The last gasp of the twitcher

Let it die. (Courtesy of Gizmodo.com)

Kotaku has posted what has got to be the most asinine, bottom feeding article I have read since Nintendo introduced the Wii and signaled that the unwashed rabble were about to come crashing into the pristine dork fortress that has encased the video gaming market.

Writer Leigh Alexander starts his “In defense of the classic controller” article with the statement: “Gamers may suffer some kind of identity crisis as the familiar markers of their beloved niche evolve – or disappear entirely. The solution to that one’s easy: Get over it. Like it or not, it’s clear that gaming’s not a ‘niche’ anymore, and its shape will change.”

Amen.

And then he launches into a ill-advised bout of wishful thinking, trying to cast doubt on the inevitable decline of the controller, writing, “Making something ‘more accessible’ doesn’t necessarily make it better.”

LOL wut?

This is an interface we’re talking about, right? It’s the ideal goal of an interface to make it as accessible as possible and therefore more widely marketable. Right? Not if you listen to the geniuses interviewed for this piece.

“Sorry to sound elitist, but I like that not everybody understands how to play games, and I doubt that I’m alone,” sniffs Frank Lantz, a java game developer and director of New York University’s Game Center.

I’m not going to call you elitist. Assuming that you were quoted correctly, I’m going to call you a fucking idiot. Let’s apply that logic to other entertainment experiences. “I like that not everybody understands how to watch movies or listen to music.” That’s not elitism, that’s self-defeating pompousness. Yes, there are writers who still talk like this, and NOBODY KNOWS WHO THEY ARE. That’s fine if you want to burn down your own life and waste public money in a fit of haughty exclusivity, but AAA game development investments are too large for this retardation.

The “classic controller” is not something to be mourned or retained as a hurdle for the unworthy. It very much still has its place, but that place is shrinking rapidly. There is nothing intrinsic about the old button array that makes it more ideal for developing shooters, sandboxes and MMOs – today’s popular genres. The Wii’s separated, motion-controlled remote ‘n’ nunchuck setup is demonstrably superior to either Sony or Microsoft’s pads, which is why both companies are dashing to replace them. But we’re not supposed to say that out loud, because the Wii is for kiddies and old people, or something.

There is something else going on here that Kotaku dares not mention for fear of alienating its readership. Videogames are becoming more of a physical thing and less of a cerebral or twitch thing. The non-transferable, highly specialized skills once needed to play button-mashing video games are being rendered useless. The jocks are taking over.

Notwithstanding the cherry-picked examples that Kotaku chose, I see nothing but upsides to making games more intuitive. It might actually attract some real artistic talent to the industry, dragging it out of the B-level comic book/sci-fi/fantasy ghetto in which it now largely resides.

Summer of Warcraft: Politicking and commitment

Part 8 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

It has dawned on me, slowly but surely, that in order to continue playing as a priest, I’m going to have to join a guild and participate in group activities. As I mentioned in Part 7, this holds no appeal for me.

While I have enjoyed playing this game with my buddy and my brother-in-law (on two different servers) on occasion, the thought of joining a group of complete strangers online to coordinate a strategic gaming effort gives me flashbacks of the fresh hell that was online group projects in college. The crippled communication and anonymity of net relationships is just a breeding ground for stupidity. So, as a rule, I must be paid to politick online, especially after last night’s experience.

I met a mage  – we’ll call him “Pabst” – outside the Silver Stream Mine in Loch Modan as I prepared to do some serious Kobold kicking. He was embroiled in a battle with a very lucky Kobold, so I blessed him and cursed the Kobold, a simple courtesy. He then asked if I needed help. He was what I call a “twitcher,” constantly moving around and typing in illegible pidgin – a tween poster child for Adderall. But I told him my quest objective and invited him to join me. Huge mistake.

