World of Warcraft is The Loneliest Road

For all that it is called a massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft is a surprisingly solitary experience. Obviously there are thousands of other people in your world with you, but to play WoW – to enjoy WoW – is to become absorbed in your avatar. You can’t touch, bump into, or otherwise interact with other players without the aid of a spell or weapon. Even public chat via the “say” command, which displays as a speech bubble from your character, leaves no lasting trace of its existence. The spoken word is as ephemeral as the players themselves, and they avoid walking through each other, spread out in group raid photos, to avoid breaking the illusion that they are actually in the world with other players.

WoW remains the most embodied and immuring game I have ever played. Every action and interaction is mediated through your avatar. The story of WoW is your story and it is reflected in every quest text and every suggested goal. You see the world through the prism of your character and while the viewpoint of above and behind gives the illusion of an objective view of Azeroth, you cannot escape the invisible ties that bind you to your character.

You also can’t make other people play better, level up quicker, or keep pace along side you. Anyone who has played for longer than a few minutes knows that all it takes is a little bit of extra time spent questing or grinding to find that your friend who was once the same level as you is now far below (or beyond) your abilities, becoming another cloud of dust on the horizon, another runner in front or behind you on the road. Any attempts to “slow down” the inexorable pull towards the level cap (and beyond, with item acquisition and stat improvement), that elusive goal of perfection and ultimate attainment, are irresistible short of outright rejection. Waiting around for someone else feels like 'wasted time' in the WoW paradigm, and so you’re back to square one. Back to a single player game and grinding alone on trolls in Stranglethorn Vale in the hope of one day reaching the peak at level 60, 70, 80.

Dominic and I tried it a couple of times, first on our original toons (both were Warlocks; I was Daverick, he was Marcos) and then later with our alternatives. By then I was onto Davethree (literally named as such) and he was a Warrior. Dominic was a Paladin. We spent a fantastic afternoon one day in the twilight days of ’07 working together on quests as per the instructions in the popular Jame’s Leveling Guide. He enjoyed collecting a number of enemies on himself while I swung a selection of large swords at them.

That afternoon we fought trolls, goblins, tigers, panthers, crocodiles and other players and enjoyed the simple pleasure of having each other’s company. We were glad not to have to travel that section of the loneliest road alone. Inevitably though, school and other commitments made him log off for a while and an abundance of time left me to plod along by myself. I rapidly out-leveled him.

We met up again, months down the track. By then I was 70, and he was still 68. Getting keyed and geared for Karazhan was my goal while he was still grinding mobs in Blade’s Edge, focusing on the inexorable accumulation of experience points. The loneliest road took us to 70 separately and resisted our best efforts and resolutions to “stick together”.

Tolkien placed these words into the mouth of Bilbo Baggins;

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

World of Warcraft will do more than sweep you away. Like an overflowing river that has burst its banks, it stands ready to break apart the group of unwary travellers that attempt to cross it. The current will carry them downstream for miles one by one - how far it carries them wil be governed by how well they can swim. I was a WoW player and I was carried off by myself for 18 months. How about you?

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This post was inspired by the recent discussion of World of Warcraft and the addicting nature of some videogames on the Idle Thumbs podcast – episode 25 ‘pause theme from battletoads’.

Frank Bilders is Dead

The water was cool and refreshing on my hot skin. I was dirty and sweaty, my clothes stained with grime and blood, some my own, some other peoples. It felt bad to be this clean and refreshed after what I'd just done, and to add to my feeling of guilt it was all premeditated.

Frank Bilders is now dead. I killed him with his own sidearm – a somewhat tarnished .50 caliber desert eagle pistol. I tell you this detail not because it’s important (although the image of that weapon will be forever stamped in my mind) but to distract from the painful sense of culpability I feel for his murder.

I mean, I knew Frank stood a good chance of getting hurt but I had hoped that something with the missions execution would go lethally awry, saving me from having to get any more blood on my hands. Every time we work together the man seemed to take another bullet wound. ‘Heh, just another scar to add to the collection’, he would say. Always focused on the job at hand, was Frank. ‘There’s some bugger out there who cut me out of a deal, and I want him dead’, he’d say in his Northern Irish swagger. No need for a reason, or context - Frank wanted something done, and you were going to do it for him.

