A Different Sort of Penis

The wife went to a "Future of Social Gaming" seminar, to which I replied, "Tell the geniuses at the social gaming thing to make people suck less."

I was half serious, and as she always does, she ignores me when I'm being...being, well like me. Then last night, I'm playing League of Legends, which is a free-to-play competitive PvP game, and the dicks arrived. They started using the N-word, and dropping F-bombs, which is shorthand for, I'm a dick, and I'm going to let you know I'm a dick, and there is nothing you can do about my dickishness.

Then they started "feeding" which is a type of griefing in which a player lets the opposing team kill them over and over again, which in turn makes the opposing team more powerful because kills give experience and gold. So not only are the dicks being dicks with words, their actions are dicky as well.

So the half-serious quip becomes truth.

Now, to be fair to LoL, they have a reporting system (which is ineffective due to the number of complaints vs. the number of employees at their company), and they are implementing a democracy of sorts called the Tribunal System, where we the players may judge other players. Hopefully all of that works out. Perhaps heads will roll, and Viva La LoL! will save us from the dicks, but honestly, that is just sweeping the dicks to another place, somewhere else where they can continue to be dicks to other people (hopefully each other).

My observation about most attempts to corral the dicks away from "normal people" is that they tend to treat the symptoms. Yes, suspensions and bans work, about as well as prison does, which means it's too little too late. As proposed by Penny Arcade in this comic, what gives the dicks their power is the anonymous nature of social gaming. I mean, think about it, how can something be social if the people in question have no idea who they are being social with? Wouldn't that be called "anonymous gaming" or perhaps "gaming with strangers?"

Though the quick fix of attaching your real life information to your game avatar has serious issues, as evidenced by the World of Warcraft Real ID fiasco. So on one hand, we have anonymous dicks, and on the other, we have dicks IRL.

So I'll rehash here what I told my wife (seriously this time), because the entire future of social gaming depends on it--

Hey Geniuses: Fix the Dick Problem.

What RPGs Should Learn From Movies

As you know, I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Origins, and while I'm certainly enjoying myself, I'm also bored out of my mind. I think this game would have been far more effective as a storytelling platform had it taken a thing or two from another medium.

My BA was in Creative Arts with an emphasis in film, while I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, I do think that I've been exposed to a fair amount of quality narratives in not only the movie structure, but in literature and fine arts as well. I am a holistic artist, which is why I have such an interest in video games in the first place, considering they combine all aspects of every other art form in existence already. I'm not writing this post because I despise video games and think they can never be art, but because I am passionate about them, and am absolutely convinced that video games are art.

So here are the places where I think Dragon Age fails, and hopefully future video game narratives can pick up the slack:

1) Video Games Should Reward You For Conflict. Way back since dudes in togas, we've understood as artists that conflict is compelling. In fact, I would almost be inclined to say that you can't have art without strife, but I'd rather not derail this post. Suffice it to say that the most common form of artistic expression demonstrates forces in opposition.

Yet, in Dragon Age: Origins, when I talk to my companions, I get points for agreeing with them, and I lose points for disagreeing with them. If I disagree with them a whole bunch, they get pissed off, and will leave my party. This means I am rewarded for passive behavior, and punished for instigating conflict.

Here is a perfect example where gameplay and storytelling are at odds with each other, instead of working together to keep the player involved in the world. The designers have set up a Catch-22 where if I want the most points, I'm bored, but if I seek to end my boredom, I lose points.

Future games, if they wish to be taken seriously as narratives, must switch this dynamic around to something counter-intuitive: players must be rewarded for disagreeing with companions, and punished for agreeing with them. Then not only is the player happy with their bonus points, but they are also excited by the conflict in your story.

2) Cut Out Your Exposition. Or at least, if you absolutely must have it, stick it in an obscure place that players never have to experience, and do not reward players for reading it. No one gives a crap about the country of Ferelden, or the Ash Warriors, or the history of your fantasy land. It is crap. It seriously is. Audiences want a story, and a story is conflict, not a history lesson.