Pabst’s idea of “helping” was to wait for me to draw an enemy, and then charge into the fray, enrage every surrounding enemy, randomly toss spells around and leave me to haplessly juggle my original target and my job, his defense. This twat thought that I, as a priest, should tank. After miraculously failing to get me killed, Pabst then began swiping my quest objectives even as he saw me heading to them. This may make for some good, old fashioned penis measuring among the offensive classes, but, in this situation, it was just pathetic. Blizzard hobbles the priesthood into irrelevance as it is. I don’t need my “friends” contributing to the problem.

So I ditched this liability and let him fend for his nutty self. I secured my objectives and then asked him if he completed his objectives, an unnecessary courtesy. He berated me for ignoring him and left the party. I wasn’t completely heartbroken.

But then, weirdness. As I traveled back to Thelsamar, the local burg, Pabst messaged me again: “listen u want to join my guild?”

Wow. I had to admire the balls on this guy. I responded, “I’m not on much, but sure.” That usually filters out the True Believers, as it did this time. Pabst then piously informed me that his clan was ” a leveling guild” and that I needed to be “on and committed.”

“It’s a video game, kid,” I responded. “‘Committed’ means ‘crazy’ in my book.” Boy, did that light his fingers on fire. Thank the gods for the ignore button.

Sorry, Pabst. You named your character after a beer. You twitched constantly with impatience. You were rude and annoying, and you played poorly. If you aren’t a “kid,” you are a manchild, and that’s even worse. But you’re hardly alone. This game attracts a certain kind of personality that sees leadership as domination, not inspiration, and delights in dominating behind a screen of anonymity. This type of personality is both the inspiration for and the creator of the stupid management essay and overly belligerent guild.

My buddy, the level 80 mage, finally lost his cool this weekend, complaining about the childishness and pettiness of his guild, but I don’t know how he put up with it this long. This is not what I call entertaining.

Summer of Warcraft: The Stigma

Part 7 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

“I am so disappointed that you are playing Warcraft,” said a co-worker this evening, without a mitigating preface or punchline.

I didn’t take this personally. In my line of work, this was a mild jab in our ongoing game of good-natured shit slinging. I responded with something self-effacing. I was ready for it. I was prepared to bear the burden of the World of Warcraft Stigma.

But it got me thinking. Silicon Valley, Blizzard Entertainment included, has a long way to go to convince the increasingly influential Xer chattering classes of the Right Coast that virtual worlds are a potentially life-enriching entertainment and communication experience. I bravely endured the slings and arrows from friends and the media (including The Office’s brilliant skewering) during my yearlong odyssey through Second Life. I, like many others, concluded that SL was a convoluted hassle. Those who aren’t into Tolkien-style fantasy concluded that about Warcraft as well.

But Warcraft’s growth rate is now tapering, and Blizzard needs to entice affluent Xers into its colorful world if, like Nintendo, it ever wants to break out of the geek set. Unfortunately, those Xers are still having trouble fully accepting Facebook and understanding Twitter, much less adapting to a fully 3D environment that has far less integration with their normal, fleshbag lives.

Scoff if you will at my comparison of Warcraft to web-based social networking tools, but what exactly is the core appeal of the game? It certainly isn’t the game itself. No, seriously, this is a terrible game. The overwrought, tissue-thin storylines are not sufficient to inspire lasting interest in Warcraft’s core mechanic, which is classic, dungeon-crawling grindcore of the most nerdy, repetitive and boring kind. I have started five different characters of different classes, races and alignments, because, after about level 15 or so, playing the game solo gets to be a chore of laundry list checking, rather than a learning and exploration experience. It’s like the game purposely runs you in circles in the same patch of land you’ve gotten to know intimately by level 5.

The real appeal, or revulsion, of Warcraft lies in its social component. Go raiding with buddies! Explore Azeroth as a swashbuckling party of hearty adventurers! That’s all fine and good, but how many working adult people who have access to disposable income and regular sex know more than two real life friends who play Warcraft? How often are those friends on Warcraft at the same time? This presents a problem. Whereas social networking can be done asynchronously, Warcraft requires a simultaneous time commitment. It must be scheduled.

