Amber Night (rebooted)

Some Friday quickies.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft: “My children–in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other
children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed:
You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.” (I pulled this link from somewhere else, but I don't remember where, so my apologies uncredited site.)

Holy shit, Steve Ballmer has not only had sex, but he's done it in multiple dimensions.  Steve Ballmer is, in fact, a Slider.  I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Ballmer walks into little Stevey Junior's bedroom as Junior is frantically trying to clear his browser cache.  “Honest father, it was porn!”  Actually, I'd probably want to be like, a fairy on the wall.  Or maybe just a little miniature flying me on the wall.  Not sure I'd deal well with the whole extending my proboscis, vomiting, and then slurping it back up thing.  I wonder if flies tend to suffer from self-loathing more often than humans.
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I was going to save this one for a MBOTW, but that would be like shooting harp seals in a barrel, which, while entertaining, is hardly sporting.  I'm not a Linux geek (although I think Linus Torvalds is one cute Finn) but I'm happy to know that I'm at least more clueful than a Tuttle, Oklahoma City Manager.
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If you're Steve Ballmer's kids, The Movie Timeline might be a little more useful than MSN search for that history paper you're working on.  Because the simple truth is, no matter how well you do on that paper, you are not getting an iPod, and your grade doesn't matter anyway.  Your father is outrageously fucking rich.  You are going to an ivy league school even if he has to buy them a new science wing.  Where they could study the effects of self-loathing on houseflies. (note to The Movie Timeline maintainers: does “Alien vs Predator” really warrant 187 goddam entries?  We get it.  The Aliens come back every 10 years.  We fucking get it.)
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If you're easily creeped out like I am, skip MyDeathSpace.  From the site:

I made it through about 2 pages before I had to stop.  I'm not real sure what to make of the site, but there's something not quite right about “memorializing” people who have nothing more in common than their MySpace accounts. (link found at BoingBoing)
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After all my feminazi ranting of late, Damion points us to what women really want.  See, is that so hard?

Peace, and have a great weekend!

I realize I'm coming in to this game late.  Kim Rom wrote his ill-conceived “Female Gaming My Ass” post on March 8, and I only noticed it about 3 weeks later.  I'm only now getting around to noticing he wrote a follow-up a week later.  I read it, I shook my head, and I almost moved on.  But I decided to write about it because Kim's outlook, skewed though it is, is representative of a larger problem in the electronic entertainment industry.  This is an industry that does not hold a high opinion of women or what women want out of their gaming experience.  Instead of marketing to women, the industry markets women as a a byproduct.  (It's why the same armor in many online games looks like a bikini on a female, and an impenetrable fortress of metal on a male.)  His inability to form a coherent argument aside, Kim is yet another drone in an army of decision-makers who either don't know or don't care that they are excluding, alienating, and ignoring 50% of the potential consumer base.  So I think his “In Defense of Why I am an Asshole” rebuttal is worth analyzing.

Rebuttal 101 teaches us to take 1 of 3 tacts: apologize, clarify, or defend.  There is a lesser-known tact, which Kim chooses to implement, called weasel words.  Kim wants us to know that it was all just a big joke that apparently only he got.

“Childish”?  “Funny.”?  How about weaselly.

I went back to the original post, trying to see what childish humor escaped me and everyone else.  Perhaps it is this:

In his rebuttal, even though he just got done telling us it was all just a big joke, he goes on to say:

So make up your fucking mind Kim.  Was it all just a big joke, or do you really believe 99 in 100 female gamers are lazy camera whores?  Oh, and thanks for clarifying the numbers.  For a second there I thought you were making sweeping generalizations.

Moving right along, Kim realizes at about this point that he really has no defense, states that he doesn't really “give a fuck,” what anyone thinks, (why write the rebuttal then Kim?) and then proceeds to whine about how one blogger called him an “asshat.”

So if I understand correctly, you can call female gamers inferior camera whores, and–pshaw!–that's just your journalistic right.  But call you an asshat, and why sir that is just unsporting.

