Wolfbytes

If you’re female and anything like me, you played Baldur’s Gate 2 as a male. Not because you usually would – given a choice my avatars are pretty much always female or asexual. It’s just that in the dawn-days of the modern CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 2 had the insanely cool idea of letting the player character romance a few of the NPC’s – and if you played as female, your options immediately sucked. Guys got Jaheira and Viconia, powerful women with opinions and personality and a chase worth having (they also got that whiny elf bint, but who ever picked her?).  Women got one lousy egomaniac Paladin, whose entire romance arc consisted of being his mother.

No wonder female gamers at the time ripped BioWare a new one, before running off to reroll as male, or mod male romance objects you didn’t want to throttle after ten seconds. And no wonder Bioware went to such lengths to fix it for the game’s spiritual successor, Dragon Age: Origins.

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Morrigan, aka The Bitchy One. Dragon Age excels at characters that you love, or love to hate, or occasionally both.

So I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Obsessing over it, you might say – I’m still nowhere near finishing it, though I’m playing at a pace that saw me finish The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion in about two weeks. Partly that’s because the game is just plain huge. But it’s also because I keep getting sidetracked into just chatting with my fellow adventurers, rather than killing Darkspawn. While at it, I realised something. I’m doing that, lavishing time on the NPC’s, because several times now those AI-controlled character simulations have conned me into thinking of them as real people.

In fact, I’ve been having an easier time treating them as ‘real’ than I generally do with the characters roleplayed by actual, (virtually) present human beings in the MMO’s I mostly play.

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I’m not much of a Wii fan, but I’m a complete sucker for steampunk and revisionings of fluffy cultural icons. I’m also a fangirl of Warren Spector’s take on emergent gameplay and game design in general. Thief – generating action by avoiding action? Deus Ex – building an action shooter you can beat without actually killing more than 3 lynchpin enemies (or even none, if you exploit a certain undocumented emergent feature)? Yeah, that’s impressive.

With that combo of concept and talent, ever since the rumors about of Epic Mickey started flying this summer, I’ve been going squee.

Now it’s official. So, y’know. Squee!

Teen princess tantrum? Not cute even when Betty Draper does it. And she's way sexier than you are.

So you make a WoW guild. You figure you’ll be reasonable and give teens a shot – you figure if they start making their own rules and invoke the mystic Drama-Llama, you can pull them aside, tell them this is unacceptable, and eventually they will either start behaving or get your boot in their ass. And it shouldn’t be a problem, since you’ll be screening them anyway.

But age limit 16-plus? If you try that, make sure all your mods or officers or whatever are on the same page about what’s kosher. Make sure your other membership is on board with the “no drama, no exceptions” policy. 16 means 2-4 whole years of the age bracket whose biggest problem is whether daddy will pay their WoW bill and if their new school will be hard – and because their lives are so simple, they have silly amounts of time to spend on convincing themselves it’s the exact opposite. Like the ghost told Betty in Mad Men: “You’re a housecat, baby. You’re highly valued, and don’t have a lot to do.”

The thing is, I like cats. They’re adaptable. I’ve never met a kitty that can’t be taught that it should piss in the litter box, not claw shit when it’s upset, and never ever jump on my keyboard demanding attention RIGHT NOW, because the possible destruction of work in progress will be met with loud noise and an immediate introduction to unassisted flight. Cats and teens, both are completely educable. They just need consistent rules.

The other thing my perfect next guild will not have is well-intentioned busybodies who listen to the upset teen kitty yowling when it doesn’t get it’s way – and then ride in on the whaambulance to tut on how naughty it is, making poor kitties cry like that. Seriously, if the kitty makes a pest of itself and then tries to claw my eyes out when I tell it no, it ain’t cruel to lock it up till it cools down and starts behaving again. Auntie Empathy is not helping by being all sympathetic and demonstrating that yes, in fact, all adult humans DO exist to make kitty’s existence comfier.

…in retrospect, I should have locked the kitty out, though, not walked out and left it loose in the house. If I want my guild back from that pair now, there will probably be violence – and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get the smell out of the couch even then.

Anyone know how to remove unsolicited drama stains?

So, the mate of a mate got his WoW account hacked. Made me think of a minor server blowout last Christmas, when Blizzard was trying to educate it’s customers on how to keep their accounts safe – and the rant I had back then in my old blog. Translated and updated here for the benefit of foreign devils. You’re welcome.

