It appears to me, from my outsider perspective, that game designers often talk about how to solve the social problems in MMOs. How do you solve griefing? You remove the points of competition, except in arenas where it is appropriate for there to be player vs player conflict. How do you get players to cooperate? You provide benefits for aiding in a kill, you enable the joining of groups automatically or with a few clicks. Or you remove the concept of ‘grouping’ entirely.

So players play ‘together’. Yet they don’t often talk. It is the act of conversing that enables a situation to form where a more permanent bond can form. Without conversation, the exchange of text and ideas and emotion, you do not get the creation of persistent networks. Think about how lonely guild chat gets. It is those networks that create ‘social stickiness’ within a game.

While Warcraft has all the hallmarks of convenience these days, it certainly started out with a lot of dialogue surrounding the very act of creating a group. Whatever the game looks like now, it started out with many more conversations inherent in the way players interacted with each other. I must point out that this was absolutely not unique in the MMO genre at the time, so I’m not saying this is why WoW is successful. I’m just pointing out that this was a condition inherent in it’s formative years. Along with griefing, and bugs, and 40 man raids, and many other things that seem antiquated and inconvenient now. While Warcraft’s massive popularity was certainly not due to this creation of dialogue in the player base, the fact that there was conversation is one that has helped to result in the general ‘stickiness’ of the player base.

People like me dabble in other games, but WoW hangs at the back of our minds because so many of our friends are there. Or they still have connections there.

Games these days are launching with less nudges for clunky text exchanges. They’re launching with no need to converse over forming a group, even if in the ‘old world’ prior to LFG systems this would have been a short hand trade channel advert.

Words have power, and when your gaming experience lacks either the written word or the verbal one, it becomes inherently less social. Yes, playing together does not inherently need communication - Journey and various other games show us that. But for those other characters on the screen to become more than NPCs to us, the players behind need to communicate. Otherwise other players are simply ‘there’.

Now, I don’t always want to talk to anyone in my games. Games shouldn’t HAVE to involve awkward social situations after all. Yet, I feel this is an avenue which is neglected. Fan-made works – art, videos, podcasts, blogs, and social networks spread the stickiness of the game because it creates dialogue between players and fans outside the game. Perhaps we need to look more at how conversations are facilitated and created within games.

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: MMO, mmorpgs, Social Activism, social gaming, Twitter, warcraft, words mean things, World of Warcraft
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

This is a long-standing bug-bear of mine, ever since the Real ID debacle in World of Warcraft, but has been brought to the front of my mind by the rudimentary systems available in Guild Wars 2.  The game has only just launched, and the design teams will be focused on fixing all of those bugs, rather than building new features. I fully do not expect any MMO to launch with perfect social apparatus, but it still astounds me that the social apparatus so often seems like an afterthought.

Always online, always connected

ArenaNet have  implemented a BattleTag style account wide friendlist. This is a step in the right direction – keeping friendships and guild linkages at the account level instead of on the player level removes a lot of redundancy and adds much convenience. Players will also post on the official forums under their tag, meaning that their contribution to the wider community will be much more visible. This unified friendlist is mostly awesome, except that the ability to hide from guildies and friends on an alt is completely missing. That said – is the ability to hide relevant in this day and age of being always connected to social networks, email and IMs via Smartphones? ArenaNET has avoided most of the Real ID weaknesses – the service is global, has statuses, and does not use your real name.

Just as Blizzard wised up and made remote guild chat an integral service rather than a premium extra, the ArenaNet team announced prior to launch that they plan to bring GW2 to smartphones and tablets. Rift still has the gold standard in mobile apps, but the more MMOs give their customers useful mobile apps, the better it is for you and me. ArenaNet has always been about removing the barriers that stop people playing together, and other MMOs are falling in line with this reasonings. By enabling players to be connected even when not at their computer, and centralizing identity via the Tag system, MMOs are finally catching up with the way that people actually play their games and connect with their gaming friends outside of games.

Reaching out – Social Media and MMOs

ArenaNet shows a lot of social media savey in general, and this is very obvious from the way in which the CMs quickly stepped up to the plate on Twitter and Facebook in response to the headstart problems that Guild Wars 2 faces.  Their zero tolerance policy may or may not yield results in the long run, but the attempt makes me want them to succeed (I have similar ~feels~ about the Trion team.) During development, the CMs kept the game in focus through engaging with GW2 bloggers and tweeters, and generally supporting community, so it was something of a surprise to me that the game did not launch with something similar to RIFTconnect. Players in Rift are able to tweet, facebook or tumblr from the game with a simple inline command – and can even send screenshots straight to any of these social services. This feature was initially very successful for raising awareness of all the cool stuff in Rift, and allows players to communicate with their twitter friends seamlessly from the game.

The feature isn’t without it’s downsides. If you follow a lot of people, then twitter easily drowns out in-game chat in the chat window. If you forget to adjust your defaults, you run the risk of spamming your twitter/facebook/tumblr followers with achievements and discoveries.

