated game engine and user interface.

And maybe you have also suffered severe brain trauma and think it’s still 1978 and Raiders of the Lost Ark would be a fabulous subject for a videogame.

If you’re one of these people, I sincerely hope that Obama’s health insurance program will eventually get you the treatment you need. If you’re not, there’s a good chance you’ll agree with my assessment that yes, the suit who greenlighted this piece of crap is, indeed, a flaming moron. Possibly even worse. Possibly he’s also the reason all those hardworking people lost their jobs. It seems like a pretty safe bet that anybody working under this idiot’s direction will eventually lose their job, while he (sorry to be sexist, it’s just my direct experience indicates most people who get huge amounts of funding to do asinine things are male) sails away on his golden parachute to wreck someone else’s brand name and/or livelihood.

There are a few things about the expansion that I do like. For one thing, there are some decent meshes for Asian and Middle Eastern clothes, and the NPCs have ethnically appropriate names, and their physical features look Egyptian and Chinese. Not to mention the building elements, which I haven’t explored yet.

I’m really going to have to put on the political correctness hat and say a few words, though.

I remember thinking when I installed the very first Sims game, “wow, look at all the languages!” I had visions of gamers in Manila and Sao Paulo and Osaka and Amsterdam and Cleveland all making their own sim neighborhoods and sending each other custom content. Later on, when there was custom content, I spent much time happily investigating sites from various countries, learning useful phrases like “click here to download.” Later sim innovations like the face generator and the introduction of different foods like sushi buttressed this impression.

In this expansion, apparently based on a movie from the ‘70s which was itself an homage to movies of the ‘40s, all that globalistic foundation is reduced to “foreign countries are where normal suburban folks go to pillage tombs.” These foreign countries have harsh visa restrictions but apparently will let you leave the country with all the antique artifacts you can stuff into your luggage.

At least in the vacation expansions for Sims 1 and 2 you could do touristy things like go swimming and learn to dance the hula. The natives might be a confusing array of black people with platinum blonde hair, Asian surnames and Hispanic first names, but at least you didn’t have to steal things from them. And you had the leisure to interact with them instead of rushing around collecting gemstones for the quest guy.

So on the one hand, now you can make even more diverse sims, and feed them shawarma and falafel, egg rolls and frog legs, dress them in hijabs or . . . those great big coolie hats, you know the kind I’m talking about, straw, pointy, about three feet diameter. The perfect attire for sneaking around the Forbidden City swiping knickknacks. You can even get an achievement for bringing home sufficiently large piles of loot, and you don’t even have to give it to a museum or anything, you can just arrange it on your coffee table.

And you still can’t reasonably play more than one household, especially if you get involved in the ridiculous visa points minigame. So you don’t really get to use all those great local costumes unless your main quest toon wants to play dress up. Forget having a family from Cairo down the block with a tiled fountain in their front lawn, and a Chinese family . . . wearing coolie hats working on their backyard rice paddy, I guess.

I haven’t read many of the other reviews of Sims 3, so I’m not sure if it has been well received or if most other gamers are like me and found it a bit lacking. I regularly get comments here on my past sim entries, from players frantic because the game mechanics ate their painstakingly designed characters. They aren’t like other game-frustration-type-comments, “argh that puzzle took me three days to solve, this game is complicated!” or “it hangs on loading and randomly crashes.” The people having Sims 3 issues have invested time – and emotional energy -- in making their characters, and with that in mind, the game’s malfunctions have a sadistic edge. If Lara Croft crashes you can get her back, no big deal, but when the computer arbitrarily devours a few hours worth of idle creativity, people get upset.

We’re talking about a custom-designed avatar that you made, and spent three or four hours exploring her moods and desires and taste in interior décor, her love life and circle of friends. People invest emotions in their creations. Even hard-hearted power gamers like me who create sims in bulk lots to populate . . . I dunno, the barren neighborhood of vacant lots I painstakingly emptied out before getting bored and wandering back to WoW, because there was no way I could see to get that “wow, I filled up this whole sheet of paper with doodles while I was on the phone and it looks kinda cool” sense in a game that constantly discourages you from actually playing it.

Anyway, it looks as though EA might have responded to complaints about Sims 3’s flaws by hiring some flaming moron who knows nothing about video games to try and fix it by making it more like Tomb Raider and WoW. Thus making things worse.

If they wanted to combine Sims with some other lucrative brand name, they could have done so much better. For example, EA makes some excellent sports games. How about having your sim show up at the stadium and get ported into a quick round of soccer or basketball? You’re probably aware I’m not a huge Grand Theft Auto fan, but I wouldn’t mind some more urban building elements. And making sims do WoW quests is just silly, but I’ll bet players would adore a time travel expansion that lets them make medieval villages and hobbit shires and elf treehouses and similar. But Tomb Raider? Come on.

I recommend this expansion if you have money to burn and want to see just how bad things are, or if you want some new trees and building elements so you can build things, later, maybe, assuming they make this piece o’crap (which formerly was one of the greatest titles in computer game history, if not the greatest) playable.

Having Fun Yet?

2009-10-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

After that last rant, one of my friends who server transferred dropped back in.

I’ve got several friends who changed servers, looking for that fabulous land where lots of people are logged in and many of them know how to play. They seem to have found people who can push the margins farther, and have accomplished things my guild hasn’t done yet. One of them, a healer who was sort of my mentor for a while, had some things to say about how my guild tends to blame catastrophes on the healers, wrongfully.

He wasn’t really telling me anything I don’t already know. For myself, I don’t have a lot of delusions about my skill, even though I could probably log into the game at any given moment and quickly find experiences where people both praise my excellence and berate my noobishness. Competence is relative, and a lifetime of many relaxing hours enjoying video games has shown me it would be very financially unproductive for a company to sell a game that I can’t beat, plus I usually can beat games that stump my friends. Anyway, whether people are flattering me or calling me names, I usually take it with a grain of salt. I do take pride on being able to get good gear on a server with bad players (who blame healers for everything), which to me means more than being able to get the same gear on a server full of competent gameaholics.

Anyway, he mentioned something another player asked him, post-server jump: “Are you having fun?”

That’s the main consideration, right? You play a game to have fun?

I haven’t been having fun with Sims 3 lately, so haven’t been playing it. I did order the expansion and will dutifully report if I get around to installing it after it arrives. But in order to have the kind of sim game I want, I’d have to spend many hours building and modding and other repetitious boring tasks, and then . . . take my fatty.

And don’t think I’m a fat hater. I’ve noticed a lot of fat hate in print lately. Usually from liberal sources, who treat it the same way certain conservative sources treat gayness: “some people think you’re born that way but it grosses me out and I think it’s actually that they are giving in to immoral desires because they lack willpower, so I think they should be forced to change their lifestyle and spend a lot of money to reprogram themselves, even if reprogramming doesn’t really work, and in any case, they should stay in the house so I don’t have to look at them, instead of pissing me off by asking for special privileges like not having people like me call them names.” For the record, I’d rather sit next to a fatty than a hater on an airplane, even though fat and hate both seem to adjust to fill the available space.

Anyway, so I have a Sims 3 fatty. He was part of my experiment to see if you could have a great big fat sim . . . who is a pro athlete, and has the “athletic” personality trait. He’s a linebacker, and amateur chef, and he eats dessert after every single meal, and always has a fridge full of freshly baked cookies. Sometimes I have to drag him away from the workout machine to get him to sit on the couch watching TV, but after a few repetitions, he got the “mmm cookies” behavior down. And since his athletic skill is maxed, he never has to work out again.

So what does he do when I release him from being the active household? He goes jogging. He turns up in the park, all slender and energetic. Does he ever go to the tiki bar to eat canapes and watch the plasma TV? Hell no, he’s over at the gym. Meanwhile, all the sims that lack the “athletic” trait apparently immediately raid Fatty the Linebacker’s fridge and pudge out whenever I leave them to their own devices.

If you’re reading this, EA, !@#!@$& you for taking what used to be the best sandbox game franchise ever and turning it into a moronic festering pile of social engineering crap. I really don’t care if WoW is using the “nudge” strategy to convince me a fish feast is healthier than a roasted boar; it stacks with the candy buffs after all. I do applaud the decision to put really fat people in the game to begin with, because diversity is good, but why include customization at all if you’re just going to grab the gamer’s hand and say “now now, that isn’t what you REALLY wanted to do, let me show you the CORRECT way to make digital representations of suburbanites.”

Anyway, Sims 3 is not fun. I don’t play it any more. WoW . . . is still fun. I think. Needs work though. And mostly these days I’m having fun with my “exit the server strategy” – leveling my hunter and my mage. And at the moment, I’m wrapped up in Halloween OCD – clicking the trick or treat NPCs every hour with several toons in the hopes of getting random rare stuff.

The guy who left, he wasn’t sure if he’s having fun. He’s got new achievements, his game time is more productive but it didn’t sound like he was enjoying the interaction as much. For me, once I’m not having fun with one aspect of the game (like dealing with other people) I latch onto another aspect (like PVP – I’m doing much of my leveling that way). And even the social aspects can be gratifying.

Example: the other night we were in a raid doing “cultural studies” after going through some new applicants, one of whom specified in his guild app that he is white, confusing us. Do other guilds track racial data? Is he looking for an all white guild? Does this mean, as a guildie inquired, that he likes to relax by chasing Jews around in his pickup truck when not raiding?

Before long, we were sharing our own cultural studies tidbits, such as Canadians eat waffles all the time, and people in South America aren’t really American but they should learn to talk American, and Japan is full of geishas wandering the streets, and orientals, and rugs, and people with southern accents play video games with possums running across the keyboard. It was all very stupid, and only stupidity rescued it from hatefulness, because we all knew damn well we were saying stupid things. And it was also very funny, because we all run into virtual culture shock from time to time.

And . . . back to the gender angle . . . I went in a 10 raid (even though I usually don’t do 10s) that was led by one of the other female members of the guild, Lorelei. We have a few, less than 10. Anyway, she did an awesome job. I made sure I told her that, and I also passed it along to the guildleader and a few others.

Next raid, everybody was ribbing her for allegedly dying a lot. She doesn’t, but after the ribbing started and her confidence got rattled, she did. I had a flash of déjà vu. Similar things have happened to me. Maybe it has to do with the old “uh oh, one of the guys is standing out, let’s bring him back to earth” thing I’ve seen guys do socially – but it takes on an edge of extra meanness when it’s guys picking on a girl as opposed to another guy, because they all want to get in on it, and they’re all trying to top each other, and the payoff is actual female attention, rather than getting another dude disgusted to the point where he logs out.

So I started pitching Lorelei extra heals, even when she seemed determined to self destruct. I’m a healer, I can do that. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the raid that can actually influence whether someone dies a lot, or not. Nope, sorry, you’re standing in the fire but I’ve got a shield on you, you’re gonna live, tough beans. The boys are going to have to joke about something else.

Anyway, it struck me later that if I actually had jumped servers, I wouldn’t have been around to do that.

So maybe there are also valid reasons to stay put. As long as it’s fun.

Dating Other Guilds

2009-10-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

I’m going to devote this blogrant to whining about my relationship . . . with my guild. But first, just because this throwback turn-of-the-century style editorial rocked my socks, here’s a tale about a worse relationship: Roman Polanski’s.

So anyway, my guild doesn’t understand me and I want to start dating other guilds. Most of the guildies I really liked have either transferred or quit the game, or plan to soon. In their place are a bunch of wannabe leaders who all seem to follow the same pattern of appearing, dispensing tons of unwanted advice gleaned from hours of website-studying, then getting keylogged and (if I’m lucky) vanishing for good. And while the guildchat assaults by that girl who took over her ex’s account and likes to spam “/lick” emotes and that drunken pinhead in Oklahoma who likes to fill the text window with all caps discussions about whether everyone likes and/or misses him have dwindled a bit, what’s left isn’t really encouraging. At one time, we could talk about news, politics, history and science, music and movies, and video games. Now, it’s mainly guys doing locker room talk and spamming catchphrases like “that’s what she said!” like demented robo-parrots with short-circuiting motherboards.

There are occasional bright spots on the horizon. Last night a female guildie led a 10 raid, I overcame my disgust for 10s just to see how she’d do, and she turned out to do an awesome job, quick and businesslike and minus the thirty minutes of trash talking and in-depth gear discussions pertaining to three people in the raid between pulls and similar BS.

But last night I got my 4/5 T9 (with the trophies), and I didn’t even boast. Or even tell anyone. Or even go out to attack things to see if I noticed an improvement. I logged and worked on my hunter, who is going to be one of my emissaries to other servers as I search for a better guild in a month or so.

(Because, you know, there’s a new raid in the next patch, and I still have 2000 dkp points.)

I did go to Orgimmar to jewel-encrust my new outfit, where I got all kinds of rude emotes from some rogue from the formerly-number-one guild who was almost as geared, and some encouragement from some toon with a scientology-jargon name.

Welcome to the top of the meritocracy. You worked hard, and here’s your reward: disdain, guild drama and alienation from your less-elite buddies as well as your alleged peers. If anything, WoW has made me more liberal, because most of my libertarian leanings seem to have washed away with trade chat. A meritocracy is a world where your friends either can’t keep up or have already accelerated past, and your peers all want to stick a knife in your back, and paramount in everyone’s mind is “this isn’t fair, I want more stuff!” And you’re never really free to run as fast as you actually can, due to all kinds of interdependency concerns, and the old crabs-climbing-over-each-other-in-a-bucket, the-tallest-flowers-get picked-first, whatever-metaphor-you-like, situation where your victory just inspires people to top that, until you’re locked in a virtual rat race that nobody can ever win.

However, I’m still insane enough to think I can find The Right Virtual Environment For Me. A bunch of people who do raids, not necessarily every night, but regularly, and well. Somewhere between maniacally pushing progression to “within minutes of release” and half-pugged, listless backhands at months-old content. A place where there are people at approximately my level of skill and commitment, and if they have abrasive personalities, they keep them under wraps until they log out. And, at the risk of sounding like the blue state elitist I am, if this group doesn’t feature a bunch of provincial rednecks whining about gay people or being dumbfounded when females lead raids or play tanks (see my current guild), I’ll be really happy.

