#eafail

Oh, thank you, EA.



Uh, so, yeah. So, obviously, EA doesn't care about girl gamers. Such as everyone who buys the Sims. Admittedly, most Sims fans probably aren't going to see this. I know I own at least one EA game (not including my permanently borked copy of Sims 2 that Alex, yes I know, ironic, gave me) but offhand I can't think of what it is.

Tweet #eafail if you're upset. I doubt it will trend, but this sort of thing makes me go rawr.

Here's a second article with the full ad, now taken down elsewhere.

Squishable bugs!

Ethnography of a Newbie

A) I was getting annoyed with my hair, so I put it in a pony tail. It's too short and layered, though, so most of it fell out. Joey saw it, and declared it to be Young Night Elf hair.

B) Standing, waiting for our coffees, Joey decides that Blink would be the best thing to have in real life out of WoW. Remember: he's been playing for less than a week, and he's already talking about it randomly, without any prompting, in public places. (Other than immortality, sickness only lasting a few minutes at a time, etc, I of course chose my rhino.)

C) Told him I was writing Ethnography of a Newbie, and that I was the Jane Goodall of the new WoW players.
"It's almost as if they're intelligent, and trying to tell us something."
"Yes, but it's hard to tell, they do speak a different language."
"True."
"But I found out what aggro means today!"

Ethnography of a Newbie

Joey has recruited another person into WoW. Already.

Ethnography of a Newbie

My pal, coworker, and future neighbor Joey has just started playing WoW. I don't really expect points for it or anything, but I'm going to just update about it once and a while.

Getting an angry text at 3:00 am because WoW won't work? How fun.

Not really being fair, there...

Alex St. John really bothered me today. Sure, he's an aggressive executive type, I understand that. The dismissive sexism? Not really my favorite thing.

I was sitting in the front row; I generally sit wherever there's the most room. He called the people in the front row something, either suck-ups or overachievers. Probably suck-ups. He went down the line from his left to his right asking everyone's favorite video games. He stopped a person or two short of me, which didn't bother me, but was unfortunate in retrospect.

Later, he was trying to make a point about Bejeweled, and looked at me and saw [Girl in Front Row - SHE MUST PLAY BEJEWELED!]. He asked if I played it, and I said yes. This was just after I added the WoW Addon for it, which I like. I had actually never played Bejeweled until that point. He asked why, and I said it was de-stressing, because it gets rid of all the other distractions I have. So does WoW, for that matter, and Brawl, and every video game ever, but I didn't say that. He looked at the class like "Hey guys, point made!"

Then, sometime later, he asked who hadn't played Halo. I raised my hand. I've just never particularly wanted to buy an XBox. For that matter, I've never bought a console game. I'm a console moocher, especially with my sister. As it happened, none of my friends own XBoxes either, so, no, I haven't played Halo. He asked why I hadn't, I said something stupid, but he got to the point of whether or not I would actually enjoy Halo, it's a huge investment to play console games without even trying them out first. That's a good point. I definitely give him that. I just wish he maybe would have picked someone else out, but he looked at me and saw Girl + Prior Admission of Bejeweled + Doesn't Play Halo = Perfect Stereotype.

So, after class, when both Wanda and I tried to talk to him, he just dismissively said, "Play more games first." I could see Wanda half-heartedly go "But she plays WoW," but for Alex. St. Jerk, it was case closed, move on.

It is a legitimate criticism that if I want to make this my career, I need to play more. I agree. I actually do. There have been a lot of game names mentioned in this class without me having a clue what they are. I just don't appreciate the assumption that Bejeweled is my game, at all.

Announcement.

Everyone knows that you can play Bejeweled and Peggle inside WoW, right?

Kristin is easily taken in by cute.

So, I'm just going to post a bunch of Noblegarden pictures. I don't usually get that involved in holidays, but I wasn't able to attend Easter at my great-grandmother's this year, and I have the feeling that has something to do with it.

On to the adorableness.

Kristin is shaking her bunny-maker.