And this is where Warcraft, for most of the population, becomes less like a game and more like work. I don’t want to come home from my scheduled workday to organize for a scheduled raid or instance. I like randomly finding friends online and cooperatively kicking the crap out of a few baddies while trash talking on the chat box, but I’m not going to bother making virtual friends and joining virtual fraternal organizations full of strange people who make demands on my time … just to play a bad roll-playing game. If I’m going to schedule anything with friends, it’s going to be in the real world, and it’s going to involve wine.

So what is the solution? Can Blizzard broaden the appeal of Warcraft without alienating its grindcore fan base? Or should the game’s core technology be reworked into a more palatable virtual world for The Rest of Us? Do we want a market full of MMOs using the “Warcraft Engine?”

We certainly don’t want them using Second Life’s.

Summer of Warcraft: As far as the eye can see

Part 6 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Don't fence me in.

It occurred to me that this series is turning into nothing but a bitchfest, so I had better clarify that there is at least one thing that I like about World of Warcraft.

I like the scale of the world.

Most RPGs of the 1980s and 1990s tried to create a world-sized map by resorting to … a world-sized map. They gave the impression of large scale by changing to the small scale. Towns and dungeon interactions happened on a different scale than world map interactions.

But then developers tried to get rid of this cheater method by actually rendering the world and having he player’s character run through it just like an action adventure. This had some terrible results at first. Final Fantasy X and XII, while highly detailed, felt like they occurred in regions about half the size of the county in which I live. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured  a huge world, but it suffered from “asset reuse” syndrome.

WoW has its own cut ‘n’ paste and pallete-swapping issues, but the punchy art style and clever terrain modeling distracts me from most of these problems. The horizon never feels limited, even has the game babies my weakling hardware. The entire kingdom of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess could fit mostly within Mulgor and certainly within the confines of Mulgore and Durotar. Azeroth is effing huge.

Even though the world is hardly the size of even a small real world continent, that’s a good thing. It’s big enough to give a sense of isolation and danger on long quests, but small enough to keep from dispersing players too thinly and wrecking the social feel of the game.

Summer of Warcraft: No noob love

I need a better reason to kill umpteen of these things.

Part 5 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

If Warcraft Realms is to be believed, the current population of Azeroth is less than 6.2 million, about the size of Tennessee or Rio de Janeiro. Detractors will whine that the game is actually 11.5 million strong (Ohio or Istanbul) as of autumn of last year, but I prefer the Realms method of eliminating characters that are under level 10 or haven’t logged in for the last 30 days. After all, we should avoid Second Life-style stat pumping.

That’s a stark contrast, isn’t it? Only 6.2 million of 11.5 million characters are active? That’s some serious churn. Still, Blizzard is operating from a position of strength, holding about 60 percent of the national MMO market. But stock prices don’t reward current standing, just potential growth. Warcraft’s growth is slowing and its cultural high water mark (Leeroy Jenkins, the Southpark episode, the artless term “pwnage” and alarmist news stories about its affect on marriages) has passed. It needs a kick in the pants if it wants to continue to add new subscribers in droves.

As a newbie, I have a few suggestions:

• Update the old areas – The beginner areas of Warcraft look every bit their four years of age, even older. The simple polygonal graphics allow for it to run on less powerful machines (like my Intel graphics laptop) and wide open vistas, but the textures could use some updating and refinement. Seasonal changes would be nice, as would a few new enemies. I haven’t seen this much palette swapping since Super Mario Bros. There is a sense when you log in as a newbie now that all the action is elsewhere. Nothing new is happening on the original landmass. It is just a grind tank. The quests haven’t changed at all, so their is little motivation for older, leveled characters to assist younger characters through the grind to more advanced, action-packed areas.
• Go beyond grind – Warcraft, in essence, is boring as hell. At the noob level, fights are an autoplay chore. I’ve parked my character next to an enemy to start slashing and walked away to get a drink. This is unacceptable. I’m sure that speeding up the fighting process would destroy Blizzards carefully balanced plot to make me take a certain amount of time to level up. Tough shit. It shouldn’t take 10 gunshots to kill something. If this game truly does not get fun until level 40, as one of my commenters alleged, then we have a problem. Because it is totally rigged for repetitive killing and little else. Where are the merchants and artistic classes? I realize it’s called Warcraft, but wars are won by logistics, not just warriors. Supporting classes, such as priests, have nothing to do if someone is not doing the killing for them. Here’s an idea – put the religious factions in charge of controlling guilds. You want some politics? You want player-created crusader drama? Put the priests in charge. No legal guilds without priest leaders. Oh, fighters and mages could make outlaw guilds, but then they would carry bounties on their heads, subject to PVP challenges without consent. Now that would stir shit up around the old stomping grounds, and it would make priests more influential and desirable. Of course, it would also make the game more like work than it already is.
• Add some story – I’ve already bitched about the fact that a WoW player never sees progress in his world. Quests aren’t cycled out and replaced after a certain number of players complete them. Azeroth has a long and fabled history that looks like a poor man’s Middle Earth creation myth, complete with unpronounceable names and OCD detail, but there doesn’t feel like anything is going on today. A noob’s first missions are always fetch quests and creature cullings, but there is no sense of why we’re doing this, except for vague excuses about not liking said creature/enemy. I don’t want to kill Kobolds because they are annoying. I want to kill them because they kidnapped, raped and consumed the flesh a young virgin of the village and then danced in her entrails until dawn. I need a reason to hate. Some players don’t need this. I do, and so do a lot of other potential customers.

Summer of Warcraft: For the Horde!

Mulgore's architecture can be charitably described as "primitive" and less charitably as "retarded."

Part 4 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

I was progressing along nicely with my human paladin on the Bloodscalp server of World of Warcraft , waiting patiently for my brother-in-law to log in sometime this week and show me around the place with his level 80 something or other.

Then I got the following message from him:

See, here’s the thing. You breath the homo air of the Alliance…..the Alliance! (say that last part like Charlie Murphy saying pancakes….pancakes!)

I sir, fight for the Horde. So I just assumed that you chose a Blood Elf Pally and joined the awesome power of the dark side.

On the plus side we can kill each other….which is cool.

*sigh* I don’t have the expansions. Goodbye, level 11 human paladin. Hello, level 1 troll priest.

On second thought, maybe not. The troll homeland, Durotar, is some kind of atomic orange desert wasteland looking like it was imported from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Everyone talks in bad Jamaican accents. My priest character was unacceptably ugly, weak and slow. I lasted until level 6 and then nuked her.

Now, I’m the proud owner of a Tauren hunter. I’m tired of manipulating people into killing for me, so I got a character with a gun and a hatchet. But the racial stereotypes continue. The Taurens are the Pacific Northwest Indians of the Warcraft racial rainbow, and their homeland is in “Mulgore,” the type of country name you only find in bad fantasy novels and video games. At least there are no references to “wampum” or “white men.” There is a prospecting company, though. And lots of totems and quite serious-sounding talk of the “Earth Mother.”

The experience thus far has been more eventful than playing a more supporting class, but no less grueling and grinding. Most quests are variations on “cull this herd and bring me pieces of it.” This sounds easy enough until you realize that somehow most of the enemies don’t have the necessary items. You kill 20 wildcats just to get 4 wildcat paws. Is this game seriously suggesting that the half dozen rounds of lead shot that I put into each victim is enough to irretrievably break all four of its paws? I smell an artificial game-lengthening device (It’s a MeMORPeGah, go figure).

This device is especially outrageous in the dwarf-killing episode, where you have to collect 5 pickaxes and then take them to the forge in downtown Thunderhorn (That’s the name? Seriously?) to have them broken. I went to said forge and proceeded to do what any adventure game veteran would do. I left-clicked on my collected pickaxes, pointed at the forge which lit up like a Christmas light, and clicked again.