I think a lot of GW and WoW players may well respond that they don’t WANT social media in their game. I know many MMO players who are openly disdainful of social media, so I can understand the lack of motivation to spend development resources on such a feature. I’m also hoping that they’re the sort of thing that ArenaNet will add in later, once launch wrinkles are finally gone.

Multiple guilds – not so multiple

The idea of belonging to multiple-guilds does not live up to what I was hoping for. I understand that it is not fair to allow players to garner benefits from all guilds they are a member of, and that it would be unbalanced for a character to contribute influence to multiple guilds at once. I do. I just wish that the communication/social functions of guilds were not tied to the ‘Represent’ toggle.

Currently, Guild membership is held at the account level, but active participation in a guild is controlled by the player at character level. This means that choosing to Represent your PvP guild while you arse around in the Mists results in cutting off your access to the guild chat of your RP or PvE guild. It’s fantastic that a player can treat their guild choice as a kind of running buffet, while removing the administration for guild leaders. It’s fantastic that I can ‘be in’ multiple guilds, but frustrating that it creates a social barrier.

I’ve seen a few other bloggers criticising ArenaNet for going so far with a great feature, but not carrying it on to the next step – mainly in regards to the Bank/Collections system and crafting. The guild interface and multiple guilds is another example of that. Perfectly functional, but it could have been just that bit more often. Just as you can view multiple guild rosters at once, I think you should be able to access multiple guild chats.

There are some minor interface tweaks that could be done as well, currently I find the interface doesn’t really make that much intuitive sense. Plus you get guild management functions popping up in bizarre places like the party interface. Hopefully the UX team will be taking a look at that in due course.

Social cues

Guild Wars 2 is also missing a few other things which are odd. Things I didn’t even realise I would miss. Things like guild/officer notes that help guilds sort out just who is who in this brave new GW2 world. As I throw a mix of new guildies together from a variety of sources, it would help if I could add identifying marks on the guild roster.

For me, what made Guild Wars 2 feel a bit lonely with regards to connecting with friends, was that the ‘always online’ nature of the account-guild relationship means that player presence is not telegraphed to any of the people they might be connected to. Think about things like guild achievement spam, the ‘welcome to the guild’ wall of text that often greets new recruits, or even the simple act of saying ‘hello’ to someone when they come online. There is none of that. There’s no sign of these social connections unless you’re looking at the guild or friend pane every five minutes.

Couple that with a simple thing like targeted emotes not doing anything, and the complete lack of /hello, /bye /thank, and GW2 is missing both some basic opportunities that prompt players into talking to each other, and the apparatus to encourage micro-interactions out in the field. What GW2 lacks is not co-operative gameplay opportunities, but the framework for conversations created by guild and social activity information. ‘Person X has come online’ is not a requirement for talking to a friend, but it’s the sort of nudge that has made Facebook successful, and World of Warcraft into the critical mass of players that it is.

(Please note that I understand it is early days yet for Guild Wars 2, and I’m loving a lot about the game in general)

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: ArenaNet, Community, gaming social, Guild, Guild Leadership, Guild Wars 2, interface design, nudges, social engineering, Social functions, social media, Twitter
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

Save up for that 3pt Healing Skill

The default one is fine, but man alive, the 3 point one will kick it’s ass and make your life so much easier during early levelling. I am playing a Norn warrior, and the 3pt healing skill is a regen passive with a flat rate heal. The default scales with your adrenaline.

Buy gathering tools immediately

Not only is it an easy way to make money, once the Trading Post works, but it’s necessary for any of your eventual trade skills. This is probably obvious to most veteran MMO players, but worth remembering if you’re a disorganised person like me.

Be wary of levelling your trade skills immediately

Don’t do what I did and blow a wad of silver (which is in tight supply to begin with) on trade skill items. You’re basically paying to level (and the buff food is lovely, but it does only last for 15 minutes.) If you’re going to do it, set a budget!

The Digital Deluxe Edition was not worth it

So I got some cool stuff, but I didn’t read the fine print while I was in the throes of saving my characters name and have in the process lost a lot of the ‘one off’ buffs available. Why? I’m rather used to Rift and other games, where you get the ‘buff’ items on all your characters whenever you create them. Hmm.

I’m really enjoying this ‘do anything’ thing.

Like, one minute I’m protecting a lady chasing a Jackalope, the next I’m a Snow Leopard. And then I might wander off and throw some snowballs at kids and it all COUNTS. Helping to ressurect someone during battle nets you experience. Going back to an earlier area and helping with events nets you karma, copper, and experience. And then there are vistas, and skill challenges, and points of interest! If you talk to NPCs you get to work on your character traits too!

I’m alone

There has been a thread of conversation in the blogosphere lately about individualist vs collectivist. Guild Wars 2 is at it’s heart individualist – but this often what a lot of MMO designers say they want. They want the player to be the hero. You can only do that if the experience for the player is as smooth and ‘you centric’ as you can make it.

While I think the omission of a /thank emote is a glaring oversight (as pointed out by Siha) I have noticed that I am more willing to throw myself into a fight involving others. Early on it was a big free for all, and very confusing, but as I mastered my skills and figured out how things worked without the triad, I found myself grouping up wordlessly and working well with strangers.

