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The Most Exciting Post You Will Read All Week About Pretending To Fish

Check it out at The Ancient Gaming Noob. Bonus content:

Trion added in another skill with the patch called Survival. Survival seems primarily focused on giving you something to do with the fish you catch. It is basically cooking… seafood… along with the ability to make some camping gear. When the female survival trainer said, “Do you need help pitching a tent?” I thought perhaps I mis-heard… or that it was some sort of reference to the Diablo III demon hunter… everybody seems to be mentioning that.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

Two years ago, Kill Ten Rats interviewed ArenaNet’s Global Brand Director, Chris Lye, who toed the curtain that would soon unveil the Guild Wars 2 marketing campaign. Since that time, Guild Wars 2 has consistently been a marketing force. For example, mmorpg.com, a major MMO news site, has pegged Guild Wars 2 as the most anticipated MMO even through other big MMO launches. I asked Chris if he would want to follow up on that interview, and he was able to bend space/time to add another hour to last Tuesday to answer. Check out his thoughts on community, the gem store, and big marketing moments below. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

High Heels

Digital high heels are entirely cosmetic. They are almost recursively cosmetic.

High heels serve certain functions in meatspace. They make someone taller. They make legs look longer and change their shape. They make it harder to run and present various other mobility problems depending on the specifics of the heel. Some like these cosmetic aspects or not.

Digital high heels do none of these things. If you want to make a taller character, you make the model taller. If you want the legs to look different, you can do that directly, too. When you look at a character in high heels, your simian brain is applying intuitions and judgments that have absolutely no applicability in a virtual world. Her shoes and leg appearance and entirely independent. If you just wanted her to stand on her toes and levitate a few inches off the ground, as if she were wearing invisible heels, that would be easier than implementing the high heels. It is all cosmetic, and it is completely independant of any physics.

This applies to both pro and con. Reasons I don’t like high heels? No applicability to digital high heels at all. She could have no feet and still play soccer; the game rules do not care about appearances. She cannot feel uncomfortable, and I can give her superspeed just as easily as any other character. The reasons you think high heels are sexy? No applicability to digital high heels at all. They are little pixels that have no effect on her leg shape or gait. It is purely fetishizing footwear, and imaginary footwear at that.

I need to work out how this affects my intuitions. We are primates, poorly adapted to virtual worlds. But until everyone else engages in introspection, we must also deal with all the primates who think that the digital high heels are sexy or marginalizing. The whole point of cosmetics is to affect perceptions, and those perceptions will drive players to or from your game.

: Zubon

[GW2] Planting Server Roots

Yesterday was a pretty exciting day in Guild Wars 2 fandom. The beta client went out for players to download the 12 gb or so before this Friday. ArenaNet also put up a blog post explaining how to choose and transfer to and from servers. It’s pretty simple.

Players choose a home-world. Their account (and all characters) are linked to that home-world. Players can transfer to another home-world for 1,800 gems once every 7 days. Players can also go play on other worlds as guests (not available this beta weekend), but they lose some of the rights of citizenship (such as World v. World access). Continue reading [GW2] Planting Server Roots

Understanding Equivalence

I have an occasional series on depictions of women in gaming. These posts, here and elsewhere, will almost always get a “who cares?” comment. (Because it is worthwhile to post that you did not think something was worthwhile to post.) Chainmail bikinis are either unimportant or perfectly justified.

We could discuss what happens to your customer base and gaming culture when half the population at first glance says, “This is not a place for me.” But why bother when LMFAO has provided some of the most insightful commentary with their video “Sexy And I Know It.” Seriously. A simple gender-flip of a standard music video makes many people “uncomfortable,” “traumatized,” and “deeply scarred.” (In case the preceding failed to warn you, the video is not completely safe for most workplaces.)

To understand what the big deal is, imagine that video being completely serious. Imagine having at least one-third of male characters in your game looking, dressing, and moving like that, including the robot(s). Imagine a world where as much effort is given to lovingly rendering that “wiggle wiggle wiggle, wiggle wiggle yeah” as breast jiggle.

