The New Yorker has a “nice talk by Jane McGonigal”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal if you want to hear more about her work on Alternate Reality Games.
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“Compulsive gamers not addicts, says head of Europe’s only clinic to treat gaming addicts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7746471.stm
The mountain of evidence and consensus in this topic is getting so huge it might actually start to penetrate public opinion.
“Premature Deathcoil problems”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665388392&sid=1&pageNo=1 almost as good as “I think my tank is grouping with someone else, and we have three DPS so I can’t just leave him”.
Ta-nehisi has an “article in Time on Warcraft”:http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1577502-1,00.html. It’s good and captures the ambivalence that a lot of people — especially adults — feel about WoW. Good on him.
I have been thinking about what makes people want to play — and particularly group and even more particularly raid — with other people in World of Warcraft and perhaps this is obvious, but the three things it comes down to are gear, skill, and fun.
The first and most obvious thing is that you must be *geared*. If you do not have the gear, you just do not get in the door. You must get geared, and you must take responsibility for your gear. And by gear I do not mean just weapons and armor — I mean having pots, food, reagents, getting your gear gemmed and enchanted. You just have to come prepared.
But gear only gets you in the door. No matter how geared a player is, they need to be *skilled* as well. I am constantly amazed by the difference in performance between an undergeared, skilled player and an overgeared unskilled player. A common mantra of my guild is that we need to recruit good players, not geared players, because you can always get players geared up, but you can’t make them more skilled. This is not actually true, I think — as a teacher I am all about helping people become more skilled! But in general it is much easier to get people geared than it is to do all the hard work necessary to get them to improve their play style, or even get them to the point where they are willing to put in the time to learn.
I guess actually the difference between gear and skill is one of degree. A computer and a decent connection are part of the gear you need as a player, and if you are lagged constantly your performance will never be that great — and it won’t be your fault. Equally, a lot of getting geared is about skill and attention — knowing the gems you need, the enchants you use, and getting them on your gear. So gear enables skill, even as skill helps optimize gear. Maybe I should call ’skill’ ‘care’ or ‘concentration’ or ‘focus’.
Finally, there is *fun*. You have to be fun to play with. Not just not an asshole, but actually a likeable person. I know a lot of people who make excuses for not including people in their groups or raids because ‘they are under-skilled’. What they really mean is ‘I can’t stand the guy’. We like to pretend that our reasons are not this subjective, but let’s face it — playing are included, and learn from others, and get better gear when they are well liked. Even more, having an atmosphere of trust and friendship actually makes you play BETTER. It provides that critical focus and hunger that makes raid successful.
So there you have it: gear, skill and trust. I think you could analyze a lot of characters and guilds in terms of these three ideas.
There is a “good article on who played what last year”:http://www.massively.com/2008/12/29/gamerdna-and-massively-look-back-at-the-mmo-year-in-review/ on GamerDNA — useful. Note to self.
What is up with the “om nom nom” meme? I have been hearing it for the past two months at least. As a piece of slang it is meant to signal positive evaluation of an object through the onomatopoeiaic sounds of devouring it. For instance:
“[cuffs of ridiculous spell power] omnomnomnom”
I think there is a bit of infantilization here as well — I think people may believe themselves to be mimicking the Cookie Monster. Here consumption is understood as approval-through-cookie-monster-role-occupance.
I’ve given up my plan of developing an expertise in WoW in China — although its something that I’m keeping my mind on. Luckily, the project is in better hands than mine. There is a nice “piece on Bonnie Nardi’s work”:http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/wow-in-china-and-us.html as well as a “shorter earlier piece”:http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2008/09/11/uci-tackles-world-of-warcraft-mystery/. Bonnie is great and I’m looking forward to reading the research results!
“The Pimp MMOG”:http://the-pimps.de/
By Germans, even.
“Graeme Kirkpatrick”:http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/graeme.kirkpatrick/publications writes on games and computer use. Unfortunately the link to his piece at “Max Weber Studies”:http://www.maxweberstudies.org/issue-2-2.htm? 404s.
Kiri has “another article on GTA”:http://digiplay.info/node/3214
Digiplay in fact has a “listing of articles on WoW”:http://digiplay.info/search/node/warcraft most of which I know about, but not all of them.
Every couple of months I relink to “Henry Lowood’s page:”http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood/vita.htm and his “cool courses”:http://www.stanford.edu/class/filmstud203a/html/schedule.htm so I don’t forget about them.
Tanya Krzywinska has been busy with “another anthology about games”:http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/book.asp?id=1100.