Kim ends with:

Here's a little lesson in debate Kim: Arguments are corroborated by facts, not the other way around.  This does not in any way prove your original thesis that “female gamers…lack the dedication and the
drive to fulfill those ambitions.”  Or was that the joke?  And if that was the joke, then, again, why the rebuttal?  Can you understand why someone would call you an asshat? (that's rhetorical, of course you can't)

Fortunately Kim's post was short, because I'm not sure how much more I could have read.  Not because I was so nauseated with his caveman mentality that I couldn't handle any more, but because the man simply cannot write a cohesive argument.  If I could ask Kim anything– anything at all–it would be this: how the fuck did you ever manage to land a job as an editor?  You can't write a cohesive thesis, you can't support your thesis, you can't even decide what your thesis is, and you sure as hell can't even be bothered to defend it with any kind of standards of reason.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of Kim Roms in the industry.  Most of them aren't going to run their mouth like Kim, but they're out there.  Kim, in his own twisted way, takes a stand against corporate sponsored female gaming teams, and yet it's his mentality that has lead to their creation and popularity.  It's people like Kim Rom that think women only want to play social games, or anything that doesn't require manual dexterity.  It's people like Kim that run the industry, thus ensuring that a very large portion of the consumer market will continue to remain untapped and either ignored or exploited.

Okay.  So it rains in San Francisco.  In March.  Who knew?  I never thought I'd say this, but thank god for the multitudes of those little cubby hole tourist traps that line Fisherman's Wharf.  When the heavens opened up, the only real split-second decision to be made was this: which one of the roughly 74 vendors I was equidistant from looked slow with a sharpie?  The reason: I'm pretty sure the price of rain ponchos was about to double.  I suppose I shouldn't feel too embarrassed.  I'm told that every San Franciscan, about a month after moving in, makes a single trip to the Wharf, never to return.  So there was a good chance that all of us were tourists.  I, however, seemed to be the only one wearing a bright goddam yellow plastic poncho.  Small children formed queues behind me at the crosswalk.  Cars stopped for me.  I directed traffic for an hour and a half, and let me just say that except for that old guy with the walker who really needs to learn how to scream a little louder–'cause hello?  Big-ass poncho on my head, duh!–I did a really good job.  Bless his ancient little heart, that dude could really move once the cross-traffic (that's what we traffic directors call it in the biz, “cross-traffic.”) got moving.  I don't think he really needs that walker.  Well okay, he might really need it now.

For me, the highlight of the Game Developers Conference wasn't so much about being at the epicenter (doh, forgot we don't use the “e” word out here) of the electronic entertainment industry, as it was me visiting a college friend in San Francisco the following weekend.  It was a blast, and while on the topic of GDC, let me just say Mr. Dismissive Microsoft poopy-head, nobody flipped me shit for my Mac.  Quite the reverse actually.  You open up your fancy-schmancy Dell Opinioron out here, and you're libel to get a Birkenstock up your ass. (or you'll at least cop some serious buzz-kill…man.)

Here's a shot overlooking Fisherman's Wharf.  It's hard to tell because you can see further than 5 feet, but this was actually taken in San Francisco, I shit you not.  Seriously, I thought we got fog in Monterey, but no.  What we get in Monterey is just practice fog.  It's the fog that hasn't quite made it to the majors yet.  It's farm team fog.  The stuff I saw over the weekend is Alex goddam Rodriguez fog. (I had to google that.  I know fuck-all about baseball.)  In Monterey when it's foggy, we turn on our lights and slow down a little.  In San Francisco, they bring out modified snow plows to move the fog out of the way.  Kids build these cute little forts out of it.  If you've never been beaned with a really tightly packed fogball, they kinda hurt.  Going out in the fog, people tie one end of a rope to themselves, and the other end to their car or their house.  A rope breaking brings tragedy and grief, because months later when the fog finally lifts, there are people all over the place walking around with shattered minds, gibbering and holding one end of a broken rope.  Just before I took this shot, a woman and 3 children ran into the street and grabbed the father, who had been wandering around in front of the house for 11 years.  He just kind of  waved his little frayed bit of rope around and drooled.  Tragic.

