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.

In retrospect I don’t think what spawned Anomen was that BioWare was actually clueless about what women want in a romantic interest. More probably, I suspect that in those early days, the whole idea of being able to romance a NPC was such far-out new shit that in their excitement, they never stopped to think what kind of statement their single male romancable character actually made.  The lessons learned from BG2 are obvious in Mass Effect, where the male love interest is a much more three-dimensional figure – but even Mass Effect was still conservative, with it’s carefully carefully enforced monogamic ideal and equally careful avoidance of male homosexuality (kissing girls, however, are fine). Still, both pushed the barriers of what until then had been expected social NPC interaction. Obviously, I was curious about how Dragon Age built on it.

From here on, there’s going to be spoilers. You’ve been warned.

The main additions to BioWare’s NPC romance kit in Dragon Age are bisexual and non-monogamous options. Two of the four romance objects won’t care about your character’s plumbing, and come with an extensive romantic history that will come up in the course of the game as both idle banter between NPC’s and plot twists. The hetero options are still quite conservative and virginal, but happily the inexperience stems logically from their histories, not a lame “well I never met the right person, but ur so speshul so now I found wub and lets make babies!” -copout. It’s fun that they’ve given the shy, avoidant virgin role to their leading man Alistair, who needs some serious romancing until he’ll even kiss your girl. It’s cool that even after the standoffish Morrigan gets naked, she is nothing less than practical in demanding to know if you’re still going to carry on with the fluffy bard bint  as well – either is fine by her, but she wants to know now, so as not to waste her time on shared property. Leliana mixes the frilly bard girl thing with sexually active bi spy-stuff – a bit heavy on the underlining, but enough to make her gushing over shoes and cute nugs tolerable. Pretty much all the romancable NPC’s manage to be charming creatures in some way – even the outrageously overdone Latin lover elf who flirts ferociously and confidently with anything that has a pulse.

For most purposes it’s that character, Zevran, who is the case study for BioWare’s NPC-romancing advances. First there’s the extremely natural take on bisexuality and polyamory, whichwould have made earlier games blush. Then there’s the animation – say what you will about DAO’s dated graphics engine in other areas, but you can’t fault the expressiveness of the characters’ faces and postures (except in the obligatory sex scenes, and the less said about those, the better). Third comes the dialogue, professionally voiced and scripted by some obscene genius who together produce somethign fantasy-authentic enough it took me a full 24 hours of play since first encountering Zevran to realise the “Antivan” accent is actually garden variety Italian. The end result character is overdone, gratuitously so, and would annoy the snot out of any female player with half a self-esteem … if it weren’t for the fourth thing, that both the NPC and the game script agree that all power lies with the player character. But only some of the time.

What BioWare has always known is that the true key to powerful game experiences is taking control away from the player – forcing them to accept, experience and appreciate things they didn’t actually want to happen. It’s harder than you’d think. Basic code demands that game events, romantic or otherwise, are initiated by the player filling certain conditions. This means that the player in effect has complete control over the game – events can be initiated or not, simply by filling or not filling those conditions. The NPC has only as much power as the script gives them, and the player knows this – and even the points where the script does allow NPC’s power can be danced around with saves and reloads, if you want to. The only way to really take control away from the player is to give them no desirable outcome – just an option that sucks less than the rest. And doing that entertainingly, that’s the brass ring.

This is why it’s so incredibly cool how the Zevran romance plays out. Traditional videogame romances invariably build to a meaningful emotional relationship. It’s wonderfully shocking that Zevran blows that off with actual irritation: “I’ll take my pleasures where I find them, but my friend – I’m an assassin and the son of a whore. What do I know about love?”. The player can keep up with the casual sex if they choose, but with that single exchange, it’s made obvious that there is nothing more to be had here. And this carries on, with exactly one exception:  if the player character elects to die at the end, the player will be told that while Zevran eventually assassinates his way to leadership of the Antivan Crows, he never takes another lover. (Technically the scene with Zev’s ex could be mentioned too – but since at 100% approval he’ll defend you even if you told him to keep his gay hands off, it’s more of a loyalty than a romance feature).

In the CRPG world of “must reward the player effort with equal player gains”, this impresses the living snot out of me. This takes balls: luring a player into exploring the romance story angle, then smacking them down by have a mere NPC say thanks, but it meant nothing.