When the time came, and he was lying on the ground writhing in pain, the situation hadn’t really forced my hand. I had plenty of syrettes, there was time and I could have saved him, but I wanted him out of the way. So instead of his healing his wounds with medicine I took out his own gun and shot him in the mouth. I hesitated, mind you– I very nearly couldn’t pull it off. But I did, and his body is now lying on a road somewhere in Sefapane, gathering flies and a layer of the all pervasive red dust. And I’m swimming up the river. Getting clean. Getting refreshed. There is no music, no victory anthem. Just the water and the noise my body makes as I move through it.

And Frank Bilders is dead.

October Round Table: Playing Halo with my Mother

'It’s a Family Affair': This month’s Round Table invites you to explore your earliest memories of playing games with your family.

How does one shoehorn family and videogames into the same sentence? In my case it’s to say that the two never were in the same sentence. As a pre-adolescent, and then as a teenager, videogames were an escape from the bullying I received while at school, and – for my parents – a welcome method of keeping me occupied for a while at home. I will admit that, as a child, I was one that demanded a lot of attention from parents and caregivers, and it was probably a happy day when they were able to sit me down with SimTower and not have to worry about keeping me occupied for an hour.

When I reached an age old enough to have my own computer (around 14 if memory serves) I began to spend entire Saturdays locked away in my bedroom playing games like the original Half-Life, Black & White, Baldur’s Gate and anything else I could pirate from friends. So it really wasn’t until last year that the phrases “my parents” and “videogames” ever really started to go together in any sentence that wasn’t an admonishment about spending so much time on my computer.

When my mother noticed how much fun my brother and I had when playing cooperatively in the Halo series of games (and how much of our focus it took away from useful and productive things like chores, eating, etc.) she declared that, it looked like fun and that one day you’ll have to show me how to play Halo. And so my brother and I introduced mum to the Halo games.

Yes, she was pretty bad at first, but she made good progress, and the fact that we played cooperatively meant it was an easy learning curve for her. The thing it made me realise, however, was just how much accumulated skill we as gamers now possess – more specifically, the ability to rapidly adapt to new control schemes and button mappings. When my brother and I played The Orange Box on Xbox 360, we perhaps took 15 minutes to become reasonably competent at the Valve variant of console shooter controls, whereas my mother with her near complete lack of previous gamepad experience still has trouble moving and looking at the same time after a number of hours playing.

So I learnt a lot from playing with family – there is such an amazing level of knowledge that we gamers take for granted. When we complain about ‘arbitrary’ control schemes, I now take a minute and think about how, well really, all control schemes are largely arbitrary to you also happen to have a similar shared gaming background. I mean, why does shoot always have to be under the right index finger? Just because that’s what we use that when shooting a physical gun? Okay, that’s a bad example because maybe there is something to be said for some button mappings, but jump as A? That’s also reasonably standard, and there is no correspondence between using your legs and pressing A with your thumb.

Thinking back to it now, when I first played Half-Life all those years ago, I had no-one to tell me about the WASD control scheme. Imagine if, instead of looking into the control mapping and thinking oh, that’s interesting, I think I’ll try that, I instead said, oh stuff that – arrow keys for me k thnx. I’d probably be horrible at modern PC shooters (in b4 “you’re already horrible at PC shooters”).

This issue of accumulated, similar experience among gamers is one that’s cropped up a fair bit in the last couple of days – Both Matt Gallant at the Quixotic Engineer and Dan Purvis at Graffiti Gamer have addressed the question of whether the ‘enthusiast’ or ‘hardcore’ gamers and press have different interests and experience to your more ‘average’ gamer (if there is such a person). I think I’m definitely on the affirmative side of the issue in question, as playing with my mother has shown me exactly how big that gap can be.

Videogames will save the world!

And I don't mean that in a 'figurative sense' or as a playfully ironic commentary on the the over-abundance of superhero tropes and 'hero complex' tales. I mean it instead that I think videogames are teaching our kids and young adults to think through, what is to many older persons, potentially opaque and incomprehensible systems.

Let me explain.

I was watching the fantastic Michael Moore style documentary The Corporation. You've probably seen the promo's for it - it's the one where the film makers compare the corporation as a legal "person" to a psychopath. It makes sense, after all it has no conscience and it's main driving motivation is the bottom line.

One of the big things that I got out of the documentary was that whenever people saw through what was a patently exploitative system (as was the case in the Bolivian water riots and a number of other examples) people got up and did something about it.

