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Friday, May 30, 2014

Yes, All Women

I have sat thinking about this for a while now, but I can't remain on the sideline any longer. There are some who may see this as propaganda, but frankly, I've seen too much for it to be debatable. I am angry.

My normally fairly anti-feminist online buddy, River, just had his eyes opened regarding the recent Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. He thought to himself, surely that's an exaggeration. Unfortunately, it's not; as he shares in the initial results of his poll.

Another Opportunity for Discussion

Elliot Rodger's particular brand of misogyny was brought on by deeper disturbances in his psyche. I hypothesize, based on what I have read, that the man was sociopathic, much like Eris Harris, one of the Columbine killers, superficially blaming others for rejection and bullying; when, in fact, they had only contempt for those around them. I also posit that perhaps Rodger didn't have "game" precisely because the women he approached romantically picked up on his explosive potential. But Rodger was encouraged by others (if unintentionally) who hold that women are prizes to be won, "targets," rather than individuals deserving of respect. Perhaps not all men are predators, but enough are that all women have encountered at least one, usually more.

That's not to say we should all be color/gender-blind robots. We all have preferences and orientations. Hell, I am about as interested in sex as it is possible to be, and fully aware of those around me that I find attractive. But just as homosexuals are generally smart enough not to proposition their hetero associates, heterosexuals need to be smart enough to know this: not everyone you are attracted to is attracted to you. And the ways they dress—or the activities they engage in—are no indication otherwise. Even if someone is attracted to you, for any number of reasons, that person may not want to have sex with you, nor welcome your sexual advances.

Sexism Stew

John Scalzi wrote a piece in April that came to my attention as a result of the hashtag, and I've been wading through the commentary. While his four levels of discrimination aren't perfect, I feel they are an excellent jumping-off point. I think the most instructive is the first level, Ambient. It's also the most contentious, given that Mr. Scalzi (accurately, IMHO) describes the cultural norms and memes (in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins) we all find ourselves stewing in. Since the higher levels of discrimination are fairly intentional, progressively fewer people engage in them. But recognizing our own complicity in ambient discrimination can be painful, and many resist the concept.

I have made mistakes of the sort Scalzi mentions myself. I am truly sorry to whomever I may have offended in this regard here or elsewhere online. Once, I was the center of a sexism controversy right here on this blog. It's still hard to see whether my words and attitude based on the cultural norms brought up in the commentary on that post were OK, or should be changed.

There are folks telling the people who want a more diverse set of heroes in Warlords of Draenor to go somewhere else if they don't like the "artistic choices" the guys at Blizzard are taking. While I agree that the devs are free to take the game whatever direction they want, the players are certainly free to call them out on perpetuating whatever social injustices in the game. Because then, when the expansion launches, they cannot claim ignorance on the issue. But some guys are tired of hearing about it.

How many times have I perpetuated some ambient discrimination? Or worse, one of the other more serious levels? The times I can think of, I deeply regret. But as I noted yesterday in sharing River's other post, sometimes we don't get to say I'm sorry. All we can do is try harder to be conscious of the things we do and say that make life more difficult for others.

We need to step up when we see problems, especially active harassment and discrimination. And we need to strive to reduce and even eliminate discrimination where it is within our power to do so, and exert influence if it is not. Because discrimination hurts all of us, even if we happen to be part of a privileged group.
That sexism is an injustice all women should be enough for us to act to change it. But the truth is sexism affects all of us. Let me appeal to the selfish men who see no need to act outside their own self-interest. Did your mother work? If you're in a hetero relationship; does your wife or girlfriend work? If so, your household was/is poorer than you would be if they were paid a fair, equal wage. If they were promoted fairly rather than passed over in favor of some man. Every male human who harasses or assaults a female human makes it harder for the rest of us to form relationships of trust with them. We're seen as a potential danger, regardless of whether we pose an actual threat. Again, none of that matters nearly as much as the fact that we should treat people with respect, regardless of their gender, orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, etc.

More broadly speaking, prejudices and discrimination of any kind affect everyone, bringing down those on the outside and those on the inside. How many great minds have been lost to history because of the actions of oppressive regimes? How many people are unable to reach their full potential or contribute more fully to the progress of humankind—or provide for their families—because they are not allowed to serve in positions of research, or management, or government, because of the prejudices of others?

Rowan Smash!