This is ultimately the thing that makes the DAO romances: there is simply no way to ‘win’ certain scenarios. In fact, there is no way to win a lot of scenarios – when Alistair calls you out about killing Isolde or Connor, at most you can minimise the hit you take from his anger. When Leliana freaks out about you flirting around, at most you can fluster her into leaving you alone.  No matter what you do, Zevran will never make a committed noise, and whatever you do, Morrigan will eventually leave. Alistair will man up, quit whining and what’s needed – but all that goes out the window if you don’t give him Loghain’s head on a pike. This is what ultimately gives all four legitimacy as romance objects. They will not conform to the player’s dominance as initiator and controller of game events. Sometimes, they’ll say no. Sometimes they’ll walk up to you, and make demands – or just plain walk away.

And this is what I’d love to see explored further in BioWare’s next iteration of the NPC romance. Characters whose name features on the movie poster exactly as big as yours does – because if it doesn’t, why would they be worth your time?

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.

Let me underscore that. For the past few years, most of my CRPG’ing has been MMO roleplay in World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online or City of Heroes. In settings where each character you meet is the avatar of another human being, you’d think I’d be having the “I’m playing with real people” experience in buckets and spades. Not so. In patently out-of-character interactions like PUGs and raids, it’s easy to remember other players are people. In roleplay, though, the uncanny valley looms huge and unbridgeable. It’s rare to ever, even for a moment, forget that I’m dealing with amateur representations of made up people, controlled by unpracticed storytellers just trying to muddle along – or worse, not even storytelling at all but just “roleplaying” and “immersing” (which seems to be code for “having teen romances with everything that has a pulse” or “arguing over trivial crap because conflict is interesting”).

Basically, the vast majority of roleplayers fail to produce a credible imitation of humanity. Real live MMO-playing humans actually fail an intuitive Turing test – but somehow in Dragon Age’s, precoded and simulated NPC’s don’t. To me, that’s cool (also rather depressing, as MMO roleplay goes, but definitely more cool). Why do AI-controlled constructs convince me of their authenticity as ‘real’ people, why do roleplay characters directly controlled by bonafide human beings fail?

My instinct is that it has to be down to the art of storytelling. Dragon Age is a carefully tailored, story-driven single player experience, where the characters fit seamlessly into the narrative and serve to build up the experience as a whole – the characters and the world feed each other, producing an illusion of realness. MMO’s on the other hand are basically a graphical interface disguising the fact that everything under it is really a loot-lottery fuelled Skinner box. Dragon Age i’s a professionally orchestrated feat of storytelling, carefully designed to engage me emotionally, not just on a hand/eye-coordination level. MMO designers, even the fabled Blizzard, don’t make that effort. They don’t make money by delivering an emotional experience: what they capitalise on is delivering ever larger Skinner box cycles to keep their players shelling out that 12€ a month to complete their latest set bonus.

That leaves narrative content in MMO’s largely down to what amateur roleplayers can produce – and that just can’t compete. First, because amateur roleplayers simply don’t have the control over their story’s environment that BioWare does, and so have vastly less tools to deliver a compelling experience. There simply is no allpowerful author capable of orchestrating the show.  But they also poison the well voluntarily, because storytelling is a skill and an art, and the vast majority of MMO roleplaying groups gratuitously cripple it. They simply forbid any demand for quality, and ban any form of educational feedback that isn’t positive and encouraging. They offer no incentive to provide good story, and make it outright difficult for rookie storytellers to learn.

People who have never roleplayed online wonder how Stephanie Meyer’s horrifficly bad Twilight came about. Those who do MMO-roleplay, have a depressingly good idea. When the rule is that players must suspend disbelief and give the benefit of doubt to storytellers less skilled, wish fulfillment and self-therapy tend to bubble to the surface. Not all “natural leaders who just need a chance to shine” are played by RL insecure people, not all people starved for RL romance will play their idealised form of the opposite sex for daydream closure – but enough do for it to be a cliche. And that’s fine, it really is, as therapy. As storytelling? There’s the rub. A good storyteller’s goal is to entertain and move their audience - your average wish-fulfillment roleplayer’s goal is to entertain and move themselves. The audience comes as an afterthought,  if it gets a thought at all.

This, I think, is why especially immersively played roleplay characters do worse than scripted AI simulations at mimicing humanity. They engage the player’s emotions, rather than the audience’s – and because they fail to provoke human response, they fail to appear human at all.

Storytellers are liars and manipulators, but it’s the art of manipulating the audience, not oneself. Until roleplayers learn that, I suspect they’ll forever fail the Turing test.

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.