This fella wants bunny food. You can carry the food and get knocked over by bunnies, or you can scare bunnies away from someone carrying food. You can help. You both get credit. Someone has bitten off more than they can chew and is now a jam stain on the road. I see their ‘dead player icon’ and run across the map to help. Most of the time. As our understandings of conditions improve, we find ourselves paying more attention to positioning.

It all adds up.

Am I still alone? No, I’m in a world filled with thousands of players. Just because I’m not talking, it doesn’t mean I’m not playing with anyone.

Siha also pointed out that you can’t help anyone complete quests in the same way that you can in WoW (group kills and the like) and this is true, but I think it might just be a different way of defining ‘helping’ and ‘working together’ in MMOs.

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Post tags: ArenaNet, cooperative game play, Early Access, Guild Wars 2, MMO, mmorpgs, rambles
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

However, they did something very deliberate with that trailer. What would have been easier for them would have been reviving the orc and elf that battle in the cinematic for World of Warcraft. Yet they did not chose to resurrect the night druid. Instead they invoked the classic image from the box of Tides of Darkness.

Okay, so the details are somewhat different. The box above is also based on Orcs vs Humans but the naval ‘setting’ of the MoP trailer definitely invokes the pirate-y looks of the above pair. Given what Blizzard have been saying about this expansion being ‘about’ Azerothian conflicts as much as drunk panda bears, this design choice makes very good sense. As much as I would have preferred a kickass orc woman, or even the night elf druid as opposed to the chin-a-licious human male – Blizzard deliberately set out to invoke this particular image. But with less hats.

Which is a shame, because then it would have been Pirates vs Ninjas.

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Post tags: Blizzard, gender, Mists of Pandaria, mop trailer, orcs vs humans, trailer, Warcraft 2
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

However, shockingly, I want to focus on how Hemingway ‘s faux paus concerning the Mechromancer class and the one confirmed skill tree, Best Friends Forever, is indicative of how the tools/principles of game design systemise certain ways of thinking about bodies and gender. A caveat here – I am not a designer. I just do a lot of analysis of things that I love.

Character leads design

“The design team was looking at the concept art and thought, you know what, this is actually the cutest character we’ve ever had. I want to make, for the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to understand the game and to play the game? That’s what our attempt with the Best Friends Forever skill tree is.”

- John Hemingway via Eurogamer

The ‘mode’ in question is a skill tree, so the character – a cute, punky, youthful woman, with a mechanical arm- can be a little more forgiving for a newer player who is playing alongside a more experienced player (or perhaps another inexperienced player, who knows.) The above quote suggests, to me, that the design of the character came before the desire to implement such a skill tree.

Mechromancer Concept via Eurogamer

The character looks relatively non-threatening, therefore it is generally easier for a designer to hang ‘friendly’ mechanics on them. I’m not familiar with Borderlands 2 beyond a very quick glance, so please note that I am not saying this is something that Gearbox make a habit of – merely that sometimes in games, function seems to follow form. Which is all very well and good, but I think this probably allows ingrained thinking to continue, when you realise that the forms that most often cause questions in critical analysis of games are gendered female. And highly idealised. And have inspired an entire mini-industry in the algorithms known as ‘Jiggle Physics‘.

Function following form becomes a problem when the physiques of designed female game fit into a much smaller number of archetypes than those of male characters. This problematical shortcut is perpetuated as gaming, coding and geek culture passes on the training, the knowledge of ‘how to design a game’ to the next generation, along with the in-jokes and the social behaviours.

A rich tapestry of design

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the way that art direction and game design interact something of mystery, because it is a process that rarely happens in front of the player. Game designers, in the MMO World, will often converse with the player base about class balance and such like. Questions about art generally centre on character design, and art and animation that directly impacts on the avatar/identity of the player.

Art in games often seems to be an artefact of over-all design – a fireball graphic to increase the fun factor, an AoE spell to telegraph to players what the next action should be. Game writing, I believe, lives in a similar symbiosis with the design of mechanics. In the end, the many elements come together to make the tapestry that is the game experience, but the mechanics remain the core.

Designing emotional manipulation

Going back to Brazie’s post, one quote in particular got me thinking about all this stuff in the first place

“Just as visual cues can appeal to the ingrained survival instinct, so too can an appeal to the human belief in saving others. Place a small girl or helpless character at risk and players will often try to take steps to save them.”

- Alexander Brazie via Breaking Open The Black Box

Just to place this post in context for you, it is part of a series of posts where Brazie discusses game design principles. His whole blog is well worth reading and following. Now, part of the job of a certain type of game is to manipulate us emotionally. Look at the huge outpouring of emotion over the Mass Effect series (and other Bioware games), think about the feelings evoked by Dear Esther. ‘Fun’ as a concept is completely enmeshed in emotions, and the outcomes of those emotions. ‘Small girl at risk’ is here an emotional stimuli to motivate the player, and so the character design of such a small girl is an example of form now following function. While this is in opposition to the function-follows-form of the Mechromancer, the form that is chosen for that narrow example is representative of the habit of a narrative shortcut. (Note that the Borderlands character Tiny Tina is character that takes great glee in subverting that particular expectation of the young female body.)