Ok that is it for now.
Ap is “reporting on a new Pew study”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080916/ap_on_hi_te/tec_video_gamers_2 that shows that over 95% of all teenagers play video games. The “Pew study itself can be found here”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/263/report_display.asp
I’m making a little list:
“Virtual (Br)others and (Re)sisters: Authentic Black Fraternity and Sorority Identity on the Internet.”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/5/528?etoc Matthew W. Hughey. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 37, No. 5, 528-560 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241607309987
“McFarland Publishing”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ has a really fascinating list, including volumes like “The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Autor”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-2822-9 and “two”:http://www.gamingcultures.com/ “volumes”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?isbn=0-7864-2832-5 by “J. Patrick Williams”:http://www.jpatrickwilliams.net/. I will have to try to get ahold of some of this stuff…
The first number of “The Journal of Virtual Worlds”:http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/issue/view/38 is out and it looks like they did a great job of it. Although some of the pieces included are old favorites — “Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat” for instance — the new stuff looks worthwhile as well. There are always lots of approaches to the study of virtual worlds, and I can’t say that I care for all of them, but the journal (so far) seems to have stuff that appeals even to finicky cats like me.
Its official — World of Warcraft has “over 10 million players”:http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080122005155&newsLang=en — 2.5 in the US, 2 in the EU and 5 million in Asia. Quick and easy statistics!
“It’s Comforting To Know That No Matter What You Do In Life, It Will Never Be As Awesome As This Picture “:http://www.unc.edu/~jmspille/images/awesome3.jpg
Also in re: the continuing expansion of the WoW Activity System: “WoW Radio”:http://www.wcradio.com/
This time the New York Times reports on “Korean internet addiction recover centers”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/technology/18rehab.html?_r=2&ref=business&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
MIT has published “The Ecology of Games”:http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/3?cookieSet=1 which features a bevy of Macarthur-sponsored, usual-suspect authored papers on games and learning.
I’m fascinated by theorycrafting websites and was just turned on to “maxdps.com”:http://maxdps.com/ — amazing geekery.
342 messages in the thread right now — a true piece of Outsider Art: “how could they do that to our shoulder?”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1272322392&sid=1
A BBC article on “post-WoW mmogs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6619875.stm is the leaping off point for a new Gamasutra article entitled “The Academics Speak: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=1 which features, among others, “Jeff McNeill”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=3
The “latest edition of New Media and Society”:http://nms.sagepub.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/content/vol9/issue4/ is a special issue on women and games/The Intarweb featuring an article by “Shoshana Magnet”: on “Suicide Girls”:http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/577. Very Boing-Boing.
Here’s one more piece from Reuters on “the AMA’s attempt to pathologize playing video games”:http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2425415820070624?sp=true.
Here’s Julian’s piece on “gold farming in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1183089600&en=1e6c650df0b49c03&ei=5070 as well as some “errata”:http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/recalculating-t.html.
And speaking of errata, “so much for Internet addiction”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/fun.games/06/25/addiction.video.games.reut/index.html
13 designs to choose from! The “WoW Visa”:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/visa/. Just when you thought virtual economies and real economies couldn’t get any more intertwined…
Here’s a space I know about but have never explored (read: perfect BA or MA project): all these graphical chat spaces like “Zwinky”:http://zwinky.smileycentral.com/, “Stardolls”:http://www.stardoll.com/en/, “Gaia”:http://gigaom.com/2007/04/22/move-over-myspace-gaia-online-is-here and “all the others”:http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/kids-and-teens-have-pushed-at-least-6-immersive-online-worlds-to-over-2m-uumth-in-the-us/.
If anyone figures all this out, let me know.
I admit: “Battlestar Galactica Credits, WoW Style”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfeYnI_lvYA&mode=related&search=
Those of us who grew up in the tail-end of the Cold War know Greg Costikyan as the Leonardo da Vinci of serious gamer geekdom. He didn’t just _write_ games, he wrote _great_ games like Paranoia. And the games he wrote were smart, funny, and insightful. Since then he’s gone on to produce popular fiction which is equally incisive — his novel “First Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812545494/sr=8-1/qid=1156573037/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8 is an absolute must for any academic thinking seriously about globalization or culture contact or neoliberal governmentality. Yes really. His knowlede of the history of table top gaming is also truly staggering, and for the past couple of years his blogging and other writing on the gaming industry has been excellent.
