Posts Tagged World of Warcraft

I don’t usually post here about my activities in World of Warcraft – that’s usually reserved for my WoW dedicated blog, to keep from clogging up this blog with too much WoW.  For the last six months or so, I’ve been on an extended hiatus from the game, but was planning to come back when the next expansion, Cataclysm, comes out. In fact, I was beginning to get really excited about it.

Initially the implementation of RealID in WoW didn’t worry me too much, beyond the thought that people might get annoyed with me for not friending them back. It was optional and you had control over who would have your information.

Then this happened:

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. The classic Battle.net forums, including those for Diablo II and Warcraft III, will be moving to a new legacy forum section with the release of the StarCraft II community site and at that time will also transition to using Real ID for posting.

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

Now, I would be the first person to agree that Blizzard needs to do something about their forums, which are a haven of villainy and scum.  Since early in my first few months of playing the game, I learned to avoid the official forums like the plague. The majority of posters there have no other thought than to troll and bully people.  Over the period of time I have spent playing the game, my posts on the official forums have been limited to event announcements as guildmaster of an active roleplaying guild, bug reports, and technical support questions.  It is true that anonymity encourages the bad behavior. However, that same anonymity also helps to maintain the security and privacy of people who aren’t behaving badly.

Now, it’s not hard to find out my real name. I’ve got it all over the place. As a professional writer, it is important that I maintain a web presence under my real name in various locations and on various social networks. It’s not really something I hide all that much, and the fact that I play WoW is no great secret.  However, I do know a large number of people who have every reason in the world not to want their real names associated with their activities in an online environment, or to have strangers they might meet in that online environment know their real name.

Here are some of the problems I see immediately with this issue:

First of all, I happen to live in a state where it is still possible to be fired from your job for being gay. It is a state where violence against gays is still a major issue and there are no hate laws. In the last three months, I have seen in the news at least two unprovoked attacks against gay men in my state, one resulting in severe injury and the other, just this last weekend, only escaping injury  because the victims knew self defense techniques.

For a long time, World of Warcraft has been one of a few places where people who are still forced to be in the closet, be they gay, transgendered, or gender-queer, could be themselves without fear of real life repercussions. There are many prominent gay guilds in the game. Attaching real names to characters and guilds and removing anonymity could potentially force people out of the closet in-real-life. Many of these same people have good reason to fear not just for their jobs but also for their personal safety if their secret is exposed.

Second, I know of a number of women who purposely play male characters to avoid being harassed due to their gender. It is unfortunate, but misogyny and sexual harassment are major issues in the gaming community, and WoW has more than its fair share.  Exposing real names on the forums would also expose the gender of those who choose to play characters of opposite gender for reasons beyond “I just liked the way they looked.”  It is quite often difficult to be a woman and be a gamer – you have to constantly fight against the assumption that just because you’re a woman you can’t tank, you can’t PvP, you can’t…play as well as a male.  A lot of women have avoided this by playing male characters and pretending to be male.  There are also women who have been stalked and harassed by real-life ex-boyfriends or in-game acquaintances in the game who have escaped them by rolling new characters with new names on new servers, retreating into anonymity. Removing that anonymity would expose them to further harassment.  It could even provide a means for stalkers and rapists to locate victims. There’s a reason why we teach our young girls to keep their Facebook profiles private and to not give out personal information. To do so compromises their security and puts them in danger. It makes it easier for predators to find them.

What happens when the first murderer finds his victim through the WoW forums, Blizzard? Or the first pedophile? Because they are there. I have had personal contact (and reported on multiple occasions) at least one pedophile that is still playing the game.  What happens when the first homophobe decides to take up arms against someone that got outed on the WoW forums? With a real name, it’s not that difficult to find an address, or find out where someone works, or harass them, blackmail them, harm them.

True, murder and rape would be the most extreme potential ramifications, but they should be considered. The fact that people could lose their jobs if their identity is revealed should have been considered.

