There are two updated posts this morning:
Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women
AND
Also, Titans of Azeroth help me, I am in the process of signing up for a two week trial of World of Warcraft. Any suggestions for which server I should join? What character class would make the best WoW tourist? If I can get the updates downloaded before the two weeks are over I will be doing well!
The premier issue of Massive Magazine has arrived, and looks great. The large format of the magazine definitely lives up to its name. This quarterly offshoot of Computer Games magazine expands one of my favorite sections there, and the overall feel of the magazine is designed to appeal to a more mature audience. I suppose using the term "mature" is kind of a weird way to describe people primarily playing MMO fantasy games, but you know what I mean. Three of the five editorial staff members are women, and the presence of Cindy Yans as Features Editor alone was enough to make me subscribe. Add to that articles by Richard Garriott, Nick Yee, and Raph Koster, and you have a very promising beginning.
In the introductory editorial, Cindy Yans asks some fundamental questions about people who play MMOs:
"Why do we play these games? Why do we play dress-up and collect stupid trinkets and swing axes and bash monsters and pilot vehicles and join virtual clubs. Why even care? Why isn't it a waste of time when a large segment of the population insists that it absolutely is a waste of time? Why are we here? Why do we return time and time again? What on earth are we getting out of these make-believe worlds that we can't find anywhere else?"
These are the kind of questions I ask as I find myself logging into Guild Wars for the 755th hour of my life, even when I have 6 other highly compelling single player games loaded and ready to play on my computer. As fascinating as these questions are to me, the fact is, contemplating possible answers to these questions has never made me want to stop playing. If anything, thinking about the motivation I have for games like Guild Wars makes me even more curious about their appeal. Massive Magazine looks to be a great way to follow this interest and gain some insight into the growing world of MMO games. I am so glad to find a game publication that appreciates the fact that in addition to their being female readers, there are those of us who are also old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter was President.
Jimmy who?
I know this is slightly old news, but I came across this curious bit of game development news in my in-box this morning via the Gamasutra Career Newsletter - it is a call for applications for the recently formed Slipgate Ironworks MMO project headed by the closest thing that the game industry has for a tabloid darling - John Romero of Doom fame:
"John Romero's newly founded and funded MMO game company in the Bay Area is developing a Super Secret Mystery Project that will be revealed to only the most qualified candidates!
My executive cabal and I are very excited to build an amazing development team and create something truly unique. . . Apply now and prepare to enter the reality distortion field!"
Must . . . not . . . mock . . . game . . . developers . . . arghhh! I will say that this job listing did stand out from the others in the email so it is surely distinctive. Do you suppose that applicants deemed unfit by the Executive Cabal ever return from that Reality Distortion Field? And does anyone know how I can receive a John Romero Super Secret Mystery Project decoder ring?
If you feel up for the running of the gauntlet at Slipgate Ironworks you can read the full listing of job openings HERE.
You can read more about the launch of Slipgate Ironworks HERE and HERE.
Arena Net knows how to throw a party, and the extended weekend Guild Wars Factions' bash known as the Dragon Festival was no exception. The format was similar to other Guild Wars celebrations, with specifically themed quests and special holiday resources to gather leading up to the main festival that took place on July 4th, but the Dragon Festival exceeded previous Guild War Prophecy campaign parties on many levels.
I particularly enjoyed the mini-games included in the five day festival, including games of chance and a Guild Wars version of the arcade classic Whac-a-Mole that involved tagging worm hatchlings as they randomly emerged from the ground. The mini-games designed as part of the July 4th festival itself were also well designed, and culminated with beautiful fireworks and the appearance of festival presents to gather. Additionally, players who gathered enough Jade Wind Orbs over the course of the event were awarded a Dragon Festival mask for their characters.
There were moments when you could feel the presence of the 2 million plus subscribers through temporary game lagg, but otherwise the Dragon Festival was a blast. It is the detail and thought that Arena Net puts into events like this, as well as the beautiful aesthetic of the world design, that keep me hooked on this game after over a year of playing.
Here are some more screens of the event:
In anticipation of the release of Guild Wars: Factions, I was thinking about buying the Prima game guide to go with the new game so I went to check it out on Amazon:
And for some reason this song (as sung by Monty Python) popped into my head:
"I've got a lo-ve-ly bunch of coconuts (They're lovely!)