This was made painfully clear when Blizzard’s warnings were discussed on the server forum. Before we knew it the page was filling up with tales of woe, people proclaiming their sympathy for the victims of hacking, and otherwise completely rational people nodding sagely and explaining that it is, of course, impossible to build a hacker-proof computer, so anyone at any time can fall victim to vicious hackers. The fact that banks, international corporations and entire damn nations succeed in keeping their data traffic secure  every day of the week doesn’t seem to matter to these people. No, really, securing your WoW account, that’s voodoo beyond the grasp of us mere mortals.

Hacked accounts are a favourite tool for gold sellers. They can also be ripped off for more merchandise.

The thing is, they’re technically right. With determined enough effort anything connected to the net can be hacked – but if you just want a few thousand WoW-keys, you don’t need to go to the trouble. Why should you, when gamers will line up to just GIVE away their accounts?

“Well of course I clicked the link, it was from a friend.”
“No I could see it installs something, but I thought it would be something funny.”
“But configuring IE is hard, and I don’t want to use another browser. ”
“I can’t use this stupid antivirus software, it kills my framerate.”
“I don’t use a firewall, I don’t have anything worth stealing anyway.”
“I can’t be arsed to reinstall to get rid of one virus, I’m buying a new PC next month anyway.”

The depressing part isn’t that those are actual quotes from actual hacking victims. It’s that each and every one of them was an educated and otherwise very sensible person, who honestly believed even afterward that they hadn’t screwed up even a little bit.

What should they have done?

The same thing everyone else who cares about data security and uses Windows should be doing.

1) Make sure that Windows Automatic Update is running. Install the newest updates immediately. No exceptions, ever.

2) Install a fully featured security suite and make sure auto-update is on. Never turn off any part of the software – it will only protect you if it’s running. Your security suite should have anti-virus, anti-malware, phishing protection, a two-way firewall and ideally also rootkit detection.  Unless you’re completely broke (and if you can afford WoW, you obviously aren’t), buy a commercial license. Free security suites will work in a pinch, but are generally better for experienced users who know how to configure them properly. Norton, Panda, F-Secure and ZoneAlarm come to mind.

3) Get rid of Internet Explorer. Yeah yeah, it can be configured to be safe – but is that easier for a net newbie than just changing browsers? Even if you do make IE secure, it’s still the most common browser on the net, which automatically makes it the favourite target for hackers. Many key loggers are countered simply by having Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera, which are immune to malware exploiting known vulnerabilities in IE. If you just can’t bare to lose IE, install Google Chrome Frame – it introduces a few potential new risks (more code means more things can go wrong), but it also closes a lot of old ones. Alternate browsers don’t have perfect default security either, but at least they get targeted less frequently.

4) Do not click strange links. Not even if a friend sent them, not even “just to see what it is” – this is exactly how a lot of viruses get passed around. Ask if they meant to send it first, and don’t click until you’re sure the link really was sent by your mate, not malware on their computer. If you’re still worried about accidentally clicking the wrong thing, install WinPatrol. It’s a security program that takes a snapshot of your system and then smacks you with a popup warning every time something tries to change it. Bloody annoying if you’re a veteran user who tweaks and changes stuff regularly, but a good line of defence for casual users who just want to surf, chat and play MMO’s in peace.

5) Read the alerts your security software gives you. If you don’t know what the process that is asking permission to run or change the registry or connect to the internet is, google it. That should give you multiple hits to help you decide if it’s safe to allow it. If you’re still not sure, deny permission just in case.

When it doubt, google it. The more links you get saying that the process is part of some safe program, the more likely it is no disaster will come of approving it.

None of the steps on this list will give you a mystical hackerproof PC – but they would have saved the accounts of every last friend, acquaintance and random internet contact who’s ever cried about their hacked account within earshot of me. Online gamers are muppets about their security, and this is exactly what WoW-hackers rely on. Even basic security will keep hackers off your back, because the vast multitudes of suckers who don’t even do that much can be ripped off with a fraction of the effort.

Why should anyone care?

The thing is, you can’t just laugh it off as idiots getting their dues. If your security sucks enough to get your account hacked, your epixx should be the least of your worries. Symantec’s bi-yearly Internet Security Threat Report and other reputable experts have long been laying it out: computer crime isn’t geeky pranking, it’s a whole new kind of underground economy. Viruses and malware, the basic tools of e-criminals, will hardly ever inconvenience the host PC in any way. Their goal is to stay invisible, and to hijack the computer for data theft and criminal activity.

