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Thursday, June 26th, 2008

My Opponent Hates Puppies

Handful of things-

Doing a lot more in the way of tickets and shows and things lately.  As I grow older, culture seems to be more and more a product that can be purchased and consumed.  Going to check out Arabian Nights horse show, looking into the Orlando Science Center and potentially a cruise for an upcoming vacation.  I’ve never quite been out of the country, and the Bahamas or Mexico would *totally* count.

I’ve been meaning to get back into cooking.  The creation of a really awesome meal as a reason for family to get together and the exhilaration of trying a new recipe (or three) is something that really appeals to my nesting nature.  Southern Fried Chicken (without cheating), fresh green beans with those little bits of bacon in them, seasoned red potatoes and a big boiled pot of super-sweet Zellwood yellow corn would make for a perfect summer “Just ‘Cuz” feast.  Chalk this Normal Rockwellesque delusion of a Publix commercial style family get-together to a heat stroke.

The likelier outcome of an attempt of the above would be a war with blood pressure as I figure out how to precisely burn or undercook the chicken while fending off the dramas of the ol’ dysfunctional gang.  Ah, but anticipated failure never stopped ME from doing anything!  Something to brew about, anywho.

In other news, I’ve been playing a handful of newly released games here and there.  The Guild 2 came out with an expansion, and it feels pretty close to a massively single-player game, something along the lines of a Port Royale and The Sims.  Manipulating your dynasty for monopoly over the Hanseatic League is fun, until you run out of buildings to buy and towns to subdue. 

Settlers 6: Rise of an Empire is a giddy-making game, and it has me mired for hours on end (when it works).  Some of the scenarios are really quite well thought out, and it really took me back to strategy 101.  My singular peeve is that in each scenario, you start with this hideously designed infrastructure with roads going every which way and all your necessary shops arranged in an insanely inefficient circle, rather than grid format.  So you have to wait until you can safely kill off that first iteration or try to build around it.  I’m sure that’s how regular old cities worked out, but ugh, annoying!

Supreme Ruler 2020 was an absolute abysmal failure in every single regard.  It is as though someone took everything that could even be remotely classified as “global strategy” and shoved it without care into a hideous, unintuitive, mind-searing interface and slowed any semblance of time lapse to a crawl.  Inflation is unexplained, nations gradually grow to hate you for no other purpose other than your continued existence, the supply chain from natural resources to finished products is obscure at best.  Domestic and international trade are meshed together with no clear figures about what’s going to who or where or why, or how much of it.  The resource progression is arcane and non-intuitive.  Short on timber?  Think making more Timber Yards will fix it?  Think again.  A horrible game that could have been a shining jewel.

As for Age of Conan, well, I haven’t touched that game since a few days after it came out.  Yes, it runs on my machine, but it doesn’t run what I would classify as “well”.  And I have a damned good machine.  If your minspec is too high, it doesn’t matter if your game has content and fun - if I as consumer-player perceive the reduction in QUALITY as greater than 50% of what the game is intended to run at, you’ve lost me at the gate.  I could probably run WoW on my blackberry.  And I haven’t heard any word-of-mouth stories about Conan that would prompt me to overlook the initial 5 FPS tutorial barrier to entry.  Eve Online also take note - reduce your “tutorial” to less than 48 hours of my life and we’ll talk.

The Political Machine 2008 was eh, alright I suppose.  A fan of the 2004 version, I was really hoping the latest installment was going to bring a lot more features and fun to the table.  Apart from the Bobblehead thing, umm, yeah, not much change.  There’s a handful of new issues to take a stand on, like High Gas Prices and the Mortgage Crisis, but there are still no debates, still no primary season.  As a player, what’s the point on taking a stand on any of the negative issues if there are no rewards involved in assuming that risk?  I’m walking through the game as Joe Pishgar up against Giuliani to Lincoln and beating them squarely by 10% or more every time by simply coming out in favor of The Environment, The War on Terror, More Jobs, Social Security.  If real politics is anything even remotely similar, I’m going to have an easy race when I run for congressbastard in a few years.  Here’s how one of my ads will go-

America is a great nation, a nation of ideals and courage.  As a person of ideals and with great faith in our country, I’ve always stood in favor of oxygen.  It’s in the air we breath, the water we drink, and through it we have one of the most powerful rights in the history of the world - the right to free speech.  Oxygen is an important resource and should be recognized for the pivotal role it plays in our day to day lives as Americans.  Come November, you are going to have a choice in candidates - I’d be honored if you put your faith and trust in me.  I’m Joe Pishgar, and I’m in favor of oxygen for America.