What I found particularly interesting about this short quote from a very short post, is that it illustrates perfectly how a game designer is going to be acting as a director or writer, even as they get absorbed in building an encounter like Netherspite (I’m so happy I know who to blame for that now, Brazie.) How much ‘storytelling’ training DO game designers get these days? Does the disconnect between overarching narrative and ancillary story products (such as the books) need breaking down more in modern MMOs. I hope there is a movement in that direction, although from what I’ve heard, the creation of quest lore and narrative often remains utterly separate to character focused endeavours such as the books.

These design short cuts aren’t always a good thing

We often forget that the gaming medium is still young, compared to the written word and the oral tradition of storytelling. Young even compared to TV and films. They are a monumental creative and collaborative effort, and there are hundreds of voices involved in the creation of an overall ‘game experience’. As new designers entire the industry – how do they learn the skills and approaches that Brazie is slowly uncovering in his blog? From mentors, from books written by people in the industry, and from the newly education programs at universities. From, essentially, the men and women who have struggled through the fledgling stages, made the mistakes, and now have the profession at the point where it is a real career goal.

This is an industry where casual sexism is so deeply ingrained that discussions about fake geek girls still happen, and well known ‘professional gamers’ stand up to defend the sort of abuse that even football (soccer) leagues now fine fans and players for. I hope that self-aware designers are looking at the way that game design is learned, and how it encourages game designers to view characters in games. Obviously, sometimes NPCs are there to be emotional stimuli, or to impart information to a player; but recognising the way in which taught design principles can systemize the presentation of gender, race, disability, religion and sexuality in game is a first, and positive step.

As, I suppose, would some PR training for your lead designers. Unless you’re specifically after the social media kerfuffle in order to raise awareness amongst the ‘traditional’ demographic, that is.

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 8 comments | Post tags: Alexander Brazie, Borderlands 2, design systems, Game design, game design principles, Gearbox, Ludology, Mechromancer, Narratology
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

Decoding Dragons is branching out into the manufacture of tasty tasty sweet chilli crisps in the form of DRAGONSNACKERS™. Each DRAGONSNACKERS™ crisp is guaranteed to have that extra hint of brimstone flame. Taste-testing was carried out by Deathwing. Further product lines will be available in due course.

(Huge thanks to @catulla for saying things that lead to the phrase ‘DRAGONSNACKERS’ appearing in my brain, and to Gazimoff for surprising me with the packaging concept!)

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: dork patrol, dragonsnackers, gigglesnort, it's dangerous out there, snacks are important
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

When I was a youngster, I devoured Sci-fi and fantasy books at a very large rate. I imagine that many of the people who are likely to read this did so too. I read LOTR when I was about 7 or 8, and followed it up with the Silmarillion not long after. I read Game of Thrones when I was about 12 or 13. I remember this because I recall my reaction to Daenerys’ predicament, and the revelation that she was my age.

My Dad, who is the awesome geek who is responsible for raising me on a steady diet of David Bowie, Jethro Tull, classic Scifi, LOTR and Red Dwarf, used to look upon my discovery of old authors with a benign sort of amusement. The amusement lasted until I made him read something. His reaction came in two flavours.

“I forgot I read this”

This particular one happened with alarming frequency. Or at least it was alarming to him. I was possibly highly entertained. At the time I couldn’t understand how anyone could forget these amazing reader experiences. There are moments when I wish I could read that scene in Game of Thrones, as though it were the first time. Times when I wish I could absorb THAT moment in Fledgling again. But forget? Nah.

Except that has started to happen to me now. I come across books, and start to read them because the names and synopsis are so completely unfamiliar to me and then I get a moment of ‘Uh, oh. It’s that book!’ I get very disappointed when this happens. Books don’t last me long, as consumable entertainment, so I feel cheated when my memory actually goes to the effort to the point that I know I’ve read a particular book before.

Other times I won’t remember until the last couple of pages of the book, in which case all is well. But hey, even I get old.

Playing older games is a bit like this. I know I played Duke Nuke’m, Secrets of Monkey Island. I know I played an Alien game on something that was probably an Amstrad. I know I played Chucky Egg, and Myst. Do I remember any specifics? No. But I remember that I loved them. It’s becoming much the same way with my early WoW experiences. There is no way to get those times back, tied up as they were in a different phase of my life when WoW was my escape.

“Oh, it’s another one of those”

This second response from my Dad, on the topic of books I’ve recommended to him, is more frustrating to me because it represents a moment where my judgement has fallen short. My judgement often falls short when recommending reading material to my Dad (and my friend @minus_caffeine, for that matter) because the man has had time to read and absorb a hell of a lot more storytelling than I have. He also values new experiences, as well as quality. Getting that balance right is hard at the best of times. For instance, I’m not certain I’d bother recommending that Brandon Sanderson series to him. It’s exactly the sort of book that he’d find tiresome because it tries to do new things, and falls somewhat short when it comes to actual execution. And not actually being that new.