If the exposition does not flow from conflict, then it should be cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. If you don't show it on screen, then it is unimportant, and is actively hurting the immersion of your players. And by "show it onscreen," I'm talking about the old but true "show, don't tell," which RPG designers seem to feel doesn't apply to them. Bull shit. Your explanations disguised as dialogue are terrible, especially when you make me read them to gain points for agreeing with your NPCs.

Don't treat me like an idiot. If you want me to know that mages can become abominations through demonic possession, then freaking show me a mage getting possessed by a demon. Don't make me listen to voice actors tell me about it. Fail.

In short, show me your world through scenes of conflict. That is the first thing beginning film scriptwriters learn, and it is a lesson every game designer needs to know.

Dragon Age and the Tea Cups

Whenever you make a character for a roleplaying game, it's a part of you. You pick a name, you generally pick the appearance, and you might even go so far as to pick the personality or profession of the character. This means you are emotionally invested right out the gate, unlike a movie or book where you have to learn to care about the characters involved.

So when I played Dragon Age: Origins (yes, I'm a cheapskate and waited until Steam had the "Complete Edition" for $25) and my male elf mage was able to choose to have sex with a male elf rogue, it effected me more than I thought it would.

I mean, a part of me chose to have sex with a virtual male. That is a pretty big deal for me. I mean, I have no choice when the dudes in Brokeback Mountain get in on, because I'm a passive observer, but here I am, actively choosing a virtual homosexual relationship. Here's an analogy:

Say we are at Disneyland. I don't like the Tea Cups. Don't get me wrong, if other people ride the Tea Cups, that's fine with me. That's their business. It doesn't hurt me when they ride the Tea Cups, and it doesn't seem to hurt them, so I respect it. I don't hate the Tea Cups, I just don't like them. Vice versa, if I like the Matterhorn, I wouldn't expect the people who like the Tea Cups to absolutely like the Matterhorn, but I would expect them to respect that I do.

So here I am, playing a game, and bam, a part of me chooses to ride the Tea Cups. (Of course, it's not the same thing, since it was more akin to watching a home video of someone who snuck a camera on the ride, but you get the picture.)

While I was watching two male elves have sex (one of whom was me!), I felt aversion. Now don't get me wrong. This wasn't hatred. I just didn't like it. In the same way that I would get nausea from riding the Tea Cups, and not like that experience, I also did not like this experience.

However, I am not the type to start carrying torches and berate Bioware and Electronic Arts for putting homosexuality in their game. Far from it. I'm self-reflexive enough to wonder why I felt the way I did. Here are the two points I took away from that experience:

• If a part of me chooses to be homosexual, and I don't like it, then that means I'm not homosexual. Which sounds obvious, but we are treading into the future, and these virtual spaces we have set up can blur the lines, and it is better to explore these concepts, rather than ignore the elephant in the room. Especially when other fellow heterosexuals often turn their aversion for homosexuality into hatred, which is counterproductive to society.
  
• Second, I wonder if homosexuals feel the same aversion whenever they make an RPG character and choose to have a heterosexual relationship. If that is the case, then I'm sorry that there are an overabundance of heterosexual relationships in RPGs, and I wish for a future where there are more games like Dragon Age, not less.

Why Star Wars Sucks as an MMO

Star Wars is a great space opera. The original movies, regardless of whether they ripped off Akira Kurosawa or Battlestar Galactica, are as fresh today as the day they came out. The extended world works for people, as do the prequels to a certain extent. Single player video games have the potential to be awesome when set in the Star Wars universe, as evidenced by Knights of the Old Republic. They can also be pretty bad, as Force Unleashed 2 proved.

However, there are two major hurdles that any Star Wars MMO must overcome in order to be a successful when multiple people are involved, and both of these obstacles are inherent to the game world itself. I first experienced these when playing the old tabletop d6 RPG, and they will continue to be true even as Bioware releases a shinier version of the same concept.


