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[GW2] The Late Fool’s Contest Winners!

I laughed. I cried. I drank a lot of bourbon, and eventually I painfully whittled the huge amount of entries to five winners. Believe me it was really hard. So many good ideas that I hope ArenaNet can process into actual gem store items. First, two notables… Tesh with the Bird’s Eye Balloon and Red Vagabond’s DelMonte Python. I do hope some form of these could make it in to Guild Wars 2. Tesh’s idea is a must have for many websites and postcard makers, and Red Vagabond’s idea would make the best minipet ever. They were the last two chopped, but I applaud their entries.

#5 Geikamir’s Glitter Jump – It’s going to happen. People will congregate in a city, waiting, and wishing something would entertain them. They will be soooo boooored. All of the sudden, some mad sylvari runs by them all aglow with glitter. This is a great idea for a impulse buy item, which I feel are necessary for a good microtransaction store. It livens things up, it draws attention, and it sounds fun.

#4 Reggie’s Map to the Stars – I liked Reggie’s idea because it was funny, but I really liked some of the ideas that could be drawn from it. A map that can only be traded to other players could bring a sort of Red Paperclip trading game, where the purchaser will eventually get back a “completed” map where each player kind of made their mark. Getting NPC asura to talk about it would be hilarious. Continue reading [GW2] The Late Fool’s Contest Winners!

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