(To be honest, and without revealing more subtext than I intend, the gay joking in my guild is usually benign, consisting of straight guys kidding each other about “dude, you left your pants at my house again” as if they were part of, um, a circle of gay guys who are all doing each other. Due to my San Franciscan ear for jargon, I believe some of the guys really are enjoying this particular fantasy from a gay and closeted perspective, and it’s pretty apparent that some of the other guys would need a couple of sensitivity-training anvils dropped on their heads before realizing that hating on the gays is not a natural and universal thing (which is why I get a kick out of the closet cases’ pretend-flirting with them). Plus, there are a few gaymers who are out to me, but not to the general public. And further, I roll my eyes more at the antics of straight guildies who feel the need to broadcast their heterosexuality with every sentence, which is sort of common in virtual reality, for noobs anyway. Still, I’ve got these persistent fantasies about guilds that aren’t dominated by sexually unsatisfied loudmouths – because sex is a wonderful thing when shared with people you want to have sex with, but when it’s nonconsensual, it’s creepy and gross and illegal (see Polanski link above). I can dream.)

So anyway, I have a vague idea of what I want. Now as far as finding it . . .

There is guild recruitment. This is sort of like looking for a job, complete with interviews and resumes. It takes place either in the official forums or on websites that seem like they’re never updated.

There is sub rosa recruiting, which is done through facebook and similar networks. I’ve looked into that a little, but couldn’t find many 1st-gen friends who are playing at the level where I want to be. I frequently run into “ooooh, there’s whatshername that I used to hang out with back when” on the internet and discovered they play WoW. In fact, that’s the dilemma I faced when starting – begin fresh in a place where nobody knows me, or get carried by friends (and alienating some friends by choosing others) so that I totally miss that “learning at my own pace” experience. I chose the first and succeeded with flying colors – I’m no longer in the top 10 geared on my server, but I’m still sort of near the top, and achieved that without using the /lick emote even once. I’m on a backwater server in a guild hovering somewhere around rank 4200, but even given that, I’ve gone farther than a lot of players. That should account for something, especially once Blizzard starts handing out bonuses to guilds with members who accomplish things.

There is the practice of just appearing on a server and socializing. This is what I’m probably aiming for, with my hunter going out to scout new places before I invest in transferring more of my toons there.

And there’s option (d) – just be a casual player for a while, and maybe get back to work writing, or find something RL productive to do. I’m giving this one some serious consideration too, which is probably why I haven’t dived into joining a new guild and agreeing to be in my chair clicking and typing at designated times. Especially given the fact Blizzard has given us more options for moving around and changing sides.

Anyway, when the expansion comes out, I hope to have found a solid crew of people who don’t get on my nerves to play it with, and I’ll keep updating my progress in that regard.

Awesome Media Snarkery Site

2009-10-07T23:20:00.000-07:00

This is my new favorite link. And it might also explain why I refuse to watch movies or comment on media at times.

I haven't seen nearly as much media as these guys have, but I get far too many of the references. And once you get that mediajaded it's hard to deal with it at face value.

Wimmin and Social Media

2009-10-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Here’s a blurb from Broadsheet (part of Salon) about women outnumbering men on social networking sites.

I’ve edited my official Darth Bunnywabbit “Here I’ve been, typing about this sort of thing for years, waiting for clueless developers to listen up” speech down to this paragraph.

And in the comments section, the predictable tribe of internet misogynists are quick to chime in that this isn’t “real” use of technology, it’s navel gazing, although if you’re sharing pictures of your navel on Facebook, it seems like you might need to find a new metaphor for “self absorbed.”

Although it’s tempting to riff on a good metaphor for “a bunch of people being self absorbed together” – an activity which can happen on Facebook or in WoW, or at your friendly neighborhood singles bar.

And it’s also tempting to talk about my own social networking experiences – I’m one of those female holdouts re social networking sites because the only thing my social network really has in common is the fact they all know me. And I was in a discussion group schism that was entertaining for a while but degenerated into inactivity when it became apparent that a few women there were really uncomfortable with actual discussion as opposed to posting stuff about themselves. Facebook is probably a better venue for that. If I were a guy it might be tempting to riff about how women like dumb superficial stuff and men are engaged in more serious pursuits, but I’ve been a WoW player too long to fall for that trap, and guys are just as dumb and self-absorbed.

Unless there are gates.

A real life gated community attempts to keep its inhabitants safe from “undesirables.” You know, people who look poor, people who drive strange looking cars, people who want to paint their houses in dangerously subversive colors that aren’t in the approved palette.

I wouldn’t want to live like that IRL, but on the internet, I’d really rather not give equal time to spammers, scammers, internet misogynists craving sammiches, people who desperately want you to adopt their religion and/or ideology despite its grievous logical shortcomings and rogues who fail at dps. And Facebook allows users to socialize with anybody in the whole Facebookiverse – with gates. Not by forcing them all into little tribes with gatekeepers, but by making everyone their own gatekeeper, empowered to include and exclude everyone they want.

WoW, a primarily male social media, fails hard when it comes to gatekeeping. I would even go so far as to say that gatekeeping failure is the main problem complained about in WoW. Asshats mouthing off in trade chat. Incompetents looking for pickup groups. Thieves and griefers with fluid identities. And the never ending search for “game-compatible” (similar level, similar skills, similar goals) players, which runs sort of like picture brides in the 19th century – after a brief written exchange, one party spends money and inconvenience moving somewhere far away, hoping to be compatible with the strangers who have already developed a community there).

Seriously, how difficult would it be to include some kind of search engine or web app that lets you say something like “I am a rogue with good dps who wants to do 10man progression raiding Thursdays and Saturdays at 8:00 PST” and hook up with others? Very difficult, apparently. To find new guilds – and yes, the thought of finding a new guild for myself has been crossing my mind lately – you can either wade through the guild recruitment forums, which look like what would happen if one of the Craigslist roommate listing servers (without search filters) exploded. Or you can make a noob on some other server and then hope to get the attention of people who might be like the people you seek (a little time consuming, even given that the players have informally designated some servers as “the raid recruiting server” or “the server where people don’t talk smack about GLBTs all the time” or “the server with a lot of hardcore progression players” – and also given that in WoW, your reputation is everything, so you’re stuck with “hi, I’m a level 1 noob, but if you alt tab out of WoW and go to a weblink you can see the REAL me”). Or you can ask your RL friends and roommates, which is what a lot of people seem to do.

People outside WoW have tried to set up something of this nature but the matchmaking websites I saw looked sparse. And I’ve learned from experience (see last post) that someone who might be a damn good gamer in one game can turn into an unrepentant scrub in another game.

There are a few promising developments on the horizon. For example, cross-server interaction. In the future, supposedly we’ll be able to text and instance with people from other servers. Which means that if I want to talk to a bunch of prospective guildies on some other server, I don’t have to go over there and create a new character. Maybe I’ll even be able to run a few heroics with these potential guildies to make sure we have compatibility under fire and not just keyboard chemistry.

And the whole faction change feature moots the issue of horde versus alliance, although there is no way I’ll ever faction change my troll and risk losing my raptor collection.

As far as advanced gatekeeping, there are addons that allow you to expand your ignore list. There’s one called “thanks for the warning” that lets you tag a player for future reference. “Oh look, that guy who was spamming trade chat the other night wants a raid spot, I think we’re full.” There’s one that lets you share your ignore list among all your characters, although for me, running around with people who don’t realize that you’re the person they pissed off yesterday can have its own rewards. And – based on what I’ve heard rather than personal experience – there are IM programs that let you just replace WoW chat with one where you can talk to anyone you want, whether they’re on another server or playing a different game entirely.

I’m still on my soapbox, game manufacturers. If you guys really want our princess-pink dollars (last I checked, they exchange at the same rate as sweaty-smelling, manly dollars), give us better social networking, and more gates.

Dear Old Friend: L2play

2009-10-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Old Gamer Friend;

I’m not sure if you’ll end up reading this, or if I’ll end up linking it to you. I know you don’t like to read, you’ve complained about it before, and you never bothered to go to our guild website back when we were a guild, or to our metaguild website once we became less organized after we started playing WoW.

I haven’t been doing much gaming with you for the past few months. What’s happened in the past is that I’ll go try to help you out with something, you’ll try to direct the action and then we fail.

Last night, you wanted to go farm the brewfest mount. You wanted me to 2box tank and heal, along with you and your wife. I said we’d need another dps. You insisted. You want the loot and I don’t blame you. So I said okay, although at the back of my mind, I still thought we would need dps. I asked if your wife would be at the keyboard, to make sure you weren’t trying to 2box also. I asked if you were sure, a few times. What I should have done was flat out state “no way, Jose – get some good dps or I’m not coming.”

I remember a time when I went to help you with something back in Burning Crusade. You’d helped me out with dps previously, when we had Anatalos tanking. Anatalos was a damn good tank. I don’t know if he still reads this blog, he’s given up WoW to focus on school and more power to him for that. But anyway, he had his tank gear and his tank spec, and we work well together, and we made the quest look easy as pie.
We went back to try it again later. No Anatalos, this time your wife was tanking. Except she didn’t let me know she wasn’t tank spec, she was half ret and half something else, and she kept dying and running back. I had some damn good dps with me, from my guild, but that didn’t help the fact that the tank couldn’t stand up to the damage, and we failed, and never did get through that quest. My dps friends left irritated with me for summoning them to failure, and you and your wife were upset because for some reason, easy as pie had turned into hard as nails. And you didn’t quite understand why.

Now normally after we set out on these expeditions we wind up pissed off at each other, so I’ve been just refusing to go along. I’ll talk, I’ll hang out, I’ll share tips, we can reminisce about games from the past or talk about music, but I don’t want to run things with you. It just leads to ill will.

Last night was more of the same. Now I can solo that particular boss down to about 30%, but then he hits the enrage timer and goes berserk, and that usually does me in. Maybe if I were soloing it as a pally or druid or something it would work, but not while I'm playing a warrior tank and a priest healer in windowed mode on adjacent monitors. I’ve tried it with one extra dps, from my guild, but we failed. I figured that maybe you guys could do that additional 30% and we could beat it.

But no, fail resulted. I had asked you just before the pull not to pull agro. That’s good advice most days, but it’s especially effective when you’ve got one person trying to tank and heal at the same time, which admittedly is not really effective for same-level encounters, although it serves me very well on lower level type stuff like hunting that guy in ZD that drops the tiger mount. (No, don't ask, I am NOT taking you to hunt the tiger mount guy, you'll probably cause a wipe.)

We were doing okay until the end part where the tank got stunned. And then . . . your missus pulled agro, and dragged the mobs far away from the tank. So I was going back and forth between my healer and tank, trying to keep them both up – uh oh, now I’ve also got to try to heal the death knight that pulled agro while at the same time making the tank take agro back, while healing both of them. Then you get into the act. You could have used your tricks of the trade move to put agro back on the tank but no, you grabbed it for yourself, and you died too. I tried to keep things going but it was no use, and we wiped when the boss was a lousy two or three hits from dropping the loot.

And I wished you luck finding a nice pug and hearthed out of there, and logged off, and made an omelet, with some ham and green onions and asiago cheese. It came out pretty good; I’ve been trying to figure out how to make omelets with my new omelet pan, and flipping them is tricky, but finally I’ve reached the point where they come out in one omelet-shaped piece. And I went off to my alliance server, where a friend helped me look you up in the armory and post mortem the fail.

We discovered that you use a spec that’s dependent on having other people in your party score critical hits. Even though you mostly solo. And that your hit rating is very, very low, which means you don’t often hit at all, let alone crit. Now I don’t know a lot about your particular class, rogues. I don’t play one, truthfully I don’t really like them, although I know a few good ones. Typically they do very high damage. Your damage, though, is really low. I’m used to seeing rogues do raid damage above 4000 dps. You do about 1300 dps. My healer can outdamage you. While healing. We had a pugger do that kind of damage in a raid I was recently in, and the guildleader had a fit, and said he didn’t want to see that person in a raid again ever.

Frankly, old pal, you’re pretty bad at the group player-versus-environment features of the game. You’re okay for soloing, but your grasp of your role in a group seriously needs some work. Unfortunately, you don’t take direction, you insist on giving it instead. Now I’m not suggesting you take advice from me on how to play a rogue because I have no idea, but I think you need to either do a little research or start doing more group activities while taking more of a passive role, following directions and asking advice.

I don’t suggest you ask my more elitist guildies. Some of them are pretty smug and insufferable, although if you catch them at the right time, they’ll probably give you some great advice. I gather you’ve encountered smugness from others when you’ve tried to group and I don’t blame you for being defensive. We’ve both probably run into bad players who give bad advice (cough), or good players who turn advice-giving into a power trip, and unless you really know the game well, it’s hard to tell them apart. I’d suggest you do what I did and continue to do – look for players who are a little better than you at what you’re trying to accomplish, and see what they’re doing different.

Also . . . I understand that you like to brag about your achievements, whenever you loot a rare pet or make a good deal in the auction house. I like to be celebrated for my achievements too. A lot of mine have to do with being good at working in groups. In fact I have clocked a great many hours in groups. That’s where my epic gear that you snidely dismissed the other night comes from. It’s very nice gear for our server; I’m one of the best geared people on it. I could link you to websites saying as much, if I were that kind of person and if you were the type to go to websites.

But I’ve been content to leave it at I’m awesome because I’m a twilight vanquisher in 3/5 T9.5, and you’re awesome because you looted a rare dinosaur hatchling, and Blizzard allows us each to travel in our own spheres of awesomeness, rewarding us frequently with virtual decorations, and problems don’t really arise until we try to do things in groups, especially complicated things.

True, you’ve been playing WoW longer than I have. And you are indeed awesome at some aspects of the game, like collecting. But dude, you are seriously bad at group play. Never ask me to group with you again until you get the kind of achievements and numbers that tell me you’ve figured out how to overcome this issue. I’m willing to help you learn, but I’m not willing to fight with you for control of a situation you’re not equipped to lead, and I’m tired of getting killed because your playstyle is ineffective, and blamed for the wipes that result.

