tl-dr

Blogs have a tendency now and then to focus on things that are negative, or to whine about a company (guilty). This is not one of those posts. I’m making an effort to talk about the good work games are doing when I see it, cause good work like that should be rewarded.

Onward!

GW2 has done some amazing work with the search interface on their trading post (TP). I notice this because it’s what I do for a living, and it’s so damn easy to use. Diane and I talked quite a long time ago about SWTOR and their (horrible) interface for their GTN, and I want to do something similar today, but highlight how awesome ArenaNet has been for their trading post.

Filters

SWTOR did these as well, and ANet did it the same as them (as they should have). This is all pretty standard, and works just how it should.

Sorting

GW2 also allows for sorting of search results by level, price, rarity, and # Available. The good news is, it sorts ALL of the search results, not just the ones on the page (like SWTOR did). Again, something small, but awesome.

Search as you Type

Everyone knows this, and uses it, and takes it for granted. ANet has done it right and done it well. It’s taken for granted in their game, and that means it works how it should.

Good for them. It’s something that can be extremely difficult to implement, but they did a good job of implementing it well.

They even did the awesome thing of having search as you type work for words in the MIDDLE of a phrase, which is awesome. So, if you want a “Berserker’s Pistol of the Earth” you can search for “Pistol” and it will bring up search as you type options for all different kinds of pistols, not just the boring standard pistol with no stats.

Free Text Search

This might seem strange, but GW2 also does have a free text search. You can go in and type in a string of random words, and it will search on that and bring you some results. They might not be exactly what you want, but you’ll get results. Many search engines that have a controlled vocabulary (like items in a video game) won’t bring you any results unless you type the item name in EXACTLY. GW2 isn’t like that. You can have your free text search as well as your item specific name search. It’s good to have both for different types of users.

Again, good on ANet for this.

Web Interface

This part is pretty cool. They made the TP accessible to third parties through the web. It brings you such awesome things as the GW2 DB and GW2 Spidy.

What could they do to make the search better?

This is nitpicking because the search is pretty good already, but if they wanted their search to be downright sexy, they should add some facted searching.

Imagine using the GW2 TP like amazon. You search for a “pistol” and then you can use the filters AFTER you’ve searched. You can then narrow down search results by price, color, level, any of those attributes. That would be AWESOME. They are actually not too far away from it already, it’s just a matter of if they think it’s worth it or not. (They could hire me to help them out ).

Also, they could make their free text search a little bit better. It’s decent now, but it could get better. That’s just me nitpicking though.

tl-dr

GW2′s Trading Post is work of great searchability, others should take note. And then ArenaNet should add faceted search so they can be absolute pimps.

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

 

How do you become a gamer? What constitutes one?

Hardcore/casual gamer aside, what really makes someone a gamer? Just playing games? Or participating in the community? Or just saying “Hi! I’m a gamer!”

What about those people who play video games a lot, but still think they aren’t gamers? I’m talking about the people that play WoW 30 hours a week. They love playing Zelda. But those are the only two games that they play. Are they gamers?

Then there’s the other side of the coin: does someone just like the “gamer” culture, but not play games, and calls themselves a gamer? Maybe this person goes to a ton of cons, watches friends play games, reads all the blogs, and is an in-depth member of the community! Are they a gamer?

Or, how about the people who are everything that a gamer is, but they don’t want to bear the label “gamer”?

I think there are two different ways to think about it:

Individual perspective

I think there’s a point where it is up to an individual to choose “who” or “what” he/she is.

“I am a gamer”

“I am a tennis player”

“I am a painter”

Or all of the above. That’s the great part about individual choice.

Cultural grouping

This is where it gets murky, because having individual reasons for why you want to be (or not be) labeled a certain way is great, but it goes against the grain of humans as social creatures. Pretty much everything humans do is as a group: Countries, states, hobbies, politics, sports, the list goes on and on.

Because of that, belonging to a certain group (e.g. “gamers”) brings with it certain baggage. Good baggage or bad, it’s still there. It’s up to the group to make a determination of whether that baggage should remain within the group or not. Because, even though you made an individual choice to “be a gamer” because “I play this game all the time and participate in the community, and other gamers should only play MMOs to be called gamers!” …not all gamers will think that way.

I don’t have much of an answer for how to describe this, or even think about it. I will need to do more research on it.

This is kind of my first foray into the concept. Any links would be appreciated!

tl-dr

We should call people who read “bookers.” Since those of us who play games are called “gamers.”