When I was a kid, I was the victim of bullying on many occasions. Eventually, I grew large enough to defend myself, and defend myself I did. Currently, I am over six feet tall and within spitting distance of three hundred pounds. While not as fit as some of my fellow gamers and bloggers, I can assure you there is plenty of muscle under this chub.
http://photoshopkoe.blogspot.com/2012/09/untuk-even-all-about-batman-di-various.html
Lilik Yanuar Pribadi
As Scooter can attest, I have two characteristics that arise from my experiences as a child: an overactive sense of justice, and a tendency to become very angry when I perceive an injustice is being perpetrated. I like to think I am normally reasonably cuddly. But I am also a big, scary bear who does not suffer bullies of any stripe. Perhaps, like Stubborn, this has caused me trouble in the past. It has definitely caused trouble for others. I may have lost friends as result, but I have gained far more.

I am probably preaching to the choir. Most of the people who follow this blog probably are not the sort of people that would sexually harass someone at a convention, for instance. We may never meet in person. But if we do meet, and it's because I saw you acting the fool with some poor cosplayer or geek girl—or whoever doesn't fit your perception of what a gamer should be—I can assure you, you won't like me when I am angry.
~~~
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Monday, May 26, 2014

Wild Country!

So as I have mentioned previously, the current plan is to go ahead and play Wildstar this summer. I can't say I am super enthusiastic about it, to be honest. Do I think it will be fun? Yes! The question is for how long?
Daisi and Rowanblaze (on Scooter's Screen)
Why am I not that enthused? While enjoyable; in many ways, Wildstar feels like a game I've played before. I have no real sense of wonder about the game. Maybe it's that Wildstar is coming at a point in my life where I'm feeling kind of bleh about the MMO genre in general. I've been disappointed too many times... witnessed things I like about games evaporate as the devs go in a direction away from what I considered great about them... jumped on hype trains that the devs really couldn't deliver on.

So I go into Wildstar with a jaded eye. Not a bitter one though. The game has its moments. I have no problem with the art choices Carbine has made. I enjoyed WoW's cartoonish colors and graphics for over five years. And I think Carbine has done a great job in that regard. The cartoonish humor has been turned up to eleven from WoW, as well, though at least in the limited time I had to play during Beta, I didn't encounter any specific pop culture references that I recognized. There are some instances of commentary on modern culture in general; like cults of celebrity, for example.
Souri (Scooter) and TomSwift (he was an inventor!)
Some of the stuff is really over the top, and I can understand why that's a turn-off for some people. A Girl Grey compared the Level-Up "Glow" to console games like BrĂ¼tal Legend, and she has a point. But as I recall, that game shares a lot of sensibilities with this one. Like the fact that it doesn't take itself too seriously. I don't think we should either.

But that's a bit of a problem, too—one which may prove to be Wildstar's undoing for me. I love story in games, and I love it to be rich and deep. Wildstar's factions seem to be very one dimensional. I was informed last night that Carbine claims that Wildstar has more story/lore than any other game. I am dubious. I have a feeling that I will be far more engaged by the scrappy underdog Exiles than the totalitarian police-state Dominion. But the whole thing strains credibility. I have more tolerance for such shenanigans than Sig does, but it is not limitless. We shall see.
The way things look on my screen.
Meanwhile, there are things to be excited about. I was watching some "devspeaks" last night, and several of the combat systems seem pretty cool. For example, crowd control effects, like Stun and Disarm, can be overcome. No more rogue stunlocks. The aiming system, while not completely new with shades of GW2, is fun to use and falls in line with enemy telegraphs. I'm not playing the UI, I'm focused in the action, even when healing.
This is my world.
Carbine wants to do WoW right. And flippant comments aside, they have the credentials, in theory, to do so. The studio was formed by former Blizzard devs, folks who worked on WoW back in the day and didn't like the direction the game took at various stages of expansion. Some of them took things they liked about WoW (40-man raiding) with hopes of improving them. Others wanted to go in a totally different direction and do the anti-WoW game, do things that had never been done in WoW (like housing). Here's hoping that the monster that they have birthed turns out better than Frankenstein's.
~~~
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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Sometimes Mania is Liberating

I feel the need to preface this post with the disclaimer that I am not a Wildstar fanboy. I suppose not playing Wildstar because you don't like the aesthetic is as valid a reason as any other. But, really?
Is this
any worse than this?
Now, I realize that not everyone wants to see "Guardians of the Galaxy," just like not everyone cares to play Wildstar. But I hate to break it to you: The Elder Scrolls Online ain't Shakespeare or War and Peace. Or even Lord of the Rings.