Do you ever shop online? The virus just nicked your credit card number and PayPal codes. Do you pay bills or use social networks? Personal data gleaned from them is the corner stone of identity theft. And that’s not even counting all the nastiness that a criminal with a few thousand infected computers at their fingertips can do. Most spam and viruses are spread by the remotely controlled computers of ordinary people who screwed up with their security. Even worse, hijacked computers are also how e-criminals spread child pornography or execute web-blocking denial of service -attacks, most commonly used for extortion.

Even hacking game accounts isn’t as petty as it seems. Though gold selling is against the terms of service in most games, it’s been estimated that in China alone the market was worth hundreds of millions of euros in 2007 – and was declared taxable income in 2008. For us gamers, it just means annoying gold spam. For law enforcement it’s a genuine concern, because the lack of a paper trail attached to virtual currency trades makes it a perfect money laundering channel for organised crime. Nevermind “cheating at the game”, or whatever morally righteous crap gamers usually spout when they denounce gold selling – the real dirt is that gold trade exists on hacked accounts and at least some of it serves organised crime.

So no, your computer’s security is not a personal choice. Hacking is not a calamity you get to cry about. Would you feel anything less than stupid if you left your car unlocked and joyriders ran someone over with it, or used it to rob a bank? An unprotected PC getting hacked is much more likely, just a matter of time. I have no sympathy for gamers who don’t realise the damage they do, neglecting basic computer security. They’re not “just” hapless victims who should be hugged and comforted and given free pants for their newly nekkid paladin. If they can’t be arsed to do the five easy things listed above, they’re also part of the problem.

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.

To scifi geeks this is old hat. We’re used to our fiction being political, we’re used to contending with flammables like Card’s religion or Heinlein’s flirtations with the far right. Gaming is younger, which is probably why Shadow Complex caused such a stir on chat boards, industry columns and in assorted blogs a few weeks back (Kotaku’s summary here, if you missed it). Shadow Complex is by all accounts an excellent shooter loosely based on the first events of Card’s action thriller novel Empire (where basically, liberal extremists assassinate the president and seize power in New York State via military coup). Card hasn’t been involved in the development process, the game was actually scripted by comic author Peter David and makes no mention whatsoever of Card’s religious/gender politics, but his name was used in publicising it. That was enough. As soon as it came out, gamers at the liberal end of the political spectrum were boycotting it – because profits from the game will filter back to Card as royalties, and thereby end up supporting his anti-gay politics.

I can’t believe this is a surprise to anyone after gay gamers reamed Blizzard for trying to ban gay-friendly World of Warcraft guilds as sexually discriminatory, and more recently chewed out Microsoft for removing all gay references from Live gamertags, even when it was part of a person’s actual name. Critics of the boycott have argued that if you dig around enough there’s probably a homophobe somewhere in every game project ever, isn’t it overreacting to single out Shadow Complex? There is a point to the sentiment, and it’s a shame to see a quality indie game get flak over unfortunate promotional choices. But gamers haven’t been those teenage boys of yore for a long time now, and until game promotion learns to respect that, someone will always end up in the line of fire. When you use celebrities to drum up publicity for your game, you can’t ignore the parts of their image that you don’t like or want to be associated with it. Public image is always a package deal. You can’t use the name of the beloved author-Card without also invoking the much less lovable outspoken homophobe-Card. As the industry and audience mature, things like who and what you choose to associate your product with will have an impact on how gamers choose their entertainment.

It’s not that uncommon to see games boycotted for content, though this is rarely by gamers themselves. Boycott based on the political views of someone involved in the game’s production is less common, because development teams are large, and tend to remain fairly anonymous. Gamers taking an ethical approach to their entertainment purchases is still new. Still, gamers are getting better at looking up connections that matter to them, and Shadow Complex isn’t the first game to catch heat over political views advocated by its creators. The Japanese hit RPG Dragon Quest has also received ugly publicity due to the main composer Koichi Sugiyama vocally supporting the right wing nationalists, who among other things deny the Nanjing Massacre in 1937.

Neither game has suffered financially from liberal criticism. Dragon Quest is a hallmark franchise, and Shadow Complex broke the Xbox Live Arcade debut download record by selling an impressive 200,000 downloads on it’s opening week. But financial ruin isn’t the point of the boycott. It’s making a statement: we know this game is great, but we will not buy it because royalties will fund politics we consider repugnant. That, I think, is way cool. It shows that gamers no longer think of their media as “just” games, “just” entertainment. The same people who have been buying organic produce and fair trade coffee are now also buying ethically kosher games.