People who know @infogamerist irl know that she is obsessed with the searches that lead people here to tl-dr. (She can’t help it; it’s part of her information scientist genetic makeup.) When she checked the searches this morning, she found this one:

why are hardcore gamers angry

That is a really good question! We all know that we are angry, but why?

Nerdraging is one of our favorite pastimes. This search, combined with something that happened at home over the weekend involving a disagreement over incorrect information on a battle.net page, made @infogamerist think a lot about gamer nerdrage. She has no answer for why nerdrage happens. However, she can attempt to create a classification of gamer nerdrage. She has not found this to be an easy task, but it’s an important one for the future of gamer culture. We can’t understand why we nerdrage until we examine how we nerdrage. The unexamined nerdrage is not worth executing.

First, definitions. Urban Dictionary provides the following definitions of nerdrage:

1. Indignant, hysterical, and incoherent screaming brought on by video game induced frustration. [nerdy editor's comment: technically, this definition is provided under "nerd rage," not "nerdrage." Citation fail.]
2. Nerdrage is both the emotion felt when a nerd is exposed to something that directly contradicts the core beliefs of their obsession, and the reactionary diatribe by the nerd that inevitably follows. [nerdy editor's comment: "nerd" is not plural, and using "their" is a bad solution for using gender-neutral language. Grammar fail.]
3. The overwhelming anger of a nerd when something or someone gets the “facts” wrong on a geeky subject such as Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons, Lunix, etc. [nerdy editor's comment: "Lunix" was a Commodore OS and that was a really long time ago, so she's going to assume they meant "Linux". OS fail.]
4. The act of Nerds Raging! [nerdy editor's comment: caps appeared in the original text, but are obviously not correct. Caps fail.]

All these definitions have correct facets in them, but none are complete. Nerdrage can exist on so many sites and manifest itself in so many ways. But, this post will only focus on types of gamer nerdrage, and tips on to handle each of them. It should be noted that gamer nerdrage can be invoked via trolling, but not always.

Here we go. /flexes e-peen

Player-to-player rage: This happens when one player gets mad at another player and says horrible things to the player they’re mad at. They can be really offensive, like when a female player is told “ur a lesbian hore” (and +1 on the offensive scale when the rager can’t even spell the insult). But sometimes they’re so bad they’re just funny. In this post, you’ll find a comment in which a kid says he was once told he’d had a penis in his stomach since birth. (What???)

@infogamerist’s tip on player-to-player rage: Avoid other players, whether it’s Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, or freakin’ Farmville (the game that makes @infogamerist nerdrage based on its mere existence). Avoid all players. End of story.

Defense rage: No, this has nothing to do with play strategy. It’s rage that occurs when players get mad about bad behavior from other players, such as camping, griefing, sexist comments, and so on. Read the comments on this post for a lively discussion from a kid who does this all the time on Xbox (same post as the penis-in-the-stomach post). One comment he made about his habits: “It’s funny to see people get angry because I tell them they suck.” That philosophy causes some serious defense rage.

@infogamerist’s tip on defense rage: If you follow her tip on player-to-player rage, you’ll never experience defense rage. If you want to cause defense rage, laugh at them after you kill them, and you’ll see how nicely your world unfolds. For added pleasure, /hug and /kiss them.

Game mechanics rage: Rage expressed within the game, about the game; typically occurs if you’re not able to kill something because that part of the game is bugged. But, sometimes trolls like to cause game mechanics rage. (that link was not necessarily associated with game mechanics rage, but the trolling is so epic that it had to be included somewhere in the post.)

@infogamerist’s tip on game mechanics rage: Grow up! I mean, become a game developer and see if you don’t miss a bug or two. If you want to cause game mechanics rage, play Warsong Gulch in WoW and tell everyone in battleground chat to go “ALL IN” throughout the bg. Rage will flow like blood from all other party members.

Vendor rage: A broader term that encompasses all kinds of rage directed at the company who made the game. Blizzard is really good at making us nerdrage – Diablo 3 disappointment, Galactic Trade Network search fails, Tuesday server downtime, pandas… all of it. You can’t do much to avoid vendor rage because vendors have all the power.

@infogamerist’s tip on vendor rage: Spam the vendor with tickets until they fix the thing, even if it means quitting your job and leaving your family. Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to go to that extent before it’s fixed.