Plus I have authority issues. I'm very picky about whose orders I'll follow. Sometimes you get around my boundaries, because we’re friends, at least until you start telling me to do counterintuitive things and it takes me a second to realize “waittaminute, the bad dps guy is giving me directions on how to fail again, I should tell him STFU, we're doing it this way” but by then it's usually too late. In the past I've thought "well, maybe he's finally putting out some dps, he does have some better gear, and it's been months since the last fail, I'll give him a chance." No more.

So I’m going to resume not grouping with you until you l2play better. I’ll still talk to you, and this time I’m not going to bother with the seething resentment, and maybe this long blog post is TMI for a general audience.

But this blog is sort of about social adventures in MMOs. You’re the kind of guy I’d like to have as a neighbor. We disagree about some things, like politics, and food, and we agree about others, such as early Nine Inch Nails and the awesomeness of the Star Wars movies. Your wife is a sweetie too (and while her dps isn’t great, it’s higher than yours). And yet the nature of WoW means that we probably would not be in the same guild, and that our different styles lead us in directions that can clash to a friendship-severing level.

And I think that’s a damn shame. We managed to get along much better back in SWG, where it was far easier to carry players with bad dps, and where there were plenty of activities that didn’t involve a hand-eye coordination face-off. We do fine just having occasional conversation in our chat channel. It’s not until we get to the actual “playing the video game” part that problems arise.

Some of the people that I enjoy playing the video game with are outright asshats. If they were my neighbors I’d put more locks on my door and perhaps get a big dog. But their dps is high, and their level of involvement with the game is equivalent to my own, and we can get through an encounter without any failing or bossiness or seething resentment. We come together, we rapidly mash keys, we win, we collect loot, we bid each other a cheery farewell. No drama, no stress.

That’s the MMO paradox I’m still exploring. What is it that makes us compatible with other people, and what kind of people attract us when we’re blindfolded as to race and gender and money and region and all those other details. I still haven’t figured it out, even though I know that logging into a guild raid with a bunch of rude strangers shooting rapid fire wisecracks at each other makes me feel warm and happy inside, and so does having a nice long chat about music while I’m wandering through some virtual swamp doing repetitive tasks.

Maybe someday there will be a game better suited toward socializing than WoW, which funnels us into narrow little enclaves defined by a narrow range of aptitude.

For now, keep your bad dps on your side of the fence, neighbor, and I’ll keep my raid pets from crapping on your rosebushes. And I’ll see you at the BBQ on Saturday. Just don't ask me to tank. Or heal.

Nostalgic, uninformed hogwash

2009-09-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Catchy phrase. Here’s an article about a guy who stands bravely athwart the tide of “OMG!! We must uninvent the internet and go live in trees now!!! Think of the children!!!!”

And here’s one of the people he’s writing about, Dr. Hilarie Cash, who runs a retreat center in the woods for patients afflicted with addiction to video games and sex.

Probably all you have to do is introduce them, let the magic work itself, then see them in six months for treating the brand new addiction their recent beloved introduced them to. Nice scam there, Dr. Money.

Which might be enough entertaining linkage to detract from the fact I haven’t been blogging lately. But anyway.

I plod steadily forward in WoW. I’m at a complicated point where to explain the guild and power drama would take up too many boring paragraphs, suffice to say I’m restless again and am once again entertaining thoughts about “how can I find people I’m relatively compatible with who still want to raid a lot and try to get server firsts.”

And although I am relatively clear on the competition part, the compatibility part is changing even now, as living a virtual life teaches me new and startling things about what kind of people I enjoy and what kind I despise, and what kind are sort of like my real life friends.

Frankly, I think that’s what’s really behind the addiction – and like in the “Better Pencil” article, taking the current pseudo-psych alarm about new forms of communication makes as much sense as Plato complaining about how kids these days were spoiled by paper and their minds would rot from lack of memorization.
Suddenly, you can filter your friends strictly by intellect. Not just as in IQ, or educational background, but by whether they are proactive or lazy, obsessive or scattered, efficient or rambling, sarcastic or serious. Being married to someone who can’t figure out how to keyboard turn their way out of the noob area is no big deal, but gaming with someone like that is frustration waiting to happen.

I’ve been pondering that as I set up my little sim village, each personality trait represented, and wonder about the sims who happen to share them and will eventually encounter each other, and then the football player and the farmer will have something to talk about with each other, and so on.

So far the game hasn’t crashed yet, and at the same time it’s sort of boring and sterile. I want to like it, to interact with it, but I feel the invisible hand of the developers twisting my little virtual arms, demanding “You WILL live a stifling Mary Sue simlife in this Truman Show-like suburb
and you will not only LIKE it, you will get all excited about the Thanksgiving expansion where you get to visit Egypt and turn into a mummy ghost.”

Umm, no. Especially when I have a dreadful premonition that Egypt will be full of randomly generated sims with names like “Eduardo Takanaga.” At least some of them will be dark skinned with blond Beatles hair wearing suit coats with cargo shorts.
Until then, it’s downloading furniture and fashions from sims3.com for twenty bucks a set (cleverly disguised as “sim currency” – I can’t really rant about the economics because it’s actually more efficient than having to buy a new $20 box of CDs for equivalent content).

Sims 3 might be awesome in the future, but for now, I think it needs a lot of work. Or maybe those mods I mentioned earlier need some work, so the gamer can get in there and tweak the settings to do away with things like off camera death and other “bus actions.”

Gamer angst aside, I’m having a pretty good week. I got the extra fast violet proto-drake in WoW, after working on achievements for a year. My death knight is tearing up battlegrounds, having discovered the concept of getting experience in them. And my druid got some gear.

Now if I could only loot that stupid brewfest mount.

Introverted Female Gamer Finds Survey Disturbingly Limiting

2009-08-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

There’s gonna be a new WoW expansion, and I’m gonna make a tauren paladin tentatively named HammerofMoo, but I’ll blather more about that later.

For now, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I confess that I find bipartisanship limiting. Binary is for computers. Therefore, I present to you
Liberals

Libertarians

Conservatives

and futurists
all carping about the same stupid news article about – guess what! A lot of gamers are not teenagers, or are female or both!! (Have I not been writing about that for more than a year?) A lot of us are introverted!! And, like most cross-sections of the country these days, a lot of us are fat!!

Film at eleven.

Regardless of how you currently feel about DarthBunnywabbit’s Favorite President So Far (cracks knuckles), consider that in the comments sections of these fairly large New Media Organizations, the sentiments expressed are relatively similar: “Oh look, another stupid correlation study, what a load of crap!”

Media dinosaurs, take a hint and cease with the deliberately inflammatory correlation study article intended primarily for arguing friends and/or relatives to text links at each other to prove they win. Your target audience, whether they vote hardcore red or hardcore blue, whether they make their living extrapolating about the future in a political, business or scientific capacity, all agree: these studies are a load of crap.

Which one do I agree with? All of them. As far as text complaining about this remarkably point-missing news distraction, anyway.

Which makes my point, in fact, but I’ll get there eventually.

Consider there are two types of people in the universe. Subset A consists of people who hate videogames and want to make others stop playing them. Subset B consists of people who either like videogames or couldn’t care less. It seems logical that Subset B, since it contains the neutrals as well as the proponents, would be larger.

Now. Subset A tends to devalue such qualities as introversion
as well as age and weight. It therefore follows that Subset A consists of young extroverts who are fascinated with mating and status displays, along with a few people who mistakenly believe you have to pretend to be that way to get sex, and Subset B consists of everybody else.

Now. Why are these young extroverts going out of their way to exuberantly complain about the old, fat, and introverted?

And I was almost going to bring up that “female” because there’s a sense of “whoa, lots more chicks play than I thought, but they’re all fat, lol.”

Then consider, how the previous gamer stereotype – which the media took collective effort in building – was that gamers were all aggro young males.

Now it follows that aggro young males would pretty much fall within the category of Subset A. Extroverted, aggro, there’s really not a lot of difference. Basically the media was telling us a few years ago that gamers were no good punk kids liable to shoot up their schools, and now they’re complaining that gamers are sedentary adults prone to melancholia.

This is what professional arguers call a “Straw Man” argument. Make a straw man, dress it up like how you think the enemy would dress and see if you can get the townsfolk to form a mob and burn it. If the mob is distracted and AFK, try dressing the straw man in something even more shocking and inflammatory.

Seeing that I live in virtual reality these days, I know people mainly by text, strange as that seems. I’m as sensitive to grammatical style as audio people are to accents or visual people are to designer labels. I’m a fine upstanding citizen in virtual reality. I own status symbols, I have a successful resume, and since this would be worth about the cost of my last restaurant bill to a Chinese gold farmer, at the same time I’m willing to chuck it all and go play a new game if they ever invent a better one than WoW. I’ve seen a good cross-section of the virtual universe.

My comrades in IT departments all over the world. The students who play between chapters. The folks in low paying jobs who struggle to pay that fifteen bucks a month, and the moms stuck at home, and the nurses waiting for someone to ring the bell, and the rich bums with too many accounts, and you know I could go on but discretion stays my hand.

Anyway, there are people in virtual reality that like to grab attention by making inflammatory straw man arguments. My server is full of them. They get in trade channel, and draw their lines, praying someone will cross them. And they get ignored, and reported. They get into pugs and guilds, create strife and drama in their quest to be recognized as Gods of Typing without the introverted qualities of long restful meditative hours of solitary patience – and get kicked. Sometimes they can stir up a bit of action but the herd always seems to arrive to trample the obstreperous ones before getting back to the business of grazing, which is what we do between really intense bursts of typing, not just pretty good, but perfect and as fast as possible.

The same verbal style that’ll get you an op ed in Your Favorite News Disgorger will make you a social pariah in WoW, especially if you also stand in fire while you're talking smack.

So here’s a little straw man for you, and I’ll dress him in the latest trendazoid clothes and staple a journalism degree to his little hand.

You’re an extrovert. You depend on input from other human beings for your health and sanity. Like many young mammals you chose a particular skill to hone in your conquest for sex and cash and companionship, and in your case it was typing real pretty. Yeah, yeah, it’s a skill for introverts/girls/other people whose social distance you want to exaggerate so as to possibly help you get sex and cash, but some writers are extroverts. Like Hemingway.

And face it, if you’re a writer at all you’re not a REAL extrovert. So maybe you want to show the real live actual cool kids (the ones you write articles about) that you’re cool too! What better way than to pick on the nerds in video games! After all, you type pretty good.

You land in virtual reality, armed only with your typing skills, surrounded by surreal landscapes and funny looking cartoon characters. And your first impulse is – attract attention! Make noise! Find the other extroverts! Where’s the party?
A couple of days later you have already received a rep as an irritating noob and are on several guilds’ “no invite” lists.

You work your way up through the Chuck Norris jokes in the barrens, the exciting world of twink battlegrounds and the annoying panoply of Trade Chat with all its – other loud people that are even louder and cruder than you . . . and their spelling makes your brain just ache . . . and what’s worse . . . they know how to play the game better than you. Because they're introverts, and they actually like reading stuff like Elitist Jerks, which is sort of like kryptonite to extroverts.

And they mock you. Ceaselessly and tirelessly. You think you know how to type? L2keybind, noob. All that time you spent trying to impress the extroverts, cultivating an appearance? We can’t see it. That “I’ve got a microphone so listen up!” tone? Guess what, everyone’s text is the same color. The deeper you get, the more you find yourself surrounded by introverts, and the more you learn that they feel sort of similarly about you, they're just quieter and less in-your-face about it, unless you try to jerk them around on their home turf or something similar.

Eventually, the electric shocks outnumber the food pellets to the extent that you leave (or get banned or suspended). (Or you go native like I did, but I was a nerd to begin with.) With a burning grudge against video games and all who play them. And nothing left to do with your spare time except try to get cash and sex by selling straw men to peddlers of air.

Meanwhile, a generation consisting of 90% gamers enters college.

Lolz

2009-08-21T09:29:00.001-07:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Sims 3 Hacks, Arthas (oh yeah, and I got a BLUE DRAGON woot!!!)

2009-08-20T23:11:00.001-07:00

Well, let’s see. My identity thief has a hearing next month. One of my friends, who happens to be roughly the size of a teenage tauren, has gallantly offered to escort me to said hearing, and I’m deliberating over whether I want to actually lay eyes on her. Other than that, RL is back to reasonableness.

As far as Sims 3 . . . according to the new expansion, the game play is going to be more questy and first-person like.

Which made me groan. If I want quests I’ll log into WoW and do Argent Tournament dailies. What I want to do with Sims is build the digital equivalent of a basement full of model train layouts. I especially don’t want to be a first person sim. Sims are vapid, shallow, materialistic creatures who need to be reminded to pee. Why would I want to live amongst them when I can be an overpowered troll priestess with a 10k smite and a blue dragon?

I’d rather make a whole town, which is what I’m doing now.

I made this vampirish sim whose mission is to max out everything maxoutable. Just for kicks. But anyway, while he’s doing that, I’ve been letting the town progress. The vampire just keeps eating ambrosia and working on his palatial manor, and adding new careers to his resume, while the town grinds to a halt.

Yesterday, I deleted most of the tombstones.

I left Mortimer Goth and Bella Bachelor. They can spend eternity in the crypt together. Everyone else – outta here.

My rationale – I have read that Sims 3 crashes when your population is too high, but also that if you kill off the resident NPCs, no new ones respawn. You just get “homeless” NPCs that spawn in response to career demands, pizza delivery, stuff like that. So I figured if I depopulate the town I’d have enough space to put up 23 households. One for each career. That gives me enough sims to have all the personality traits. I can devote unused residential lots to bizarre theme restaurants and other diversions and otherwise play with the new build mode. Which is kinda what I really want to do, with just enough characters to populate the place but not so many I can't keep track of them. And I might even have room left over for a “player sim” to interact with them all and go on exciting quests to become a mummy in this new expansion, which hopefully will include a lot of Asian and Middle Eastern build features. Or I could just log into WoW and kill mummies for gold. While talking to people. Hmm.