I assume that gun-toting rodentia breaks your immersion or something. I can't honestly say that Wildstar is an immersive experience for me either, but you know what? It's kinda fun. On the one hand, you have scenery-chewing bad guys (that the Alliance of Awesome seems hellbent on playing); on the other hand, you have tree-hugging space hicks and zombies. You have garish colors and sardonic announcers mocking how "badass" you are when you level or when you die. Come to think of it, Wildstar takes a lot of cues from Animaniacs—and Golden Age Warner Bros shorts.

And that's OK, not every game I play has to be painted in greys and browns to be worth playing.
Thanks to Belghast
~~~
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Monday, May 19, 2014

In Which Comfortable UI Trumps Interesting Progression

So Scooter and I had the talk last night. You know, the one where gamer couples decide whether to play a game or not. Those of you without the blessing of having your significant other playing with you simply decide whether you will or will not play a game. When another person is involved in the decision, it becomes a negotiation. Since so much of your game time is spent with the other person, you are likely to play games which you feel "meh" about but that your partner loves. Or you may end up foregoing a game you like because your partner can't stand playing it.
For me, the worst part of The Elder Scrolls Online was the reticle-aiming UI. After writing my review, I had one more opportunity to return to TESO, and was even more frustrated by the UI, deciding then and there that I would not be playing. Scooter was of a similar mind, and we let it pass us by—even though everyone else seems to be playing, and I heard from someone on Twitter whom I cannot now remember that there is an addon that enables MMO style mouse targeting and navigation. (A choice TSW has as part of the default client.) But I loved the concept behind TESO's progression system and how every class can use any type of weapon or armor, leading to interesting combinations like archer tanks and healing rogues. (I've heard that it's not as completely wide open as Skyrim, but pretty close.) And the lore/world looked interesting enough.

But that darn UI. Just nope. On Belghast's Aggrochat, a frequent theme can be paraphrased as "playing the game, not the UI," and I agree, though maybe not quite the way they think. When the moment-to-moment functionality of moving through and interacting with the environment is frustrating, not much else matters.

Wildstar, on the other hand, has very pedestrian progression. Each class has access to a single weapon type, for instance. However, the UI is something I am far more comfortable with. It's easy to move, and easy to interact with the environment. I hope to avoid needing the many action bars that the UI provides, but we'll see. Others have commented that the garish colors and frenetic environment of Wildstar are a distraction; and while I don't disagree, exactly, I do think it fits the humorous, irreverent style of the game. The story and world are intriguing, though I have issues with some of the design decisions made by the devs. I'll cover the cons in more detail later, but the pros are definitely there.

We've gone back and forth over Wildstar several times over the course of the open beta. I'll have a fullish review up soon, but wanted to post this now, since it's a slightly different topic. Then there's the subscription. Both Scooter and I are reluctant to sub again after almost two years of not needing a sub in any game we were playing. I'm still not sure we'll play past the first month. In the end, Wildstar has won us over, grudgingly. She likes the game, and the game works on the laptop I am currently using, with the video turned all the way down. So we've decided to "buy the box" at least and see how it goes from there.
~~~
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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Playing the Name Game

And a cry went out across the world, wherefore can we not log on to the Wildstar site and claim our selfhood?
~Rowanblaze 14:5
Twitter and the blogosphere were abuzz yesterday with the collapse of the Carbine webserver(s?) as people rushed to get their character names reserved before the impending headstart and launch of Wildstar. Since Scooter and I are still on the fence about even buying and subbing to Wildstar, I only looked on with bemused detachment.

Syp can't believe Carbine was not prepared for this onslaught with servers capable of handling the inevitable traffic. Since "first come, first served" in an era of global communication seems a bit unfair, Tobold thinks a lottery would be a good way to go. While I agree with him about commodities like tickets to Blizzcon (something else I have little interest in going to), I am not sure how that would play out in distributing unique items—names in this case.

As I did on those blogs, I wonder yet again why more companies don’t go with some @handle-type route, like Cryptic and, more recently, Zenimax have done. At its heart, this is a database design issue, a decision to be made by the devs. A character name (along with all other aspects of a character) is simply a part of a database. If you're distributing your playerbase across separate servers (another relic of prior decades), unique character names might be OK for a while. But if you have a flexible server system, then to me it makes more sense to have unique user names and let the players create whatever character name they want.

Within reason, of course. No need to allow offensive terms or phrases in character names or player handles. But systems for determining whether a name may be inappropriate are fraught with problems, too. I once tried to create a name in Guild Wars 2 that included the word "Jewel." It was "not acceptable" and the only reason I can think of is that it included the letters j-e-w in sequence. The system was not capable of recognizing an innocuous iteration of those letters.