Fact correction rage: Any rage resulting from incorrect statements. This can be related to vendor rage, player-to-player rage, or any other interactions in which facts are disputed. Feelings can get really heated about whether or not an item needs enchanted, or whether Spirit or Intellect is a more important stat for a mage, or whether it’s a helm or a sword that caused that thing to happen.

@infogamerist’s tip on fact correction rage: Stay out of these fights when possible; typically, e-heads will roll before they are finished. However, if you see something that’s clearly and totally wrong, let the world benefit from your supreme knowledge. Refer to everyone else in the chat/in the forum/on Vent as a “FUCKIN DOUCHEBAG.”

Ragequit: @infogamerist’s preferred form of nerdrage!!! This happens when you get so mad at vendors, the FUCKIN DOUCHEBAGS who keep killing you, game mechanics, or whatever else that you can’t take it anymore, so you just leave… you /gquit, or log, or throw your computer/console/controller out the window. And then you rage at yourself because since you just destroyed your gaming equipment, you can’t get back in game and therefore now have nothing to do since you dropped cable last month to pay for the expansion pack you can no longer enjoy.)

@infogamerist’s tip on ragequit: If a break will speed up your cooldown, then take one. But gamers have short attention spans; this means that if you ragequit to prove a point to other players, they will only care for 2 seconds at most. In other words, AoE is minimal, and crit is increased by 0%. Hardware destruction is discouraged.

So there you have it. Somehow, this list feels complete, but also seriously lacking. What nerdrage types did @infogamerist miss? How have you experienced the ones she’s listed? Do you have more pro tips to share?

Note: As a female, @infogamerist does not really have an e-peen. With that admission, she’s fully expecting a male pig to comment on this post and tell her to get her fat, ugly, slutty self back in the kitchen so she can make him a sammich and then suck his e-peen. Unfortunately, the first one to do that has no e-peen, and probably no rl-peen either.

tl-dr

Stop nerdraging. Of course, if players, vendors, or your games are wrong, then do what you have to do to make them right. And remember that nobody cares except you, and the 200 people who reply to your angry forum post.

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

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I’ve been taking some time to go back over a post a did months ago where I proposed a theory of the difference between casual and hardcore gamers. I still think quite a bit of it is relevant, but there is definitely some nuance that has appeared as I have talked about the topic with different gamers (casual and hardcore), and non-gamers.

Let me get the surprise out of the way: there are two different ways to mean the term “hardcore” when talking about the gaming community, and it relates to the gamers themselves, and to the games they play. There are hardcore gamers and casual gamers, and there are hardcore games and casual games (if we wanted to make this a completely black and white topic). There are tremendous shades of nuance here, but I think that’s what it boils down to.

First, let me stress something: the different terms of casual and hardcore do not, in any way, denote quality. They are just terms to differentiate different patterns of game playing; different behaviors that are involved with games.

Hardcore Gamers*

People have a picture in their head that hardcore gamers are the guys who sit in their mom’s basement and play World of Warcraft for hours on end. The view of the casual gamer is someone that plays Farmville/Angry Birds. Both are correct. Both are also wrong. The difficult part is that these two different games are the difference between hardcore and casual games, but the players themselves could be casual or hardcore.

I maintain my previous statement that engaging with a community outside of a game is what turns someone into a hardcore gamer. What I will change about my original statement though, is that even if you do not identify as a “gamer,” you can still be a gamer. You do not have to self label to be considered part of the “gamer” community.

In addition, I think the amount of time spent playing a game does have an impact upon deciding if someone is “hardcore” or not. This number can be arbitrary and hard to really nail down, but I think it does play a role. I did not mention this in my previous post because there was no real way to measure it (without a lot of research projects and interviews). Hence, my desire to use the interaction with a larger community as the barometer of when a gamer becomes hardcore or not. Sure, it’s never black and white, there is always a lot of grey, but I think this is what being a hardcore gamer really comes down to:

1) Identifying strongly with a particular game or genre.

2) Playing that game or genre extensively.

3) Engaging extensively with a community involved with that game or genre (both inside and outside of the game).

I hear one critique screaming at me as I write this: “But social games that are casual are built around community!” True. Hence why I think you need to meet some part of all 3 rules to fall into the “hardcore gamer” category.

It’s very possible to play any type of game (including Angry Birds or Farmville) and be a hardcore gamer. It’s also possible to play hardcore games (explained below) and be a casual gamer.

*This is just me throwing ideas around, tell me if you don’t agree. I want to sort it all out.

