tl-dr

What happens to you when you go in a dungeon? Or maybe I don’t want to know… moving on…

Recently, in the context of my musings related to being a long-time video gamer but a newer MMO player, I’ve posted about fail MMO groups and about getting corpse camped in PvP. Today, I’d like to talk about an experience I recently had in World of Warcraft dungeons, also known as instances. Please forgive my indulgence… as a social scientist trained to observe human behavior, I am fascinated with watching the group dynamics in MMOs. The topic is so ripe for research.

My first time (in a dungeon)

My very first experience in a WoW dungeon was a fail. I was on a lowbie tauren druid (around level 15, I think), and Jacob convinced me to try an instance on my own. (Since everybody I knew in game was playing much higher level characters, I didn’t know anybody to group up with.) But I used the Dungeon Finder tool and got assigned to a random group of people. I was in the dungeon for maybe one minute, and I had no idea what to do. I died quickly, and I didn’t know how to get back. I whispered Jacob, and he said something about how I had to re-enter the instance to rez. He identified the dungeon I was in, and tried to give me instructions for going back, but I got lost, nerd raged, ignored the party leader yelling “DRUID! Come back!” at me in chat, rezed at the graveyard, and decided I wouldn’t do any more dungeons anytime soon.

My enlightened return to the dungeon

Months later, a few people convinced me to try dungeons again. I was much more experienced in WoW by that time, and went in one with an experienced friend. Suddenly, when I saw how easy they were and how much XP and gear you could get in payoff, I couldn’t get enough of them. A few days later, I ran a dungeon with somebody in guild. I didn’t know him personally, but I felt good knowing that I would be with a guildie. Things were going along well until we arrived at the last boss. We worked and worked at killing him, and he had no health left, but no matter what we did, he wouldn’t die! A group member submitted a trouble ticket, hoping that Blizzard would respond very quickly, but they did not. He then suggested that everyone die, rez, and try again. We tried that, but he still wouldn’t die. Eventually, we collectively decided to leave the group while lamenting the weirdness and thanking each other for the good try. We never finished the dungeon. He dropped the ticket. We never determined what happened. That should be frustrating, right?

Dungeon fail, not group fail

In this case, the game itself was “bugged.” I have done that same dungeon twice since the fail, and have not seen the same issue. People have certainly played it many times before me. Only Blizzard knows (or, perhaps, doesn’t know) why it happened, and perhaps it’s happened more than once. Whatever the reason, the fail was based on the game itself, not on the players, and I can’t believe what a difference that made in how I viewed the experience. In the incidents involving the annoying corpse camper and the fail Goldshire-area group that I’ve discussed in previous posts, I completely stressed out. But with the dungeon problem, I think that the group dynamic made all the difference. We were respectful and supportive toward one another, despite our shared frustration. If we had blamed each other, abandoned each other, or taken out excessive nerd rage on each other in some other way, I think I would have logged for the night, ran to bed, and pulled the covers over my head.

Groups in the dungeon (and on the playground)

I need to qualify this discussion by saying that I’ve heard stories from more experienced WoW players explaining that dungeons are much easier now than they used to be. I also have seen a few dungeon fails in my relatively limited experience, like when the tank leaves the group, or when a group member gets left behind. That all said, it seems to me as though the group dynamic in a dungeon is more cooperative than in a BG (or in Goldshire, when you’re not ERPing! haha!) Perhaps this is because all the people in the group are focusing on the same goal: killing the same NPCs. But then, how is this is different than many BG groups in which the BG chat is used to insult the other players on your side; isn’t the goal there to defeat the opposing side as well?

Jacob/Gameronomist/Ace and I discuss all the time how games parallel RL. People have opportunities to work together in all MMO settings. For information science researchers, it would be interesting to find out what factors influence whether people choose to work together and encourage group members, or decide instead to call them “f*****g idiots” in public chat, abandon them, camp them, or whatever other bad behaviors they choose to exhibit. There is an existing body of research about small groups in psychology (I know this because I once took an undergraduate course called “The Psychology of Small Groups”), but there is something different about in-game group behavior. It’s live and it’s got XP/honor/gold at stake, just like RL. But it’s (sometimes, although not always) anonymous. There are probably other factors that are different too, but I can’t think of them right now because (1) they need to be studied so we can identify them and (2) I really want to finish this post so I can go run a dungeon or two.

In the end, public behavior in MMOs all comes back to what we should have learned in kindergarten: play nicely with others. Unfortunately, it seems like too many gamers stayed home sick that day.

In closing (and I mean it this time), below is a screenshot of my mage in the Auchenai Crypts instance. For the record, I didn’t know anybody else in the instance with me, we killed everything, I didn’t die a single time, and the only time anyone in the group used chat was at the end, when one player said “cyas.”

tl;dr

MMO group experiences can be positive, even when the game goes badly.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

 Welcome to the tl-dr Newbie Blogger Initiative Post (Number 2)! Big props go out to Syp and his blog Biobreak for starting up this concept. It’s a great way for new bloggers to get into writing for whatever their reasons are.

For this post, I want to write another post on how to help out other bloggers. After this post my high-and-mighty-soap-box will be broken from the advice I have spouted. For this post, I’m going to focus on Categories and Tagging (in the WordPress nomenclature), because I am an expert on such things. Really. I swear. I have a Master’s Degree in how to organize stuff (even gamers), and I work professionally creating organization systems for online systems. Ask me about web design and I would not be able to help you besides say, “You should make it look pretty!” But data modelling, curation, and organization are my wheelhouse. Star  Shadow has a great tutorial on using categories and tags in Wordpess. I’m just going to build on what was said there.

Categories

This section is very controlled and will be how you want all of your posts grouped together. For example, if you’re running a gw2 site:

Professions
—Mesmer
—Ranger
—Warrior
—etc.

Crafting
—Leatherworking
—Cooking
—etc.

Type of play
—pve
—pvp
—wvw

etc. etc. The main goal with “categories” is how you want to group your posts for people to *browse* or *navigate* to a different subject on your blog.