There they are a standing in a row.
(One, two, three, four)
Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head
(And bigger)
Give 'em a twist, a flick of the wrist, thats what the showman said."
Huh! I wonder why?
UPDATE 4/28/06: Now YOU can sing along too!
In my previous post I touched on some of my views about how men and women differ in their approach to the choice of gender of the RPG character they are playing. Here are my further thoughts on this topic:
Role-playing games offer many opportunities to engage with archetypes as a way to explore aspects of the personality that we are not otherwise allowed access to in society – think warrior, thief, mage, etc. Here is where we find one of the potentially therapeutic aspects of gaming, that we have opportunities to explore different sides to our personalities in consequence-free environments. It provides a freedom difficult to find in other aspects of life, and is particularly engaging because of the interactive nature that these games provide. I also see the opportunity of playing the opposite gender as a RPG character as offering a way to specifically explore masculine and feminine aspects of the personality. A male playing a female character or a female playing a male character can be a way to make a connection with inner qualities that don’t often get explored in our day-to-day lives.
I have been curious to find in my gaming experience that men are much more apt to choose a female game character than women are to choose a male character. When I ask men about this I almost always get the same answer: Men say they choose female characters for what I will call the jiggle factor – they want to have an attractive female character to look at while playing the game. My observations of the jiggle factor in action does confirm that many male players enjoy dressing up their female characters in fancy (and skimpy) outfits, giving their characters sexually explicit names (with a disproportionate number of variations on "humpalot"), and generally parading and dancing their characters in public - all which reinforce the jiggle factor as being an important aspect in choosing a female character for men.
I have not found a similar experience with female players creating male characters. There does not seem to be as great of a tendency among women to create male characters in the first place, and when they do the characters tend to not be about exaggerated sexual fantasies. For the most part, the women I have played with prefer playing female characters, and those that have made male characters have created idealized men in nurturing roles such as a big brother or a healer. If the converse of the male jiggle factor was at work I would have expected to see a trend of women creating muscle-bound male characters stripped down to their underwear dancing suggestively in public, but that has not been the case in my experience.
Men have very few opportunities to explore their female sides within the confines of society, so the ability to play a female character in a RPG setting may be all the more attractive to them. Since most RPGs are designed to offer female characterizations that provide for the jiggle factor, this primary reason is enough to justify the choice of a female character among male gamers. The chance to pretend to be a female through their RPG character while at the same time engaging in more masculine pursuits is a unique chance to explore the potential balance between the feminine and the masculine, especially since the real world offers very little tolerance for such explorations. For this reason, the consequence-free environment that allows them to kill without repercussion also provides the chance to see what it might mean to connect with inner traits that might be considered too feminine to express in their real lives.
Women, on the other hand have a much lower tendency to play male characters when given the opportunity to choose character gender in a RPG. I feel that this is due in large part to the game content itself, which provides ample opportunity for women to explore their masculine sides through the quality of the elements specific to the game. Playing a RPG that casts the character as the hero and involves accomplishing game tasks that require elements of battle, stealth, or hand-to-hand combat (in player vs. player scenarios) are all aspects that provide a female player a chance to explore more masculine pursuits without the necessity of playing a male character to accomplish these things. The result is that simply being a woman who plays a RPG may offer enough of an experience of the masculine without requiring the need to take on the male character qualities as well. The game itself provides the environment for women to explore their masculine sides.
This post addresses only one small aspect of what is a much larger psychological experience in playing RPGs. It may offer a place to begin to understand how the issues surrounding gender characterizations in RPGs are interpreted in very different ways by the men and women who play these games. The RPG game format has the potential to be the most gender inclusive when it provides both men and women the opportunities needed to explore aspects of their inner lives through their game characters.
More Oblivion concept art like the image above can be seen HERE.
The Guild Wars Factions Preview Weekend Event is underway! Here are a few screens from the new Factions world. It's great to see all this architecture in the game world, and it provides a very different atmosphere for the game.
Click on images for larger versions.
More information about the free preview can be found on the Guild Wars website HERE.
Here's a few screens taken this morning of some Guild Wars characters dressed in the spirit of St. Patrick's Day:
So dye your armor green for the day and then ask a Mesmer to step dance for you!
Beannachtai na Féile Pádraig fellow Tyrians!