My vampire sim has already bought all the businesses, which allows him an income of about 70k a week and also lets him rename them. Sayonara, Doo Pease Corporate Towers.

Now if you’re into some really hardcore game rearranging, you might want to investigate this other, um, mod I found. At More Awesome Than You.

Please note the caveats about the fact that it might kill your game stone dead. I have not installed it myself for this reason. However, I was really tempted. This mod allows you to do everything from revert to Sims 3 style aging, remove the blurs, force-overload a house, eat raw meat (OM NOM NOM!), randomize the NPC vocal range, all kinds of nifty stuff. It has a whole series of “anti bus” commands – off the shelf, Sims 3 occasionally has your sims die off screen, without your permission, without even leaving a tombstone so you can rez them as ghosts. In other words, they got “hit by a bus.” Some of the “bus” actions include sims getting fired, fat or homeless without your permission.

I mean, seriously. You create an athlete sim, spend many sim hours training him, then the minute you take your eyes off him he gets fat and quits his job. That would suck.

Anyway, my rich vampire sim only has a few neighbors left, and in the meantime, I have bulldozed all the empty houses, which must free up SOME space, and have built a few residences for my carefully groomed allotment of 23 sims. I made new Sims 3 versions of Graceland and the Psycho house, and could have used a few more architectural options for the latter when trying to get that crazy peaked semi-mansard roof with the more traditional roof around the 2nd floor cupola, but the textures came out very psycho-like, and the weed and bramble and dandelion filled yard made a nice touch. Hooray for Sims 3’s courage to include ugly plants alongside the rosebushes. (And can we please have some plumerias and banyans from the first 2 versions?)

I’m still grumpy about my inability to rename the streets, but I’ll bet there will be a mod for that soon, if not already.

Meanwhile, in WoW,

I might have mentioned a (cough) blue dragon. From heroic Malygos. I won the roll. I think it’s actually an Azure Drake. It rocks. I’m having fun with WoW lately. More dino mounts and pets, more stuff to grind for, and the new raid instance is deceptively seductive – an arena, with a boss.

And every week there’s a new boss. We’re up to this evil pack of butchers including an especially despised paladin. When you wipe, the Alliance king calls you a scrub, and when you win, showers of wonderful purple lewt appear.

Also, I read that bestseller about (warning spoilers in link -- no spoilers here) Arthas. I was going to do a full on review here in my blog about it, complete with early 21st century style snark and negativity, but I checked myself. People who write like that are old and bitter and need therapy, and retraining my perspective to exclude that kind of thing is part of why I’m a WoW addict.

The prose is not something that would get a passing grade in your typical English lit program. The style is plain, aimed at a teenage fantasy novel sort of market, and there isn’t much description – if you’re reading it, you probably have some notion of what Durnholde Keep looks like, and if not, there’s a handly little “come check it out online!” blurb on the last page.

The characters . . . a snarky reviewer might call them simple. Their conflicts tend to revolve around passionate family rivalries and grudges, but then, so did the conflicts in Hamlet and the last Gulf War. There are three female lead characters, an old school traditional princessly one and a typical new school traditional headstrong tomboy who reads a lot, and the character who will eventually become queen of the Undead, who gets victimized in an elaborate, justification-for-future-ass-whooping sort of way. The male lead character, Arthas, well . .

It’s a simple story whose job is to summarize all the elaborate WoW backstory in straightforward fashion so we all know exactly what all those cut scenes in Caverns of Time are about. Which is nice to know. It helps me appreciate the game a little better.

Other WoW gamers who have read the book and mentioned to me they liked it usually focus on Arthas’ character development. Arthas is indeed a bad guy, and the main story is how he becomes that way. One bad decision at a time.

Which is, I think , how most bad guys eventually end up there. Some of these people who mentioned it contrasted it to the absolutely crappy job George Lucas did with explaining how Jake Lloyd became Darth Vader.

Gamers don’t really care about prose, or technique, or how some asshole floored the English department by scrambling the cut scenes out of sequence. They care about story. How do we get from point A to point B, and does it make logical sense. In this sense, the Arthas book succeeds where a great many fail. Arthas is a tragic hero with noble intentions, and everything he tries to fix just gets worse.

Arthas is also struggling with gamer-related issues. He commands an army of the undead. When they encounter the other kind of army, they conscript the casualties, and since they are undead and do not march on their stomachs (unlike the other kind of army), they exponentially scale until they become totally OP.

Yet the more obsessed he becomes with being OP and winning, the more humanity he loses.

Which is a paradox that most of us gamers come to terms with at some point.

The really interesting thing that Arthas does, though, is tie all the storylines together. Which I find fascinating because typically you have something like
Prequel -- Story -- Sequel -- More Sequels As Market Will Bear

But this takes place before WoW, and explains how the last expansion fits into the grand scheme of WoW, making it sort of surround the core lore like the chocolate around a cherry. Only a thoroughly computerized mind, I think, could have come up with that kind of literary circumnavigation. Most novels are written by the exceedingly right brained, people who like to wallow in the sensual nature of syllables, but here is one written from an exceedingly left brained place, with lots of facts and details and three-dimensionality, but not a lot of allusions and wordplay (and, praise the lord, a total lack of illogical unsequenced stream of consciousness postmodern interludes and whiny emo analyses of dysfunctional childhood as motivation for all future behavior -- I can't wait until novels for grownups finally get there).

Rest in Peace, Yogg Saron

2009-08-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

I had a terrific day today.

It started with a pot of coffee and WoW, I ran around getting tournament badges and feeding my baby ravasaur, which will grow up into a ravasaur mount in only 18 more dailies.

Then I went shopping with my friend and got a bunch of housewares type stuff, and had an absolutely sublime lunch at this Burmese place (samusas, tea leaf salad and a kind of chicken curry dish, with brown rice). I even had a glass of sangria without getting an insta-headache, a rare occurrence. It was a beautiful summer day, so beautiful that most of my neighbors were out doing something more interesting than standing in line ahead of me.

I came home, logged back into WoW, as expected, we did not have 25 organized people online at raid time.

So I got my red and yellow epic gems, paying for them with honor from battlegrounds. I was capped, and now I have none left – which means I can do more battlegrounds. Hooray. I hate doing things when no points are involved. The verdict is still out on blue epic gems.

Some of my guildies went to run the new heroic on 10, then when I asked where my invitation was ten minutes later, said they were already inside and the group was full, oops. I hate 10s.

I got mad and alt-F4’d in a fit of pique – then logged back in and checked my bank alt, and came back to my raid character. The real leader took over, and we proceeded to pwn the new 25 raid in one shot. I think it was a server first, I’m not sure.

We weren’t sure about our Yogg capabilities with our particular group. We had some disconnectors, including me – and I rarely disconnect. I have large corporate cable internet and I live in an extremely digital place, on one of those “keep the power up on this corridor at all times” type regions, with my quadcore computer. But I got evicted from Ulduar so emphatically that I had to reset my cable modem and reboot. And I even came back in alive, unlike a few people who came back to discover they’d been mind controlled and we were in the process of killing them.

Tempers were high. The leader was in particularly good form as far as verbal abuse, and I was fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end of it. We wiped at it for an hour. I ran out of flasks and bummed another one.

Here’s what the Yogg fight is like – in phase one, you have ugly yellow smog clouds floating around. If you step into one, a mob spawns. If you kill that mob most of the way dead and then drag it back to the boss, it explodes and partially kills her. But you can’t drag it through the yellow clouds or you get more mobs. The DPS has to keep from killing the mob before it gets near the boss. And stuff is aoeing us.

When we first started doing this fight, someone got mind controlled every few seconds and I spent most of my time furiously spamming dispel, but they took that part away, fortunately. So in the first part I basically kick back and heal whatever’s bleeding.

Then there’s phase two. For this phase, Yogg turns into an evil brain and rants about being the god of death, and tentacles appear. Some are giant and try to kill you, some are small and grab you and flail you around, while green lasers try to fry you and various special effects attempt to drive you insane, which you cure by standing in a green beam off to the side. Periodically, portals open up, and some of the raid goes in and directly attacks Yogg’s brain.

The previous attempt, they had let me go in the portal to heal the people assaulting Yogg’s brain directly. It’s bizarre in there, you have things you’re not supposed to look at or your sanity plummets, and the actual brain room is all in photo negative. Then you portal out (if you’re too slow you get mind controlled) and repeat a couple times.

Phase 3 – don’t ask me, I did it with my back turned. Mobs were being killed, Yogg’s brain was being thrashed, and if you face it, you lose sanity. So I faced the wall and stared at the health bars. This is apparently how Blizzard intended the healers to spend the Gigantic Climactic End Battle of Ulduar – facing a stone wall. Yeah, Blizzard, we healers love you too.

Anyway, after months of beating our head against the wall on this thing, we tweaked the strategy slightly. That was enough to get us past it. We wiped at 3% the first time we tried it, and the second time – Yogg fell down.

He dropped the shoulders that would finish my T8.5 set, but I deferred to the paladin tank. I’d rather stand behind someone more geared than me than try it the other way around.

We took our screenshot, for our personal archives.

This same weekend, the remnants of what used to be the top guild on the server all transferred. The population doesn’t seem capable of supporting that many guilds, so they’re going somewhere else to try and get their full 25. Throughout much drama, my guild is now the top on the server.

We joke about how we’re not World Class. We get a lot of players who don’t think our pace is fast enough and end up transferring. We’ve got an obsessive core with little in common yet who work well together. The guild is at its second anniversary, and I’ve been with it about a year and a half now. Seeing them bulldoze their way past all the content in the game has been extremely rewarding. Probably the best thing I’ve come across in WoW.

After I came out of Yoggland I couldn’t resist sending a tell to that paladin from my first guild. He and I still occasionally boast back and forth at each other, although I think he finally gave up trying to catch me. He was a good sport and congratulated me.

And since I can run around in battlegrounds again, I went in the new one, Isle of Conquest. I got to skydive into the gnomes’ fort from a zeppelin, and float around over some lovely scenery, and my side won, so I think the new battleground is just dandy.

I’m still glowing. Horde first.

Face-Palm Repetitive Connective Syndrome

2009-07-30T00:08:00.000-07:00

I was reading Sims 3 reviews on Amazon and noted a lot of people had similar reactions to mine. Cute, but I’ll come back when they let you customize it more.
If we want to be led through on rails like it’s a ride at Disneyland, we’ll buy console. PC is for customization.

Meanwhile, the “WoW therapist” story I linked yesterday got featured in Yahoo because so many people liked it

so I thought I’d riff on the many things about it that amuse me:

(a) Of all the guilds I’ve ever been in, the ones that managed to succeed in whatever they were focused on doing were led by people who for whatever crazy reason have gone past masters in psych, and you can barely farm eternals without tripping over noobs working on their BS who thought it might be neat to do a paper on computer games. Therapists are hardly unrepresented, as compared to, say, female dwarves.

(b) How come teens with antisocial behaviors manifest them outside the privacy of their bedrooms while the antisocial teens playing WoW are not manifesting antisocial behaviors because they’re avoiding people? Does an antisocial behavior require an audience, like a tree falling in the forest? And if it occurs in the solitude of cooperatively raiding with 25 other people . . . never mind. This kind of paradox is probably what prevented me from getting a psych degree myself, and I thank the spirits and fairies each day for my decision.

(c) The AMA says game addiction is not a legitimate disorder, while a “Swedish study” (complained about in previous bloggage) and “other reports” say otherwise. Now, what sort of reports are we talking about here? And who is making these reports? And why do they lack credibility even sufficient to get into this straw-grasping attention hoe shrink’s bid for international publicity and/or ridicule?

(d) Graham asked Blizzard for free WoW. Lol. Pay your $15 a month like everybody else, noob.

(e) Most therapists probably aren’t WoW experts. Lol again. Although it might be true for that scrub paladin that ran my first WoW guild, although even he managed to raid Darnassus and get a bear mount at (cough) 4am on a Monday after a holiday 3-day weekend (cough), most of the psych professionals I have gamed with are rather adept at gaming, as well as making the kind of player-behavior predictions that are useful in games of strategy. Psychology and gaming share several skill sets.

(f) Recruit gamers to act as “peer mentors.” I can just see trade chat now. However, I’ll spare you actually writing it. Trade chat, for the uninitiated, is like Twitter if it were run by 14 year olds with Tourette’s.

I’m envisioning this noob standing around in Stormwind , appalled at the rampant use of idiom and abbreviation as well as the spelling and frequent interjections of pure madness and or gratuitous offensiveness. Finally, some clever and manipulative 15 year old offers him a few run throughs before abandoning him to a noobish death along with ridicule, and a hot NE dancer turns out to be a guy. And despite all that he decides he likes the game enough to zoom all the way up through level 80 and become a raider, arena junkie or guildleader. There, he will finally meet the people who spend an number of hours determined by some to be excessive.

Except by that time he’ll be one himself.

This guy is basically looking for a free WoW subscription and publicity. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were just trolling for noobs himself so he can bill their parents for curing them while ebaying their accounts. But hey, I’m suspicious. Tell ya why in the post below this one.

Anyway, if you're a busy WoW player and can't take time from your raid schedule to run this noob through RFK while he tries to cure your hobby, uh, mental disease, here are the top secret Rorschach blots that shrinks have used for years to give people experimental brain surgery against their will and other forms of therapeutic treatment. Feel free to test your own psyche yourself in the privacy of your own browser window.

I think the first one looks kinda like a night elf dancing on a mail box with some people in arena gear standing around.

There can be only one!

2009-07-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

I posted a while back about having my identity stolen.

Basically, the Friday before Memorial Day, my wallet was stolen, and over the last month, the thief committed all kinds of fraud and forgery, both against my stuff and against other people using my ID. I dealt with the necessary visits to governmental and banking type places, and am not out anything but my time and a colossal boatload of stress and annoyance as Mizz Identity Thief kept turning up in creative new places – like the time she visited my bank, all dressed up in her finest finery and clutching my driver’s license, asking if she could please change the account address. My bank was kind enough to email me the pics from the security camera, which I was vindictive enough to post all over the internet.