In other news, work is proceeding apace.  I’m pleased as punch that I get to design a community infrastructure from the ground up.  Who knew there was so much delight in affixing the nuts and bolts to a sequence of policies and initiatives?  It’s fun, but very documentation intensive.  I don’t think I’ve ever really thought this deep about how communities are formed from nothingness.  Usually there’s a community already *there*.  On the flip side, most of the major issues I’ve encountered in the past have been the result of missed steps or incorrect assessments during the infrastructure planning phases.  So, I’m TOTALLY going to be the guy to blame if I accidentally miss a disciplinary policy or skirt a half-dozen less dynamic pylons of the infrastructure.  On the other flip side though, if it works like a well-oiled machine, I’m absolutely going to patent the accursed thing.  (Can you patent a process handling philosophies of formative relationships in a socio-psychological online group dynamic?)

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Pee Arr

Am I the only one that breaks out into fits of giggling when a commercial comes on TV advertising the “major breakthroughs” and “exhaustive hours invested into research” for alternative energy sources, and then the logo at the end comes up as an oil company?  Investing in alternative energy sources, big oil?  Aww, that’s precious.  Of course you are!

It is just downright adorable that Chevron, Exxon and BP think that they can somehow convince the attentive public that they are pioneering the cutting edge of advanced non-fossil fuels technology by flashing a few “flower girl in the meadow” and overused Extenze “scientists working in a room filled with beakers and bottles filled with water dyed by food coloring” stock video clips.  Right.  We’re working hard to make every single aspect of our businesses obsolete!  So remember next time you are at the pump, every 1/5,000th of a penny is directly invested into promoting alternative energy (public relations commercials)!

In other news, Phillip Morris would like you to stop smoking, Smithfield sells only the highest quality pork products, and ask your doctor if Astra-Zeneca is right for you.  If you can’t afford prescription drugs, you may qualify for a program to provide them to you at little to no cost.

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

The End of VMK

As promised, I’m going to try to write a little bit about the closing of VMK.

Firstly, it came as quite a surprise.  The game had been doing quite well, and was in what I’d like to characterize as the “throes of new growth”. 

Actually, I’m going to suddenly diverge for a moment here to mention the unique flavor of VMK.  As far as social spaces go, it was specifically unique.  Canned dictionary-based chat lead to a seperate language.  I glove my duh.duh as “I love my daddy.”  Language is the first icon of culture, and VMK’s culture took great pains for me to originally become inducted into. 

The environment of VMK was Disney, but a softly dilluted Disney with alternate non-brand characters like the Yeti and Esmeralda the fortune teller.  But, despite this dillution, the environment in which the players played was kept almost diabetically sweet through persistent high quality content updates.  New clothing, items, rooms, contests, events - grand things and special attentions that paying subscribers of most MMOs would give their thumbs for were commonplace and free. 

The players themselves coordinated events and room hosting, playing games in the freeform social space provided them in exchange for their increased brand awareness.  Tweens, mostly female, occupied the bulk of the demographic.  Coupled with this, I presided as Community Manager over the most professional ace team of Moderators and event Hosts I have ever known of.  With pedigrees in AOL’s Community Leader program, the mods I had the pleasure of directing I have never witnessed before in any other MMO.  And to boot, the staff itself was huge! 

Due to COPPA regulations regarding kids in online spaces, moderation had to remain constant, and so my staff was a sizable 30+.  One of the major aspects of sadness I have about the game’s closure is that I will likely never again see assembled a team of moderators as freaking awesome as these guys were.  The majority have gone on to other projects, but I aspire to hire them back again in my next mod team if I possibly can.

So, we were talking about VMK’s unique “flavor”.  Ever see that movie from the 80’s, Legend with Tom Cruise, before he went all schitzo?  You know the one, with Tim Curry as the big red, black horned Satan creature.  In it, there’s a few scenes with a unicorn running and bucking through a forest with insistent rays of sunshine blasting down in between windswept leaves.  There’s a reverb synth riff playing by Tangerine Dream in stopping, high breathless pace over piano.  It’s a dirty, brilliant light filled with dust and earth and good.  That’s probably the most accurate way I can describe the flavor of VMK.