Hardcore Games

What makes a game hardcore? Where is the line between a easy casual game like Angry Birds and a complex MMO like Guild Wars 2?

In my mind, it’s the skill required to play the game.

No, not the “omg I’m going to wtfpwnbbq you at this game” kind of skill. Or even the, “man, I suck at this game but it’s still fun” kind of skill. I’m talking about the, “how long will it take me to learn how to play this game?” type of skill. Or even the, “can I even play this game? It looks really hard.” kind of skill.

Most anyone can pick up most casual games and learn how to play them in a matter of seconds, and be entertained for hours (whether you’re a casual, hardcore, or professional gamer). Looking at the hardcore games, there is usually a tutorial of some kind, and a lot of learning that goes along with it. Keybinds being a great example. Getting used to using half a dozen (or even dozens) of skills in a keyboard, learning combos in fighting games, or using a new controller for a console requires a certain amount of skill and learning. I think this is what differentiates a hardcore game from a casual game.

So, to a certain extent, I’m still talking about time spent with the game. That might be different for each individual, but how long it takes to learn a game, or how difficult it is to learn a game, is what can make the game “hardcore.”

tl-dr

Hardcore games require some learning and/or skill. Hardcore gamers have a community, identify with a community, and play a lot.

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

 

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.

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

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Welcome to a Presidents’ Day (US)/Family Day (Ontario) special edition post! I wish I were writing it under better circumstances, but as tl;dr’s adminstrator, I need to break some disconcerting news to our readers. Yesterday, you might have noticed that tl;dr had posts about the virtues of cabbage soup for weight loss. It’s because I got pwned. At least it makes a great story. Here it is.

Yesterday, after taking care of some RL things and then sleeping off a massive headache through the evening, I came downstairs to my computer to check on things and eventually get in game. One of the first things I do when I get online is troll the stats for this blog – the fluctuations in views, Google searches that lead people here, and so on are fascinating! But when I logged in to the blog, the first thing I noticed was not Sunday’s stats, but rather the registration of a new, unknown author as well as two new posts about dieting by said new author.

Panic set in! Jacob and I believe in healthy living, but we certainly don’t blog about it here! Classification fan that I am, I noted that the “author” had used some of our official “controlled vocabulary” categories such as “Health Sciences Libraries,” but some of his own unique tags such as “Cabbage Soup Diet.” After an uneasy laugh, I proceeded to fix it.

*flexing Information Goddess muscles and inhaling the power of root access*

Time for action! I trashed the posts, deleted the user, and changed my admin password. I called my hosting company to find out what else could be done, and if any other compromises had taken place (it was 11 pm… I must express gratitude toward JustHost for providing 24/7 instant and reliable tech support). I took comfort in the rep’s reassurance that I do all the right things on a regular basis: I keep on top of plugin and WordPress updates, I don’t install questionable plugins, I carefully control who has access to the blog’s dashboard, etc., etc. We looked through my WordPress files and database together, and thankfully we didn’t see anything additional that seemed unusual, so I thanked him profusely, and he congratulated me again on doing the appropriate admin work; apparently, most people don’t do it well. (Side note: the logic behind ignoring updates escapes the Information Goddess. Updates can save the world, or at least the blogosphere.)

*taking deep breaths and gulping down a glass of water*

Realizing that I couldn’t do anything more, I finally logged into WoW, and my friend queued us for what turned out to be a round of senselessly hilarious PvP. Our pattern in this particular battleground (bg) was as follows: run out, die, rez… run out, die, rez… rinse and repeat. I may have set the record for dying the most times ever, but somehow it seemed fitting, given what the blog and I had just experienced. I, the Information Gamer Goddess, had to admit it: she faced Internet aggro, and the Internet pwned her!

So, if you visited our home page yesterday and found cabbage soup for weight loss tips instead of our usual brilliant insights on gaming, libraries, and information science, I extend my apologies. Despite my best attempts to keep this blog safe, secure, and running smoothly, there are some bad things in this online world that I cannot avoid. I am, however, proud of my immediate response, as well as my prevention work over time, and it was not the end of the blog as I knew it. My question for you is: what have you learned from this?

That is today’s lesson, boys and girls. This concludes our special edition holiday post. We will be back tomorrow with *real* content.

tl;dr
Nothing is safe online, not even tl;dr, the safest and most exciting spot on the internet.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training. (But expect to get pwned!)