More to come.

Mouth-breather of the week.

From GamePolitics, we learn that Kim Rom is scared of women.  He likens females playing games to “a joke,” and while he concedes that “female gaming is a
great concept,” in the way that dogs are so cute when they think
they're people, he is then shocked (shocked I say!) to find that female gaming teams such as the Danish all-girl team Vildkatten attract sponsors who play on their feminine traits:

“But funny thing – most of them actually do attract sponsors. Here is why;

They have vaginas.
They have asses.
They have tits.
They have mouths.

That more or less covers the 4 primary selling-points for female gaming teams.”

So nice job, Captain Obvious.  Here, let me try.  Um…how about this thesis: boys are attracted to female gaming teams because:

Wow, that was pretty fucking easy, and it only took me 2 bullet points.  Maybe I can be a “manager and editor-in-chief” in the “eSports industry” too.

Kim goes on to say:

Point goes to Captain Obvious again.  In general, a random sampling of males and females will show a disparate number of “good” male gamers over female gamers.  No surprise there; although that gap is closing, it still exists.  Note that Captain Obvious says nothing about men being inherently better, simply that the male culture fosters this behavior, and so it stands to reason that they will be predisposed towards this behavior.  This is important to understand, because Kim uses the argument as a springboard to propel his argument from obvious-to-the-point-of-blogging into omgwtfbbq territory:

This is Kim's argument:  Men are better at gaming than women because culturally boys are encouraged to shoot things, while girls are encouraged to nurture things.  Ergo, females “lack the dedication and the drive” to be good gamers.

There's actually a term for this kind of logical leap; it's called an Argument from fallacy, and if you've ever been on a debate team you probably recognized it immediately for the intelligence-insulting mouth fart that it is.  Hell, if you've got more than a couple brain cells to rub together you probably spotted it.  Kim would have you believe that having a vagina knocks the “dedication and drive” for the “big Dollars” right out of our poor soft little heads.  Dear god, what a caveman motherfucker.

Now, I happen to agree that these sponsored female teams are a bad idea.  Over at Sachant I even argued that they probably hurt the industry.  But dear god, spare me the testosterone bullshit that female gamers cannot compete because we just can't be bothered to put the effort into pulling ourselves up to your level of leet skillz.

Perhaps the most revealing part of Kim's article:

Dude, I hate to tell you this, but your wife has been hiding a terrible, terrible secret.  You might want to rent The Crying Game.

Unfortunately I was only able to spend Friday at GDC, so I missed all the cool stuff. (the world will pay for making me miss Ron Moore)  How, you ask, did I fit into this motley collection of people with real jobs in the industry?

Abandoned by my “sponsor,” I am sitting off to the side typing up some notes on my Mac, when a guy in a Microsoft polo shirt walks up to me.  I look up, and I think he's going to say something.  He looks at my laptop, back to me, shakes his head, sighs, and walks away.

(he did look back and laugh in a friendly “gotcha” way.)

Hopefully next year I'll be able to spend all week at the conference and even participate in some sessions, but judging from Psychochild's impressions, I didn't miss much in the way of sessions.  I spent the rest of the weekend in San Francisco doing the tourist thing, but did not buy the “Alcatraz Swim Team” hoodie)

I was really looking forward to the FX series Black.  White. (obnoxious audio warning)  I'm not sure why, because I immediately spotted it for what it is: a shallow treatment of the very complex issues of race and racism.  I suppose I was hoping to be proved wrong.