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Friday, May 30th, 2008

Friday in LA

I have been given 550,000 humans to play with.  Hopefully I can channel their efforts into something glorious and productive.  More to come soon!

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

VMK Gone Away

I keep rewriting this post, and I keep failing at it.

I want to tell you about VMK’s closing.  I want to tell you about the dark lessons watching a community die can teach.  I want to tell you about Madison Reed.  Maybe next week.

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Why I Don’t Play WoW

The reason I do not play World of Warcraft is because as a game, it is too good.  Yes, I played from levels 1-60, and I experienced end-game raiding content well before Burning Crusade.  I was lucky enough to have exhausted much of the content available before Blizzard dumped a heaping helping back on top, and used the momentum from my raid misfortunes to build up enough escape velocity. 

I’ve escaped from World of Warcraft, and I’m proud to say that I have.  But I don’t damn the game or the players who play it.  For me, the world of Azeroth presents too much opportunity for fun to stand in direct competition with “RL”.  The problem, if it can be seen as a problem, is that as a game it is too well done.  There is so much content to go through, with such a rich, consistent history.  The game itself feels easy, dangling well-deserved carrots at frequencies seemingly tailor made to the player.

I’m not going to call WoW the perfect MMO.  It falls short in several areas.  First off, there is no player housing.  Player housing provides a sense of permanance and ownership that simply doesn’t exist in most games outside of Ultima Online.  There are no live events.  Nothing on a WoW server is ever going to be truly “surprising” or unique in that it happens out of the ordinary.  Thirdly, endgame remains GearCraft, which perhaps is the only extant solution to the design problem of endgame on a level treadmill.  You will have inflation, you will have farming, you will have economic stratification.

And it is a level treadmill.  Don’t convince yourself otherwise.  It is a cleverly designed, beautifully tweaked level treadmill obfuscated deeply by mounds and mounds of gooey sugary content.  Level 14 to 15?  Not without going to this new land and exploring wonderful new things and meeting all these awesome new NPCs and abilities!  Nom nom nom.

When I went to interview for the spot of Blizz CM, they asked me if I still played, and I embarrassingly had to say no - and tried to explain to the best of my ability why.  They handed me a copy of Burning Crusade, fresh off the presses, and it still sits, unopened, on the shelf in the closet of my home office.  Sometimes, late at night, when I glance over the four or five rows of game icons on my desktop, the box seems to call to me.  “Play me.  I could give you untold hours of satisfaction.” it seems to say.  And it would, and I know exactly how it would feel and what to expect if I cracked that box open.

It would consume every spare moment, every moment not dedicated to something specific, something Other.  “Other” itself would be WoW, and all conversations like roads would lead back to WoW.  The dulcid hypnotic music of the swirling opening gate of login screen would welcome me time and time again, until a very part of my psyche and soul were claimed by the World of Warcraft.  I would find myself engaged in the evil math, the DARK MATH that I have spoken before of to friends and relatives when afflicted with the powers of World of Warcraft.  You know this math of which I speak.  You’ve done it yourself if you’ve played.

/played.  Oh, I spent that much time in this game.  I see.  Well, let’s see, that’s 8 months, times subscription fee, plus original box purchase.  Divided by how many hours I’ve played.  So that’s X cents per hour played, enjoying a wonderful game.  If I were out at the movies or having drinks with friends, it would be a lot more expensive.  A night out on the town can run upwards of fifty, sixty dollars.  And look at all the fun I’m having staying right here at home.  It’s a smart decision, it really is.  It really is.

Dark Math.  Justification and truth used to reinforce what is undoubtedly an addiction.  And anyone that says they aren’t addicted to WoW is pulling your leg.  It’s an addictable MMO.  I would go so far as to say that it is the most addictive MMO.  Watch the eyes in a “casual” player when they hear that login music.  They freaking dilate, as though the person were physiologically getting ready for food or sex!

I don’t play WoW because it would eat me.  I was actually in the beta test, and I learned how good of a game it was then, and outright refused to buy it when it came out because I knew matter-of-factly that it would consume me cowlick to toenail.  If, at some point, Blizzard decides to release a redux version, with less content, maybe more PvP, and certainly less satisfying gameplay, I will gladly consider giving it another go. 