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

Just a forewarning before you get too deep into this post: It’s going to be full of jargon and the nerd will be deep; both the gamer nerd and the library nerd. Truly full-on nerd. (Or Geek. Whatever.)

Disclaimer: This is in no way endorsed by Bioware, and it just contains the authors’ opinions.

Bioware has also been noted as saying they understand the Galactic Trade Network system is lacking. Rumor has it that they had another system in place during beta, but it taxed their servers so much it was crashing the game. (These statements are conjecture)

Diane and I are making a couple of assumptions for this post, so we’ll just list them here.

1) You know what an Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) is.

2) You know what Star Wars, The Old Republic (SWTOR) is.

3) You’ve used an online auction system before (like eBay).

The Galactic Trade Network (GTN) is the (rough) equivalent of eBay, but it exists within SWTOR. That’s right. A hugely robust search system that is completely independent of the world wide web exists. This area of information search and retrieval is undiscovered by most, if not all, of the information science world. It’s time to take a look at it now. And more than that, it’s time to critique it, and see how it can be improved when hundreds of years of classification and organization are applied to it.

^A visual of the GTN, so you know what we’re talking about.

Everything is already classified

The good news about the GTN is that (almost) all of the content is already classified, and that’s just because of the function that the content plays within the game. Items have a number of different metadata attributes (ways to describe something), like: Title, Level requirement, Stats on the item, Quality (Artifact, legendary, etc.), Armor Type, Weapon Type, the list goes on. All of these different things are metadata attributes that are applied to different items. (Librarians use the word “metadata” because it’s easier than saying “the word(s) you use to describe an object” when talking about stuff like this. Additionally, the formal definition we learn in library school – “data about data” – is just too circular to be meaningful).

So all of the items in SWTOR have rich classifications and abundant metadata already on them. What does that mean?

It means that Bioware has the foundation to create amazing search interfaces. All of the content exists and it’s easy to find, and now it’s just a matter of taking all of the content and creating a user interface that allows for easy access for the user. Sounds easy, but it’s extremely difficult.

User-Centered Design

Bioware has already come out with a system, and it works, but it could be improved upon. The SWTOR Community has already commented on how  the system could be improved. I’ll run over them really quickly and add my comments to them. (The original post is what I’m using for this section)

1. The drop-down categories (armor type, rarity, level reqs, etc) should be for NARROWING DOWN EXISTING SEARCHES, not confining what you may search for.

This is possible, and could be done, but not in the current system that Bioware has implemented. The common “faceted navigation” that you see in most commercial websites like Newegg and Amazon has become an industry standard, but applying it to an in-game system has yet to be done (to my knowledge). This would be a large innovation in the gaming world.

2. We should be able to search by name FIRST. I should be able to type in exactly what I’m looking for, click buy, done. It’s that easy.

I completely agree with this one. The current system allow for no “Title search” of an item. You are required to pick a filter before searching by title, which makes for extremely nice database design and a lot less server load, but annoys users now that they are used to being able to search how they like. This keyword search to narrow down an existing search also does not work very well right now, it only works on a direct match of a keyword (e.g. “Red Goo” not “red go”), which is frustrating as a user.

3. If I’m listing multiple same-item auctions, PLEASE have it memorize what my price was. If I’m leveling up my crafting skill and I made 20 Random-Blue-Chest-Piece-of-***-Kickery, please for the love of all that is Star Wars let me only name my price once rather than making me type the price in 20 times. That is way too many clicks and key presses.

Save the time of the [user]. Any little change that can be done which will make the life of the user better should be done.

4. Include an armor SLOT drop down. Helm, gloves, chest, legs, etc. If I’m looking for a Purple Medium Armor level 47BOOTS, I shouldn’t have to search through pages and pages of chest pieces, leg pieces, and helmets to find it.

This will be an easy fix, and one that I assume Bioware will implement rather quickly. As I mentioned above, all of the data is already classified well, this is just a matter of adding another “filter” which the current UI doesn’t support.

5, 8

Hit up the original thread to read these. They don’t have anything to do with the system or UI, so it is beyond the scope of this post.

6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15

Save the time of the [user]. (see #3)

7, 13

See #4

11. Some of the items are currently being listed under the wrong categories. For example, Underworld Trading Fabrics are being listed under Diplomacy.

A bug in a new system that needs to be worked out. Perhaps the metadata for “Underworld Trading Fabrics” is in the wrong part of a database somewhere. Just needs to be looked into on the back end.