You can break out the categories any way that you want really, just remember that once you decide on them it’s hard to change them. If you want to add a new category to 100 posts that you’ve already posted, you have to go back and add them by hand. So deciding on categories near the beginning of your blog would be a pretty good idea. (If you want some help with this, I’m happy to throw some ideas at you.)

Tags

Tags are important for 2 things on your blog.

1) Searching
If you’re searching for something on your blog (not from google), the tags are what will be searched, so think about what types of terms people would search for. (Google will search fulltext, categories, AND tags, so it covers all the bases)

2) Word cloud

This is important because it’s a great visual for the tagged content on your site. People will click in here a lot to find different content you produce, so if you use many tags in the same ways they’ll be able to find more content they are interested in. I read an article last year about word clouds that actually said they improve how people find stuff on your site by x%. I don’t remember all the details (like who wrote it), but I remember the paper being solid. If I find it again, I’ll let y’all know

Cases and phrasing

This is just for consistency to help out your users. It takes a bit more thought when you put tags on a post, but the effort is well worth it in the long run.

Make sure you always use the same case for words. So, if you have a tag for a guild wars 2 blog, and you want to tag every post being about guild wars 2, make sure you always say “Guild Wars 2″. The system thinks “Guild Wars 2″ “guild wars 2″ and “gw2″ are all different things. It can’t understand the semantic similarities between them, so you have to be diligent about using the same phrasing, capitalization, and case for all the tags you use. (e.g. “tags” and “tagging” are actually 2 different tags in the system).

Meta tags

I’m going to use a real example here to illustrate how tagging should happen “behind the scenes” of a post where it is only done for a system.

Here are the tags for the last #nbimmo post I wrote. And I was lazy and didn’t do all of them. I only did about half of what I wanted/should have.

nbimmo,newbie blogger initiative,newbie blogger initiative mmo,creative commons,creative commons license,cc license,cc,sypster,biobreak,dmca,digital millennium copyright act,takedown notices,take down notices,c word,cunt,c-word,attribution,sharealike,share alike,noderivs,no derivatives,noncommercial,non commercial,plagiarism,jacob ratliff,jacob a ratliff,jacob a. ratliff,gameronomist,gaming information,information about games,video game information

Let’s break it down a bit to make sense of it.

“c word,c-word,cunt”

Let’s start with this one, because I bet many people did not even see it in my list. First of all, let me apologize for the language, as it is definitely R rated and NSFW (but in this context it is SFW, because I could have this conversation at work because of the context).

In the post these keywords are taken from, I had a section that referenced the “C-Word”, and I was talking about copyright, but referring to the C-U-Next-Tuesday variety as a tongue in cheek joke. I added that version to the Meta Tags because 1) having it doesn’t hurt anything (because no one can actually see it), and 2) if someone is doing a search for that word and comes upon my post, I would rather they be on my blog than somewhere else.

“copyright,copyleft,piracy,pirates,pirating,dmca,digital millennium copyright act,takedown notices,take down notices”

A few of these words I used in the actual post, but most of them I did not. I never talked about copyleft or pirating. The others are just the many variations a word could have. Pirates and pirating being a good example. I would not use all of these for the visible tags (as I mentioned above), but using all the variations for the meta tags is good because then I get different people to come to the blog who have different search behaviors.

“creative commons,creative commons license,cc license,cc,attribution,sharealike,share alike,noderivs,no derivatives,noncommercial,non commercial”

Same as above.

“gaming information,information about games,video game information”

I put these tags in the meta tags section of every post published on tl-dr. It’s the main focus of our blog, so I want to make sure people looking specifically for these topics gets to us

“jacob ratliff,jacob a ratliff,jacob a. ratliff,gameronomist”

These tags are all about me. My name and how I am searched on the internet. Before I started using the handle “Gameronomist” there was only 1 search result for it on Google, now there are tons. Googling my name has also changed because of the SEO I’ve done on this blog. I have moved up significantly on the searches, and this blog is ranking up in them as well. Good personal branding.

Do you have any suggestions for good ideas about tagging and categories? Let me know!

tl-dr

Categories are ways to organize posts. Tags are used to search for posts. Meta tags are for Google.

Ding! You’ve Leveled Up! Please see your local librarian for training.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Welcome to one of my famous information science research rants. Prepare yourselves!

Last week, University of Western Ontario PhD student and tl-dr blog contributor Caroline Whippey successfully defended her comprehensive examination. (For those of you who don’t know what this means: she read a few thousand pages, wrote two papers on those few thousand pages in five days, and then answered questions about the readings and her papers in a face-to-face exam by three professors at once.) I am thrilled to be one of her professors, because she’s studying video games and information seeking for her PhD research.

During the examination, I had a moment of clarity. I felt guilty about it at first because it was Caroline’s moment to show off her knowledge and thoughts, not mine. But as the term flew out of my brain, it fit so much so well: games are non-linear spaces. This is the most important reason why they present so many challenges for information representation, searching/seeking, and retrieval. Let me explain.

Problem 1: Finding non-text information is difficult

My edited volume of peer-reviewed research, Indexing and retrieval of non-text information, is currently in press. I have been studying non-text information since I was a master’s student. I hate the term non-text, because it describes what it is not rather than what it is. In information science, we define this by listing subcategories of this category: photographs, paintings, videos, music, maps, data visualizations… and I include video games. The book contains a chapter from Caroline exploring the non-text elements of World of Warcraft: think about the ! over the heads of quest givers, the look of the environments we play in, the aggro sounds from the monsters, the relaxing sound of the water flowing nearby… these all give us information about the game and what to do in it. Caroline states in the conclusion of her chapter:

WoW is truly a rich and complex audio-visual environment. Players gain large amounts of information from the audio-visual elements of the game, as well as from text. The information within the game provides an understanding for how the game should be played, and how to behave in specific in-game contexts. Through visual and audio information, players learn the rules of the game. Visual and audio elements also contribute to the immersion of the game, providing a more engaging experience. (Whippey, in press)

I have argued for years that non-text information is more difficult to describe and find than textual information. This is a real problem on the Web, considering the proliferation of non-text information we use every day. (Think about YouTube, and that’s all I need to say about that.) The ways we have to search for non-text information are frequently not acceptable, because the words assigned to the videos or pictures or maps don’t always meet our information needs. Honestly, searches like “cute puppy videos” can only take us so far… and, fellow librarians: that’s a really advanced search for your average Web user.