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

That Answer Is

So I’ve been watching this show on that bastion of morality that is the FOX network and I’ve found myself a bit sickened that I’ve become semi-addicted to it.  The addiction is not a healthy one, because watching this particular show evokes the same set of emotions as driving by a horrific car accident where you know someone got badly hurt, and your curious self wants to see the blood and body parts..  You can’t help but watch.

I have a very special relationship with what I know as Truth and Honesty, and this particular television program has managed to weaponize in a way I never fathomed possible.  I knew previous that truth could be used to destroy, a full on destructive force, objective and unmitigated, but I hadn’t the foggiest that it could be refined into an almost thermonuclear state.  If you haven’t seen the show, I can summarize it really quick for you.  A person attempts to answer 21 questions truthfully in front of family and friends, with the results of a polygraph test used to compare and contrast answers given, with a firm “True” or “‘False” to varying levels of personal questions.

In “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” fashion, Honesty is prostituted for thrill and laid bare, forced to dance lasciviously before an audience of cheers and cajoling.  The Moment of Truth is a meticulous gorey dissection of the physics of Truth itself, generally at the cost of the humanity and relationships of the contestant.  Each time I watch the show, I am lessened, and I question my own sincerity.  Is Truth objective or subjective?  Is it a matter of perspective or is it an absolute?  The morale of the show would seem to be that some truth is not meant to be shared, and that there are dark corners of every person’s life which are never intended to be seen in the light.

But can this be?  I don’t have anything to hide (famous last words), but I ask myself if I could survive as a person if I were in fact the embodiment of the “open book”, with no areas of my psyche untouched by expression with intent.  Could anyone?  There is a given level of operational deception that is incurred as a cost for existing in reality, and the real Virtue of Honesty is the practice of minimizing that expense.  Without that base deception and set of assumptions, we would be psychologically naked, a series of undefended egos and ids walking about, subject to the slings and arrows of even the slightest emotional variance.  But I digress.  The Moment of Truth doesn’t ask any of these questions.  As a circus of emotional violence, it symbolically exists as the solemn right hand raised in sacred oath to tell the Truth, fatally severed at the wrist. 

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Sins of the Sins of A Solar Empire

This game had the potential to finally usurp Master of Orion 2 as the grand-daddy ultimate space strategy 4x simulator of all time and it totally blew it.  The gameplay is wonderful, the graphics are pristine, the flow of the game is good, solid and challenging.  But the epic feel that comes with taking your civilization from barely out of newly discovering faster-than-light technology at Warp 1 and the monstro-behemoth moon-sized Eater o’ Stars style space stations is nowhere to be found.  In Sins of a Solar Empire, you basically take your space-faring folk from “decent space peeps” to “pretty good space peeps” from start to end with no major technological eclipsing of other races to be found.  This, in sharp contract to MOO2, where you start off as partially sentient goo and end up with the galactic power to shape energy at will into small planetoids and hurl them through the universe at your diplomatic opponents.  The scope just isn’t there.

Actually, I’m going to go out on a limb and classify Sins as an RTS rather than a 4X.  All the RTS elements are there, in full force, even the rush.  And I take back what I said about Master of Orion 2 being the grand-daddy of 4xers.  The rarely mentioned game by Empire called “Stars!” was the true grandpa to the genre, and no one has quite grasped that level of brilliance since. 

In Stars!, you could fully customize your race, anything from robotic silicoids to energy-beings that could only live on starbases instead of planets.  To colonize a world in the seemingly endless galaxy, you had to ensure that the gravity, temperature and radation were within the thresholds for your population to survive.  You could fling mineral packets to and fro with planetary mass drivers, set up stargates to travel between distant worlds within a single turn, bomb and invade other cultures and subjugate them to your galactic will. Minefields, ramscoops, lasers, precision targeting computers, terraforming as an act of war, strip-mining and biological and genetic warfare.  What a freaking glorious game that was.

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Rares Markets

Quick item of note I’d like to cover really quickly before it passes into the oblivion that is external to my limited mental RAM.

Firstly, the rares market in any MMO is complete and utter bullshit.  Rares, and the uncommon nature of items, gear, furniture and objects of interest that have absolutely no effect on the balance or outcome of the game’s linear (or non-linear) progression exist as illusory economic components in a false market.  Please take a moment to grasp that.  A “rare” that comes into existence is arbitrarily assigned a value based on the artificial demand placed on the desire for that given “rare”.  This is a communal value, not expressed in terms of net gain (such as an epic weapon), nor consumability, nor any other value aside from simple banal aesthetic.