Videogames, according to Ian Bogost, can speak to players through what he terms Procedural Rhetoric, and as games get more complicated and convoluted, gamers are only getting more and more used to the idea of procedures and systems. Gonzalo Frasca in his essay for The Videogame Theory Reader (which I have summarised elsewhere) likens simulation to the act of creating government legislation and I think he's quite right when he says that

"Video games imply an enormous paradigm shift for our culture because they represent the first complex simulational media for the masses".

Videogames can and are giving players the experiences necessary and the cognitive tools to be able to start to come to grips with large systems and procedures. In the film The Corporation, a company appearing 'socially responsible' becomes a market driven reaction to consumers being turned off by irresponsible plunderers of the environment. This is a product of the market, which in itself is a system. When more people are taught (by videogames) the ability to think through processes in general, it is my hope more people will start to take positive action and make themselves heard about a number of these inherently bad systems that have cropped up in society.

That's enough of my ranting. Go watch The Corporation on YouTube or DVD and get excited about the prospect of a gamer revolution! Viva La Gamer!

Of Indie Games and Children

A few weeks back I was babysitting a family of four kids all under the age of 11 for the whole day, 9-5. It was fun, as they're all great kids and all I've gotta do to keep them entertained for a while is put on a Star Wars DVD and let em go nuts with the movie. By go nuts I mean be incredibly absorbed for multiple hours.

Anyway, as the day dragged on and they got progressively less interested in the movie (I think we were up to episode 6 by then) I decided to show them a couple of cool things on the PC. They showed me a few fun mini clip games that they enjoyed, and it got me thinking about sharing a few of the Indie games I was rather into at the time with the kids. I downloaded the cult classic Death Worm (which I've mentioned before in my 10 indie games to be playing while not working on your thesis post) and prepped the kiddies on how to gobble up lions and elephants and people like a good Death Worm should.

They got stuck into it like professional gamers. They loved it, and I quickly downloaded the two player version of the game, which delighted them even more, as there are 4 of them and in their family there's always someone wanting to do whatever another one is. Two players means one less person to be left out. Coincidentally, they were actually better at the game than me I'm mildly ashamed to say. It seems to me that kids are getting better and better at games, and at younger and younger ages too. I've got no chance these days.

Anyway, their parents get home about an hour or so later and I suddenly realised that... well... maybe Death Worm was a little bit of a mature game to be letting a bunch of (remember max age) 11 year olds play. Worries aside, their parents are super-cool and were totally fine with them playing it (I wish my parents were that understanding!) and that was that. Did I mention how awesome I think their parents are yet - both generally and specifically about games? Oh I did. Oh well, can't really stress it enough.

But it got me thinking... there are Indie games out there, for instance Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, which while not explicitly depicting abortion, at least hints at the act and is quite a mature kind of experience. Oh, and by the way, it's not at all rated by any classification system, because it's free to download. As far as I know, no idie game that is free to download comes with any kind of classification, offical or not!

I know, I know, Caveat Emptor and all that goes without saying on Teh Intertubes, but it's a bit of an interesting situation we're in whereby politicians are shouting left right and centre "WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF TEH CHILDREN!!!" whenever any game aimed at a mature audience comes out (For a recent local Australian TRAVESTY of an incident, see this video in which an audience member asks a panel of politicians and journo's why Australia can't have an R18+ classification for videogames and in which Fallout 3 is described as being 'all about killing people'. Incidentally what I want to know is why the FRAK did the question asker, apparently a writer for an Aussie online gaming portal, answered 'basically, yes' to that description... GAH!). Additionally, these same politicians are choosing to ignore current information, statistics even, that says the average Australian gamer is aged 28, and that there are games being made without classification being targeted at this same age bracket (indeed like Randy Balma and Death Worm).

So anyway, the lesson to be learned this is;

Don't forget when showing friends your Indie games to think about age appropriateness, because chances are if you're like me, you've probably never even given it a second (or first!) thought before.

Or maybe you have and I'm an idiot for giving Death Worm to a bunch of tiddlewinks. Either or.

More proof of the versatility of 'Obilivion'

The main point of this post is to link to Christopher Livingston's highly entertaining travel-blogue which is based around creating a character and role playing him as an NPC in the world. The travel-blogue is called 'Living Oblivion' and he uses a bunch of mods to starts his character Nondrik in the port town of Anvil (somewhat reminiscent of Morrowind) and roleplaying as an NPC, Livingston refuses to run to destinations or to use the quick travel feature, resulting in what must be a very leisurely pace at times.