Wake-up call of the day: according to Alexa, the top two searches on YouTube.com itself are “youtube” and “you tube.” (Good luck with your information literacy plans.)

Problem 2: Video games are non-linear spaces

Back to games. As complicated as it can be to describe and find and browse photographs or videos or music with words, the video game changes everything. The fundamental difference is that photos and videos and songs are linear: they have a starting point, an ending point, and the material in the said “document” never changes from start to finish. A video game such as WoW, however, is non-linear. Certainly, Blizzard creates the structure for us players. We have to use both textual (reading quests and chat) and non-textual (the world itself, the presence of our enemies) cues to play the game. However, as players and immersive participants, we create the information in the game as we play the game. This means that the information (or the document, if you will) changes constantly. Every time we make or delete a toon, gain XP, join or leave a guild, whisper to a friend, run a BG… we are adding and changing information to that game. And, because the game is collectively experienced (read?) by all its players, all that information impacts what the players have to search for and represent and retrieve when we play.

Is there a Solution that fixes Problems 1 and 2 combined?

What does this mean for improving gamers’ access to information? This is an important question, because gamers are constantly in a state of information seeking as they work to improve their game/skills/experience. The answer is that everything we have developed in information representation and retrieval doesn’t work. It’s important for Horde players on PvP servers to know where their Alliance enemies are, but you can’t exactly Google that. If you’ve just hit level 80 and need new PvP gear, how do you find out what’s available in the auction house, and how do you know – based on what’s available – which options are best for your class? Azeroth is Azeroth, and as a concept it never changes. But, it’s different from server to server and from second to second. It’s changed by a multitude of players through textual and non-textual means as they move through it and impact it in a non-predictable, non-linear fashion. And since Azeroth (just like our RL earth) is non-linear, it cannot be represented and manipulated with the linear paradigms that information science – and Google, YouTube, and the rest of the linear Web – have been using thus far.

/takes a deep breath

That all said, our next step is to determine what needs to be thrown out the window *, what can stay, and how to approach it. The “we need to reinvent ourselves” line that us information people are prone to using every time a new technology impacts the world is a waste of energy, and it just sounds too exhausting. Even with this non-linear model for video games, and the change in research direction that needs to happen as a result, we’re still doing what we’ve always done: providing access to information. But the difference in games is that we do not have the option of assuming there is a neatly packaged document x out there in physical or virtual space that is ready to satisfy the user’s information need as soon as the librarian at the reference desk connects user y with document x. Because x changes more frequently than my mage can blink, in both textual and non-textual forms. Recall, precision, relevance ranking, and Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process are immeasurable and unobservable.

* Throwing things out the window is one of my favorite things to do. Just ask my guildies.

tl-dr

Video games are non-linear spaces, and they need to be handled differently for information seeking and retrieval. Those new handling methods are TBD.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

 Welcome to the tl-dr Newbie Blogger Initiative Post! Big props go out to Syp and his blog Biobreak for starting up this concept. It’s a great way for new bloggers to get into writing for whatever their reasons are. I hope to be able to spread some of the love around here. I have a ton of new blogs to start reading, but I think it will be a while before I can get to all of them.

I posted about this briefly in the NBI Forums, but I wanted to get into it in blog format so that it was here for people to reference if needed. It is a much overlooked issue that I think really needs to be talked about. It is a really un-sexy topic, but I’m taking a bullet for the team (my page views! Nooooooo!), so that everyone is protected from legal issues that (could) pester them.

The C Word

Everyone talks about it, but most do not really understand the ins and outs of how to really protect themselves from the dreaded copyright problem. We all hear about SOPA/PIPA, CISPA, and Piracy, but there is a lot of magic that happens behind the curtain that we trust the Wizard to take care of. I’m going to keep the Wizard behind that curtain, but tell you how to keep him happy.

Creative Commons Licensing

Do not be scared of creative commons licenses. They are extremely easy, and they provide a HUGE amount of protection to your content. Go to the link above and you can read about all of the different licenses, they are very user friendly and written in language lay-people can understand. I laud them highly for that, cause legal stuff can be confusing.

The quick break-down:

Attribution: “If you quote me, say my name!” ’nuff said.

Share-Alike: If someone quotes you, or remixes your work, they have to use the same (or comparable) license as you.

Non-Commercial: They can’t make money off the content they get from you. (Does not stop YOU from making money on your own work)

NoDerivs: People can share your work, but they can’t change or remix it.

Now, the way the licenses work is you take the 4 options above and you pick the options you like and combine them until you’re happy. “Attribution” is the only one you have to have (because without it, you wouldn’t need a license would ya?).

This blog uses an Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike license. We (Diane and I) chose this because it means that people can use our content and remix it or build upon it any way they like. As long as they are not selling it (making people pay to read it for example), and if they do quote us or remix/use the content, they should use the same license as us. We chose not to have a “NoDerivs” because remixing content is the soul of the internet. Take it and make it better!

After you choose the license you want (easy 3 question survey about how you want to protect your content), it provides you with some embed code. All you do is go to the HTML view on your blog (the “HTML” button on the upper right of the drafting box on WordPress), and insert it at the bottom of the page. You can see what it looks like at the bottom of this post. It really is that easy.

Note: Someone can always come to you and ask you to “waive” the license for them to use the post so they can use it somewhere without the restrictions of the license. You just need to give them permission before they can do it. Just give them permission in writing and keep a copy of what they are using it for.

Other People’s Copyright

This one is not so fun or easy. Sorry

Just imagine why you licensed your content (above in the CC section), and imagine someone else did that. Or didn’t. Creating something gives them basic copyright protection. So you can’t just rip it off and pass it as your own. Remember those talks of plagiarism your teachers and librarians gave you in school? Basically that. It is ok to quote them. Just say: “This guy said, ‘blah blah blah blah.’” That will save you the headaches of legal issues and drama. Same goes with pictures and videos. Just make sure you link to the original place of content.