The rares market in any virtual economy is one of smoke and mirrors.  Price for the item in question only exists so long as there is demand for it.  Because the item exists outside the typical economy, most of the time it has no base value from which to obtain a derivative.  The rares I am referring to are the oddly shaped “rock” and “horse dung” and “bright purple robe”.  Items which one would assume would not be worth hundreds, even occasionally thousands of dollars, yet are.  Rares like these exist as anomalies, unintended and forgotten elements of a gamescape.  In the same category, are however the limited release items, objects only given out at certain times or for certain reasons, obtained in some arcane way a given number of years ago.  Less valueable, but still considered rares in the overall market under discussion.

So far, from my experience in live events, community management, and as a player, I personally advocate a direct and total destruction of any extant rares market in any virtual world.  Rares markets marginalize player segments, and while the common excuse of “preservation of history” is valid, it is nevertheless a useless arguement to make when you take into account that the majority of those “historical items” are bugged, accidental, or incidental instances of crowning favoritism.  The rares market, through strictly desire-based valuation, causes inflation of the game’s currency.  A rare serves as a potential repository of a set quantity of currency, variant on demand, that stored up generates inflation.

For example, take into account the history of the Raiment of the Zessler Guard, a specially-hued simple green robe I gave out while serving as Event Moderator for the UO server Legends.  For being present during the Britannian Invasion lead by the powerful necromancer noble, Erik Zessler, those present were given a robe from his own hand to indicate their allegiance to the cause.  Literally hundreds were given out.  I came to understand that more revenue was being generated from the server transfers to and from than was actually being expended on the contracts with the EMs.  Several years later, the Raiment of the Zessler Guard goes for 35-60 million gold in UO ($50-$80).  Despite the initial flood of the market and the devaluation of any existing rare robes on the server, as a rare, the robe represents a inflation of 60 million gold each.  That’s 6,000,000,000 total at a rough estimate of $9,000. 

Quick summation, a targeted saturation of a rares market can increase the health of the virtual economy and lower the marginalization of player segments.

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

The Crucifiction Effect

Spotted this in this evening’s Ultima Online House of Commons.  Kudos and huzzah!  Apparently, Draconi, one of the designers for Ultima Online, discovered an illegal scripter and very publically annihilated his house in Luna.  Burned it down to absolute ruins and put up a scarecrow in effigy of the “traitor”.  The community response was a glorious outpouring of elated glee. 

Not to get all Machiavellian on all ya’lls (too late?), but this is one of those really fun things that, when done infrequently, can really help amp up the level of goodwill in a game.  I use the term “crucifiction effect” to describe the exact mechanics and overall impact such a harsh and public treatment of a player can have.  When you look at the judicial system of Rome, and the way things worked in the realm of Caesar, my own liberal bleeding heart sentimentalities aside, crucifictions worked. 

After conquering a new province, or as punishment for various crimes, the Romans would very publically punish, to the greatest extent imaginable (with a minimum of fuss on their part) an antagonist by nailing them to a big ol’ piece of wood.  This generally had the psychological effect of making the other antagonists fearful, subservient and obedient, while simultaneously bringing pleasure and a sense of righteous justice to the Roman citizenry.  Moving that example forward to the wilderness of virtual worlds - crucifiction in practice works wonders.

Another example of this, apart from UO’s, could be earlier in 2007, when credit spammers in SWG were confronted suddenly by Dark Jedi that landed on their heads and discovered that they had been made overt, and attackable.  And another, lighter example - notice how Blizzard seems to wait until it has an impressive number of bans (50,000, 100,000) before laying them out in one fell swoop for maximum effect of iron-fisted justice?  Major, public, harsh action against that segment of the player population intent on doing the most damage to the game.

I think the trend towards this type of “vengeful hand of god” treatment of troublesome players is a wonderful thing, for the same reason that many players in online games do.  When a virtual world, threatened by encroaching violators who would see the economy rended to shreds for personal gain and the stability and core value of the service shaken under their ministrations, that world’s architects should react as violently as possible.  “There are too many of them, and not enough us to fight them” is often cited as excuse for a passive permission for these cretins to continue their unseemly work.

Often true, but an occasional and very public obliteration of a handful of them can really do wonders for goodwill and to make others think twice about going over to the dark side.