Blizzard’s anti-hacker advice was good enough, as far as it went. Never share your account information. Change passwords regularly. Buy an Authenticator, if you play at net cafes – that sort of thing. They just completely skipped the most fundamental problem:

The vast majority of MMO gamers are complete muppets when it comes to basic computer security.

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Random point of interest – Blizzard and Valve are two studios known for their ability to do no wrong in game design. Just recently, Valve’s Chuck Faliszek and Blizzard’s Kevin Martens have given the same reason for why: Iteration.

Basically, both profess to build a playable model of the game as soon as possible, and then test, revise or even throw out entire ideas if they prove unworkable. The main difference seems to be that Martens tells Gamasutra they do this inhouse (which is explains why Blizzard has so little leakage on projects – though how they shut up their employees, gamers have long dreaded to speculate). Faliszek on the other hand told TVG that Valve brings in outsiders to do the playtesting, to see how actual gamers will act – because how they play is how the game will be played. That could explain why Valve has blazed through Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 development at what seems like lightspeed? Playtesters uncontaminated by the designers’ idea of how a feature should work may well end up using it completely differently from how it was envisioned, and so encounter or solve problems that won’t come up with inhouse people, who have a rough idea of intended usage.

Speculation aside, fun to see top designers from different corners of the field agreeing that what makes ‘em great is plain work and correcting themselves, not some mythical X-factor.

When I was younger I didn’t much care who produced my entertainment. The work was the work, I didn’t care what the guy behind the book or movie or game thought, I was more interested in the thoughts and feelings the work sparked for me. And that’s why I was genuinely shocked, the first time I came across a political essay by Orson Scott Card.

Here’s this guy, whose Ender’s Game was one of the books I most remember from my teens. He’s a multiple Hugo and Nebula and whatever else -winning author whose work I’d genuinely enjoyed and admired – and there he was, spouting off on a Mormon website about how marriage has only one definition, the heterosexual one, and any government that attempts to change that is an enemy that must be fought and overthrown. Since 2007, he’s also joined the board of NOM (National Organisation for Marriage), which lobbies against gay marriage across the US with tactics that are dubious at best.

I remember being angry. Not because Card has an opinion – of course people are entitled to those, whether I approve of them or not. The line is drawn where those opinions move out of a person’s private life and become a demand they try to impose on society at large – which is exactly what Card was doing. I was furious because I suddenly realised I’d never again be able to read anything with his name on it without being reminded of the flaming discriminatory politics the author’s fame and royalties all contribute to. Something I’d enjoyed had been ruined, because I couldn’t in good conscience enjoy fiction that supplied fame and monetary support to a propagandist of the American religious right.

Card still writes, both fictionally and politically. I’ve read the second – the first just doesn’t feel honest anymore. Read more…

When the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm announcement landed, I quit WoW. Not for that reason alone, but the final straw was Blizzard confirming class restrictions would be relaxed. Most dedicated RP’ers right now are praying there’s some in-world story explanation to this that hasn’t been revealed yet. Because for us, changing who can be a druid or a paladin, let alone having Night Elves abandon the bane on using Arcane magic, is sort of a a big deal.

The pure gamer in me says it shouldn’t be. Players have been clamouring for certain gameplay/class restrictions to be changed for ages, and accommodating them is just good customer service. I’m only shocked here because after years of on/off roleplay in WoW, I finally realised an old friend was right. For all it’s genius in gameplay and design, in storytelling WoW delivers the exact same bullshit quality as any lesser franchise. It tells the same half-arsed stories using the same two-dimensional characters as every other Generic Fantasy Game (TM) out there – and it’s doing it’s damnest to achieve more, not less, genericness.

This also isn’t a big deal. In the world of gaming, only BioWare and Peter Molyneux routinely make story their primary selling point. To the rest “compelling story” is the same sort of non-information press release spin as “action-packed adventure”, “thrilling gaming experience” and “exclusive title”. WoW has never claimed it’s story is all that special, and it’s never claimed to be a RPG, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge it on those grounds (though it does have dedicated RP servers, so they do try to snag that audience too). It was just a shock to realise that though Blizzard does allow for roleplay in WoW, on closer reflection their approach to story seems handcrafted to drive all but the most casual roleplayers clinically insane. Read more…