That is not a critique of those particular books, but just an indication that it is extremely hard for creators to do something properly fresh in an established genre. Many authors I absolutely love have fallen at the hurdle of ‘Dad is bored with this now’. I’m now getting to an age where many ‘new’ books coming out don’t feel especially fresh or revolutionary to me, even when other rave about them. I really have to dig to find an author that steps outside the standard milieu. But that’s okay – that’s what happens when  one combines memory, pattern recognition, and experience. I suspect most readers will experience similar phases of malaise with their favourite genres, and will similarly find a new way to consume and enjoy the sort of books they’ve historically loved.

What has this got to do with games?

Coming back to the virtual spaces that we’ve all be inhabiting since MUDs opened their doors, the issue is this. Firstly is that narrative and characters need to grow, and evolve. Secondly that the gaming/MMO industry is having to mature at a very rapid rate, as evidenced by the ongoing ‘games as art’ and ‘games and feminism’ and ‘games and other ‘isms’ discussions, and the emergence of credible research communities and programmes in the field of game studies.

We have access to an ever expanding number of games, old and new, through digital downloads and multiple mobile platforms. Mediums like Tablets/iPads are bringing board games to videogaming. We have games like Dear Esther that prompt discussions about agency and narrative.

Yet these huge, massive MMOs that promise us so much, will always be battling against ‘Oh yes, I’ve played this before’ or ‘Oh man, this is so much like x Game.’ A while back I compared Rift and World of Warcraft to two different novels by Terry Pratchett, and the comparison was appropriate, but I think the Books/Games metaphor can be carried a little further. Yes, I know the player has a huge influence on how their MMO experience develops (through choice of in-game progression paths, character identity, guild choice, participation in group activities) and this isn’t something that is present in books, but a game is still a supposedly cohesive presentation of consumable and modifiable content, allowing a player to have an experience through a number of mechanics that will be somewhat familiar to them.

Still with me? I’m not sure I’m with me yet, so it is okay if you’re not!

Authors play with narrative devices, structures, grammatical rules. They break them and and follow them, and do all sorts of things with words in order to present us with the BOOK EXPERIENCE. The publisher adds to the BOOK EXPERIENCE throw marketing, covers, related images, editing and commissioning the rest of a series. The ebook revolution may be changing this formula slightly. Yet the regular reader will navigate the narrative of a book in much the same way every time, and we don’t get tired of the the overall format of ‘reading’.

With gaming, a similar thing holds true. A player of FPS games does not get grumpy because Half Life 24.546 includes a first person perspective and some shooting. And the point here isn’t that ‘fresh new story telling’ is needed to make a new FPS something special in terms of sales and a GAME EXPERIENCE. Nor even that MMOs do. MMOs do a particular job, and each next gen MMO re-iterates familiar formulas in the attempt to give us a newly compelling experience. All in the name of shareholders.

But I’ve had nearly 8 years in MMOs. As fondly as I look back on my first 2 years of roleplaying and regular raiding, it ain’t never going to be like that again. And I have to accept that with my experiences in games, and fantasy ones in particular, that I’m always going to have a sense of ‘oh, its this again.’ I’m rarely ever going to be alleviated of that brick, unless I play something I’ve truly never experienced before. I can’t expect the game developers to come and take that brick away for me – I need to find some way to carry it, or some way to put it down, while I go about my usual business of consuming games that otherwise bring me a large amount of fun and relaxation.

Excuse me, I think Guild Wars 2 has a stress test tomorrow, and I want to see if I can learn to play my Shadow Priest again in the time.

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Gaming, memories, MMO, mmorpgs, narrative, personal, rambles
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

All the little elements I’ve mentioned – the lore that gets deeper as you look, the rifts themselves being connected to the zones, the ability to skip quests you really don’t like without losing the greater thread, the artifacts (what archaeology should have been) it builds up to a satisfying whole. The game has heart.

I’m not sure if I’d agree with that at this point, but both ‘games having heart’ and ‘soulless MMOs’ are very very odd ways to talk about games and gaming, at face value. Let’s take a look at a couple of quotes from bloggers who have used such phrases more recently.

Guild Wars 2 lacks soul, in my opinion. And, while I mean this affectionately, if I’m going to play a soulless MMO with a great development team then it’s going to be RIFT.
- Liore, Herding Cats

This is the quote that prompted me to asking “Why do I feel this game has a soul, and Liore doesn’t. Also what the hell is a digital construct doing having a soul?” Thus, an exploration of ‘soul’ in MMOs was born.

To me, SWTOR feels like another predictable and soulless experience. It’s akin to a slick Hollywood blockbuster movie with cardboard good guys and bad guys with copious amounts of explosions and special effects thrown in for good measure.
- Wolfshead, Wolfshead Online

Wolfshead can always be relied on to dislike a theme-park MMO. Although all the quotes I’ve included here focus on Rift, SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, I think we can assume that Wolfshead probably has the same criticism of the behemoth that is WoW.