And if she wants to sue me for posting her identity-thieving ugly face all over the internet identifying her as an identity thief, she can bring it.

Anyway, last night the police from a nearby suburb called to let me know that she tried to commit yet another forgery-related series of felonies against a harmless innocent bank, but this time she got caught. She was

In Custody.

Which are two of the most beautiful words in the English language as far as I am currently concerned. She is Someone Else’s Problem. She’s not going to turn up as part of some weird cult of satanic serial killers misidentified under my byline. I’m not going to wake up to a SWAT team with a warrant because some pinhead of a thief shot up a bank, my bloodspattered California driver’s license clutched in her hand. Instead, she is in the custody of my honorable bureaucratic brothers and sisters, who are seeing her as One Of The People Who Is The Reason Other People Have To Stand In Line.

During all this, I had many musings on the nature of Identity itself. After all, I spend much of my time as a troll or a zombie or one of many sims, and these days my only public identity is under pseudonym, like this blog. I don’t social network because a lot of my friends are on different sides of various kinds of socially-perceived gaps and boundaries, and if they realized that, drama could ensue despite the fact that they all have good character and a clever sense of humor along with typing skills.

I’ve seen people get every bit as upset over getting keylogged as I got when my bank account got jacked – with one small exception. Lack of an ATM card meant I couldn’t just summon food to my house, and lack of gold has never affected me on the physical realm so as to impair my survival. Still, the emotions seem remarkably similar.
Identity is time invested. Whether that time was spent going to college, developing a sim or grinding to level 80, those are your experiences and you earned them. They are yours on a primal, foundational level. If someone tries to take away your end result, you’ll get cranky.

The thief is in jail, with the other criminals, wearing orange. She needs a really long timeout some place where she can’t steal things and she should be forced to give everybody their stuff back. If she’d run off to the grocery store to buy milk and diapers and donations to shelters for homeless rabbits instead of robbing banks and live action roleplaying that she’s me, I might be sympathetic.

I am in a festive mood today.

Movies and Therapy

2009-07-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Sims 3: bored, bored, bored. I’ve been through most of the permutations of game play, and I am still finding interesting little details and quirks, but I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to make a town “mine” I would have to go to hours and hours of trouble. So I haven’t. I’m assuming more customization will be forthcoming. It’s a great game and I recommend it, I just haven’t got much left to say about it. Maybe after the next expansion.

WoW is also getting a little dreary, despite glowing promises of future wonders, such as the next patch, and the WoW movie, which will be directed by nerd cult hero Sam Raimi. Well, he’s also one of Darth Bunnywabbit’s heroes, because he was responsible for both Evil Dead series AND Xena, and even The Quick and the Dead, in which Sharon Stone plays a gunslinger. Plus Spiderman! If anyone can make a video game movie that doesn’t suck, it’ll be Raimi.

I tanked Naxx last night, which was fun because I haven’t tanked in a long time. A lot of the guild has been gearing alts, so tanks and healers and dps are all trading places, which makes things a little more interesting (and also requires us to memorize the names of yet more alts). But we still haven’t beat Yogg-Saron. This annoys me. And I’m running out of things to overachieve, so lately I’ve been doing a lot of farming. Maybe I need therapy.

Games, Bananas, Girliness and Stuff

2009-07-21T15:27:00.001-07:00

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a while.

As far as general gamer stuff, there have been too many links lately for me to follow regarding my original focus, games and gender.

Wired ran a snotty feature about games for girls, with an annoying “ridiculous life lessons” angle that seems more appropriate for a magazine for moms complaining about first person shooters turning little boys into serial killers.

Which makes it hard to tell if the games suck, or if Wired is following the general “if it’s pink, it must be bad” trend that seeks to encourage all men, women, boys, girls and pets to shun girliness and strive for respectably masculine tastes. I’ve actually seen women in all-female discussion groups complaining to other women about “girly” music. Seriously.

And of course, if girly equates bad, it follows that being attracted to guys is similarly bad, whether you’re a gay dude or a straight female. Which reminds me of the brave attempt at logic a gamer boy unveiled on me once when I made a lame comment about the relative hotness of an NPC. Apparently in his world, a woman is acting gay if she thinks men are hot. Mmkay

Anyway, speaking of nonheterosexuality, GLAAD is speaking up about the prevalence of homophobia in online games. I’m not sure what can be done about it other than more social gating and sorting, and possibly upping the penalty ante so that talking anti-GLBT smack has the same effect as talking trash about race. At the moment, hating on the nonmanly – in WoW, at least -- is prevalent enough to give anyone trying to censor it carpal tunnel. That and it’s hard for a lot of people to dismiss someone or their actions for being whining, incompetent, unskilled, prissy, dramatic, self-centered or fail-prone without resorting to metaphoric nonmanliness. Maybe we just need more metaphors.

Meanwhile, in Sims 3, I’m playing two different worlds. One world is Land Without Time, which always has time disabled. The other is where sims live before either developing to the point where they deserve to live in the Land Without Time or becoming abandoned to fend for themselves and raise future generations. I’ve explored most of the features, although I stubbornly refuse to involve myself in the neighborhood backstory the developers have inflicted upon us. I’d rather just level the neighborhood and build my own, and I’m certain the tools to do that will be forthcoming, and when that happens I’ll get into Sims 3 again. In the meantime, it’s a wonderful game. I’m just running out of stuff to look at, and considering it’s taken me a couple of months to get to that point, Sims 3 is a very worthy investment.

Also, I discovered a couple of cool little features in Sims 3.

One is spying on the neighbors. Since Sims 3 isn’t lot-centric, you can leave the house and go look at what’s happening at the beach or wherever while your sims sleep or work or do their chores. This means you can go watch neighboring houses. I noticed when I changed the camera angle that I could see neighboring sims inside their house, through the window, and since then I’ve been cruising through town to see what the other sims I created do when I’m not bossing them around. My favorite so far was when I caught the evil family all standing in their yard chortling “muahaha!” to each other.

Another is monopolizing the town businesses. You can invest in them and collect income, and if no competing sims hold shares, you can eventually buy the businesses out and rename them, and collect income from them.

Meanwhile, in WoW, I’ve got a motorcycle for my priest, my warrior got to tank Naxx last weekend, including main tanking Thaddius while wearing blues – fortunately I earned purples for doing that, so now my tank’s no longer in blues. It was fun tanking again after many months of healing. I’ve put off leveling my death knight and hunter and mage until the patch makes that a little easier, and now I’m just bopping around doing things like 2boxing vanilla and Burning Crusades instances. We still haven’t killed Yog Saron because it’s summer and we have a hard time getting twenty-five good players logged in at the same time. This annoys me. Other than that, WoW is going good.

And RL is . . . less annoying. My identity thief is still at large, with her lurvely fur-trimmed parka and logo-covered handbag, and I am now a notary public, just in case some day having all ten of my fingerprints scanned into the Secretary of State’s database turns out to be a good idea. I figured I’d turn my anger at forgers and frauds and identity thieves and other RL hackers in a productive direction.

My bunny is doing fine, hopping around in good health and spirits, and devouring chunks of banana with sharklike intensity. I had a birthday and tonight I’m going to get treated to a nice big fat steak as my celebration winds down.

Pinnacle of Awesomeness Yet No Alien Abduction

2009-07-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

In WoW, my main is a Twilight Vanquisher with 4/5 T8, and as of last night, a motorcycle. In other words, pinnacle of awesomeness, which is presenting its own unique issues, but more on that when I’m feeling emo.
Now as far as Sims 3 . . .
First of all, there WAS a story progression bug, which was fixed in the last patch, according to the Sims 3 forums. Many irate customers reported their sims aging and dying because global aging couldn’t be deactivated. Whoops.
Meanwhile, I’ve been basically playing each household in a separate neighborhood, saving them when they’re at a good stage to eventually get moved into the No Aging Allowed neighborhood. In my original neighborhood, I’m up to generation 3, who has just married the daughter of two other sims I created and left in town. They had a daughter and named her Christi without my input.
Many people on the forums were mentioning the difficulty with getting sims to fall in love in Sims 3. It does seem to require heroic effort. My generation 2 sims never did get married, the option was just never there, despite a long relationship and a son. I wondered if it had to do with the fact he was designated as her boss, even though he was a rock star and she was a classical musician, but even after she quit her job to spend all her time raising little Quincy, she and her husband never got beyond the “romantic interest” stage.
Anyway, my young sims in love required a great many dates and flirts before she agreed to be the latest Mrs. Jackalope, and I was rather annoyed by the fact that she didn’t get to keep the proceeds from her 73k house when moving into the legacy home, inheriting only a couple thousand in pocket change. What’s up with that?
I discovered the Sims 3 Store. For a nominal microtransaction fee, you can get play money to spend on new furniture, which made me wonder if this is how they’re going to handle the mini-expansions from Sims 2 that basically gave you a couple rooms of furniture and a few outfits. I got a few Sims 3 Store credits with the game, and I used them to get a tiki-style living room set.
I actually like the new way to download official content, as well as the way it’s stored in the game. Very clear and well organized.
After making an insane sim and leveling him through lots of stargazing, I was forced to face the reality: no more alien abduction. Perhaps it will be in an expansion, along with the vampire fish. Playable ghosts, meanwhile, are sort of cool. If you ever get tired of them you can send them back into the afterlife, at which point they become NPCs again.

Zomg, Sims 3 has playable ghosts!

2009-06-28T14:41:00.001-07:00

After getting most of my WoW toons through the Midsummer flame achievement dealio, I headed back to Sims 3.

I made a new neighborhood, Land Without Time, where I will keep all my sim families who have reached their "perfect" stage.

Everybody else gets to stay in the alternate universe neighborhood where I started out, and every time I change families, I save -- just to make sure.

So anyway, I went back to my farmer sim family, and had the widow plant a few crops. I had seen a quest for other families involving taking remains of deceased loved ones to the science lab for a rez, so I wanted to see if somehow I could save my deceased farmer sim, Nathaniel, or at least have him around as a zombie.

His ghost was haunting the premises quite regularly, glowing yellow. To my surprise and amazement, the widow could talk to him.

And . . . she could have sex with her husband's ghost and get pregnant. Of course, the moment I discovered that interaction was possible I had to click it, and she got knocked up right away, and I immediately saved her out of Land Without Time and moved her off to the parallel universe to give birth to her son, Jebediah.

After Jebediah was a little older, the widow did get that quest to run down to the science lab with ex-hubby's tombstone, so she did. After a dialogue box and an action bar, she received the sad news that something had gone slightly wrong. Apparently! Nathaniel was now in the family as a glowing yellow ghost.

His skills and personality were intact. His widow was now designated as his "ex-wife."

By the way -- I have noticed weird bugs around relationships. For example, my rock star sims never get the relationship option, and have been "romantic interests" for quite some time even though their relationship is maxed and they live together. I'm assuming it's a bug associated with either the fact they are co-workers or the fact I arbitrarily moved him into her house in edit town mode. Maybe it's reading them as siblings. Go figure.

Anyway, the ghost of Nathaniel eats, poos, sleeps and requires social, just like the living sims. He has a couple of ghostly interactions, "scare" and "tell ghost story." Don't ask me if he ages, I aged his son to teenagerhood and his widow is now an elderly lady but the ghost is still an adult, and for some reason he grew a beard in the afterlife. I'm going to upload him to the game website as soon as the house is a little more finished.

And I've gotten over my irritation with the timeline now that I've got my alternate universe neighborhood in place. After a little quality time with the ghost family, I saved them and put them back in the Land Without Time, then I overwrote the rockstar family with their saved version (good thing, as the parents-in-law had both died while I was busy with the farm sims). I just need to do a little more saving between the neighborhoods with and without time.

Time in Sims 3

2009-06-22T14:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve complained before about the Sims’ strange interaction with time. In past sim games, time was relative to whichever sim you were playing at the moment. With the expanded possibilities for sending sims out on their own in Sims 2, you wound up with the Housemate Paradox: if Sim A and Sim B are twins, and Sim A goes to a nightclub for six hours, Sim A will then be six hours older than Sim B.

This reached an apex of absurdity with the college expansion, where the student who spent the most time prowling around the student union always graduated first.

Sims 3 has made efforts toward fixing this. I already mentioned the “progression” checkbox, which allows the neighbors to age, have babies and advance in their careers even when they are not the active sims.

There is also an “aging” checkbox. I’ve been keeping that turned off except for when sims get pregnant, because otherwise, the pregnant sim just stays at that “positive pregnancy test” stage for the rest of her life without ever growing a belly or giving birth to a child.

Yesterday, I went back to my first sim family and, to my horror, discovered that the parents had become old and gray. A little quick experimentation soon revealed that “aging on” affected everyone in the neighborhood. Along with other weirdnesses – one sim family’s toddler just disappeared, and several of the elderly NPCs died of old age, but not until I switched control to a family that had befriended them.

I had been playing, for the most part, with aging off. Except for when the family with the vanishing toddler had a baby, and the week or so of sim days it took to gestate the baby was apparently enough to push several of the townsfolk into the next age bracket, and summon the grim reaper for those already near the end of their sim lifespan.

So! Apparently those who like to sim in an extremely lateral fashion, like me – creating dozens of characters to populate the town – are at a disadvantage here. Apparently you can either have (a) a wide cast of characters – who never have babies, or (b) a game focused on your main characters and their descendants’ interactions with Mortimer Goth VII. Blah.

I thought of several workarounds to this problem.

First, I could have a “non-aging” town. Since you can store several games, I could have both an aging and a non-aging version of the default town. I could even transport families from the “aging on” town to the “timeless” town if they reached a stage where I want to freeze them. If I wanted any sims living in the “aging off” town to have kids, I could move them to the “aging on” town, then transplant them back to their time paradox infested neighborhood once the kids grew to appropriate ages.

This idea, however, gives me a headache. I like having my one dynasty family that does most of the baby-having mixed in with a large cast of extras. Even though this can create oddities like sims falling in love with dudes that were rejected by their great grandmothers.