For the first time in at least a year, I sat down and played WoW with other people in the room. Amazing. (It probably helped that after an hour or so, Cameron gave me his computer, a pretty high-powered desktop with an absurdly large screen, as compared to my very average laptop. It was better than anything else in the world.) I joined a guild for the first time since my original guild split in...2007? I may have my antisocial tendencies, but this was like seeing the sun for the first time in years. I'm not an active guild member, they just let people invite their friends, who can later apply to raid with everyone else.

I logged on for the first time since Tame (Exotic) became available. I now have a woolly rhino named Sweetums, and she completes me.

The real problem here, though, is Noblegarden. It's so horribly cute that I can't stop playing until I finish those achievements. And it's only available for one week, so I can't put it off. Nothing seems to motivate people like things being available for limited times only: score one for Blizzard and its holidays.

It does seem somewhat strange that the whole holiday is unbearably cute. It seems like one of those "know your audience" things, and I'm really wondering what the overlap is for "people who would squeal excitedly after their avatar got turned into a bunny" and "people who like to kill things mercilessly with their epic weapons and big spiky armor." On the other hand...it's Blizzard, and they can do what they want.

Also, a picture of Sweetums.

Everything Bad is Good for You

I had to read a section from Everything Bad is Good for You for Communications 200 last fall, and when I saw the whole book in Half Price the other day, I bought it.

His basic claim is, without arguing about the content, that the cognitive tasks involved in video games and TV shows are good for you. I'm just going to write this entire thing like he's correct, though I don't have the expertise in psychology or anything to back it up.

In video games, he finds an enormous amount of effort. Games have puzzles and force you to solve all sorts of logical, reasoning, pattern-spotting things. They involve long-term thinking - he quotes a line of tasks in one of the Link games that gets incredibly, incredibly complicated. The amount of guessing, and just figuring out what to do is intense. You have a general guideline for what you're supposed to do, but often it takes some guessing and running around to get it right. He cites the length of game walk-throughs as evidence of complexity that non-gamers vastly underestimate.

He also completely denies the idea that games decrease players' patience by giving instant gratification. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's one of the more annoying ones to me, so I'm going to talk about it. I do remember my dad walking by and citing it while I was playing a game on the PS2, Jak and Daxter. I was trying to beat the final boss for the 20^th or so time in a row. The same fight, over and over, for probably an hour. After untold hours of playing the game to get to this point, and with untold hours left to complete every task and find every orb so I could finally have that coveted "100%" on my file. I probably could have read every well-known Jane Austen book in the amount of time I spent playing this one game, my very first full RPG.

In the next part of the book, he talks about TV shows. His claim is that TV shows have gotten increasingly socially complex, with more characters, more plot lines at any particular time, more expectations that the viewer will figure out what's going on without the answer thrown on a silver platter. Reality TV may be dumb in content, but it uses the parts of our brain dedicated to figuring out social connections and how to work with them.

What I wonder is what his perspective on online worlds is. The book was written in 2005, before the big boom. If keeping up on social relations and sharpening people skills is a good thing, and the basic structure of games is a good thing...shouldn't my WoW addiction be a very good thing? I do feel like WoW quests are not generally very complex, with a few exceptions, but the long-term strategy stuff definitely plays a huge role. For most people, I hope.

Krisssssssy, or, I gained 4 flow while also writing this entry.

So, I immediately went home to try out ourWorld after lecture. This is the worst/best idea ever. A game that rewards you for playing (not mastering, just playing) a variety of super-addictive minigames? Where you get cute clothing and cute dance moves?

So, while playing this, I was trying to track my thoughts and be aware of what I was doing. While playing Rings, one of the little puzzle games, I constantly felt like I could do better. I could get further, I could put more rings down, I could get bigger stacks. I just needed some practice. I can't speak about the specific neural pathways and transmitters and that sort of thing, but I definitely know I had a weird excited/relaxed state. I also think it had little spikes, with the tension rising as the 6 slots filled up, and easing a little every time I managed to sink a perfect stack.

It was similar for other minigames, and switching between them seemed to only make the effect worse, because I was already keyed into solving visual puzzles fast, but now I was switching between them. It was sort of like what one of my friends called muscle confusion - where you keep switching between exercises, like from biking to elliptical to backwards elliptical. I was doing effectively the same thing over and over, but by varying the details, it ended up more intense.

