A Change is Gonna Come

Posted: February 24, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in Game Players, Games and Life, New Media
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"Why, Oh Why?" by Cayusa. CCLicence.

Sometimes you get a situation where all the worst aspects of our current new media environment collide and form a perfect storm of hideousness.  So when you take Reddit, add in a sprinkling of Twitter and stir it all with a bunch of rabid gaming fanbois you might expect something truly appalling to emerge.

Way back in the gaming Dark Ages (2006) a woman who was then a senior writer for Bioware gave an interview in which she expressed the opinion that game developers should build in an interface option that allowed players who were more interested in story and character interaction to skip the boring combat portions of the game in the same way that most story-driven games allow you to rapidly skip through all the story and dialogue in order to get back to ripping out entrails with a pike.  It is a pretty inoffensive proposal, all things considered.   She never says that games should be less combat-oriented, or that stories should play an even more prominent role, simply that there should be an option that allows for the gameplay preferences of a particular group.

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Selling Yourself Short

Posted: January 23, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in Games and Marketing, Uncategorized
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I spend a lot of my time trying, in print and in person, to work against the negative stereotypes that abound concerning videogames and gamers.  Sure, sometimes that effort involves pointing up some of the negative characteristics of gamers and game developers that a lot of people either don’t notice or tacitly accept as “just the way things are.”  Yet, on the whole I am usually trying to convince others that the world of gaming is interesting, complex, significant and, potentially, a hugely important force shaping our culture.  Every so often, however, I’m reminded how powerfully the gaming industry is not an ally in this effort.

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Managing Expectations

Posted: December 9, 2011 by Twitchdoctor in Exemplary Games, game design, Games and Marketing
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Star Wars: The Old Republic

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been encouraged lately by the thought that even though the world of game design has, on the whole, proven stubbornly resistant to learning from its mistake (mainly due to a collective memory that makes an ADHD ant appear to be a fount of oracular wisdom) some improvement is nevertheless possible.  I’ve been quite impressed with the Bioware’s preparations to try and ensure that the launch of the massively hyped Star Wars: The Old Republic will not be an unmitigated disaster.

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Encounters of a Nerd Kind

Posted: October 19, 2011 by twinhits in Games and Life
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There’s not really anything like it, every Saturday I get to go to one of our computer lab classrooms, jump around and yell excitedly about Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft II. This is CSL, the Colligate Starleague, founded by Mona “Hazelynut” Zhang over at Princeton University. It started in 2008 and has since has grown into over 240 schools competing around the country. About a year ago, my roommate, GenerallyAwesome, and I founded the George Washington Unviserity CSL team and ended up doing marginally well in the competition. Since, we’ve passed it off to enterprising young sophomores and then returned to our peaceful lives. GenerallyAwesome still competes regularly, and I go to be enthusiastic and get people excited because I’m actually pretty terrible.

The most important part about setting up any kind of offline organization like this is courage. As many of us are painfully aware, the impression is that online gaming isn’t one of the most popular things to be doing and so gathering offline to game and hang out isn’t something a lot of gamers will feel comfortable jumping right into. I felt a lot of this when we were setting up our team (GenerallyAwesome didn’t, he doesn’t care), but I remembered the immortal words of Starcraft II commentator and personality Sean “Day[9]” Plott: Love what you love and show that you love it, people will understand and love you for it. If you are unafraid of what you do and show courage in loving it, people will see that and those that love it too will show more courage themselves.

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Looking for Wuv in All the Wrong Places

Posted: September 30, 2011 by Twitchdoctor in New Media
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Bad Times for Love

Bad Times for Love. CC Copyright by Javier Noval

Occasionally you come across something on the Web that forces you to stare unflinchingly into the dark heart of humanity.  Well, OK, on the Web that happens more than occasionally and not simply when you are frequenting 4Chan.  Sometimes, however, the experience isn’t simply repellent and/or tedious but actually illustrates something profound about the evolution of human nature and its vexed relationship with digital technologies.