I hate Rift as a game. The content that was around when I left was soulless (get it), dumbed down, and just not what I wanted out of an MMO. What was an interesting evolution of the themepark model in beta ended up being a 2011 version of current themepark design at launch.
- Syncaine, Hardcore Casual

Syncaine is another critic of theme-park MMOs. I’m not sure what changed between beta and launch to prompt such hate for Rift, but at least there was a pun involved. In any case, from the above three quotes it is possible to see that there is this conception that games need to have ‘soul’ in order to be an attractive proposition for a player. I doubt most of us would articulate this need in such a way, so I’m going to say that I think for a game to have soul, the player needs to be able to forge an emotional connection with either the virtual space, or the characters and other players within the game. At least for the purposes of this rambling article.

What makes a game soulless?

How can a digital construct that doesn’t even lay claim to imitating personhood be talked of in terms of a soul? Strictly, it can’t, but like most people I could easily talk about the soul of an old house. The old house has character and all the cracks and bumps and bruises contribute to that, the marks of humans living out their lives within the walls of the house. It’s a way of feeling connected to a building. Alternatively, a city centre tower block will often be seen as a soulless construct, despite the thousand of people living out their lives within it’s offices and public spaces. An ancient church in the middle of rolling english fields is romanticised due to generations of focus on the community rituals and experiences shared within, yet now it lies empty due to the secluarisation of the country and it can still be said to have soul.

What does a game share with a building? It’s a construct, though digital, created by many hands. The NPCs and animations are figuratively created and moved by the will of the animators and designers, the feel and function and mechanics of the construct are created by massive collaborative effort for the consumption of thousands of customers. A building is created through the artistic vision of the architect, and then modified by the owners, the project managers, engineers and the thousands of workers that make the initial plan a reality.

So is it this plurality of creators that renders a virtual world ‘soulless’? Videogames, with their narrative elements, are more often compared to films as the ‘other narrative popular medium’. Now, the videogame industry exceeds the film industry in terms of revenue these days, but films have a greater tradition of popular criticism. Film industry traditionalists  criticise the new technology of CGI for being ‘soulless’, so the completely computer generated gaming industry is already fighting a rear-guard action when it comes to the percieved authenticity and emotional heart of a game.

Creating emotional heart

This post came about mainly because of Liore describing Guild Wars 2 as soulless, and then going onto describe RIFT the same way. No piece of digital media can hope to please everyone, and her comment got me examining my own perceptions of Guild Wars 2 (having played the beta) and Rift.

To take a closer look at Guild Wars 2 – the art work and lighting is absolutely stunning. The game is beyond beautiful without trying to be photo-realistic. One of the original trailers for Guild Wars 2 had one of the developers talking about how the game should feel ‘hand-crafted’. In terms of having an emotional centre, that feeling of lovingly created environments is a very good start. Every time I pan the camera around, there are beautiful vistas almost every angle feels like a natural world. The game is huge, and the snatches of conversation I hear as my character wanders around, the way the wind moves through the grass, it feels like a wonderful MMO.

But didn’t I say similar things about Rift? Well, yes, but by the time I got to the end of the levelling curve I was tired of  desert, and the lack of social interaction. After the visual clarity of WoW, I started to find the pretty graphics of Rift inaccessible. The more disconnected from the game I felt, the less heart and charm the game seemed to have. To give a game heart, players need to feel an emotional connection to the world. To say that a film, whether big budget or indie, has charm is to say that the film has succeeded in charming the viewer. To say that a game has heart is to say that it makes the player’s heart (or emotional swell) respond.

The emotional heart of a game comes in part from the central vision of the game, the themes explored by over-arching plots and the atmosphere crafted by the game creators. Diablo 3 is an incredibly monetized game, with emotional connections forged by players who have been waiting for 15 years, yet the emotional heart of the game comes not from the rather simplistic story, but from the atmosphere, music, and the attention to detail displayed in the character animations and the addictive gameplay.

Warcraft has the home advantage

As with many things, WoW has the advantage in that millions of players have already forged emotional connections with the game, the community, and the game world. After not logging for a while, the soaring music of Stormwind as one flies through the front gates still tugs at the heart strings. There’s a lot to be said for the emotional centre created by the veritable mountain of memories created by raid triumphs and failures, by RP moments, by silly guild events involving ogre suits and fireworks. Rift, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World have to fight against 6 years of emotional highs and lows, of the rituals of WoW raiding and PvP (at least in my case.)

How do I forge a connection with a world that is completely new to me? Despite the gorgeous graphics, as an MMO veteran, a game world of a new MMO is always seen as a construct first, and a ‘digital world’ second. Despite the ratty graphics and legacy designs of Warcraft, the landscape of Azeroth has left an indelible mark my history as a gamer. For many others, previous and concurrent Blizzard games will mean that the emotional connection to Azeroth goes even further.

Questing to create a connection

And this is why the ‘questing’ and social aspects of new games really are the make or break features of a new MMO. Firstly there is building on and evolving a system that has bridged from game to game. Secondly there is the relaying of narrative that helps players connect to the stories of NPCs and to their own tales. Guild Wars 2 eschews the linear narrative approach in the way that players interact with the world. A renown heart, on it’s own, has very little story connected to it. Instead the Renown hearts, the continuing events, create the overall background of an area. I’d even go far as to say that every single zone is a quest, and how a player interacts with the Hearts determines how much or how little of the zone narrative you chose. For me it harks back to the early days of questing in WoW where there were some quest chains, but many individual quests that could go in any order.