Note about copyright: You can talk shit about anyone or anything, as long as you quote the source material. Freedom of speech allows that. If people are telling you to take content down because of something you have done, or they send you a DMCA takedown notice, do not just automatically do it. You can ask questions first. If this happens to you and you are scared, hit me up, I will help you with it. I can’t be your lawyer, but I can get you in touch with information on how to deal with it. Just because you’re saying something negative doesn’t mean you’re breaking the law. Criticism and parody are protected under U.S. law (a lot of international laws too).

tl-dr

Copyright is a bit magical on the back end, but it’s easy to protect yourself if you are conscious of how to do so.

Ding! You’ve Leveled Up! Please see your local librarian for training.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

I’m a longtime fan of single-player games, but I’m relatively new to MMOs. I’m finding that the social and community aspects of MMOs fascinate me. The ability to group up with people in order to quest together, run BGs together, and so on can be wonderful, especially when your combined knowledge and your characters’ strengths can help each other.

But, as I began to explore in my corpse camping post (and as we discussed potential remedies for camping in Jacob’s follow-up post), playing with others can have a dark side. Those of you who do PvP know all about, for example, the fail battleground group, in which people spend more time insulting their team members than trying to win, and the group predictably loses (on many levels). Today, I want to tell a story about a fail group I joined over the weekend that also ruined my day.

In WoW, I only have time logged on the Horde side, so recently I’ve spent a little time playing lowbie Alliance characters to get a feel for the other side. On Friday night, I made a Human Hunter named Ailsa (not her real name.) Ailsa was picking up quests in Goldshire when an Alliance-side friend in game made a comment that Goldshire was known for late-night erotic role play. I then discovered a group of characters RPing domestic violence! I took that as my cue that it was too late to be playing anyway, and went to bed.

On Saturday afternoon, I went back to Ailsa. She went into Goldshire’s Lion’s Pride Inn to turn in a quest, and accidentally went into the Inn’s back room; three characters had taken their clothes off and were staring at her. oops, sorry!!!! /embarrassed

Ailsa promptly left the Inn. A higher-level male character (I’ll call him “Party Leader”) asked if I wanted to hang out with him and invited me to a group. I thought, “Well, MMOs are social, I’m not busy with anything else, and if this turns into ERP, I’ll leave the group.” And then accepted his group invite.

From there, things just became… bizarre. Party Leader kept challenging me to duels, which of course he won because he’s higher level than me and laughed at me. Party Leader then informed me that his best friend was on now, but that I could play with both of them. So Party Member 2 joined our group. Next there was a few minutes of Party Member 2 calling Party Leader for help, Party Leader telling me to wait at various places he left me so he could go help Party Member 2, and so on. I wasn’t getting any questing done, but I couldn’t make myself leave the group. As a constant observer of human behavior, I wanted to see what was going to happen.

Since I’m (1) unfamiliar with the area, and (2) the most spatially challenged person in WoW, I continued to follow Party Leader. We ended up in Duskwood, which is a level 20ish zone. A few monsters started to attack us. I attempted to help kill them, but Party Leader killed them easily, telling me he had my back. OK, then.

We approached Raven Hill Cemetery, at which point Party Member 2 and Party Leader started speaking in code to each other, I believe. Party Leader told me he had to go to Party Member 2′s house to help him out, and then he dropped me from the group. Within seconds, I was dead. I rezzed at the Spirit Healer that happened to be right where my body is – several times. But, I kept getting killed within seconds. I tried to hearth back to Goldshire’s Lion’s Pride Inn, but NPCs called “Flesh Eaters,” which appeared to me as Level ?? Undead things, killed me before I could hearth back. /nerdraging, I logged and gave up on Ailsa for the day.

The next day, a friend I’d told about the experience offered to see what was going on and thankfully came to the cemetery to help me. He watched me rez, and he watched the Flesh Eaters attack as predicted, but his higher level character killed them for me so I could hearth back to Goldshire. He told me that perhaps I could have backed up to avoid the Flesh Eaters long enough to hearth, but that having Level ?? Flesh Eaters right at a graveyard was highly unusual and understandably difficult for Level 9 Ailsa to handle. He also said to watch levels of the the NPCs as you enter a new area, and if they’re higher than you, you should leave. I knew this, but I wanted to trust my oddball party members to see what was going to happen.

I reflected on this situation while cleaning the house (hey, RL’s gotta happen, even when the game becomes terribly intriguing). I considered how in an MMO, as in any social setting, we have to look out for ourselves. We must be aware of the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our personalities. For me, because I don’t intentionally mislead anybody for any reason, it is difficult to imagine why people would want to mislead/abandon another player… especially when the player is not even a threat to their success or failure.

How do people find this bad behavior fun? If you’ve done similar things, or can provide insight for me, please comment on this post and help me out! Also, is there anything I should watch out for so I don’t encounter these situations again? (I’ve had very positive experiences with random groups, but not this weekend.) I hate to be a broken record, but this is an information seeking problem: how do players find out whether other players are good group members? It almost seems as though we need something like a rating system for each other, as we see in social media when we can rate others’ posts and comments. You can report people to Blizzard for certain behaviors, but I’m not sure that what happened to me would be reason for reporting them.

In any case, there’s my “fail MMO group” story of the week. To finish the story: once back in Goldshire, Party Leader was there (did he ever leave?) and invited me to join a group as soon as he saw me. I declined, put him on ignore, and smiled. Sometimes *not* joining an MMO group can be liberating, especially when you know it’s going to be a fail!

tl-dr

Be careful about who you group up with. But even if you’re careful, you might get killed in Goldshire by some higher level bully, as the boys of South Park know.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Todd has worked in the games industry for quite a long time, starting as a Beta Tester waaay back in the olden days of 1996. He then moved on to Silicon Knights where he was a Designer and a Lead Designer working on projects such as Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, and early production of Too Human, and has also been a Senior Producer on various projects for the Nintendo Wii and DS platforms. Currently he is playing Black Sabbath songs backwards to see if any of them make him go “light side” in Star Wars: The Old Republic and so far … no, none of them have.