With Wildstar's launch barely weeks away, it's probably too late to implement a system of player handles the way Elder Scrolls Online and Star Trek Online have. But I would plea with any game developer to consider such a system if you really expect to have a massive number of people playing your game. Non-unique character names means no rush to reserve said names, and no crashing of an unprepared server suite.
~~~
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Monday, May 12, 2014

Happy Birthday, Ruciboo

The 6-Pack: Lucy on the left, then clockwise from the top: Bella, Chico, Moina, Dexter, & Quintus
Perhaps a bit off topic, but it's not the first time. I wanted to get this post out yesterday, but I procrastinated. And then there were Dominion weenies to slaughter, so the blog fell by the wayside.

As you may know, we "rescued" several dogs last year, two from a coworker who was moving, and one quite literally a stray off the street. The stray (top-middle in the top pic), whom we named Bella, turned out to be gravid, and on Mother's Day last year, she gave birth to two beautiful puppies. Sadly, our tiny Ivory puppy did not make it, and though we had planned to give them away to friends or family, we decided to keep the Ebony one, formally naming her "Lucy."

Lucy quickly had the pack alpha wrapped around her finger. She has earned several nicknames: Lucifer, Rucifee, Ruciboo, and so on. We know she's half chihuahua, but we're not quite sure about the other half. She may be a chiweenie, given her length, but some other characteristics make us think of other breeds. I need to break down and get a genetic test, just to satisfy my curiosity.
Lucy loves to play. She wrestles her mother and her Auntie Moina(on the far right in the top pic). She loves to run outside with Moina and Unca Chico (top right). And she loves to get up on the couch or bed and snuggle close to me. She has competition from my "overly attached puppy" Moina. Unfortunately for Rucifee, she's not a jumper, having strained her hips or hind legs at some point while our magnificent Zane was still with us. But she generally holds her own, getting my attention with little barks and yelps.

Scooter finds it amusing that I—a man of such large stature—have this tiny puppy as my favorite.  As I said, she has captured my heart. Unlike the rest of the six-pack, I have known her all her life. And I plan to know her all her life.

So Happy 1st Birthday little Lucy-Boo! And many more to come.
~~~
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Friday, May 9, 2014

Limping Along: The State of My Game

I'm lucky Scooter has an older laptop that still functions well. Even though it limits the games we can play due to older specs, it's better than mine right now, with no USB or Sound Card, and an iffy RAM.
I simply haven't been playing very much in the past month or so. I log into TSW to do Beyond the Veil on Thursdays, but I haven't even purchased the mission pack that came out last month. I don't know if I'll get Issue 9 when it is released either. I'll wait until I can play.

Of course, this has dampened my enthusiasm for gaming in general. Scooter and I jumped into Rift the other night, and it plays well enough on low settings. But it's funny what she can see, that I can't because of view distance. It reminds me of my early days in WoW when everything in the distance was a fog.

Since we were playing SWTOR when she got her new computer, it's still loaded on the one I am using now. I have thought about playing that, But the game is unplayable—as far as I am concerned—without a subscription, and I was unhappy with EA/BioWare before the punitive cash shop was introduced. So that's out.

Scooter and I decided to give Wildstar a spin, so we downloaded the client last night. Tonight we'll see how it goes. The Alliance of Awesome is going Dominion, so we'll roll that way, too; even though I personally like the Exiles better, from what I've seen.
~~~
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Newbie Blogger Initiative III: The Revenge of the Newbs

I am not actively participating in the festivities of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this month, partly because I kinda feel like the best advice has been put forth, and is ironically contradictory. Heck, I no longer follow the advice of one of my own posts from the inaugural NBI in 2012. But I still wanted to encourage the newest members of the community and promote the event, because I think we generally have a great community, and it's events like the NBI that help foster that feeling.
I will be doing what I can to read at least a post or two from the new blogs and adding them to my latest roster. I also will try to spotlight posts I like. Here is a list of bloggers partially cribbed from Belghast over at Tales of the Aggronaut. I have a feeling it is not comprehensive, and I will be adding to it in the far right column of this blog as I see new bloggers from this year's class.
In the spirit of that, I encourage you to check out the Weekly Roundup #1 at the NBI hub, which includes links from some of the new folks and advice from some of the vets. And have fun whether you're writing or just reading.
~~~
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.