1) Star Wars is a Dead World.

This means that anything that happened in the movies, books, or the extended storylines is unchangeable. If you decide you want to kill Darth Vader, or go out with Princess Leia, you are on your own. Anything set around the same time period as the movies must somehow adapt to that history, or it "doesn't count." This means that your character is bound by the vision of the developers, and the developers are bound by the vision of George Lucas, and even Lucas is bound by the layers and layers of history that have already been told about the Star Wars universe.

Anything not set around the time period of the original movies is fair game, however, which is why an MMO set either way before or after the movies could possibly work. However, this too is a gamble, as a developer has nothing in the game world to work with, since Luke, Leia, Darth Vader, etc...are either not born yet, or dead.

The Bioware MMO is taking that bet, by releasing a game set in the far past of the Star Wars universe, where they can make up whatever they want, with the downside that none of it has any relevance to the content we are used to. (For example, we can't go hang out with Han Solo.)


2) The Force Sucks

I'm sorry to say, it does. It's great for movies. It is absolutely horrible in a game.

Oh, they've been trying to spruce it up, make it flashy for the kiddies. They've been upping the ante on the Force, where at first it was really hard to chuck some rocks, while now Force users can jump around like rabbits or make people explode.

However, you've got this science fiction world, you don't have magic, or psionics, or mutations, or any cool alien races. Instead, you have two factions: dudes with lightsabers that are OMFGWTFBBQultrapowerful, and wimpy dudes with blasters. Like when Darth Vader pwns Han Solo without even trying.

Now that said, in a game they can easily tweak it so that lightsaber characters are as strong as blaster characters, but that is not entirely the point. Force users get all sorts of neat abilities that non-Force users don't get. What do the normal people of the world gain in exchange? Yay, they can repair a droid, use a jetpack, or ride a tauntaun. Woo.

The Force is further limited by #1 above, because the game developers can't let it do anything. They can't let you shoot fireballs, summon monsters, teleport, time travel, go invisible, or one of the many, many things that you haven't seen in the movies that don't fit the "vision" of the world.

Not to mention that any discussion of the Force is inherently linked to the morality of the Force, because that's the way the game world is set up. Like you can't use Force lightning without being a bad guy, because that is a bad guy power. Even though hacking people in half with a laser sword is just fine. I mean, you've got a bunch of so-called good people that can't be emotional at all, can't have sex, can't have relationships, and there are plenty of those dudes running around. Then you have the evil dudes, who constantly let their desires run rampant, and none of them got it on with a hot Twi'lek? Right.

...

In short, everyone wants to play a kickass Jedi/Sith with awesome powers and a lightsaber, and nobody wants to play a second-class normal person. You've got a crappy source of "magic" with crappy rules attached to it, in a dead world where everything neat has already happened, and your character plays second fiddle to the NPCs, and you play third fiddle to other players if you happen to play a non-Force character.

Not a Total Slacker

Just to show that I've been doing more things than I give myself credit for:

I've written two guides to League of Legends. If you are into that sort of thing, you can read those:

Zen Malzahar
Sun Tzu Teemo

I've also been writing random guides for Dungeons and Dragons. Things like:

Dwarf Pitfighter
Half-Elf Knight

etc...

I've been trolling random forums, stirring up the craziness in people, and periodically helping those in need of my mystical knowledge of the gaming arts.

I think that watching this video has got me thinking on how to be, if not proud of my pastimes, at least content in knowing that in the right place and time, they can be appreciated. Now the question remains, how do I get myself from where I am to where I want to be?

Puzzle Pieces

On a similar note to last post, I've always had a difficult time marrying my opposing interests in gaming and art.

(And by gaming I don't mean gambling. I'm not talking slot machines here.)