I can’t count the number of times someone, in a social situation, has made that comment to me when I would tell them make I make games for a living. Yes, making video games can be fun, but it is also a business … BIG business. It’s not all fun and games when you are working in an industry that generates $1.7 Billion in Canada and $25 billion in the U.S. . That’s a lot of money, so you can imagine why game companies can be fun to work at, but also take things very seriously.

Other than playing the game you are working on, there are many other tasks that are required to get the game from concept to completion … and I don’t mean fragging your co-workers (Although that can be fun at times). One important task that is required is research. Regardless of whether you are doing a small mobile game or a major AAA console game, you still have to do some degree of research.

TARGET AUDIENCE

One of the initial things that need to be researched is to determine who your target audience is. Often you are creating a client’s vision of the game instead of what you want to make, so your idea of beheading zombies might not be appropriate if the client’s target audience is 6-12 year olds.

Research into your target audience is as simple as looking at competitive products such as reviews, trailers, and gameplay footage. The best way is to actually play through some of the competitive products on the market that are in the same age group. Bet you never thought all that time becoming a champion Halo player would have you end up playing Barbie’s next adventure and Mickey’s clubhouse, did you?  Playing games from competing developers is the best form of research for your current project.

REALISM

Now you are ready to research the realism of your project. Whether you plan a cartoonish or ultra realistic look, you still need to research the overall art direction of the game and create a series of concepts that define the look that best fits the feel and time period you want to achieve. A cartoony game such as “Castle Crashers” still shows time period accuracy where the knights have cylindrical helmets and accurate weapons (e.g. claymore, lance). Yes, the game has weapons that are more humourous such as an ‘apple peeler’ weapon, but this still fits into the whimsical overall feel of the game. A game like this doesn’t get into minute details, so research for this is as simple as going to the library to look through historical books or looking up information on the internet.

When ultra realistic games are researched, there is much more attention to detail. Games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed had an enormous amount of research done to ensure the accuracy in the time period. The “Assassin’s Creed” series has been researched in the areas of fashion, architecture, technology, and social/political/religious contexts. When Ubisoft was making the game they actually sent people to Rome to do more intricate research into the layout of the city, and they also had an Historian working with them to go over historical accuracy. What you see in the game is what Rome was like in that time period. Of course, the developers take some liberties in order to generate interest in the game and to accommodate gameplay elements.

These are examples of the architectural research that was done for “Assassin’s Creed II”.

Left: in-game image … Right: actual building

Games in the “Call of Duty” series required research into World War 2 technology, military uniforms, weapons, geography, politics, and tactics to ensure its accuracy in depicting events from WWII, such as the D-Day invasion. In their most recent games, the developer met and worked with U.S. Marines to get pictures of current equipment that they use, witnessing equipment (like tanks) in use to see how they operate and react, and going through breaching operations.

In games like these, if players take the time to look around a bit and absorb all this information, they can learn a lot about the Crusades and Renaissance periods and about the happenings during World War events.

GAMEPLAY

No I am not going to forget about gameplay. I believe the best research that can be done for gameplay is to look at the existing research done for each scenario. Often, gameplay ideas come from looking at your environment as well as art assets that have been created. I was working on Eternal Darkness when the design team was brainstorming how to incorporate a chapter page for the player to find. I noticed we had a stained glass window in the level and suggested we incorporate into the stained glass. It would take too much work (at the time) to do that, so we decided to just make the glass breakable and have it hiding behind the window. So simply researching through your own project can produce gameplay ideas. Research other games to get ideas, and don’t stick to the same genre that you are working on. Good designers play various genres because you never know when an idea from one genre can translate into another.

TAKE TIME TO LOOK AROUND

So next time you decide to jump into a game because you have the itch to frag and gib a few newbies, take a few moments to do your own research and have a look around at the environment and in your inventory. All the research that was done to create many of the games we play is accurate to the smallest detail and can really teach a lot about what society was like in that particular time period. Some may be saying, “I want to kill some online players! I don’t want to waste time looking around!” But if you think about the fact that Game Designers can be very devious (I know I was), and they like to hide things around the game that blend in with the environment which are actually useable items you can take advantage of. Think of the look in your opponent’s eyes when you beat them using something they didn’t expect. All because you did a little research.

 tl;dr

Explore, have a look around … you never know what you will discover.

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I know the first thought most people will have reading this: “What does a middle class white male with a Master’s Degree know about racism and diversity?” And you would partially be right; I do not have a lot of experience with racism first hand. I have not had to deal with racism as an integral part of my life. But you would also be wrong, though not in the way you expected.

Peggy McIntosh wrote a great essay talking about white privilege, and it hits very close to home.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

It is a very true statement, and applies to the video game community in a heavy way. It was something I never really noticed for a very long time, because I was taught not to recognize white privilege; which in this instance was all the white influence in video games.

Well, I am standing up right now and demanding better diversity within video games.

Not because of a “holier than thou” cause.

Not because I want to see everyone equally represented (even though I do).

Not because it will increase the player base of gamers in the world, and promote inclusivity (but it will).

Not because I want to see people with different skin colors in games (one sided diversity).

 To me, it’s never been about that, at all… It’s not about fairness, it’s not video game affirmative action. It’s about actually pushing our medium to make better games, to tell better stories in our games.

That’s what I’m talking about. Sure, diversity is the right thing to do for many moral reasons, and reasons of equality, but everyone can get behind the idea of better stories within games. There are thousands, if not millions, of narratives and ideas that can still be told in the video game world; let’s open up and find out what those are.

Create a discourse and move the world forward. Unpack your knapsack.

The inherent racism of developers

“But Jacob!” you say, “I don’t see this racism you’re talking about. Games have ideas ranging from historical settings all over the globe, to the completely fantastical!” You would be partially correct. The answer is not a simple one though, so bear with me.