Simple GTN Additions

Aside from a complete overhaul of the GTN system, there are a few things that Bioware could do to improve upon the current GTN UI. They’re simple changes that will make the lives of all of us users much easier.

1) Alphabetize the drop down menus.

The current drop down menu that is first chosen looks to be ordered by “priority”.

That’s fine for someone who is looking for something at the top of the list, but each user has a different priority. Alphabetizing the list will make it easier for people to scan down the list for what they’re looking for (e.g. I’m looking for a “consumable” so I automatically will look toward the top of the list, instead of the middle where it currently is now). This is by far the easiest change they could make, and it would increase usability so much.*

*Some of their drop downs are alphabetized, some are not. There is very little consistency to it.

2) Make the list shorter / Separate it somehow

The best practice for creating lists like this (a taxonomy) state that you don’t want a list longer than 7-10 terms because the standard user just zones out and stops reading the list. Either make the list shorter (hard), or separate it into different lists for easier reading. Create a hierarchy out of it, just on the list.

Example:

Gear

• Armor
• Melee Weapon
• Ranged Weapon
• Implant
• Earpiece
• Offhand
• Relic

This way, users can see what they are looking for at a glance very easily. And it doesn’t even require a change to the background programming of the system, it’s just a cosmetic change on the UI.

3) Refine by specific stat

This one may be a bit more difficult, but I’m unsure without knowing the intricacies of how Bioware’s actual database system works. There should be a filter or refinement tool to allow for searching/narrowing by a specific stat (e.g. Willpower, Might, alacrity, etc.). It could even be more general and you can narrow by primary or secondary stat.

Crafting materials

Right now being able to find crafting materials on the GTN is a nightmare, mainly because of the no title or keyword search option (or the keyword narrowing function not working properly). A quick example: If I want to find a material for crafting something, doing a search yields 26 pages of results, with 8 items on each page. Narrowing this by title would be easy, but the best way to be able to do it would be to sort it by crafting level.

Most crafting items just have “Item level 1″ as their item metadata, but they also have a specific “grade” applied to them, which can be Grade 1 through 6. There are also many sub-categories of crafting materials.

Being able to search or refine a search by a “Grade 2 Biochemical Sample” rather than a “Grade 4 Biochemical Compound” would allow a great amount of functionality for advanced users. And, again, the metadata/classification already exists, it’s just a matter of implementing it in a user friendly way.

If you liked X, then you would also like…

The above was all Jacob’s work; now it’s my turn (this is Diane). Think of us as two sides of a d20.

Recommender systems try to predict what the user would like based on current and past searches. If you use Amazon, you are familiar with recommender systems. For example, if I search Amazon for SWTOR, I get the following recommendations on the SWTOR product page:

As you can see, it recommends SWTOR game time, another video game, an operating system that supports SWTOR, and so on. This is based on past behavior of other Amazon users.

Pandora is a popular example of a recommender system: If you start a “Katy Perry” station, Pandora will play music by other dance pop artists. Some of us think recommender systems in their current forms are frequently too narrow in scope, and some of my academic research seeks to work on these ideas. For example, Katy Perry is certainly similar to Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, Rihanna, and so on, but what else could a system find for me that is not so obviously related? Who were their musical role models when they were growing up? Who has a voice similar to Katy’s that I might enjoy? I’m currently leading a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada called “Using affect-based labels in whole collection retrieval” to, in part, investigate these issues.

As a researcher, it’s my job to be visionary, so here we go. In the long run, information science needs to stop thinking about documents/objects (e.g. A pdf, a word doc, crafting materials, medpacs, or PvP gear) in a system as individual silos, things that can only be retrieved if you can identify one or more facets. The idea that you can only find things by telling the system what you are hoping to find- and telling the system in the terms of the system – needs to become old school. In the paper entitled “Breaking in and out of the silos: What makes for a happy photograph cluster?” that I presented at the Document Academy conference in 2010, I stated the following:

… extensively known Web sites and tools really only provide ways to start “searches” with “keywords.” A search for any relatively broad search string retrieves far too many documents for an individual to sift through. Additionally, the “black box” phenomenon in which the user does not know what exists in the system is of ongoing concern … known-item and narrowly-defined subject access searching … has denied us any substantial progress toward new ways of thinking about information exploration.