I enjoy all forms of games, including but not limited to, tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons and Storyteller, video games of all sorts, ranging back all the way to the 8 bit systems of my youth such as the NES, all the way to the games of today like Team Fortress 2 and Torchlight. I made a roleplaying game, I've tweaked even more rules than I can list, and I've made a couple card games.

I also have a Creative Arts degree, which means I've acted, made movies, written reams of bad fiction and poetry, studied music and art, what have you.

These two fields, though they have many things in common, like perspective and narrative, flow and feel, are almost impossible for me to combine in my everyday life. I'm not an artist in the sense that I don't paint, I don't draw (at least, very well), and I don't play an instrument. Likewise, I don't program computers. I'm in the middle ground of mediocrity, where I can see the specialists at both ends of the spectrum, and I'm floundering while trying to glue together disparate parts of a huge puzzle.

What do I do with my writing ability? How do I apply that to games? Or art? Or games and art? There has never been a clear path for what I want to do, and so many times I end up back where I began: with nothing.

I've been looking into things like game design, and I realize that these things are difficult. People don't do this because they are easy. I have a lot of hard work ahead of me, if anything in my head is going to come to fruition, and that is a sobering thought. It makes me want to give up, which is the worst possible place to be.

Of course, even my son knows that Elmo says you should always keep trying. Elmo is a pretty smart...er...guy?

Virtual Environmentalism

Internet spaces like this are going to be more refined and organized in the future, especially when the next generation of people grow older and take up the mantle of leadership, particularly within the academic sphere. Virtual worlds, and by that I mean MMOs in specific and everything techy in general will be cataloged, debated and critiqued, and most of all, kept for future generations to peruse at their leisure.

I'm not saying that every game made will be available for anyone to play, instead, I envision a time when certain games are given the "Classics" brand and resold to consumers at the 2100 version of Barnes and Nobles. There might very well be a Shakespeare of our generation lurking within a PC or console title, and a hundred or even a thousand years from now, college professors might be dissecting the narrative of World of Warcraft.

I imagine societies and organizations dedicated to the preservation of video games of all types, and a type of virtual tourism, where we can visit the Yosemites and Yellowstones of these worlds (Storm Peaks and Grizzly Hills), and my kids and their kids will marvel at 8 bit graphics and sidescrolling sprites. With the emergence of this digital holistic medium, there will be those guardians that will harbor the articles of the past for our progeny. They will be the ones sitting in the virtual trees saying, "I defend this code with my life," as the authorities rev up their computational chain saws.

Beatles: Rock Band

I got the opportunity to play The Beatles: Rock Band last night, and we completed the entire game in one sitting. Now, I'm not going to complain about the brevity of the experience, because that isn't the point of Rock Band titles in the first place. I had a great time, though some of the songs were questionable. I consider myself to be a fan, and many songs were new to me. Which is good and bad: good because I found songs I had never heard of, bad because I'd have to sing them.

What I do question, however, is the addition of harmonies. I highly doubt that a casual user, or anyone who has never actually been musically trained can pull off a three part harmony on the fly. Granted, they don't hurt your score if you don't have them, but I can't for the life of me fathom some combination of people I know that would have the skills to pull this off, me included. Only if we actually sat down at a piano, gave each person their part, and in essence, formed a tribute band to the Fab Four could we possibly have any hope of striving with this aspect of the game. It just seems like a great idea in theory, but I would have rather had the development time spent somewhere else.

I mean, I've been in a choir, I know musical theory enough to know that two other people would have to sing the third and the fifth above what I'm singing, or drop down an octave and sing below me, but there is no way that I can do that without practicing when the game is turned off and I'm sitting at my electronic piano.

It's a more extreme version playing the drums, where I keep thinking to myself, "Great, now I should buy a drum set so I can practice the drum part of Rock Band, so I can get a high score in a game, instead of spending that time actually playing the drums."