So his latest effort “Manifesto Games”:http://www.manifestogames.com/ is something I feel biologically compelled to write about. It doesn’t take long surfing around the site to figure out exactly what is going on — an indie games program wrapped around a content delivery system wrapped around a bunch of well-designed but not Oblivion-beautiful games. Anybody who remembers the Good Old Days of Oregon Trail will find themselves at home on the sight — they even have “Taipan”:http://www.manifestogames.com/node/1058!
So… go buy something from them now!
I admit: like everyone else who plays Civ IV I am in love with “the opening track”:http://sushi-delight.blogspot.com/2005/11/baba-yetu.html composed by “Chris Tin”:http://christophertin.com/biography.html and performed by “Talisman”:http://www.stanfordtalisman.com/html/frames.htm. Sure, in a post-Graceland, post-Lion King world this sort of thing sounds derivative, and Talisman’s website has loud music playing by default. But “just listen to it”:http://christophertin.com/samples/BabaYetu.mp3 (link to MP3)! I think Civ IV is one of the best-designed games EVER, and the entire thing oozes with classy, thoughtful presentation. While the soundtrack concept owes something to EU II, it avoids being a ‘greatest hits’ soundtrack (with the exception of the Allegri Miserere) and features John Adams in the modern period. That’s classy. Also the game has managed to jettison most of the ugly racist unilinear evolution evident in earler incarnations, and the opening sequence is heavy on the optimistic hope of global progress and low on blood and gore quotient. And there are, afaik, no Hot Coffee sequences squirrled away in any of the wonder movies. Way to go Sid — and especially way to go Chris Tin and Talisman!
While I have managed to aboid preordering Civilization IV, I know that not everyone is as strong as I am. And I think that this is a good tome to remind people that if they have had a hard time dealing with Civilization in past, “there is help”:http://www.civanon.org/home.shtml. Don’t be afraid to reach out.
Super geeky but also stirs my fancy somehow: The 203rd Tatooine Expeditionary Stormtrooper Legion in Star Wars Galaxies has been so well organized that the game developers rewarded them with “a visit from Darth Vader himself”:http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=40594 — follow the link to see screen captures of Vader encouraging the troops. “The Emporer Knows Your Loyalty!”
There’s something going on here about fantasy and fandom in MMOGs that is interesting — instead of playing Just Another Elf you get to play Just Another Elf who has been cool enough to meet Legolas (or any other named character from the stories that a fandom is based on). I would talk about it more, but I must Work On The Dissertation instead. Bah Humbug.
An IRC homie of mine recomends “Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law”:http://www.nyls.edu/pdfs/v49n1p147-184.pdf by “James Grimmelmann”:http://www.laboratorium.net/, whose blog shows him to be, indeed, worthy of IRC-homie-reccomendationdem.
It had to happen: The Everquest Reader is in the works, by Edward Wesp and Eric Hayot (CV here). Hayot has also been blogging at Printculture on all manner of things, including Freedom, Leverage, and Outlaws in Video Games. The site is powered using Nucleus CMS, which I hadn’t heard of before. Printculture is a pretty sight, but the fact that you can’t search for entries by authors is a pain — I wonder whether it was Nucleus or Printculture that saw fit not to include it.
In an earlier version of my Anthropology of Virtual Worlds syllabus I incorrectly attributed the pieces “bow, nigger” and “possessing Barbie” to Jim Rossignol when they were in fact by always_black, who runs the the website (wait for it) alwaysblack.com. Sorry for the confusion, AB. It’s a good site and if you haven’t yet read Bow, nigger you should definitely check it out.
Unfortunately I will not be able to each my course on the anthropology of virtual worlds at HPU this quarter. It was underenrolled — mostly due to the fact, I believe, that the administration decided to schedule it at noon, right during lunch. *sigh*. On the one hand, this means I don’t get to have the opportunity to be the second person in the nation to teach a course specifically on virtual worlds. On the other hand, this means a lot more time for other projects such as the dissertation.
One good thing to come of this is that I do have a syllabus which will hopefully be helpful for others. As you can see it’s not entirely finished — there are a few swaths of vague readings, but the basic outline is there. Take a look if you’re interested.
I’m probably The Last One On The Block To Hear About This, but The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication has tons of interesting stuff like The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Invidualism. The current issue has a few articles on virtual communities too.
Huzzah! Jill’s Dissertation (note: link to ginormous PDF) is now online (link broken atm try in a bit) for all to download and page through. In a perfect world I’d start reading it right away. Thanks for making this available, Jill!
Armchair Arcade: a journal on retrogaming. Truly good stuff for those of you looking to level up your knowledge of intelligent, non-academic writing about video games.