And that’s why I feel all fuzzy when I hear people not just complaining on the internet, but actually writing to Microsoft and Chair to explain why they won’t buy Shadow Complex in spite of it’s quality – or explaining how they buy the game, but balance Card’s involvement it with a donation to Card’s political arch nemeses, ACLU or other gay-friendly charities. Anyone can rant on the internet. Gamers actually taking the point to the developers signals something in the evolution of gaming toward a mature media.

(Note: Yeah this is last month’s news – the column was written then in Finnish. So sue me for being lazy about translating my stuff. Better late, and all that.)

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.

Much fluff, less meat

The root of the problem roleplayers face in WoW is that there is story, but it establishes almost nothing useful about the setting. The games and novels and comics only tell their own isolated bit of epic history, generally involving dashing teenagers (or adults, ancients and demigods who act remarkably like teenagers), who basically go about solving dramatic situations with ill-advised but dramatic action, and then evade all responsibility by doing something even more dramatic. There’s very little about normal culture or less epic times – and even the epic bits read like the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which shares WoW’s remarkable ability to drown all its cool ideas in metric fucktons of embarrassing posturing by uninspired protagonists. Which is a shame, because under the goop the Warcraft setting does get around to some pretty neat fantasy themes – noble and intelligent orcs and trolls, savage and magic-hating elves, a religion that’s evolved past the need for God and a matriarchal society that isn’t all about peace and hugs, to mention a few. In spite of Blizzard’s best efforts to produce a homogenized fantasy MMO, some of that variation still survives in WoW.

For those bits or originality, I made a lot of excuses for Blizzard’s storytelling over my WoW roleplaying career.  “Play along with the setting, not against it” is a direct quote from the roleplay section of the official World of Warcraft player’s guide, and I used it a lot. The thing is, to do that there has to be a setting. The game itself isn’t enough – roleplay in any narrative way requires an underlying, predictable idea of how things work in the world, and that idea should not retroactively change with the latest bugfixes, class revamps, raid content and expansions to the mechanical game. I’m not even thinking about the genuinely heavy-handed game mechanical stuff, like phased areas — speed questers like me will usually have finished anything that could put us out of phase soon after it came out, nailing story-related quests to “some point in the recentish past” (or if it’s a secret revelation, to “we suspect, but can’t prove it until Blizzard advances the story to make this common knowledge and fact”). I’m talking about the basic world information that give the story its context.

Where Blizzard deserts roleplayers

Sitting and talking about stuff - the backbone of roleplay. Easy, as long as you have a setting that actually knows how it works day to day.

To have sensible roleplay, I need to know if my 500-year old elf is an ancient or a teen among her people. I need to know if my character’s culture considers torture ok or a crappy thing to do. I need to know if my character’s religion thinks God is a code of conduct, an actual creature or that big blobby sun-thing up there. And if this can change on the fly – by switching elven age maximums from 700 to “several thousand” years, or by turning Blood Knights from evil leaches into redeemed servants of the Naaru, or by having Night Elves pick up Arcane Magic again, or by declaring that Tauren can be paladins because they worship the Sun, which is now exactly the same thing as serving Vorlon-wannabe aliens or studying a warrior monk philosophy that has long since done away with the concept of ‘God’ in favour for something semi-Zen…

…this is where roleplay starts coming apart. Changes like that aren’t “just” furthering the plot, or adding to the setting in the same way as opening up previously inaccessible places like Quel’thalas or Dalaran does. They’re not a pure gameplay change, like rebuilding the paladin class from skills to talent trees. They’re rewriting the underlying logic that governs what is normal and possible in the setting – it’s like saying, ‘in this expansion, gravity will work sideways, and it possibly always has’. At the very least roleplayers need some way to rationalise the change. What bugs me is, I’m pretty sure Blizzard knows this, and doesn’t care. Why should they? Roleplayers are a minority of paying customers, 5% or less by common estimates. There are probably more Italian-speaking WoW-players than there are RP’ers across all the language areas. Italian localisation would be a better investment for Blizzard’s money than catering to us whiny roleplaying geeks.

I can respect the logic. As a gamer, I can admit Cataclysm implements stuff I’ve wanted (flying mounts in old Azeroth and an update of the badly dated classic zones), and I have to admit that Blizzard does, rarely, make an effort to cater to us with a more storied experience. The irony is that when they do this – by dungeon encounters, or phased quests, or by having Silvermoon NPC’s blithely praise Kael’thas while Outland NPC’s revile him as a Legion lackey – they just succeed in exposing how generic their idea of story is, and how primitive and ham-handed MMO tools for handling narratives actually are. How many times a day did the Alliance see Onyxia exposed before Blizzard finally freed us from that terrible /yell-spam?