An extract from 'Day 19 & 20' of the Travel-blogue:

I’ll be honest — walking everywhere and never fast-traveling isn’t… easy. The click of my mouse could instantly transport me to any city in the game. Sprinting would decimate my lengthy travel time. There are long stretches, like today, where I’m not attacked, there are few ingredients to pick, and not much of anything interesting to look at, and I think, man, why the hell am I playing like this?


But at moments like this it somehow feels worth it. In other playings of this game I’ve spent days, weeks even, in Imperial City. I know it inside and out. I barely even look at the city, I just zip there, run to the merchants, unload my junk, and dematerialize to my next location. But playing as Nondrick has restored a good deal of majesty and mystery on Imperial City, and catching a glimpse of it through the trees, seeing it grow closer and larger each time, is a bit of a thrill.

Oh, also, for a little bit of contextualisation, Chris Livingston is the guy who wrote, posed and print-screened 'Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman' which is a must read for anyone interested in the Half-Life universe.

Also, just wanted to give a heads-up for a post I'm working on "What Videogames have can learn from Digital Musicians" which is hopefully going to explain how I went from a Digital Musics major to a videogame theoretician (if I can even really call myself that...). I've got some interesting ideas, so I hope people will come back for that next week. Until then!

10 Free Indie Games to play while not working on your Thesis

So I've recently been invited to a facebook group started by a few people in my honours cohort called "If you write my Thesis for me I'll..." and we're encouraged to finish the thought. =D

So, in a similar veign, I've spent the morning compiling a list of 10 or so Indie games that are both 1) Free and 2) Awesome to aid in the noble task of procrastination. Presented in alphabetical order.

BARKLEY, SHUT UP AND JAM : GAIDEN

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=11760

“The Great B-Ball Purge of 2041, a day so painful to some that it is referred to only as the "B-Ballnacht". Thousands upon thousands of the world's greatest ballers were massacred in a swath of violence and sports bigotry as the game was outlawed worldwide. The reason: the Chaos Dunk, a jam so powerful its mere existence threatens the balance of chaos and order. Among the few ballers and fans that survived the basketball genocide was Charles Barkley, the man capable of performing the "Verboten Jam"...”

CHALK

http://www.konjak.org/chalk.htm

“Chalk is all about drawing your way to all the glory! Draw lines across shapes to destroy them, turn back bullets at enemies and thwart huge boss enemies by bouncing stuff back in their faces!”

CLOUD

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/

“Cloud, also known as That Cloud Game or Cloud: The Game, is a third-person computer puzzle game, designed by Jenova Chen, based on weather and atmospheric aesthetics. The game features distinctive hand-drawn art, as well as non-violent, whimsical play inspired by… Katamari Damacy.[1]”

CORTEX COMMAND

http://www.datarealms.com/

“Cortex Command is a 2D base-building game in the vein of Worms, only with robots piloted by disembodied brains and giant bunked filled with electronic death. (Also the astoundingly detailed pixel-art and physics makes Worms look a bit like it was made during a sneezing accident.) It does require a bit of patience, however, so take your time and experiment.[2]”

DEATH WORM

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=279075

Imagine if the 90’s B-movie ‘Tremors’ became a videogame. This is it (with less Kevin Bacon).

DINO RUN

http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/

“The basic premise is that you are a little dinosaur escaping extinction! Run, run (and jump), as fast as you can to the end of each level before the “Wall of Doom” engulfs you.[3]”

EXECUTION

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=375097

“One of the major dilemmas with pushing games into more complex experiences and art forms is that games don’t necessarily generate any kind of consequences. Unlike shooting someone in real life, which leads to both moral and literal consequences, in a video game it either doesn’t matter or can be undone.[4]”

FL0W

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

“The game involves the player guiding a tiny, aquatic worm-like microorganism through various depths of the ocean to consume other organisms and to evolve their organism as the player advances… Within the first two weeks following its release, flOw attracted approximately 350,000 downloads.[5]”

OFF-ROAD VELOCIRAPTOR SAFARI

http://raptorsafari.com/

“Sweet Raptorchrist, it’s here... and it’s even more incredible than you imagined.[6]”