Which is not the same thing as min-maxing travel time and XP.

The Hearts definitely appeal to the explorer, but they could appeal to the narrative junky if the player takes the time to talk to the zone scouts.

So emotional heart? Well Guild Wars 2 does that for me whenever it starts to tackle issues of gender and parenthood, because those are the issues that matter to me. Whenever I hear a female charr growling “Kitten’s got a sword too” in answer to a patronising male charr, I cheer inside. For me the game has heart because it’s clear that the developers and artists really believe in what they’re doing. The game feels designed with a gamer like me in mind, and I’m not even that much of a PvPer!

On the other foot, Star Wars: The Old Republic hinges it’s emotional connections on how well the storylines are written, and on the playerbase’s emotional connection to the Star Wars IP. Rift was always going to be battling against the lack of established IP, and the juvenile nature of it’s storylines let it down in the early days. My initial reaction on hearing about the dragons and planes was “Seriously? What happens when they run out of dragons?” Trion have managed to balance out a shallowness of concept by setting the gold standard in terms of content release and response to issues. Yet the dynamic content doesn’t really connect with players on an emotional level (at least not in my experience), and the questing is questing we all know and love. Players who love and enjoy the game, and it’s souls, will have found and made those emotional connection with other players  and the stories of the game. I still have fond memories of solving some of the various puzzles and discovering caches, and those moments of triumph helped  me to forge that connection with the game and start to see it as a game with soul.

What is ‘soul’ again?

I seem to have defined it here as ‘having an emotional centre’, but that is a very ambiguous phrase. Does a game have soul if it was crafted and created with love and passion, or because the designers created a stage suitable for the enactment of ritual, friendship, and emotional highs and lows? I suspect it’s a little of both. There is a tendency to see large companies as faceless entities, with games created by committee with revenue models in mind, and to forget about the passionate individuals that want to create games they want to play. Yet the biggest MMO of all probably has more soul in it, invested by millions of players and thousands of developers and contributors, than the smaller game that is attempting to evolve the MMO genre.

Hence the magic of social features. Rift remains quietly successful and has fabulous social features and connectivity, and many MMO bloggers continue to praise Trion, and I suspect I would find the game a much more emotionally charged experience if I were to start playing it again now. At the moment the personal story in Guild Wars 2 leaves much to be desired, and the emotional connection for me comes from discovering a more motion-based combat style, and hearing of the struggles of Charr females and Norn women. I have no clue if that will persist for me once the game goes live, or if I will find the launch day game lacking in emotional centre. Whether a game is Soulless or not is certainly not an objective thing, in my opinion.

I haven’t touched upon the ‘soul’ of expansions, or on The Secret World, Wildstar, or any number of new MMOs. Do you think my conception of a ‘soul’ for a game is the correct one? There are certainly other things that one could mean by it!

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 16 comments | Post tags: ArenaNet, Blizzard, emotional connection, Gaming, Guild Wars 2, MMO, mmorpgs, narrative, rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Trion, World of Warcraft
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

I’m trying to marshal my thoughts on this because there is so much to deconstruct. In some ways that is a very good thing – the last thing I want to do is exit the cinema after a film and not care about it. However my criticisms and thoughts are on several levels – implementation, intention, and there is a hint of the intersectional.

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Read the full post of [Movie] Prometheus : Well there is certainly a lot of smoke (2,070 words) at decodingdragons.com (This cut means there is spoilers, I always endeavour to ensure that my feed is otherwise un-truncated.)

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: Android, Charlize Theron, David, Elizabeth Shaw, Fassbender, films, Meredith Vickers, movie reviews, Noomi Rapace, Prometheus, spoilers
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.

If not narcotics

As someone with a bit of a bent for so-called ‘Social Justice blogging’, I regularly call out things that I feel are problematic. This might be detailed analysis of the way a company handles being called out over a particular turn of phrase  (a’la Blizzard and Geek Chic Cosmetics), or it might be a more textual analysis of gender roles within a game. So for me the parallel in this phrase comes from those sources. Whenever players like me cry out about the heteronormativity of things like the Goblin Starter Quest, or even when companies like Bioware start introducing Gay and Lesbian romance options; there is invariably someone ready to say ‘why do I have to deal with these real world issues in my game, I just want to have fun’.

I may have paraphrased with that, but essentially it’s another version of the ‘It’s fine as long as it’s not in my face.’ The SF&F world has long prided itself on being more progressive and open-minded than the mainstream. While shows like Star Trek look dated and sexist these days, back in the day they were somewhat revolutionary. Yet the all pervasiveness of the erasure fantasy is going strong.  Not only drugs are supposedly erased from the MMO market, but so are addicts and the associated social problems. Representation of poverty is sanitised, made clean.

