The mountain of evidence and consensus in this topic is getting so huge it might actually start to penetrate public opinion.

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.

“[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.

By Germans, even.

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.