RANDY BALMA: MUNICIPAL ABORTIONIST

http://www.messhof.com/games/randy_balma_municipal_abortionist.php

“It’s half art experiment, half game and all punishment. It’s a sequence of aesthetically torturous and fairly difficult mini-games, peppered with clashing colours, unforgiving controls and angular, metallic noises aimed dead-centre at the brain’s pain-spots…That said, I haven’t in fact been beyond the opening GTA-esque bus-driving stage, in which the controls keep changing on me, cars spontaneously explode into rainbow-clouds of pain and collisions can randomly turn me around - and getting myself back on course is a horrific endeavour based mostly on chance. I actually hate it. I really, really hate it. But, at the same time, I also find it very funny.[7]”

SUPER COLUMBINE MASSACRE RPG

http://www.columbinegame.com/

"Interactivity is one of the core features that differentiate games from passive media like film. In a game we play a role. Most of the time, the roles we play in games are roles of power. Space marine, world-class footballer or hero plumber. Isn't it about time we played the role of the weak, the misunderstood, even the evil? If videogames remain places where we only exercise juvenile power fantasies, I'm not sure there will be a meaningful future for the medium.[8]"

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[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Cloud (video game)," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cloud_%28video_game%29&oldid=207379083 (accessed June 2, 2008).

[2] Jim Rossignol, ‘Cortex Command’, Rock Paper Shotgun, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1604/

[3] Derek Yu, ‘Dino Run’, The Independent Gaming Source, http://tigsource.com/articles/2008/05/06/dino-run.

[4] L.B. Jeffries, Execution – An Experiment in Game Consequences, Pop Matters, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/post/59135/execution-an-experiment-in-game-consequences.

[5] Wikipedia contributors, "FlOw," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FlOw&oldid=213949190 (accessed June 2, 2008).

[6] Derek Yu, ‘Off-Road Velociraptor Safari’, The Independent Gaming Source, http://tigsource.com/articles/2008/01/29/off-road-velociraptor-safari

[7] Alec Meer, ‘Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist’, Rock Paper Shotgun, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1808

[8] Ian Bogost, watercooler games, quoted on www.columbinegame.com

Becoming Gamer; or "My last ever log out."

I hearthed to Shattrath, at the request of a very good friend of mine. She had something to show me, she said, and I had a good idea of what exactly that was. I had, after all, 'twinked' her with 1,000 gold a few weeks prior and, as it turned out, it was her snowy gryphon mount that she had purchased with my parting gift, that she wanted to share with me. I felt like a big brother to a little sister - I had never met her in the 'real 'world. She hugged me, made a *sniff emote and said with lots of exclamation marks that she'd miss me. I was going to miss her too.

Recently, after a particularly bad experience with an overly controlling and somewhat arrogant guild leader, I was left without a World of Warcraft guild that I called home. I wanted to 'progress' and to see (and beat) new content but finding a new raiding guild to start building relationships within was just not something I was prepared to do again. University was also starting to heat up, with an increasing amount of work having to go into assessment tasks and my major thesis, when my job, which that suited me and my study timetable perfectly, sadly dried up. Without a steady income, and having to still pay the bills (not many, but a few) I decided that, well, after a good run of a year and 6 months with the World of Warcaft, maybe it had become time to hang up the gauntlets and retire gracefully.

So I did. And it's probably one of the best things I could have done. Now, I'm not saying that wow is the devil or anything knee-jerkingly reactionist like that (although I *do* have some serious issues with some elements of it: the grind, only having one somewhat flawed model of guild leadership, etc, etc). But instead, much like Mr Brainy Gamer himself, Michael Abbott, said - it means that I can play other games again. I mean, in all honesty, how many people who play wow seriously do you think also play other games seriously and critically on a regular basis? I'd wager not many.

I make no secret of the fact that I want to work in the games industry. I am working towards that with my degree and with my thesis, and also, now, so with this. I can't just play WoW all the time and call myself a gamer. I honestly have no desire to work in any other field. I recognise that I probably will, but I hope that eventually I will be able to work for a living on what I am so most passionate about. My passion is for gaming, and that's really what this experience has been all about. I've left WoW and all of the amazing wonderful (and some horrible) people that I met on the Alliance side of the Dath'Remmar Oceanic Realm, and yeah, I'll miss them too. But I'm not a really a WoW-er. Not anymore. I'm a GAME-er.