Sanitised Narcotics

The Massively article makes mention of Spice in Star Wars Galaxies, and pipeweed in LOTRO. As I understand it, Eve: Online has an actual drugs trade as part of it massive economy, although I am not familiar with the in game mechanics (is it just a commodity, or can you actually take the drug?) In World of Warcraft players are able to buy alcohol, and will experience short lived ‘drunk effects’ – drunkenness is often played for a laugh in game. Blood Elves are known for their addiction to magic, and addiction to magic is a fairly common trope in the SFF world.

Downer Effects

I’ll venture to say that ‘temporary drunk effects’ are probably the most a player will see of withdrawal symptoms, or what the presence of drug addiction can do to a person and their community. While there are great SFF books based around drug addicted protagonists (hello Sherlock), I’m not really certain how that could translate into a playable, fun game for users. I’ve talked about immersion and absorption as goals for world building before, is this one of those cases where things get too real?

However, that, for me, segues back into the discussion of NPCs with disabilities generally not being in games. You might hear of a character in a wheelchair (Oracle springs to mind) but for the most part physical disability is erased from the fantasy/sf world, except in cases where physical deformity is used as a manifestation of mental weakness (i.e. drug-induced madness.)

Presentation of poverty

I haven’t been able to do a lot of research for this post, so please excuse the brevity of the references. In Warcraft the only addicts we actually see represented are the Wretched. In many ways they are remarkably similar to the Broken, who are pretty classic post-apocalyse-survivor types. Their bodies are physical manifestations of their addiction, in the same way that we might associate looking pale, thin and sickly with drug addiction. One crucial point here is that the addiction is accompanied by madness. Representations of mental illness in SFF are generally beyond the pale, so I’m not going to focus on that in this post, but the characterisation of these addicts as being beyond help and something to eradicate is important to note. Sympathy for addicts and recovering addicts is often in short supply in the real world, so it’s not surprising that beings who succumb to their addiction are shunned almost without thought in fantasy. Blood Elf players are shown this attitude to addiction in their starting area.

In many ways this approach is also rife with classism, as it is in the real world. A rich addict can get support and help – in effect they can afford their addiction. A poor person, already marginalised by the education system, jobs, and other factors becomes an outcast even amongst their peers. In a world of limited resources, the only way to cope with someone in this position is to de-humanise them.  In Blood Elf society, we know that Blood Thistle Addicts are looked down on as well, so this disdain for what is seen as weak behaviour is inherent even in an entire race of elves that continues to struggle on a racial level with issues of addiction.

Yes, I know I’m muttering about de-humanising an elf.

In contrast the consumption of alcohol is often played for laughs, or even celebrated because it is much more socially acceptable and not viewed in the same class as narcotics. This is probably due to the ability of millions to partake in moderation, where ‘moderate’ use of any kind of narcotic is pretty much invisible due to it’s illegal nature. Thus when poverty is presented in a game like Warcraft, which is very cartoony, it is often in the form of refugees and bandits (see the current version of Westfall in particular.)

One of the things that struck me about Star Wars: The Old Republic was it’s willingness to show the down side of life – a product both of Bioware being more aware of social issues and one of the original protagonists of the Star Wars movies being a smuggler. It’s hard to be all neutral and all about the contraband if the contraband and it’s consumers aren’t actually in the universe.  I’ve not played SW:TOR for a few months so I cannot easily research exactly how this is presented, but I do seem to recall that drugs and smuggling were definitely something associated with the ‘underdog’ aliens that suffered other economic and social opressions.

Plus, you know, the dark side often seems very much about addiction to power when you first take a look at it. And a second look. And possibly a third look. The fate of Darth Vader is very much tied up in what addiction can do to a person, although poverty certainly doesn’t impact on his life.

Lore and world appropriate

The original Massively article makes a point about game makers sanitising narcotics for the sake of censors and other such things, which in some ways simply baits the reader for a response of ‘well they let all those violent naked chicks through, why does a little drugs hurt’? And in many ways I agree with them. It certainly isn’t appropriate to touch on heroin use in Hello Kitty Online, but seeing as addiction is actually referred to in many more adult MMOs perhaps it is time for developers to think a bit more about how drugs and alcohol are handled in game. A society’s attitudes to alcohol and narcotics is a large part of world building, as it will touch on everything from social traditions and ceremonies, to social entertainment. Attitudes towards substance abuse inform class-stratification, and add depth to the world you’re trying to create.

This is one of the reasons I’m hemming and hawwing about getting an a copy of The Secret World. As an ‘alternate universe’ game set in the real world, it’s approach to sexuality, gender, race, class and disability may well be thrown more into the spotlight than in a game like EvE: Online where you almost may as well not have a humanoid avatar at all. (I have taken to imagining all EvE players to be like the Pilot from Farscape.)

© Pewter for Decoding Dragons, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: drug addiction, intersectionality, Mental Health, narcotics in gaming, poverty in games, rambles, Social Activism, world building
Decoding Dragons: Slaying the kyriarchy, one internet dragon at a time. An intersectional blog about gaming, films, and general geekery, with a healthy portion of gender, sexuality, mental health and anything else that breathes fire on occasion.