Click images for larger versions. By the way, the seated ranger's name is Lucky Shot Pat.
The armor designs that are part of the Guild Wars game posses an interesting property. As your character advances through the game there are several choices of styles per character class and gender for increased protection. What I find to be a curious bit of logic is that the less armor there is covering the character's body the more protection it offers (and the more in game gold is costs to buy). I have dubbed this phenomenon The Guild Wars Law of Inverse Proportion.
In mathematics an inverse proportion is defined this way:
"Two quantities, A and B, are in inverse proportion if by whatever factor A changes, B changes by the multiplicative inverse, or reciprocal, of that factor."
Although the actual algorithms used to calculate armor stats during combat may not adhere to this mathematical definition, a few minutes capturing screen shots at Marhan's Grotto offers up some compelling anecdotal evidence. Marhan's is one of the sources for what is know as 15K armor, due to the price of 15,000 gold per armor piece. These 15K armors are not all so revealing, but they do offer some of the skimpier options in the Guild Wars universe in damage protection.
How do they keep from catching an arrow in that long expanse of a midriff?
There is an amusing piece on Wonderland addressing a similar issue in WoW, which was presented in conjunction with an original post on The Geeky Feminist entitled "I Blame the Patriarchy". The later was written in response to the plethora of female Elementalist characters dancing in the towns with nothing but their undies on.
Just in case you think it is only female characters running around in the buff in Tyria, here's a few parting images:
I've just read an excellent article in the April edition of Computer Games magazine written by Aaron R. Conklin on the effect the success of MMOs are having on the single-player RPG game format. If you have a chance, try and get your hands on the magazine and read the whole article (it’s called Singled Out?). The entire April issue is dedicated to classic RPGs, and it helped me to remember why I love the single-player RPG format so much.
From reading the article I now realize what is at the heart of my lack of enthusiasm for the type of game experience offered by World of Warcraft. Read what Ken Levine, creative director of Irrational Games, and creator of Freedom Force has to say about WoW:
"Levine, who eschews grouping and plays World of WarCraft as a single-player RPG, sees a parallel between Blizzard's online kingdom and Disney's Magic Kingdom. To him, World of Warcraft is a virtual gaming theme park that's been polished to a glare and tightly optimized for a large group of players. While he gives Blizzard props for creating a strong, appealing product, the immersion factor, he says, just isn't there the way it is in a single-player game. "How impressed are you to kill the boss monster when you have five guys standing behind you waiting to do the same thing?" asks Levine, "To maintain a sense of immersion, you have to not see that."
I am not overly concerned that MMORPGs will be the death of the single-player RPG. If anything, I think they have introduced more people to the special qualities associated with playing RPGs, increasing the general interest in RPG-type games. Subscription based games such as WoW do have the potential of using up the bulk of an individuals game buying budget, limiting the number of new games purchased, but the growing success of the non-subscription format of Guild Wars challenges the assumption that you have to pay monthly fees to get good game content.
What finds me playing an MMO in the first place is the combination of the lull in new single-player RPGs available and the fact that Guild Wars is an MMO that still can be played like a single-player RPG. Even though I am a member of an active guild, and I have spent any number of hours playing with my guild mates, the game format in Guild Wars allows me to have access to the higher level game content playing by myself. I would estimate that 90% of the game is available to play singly, so even if a player chooses not to make any friends in the Land of Tyria they still have access to most of the content of the game. In contrast to what I quote above, I haven’t had to loose any of the things that make single-player RPGs enjoyable to play with Guild Wars; the immersion of the privately instanced worlds, the sense of being the central figure in the story line, the ability to progress at my own pace.
If I hadn’t found a single-player RPG experience playing Guild Wars I would have left it behind a long time ago. As I wait for the release of two greatly anticipated single-player RPGs; The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Neverwinter Nights II; I am also equally excited about the release of Guild Wars: Factions. Guild Wars hasn’t ruined me for the traditional single-player RPG, if anything, it has kept me interested during the inevitable break between versions of these two great single-player RPG franchises.
I recently discovered that there is a command in Guild Wars that tells you how long you have been playing the game. Not without trepidation I typed /age and received this message:
"You have played this character for 424 hours 3 minutes over the past 8 months. Across all characters, you have played for 510 hours 23 minutes over the past 8 months."