Let’s say I am a Sith Assassin, and my crafting skills are archaeology, treasure hunting, and artifice. Here are some potential information exploration questions:

• I have x, y, and z crystals (crafting materials) in my inventory. If I could learn what products others are selling that are made with those materials, it might help me decide what to make next based on supply, demand, and physical feasibility. Also, knowing what products are most popular might help me decide what I should spend my time and credits on.
• I am at level 13, and it’s my first SWTOR character, so I am still a noob. I think Khem Val would be a better tank if I could get him some better armor, but I don’t know how to find armor except by sifting through the GTN with the existing interface that Jacob described above, or by hoping to loot/find something good. How can I find things that fit my character’s (and Khem’s) current status? He can only use heavy armor. I think his pants are already pretty good, but he doesn’t have anything on his head yet.

Max level players/characters won’t have these kinds of questions, but you can’t get to 50 until you figure out things like these. Be patient with the noobs’ needs. Focusing on the user and how their information exploration happens is a valuable tool, rather than just focusing on finding specific documents or objects. It’s about the user experience, not the the search result.

In conclusion, finally

MMO players are in a constant state of information seeking. This knowledge state compels us to retrieve or explore information constantly; the plethora of items we need to purchase for crafts, combat, and other tasks are essential to becoming 1337. Better in-game information search, retrieval, and exploration systems that facilitate making the obvious and not-so-obvious connections between items for sale would help us put these pieces together in meaningful ways. We, Jacob and Diane, with our classification and systems expertise, would love to help Bioware make this all better. (We’d also love an all-expenses-paid speaking engagement in Hawaii, but as previously stated, this is all just our opinion).

Side note: We had to edit this post before publishing it because Bioware fixed a few of the issues without mentioning it in patch notes. Good work Bioware!

tl;dr

The UI for SWTOR’s GTN could use some improvement, as many players have noted. We have some ideas on how to make it better.

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

Welcome to Gamer Classification Week! This week, Jacob and Diane are providing a 5-part series on the categorizations related to gamers and gaming. Understanding these many aspects of gaming is essential to helping you understand games, gamers, and the information with which we collide. Make sure you catch up with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4!

The concept of gaming spans parts of life that most people do not even think of as “gaming.” Most of the time, they are just enjoyable hobbies, or a way to spend a few extra minutes while killing some time. The biggest example of this that I can think of is Board Games. Monopoly. Sorry. Life. Risk. These are all games that have been around so long, they’re just a part of everyday life for most people. Some board games even start to look like video games.

Video games are no different than board games; the background structure of them remains the same, they just become more complex, faster, have a different story, different format etc. Video games and board games are both still games. They both provide community, socialization, and learning.

Some games are just better at it. The best example I can think of for an educational video game is Fold.it. It’s a video game (that can be played by anyone), to figure out the structure of proteins. It’s highly educational, so much so that the players of FoldIt are all authors on an article in Nature for the work that they did. These are laymen, without advanced degrees. Gaming is changing the world. The gaming trend is even continuing, with a new game that has come out more recently than Fold.It called Phylo. It’s about DNA rather than proteins. Games and gamers are making the world better by doing what we all like doing: playing games.

A step away from the “serious games” is the idea of gamification, the idea of turning anything in life into a game; to make it more fun and more productive. A great idea is turning grad school into a game.

Perhaps the problem with graduate school, like the problem in many bad video games, are the mechanics behind the way we do graduate school. Here is my proposal, game graduate school. If we look at the game mechanics that make games successful, we can approach grad school in a way that might make it easier on us, and also more fun.

Gamification is also simple. It doesn’t have to be grandiose and change a lot of lives or make something serious better. It can just be about playing a game with coffee beans. 

What games do you play that aren’t video games? Did you realize they were games before?

tl;dr

Video games are just the new kid on the block, humans have always played games.

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

Welcome to Gamer Classification Week! This week, Jacob and Diane are providing a 5-part series on the categorizations related to gamers and gaming. Understanding these many aspects of gaming is essential to helping you understand games, gamers, and the information with which we collide. Make sure you catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!

The type of game that a gamer plays is generally more important (within the gamer community) than how often that person plays said game. Playing each of these types of games will still label someone as a “gamer”, but the different types of games attract very different types of people, for many different reasons. The types of games that I can think of off the top of my head are: FPS, TBS, RTS, RPG, MMO, Racing, and Fighting.

First Person Shooter (FPS) games are generally the type of game the lay-person knows about, because they are the type of game brought up in the ongoing debate about video games and violence. Some of the top contenders for most well known FPS games are Doom, Halo, Half-Life, and Duke Nukem, but there are many many others. Generally these are multiplayer games, and require a lot of hand eye coordination and practice, with a large emphasis on tactics.