The central premise of the show is gimmicky and flawed: through the magic of Hollywood makeup artistry, change someones skin and put them in a couple situations where the issue of race might arise, and see what happens.  Of course, the producers are working with a completely stacked deck, thus ensuring the desired conflicts and outcomes.  The white father, Bruno, is about as intellectually curious as an anal wart, while his black counterpart, Brian, is the unmovable force to Bruno's unstoppable motion.  Who's right?  Who cares.  It's all about watching the sparks and sometimes the explosion.  Then there's Rose, the white 17 year-old daughter every parent wishes they had.  She's smart, funny, outgoing, and displays a wisdom and intellect beyond her years.  She is paired with Nick, a black 16 years old boy, an 8th-grade dropout who makes the wrong decision at every junction, and who self-identifies with the stereotypical “thug” culture.  Gee, who do you suppose is going to come out…well smelling like a rose in this pairing? (my only consolation is that I think the producers expected a lot of conflict between Rose and Nick, but they were too honest and intuitive to fall for it.)  Meanwhile, the white mom, Carmen, is flakier than a psoriasis convention in a snow storm, paired up with a very strong, opinionated, and easily-offended Renee. Gee, what do you suppose is going to happen there?

There are some cheap laughs to be sure.  Carmen wants to wear a dashiki to a black church, Bruno throws the n-word around like some kind of magic fairy dust, and Rose writes the worst…beat…poetry…ever.  Cheap laughs, uncomfortable moments, but no serious exploration of race and racism.

The show is a
gimmick, nothing more.  You can't just paint someone the other color and expect them to understand the real and complex issues of race, especially when the players have been hand-picked for optimum drama and hilarity.  There is no honesty, only a facade to prop up a failing premise.  The best that can be said for the series
is that it does a fair job of showing the difficulties of throwing 2
very different families into the same house and seeing what happens.

It's unfortunate they didn't hand this project over to Morgan Spurlock, whose series 30 Days (also obnoxious audio, sorry) shows you can take a real honest and serious look at the social issues that affect Americans.

Terra Nova reports that the upcoming MMO Roma Victor “has come up with a unique punishment for griefing: crucifixion,” and then goes on for an additional 450+ words to say “it's a unique way to handle punishment.”  In short, griefers in Roma Victor can expect to be crucified in-game (and in-public) so that all may see their crimes.

I'll give them that it's unique, but like my grandfather used to say, you can put a dress on a pig, but it's still a pig. (My grandmother sued for divorce shortly thereafter.)  In terms of game design, my friend Mox put it best: “when you develop content for gamers, even if it is to punish them, they will seek out to experience that content.”  In other words, if you make content for griefers, they will grief to experience that content.  The designers of Roma Victor are actively encouraging griefing.

Additionally, the time spent on creating content for griefers could perhaps have been better spent creating content for the vast majority of players who do not grief or otherwise make asshats of themselves.  Why create content for the 1% (made-up statistic) of players who try to ruin your game, when you could be developing content that the other 99% of your players might enjoy?

The punishment for griefing or otherwise playing outside the bounds of the game (i.e. being an asshat) either needs to be out-of-character warnings, or a ban, perma or otherwise.  That's it.  You do not give them the attention they crave, you do not give them content to experience.  You get their ass the fuck out of the game so your other players will continue to enjoy the game.

The subject of player discussion forums has been something I've wanted to talk about for awhile, and last night Abalieno provided me a perfect lead-in.  He shares the story of a player who was banned from the official SWG boards for posting sarcasm.  The irony is not lost on me, considering the mockery Sony has made of the game.  Ban me?  Ban you!

Back in the day game publishers, for the most part, left discussion forums to 3rd parties such as Stratics and IGN.  It was one less thing to support, and they didn't have to worry about taking ownership of player comments.  Some publishers even took pride in their relationships with outside community sites.  Mythic's Sanya Thomas, for example, can still be seen posting to 3rd party sites.  A Sanya post can do more to quench a stupid flamewar and misinformation than any moderator on an official board could ever do.

Somewhere along the way game developers realized that the disadvantage of not having to control player comments is that they can't control player comments.  Even the heaviest moderated boards allowed for a wide range of player discussion.  Some of that discussion was quite embarrassing to the publisher, and that was a problem.  I don't know exactly when it happened, but it first jumped into my consciousness when Sony started running the official EQ2 boards.  It really doesn't matter who started it, or when, because almost every single publisher is on board with running their own boards now.  It's usually touted as a “feature,” and players are all too happy to drink that saccharine sweet Kool-Aid.