Would you like to destroy the Dwarf Pickaxes?

Yes, my good man! With all speed!

Then…nothing. I did not get any broken tools back in order to take back to Bloodhoof and finish my quest. It was then that it dawned on me that my five pickaxes, representing the bullet-riddled corpses of dozens of dwarfs, had been deleted along with a half hour of my life that I will never get back. So, can someone tell me why Blizzard decided to use the verb “destroy” for deleting items instead of “drop,” like every other RPG in the history of ever?

Summer of Warcraft: Oh Lord, I’m stuck in Westfall again

With sunsets like this, your character should take damage just for breathing Westfall air.

Part 3 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

The moment I set foot in Westfall, I wanted to leave immediately. The place looked like a weepy country song sounds – sweeping fields of brown and depression.

After the bustle of Stormwind and the quaint serenity of Goldshire, Westfall seems like a smack in the face. The sky is a luminescent orange/brown, bringing to mind toxic waste. Everything else is either tan or brown, like the designers wanted to test the limits of players’ serotonin reserves. Buildings are mostly broken and crumbling; vegetation is dead or dying.

“You would think, after four years, they would have fixed that roof,” my buddy snarked as we arrived at the inn with a gaping skylight straddled by hammering workers.

The most colorful thing in this region is the red bandannas that you pull from the faces of slaughtered Defias thugs. And you will see a lot of them. The whole region seems to be some kind of outlaw hodown…which we didn’t mind in the least. The one nice thing about Westfall’s wide open sadscape is that there is little to get in the way of my buddy’s Mechano-hog bike. This place is made for drive-through destruction, roads be damned. Our now-familiar routine of high speed smash-n-grab evolved into a steady rhythm of rape-n-pillage.

But even at our accelerated pace of leveling my noob priest, Westfall was an interminable drag. I realized that Warcraft irks me, because I never seem to make a difference. In Zelda or Okami or any other single-player, run-around-and-kill-shit game, you actually affect the environment by completing quests. Families are reunited; fields are made green and fertile; populations are restored to life. And they stay that way.

In Warcraft, I give a vanishing potion to a lovelorn farm girl, and she disappears and walks away…only to immediately respawn as I stand agape with a Young Forest Bear steadily chewing on my ass. I regularly run into people doing stuff I just did and wanting me to help them do it again. It’s the nature of the beast, I realize, but it’s demoralizing. …especially in Westhell.

Netbooks are a fad, and here’s why

You can take this Valleywag story with a huge grain of salt, but, if even only he punchline is true, you can easily see how it can cause problems for the latest and cheapest in computing – the netbook.

The short version is that someone posted nasty comments about the White House Flickr photostream, and Flickr nuked his 1,200 photos. Methinks someone at the White House bitched, and Flickr responded dutifully. But the problem remains that, for whatever reason Flickr acted, they did so without regard for this man’s data.

The promise of the netbook – just enough processing power, data stored in the “cloud” and a cheap price – is tarnished by events like these. I keep all my Flickr photos backed up on two local hard drives for just this reason. I don’t trust the ethics of SoCal companies who run server farms. They have shown time and time again (Google with Chinese censorship? Facebook’s TOS?) that they value expediency over integrity. If you don’t trust banks with your money these days, you sure as hell shouldn’t trust Google or Yahoo with your data.

So, I expect netbooks to flourish during the economic downturn as a cheap access option for Internet services. But, I also fully expect them to morph back into fully-functioning laptops in the coming years as people discover just how unreliable the “cloud” can be.

Update: The chassis are already getting bigger. All we need is a bigger SSD and a peppier processor, and the “netbook” marketing term is dead.

Summer of Warcraft: Buff and grind

Part 2 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top. And you’ll need the cocaine. Tape recorder for special music. Acapulco shirts.

- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

My quest list for Elwynn Forest (and environs) read like a manifest for Noah’s Ark – list after list of fuzzy forest creatures needing a good slaughtering. This promised to be time-consuming, considering that my level 8 priest was fighting like a muscular dystrophy patient on opium. Then my friend, a Level 80 mage with a bitchin’ motorbike and sidecar, showed up.

Level 9 Paladin

I’ve discovered that World of Warcraft mainly deals in grind and fetch quests. Being an open-ended, non-linear RPG, I’m not surprised. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. I have friends who great each new Final Fantasy release as a giant endurance race/Easter egg hunt. They thrive on grind. I do not. I get bored, shut off the game and go watch videos of things blowing up.

So when my friend shows up, shooting blue lightning bolts from his hands like Darth Vader’s idea of an angry god, I put him to work doing the killing for me. Suddenly, what had been a laborious “quest” became closer to a smash ‘n’ grab operation (loot ‘n’ scoot?). Jump into the rumbling motorbike, dash to the quest location, slaughter indiscriminately and then dash out to go cash in. We had the forest cleared within an hour.

Perhaps the purists would view this as “cheating,” not earning my keep. Eff them. The quests are repetitive, designed to kill time and keep you coming back for more (paid) subscription. With few exceptions (Princess Must Die?), my roll playing experience in Warcraft so far has consisted of a humorless culling of dumb-to-semi-intelligent animals. My next destination, Westfall, promises more of the same.

I am grinding the game myself on another server, using a more slaughter-ready character, a Paladin. Initially, I found it easier, since I could actually, you know, fight. But then I realized something. As a priest, I’d been wandering the forest alone and nearly helpless. Other players would often spontaneously help me out by tanking for me, buffing for me or even giving me money. As a Pally, the spontaneous help has been diminished.

Summer of Warcraft: Ethnic Cleansing

The Priest, Level 9

Part 1 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

I wasn’t in Northshire 10 minutes before I got my first assignment – go slaughter a bunch of rat … things.

I’m a World of Warcraft noob. Yes, for nearly five years, I have managed to avoid playing this massively multiplayer online game. I refused to pay for what seemed like work. But then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Back to the rat things. They’re called Kobolds. They talk. They’re imagined as intelligent lifeforms to a certain degree. They wear pants. I designed my character to be a priest – a healer, protector. And, like everyone else, I was expected to slaughter these creatures, because, well, they’re funny looking and “we can’t have too many of them around.”

This is interesting logic. I mean, when I ventured into the forest to find the Kobalds, they ignored me. Same with the wolves who loitered nearby. Here I was, a man (actually, the character is a woman) of the cloth, bashing these things for collectibles. It didn’t sit right with my sense of purity. Most games give you at least a nominal reason to resort to violence.

I chose to be a priest, because my wife is a patient woman. When my friend offered to buy me three months on Warcraft (he wanted some perk from the game’s friend recuitment scheme), she didn’t set my laptop on fire and throw it out the window like she promised to if I ever started a Warcrack habit. So, in honor of her future vocation, I made my character a priest. Just like my wife, she has short red hair, snow white skin and an ass that would make Sir Mix-a-lot blush.

Actually, the ass was a fluke of my screen resolution. For the last day, I’ve been wandering around Azeroth thinking that the game designers had a thing for stocky, buxom chicks. A screen shot I took of the game revealed that my monitor is doing the old wide-screen squash. But the righteous booty was a stark reminder that Warcraft doesn’t give up much in the way of character customization.

Anyway, I am so far not impressed with Warcraft’s fascist tone, at least in the human storyline. I’m not talking about the violence. I’m talking about the authoritarian statues in Stormwind; the emphasis on race and racial cleansing; the High Fructose Purple voice acting; and the Wagnerian score. The whole thing is cheeseball and over the top, glorified gore grinding.

And Warcraft does have a problem when it comes to requiring priests to murder for a Higher Purpose. According to WoW Wiki, the Church of the Holy Light has three tenants – respect, tenacity and compassion. I’m pretty sure braining non-aggressive creatures violates at least two of those three ideals.