One of the biggest issues I see with racism and diversity within games is not the people within games, but the developers and designers of games. As I stated before, it is not conscious racism, it is not the racism associated with the pre-1960s in the U.S. (Separate But Equal), and the civil right’s protests. It is racism that is blind in one eye, and partially uneducated. I will show you an example of what I am talking about. (quick note: I am not calling developers racist, I am trying to point out a subconscious pattern of thinking that [almost] all of us have)

Can you see it? The inherent racism here is not in the actual design in this picture. I think it is great that designers are looking to other cultures for aesthetic design. The problem is that of all the characters and everything else that exists within this game (in this case, World of Warcraft), there is not one person in the game that is Asian. Even the “Humans” within the game do not have an option to have Asian features. (Pandarens do not count, give me a break) Explain to me how you can import this amount of Asian culture into a game, and ignore the people? Sure, it may seem like a minor thing, but who cares about sitting in the front or back of the bus? I think that this subtle concept is what Peggy McIntosh is talking about with her essay.

Here is the counter argument that is going to come up right away: “But WoW is a fantasy world, and has all kinds of races that aren’t even human!”

Sure, but they are all still inherently white. Or, if not, they are stereotypical of another race or culture in an almost offensive way. “But that is ok! It is just a video game!” Wrong. That just perpetuates the cycle and nothing gets better. Diversity (especially sexual diversity), is very lacking in WoW and other games.

Why are dwarves stereotypical Scotsmen that drink too much, with a Scottish accents and kilts?

Why are trolls stereotypical “Jamaicans”, with their Voo-Doo and accents?

I cannot count the number of times goblins have been called the “Jersey Shore” of WoW, especially with their starting zone.

2 out of those 3 examples are even racist to a sub-culture of white people. It is racism within the white race (which in itself is a generalization).

If you want a quick video to get an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a great one from the Extra Credits crew at Penny-Arcade. Or go read a book about it (Chapter 4).

Now, I realize that all of the traits of these races are a part of WoW lore, and I am not suggesting they change right now, I am just pointing out the inherent biases that a predominantly white video game community has when trying to create diverse games and story lines. It is actually good game design considering the current gaming demographics; it has been proven that people like to play games that reinforce their self image. The problem is, if we (the gaming community) are only reinforcing the self-image of one select group of people, we are excluding everyone else. If the gaming industry would like to keep growing, that means different gaming populations. Which means diversity. Plus, we want to be inclusive here, amirite?

It is not something that will change overnight, but it needs to be talked about and discussed. It needs to be in the light of day, and it needs to be improved upon. Big props for the community at Guild Wars 2 and their Blog Carnival on Diversity. This is a great step, and more of the communities should be doing things like it.

Here is another example of a game moving the racial dialogue forward. The new Assassin’s Creed game (3) will feature a minority hero; a Native American that belongs/belonged to the Mowhawk/Kanien’kehá:ka. I am sure there will be some things about the portrayal that will be completely accurate and racially sensitive. Other things in the game will probably be on the opposite end of the spectrum. But, they are moving the conversation forward. Taking risks, expanding story possiblities, and reaching out to new audiences. Good for them. I will be buying this game just to see the story and how it works (even though I love AC 1 and only played 10 minutes of AC 2 because of boredom, this story change has guaranteed my purchase of AC3).

Racism within games

This needs to be mentioned briefly, but I will not pay much attention to it because it detracts from my main point; the racism within the community of gaming. The players themselves are the worst offenders, but that is a post for another day because it touches on many larger issues.

(Aside: If you are one of those people that shouts hurtful/racist things online or in games, calling people “f*g” or “n*gger”, I will call your ass out. every. time. That shit is not cool.)

The long tl;dr

As an individual, I may not be the best person to talk about diversity or racism because of my background, but I do not think that should matter. The discussion needs to happen, and I will step up to the plate and take my chances with it, even if I get hit by the pitcher. Everyone else can walk around with their invisible knapsack; I want to unpack mine.

Do you have any other examples that fall inside these lines? What about suggestions to improve diversity within the gaming world?

tl-dr

Everyone in the game industry needs to have the courage to stand up and create diverse games, and to play diverse games.

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What is Knowledge Management? The short answer is that it is What Valve Does. (note: The jury is out on whether this is really from Valve, but either way, all my arguments still apply. I’m going to act like it’s real.) The long answer is much more complex, but bear with me because it will bear great fruit at the end.

What is KM? (The boring part that makes the rest of the post really cool)

(Side note: The main concentration of my Master’s in Library and Information Science was in Knowledge Management, so I’m not just making all of this up, I do have experience with it)

Knowledge Management is difficult to define easily, and means something different to a lot of people because it can be implemented in many different ways in many different business structures. (Note: Information is stuff that you can easily organize and hold in your hand or put on a computer. Knowledge is what you keep in your head. Don’t know what I mean? Try to explain to someone who is blind what the color blue is.)

Wikipedia has a definition, but it’s kind of confusing.

Strangely, I find the best way to describe KM is to talk about what it’s not. Quotes that follow are from here.

“If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow”

Lew Platt, ex CEO Hewlett Packard

And what that really means is what follows:

“Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organisations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives”

Ron Young, CEO/CKO Knowledge Associates International

So the trick with KM is to take all of that Knowledge in a company (not information), and be able to use it.

Valve uses KM, and I do not even think they meant to (The beginning of the cool part)

Valve released/leaked an Employee Handbook a little while ago, and I highly recommend you read it. (I know, you didn’t even read the employee handbook at your current job, but trust me on this one, it is AMAZING.)

The employee handbook is a way to help new employees integrate into the Valve system, which is very unique. In a nutshell, Valve is completely flat. Completely. There’s a founder, but he has no more power than the guy who was just hired. There are no managers. No hierarchical structure whatsoever. Because, according to Valve:

“The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.”

So Valve instead focuses on hiring the best person for the job. And then having the people working at Valve hire someone who is even better than they are, thereby growing the awesome of the company.