But mostly they don’t seem to bother. The message seems to be that story is fine when you’re levelling and bored, but the purpose of WoW is to reach the endgame. If the Argent Tournament is anything to go by, after that we’re only expected to want a graphical button mashing exercise whose sole point is to reach the next loot lotteries and/or PvP leaderboard update. Success will be rewarded only with gear that lets you do the same exact thing a tiny bit more efficiently. This is what WoW is about now – the story is padding at best.

It’s built for raiding

Even the tram in Ulduar looks cool. Raiders are used to scale - take it away and the whole thing collapses.

I don’t mind flimsy or even no story if it’s logical. An underground gladiator ring, Arena-style and run by greedy and immoral goblins, works fine. But the Argent Tournament? We’ve fought an epic campaign to Arthas’s doorstep, we’re ready to smite the greatest traitor of the generation in his undead unmentionables, and we … set up a tourney on his porch so he can laugh himself silly while Tirion Fordring’s valiant knights beat up on each other? Or worse, watch while Tirion obligingly decimates his own army by feeding them to random raid-bosses?

Ulduar was the allout showcase of Blizzard’s current raid-building prowess. The scenery was beautiful, the story stuck together, progression was nicely modularised to let raids vary their routines, and even the trash fights were challenging enough to wipe overly cocky raids. The Tournament instances, Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader, are the plain lazy antithesis of that design. One ugly arena, and nothing else except a lone NPC to click. When you do, you get a boss to fight, without even the thinnest clue why Tirion is playing last days of Rome on the Lich King’s front lawn. Couldn’t they at least have added some nominal mechanic where a failed raid is rescued from the beasts and patched back up – so it would seem like Tirion is training his army and not just butchering chunks of it for giggles?

I’m hoping the hyperefficient boss-o-matic is a design they’ll back away from. In other raids, gameplaywise, WoW is still unbeaten, and I’d like to return to nostalgise, once the sting of disappointment has worn off. But if I ever roleplay in the game again, I’ll be doing it with a big “whatever” to the setting – because anything else simply isn’t worth the effort.

Newbies get sabotaged by the epic

Blizzard has never honoured the terms it offered to RP’ers. “Play with the world, not against it” simply doesn’t work when they retcon established facts about the game world regularly. It’s the roleplay equivalent of a spouse who demands you do EXACTLY as they want, and then without warning decides they want something else instead. No-one wants to be the poor sucker being jerked around like that. Especially when each change of heart breaks suspension of disbelief and reminds you that even the bits that aren’t annoying you right now are still very tired and very teenage. And Blizzard’s own lore characters are only the start of it.

When these guys are given buddy-dialog, can you blame roleplay newbies for getting swelled heads?

Take Tyrande who somehow gets called a wise and loving leader even after murdering her own people to free a known menace. Or Sylvanas, who apparently is queen of the Forsaken largely by virtue of being powerful enough to stay pretty and stand straight while dead. Or Rhonin, who might seem a match for demigods if his best mate Krasus wasn’t married to one – which should be cringe-worthy in and of itself. When the official gold standard for viable characters is like that (and a very sincere “like that”, not an ironic Quentin Tarantino “like that”), it’s no wonder so very many WoW-taught roleplayers create Mary Sue after Mary-fucking-Sue and proceed to enact their own personal soap operas as if the world revolved around their dramatic and luridly described navels. Sometimes as players as well as characters.

The one thing about Cataclysm that makes me happy is that Blizzard finally broke my back. Since I’m not taking intravenous bullshit-for-story from the source anymore, I can finally take a breath and quit taking it from players as well. No more drama that would make daytime TV writers cringe with the frequency of life-altering disasters. No more roleplay where ‘mature’ consists of playing a female character (though really you’re male) and only having cybersex some of the time. Yes that second one is a cliche, dammit – because in seven years online I’ve met a total of four men who don’t publicly admit to doing both, “but it doesn’t count because…”.

Yes it bloody does count. Could you punks at least exploit your own gender and sexual orientation for a change? You’re embarrassing the actual women and lesbians/bis – I’ve lost count of how many people have told me I play “a really convincing woman” because of you.

Bad Blizzard. Bad WoW roleplayers. No cookie for either of you.