Recently, my friend Laurie posted an article about the impending Facebook changes from CNN’s Tech blog.  Peter Cashmore’s “You’ll Freak WhenYou See the New Facebook” highlights Facebook’s impending overhaul of its profile pages in order to introduce its new “Facebook Timeline.”  Some of you may in fact have had your profile switched already.  Cashmore acknowledges that most users will probably hate the change initially but then they will think it is the greatest thing since Al Gore invented the Internet:

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Lamentations on Gamestop (or is it Gamestop Analysts?)

Posted: September 24, 2011 by aegisfang in Game Platforms, Game Research, Games and Marketing, Games and the Media
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I recently read an article entitled “Game Over for Gamestop“ on a website called SeekingAlpha.com which suggested that Gamestop as a business will collapse at some vaguely defined point in the near future if their business model does not change.  Now I see several flaws in the theory and logic that they are using to make this claim, but let’s begin at the beginning.  Who is Seeking Alpha?

Seeking Alpha is, first and foremost, a blog.  It is not news.  It’s not market research.  It is a financial blog that attempts to guide stock market investors with tips, analysis, and sometimes the support of news.  They are making an argument and drawing a conclusion.  According to their About Seeking Alpha page “Seeking Alpha is the premier website for actionable stock market opinion and analysis, and vibrant, intelligent finance discussion.”  And yes they really did boldface their font just like that to jump out at you so you won’t have any delusions about who they are or what their business mission is.  Now as with every business in the modern competitive world, they have to justify who they are and why we should be reading this blog as opposed to say the online Wall Street Journal.  In answer to this quandary, they respond “Seeking Alpha differs from other finance sites because it focuses on opinion and analysis rather than news, and is primarily written by investors who describe their personal approach to stock picking and portfolio management, rather than by journalists.”  And once again they did feel the need to bold those specific phrases so there would be no confusion.  So putting this all together, Seeking Alpha is a blog written by investors seeking to provide financial advice with regard to the stock market.  They are not journalists, which I believe is a two-fold point.  They are not writing news so if you are looking for stock market news, turn around and run the other way.  Secondly, they are investors not journalists, but specifically not stock market (Wall Street Journal?) journalists.  They are not judging companies based on the news of that company.  Well really they are, but that’s not why they are here.  They are here to take the news and take the history and take the products and take the numbers and take their own investment experience and coalesce all of that information into a coherent opinion of the company specifically with an eye toward consumer advice.  Really this just makes them bad editorial journalists and product reviewers, but I digress as that’s an argument for another time.  Now I apologize for having spent my first 500 words on this website and I’m sure you’re wondering what any of this has to do with games and gaming, but don’t worry I’m getting there.

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Compulsory Socializing

Posted: September 24, 2011 by Twitchdoctor in New Media
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Pissing on Facebook

Now that is Streaming Media

An open letter to all my Facebook friends.
Is this really the best we can do?

I did some interesting things to day:

  • I went to a museum with my students, looked at stuff, got lost, distracted, ended up in a place I never intended to be and learned something new, engaged in random and unpredictable conversations with students and, twice, with a complete stranger;
  • I sat around a table over food and drink with my students and a colleague and talked about everything from writing to shopping for shoes to near misses with DC traffic to communications technologies.
  • I walked around in public with my students in the rain talking about our lives.
  • I wandered up to our department offices for no particular reason just to see who was there and engage them in random conversations about anything whatsoever.
  • On my way into the library, I spotted a librarian friend whom I hadn’t seen in several weeks and just went over to talk with her about nothing in particular. . .a conversation that suddenly turned thought-provokingly particular.

The day isn’t two thirds over yet and I’m exhausted.  Talking with people face-to-face, especially in groups, you never know what is going to happen.  Things get unpredictable very quickly and you have to work hard to keep up.  But people inspire you, provoke you, piss you off, and you feel better at the end of it, larger somehow, more substantial.

The latest Facebook overhaul (really just the first stage in a comprehensive roll-out of new services and functions) promises to leave me feeling a lot less exhausted in the future.  It also promises to leave me, or rather, to leave all  of us, shadows of our former selves.

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