Of course, the way to keep from losing anonymity is to avoid posting on the forums at all, but where is this violation of privacy going to stop, Blizzard? And did you really want to leave a significant portion of your customer population faced with the choice between asking a tech support question and preserving their own personal safety?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blizzard exposes real names on WoW forums (go.theregister.com)
• An interesting experiment in online social forums (scienceblogs.com)
• Produce Your Name and Papers, Please (terranova.blogs.com)

Here lately, with me playing less and less WoW out of sheer boredom with the game (after five years, it’s finally getting old), I’ve been poking around and looking at some of the other MMO offerings already out or pending release at some point in the future.  All of them have some little something to offer that sets them apart from WoW, but for the most part, even then, they just look like the same old thing. Some of them, many of them in fact, don’t even seem to want my sort of player around.

See, I don’t like huge-group raiding. I absolutely, passionately detest PvP.  According to Bartle, I’d be an explorer/socializer as my gamer type. I enjoy finding every little secret place in the game, and I enjoy spending time with my friends, many of whom live too far away for me to see often in person. I love roleplay, the idea of stepping into a character and creating my own story.

So I got to thinking about what would make me really get excited about an MMO. I’m quite aware that many of these things I’d want are total pipe-dreams, but it would still get me excited, were it possible to do.

• A game built *for* roleplayers, with a large, immersive, and dynamic (*changing*) world and a story you can really sink your teeth into.  This could include any of the following:
  • Dedicated mods that work only on the roleplay servers.  I’d even be willing to pay more per month to ensure that my play experience is free of RP griefers and netspeak and that roleplay is enforced. People rolling on RP servers are there to RP, otherwise, gerroff.
  • Interface options for roleplayers, like EQ’s ability to flag yourself as a roleplayer, or like the various description addons you can download for WoW, but integrated as a part of the game.
  • Good character/clothing customization.
  • RP related quests. (I have seen this done before.)
• An extendable post-level-cap advancement option, even if it has nothing to do with actual combat ability or utility (ie. being able to spend post-cap xp on things like an extra tradeskill, a percent extra gold gain, unlocking fun ‘toy’ items, etc.) to keep the game interesting for non-raiders after they hit the cap. (WoW tried to do this for casual gamers with the achievements system, and it’s a good idea, but could use some expanding.)
• A game where a player’s skill, rather than their equipment, determines their success, and where it actually requires skill to reach level cap and beyond. Yes . . . I like it when it’s harder. I’ve often cried out for nerfs of my own classes after they became so easy to play that complete idiots make it to level-cap without even understanding how their class works.  A harder game makes for more skilled players, and skill has nothing to do with what you’re wearing.

That’s my little wish list.  WoW did a lot of things right, a lot to change the face of MMO’s, and like I said, I’ve been playing for five years. That’s a hell of a shelf-life, especially without taking many breaks in that time.  I’ll probably never see any of this stuff, but it doesn’t hurt to hope.

I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins lately, and a lot about it has reminded me of something I’ve been missing a lot of in games, lately: Story.

The games that I remember the most fondly from my childhood are those that had the best stories and character development. Gameplay in some of them might have been simple turn-based “Keep Pressing X” type controls, but the stories were what kept me playing them. My first introductions to PC games were also story-driven games. Some of the best stories I’ve seen in video games were in RTS games in which I might have been controlling entire armies, not just in RPGs where stories are “essential”. (Starcraft is an excellent example of a good, well-written RTS campaign)

The thing is, with the coming of multiplayer gaming, storytelling has pretty much been deemed unnecessary. The best examples of this are in the RTS genre, where the RTS of the past always had massive, story-driven single-player campaigns – campaigns that simply no longer exist in the modern versions.  If an RTS game even has a single player option or campaign at all, it nearly always seems plugged on as an afterthought, a repetitive little bit of narration plugged on what is essentially just a “against-the-computer” battle.  Without the story, there is nothing to make the player care about the characters or races.  It all turns into making a choice between the pure gameplay based advantages and disadvantages of each, rather than because the race itself means something to you.