There is a false equivalence in the unrealistic depictions of men and women in gaming. Men designed by men for men will tend to look a bit different from men designed by women for women, and “men designed by men for women” is not the same thing. (It is amazing how many boys call something “gay” when it is perfectly heteronormative but for the other half of the population. The notion that sexualized depictions of men are “gay” is a barometer of how male-centric one’s perspective is.)

You have a vicious circle if you are reducing your female audience through marginalizing depictions and then using that skewed audience to justify the depictions.

: Zubon

Yes, some women like musclebound men in spandex and fantasize about hunting demons in thigh-high stilettoes; outliers do not shift the median. My circle of gamer friends includes a burlesque dancer, but she is not usually in those outfits.

Update: image of mesmer armor, captioned by the poster: “I think this is THE image that sums up the problem with GW2’s armour..”

[Eve] Hunted Becomes Hunter

If you follow my adventures, or those of our CEO SynCaine, then you are aware that last week, our wormhole was invaded and camped by a rather talented band of killers.   Eve being the fickle mistress that she is, saw fit to place these killers in our wormhole precisely when we were settling into the site clearing and when we were so inundated with sites that we were out in gas ships, mining ships, and many of us dual-boxing in combat ships in Sleeper sites all at the same time, which is a really bad idea, when you don’t have that much experience in general wormhole defence and PvP.

In any event, we observed the skill level of these guys, and SynCaine chatted with their leader throughout the days they were logging kills on our fleet like Velociraptors at a petting zoo, and in the true spirit of Eve, they saw a great deal of common-ground and retained each other as contacts even after we learned not to fly into the dinosaur teeth and starve the beasts out of the Hole.

Continue reading [Eve] Hunted Becomes Hunter

[GW2] Hiking the Cooperative Journey

Over the weekend I had a revelation in gaming. I played Journey on the PlayStation 3 (PS3). For those that have a PS3, the $15 for the game is more than worth it. It’s the story of your journey to the holy mountain. It’s rather gameplay light, and it is more about the experience. Given the amazing Metacritic score, I know I am not alone in believing it is an experience worth playing.

There is one catch to the game. As players go along they are occasionally joined by another player. Creative Director of thatgamecompany, Jenova Chen, likens Journey’s cooperative style to hiking. A player might notice another player behind and make sure the other player stays behind. A player might just let the other player pass, or the player might wait up so they can walk the holy path together. While players can unlock content gates for each other, it’s not like Portal 2’s cooperative mode where the two players have to be in constant communication to move forward.

Out of this simple canvas, magic happened. Each time I met a new red-robed pilgrim, there was a connection. Sometimes we played around not caring about moving forward. Other times we helped guide each other over the next hill. Of my two favorite moments, one I can’t share for spoiler reasons, I had a companion go up ahead, and something bad appeared to happen. I hunkered down, refusing to move for quite some time. Eventually I saw a bling in the distance as my companion was communicating with me via our one communicating button. He was waiting for me… right at the end of the level. He could have just moved on, but instead he had waited to make sure I would be okay. Experiences like that stand out in the noise of games where most human allies act like bots.

Why am I discussing Journey so much with a Guild Wars 2 tag? Continue reading [GW2] Hiking the Cooperative Journey

Selling Your Game on Kickstarter

If the last big trend in MMOs was the hybrid F2P model (headliners: Turbine), the potential next big thing is Kickstarter. Double Fine had a rather prominent, $3 million success on that. From the developer’s perspective, Kickstarter must be the best thing ever: get people to buy your game before you have even started making it. You know the game will be profitable because you don’t get started until you have already sold enough copies, plus some bonus cash from people who will pay $1,000 to have a weapon named after them or such. I’m interested in seeing where this will go. Or maybe it will be another fad that disappears in three weeks, but let’s look around.

Continue reading Selling Your Game on Kickstarter