That is my fundamental problem with games that emulate reality: I would more often than not go do the activity that they are emulating than occupy myself with a virtual simulation of said pastime. I would rather bowl, play tennis, football, soccer, or write music, than play many of these games. Thus, my preference tends to veer towards things I can't do in real life, like command a conquering medieval army, defend the world against aliens, walk around as an elven wizard, or pilot a space ship.

Not to mention the fact that I can't help but feel some dissonance from the idea that I'm playing a game that turns real people from 40 years ago into video game sprites, whose bohemian image is being used to line the pockets of certain corporations. You have to wonder what John Lennon would have thought about all of this.

He'd probably say something along the lines of, "Who cares about that, the bigger question is, how do you uncremate someone?"

Multiple Me

I've had two friends from high school that are also INTPs join the Navy and prosper as officers. Now I may seem like a green hippie iconoclast, but in many ways I'm moderate, and it's only the internet that transforms me into something radical. I revel in my contradictions, and one of them is that I absolutely love games of all sorts, from board games to video games to card games to sports. Anything with rules, where people can compete, and where resources must be positioned for maximum effectiveness intrigues me.

Where this skill is useful is in any arena where I need to strategize about what the best possible course of action is to win any sort of engagement, be it science, war, business, or anywhere where it is necessary to not look at individual encounters, but the bigger picture. I tend to look in the long run at situations, theorize many different solutions, then plan accordingly.

I tend to spend my free time playing games where I can use this skill, like in games such as World of Warcraft (until recently), or Team Fortress 2 (where I can play whatever my team needs to win.)

What this means is that I could have flourished in the military. I can see that. I'm not going to use this space to disapprove of those that did. I'm not anti-military, any more than I'm anti-American. I love this country, and I respect the fact that someone else is putting their butt on the line every day for my benefit. I have the right to question where and when and how the military is being used, but it would be foolhardy of me to suggest that this country or any country does away with their armed forces entirely.

I think the one reason why I didn't enlist was the same reason why I didn't stay a Chemistry major when I first failed out of college: I just didn't like who I was surrounded by whenever I entered a math or science class. The lab professor for one particular class was a stodgy old guy who would stare, scrutinizing every time I wasn't absolutely perfect with a beaker and a Bunsen burner. I felt like every student in every class was a robot, and I was absolutely bored out of my wits.

The break came when I started taking radio classes, then creative writing, then art. That was it for me. Cute girls plus no right answer plus randomness appreciated? Sign me up for that!

I went back to community college, did theatre and a little photography and television and choir (which is where I met my wife). Did random jobs like pizza delivery driver and video game testing, I measured drainage ditches in Carmel by the Sea, and at some point my wife made me go back to school and eventually get my Creative Arts degree. I now do random art and take care of two kids.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like had I zigged instead of zagged. Maybe in a parallel universe there is another me on a submarine, wondering what it would have been like had he taken those art classes.

Identity Dissonance

I dig both versions of Rock Band. Even the upcoming Beatles game interests me. However, up until this point, I have been too poor to buy the games, let alone get any of the downloadable content. I've been relying on the generosity of others, and for them I am grateful.

Our priority since having kids has been paying for the kids. I haven't upgraded to any of the current generations of consoles. My computer is a shantytown of found and given parts. The last game I bought (after giving up WoW) was the Orange Box, which has the highest entertainment to cost ratio of any video game out there. Even that only set me back $30, and it was a big deal at the time.

I don't see myself buying any game on the foreseeable horizon, especially not Starcraft 2 since they announced it was really three separate games. I can't see myself shelling out $150-180 total on an RTS, I'm sorry. I would play through the single player campaign, then play online a grand total of three times before I realize that playing an RTS against anyone other than your friends, who lugged their computers to a central location, and who are able to mock each other without abandon, is a complete waste of my time. I don't give a crap if I win or lose to ZERGYBABY69 or RAYRAYGOGO. Nostalgia is cool and all, and it was a big deal ten years ago, but I've changed, and I don't think I can relive the Starcraft experience any more than I can go back in time and right all wrongs.