As much as I love World of Warcraft, MMORPGs took the story out of the RPG just as much as multiplayer removed it from the RTS.  True, these stories might have a large, involved storyline put together by the developers, but the average player likely knows very little of it beyond the names of important bosses in dungeons.  (The exception to this, of course, would be roleplayers, who make it their business to know the lore of the game, but they are hardly the “average” players.)

Dragon Age has reminded me of just what I loved about all those old games with their involved stories and characters you couldn’t help caring about (or hating with a vengeance, as the case may be) – that it’s paired with good, fun, gameplay mechanics only adds to the fun of the game. It also brought to mind just how few truly story-driven games exist on the shelves these days, and just how much I wish there were more.

I’d like to see gaming get back to the point where story is not just an unnecessary and thoughtlessly added bit, but an essential part of games.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dragon Age RPG impressive if not perfect (pbpulse.com)
• BioWare Reveals Dragon Age’s “Massively Single-Player” Details [Bioware] (kotaku.com)
• Review: Dragon Age: Origins (cinemablend.com)

I’ve been a fan of Cassandra Clare since before she was a bestselling author.  I first came across her writing in the most humble of locations – a Harry Potter fanfiction community.  Her Draco Dormiens trilogy, a retelling of the Harry Potter series from Draco’s perspective, is one of those incredibly rare, amazing things you almost never find: Good, well-written, novel-length fanfiction that keeps the spirit of the original characters intact.

Unfortunately, Draco Dormiens is nearly impossible to find now, since a cease-and-desist order forced its removal from the internet.

I had heard, through that same fanfiction community, that she had been working on an original novel and had found a publisher.  Here was someone who had managed the fanficcer’s greatest dream – a book of her own on store shelves.

Knowing the quality of her writing, I was unsurprised to find out that it had made it to the NYT Bestselling list. I didn’t actually pick it up until after the third book, City of Glass, had come out, though, mostly due to my own failure to keep up with what was happening with them.

At first glance, I was a bit disappointed, as the books looked to be Twilight clones, and Twilight had read as badly written, Mary Sue filled, fanfiction.

The Mortal Instruments series might deal with the same general genre as Twilight, but it is that genre in the hands of a good writer. Believe me, as a long time lover of vampires, a good writer makes all the difference.  They aren’t the best or most original books I’ve ever read, the subject matter is clichè, especially at this point in time when the marketplace is absolutely flooded with vampire stories.

What sets these novels apart, not just from the other vampire stories glutting the marketplace now, but also from most adolescent and young adult fiction currently in publication, are the issues that Clare deals with in her books.  There are no weak women in this series – indeed, the women are generally the most strong-willed of the characters, whether for good or for ill. No matter what side of the fence the women sit on, they are almost uniformly strong, intelligent, and opinionated.

She writes, extremely frankly, about homosexuality.  One of the central characters is gay, and the world of the Nephilim (demon-hunters) that he must exist in is even more oppressive against homosexuality than our own.  There’s also an issue of incestuous attraction between the two main protagonists who, like Luke and Leia, find out that they are siblings only after their first kiss.  (Gays and incestuous thoughts in a YA novel, Clare, you are a brave one!)

Clare is not above making jokes about the tropes and clichès of the genre, either.  At a party filled with “Underworlders”, the heroine wonders about how there are only beautiful vampires, never any ugly ones.  She gives easter-eggs and tongue-in-cheek references to the geek community where she found her start, and with an insider’s sense of humor.  World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and Naruto mangas make appearances throughout the novels, bringing the world of the books more fully into this one.  These books are written by a geek for other geeks, but you wouldn’t have to be a geek to enjoy them.

Definitely a fun read – I made it through the first two books in the space of a week, and the third was only delayed because I was having trouble getting my hands on it.  I’m anxiously awaiting the fourth.  They are unashamedly pulp, and if you don’t get into vampires and werewolves and demons, you probably wouldn’t get into these, but if you can set aside your post-Twilight disgust for a moment or two, you can have a good bit of fun reading them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fanspeak: The Lingo of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fandom (oup.com)
• Was Dumbledore Gay? (dashpunk.com)
• The Twilighters Are Mad, And They’re Not Going To Take Our Crap Anymore [Sparkly Vampires] (jezebel.com)