Second, I could just continue fiddling around exploring the game until either EA or the enterprising community of coders, hackers, meshers and skinners come up with a way to turn aging on/off for the active household only. However, I can’t stand the idea of a sim that I invested time in developing turn into a senior citizen before I get around to playing them again.

Third, maybe there’s a cheat built in that can accomplish this. I looked around for Sims 3 cheats and didn’t find anything immediately relevant.

However, I did find a list of cheats that includes the updated version of the money cheat, the floor level hack, the “take out all the video game icons so I can make my machinima movie” command, the “disable the code that won’t let you put your car on the roof” command and the mysterious “enableLlamas on/off” command. Plus a "freerealestate" cheat that enables sims to move into houses they can't afford and makes me want to crack snide jokes.

Fourth, I could pretend my sims are living in a harsh totalitarian society where pregnant women are whisked away at the first sign of morning sickness and confined in a distant suburb until their offspring are old enough to return. I could even make a big prison-like warehouse for them, decorated with ducks and bunnies. Umm, yeah, that sounds like my idea of a splendid videogame experience.

Fifth, I could play each family in order, strictly in turn. No fooling around with the blue-haired rock star until the paramedics, farmers, writers, CEOs, villains and cops undergo a full sim week. Ugh. I don’t like this idea either.

Sixth, there’s the “extra long lives” option, which extends (or shortens) sim lifespans so the fact the neighbors are taking a week of communal time to give birth to twins won’t really make much difference to anybody. But then no sims would die of old age, and I’m not sure if this is a good thing.

Seventh, no more babies. I don’t really like this option either though. Sim babies are cute, and watching them develop is fun.

Anyway, this development has made me back away from the game until I figure out what I’m going to do about the corrupting influence of time. As far as my boringly organized game plan, I gave it up once I realized my neighborhood was getting old without my permission, and played my blue-haired rock-star sim (whose romance with one of the NPCs was slightly altered when she suddenly turned old since the last time I saw her).

And I made a new sim: Teena Trashe. I spent about half an hour copying the features of my identity thief, then dressed her in a suitably hideous outfit and gave her a personality consisting of Evil, Kleptomaniac, Daredevil, Mean Spirited and Loser. Then I moved her into a trailer. If the identity thief can attempt to steal my name, I’ll just appropriate her face.

I was a little worried about the fact that Sims 3 sims seem to have more emotional-bonding potential than previous sims. What if I wanted to, say, have one drown in the pool just so I can see what the animation looks like? I don’t think this will be a problem with Ms. Trashe. Plus if I want to experiment with things like “do evicted sims become homeless?” and “will a sim in a terrible marriage leave on their own and join the ranks of NPCs?” I’ve got a nasty little guinea pig to help with my studies. Anyway, I’ll keep posting on how my therapy is progressing.

Fortunately WoW was interesting this weekend, and I spent some time happily raiding and chatting and working on the Midsummer holiday achievement while pondering my time-paradoxed sims.

Also – today’s my anniversary. One year without a cigarette. I’m very pleased. I’m still very fond of my nicotine gum, especially during raids, but at least it smells minty fresh, unlike the breath and clothes of a smoker, which frankly smells like an overcrowded subway in hell. Or at least that’s the association that comes to mind whenever I stand too close to a smoker these days. Thanks video games, for helping to make my smoking cessation possible by allowing me to still socialize with smokers without having to smell them, and giving me something to constantly do with my hands.

Adventures in Sims 3

2009-06-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

There are lots of different kinds of simmers. Some people focus on their sims’ character development, or on building, or on fashion design.

Me, I like to create towns. My general sims goal is to have a town where as much of it as possible is custom built by me. I’ve done things like used third party software to customize all the NPCs, terrain hacks to turn mountains into lakes, code hacks to re-prioritize sims’ behavior. I used to like to put a hacked object that override all motive decay on a public lot and let the game run all night, so that in the morning my sims would have all kinds of inappropriate crushes and enemies. During elections I like to make the candidates into NPCs and set them to violent hatred of each other so that they launch right into fistfights when encountering each other in cafes and parks.

I have fantasies about being the kind of simmer that plays patiently, in slow motion, with particular sims, but I tend to rush through the game. However, maybe the people that like to sim at a more leisurely pace or focus on some other aspect of it might appreciate some of my hints.

I had resentments about being forced to start Sims 3 in a “factory town” – I’d have rather had a blank landscape. However, as I got into it, I appreciated the fact that the NPCs were actually characters to a far greater extent than previously. Bella and Mortimer Goth are there, in teenage version, and the Landgraabs, and Ms. Crumplebottom – you don’t really have to play them, however.

Sims 3 has a lot of “interpersonal” quests where you have to go to a particular sim and befriend them, or bring them fresh produce, or ask them for career tips. After you create a few sims, they’ll start to become subjects of the interpersonal quests, so that my buff soldier sim was being offered quests to go do some personal training on my lazy novelist sim to help her get into shape.

These quests are an expanded version of the “career choice” popups in previous versions of the sims. They can relate to work, or hobbies, and have different kinds of payoffs – career repution or cash.

So I decided to colonize the premade town with my sims, hoping that eventually there would be a way to start one from scratch, whether as an expansion or a third party hack.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Octavia Jackalope, her husband and teenage daughter live in my first attempt at house construction. The Jackalopes were my intergenerational family from Sims 2, all named alphabetically starting with Adam Jackalope. Clicking on a Jackalope’s family tree would reveal ancestors from many races, assorted celebrities, bigfoot, space aliens.

Unfortunately, this style of play clashed with the Sims 2 game engine, which insisted on keeping each ancestor in resident memory. Many times the Jackalope family crashed, taking their whole town with them.

So Octavia, the latest Jackalope (and her daughter, Penelope) have nice quiet family trees. Only I know their true sordid past. Octavia was going to be a novelist but sold out and became a journalist in addition to being a novelist, because I wanted to see the career trees.

So far I’m very impressed with the way the careers have been customized. Journalist sims have to go cover stories, business sims get to conduct endless meetings, military sims have to report for special training (and later, when they reach the rank of Top Gun, they have to win dogfights), chefs have to cater gatherings at city hall.

Octavia can choose from several genres when writing novels, and she can also write articles. The titles can be customized, but random ones are provided for sims with writer’s block. Instead of a lump sum payment she gets royalties spread out over a period of time.

Octavia is married to cyCL0ne stORm (now cyCL0ne Jackalope) who apparently was the “off the wall cast member” character in reality show type house. Her daughter, a musical prodigy, is still a teenager, and I left off there to create some more local teenagers for her to interact with.

Rafael Chupacabra is another refugee from my last game. He lives in a mission-style house and is at the top of the crime career path – at a certain point you get to choose between “theft” and “pure evil” so I opted for the latter.

I’ve mentioned my farmers, who were also chefs until the husband’s sad and untimely demise. I’ve also got a business family, a mad scientist family and a military family who are all maxed out in their careers. Chef sims get a special career item when they reach the top, a deluxe refrigerator, but I haven’t seen that with the other careers yet.

So far, the pay scale seems to be a little out of whack. My corporate CEOs took forever to save enough for a nice house, but my farm sims made a fortune right off the bat, and my soldier sims had their green-aluminum-siding-covered base house when they were only at career level 7 or so.

The business sims did buy a partnership in the bookstore, which costs 7 grand up front and requires you to visit the bookstore to get a 1 grand payment every week, indefinitely. Apparently you can have board of directors feuds over control of the local businesses. How exciting.

Of course, perhaps this is a post2009 economy, where humble farmers make more than corporate CEOs. I’m not too adverse to that. If that is the case, however, something needs to be done about those journalists. The fact that they have to wear 40’s style trenchcoats is revealing.

Then I’ve got my lovely Hawaiian sim, Lani Kuuipo, who took over the mansion on the little cape that extends out into the sea, tore it down, and built an island style house with garden and fishing pond. Fishing and gardening in Sims 3 kept me occupied for several days. You can fish in many locations, discover specific bait for the particular fish you want, and sell them for lots of money. You can also use them to fertilize plants in your garden, or keep them in fishbowls (even if they’ve been in the freezer for a while, they perk right up).

Lani’s house is decorated in a custom aloha fabric that is a recolor in more aloha-y colors from a pattern in the default library. This feature is amazing, and lets you customize most of what’s in the game to a specific color scheme – bathtubs, carpets, clothes, you name it.

There are vampire fish. I have no idea whether they can make sims into vampires, but if that’s your goal, that’s where to look. There are also hints at alien abduction.

Right now I’ve got a doctor family all ready to level up. I think I’ll be making a sim family for each career track, just to get a healthy population of my own custom people in town while checking out the different career trees, and then I want to make an insane sim that aspires to either alien abduction or vampirehood. Perhaps both.

This Just In: Greed No Longer Good

2009-06-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

Wow, Mr. T, thanks for the nice comment!

Sims 3 DOES somehow drag you into investing emotion in your sims, to a far greater extent than Sims 1 or 2. I think it’s the way you’re forced to become involved in their lives to a far greater extent.

As to whether that kind of emotional investment that leads one to contemplate it at length later and apply its lessons to life in general constitutes “art” – I think it’s close to the essential meaning of art.

And I also think it would be a good idea to split these essential qualities of art away from the narcissistic forms of self expression that get your attention (often because they’re too loud or shiny to avoid) but don’t lead you to contemplate anything less shallow than the lead singer’s hairstyle.

Anyway, I was thinking (again) of splitting off a separate Sims 3 blog. However, I’ve tried this before, and basically I wind up ignoring the “just the facts” blog to spew long philosophical rants about things like “the meaning of art in the 21st century” – which is no good at all from the standpoint of “hey, why don’t I start retooling myself a career as Someone Who Writes Helpful Game Advice.”

Basically I suck at greed.

Even now that I’m recovering from – well, someone greedy committed a crime and inconvenienced the living hell out of me.

This person.

Quickpost these images to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

Here she is trying to convince a bank that she’s me, courtesy of the bank’s cameras. Other than sharing my gender, species, approximate height and race, she doesn’t look much like me, and the bank teller, who knows what I look like, didn’t fall for it.

She’s apparently got other friends who share the same hobby, judging from what I’ve seen, so she’s probably more of a low level trash mob than a boss in this particular criminal enterprise. I’m still mighty pissed off at her, as well as her evil overlords. Plastering her ugly face all over the internet might not lead to her arrest, but it’s making me feel a little bit better.

But anyway, I’m pondering this separate Sims 3 blog notion currently while clawing my way out of the inconvenience inflicted upon me by said biotch and will report further once I make up my mind, and until I figure it out and provide a link to said new blog, I’ll just keep all my e-diatribes here in the same place, philosophical rants and how-to guides coexisting harmoniously together.

Sims 3: Art or Soup?

2009-06-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

RL: intensely stressful. Enough said. I don’t like to listen to a lot of moaning, and probably neither do you.

WoW: my guild STILL hasn’t killed Yog Saron despite many failed attempts. I hear it either got nerfed this week or last; I’ve been preoccupied with RL stress.

Sims 3: I’m still loving it, but last night I had a sim die for the first time. I wasn’t extremely attached to him but it bummed me out to the point where I closed out of the game. Which is weird, I never felt that way for my previous sim pixels past the third or fourth one I created, but Sims 3 has an insidious way of involving you in their little sim lives.

Meaningless protracted philosophical arguments about the digital age with particular attention to video games: well, let me just roll up my sleeves.

I’ve been reading this book, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.
For the most part it’s right up my alley. She takes potshots at lunacies on the left and right, puts out a nuanced and well defined history from the last century that coincides with my personal experiences and those of my parents and grandparents, and champions secular thinking while maintaining a respect for religious tradition (while taking a few well aimed blows at evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins, whom she apparently dislikes for similar reasons to my own).

But then she dives right into male/female brain differences and video games. She apparently thinks most of the theories regarding the former are bogus, and that video games are just bad.

I will stipulate that I believe: (2)video games are just chock full of win and goodness; and male/female brain differences, as well as other kinds of brain differences, apply to a lot of people, but a lot of medicine is still in the “betting the odds” stages, and the fact that my 5’7” female body is taller than many or all of the Chinese women on the 30 Stockton and shorter than many or all of the African-American gentlemen on the 22 Fillmore does not mean that I am in some limbo between the genders, however, there is enough overlap so that 5'7" may be a signifier of many things, depending on context, but gender is not an exclusive one.

As such, I take an interest in studies like this one that Discover captioned “A Gay Man’s Brain Looks A Lot Like A Straight Woman’s Brain” (in which 90 individuals were studied, which is about how many people seem to be on either the 30 Stockton or the 22 Fillmore whenever I am attempting to save the goddamn planet by taking mass transit, you’re welcome).

I think that the truth is somewhere in the misty gray realm of “I wonder if those 90 people would have different average brain structure from 90 people chosen truly at random like a jury pool – and even then, jury pools consist only of registered drivers and voters, and don’t represent the people who do neither – because the kind of people who would want to participate in a brain scan study about sex are probably a little different from the norm themselves.”

But anyway, if a male brain, even one tagged as a “gay male brain” is more like a “female brain” than another male brain, HOW IN THE WIDE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS CAN YOU EVEN QUALIFY A BRAIN AS BEING MORE LIKE A FEMALE THAN A MALE BRAIN IF IT IN FACT IS A BRAIN RESIDING WITHIN THE SKULL OF A LIVING MALE AND WIRED DIRECTLY TO A PENIS????

*a slight pause while Darth Bunnywabbit reaches for a tranquilizer*

From a purely scientific standpoint, you can’t really argue that there is a gender-related brain difference without scanning everyone on the planet, and then apparently the out gays and lesbians can totally monkeywrench the study – never mind the closeted ones, the bisexuals, the transgendered, the chicks who will fake it if the dude buys a sufficiently expensive dinner, the dudes that serve as temporary wives for convicted felons, et cetera. So what have you got left? A definition of “male brain” that only applies to 51% (i.e., more likely than not – civil tort proof) of the brains currently attached to penises?