Players drink the “O Board” Kool-Aid because that's where the official news is going to be posted first.  It's the only place the devs and designers are going to post, and if you're lucky maybe the pointy haired president of the company might pretend to listen to your ideas about what will make the game better, provided you bury your nose far enough up his ass to smell the bagel he had for breakfast.  And some players even defend the jack-booted decisions of the official moderators, usually hiding behind the “they were just enforcing the rules you agreed to” banner.  These same players content themselves with the knowledge that because the official boards are more tightly moderated, there's less garbage to sift through when they're looking for real information.  Bullshit.  They may not have to wade through the flame wars and the rants that were the hallmarks of third party sites, but it's been replaced with the kind of fanboi chatter that makes Republican party loyalists look like nipple-pierced anarchists.

Many 3rd party player forums are now either extinct or have become shadows of their former selves. (Stratics, you poor poor bastards.)  Any more, independent community sites either have loyal but older bases, or they're clan/guild sites with very small communities.  The industry has succeeded in consolidating their power over player discussion, it's not likely to change for some time, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Sony and the rest of the industry must be proud of this “technological terror” they've constructed.

Ever had one of those total recall moments where something triggers a long suppressed memory, causing a flashback of such intensity that you are literally knocked to the floor, where you thrash and scream like Linda Blair in a a 666th-level-of-hell-induced seizure?  Um…okay…neither have I?  Yeah…

This selection of Penny Arcade narrative art, however, brought back a particularly vivid childhood memory that I'd all but forgotten.  It was late February, and I was turning 5 or 6 or some post-linoleum-lizard age like that.  My mother could say for sure, but we really don't want to drag her into this, so you'll just have to work with me.  It was going to be the best birthday ever. (Well, I had a 1 in 5 or 6 chance of it being the best ever, anyway.  Not counting my zeroth birthday, which quite frankly sucked.) My dad had bought me a big ladybug piñata—I was totally into ladybugs so shut up mkay?—and I fell into the kind of love only a gap-toothed little girl can fall into with something made of paste and news print.  To be sure, it was an ill-fated love; the kind of modern day tragedy only James Cameron, a ship, a big-ass hunk of ice, and Leonardo Di Caprio could do justice.

The morning of the perfect little white middle-class girl's birthday party, I eagerly helped put out all the little ladybug napkins, plates, hats, party favors, and of course helped load the candy into Ladybug, and then helped my dad string it up so that it could "fly" in the tree in the backyard.  I did not at that point comprehend the fact that the whole idea behind this process was the lead-up to an unholy ceremony, culminating in my friends and family bludgeoning the fuck out of my sweet little Ladybug and engorging ourselves on her cellophane covered entrails.  I simply missed that memo.

I think my little Ladybug knew her life clock had turned red, yet stoically said nothing of the carousel to come, in order that our last moments together be happy ones.  She bravely accepted her role in the black mass as her fated purpose on this earth, perhaps looking forward to joining her friends Burro, Chili Pepper and most of all, el Toro, in that great fiesta in the sky, where there are no more beatings, and your sweet delicious insides stay inside of you for all eternity.  At least, that's what I remember seeing in those large, innocent crepe paper eyes.

I don't remember a lot of the details, but I do remember an initial sense of first confusion, and then smug satisfaction when I saw the other kids hit her with the plastic baseball bat, to no effect.  Ladybug was tough, and no plastic bat was going to break her.  Then there was the big kid, the one at every little kid's birthday party who is too old to be doing this shit, but is doing it anyway because his parents are too stupid to comprehend that their child towers over the other kids by roughly 4 feet.