That's just normal minigame stuff, though. The flow system I find particularly insidious. It provided a concrete measurement of how much time I'd spent on there, and a little goal to set for myself each time I was on (10 flow). It also was positive rather than negative - if they'd done the same thing with just an outright clock, I would probably feel bad about spending x number of minutes on, but gaining 10 flow was seen as an accomplishment. (See? I don't even know how long it usually takes me to get 10 flow.) Even if it really is just a clock of how much time I spend playing games. It's also not just awarding coins. I might actually eventually realize that I really like the clothes I have now and don't really need to buy anything more. I have over 4,000 coins that I just can't really think of using. 4,000 is also such a high number I don't see the impact as much as I do with my 10 flow that I keep spending and regenerating.

I also saw the whole word-of-mouth thing meeting the whole addiction thing, as within two days my sister was stuck playing it, too.

So, I'm going to go now. I need to get two more flow while playing tonight, or I won't have an even 10 and won't be able to click the more efficient giant bubbles.

Well, maybe it influenced me a little more than I thought.

As I mentioned in my last post, before my angry rant about my WoW-jacker, someone molested me right away in Second Life. I brushed it off as a sort of "Well, that was weird" incident, but I think it might deserve more elaboration. Well, that and it's the most interesting thing I can think to talk about right now.

I was standing in a starting area. I looked remarkably confused, so someone who was apparently stationed there to greet people sent me some notecards with basic game facts on them. I was standing there, reading them, and not talking or moving or anything. I'm not sure how or if Second Life displays being AFK, but it's possible this guy thought I was.

I was the prototype girl in the pink dress. I think she's called "the girl next door." He was some guy in a suit, with nothing distinctive about him. He touched my lovely lady lumps. I stood there silently, because I was way, way too confused to do anything about it. Same thing happened in a bar in Germany. Long story. Finally, I managed to simply press the down arrow and step back from him.

This week, I went back to try it again. I was walking around the area where the free clothing is, trying everything on. I found an adorable outfit with a micro-skirt and a cat shirt that showed my midriff, but felt too undressed after only a few minutes, and had to go back and try to find something else. Eventually, I found the option to edit and create your own clothing, and so I made my shirt as long as possible. I couldn't find a skirt that was long enough, so I created plain black slacks. Soon I found a dark gray hoodie with just a few purple stars on the front. So, I stepped back to see how I looked, and it struck me that I looked rather like someone who had in fact just been molested and was now trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible.

Well, my luck is great so far.

Game Journal – Week 1

This has not been a good week in the gaming world for me. I have Eve Online downloaded and installed, but haven’t really tried to play it yet. I finally installed Sims 2 on my new computer that will actually run it, surprise surprise. I created an account on Second Life, pretty little Kristin Frostwych. I was molested within the first half hour, but got over it. Then I opened WoW to play for probably the third or fourth time since last summer.

It opened automatically to a server I’ve never created a character on. There were nine characters there, a few little 5-10s, but also a 40, a 30, and a 20. All of them were male, and I never play male. The 40 was a rogue, and I really, really cannot play a rogue. You can imagine how thrilled I was.

I checked out my main character, a 69 Tauren hunter, and she was exactly where I left her, with all of her possessions. I initially thought I was missing a BE, but she was there, too. All of my keybindings were messed up; imagine a very confused-looking cow running sideways, stopping, and then running sideways again. I reset them to default, and changed the few I like changed.

This is like a test of players’ attachment to avatars and the sanctity of gaming in high-stress environments. The third thing I did, after changing my password and inspecting my account for damage, was of course to blog about it in a WoW group. Once it was clear there was no actual damage done to my account, people started saying things like, “Man, it's like those stories about burglars who break into your home and do the dishes,” and “Lol, weird but funny really. Maybe someone was being kind and just felt like leveling some characters for you?”

I felt really strange about this. I did not like, on principle, someone else playing with my stuff. I'm never going to use these new characters. It's not a favor to me. I'm considering deleting all of them, after maybe making an alt to mail anything valuable to, just in case I ever have reason to play on that server. But - "kind"? Really, people?