It is brilliant, and it is KM because of the elimination of silos.

The idea is to take all of the ideas within a company and let them run wild and work as they will. Do not stifle the company with bureaucracy or a hierarchical structure. Just get the job done. It is such a brilliant idea, and yet it almost never happens because it is extremely difficult to make happen. Valve even acknowledges this on Page 49.

Q: If all this stuff has worked well for us, why doesn’t every company work this way?

A: Well, it’s really hard. Mainly because, from day one, it requires a  commitment to hiring in a way that’s very different from the way most companies hire. It also requires the discipline to make the design of the company more important than any one short-term business goal. And it requires a great deal of freedom from outside pressure—being self-funded was key. And having a founder who was confident enough to build this kind of place is rare, indeed.

One of the main key points that they acknowledge is the hiring process, and hiring of great talent. Hiring the right people that can work in this type of system is really key. If people are not self motivated and do not know how to form their own teams or work on their own projects, this system would fail utterly.

So what else does Valve talk about in the Employee Handbook that is different from most institutions?

They are absolutely and completely supportive of their employees both at work and in the rest of their lives.

for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. pg. 17

Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company— we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors. Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as  opportunities to learn. We can always repair the mistake or make up for it. pg. 20

Valve pays people very well compared to industry norms. Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or  Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money  back into each employee’s pocket. Valve does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create. pg. 27

And they have an employee vacation for a week every year! So awesome.

Keeping your employees happy and fostering a “flat” organizational structure is great, but it is being able to utilize that structure that really matters.

Which brings me to my next point:

Communities of Practice

Valve calls them “Cabals.” Compare the Wikipedia definition to what was being described by the Cabal article about Valve from Gamasutra. To me, t hey are the exact same thing. The crazy/amazing part is not that Valve was able to discover this on their own, but that they followed through and took it as far as possible. This is an amazing case study of communities of practice. I can think of many Knowledge Managers who would give limbs to get into this company just to observe and see how it actually works on a day to day basis.

I guess the Information/Knowledge Community better start noticing the Video Game world a lot more then, because that is what Valve does.

Please, it can’t be that easy.

There are problems with the system, there are problems with every system. Valve even acknowledges them on page 52 of the Handbook.

What Is Valve Not Good At?

The design of the company has some downsides. We usually think they’re worth the cost, but it’s worth noting that there are a number of things we wish we were better at:
• Helping new people find their way. We wrote this book to help, but as we said above, a book can only go so far.
• Mentoring people. Not just helping new people figure things out, but proactively helping people to grow in areas where they need help is something we’re organizationally not great at. Peer reviews help, but they can only go so far.
• Disseminating information internally.
• Finding and hiring people in completely new disciplines (e.g., economists! industrial designers!).
• Making predictions longer than a few months out.
• We miss out on hiring talented people who prefer to work within a more traditional structure. Again, this comes with the territory and isn’t something we should change, but it’s worth recognizing as a self-imposed limitation.

In my mind, these are problems that other systems may not have, but they are not system breaking problems. It is just a system that people are not comfortable with and requires a lot of self motivation. It also requires a lot of collaboration and being able to work well in an environment that no one in many education systems are trained for. There is no teacher/boss/manager telling you what to do. Something needs to be done? Do it.

Inside the company, though, we all take on the role that suits the work in front of us. Everyone is a designer. Everyone can question each other’s work. pg. 37

In my mind, the biggest problems that Valve now would have are problems that no one except Valve employees could know about. I am sure they have Knowledge and Information Systems that could use looking at, that are inefficient, that store things in ways that are hard to find and just lose information in the mass of information they have. But that is a problem a good Knowledge Manager could solve over time, especially in an environment like this. (Hey Valve, if you’re looking for someone like that, I know a guy. /winkwink /nudgenudge)

There is no way a large company could do this. It’s too big!

I’ll let the book speak for itself:

Concepts discussed in this book sound like they might work well at a tiny start-up, but not at a hundreds-of-people-plusbillions- in-revenue company. The big question is: Does all this stuff scale? Well, so far, yes. And we believe that if  we’re careful, it will work better and better the larger we get. This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s a direct  consequence of hiring great, accomplished, capable people. Getting this to work right is a tricky proposition, though, and depends highly on our continued vigilance in recruiting/hiring.

Other thing I thought was cool

They have a glossary at the end of different jargon, lingo, and code words that employees use regularly. This is so helpful to new people and really just increases how fast they can be integrated into the company. Every office/group of people/community of practice should have something like this.

tl-dr

Valve has instituted a structure that allows for a very organic use of Knowledge Management. I hope they release more information about it. Plus, working there looks like it would be great.

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A few months ago, I wrote a post on girl gamers. (tl-dr: Let’s move beyond the gender stereotypes about video gamers… and just play.) The post generated quite a bit of discussion both on the blog as well as within my gaming guild. It’s clearly a topic close to me, but stronger feelings and thoughts emerged from both women *and* men than I expected. So, after some contemplation, and after Jacob and I found substantial coverage about this topic in recent media, we decided it needed further exploration. Therefore, this will be the second in an ongoing series of “girl gamer” posts from me.

Anyway, on with the post! If you have 2 minutes, watch this video. If you don’t have 2 minutes, the tl;dw (too long; didn’t watch) is this: we’re girls, we’re gamers, and we’re here to play games, not to have sex with you.

The commentary accompanying this video where Jacob found it calls it “more stirring than any two minutes’ worth of video has any right to be.” Why? Obviously, there are men out there who see women as sex objects, and nobody needs that. But do women have to be pointedly against sex to prove themselves as gamers? It seems to me that the theme presented in this video is actually anti-feminist. In a way, it denies a woman’s choice to do what she pleases, including denying herself an essential part of the human experience in order to prove herself as a worthy gamer. Can you imagine a video of male gamers saying, “I don’t care about sex. I care about games“? No, I can’t either.