I've even been having my doubts about returning to the Alpha of all CRPG/action game hybrids: the Diablo franchise. Disregarding its ever changing release date, from 2010 to 2011 (which, knowing Blizzard will be 2012 in short order), I just can't see, first, my computer running it and, second, me having any time to devote to this game. I'm not saying no, since my favorite games ever were Diablo I and II, but I'm having doubts, and that's strange.

Like how my dad doesn't play pinball at the bowling alley any more, or how he never gets his pool cue out and owns people for cash. It's just not what he wants to do any more. He'd rather pick green beans in the garden with his grandson. When my son haphazardly rides his bike around the court, my dad would rather run along beside him in case he falls.

Instead of souping up a gaming PC so I can run Diablo III, I'd really rather get a Mac with Logic Pro on it.

College Humor Rocks

Go here.

Mario gets finally gets what's coming to him. Minesweeper gets the treatment it deserves. Facebook as a movie device.

Not much to say today, consuming more than I'm creating, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Virtual Worlds

I'm loathe to discuss this, since I have been periodically lost within digital spaces, however, I definitely think there is merit above and beyond addiction and delusive behavior in things like MMOs, and video games in general.

I'd like to specifically address MMOs, since I have been enthralled with one for about the last four years. One of the things that became apparent over time was that objects would have value to me (and anyone else similarly leashed by the game), but to everyone else, level and gold and gear and whatever else had absolutely no value. In fact, the more in game value I possessed, the less real world value I had. This makes sense from the outside, but when I was inside, somehow the virtual value equaled any real world value (time) I had traded it for.

Now before I jump to conclusions and say that no one should ever believe in virtual goods, I'd like to point out that every currency in the world is virtual. Every service provided by a person that doesn't result in the creation of an object is virtual. Every social contract we uphold, every generalization, and every idea we have in our head is virtual.

The difference is that everything I mentioned above can be traded in the real world. I can trade my services to you, and you can give me cash, which I can then use to purchase a taco.

MMO value, on the other hand, cannot (easily) be traded in for real world value. I can't sell a character for cash without breaking the rules. I can't "work" at a task in the virtual world, and then recieve real world value for that service. That's why these spaces are limited to MMOGs. I can't take my orc shaman, grind out some gold, and then convert that gold into real currency.

In order for these digital spaces to make the transformation from valueless "games" to legitimate "worlds," then some sort of exchange rate must be introduced, and trade barriers must cease. Just as goods and services cross national lines, so too must commerce cross between the real world and the virtual world.

Until then, these places will be valueless distractions, and nothing more.

Flash Games

Not much to say. The kids were crazy today, so I spent my free time playing flash games on Kongregate. If you get the chance, I'd check out some of these, they are pretty neat.

http://www.kongregate.com/

Warcraft Movie

The official link here:

http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/090721.html

The movie will probably suck, as I have never seen a decent video game adaptation before.

However, that doesn't mean they will always suck. If it were to ever change, a Warcraft movie would be the ideal place for it to change. The lore is expansive, the characters are compelling, and Blizzard wouldn't push out a crappy movie just to make a buck. (Or at least that's my impression.)

Ever since I quit World of Warcraft though, I'm less inclined to be a fan of all things Blizzard, and I don't know how I feel about supporting a movie designed to drag more people into their MMO. Rationally, I realize that the movie and the video game are apples and oranges, but irrationally I feel that I would be akin to an alcoholic going to a drinking party.

This is also making me question whether I will want to purchase additional video games in the future, from Blizzard or at all. I spent four years of my life within the Warcraft universe, and I'm finished with that level of immersion. So any future game has to simultaneously be better and worse than WoW, which is an impossible feat.

I suppose I will have to take a "wait and see" stance here, however, this is not really appealing: my identity has been tied up with the "gamer" description for so long. To continue calling myself a gamer, while shunning the video game category, seems a little hypocritical on my part.

Maybe it's akin to having a drinking limit, and staying away from the hard drinks.