Avatars aren’t tokens

 Posted by (Visited 15037 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 062009
 

A little bit ago there was a kerfuffle over an event in World of Warcraft that ended with female characters getting bunny ears put on their heads. This post isn’t about that — not directly, anyway.

Rather, it’s about the reaction that many users had regarding avatars, characters, and players, and the divides between them.

The key quote that sets me off is this one from Tobold:

Ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible.

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New art game: Today I Die

 Posted by (Visited 10117 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 062009
 

How can I resist a game that combines poetry and puzzle and art game? Here’s Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die. There are multiple endings, by the way.

The game is brief, but interesting and affecting. Worth checking out, and it runs in the browser, so no download required.

His donation model is interesting too. Custom work for people, for a price, akin to how some musicians are offering house concerts for people who buy ultra-fancy packages of their recordings.

All-Everquest Game Studies issue

 Posted by (Visited 5866 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
May 052009
 

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

  • Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
  • Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
  • Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
  • Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
  • Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
  • Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.

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How David Beats Goliath — a lesson in game design

 Posted by (Visited 9275 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 042009
 

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article, “How David Beats Goliath,” is a must-read for anyone interested in game design. Or business strategy.

It’s all about how underdog outsiders can come to a “game” (meaning, a formal structure of rules with win conditions) and because they are free of social preconceptions of how it “should” be played, can use unorthodox tactics to win. The article purports to be about game-playing strategy, but I think it has just as much to say about how you set up your rule systems as anything else.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

The Sunday Song: I Will Be There For You

 Posted by (Visited 5967 times)  Music
May 032009
 

I wrote this song for my son. He’s been having migraine headaches and some sort of sinus infection, and has missed a lot of school. He’s also just turned 11, and you can see him growing up day by day. But I suppose it could be from anyone to anyone, really.

Guitar is in double-dropped D, then capo III; song’s in Bb. It still could use a fresh vocal track, a fresh bass track, and it’s missing the backing vocal part from midway to the end (software crash ate it).

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