Fellow girl gamer Caroline Whippey and I have been conducting interviews with MMO gamers about gaming and its relationship to well-being; we will present preliminary findings from this research at the Canadian Association for Information Science conference in May. The sample for this qualitative and exploratory study is not meant to be statistically significant and so it cannot be claimed as representative. (Yes, I teach research methods and statistics; why do you ask?) In interviews I’ve conducted with many of the female participants, they have told me that a relationship with a man was the primary reason they started gaming. They wanted to play because their boyfriend played, for example. The women ended up liking the game, and regardless of whatever happened with the relationship, the women went on to level up multiple 85s in WoW, to lead guilds, and so on. (Yay!)

The book Digital culture, play, and identity: A World of Warcraft reader has a chapter called “World of Warcraft as a playground for feminism.” In a footnote to this chapter, author Hilde G. Corneliussen wrote:

Even girls can have difficulties seeing other girls as gamers. In a study of female hackers in Norway, Nordli found that even female hardcore gamers did not really trust new girls to be “real” gamers, and saw them as a threat to their own hard-earned image as skilled female gamers (Nordli 2003). I have also found that women are not really expected to have fun with computers. During an interview with three female computer students, they simply laughed at my question about what they did to have fun with the computer, referring to boys as the ones who had fun with computers – before they told me about their own pleasurable experiences with computer games (p. 82).

It seems we are in danger of a dichotomy, girls! Either we feel the need to stamp out our femininity/sexuality to prove ourselves as “real” gamers, or our play comes secondary to the enjoyment and preferences of the boys that surround us. Why is this the case? Corneliussen suggests a few things that, in my mind, could affect this odd range of relationships between gender and games:

• An incorrect but widespread myth exists which states that girls don’t like to play computer games. This stigma leads girls to believe a self-fulfilling prophecy that they’re not supposed to enjoy them.
• There is an assumption among game designers and others that girls like to play games such as Barbie Fashion rather than “boy” games that involve competition and fighting such as WoW.
• In WoW, “Despite … stories of strong women, most of Azeroth’s history is a story of war and conflict played out by men, which leaves most of the population of Azeroth, including most of the female characters, invisible.” (p. 70)
• Also, in WoW starting areas, more male than female NPCs exist – except, interestingly enough, in the case of night elves. The lore surrounding the night elf race involves more females than any other race.

These observations, while true, are just strange to me. As I stated in my last girl gamer post, I’ve played video games since I was 6, so I’ve never known anything else. Scholars have argued that video games are important for 21st century/digital literacy, and we see this even in the pervasiveness of gamification techniques in today’s social media environments. So, as long as we have a culture that excludes girls from playing or demeans their status in games compared to boys, the education quality of today’s female children could be at stake. My question: what can we do about it?

The feminists who came before my generation worked to ensure that women have choices. As a result, we can choose to play Barbie Fashion. We can roll a WoW blood elf and then kick some Alliance butt in Arathi Basin. We can choose to ignore the lousy men who view us as nothing but sex objects. We can choose to enjoy our femininity and sexuality without compromising any of this. And we can continue to shock people with our choices, as this female WoW player did on a dating show, until the weird dichotomy is gone. It is counterproductive to continue enacting either side of it in order to prove a point, stake a claim, or hold onto a man. As long as we do this, the stigmas and the misconceptions will continue.

So go out there and do what you wanna do, girls… no male ganking required. (omg, that felt liberating to type!)

tl-dr

Girls don’t have to stop being girls – or place the interests of boys before their own interests – to play games.

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Video games and art have a strange relationship. Many people don’t view them as being art because they are “games,” or “just for fun” or a variety of other reasons. I think video games themselves are great works of art and they inspire great works of art.

To prove my point, read this article from Kotaku, which is awesome, but specifically for this quote:

“The whole document we put together was great, but just as we handed it in, the most amazing thing happened. The ‘Game On’ festival began. The Game On Exhibition was held in the Queensland State Library and was government funded! Here’s an exhibit, at the library, celebrating the history and artistic merit of video games, and we had the curator of the event write a big document stating that gaming has artistic merit.”

Boom. Video games have artistic merit, and it was facilitated by a library. (See? Games, information, and libraries really are connected)

But, since I’m a good librarian, let’s talk about a few other ways games are validated as art:

The art within games

The motivating factor with a lot of gamers is to see what kinds of art are offered within a video game. I’ve never been this type of player, so I’m going to refer to the words of others to make my point for me:

Gabe was talking about an upcoming game he is playing called Kingdoms of Amalur, and said;

A big part of the reason I play games is for “new art”. That is the thing more often than not that keeps me progressing. What will the next level or zone look like?

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true for me.

One thing along these lines that I can definitely get behind, is how beautiful some games are. It’s a completely personal opinion and very subjective a lot of times, but the visual artistry behind many games is just spectacular. Sometimes it’s so moving, that people make representations of art within games, within other games. Very meta.

There’s also a great video of employees from Bioware talking about video games as art. I appreciate it because it crosses the spectrum of visual arts and talks about different kinds of art as well. It’s important to note that video games as art are not just the visuals, there is also the literature and the story involved, plus the concept of the game as a whole being one piece of art.

Using video game content outside of the games as art

Here’s where the line gets even more blurry for me. What if someone is creating traditional art (or maybe not so traditional art), but the content is about video games? Does that legitimize video games as art? Or does it legitimize the art being created because of the art that was originally in the video game? Is this art? Are these?

If I created a video game that was about treasured pieces of art, would that legitimize video games as art?

What if there is an art curator at a major video game company that handles all of the video game art displayed at the company, wouldn’t that be cool? Oh, wait, it already exists.

Smithsonian

I saved this section for last because it’s both the coolest and the most validating for my argument that video games are art.

If you have not yet heard about or seen this exhibit, you should read up on it because it’s great. The Smithsonian put together a huge exhibit of the history of video games as art, and actually allowed for a huge community to vote on which game should be included (some of the choices were crazy hard. How do you pick between Zelda: A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger? That’s just mean). I hope I get a chance to see this in person.

Link Round-up for ya:

Flickr

American Art

Globe and Mail

 

Anyone out there been to see this yet? How is it?

 

tl-dr

Video games are perdy and artistic and stuff.

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