What you can do is play the odds, which is frowned on. You can say “most females like this kind of activity and most males like this other kind of activity” – for example, many little girls, self included, prefer dollhouses to power tools.
But you have no guarantee that some ignorant mammal seeking dominance over another mammal won’t take those words as Scientific Authority that “Mommy, my sister is taking apart the alarm clock again instead of playing Barbies with me, she’s weeeeeeird” and filter said statement through the confirmation bias structure located in their brain until it resembles something close to “I win, nyah nyah.”

Because that, after all, is one of the things we selected heavily for during the evolutionary process. Winning. It’s no wonder some individuals wind up with a disproportionate desire for it and repeatedly subject themselves to win-producing stimuli such as video games. Less than a century ago, for people bearing DNA just like your own, winning was a matter of life and death.

Jacoby has a better reason for being against video games though – she’s in favor of “middlebrow culture” – compelling the masses to listen to Beethoven and read Shakespeare and such. Which I don’t quite disagree with. However, I also comprehend the inherent bias in same – if your particular gender or ethnic or class or whatever contingent has been too busy working to make sure that guys like Beethoven and Shakespeare had the leisure time to produce brilliance to produce any homegrown brilliance themselves, high culture looks suspiciously like imperialism.

I mean, I grew up in Hawaii, siting around with a diverse bunch of kids in class reading about how “in the winter it snows!” with strange pictures of all-haole classrooms. I’m haole myself but I could tell it was an attempt by some faraway domineering mammal to declare that his vision of what reality looked like was more authoritative than what I could see with my own eyes.

A lot of mainland haoles really don’t get how pushy that is – although they sure notice it when people from different regions dismiss their home and culture as insignificant. Just because the people around you are reinforcing your beliefs doesn’t make them true (see Flat Earth Society). But, since I obviously overflow with regional pride myself, I definitely understand it.

Meanwhile, enough culture warring. Back to video gaming. So my sim died.
He was a farmer sim, with a pigtailed wife and a pair of overalls and a knack for growing things. He wasn’t the brightest card in the deck, his favorite thing to do was re-read the same mystery novel, over and over again. But he worked hard at the restaurant job he took to supplement the meager startup earnings from his farm, and he was popular with his co-workers, and he was a pretty decent guy. Good to his wife. Never fought with anyone.

One day the neighbors asked him to fix their stereo. He was handy around the house, with a skill of 5 or 6, and it was a midrange stereo, so it seemed like a do-able deal. Especially since the same neighbors had asked his wife, who had much lesser skill, to fix their TV, and she was doing a fine job.

So he was working away at the stereo – without having de-energized the equipment and followed lockout/tagout procedure per OSHA standards. Although that really shouldn’t be an issue with a stereo, the capacitors in most home units really don’t carry enough of a charge to fry you unless you work on them while they’re plugged in, unlike the old CRT TV sets, which can kill you even when de-energized. And he was wearing his work boots, which I’m sure meet work boot standards, it’s not like he was standing in a wading pool wearing copper sandals or anything like that.

He died, though. An arc jumped out of the stereo and that was it. The angel of death appeared. First time I’ve seen him in Sims 3. He did not offer to play roshambeau for the deceased’s life, the way he used to in Sims 2. He just laughed nastily and went through an elaborate animation. Then he sat down on the couch and watched TV for a bit before vanishing and leaving a tombstone – which I can engrave with a custom epitaph.

And the ghost of the farmer (which is yellow – the ghosts are pretty active in Sims 3, but I’ve only really encountered them while fishing at the graveyard) got up and went through a few tricks.

And I couldn’t play any more that night. I was just too sad. And I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about deep issues like mortality and identity and whatever – possibly as overflow from my stress, but my little sim’s demise seems to have added a few different angles. Last night I just changed that family to inactive and made a new family (the lawyers who will represent the widow in her suit against the stereo manufacturer).

I was Affected in the way that a good movie or book can Affect one for several days-months-years afterwards, and since the Affectation occurred in the region of my intellect rather than my drives for status, sex or ego aggrandizement, I’m accepting it as Art.

But anyway. In arguing in support of high culture and against lowbrow concepts such as video games, it is argued that the objective standards formulated by past geniuses in the lands of my distant ancestors are good, and should apply to all else. I maintain that although a standard of excellence is possible, coming to a consensus on same is extraordinarily difficult. Although these distant snowy lands did produce people who inflicted a common framework upon a lot of people, we are now so thoroughly woven into that framework that we can only rage against it in its own language. And in order to improve this framework so that less people take issue to it, we need to understand how it was built, and Shakespeare is a multilayered structural analysis.

By all the standards of Great Art, I had a meaningful Art experience with Sims 3. It made me think about things, change my mind, examine possibilities, contemplate philosophies. I was emotionally affected. My sims may be the shadows on cave walls Plato was talking about, but he was referring to very early stages of cave projection technology, and Sims 3 is state of the art. There's that word again, art.

The art that was produced was collaborative in nature. Piggybacking upon the inventions of thousands of anonymous coders that made an “interactive movie program” possible, with contributions by the hands that build and mine and machine the equipment, and brains that manage project teams, and noobs that pony up their $49 for a video game they’ll play three times before losing interest, was me – designing the sims, building their little dream farmhouse, grinding them through levels of agricultural prowess while making their life decisions and watching them go about their daily lives.

Great artists piggyback too. Someone built their piano, or their easel, or the philosophies upon which their work is premised, and other hands labored to do their laundry while they were being brilliant.

In the case of Thoreau, it was his mom – he dropped his laundry off with her every week while writing Walden – you know, the highly esteemed literary classic about a dude who doesn’t need nothin’ from nobody and goes off in the woods by himself and has a spiritual individualistic epiphany about his personal relationship with nature in between getting his mom to do his laundry?

European enlightenment-era High Culture is necessarily going to be all about glorifying the individual will over the oppressiveness of the masses, whether it comes in the form of self esteem workshops or worshipful attendance at a concert hall. With that as a template, it’s no wonder that only the brilliance found in those who exemplify the mammalian peer standards for excellence – the shiniest of the alpha males – typically gets celebrated.

Similarly, art not grounded in this worldview is going to be more involved with “many people getting other people engaged in an activity” rather than exploring the relationship between a man and a spotlight. It's going to look more like a crowd of people dancing than a crowd of individuals in high social-status-competention clothing behaving submissively before a male presenting elaborate mating displays. Because that's what a lot of art basically is, some dude showing off so he can attract women, and the High Art definition seems to be reserved for those who create art for ostensibly loftier reasons. That doesn't mean these virtuoso displays aren't breathtaking and worthy and capable of communicating intense thoughts and emotions. It's just that they're produced by the few members of society who can do this really, really well -- and narcissistic enough to record their impulse for future performances.

My other game, World of Warcraft, walks a continual tightrope between individual glorification and anonymous group contribution polarities, if they can even be considered a polarity.

Humans do like to think in polarities though, and all the binary code that makes this blogging possible is a credit to that, even if it has occasional weird side effects like “there are two kinds of brains: male brains and female brains, and this is why all girls suck at math, except for the women who really have men brains and then there’s the men who really have women brains, but they’re just gay or something, don’t worry about that.”

Anyway, I loved my dollhouse, I had an extensive collection of Barbies, I’m attracted to boys, I think Sims 3 is Art – although what I experienced is not even reproducible art unless I were running a video of the whole experience, which might have to be edited, and which might not even produce the same emotional impact for each user. It made me think though. Probably more than that Dostoevsky novel I was attempting to tackle before I got blindsided by RL stress. And I cheerfully admit I have deplorable taste, after all, I rather enjoyed Twilight.

Sims 3 Tips: Changing Active Household

2009-06-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

I was going to put this in a comment but it got long. Anyway . . .

Thanks for the comment, Lifa! Oh good, now I don't feel as guilty for not playing my alliance toon :)

To get multiple families, go into options, edit town while you're playing. You'll get a save option.

Once you’re in this mode, you can split households, evict sims back into the family bin and designate whatever household you want. You can also make new sims and build things. Make sure you save your town after you're done editing it and go back to the main window to play the new household.

Note that all your other families become NPCs when you change the active household, and will wander around on their own doing things.

IMPORTANT: If you don’t want them to have more kids or age while you’re not playing them, go into options and turn story progression off. At first I thought story progression (i.e. globally aging the whole neighborhood at the same rate) was a great idea, but then I started reading in the Sims 3 forums about people being annoyed with things like single guys spawning large families of kids independently. So I’ve decided to leave it alone unless/until I decide to explore it.

Most of the cheats from Sims 2/1 still work – ctrl+shift+C to get the cheat window, kaching and motherlode for cash, “moveObjects on/off” to force object placement (e.g. if you want a car or some trees on your roof), “constrainFloorElevation off/on” to play with multilevel building (e.g. connecting the garage to the house).

One thing I am finding a bit annoying – I haven’t yet found a way for the sims to get new clothes. I guess I could create a special “clothes sim” wearing the outfit I want and move it in with the sims desiring new clothes before evicting/deleting it and adding its outfit to the family wardrobe, but that seems harsh. Maybe clothes-buying will be part of some future expansion.

I haven’t had a single serious performance issue yet. The new game design seems to be a lot more efficient with system resources, and hopefully extremely long load times are a thing of the past. I did have a couple of sims who refused to get out of bed. I know just how they feel. After a restart I was able to get them to just go to sleep in it, and they jumped back out after a few hours of shuteye. I can run it in windowed mode while WoW is in windowed mode while waiting for raids to start. Woot.

Woot, Sims 3

2009-06-04T16:25:00.001-07:00

In WoW, my guild finally beat Mimiron, and we beat General Vezax. This leaves only one undefeated Ulduar boss, the dreaded Yog Saron, who apparently is related to Yog Sothoth from the Cthulhu mythos, thus bringing the glorious collision of Lovecraft, Norse mythology and robots to a . . . uh, loud final chord.

Woot.

Hopefully we’ll get Yog this weekend. Also, I got my warrior to 80 and am gearing her up to tank, and my Death Knight’s finally in Northrend. But in the meantime, Sims 3 came out.

Sims 3 is amazing so far. I had a few initial issues with the interface. For instance, it’s hard to switch from one sim household to another, and for a moment I was convinced that you could only play this game with one character (or family of them) per town living in the midst of the usual motley NPCs, sort of like the console sims games, which was almost enough to get me to go back to Sims 2. But fortunately I didn’t; “change active household” is in the same place as “building mode,” and I found it last night when I constructed my first simhouse.

Sims 3 is the same basic game as Sims 1 and 2, yet better. An army of detail-oriented nitpickers has gone over the entire concept with a fine toothed comb, making what was already there a little bit better.

So in create-a-sim mode, in addition to a jaw-dropping (literally, you can drop the jaw or raise it, widen it, narrow it, etc.) array of sliders for facial features, you can adjust body weight and muscular fitness on sliding scales, you can have hair with different colored highlights or roots, you can customize the color of each default garment, you can select from a wide assortment of shoes and hats and sunglasses and other accessories, and you can give each household member and individual first and last name. You can choose a unique pitch for the voice, so that crowds of babbling sims now actually sound like crowds.

You can also give them more personality. Sim astrology is gone (hooray!) and in its place are individual personality traits. Lots of them, many with their own unique emotes and bonuses.

I started with a red-headed sim who is a genius, a computer whiz and a bookworm, kind of out of shape, disinclined to flirt and fond of electronic music and grilled cheese sandwiches. No, she’s nothing like me. For one thing, she’s wearing a purple camouflage t-shirt that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, although her jeans and Converse All Stars look kind of like mine. Also, her “a little bit darker than fishbelly white” skin turns reddish on my monitor A (haven’t tried her on monitor B yet) (um, I put a second monitor on to make it easier to 2box my priest and warrior when playing WoW, and so far I can fight large groups of regular mobs that way but not elites -- yet). So she always looks sunburnt, while the real me hasn’t been sunburned in years, because you have to go outside in the sun for that, assuming you live in a place where there is sun outside rather than fog.

Plus I hate grilled cheese sandwiches. Cheese sandwiches should be broiled open face in the broiler, and should be made of fresh parmesan cheese (not that dried out stuff) on sourdough (the artisan stuff with kalamata olives is nice). The way I enjoy them approximately 3 times a week. Oh, okay, sometimes more.

Octavia Jackalope (from the illustrious Jackalope family that bred their way to generation N in my old Sims 2 game) ended up working as a journalist (lol) because she is a writer. She started out as a scientist but they wanted her to learn gardening and I wasn’t prepared to deal with that yet. So Octavia churns out sci fi novels. These appear in physical form so you can leave them lying around the house – Sims 3 is loaded with books, which can be bought at the local bookstore or checked out of the library. Some teach skills or grant abilities. Sometimes you get assignments to read or proof them, and bookworm sims will usually carry several books around so they can have a text moment when you’re not ordering them around. You can custom-name your own books, although the program helpfully provides suggestions if you have writer’s block. And instead of being paid lump sum for them, you earn royalties, including payments issued after chapters are delivered while the work is in progress.

Work itself is more interesting. I can actually follow Octavia downtown to her office, and direct her to work really hard, or goof off, or suck up to the boss, or chitchat with her co-workers. Sometimes she even gets assignments to run around town chasing leads, plus she can interview the neighbors and review the local business.

Work is where Octavia met her beloved, CyclONe StoRm, who is also a computer whiz and genius. Yes, he really spells his name that way (but he’s taking her name when they get married, all the Jackalope women do that). After a mercifully brief courtship (Octavia hates flirting, you’ll recall), including several Deep Conversations – an interaction that only geniuses can do – they were soon making woohoo. Which is different from Sims 2 woohoo in that there are showers of rose petals rather than fireworks.

I mentioned the novel-payment arrangement, and I note sims now receive hourly pay, and work assignments that creep into their personal lives. I was wondering how the old shopping-addicted sims would translate to this new world we live in, of mass unemployment and Priuses, and I’m pleased to report the sims are as contemporary as ever. They have multiple vegetarian options, they can walk downtown instead of driving everywhere, the nerdier ones are likely to whip out a laptop and start social networking at the drop of a hat, and they all come with cell phones now (you can even pick the ring tones). Which might be weird for those who like to play anachronistic sims, but I think those types will be pleased with the new advances in gardening and fishing.