His first mighty whack connected solidly.  Ladybug reeled from the blow, visibly dented.  I realized at that point that Ladybug was not, in fact, immune after all.  Death, I suddenly realized, would not come to Ladybug as she rocked her elderly carapice on the front porch of her patio home in the piñata retirement village.  No, death would come at the hands of a brace-faced brat, to the cheers and squeals of eager children, and it would come soon.  It was over after only a few more strikes from his mighty pre-teen guns. Then came the spray of candy, showering out in slow motion like glittery gore from the innards of my sweet Ladybug.  The memory ends there, but I'm told I was inconsolable for the rest of the day, and that nervous guests gave polite excuses to absent themselves.  I got a lot of that growing up, come to think of it.

We buried ladybug the next day.  It was a beautiful non-denominational funeral, held I suppose on a brisk early spring Colorado day.  Years later my brother, who is older than me by 4 years, would say that everyone had the worst time keeping a straight face.  I pointed out that it wouldn't have been necessary if they hadn't killed my fucking piñata.

I can't wait to do that to my kids.

In my
DDO review, I wondered if the game would hold up over the
long term.  It's only been about 3 weeks since launch, so that
question is still very much up in the air.  But so far, it's
looking good.

Likes:
- The monsters are as smart as
they should be.  Slimes, for instance, will come at you and
just want to kill you.  Kobolds will maneuver themselves
around, try to outflank you, and even run back to regroup. 
This is very refreshing.

- Unlike most other MMOs,
you don't get the sense that monsters are just standing around waiting
for you to slaughter them.  Slimes drop from the ceiling as
you pass over, kobolds wake from their sleep or respond to a rallying
gong, assassins pop out of nowhere.  This makes the
environment feel alive and unmechanical.

-
Traps.  Nothing gets a bigger chuckle out of me than the ninja
looter who gets cut down by a blade because he didn't wait for the
rogue to find/disable it.  The game rewards smart players; I
like this.

- Resources.  You can only heal
and gain spell points back in a tavern or a shrine, or of course
through spells or potions.  There is no resting after every
fight to recover life and mana.  As a caster you can't just
nuke away, dishing it out and then sitting down for a few
minutes.  Likewise, tanks need to watch their hit
points.

- Dungeons.  They're
beautiful.  They flow naturally, they go up, down, and under
water.  They feel like they were hewn from stone and earth,
not just plugged together by a 3D modeling team.

-
The game is about adventuring, not some kind of end-game
objective.  There are objectives and milestones, but the real
joy in playing the game is in the playing of the game, adventuring and
crawling through dungeons, not grinding to some maximum level so you
can finally experience the content that matters.  In DDO, all
of the content matters.

Dislikes:
- If you misspell the
intended recipient's name in a /tell, you don't get an error, you just
get the message echoed back to you like everything is fine. 
Your /tell just ends up in some bit bucket.  I'm really
surprised this bug made it through QA.

- There
absolutely, positively, needs to be a reply key.  There is a
/r key which will reply to the last person who sent you a tell, but
here's the problem: if you've just composed a nice well thought-out
reply, and someone else sends you a tell while you are composing that
reply, they get your reply.  The mind reels as to why this
wasn't included in the first place.

- To gain access
to the marketplace (and your vault) requires going through the Water
Works quest, a very long, albeit enjoyable, quest.  There
doesn't seem to be a convincing back-story reason for
this.

- Vault space is about 1/2 of what it should
be.

- Lag is still a problem.  I notice
that I get more lag with voice chat turned on.

-
Everything happens indoors, usually underground.  It makes the
world seem small and compartmentalized.  I'd like to see some
outdoor adventures.

- The names over the people in
your group are the same color as those not in your group. 
Makes it difficult to find a group mate in a busy tavern or
zone.

- There needs to be an auto-follow
key.  I've seen arguments on both sides of this , and
opposition comes mainly from the anti-bot
crowd.

Looking forward to:

- Player
housing
- Crafting
- More varied content
-
Bug fixes

One of the overused buzz phrases MMO
developers like to use is “next generation.”  Usually this
means better graphics, because very few companies seems interested in
developing an MMO that breaks the typical Everquest
grind-until-you-drop mold.  I'm not ready to say that DDO
delivers a true next generation experience, but it definitely gives us
a glimpse into what is possible.  Game designers take
heed.