Two initial thoughts came to me: First, I had no idea I had spent that much time playing this game, and second, no wonder I like this character so much, we have spent a lot of time together! Then of course, I couldn't resist, so I pulled out the calculator. Eight months is roughly 240 days or 5760 hours. I have spent 21 ¼ full days in the last 8 months playing Guild Wars, or 9% of my time. If you just count waking hours in the day, then it is closer to 32 days. So basically I spend one waking hour in eight playing this game.
It took me a while to digest this statistical analysis. Rather than dwell on all the things I might have done without Guild Wars in my life (because I'm realistic enough to know that if it wasn't Guild Wars it would have just been some other game) I decided to try and put these figures into perspective. One of the joys of statistics is their malleability, so in classic Mark Twain style (remember his three kind of lies - "lies, damned lies, and statistics"?) I decided to make this bit of information work for me.
I began by putting my numbers in context with other Guild Wars players. In an impromptu and highly unscientific survey with the members of my guild I found that among those who had been playing for about the same lengyh of time (7 to 8 months) I had spent the least amount of hours playing. Not only had I spent less time, but I had spent considerably less time, with my guild mates out pacing me by 2 or 3 times the number of hours, with the most dedicated member of my guild having played 5 times as many hours as me in the same 8 month period.
What about the amount of time people spend on other sedentary recreations, such as watching television? I took a trip over to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website and looked at the figures from 2004 (the most recent available) from the American Time Use Survey. I found that on average men say they spend 20 hours a week watching TV and women say they spend 17 hours a week. My 10 ½ hours of game time is looking pretty good in comparison.
Does this mean I think that playing computer games is a waste of time? Not in the least. That attitude is everywhere, though, so it is difficult to avoid feeling compelled to justify time spent playing games. I don't think people generally consider that time spent gaming isn't so much time spent not being a useful member of society as it is time spent away from other types of recreational entertainment. More importantly for me, as long as Coca Cola doesn't figure out how to do product placement in the Land of Tyria, it means time spent not being bombarded by the unrelenting onslaught of commercial advertising. According to this Wikipedia entry, a typical hour of US television consists of 18 - 24 minutes of commercial time. If you do the math you find out that the typical television watcher spends 5½ to 7½ hours a week watching TV commercials. How unproductive is that?
I may be growing old online as the hours tick by on my /age counter, but at least I don't have to sit through another commercial for toilet paper while doing it.
I have been toying with the idea of getting a World of Warcraft account lately, as a way to better understand the rampant social experiment that WoW has come to be. I thought about trying it out when it was originally released - I read reviews and watched demo movies of game play - but it just wasn't compelled to try it out. My prime point of resistance is that I have never been overly excited about monthly subscription fees for online games. That just seems like a design formula for game grind to me, with the ever elusive carrot-on-the-stick approach of keeping players hooked. Obviously though, in 5.5 million obvious ways, something about World of Warcraft is working.
I have read about so many aspects of the World of Warcraft gameplay that sound unappealing to me, which makes me wonder what makes it such a success. Here's a list of what has me holding back from signing up:
Additionally World of Warcraft has been getting some especially bad press lately, (which has been covered on blogs everywhere), after banning a player - and then rescinding the ban - for recruiting for an openly gay guild (a brief and to the point reporting of this can be read in a BBC article HERE).
I have been playing Guild Wars for the last eight months. As I look over my list of concerns about WoW I realize that all of those issues have been avoided by the designers of Guild Wars, and this has made for a very enjoyable game experience for me. Guild Wars recently passed the 1 million mark of players, and indication that there is a growing amount of people looking for something a bit different in an MMORPG. Although Guild Wars is not technically a "Massively" MORPG, because game play occurs in private instanced worlds and the only fully public areas of the game are in towns, it still compares in many ways to WoW.
So here are my questions: Is there some compelling aspect to the WoW game format that I am missing? Is there something about the particular aspects of the overall design of the game that adds to the social experiment aspect to playing WoW? Is it worth throwing down some money just to experience that for myself?
I came across a post over at New Game Plus that consists of excerpts from a survey conducted with women who play World of Warcraft. I haven't yet experienced the game phenomena affectionately known as "World of Warcrack" (for its addictive nature), but I found New Game Plus' post to be very interesting to read through.
Read the survey results at New Game Plus HERE.
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