Build mode . . . I’ve barely started on build mode. Even my primitive little 2 story house looks great, and all the headaches associated with garages and foundations have been fixed, and basically everything that was already there has been improved. The trees sway in the wind. The sun comes through the windows and makes window-shaped patches of light on the floor. The furniture arranging grids have been improved so you can place furniture at an angle, and your coffee table can accommodate the usual piles of junk that wind up on coffee tables without being restricted to one item per grid square.

So, yeah, I’m still playing WoW, fighting the bosses, ending the endgame, within spitting distance of a horde-server-first on Yog Saron. WoW is awesome.

However, something new and very shiny has caught my eye. So I’ll be um, not signing up on the raid calendar for a couple of days.

I think my guildleader knows I’m cheating on WoW. He gave me a cool pair of (item level 226) shoes last night. I still love him, and Yog Saron, and nearly all of my guildies. I’m just . . . probably going to be a little preoccupied. For a while.

Salty and Osem

2009-05-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

Last week brought a scary vet adventure with Darth Bunnywabbit’s bunnywabbit, who developed a gastrointestinal problem that could have been lethal if I hadn’t rushed him to the vet. So I spent the week squirting medication, along with a liquefied hay solution that looks like something you’d find in a diaper, via a syringe into the ungrateful and unappreciative mouth of a small adorable bunny suffering from a horrendous tummyache that apparently thinks I’m trying to waterboard him. He’s out of danger and doing much better, especially now that I’m not trying to squirt noxious liquids past the bunny fangs any more.

Meanwhile, since I needed something to do between hovering and syringing, my WoW addiction continues unabated. Most of the time I’m on my troll priest, zerging Ulduar. We are up to Mimiron, and I think we will beat him soon. After he falls down, we’ll have cleared everything but the last two bosses. And once they go down, I may re-think my Ulduar-addiction lifestyle, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.

Mimiron is a great encounter. First there’s an introductory ride on a futuristic monorail that gave me Star Wars Galaxies flashbacks, and then you get to deal with a bitchy sarcastic robot. Or maybe he’s a transformer. He starts out as a humvee, then changes into a cannon that shoots lasers (pewpew!), then becomes a floating hovercraft sort of thing (with more lasers) before combining all three of his transformer parts and becoming a giant bot of death. The fight is basically about avoiding the lasers and other hazards, like everything else in Ulduar, with lots of mandatory cooperation.

I’ve deleted a lot of tedious blog paragraphs on the Ulduar fights. If you’re looking for detailed strategy, try WoWhead, or the videos on youtube. The gist is that they are fun, and they are challenging in the way a normal console-type game is challenging, and they require a lot of intercommunication – calling out when you’re about to do something, or splitting into little teams dedicated to responding to one particular threat. It’s less a matter of 25 people soloing something together.

And it’s changed the game, and the guild structure, and the balance of power, and et cetera. I’ve written about that too. For me personally, despite a few attempts at wandering around to see if the grass was greener somewhere else, I’m still with the same old guild I’ve been raiding with for the past year. I can only attribute this to compatible temperaments and a similarly twisted sense of humor, along with a general absence of whining.

I’m currently helping a buddy who just joined navigate through our complicated web of in-jokes and deliberate bad spelling (some of which is the basic 4chan “I can has cheezburgr?” type lingo popular with gamers and texters and some of which is homage to exchanges we have seen; a guildie’s enraptured yet incorrect rendering of “awesome” as “osem” has become our standard spelling, and the general purpose comeback for any accusations or name calling is a capital “NOU” – shorthand for “no, YOU are the one rightfully deserving of any righteous insult spewing which I am currently too emotionally overwhelmed to articulate” – or something similar). Things just wouldn’t be the same if we had a lot of prisses around explaining why it’s important to use correct grammar and syntax at all times, or complaining bitterly about how difficult the game is.

I’ve been leveling my warrior. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with her once I’ve got her leveled, other than run her through dailies and make money, but she already had epic flight, unlike the other toons, who would require 6 or 7 thousand gold coins to get there. Maybe I can get back to tanking a little. So far I’m at level 77, in full fury spec and carrying around two ridiculously huge Kara weapons.

Oh yeah, I’m salty.

There is a fishing meta-achievement that gives you the title of Salty. My evil Alliance twin has a Salty title. I’ve been conspiring with him lately about the Argent Tournament pets, trading horde ones for alliance ones. I’ll admit, I was jealous. I also sort of wished that I had focused on my blood elf hunter with the similar name to his night elf hunter, just for the harmonious symmetry, but for all that harmony and symmetry and suchlike, we tend to have conversations liberally strewn with awkward silences, and I’m not sure how well we’d get along despite being soulmates and having the same birthday and similar WoW careers and such.

The sub-achievements required for becoming salty range from easysauce (go find a random pile of debris floating in the water and fish from it) to involved (go into Serpentshrine Cavern and fish up the Lurker). I got most of these sub-achievements done around December. There was one left: the Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Contest.

This happens at 2:00 p.m. server time every Sunday. I have been doing it faithfully for the last four or five months. At 2:00, randomly placed schools of tastyfish appear all along the coast, and the first one to fish up and turn in 40 of them wins the prize, your choice of an osem fishing pole or a trinket that turns you into a piranha fish. Only 52 people per server can accomplish this each year – this means there are about a hundred of them on my server, with a slight allowance for server transfers. I’ve heard of people temporarily transferring to underpopulated servers to get it done, and of PVP servers where large guilds offer to eliminate all the competition if you pay them a large sum of gold.

On my crowded server, the main obstacle is crowdedness. There could be four or five people casting into your little school of tastyfish. And since the locations where the fishies spawn are random, you might have bad luck and head to a location with more competition than fish pools. I had the opposite situation: fish everywhere and nobody to notice them except me.

I had a running joke going about “time for me to go lose the fishing contest again, it’s a Sunday tradition.” But yesterday, once I noticed that I had a much bigger lead than usual, it started occurring to me that I could do this. Two fish left to go, another pool surfaced right next to me – I can do this! Cast, cast, 40! Hit the hearthstone! Run to the NPC and this time, instead of the heartbreaking text that goes something like “you failed again, ready for your 4g consolation prize?” I got the “you are a master angler! Which prize do you want?” text.

Which mesmerized me for a moment, until my brain helpfully reminded me that this was a RACE so I should JUST CHOOSE SOMETHING. Like the trinket, which I had already decided I wanted, just because it’s sort of neat to be able to change into a piranha fish. So I did. This caused victory notices to go up in guildchat, as well as all over Stranglethorn Vale. A few people congratulated me, a few more people whined that I must have cheated, the contest was tooooo haaaard and so on. Plus there was the obligatory “dammit, I was just a couple fish away from victory!” refrain, which I used to sing myself.

I promptly put on my Salty title and turned into a piranha fish and swam around in the harbor. Being a piranha fish is osem. So is being Salty.

Changing Times

2009-05-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

This was unexpected. Here’s a clip from Salon discussing industry findings that – gasp – gazongas don’t sell videogames, 40% of gamers are female, and emphasizing the gazonga appeal of your videogame product is likely to lead to plummeting profits.

Well damn. My soapbox was pointed in the right direction.

These days I am seeing a lot more women players, a lot more women in hardcore raid guilds. The last gender related outrage I encountered had to do with the practice of zapping magic bunny ears onto female toons’ heads (a practice which Darth Bunnywabbit does not at all disapprove, although Raph Koster, who has apparently been reading Denis Dutton’s book on art and evolution,
(which I have not yet read but it’s on my “to read” list as Dutton not only runs my favorite website, a&ldaily, but is one of the leading critics of postmodernism)
has a pretty good argument against it.

For me, bunny ears can represent a wide palette of silliness ranging from Playboy to Bugs, but I’ll bet at some times on some servers some of the male players probably got carried away with their bunny-ear powers to the point of obnoxiousness. In fact, the main complaint seems to be that the game mechanics encouraged obnoxiousness on the part of the players, not that the game elements were in themselves offensive.

A lot of things have changed since I started this blog, in fact. Star Wars Galaxies is still chugging along despite my abandoning it, like a pair of discount shoes on the feet of a kid mournfully gazing at the footwear Everybody Else is wearing this year. WoW got even bigger – and caught my interest to the point where I became that hardcore raider I said I’d never be, vent and all. All my “pals” in the journalism industry, the ones who were writing about how videogames are a social evil leading directly to obesity and murder, are . . . well, I’m not going to snark about the economy, which is stressing the crap out of real people everywhere, but other than the ones who have moved on to terrifying people about Swine Flu, it seems there is a lot less wind in those particularly hostile sails. Postmodernism is dead, and I could link a few of the delirious blog posts and articles I’ve been enjoying to that effect, but if even WoW is making jokes about tantrum-pitching deconstructors, it looks like the zeitgeist is ready for something completely different.

Well, that and the gaming companies have figured out by now that anyone with half a brain can find all the gazongas they want on the internet, and fooling sophisticated consumers into buying a crappy game by promising them pixelated jiggle is going to be about as effective as trying to sell pizzas by displaying pictures of ice cream. Sexy, now that’s another thing. Gamers like sexy, whether it revolves around gazongas or muscular pecs or some combination of the two. Sexy is aimed at grownups, not at giggling twelve year old boys.

There’s a girl in my guild – woman, I suppose, she’s married to another guildie, which is how she happened to join us. She likes playing WoW and has several characters but isn’t really as competitive as the rest, and although she’s nice enough, she makes many typos and probably would have a hard time figuring out the game on her own. Anyway, lately she has discovered that she can command all kinds of attention by doing /lick emotes to others, and by dancing her naked toon around the auction house, and she’s reveling in it, and these days when I log in, usually I’ll see several screens full of her text, warning people she’s going to find and /lick them, commanding everyone to show up in some city for an orgy (i.e. having their toons dance around in their underwear while doing /lick emotes at each other), that sort of thing.

It’s annoying, sure. Then I realized a couple of things. First, it’s not nearly as annoying as this very emotional drunk guy from Oklahoma who likes to flood guild chat with similar begging for love, sex and/or attention. (Annoying is when the two of them are BOTH on and feeling typeative.) So if I were to write this off as dumb girl behavior, I’d be dead wrong. She’s doing it in a female way and he’s doing it in a male way, but they’re both wearing the same general style of asshat.

My second realization was – omg, there are still girls who do that??? I suppose there always have been, but I just haven’t seen any in a while. Maybe that’s because I’m in a raid guild where you don’t tend to see a lot of players with more emotional neediness than clicking skill. But then, I’ve also been in guilds on my alliance toon, and I talk to people in various guilds, and I haven’t really seen much of this particular flavor of noobishness. More to the point, I haven’t seen anyone expecting all female players to act this way. A couple of years ago, yeah, there was a certain sense that women players were only there to seek drama and attention.

It’s different now, and in a way I wanted things to be different. I’m quite pleased.

Love Letters from Ulduar

2009-05-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

My Ulduar addiction continues. We haven’t cleared it yet, currently working on Thorim, in the “WoW versions of Norse gods” section of Ulduar, which includes “Hodir” and Freya, whose name survived Blizzardification intact. Strange.

After we get past the Norse gods, we get to fight dudes from the Cthulhu mythos, culminating in “Yog Saron.” I’m not quite sure what motivated Blizzard to change that from “Yog Sothoth” but I presume it’s the same logic that turned Odin into Hodir. “Noooooo, we’re not cribbing from other sources, this is our original creative work, INSPIRED by other sources!!”

The boss fights are creative and difficult, although they keep getting progressively easier with each patchlet, as Blizzard tones down the difficulty level. As I mentioned previously, this is rebalancing power among the guilds, and as a result of drama circulating around my guild’s Horde firsts, the server thread dealing with guild progression got discontinued in an epic flame war, so at the moment progression is not even being tracked. Which suits us, we’ve always been more of a casual/hardcore guild that is more interested in moving forward than competing.

Then there’s the recent holiday mania stoking my addiction further. Blizzard finally added my favorite holiday, Easter (aka Noble Garden), complete with bunnies, baskets and eggs. It came a little bit later than the real Easter, but that’s okay. I spent Easter Sunday logging into SWG, where I put on my blue elder jedi glow and ran through a deserted Mos Eisley for several minutes before encountering a noob who asked me about my glowiness. I asked him if he had ever seen anyone do that before. He hadn’t. I logged out. Going to finally get around to cancelling that account soon.

WoW Easter was a bit more fun, especially the part that turned the towns outside the main cities into flurries of pink bunnies zipping around collecting festively decorated eggs. I put several toons through this torture: my priest, my druid, my death knight, my hunter, my warrior, and even my little level 13 mage banker, who managed to score a magical tome that will allow her to turn people into rabbits in only 47 levels, so I guess she’ll be my next project.

There was minor uproar over Easter, having to do with one of the holiday achievements, which required you to non-consensually zap female toons with a magic bouquet that makes bunny ears appear on their head. Some people cried over the nonconsensual objectification aspects of it, others cried over the fact that apparently only .001% of the player base rolled female orcs, making it sort of difficult to find one to bunnyfy so you could get your title.

After Noble Garden came Children’s Week, complete with another holiday achievement that caused much consternation, School of Hard Knocks, which required you to take an orphan temporarily in your custody for the week into four different battlegrounds and pull off some routine feats – routine if you’ve done a lot of battlegrounds anyway, scary and intimidating for those players who make a point out of avoiding battlegrounds or other forms of pvp. And for those players who enjoy battlegrounds, here was a huge influx of clueless noobs who weren’t necessarily playing to win – starting with the obsessive “must get achievement first!” crowd, the gamer brothers and sisters of the dude who went ballistic on me for daring to snag one of the several Easter egg spawns he was camping.

Gamers. They’re just never happy. Except for me, I’m happy with my new Ulduar addicted lifestyle, and I’ll be even happier when we finally clear the place – maybe at that point I’ll scale back, quit being so obsessive, level my other toons, maybe even log out for longer stretches. Maybe. We’ll see.