On a larger scale, there are Turn-Based and Real-Time Strategy (TBS and RTS respectively) games, which focus more on strategy than tactics. There is also a component to RTS games that’s considered very important, which is micro. Micro is the ability to micro manage and organize multiple units/buildings/groups at a time. Usually it’s measured in Actions Per Minute (APM), and some professional players have been known to get upwards of 400APM during their RTS games. (I’m sure I got that number wrong, and feel free to correct me in the comments). day[9], who I’ve previously talked about, is an expert at this, please see his page and videos for more information.

Role Playing Games (RPG), are another popular genre of game, and generally involve focusing on one character, or avatar (not Avatar the movie), and using that character to go on different adventures. RPGs typically bring to mind the fantasy genre, but they can actually be any metaphor, from Super Heroes, or to just everyday life.

While all of these different game types mentioned (FPS, TBS, RTS, and RPG) can be played in a single player environment, many of them take on a completely different context when the multiplayer environment is added. For FPS, TBS, and RTS games this leads to increased competition and community, sometimes very robust ones. In the case of RPGs, adding multiplayer spawned a whole new genre unto itself, creating MMORPGs (sometimes pronounced Ma-Mor-Pa-Ga’s if you want to say something hilarious), but otherwise known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. These are games where hundreds or thousands of people exist in an online virtual world playing side by side and/or against each other.

Racing games are something I haven’t been in contact with since I was younger. Generally very straight forward for picking a car and driving, they have become very advanced in recent years, combining ideas from other genres. You can have an RPG racing game pretty easily by being able to customize a car and go on “missions” to earn money. Just a different metaphor. Then you have combat racing games like Mario Kart, which are fun for any type of gamer. (I welcome any comments or content that I can add on this section from readers.)

I’ll come clean about fighting games: the last one I played was Street Fighter II. No Alpha. It’s been a while. I take that back, I did spend a lot of time playing Super Smash Bros., but that is the extent of my fighting game experience. I would welcome a more experienced opinion on them in the comments. In general, fighting games are third person, and mainly melee combat. It can be 1v1 or multiplayer; it varies dramatically.

So what do these different genres matter? For the gamers reading, they already matter because those are the games that you play, where your community is, and where you spend your free time. For the information world, it matters because of how information is disseminated to these different groups. Libraries and the information world cannot just “research games”, because they are too nuanced and different in every information aspect to be grouped together in that way (as Caroline has previously said).

Do you have a favorite genre of game that I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments!

tl;dr

Different genres of video games are as different as genres of books.

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 Gamer Classification Week! This week, Jacob and Diane are providing a 5-part series on the categorizations related to gamers and gaming. Understanding these many aspects of gaming is essential to helping you understand games, gamers, and the information with which we collide. Today, Jacob provides a look at how gamers are viewed – what a bunch of nerds! See Part 1: Casual, Hardcore, and Professional Gamers, and Part 2: Geeks, Nerds, Dorks, or “Others?”

The format of a game means a lot to a gamer. The platform defines the game in many ways. For me, the platform that I choose to play on has to do with two main factors: community and use.

Let’s start with the big daddy of community gaming:

Facebook

Facebook is considered the place to go for casual gamers. It is defined by the community. Playing Farmville by yourself is possible, but playing with friends is where the rewards of the game come into play. The sharing, helping, and community building among Facebook friends is what helps to define Facebook gaming as a platform. While this platform is not really considered to be the realm of “gamers”, it now holds a sizable portion of the community that plays games online, so it cannot be discounted from the race. This is different than enriching the community, like hardcore gamers are more likely to do, because there is no involvement with the community outside of the game. This is just participating with the community while playing the game.

In terms of use, Facebook is very limiting for the type of games that can be played. It requires internet access, subscription to the Facebook service, and a group of like minded people to fully be able to play the game. The development platform for the game is also limited because making more complex and in depth games is not always possible. Imagine trying to play Mario Kart or Dance Dance Revolution on Facebook and you’ll start to understand what I mean.

Console Gaming

Console gaming used to be very simple and straightforward. There was a tv, the console connected to it, and the controller connected to the console that controlled what happened on the screen. The use was very simple, but very effective (and still is). Community was the same. It used to be that the community revolved around single player games, or how many friends you could fit in your living room (and argue over whose turn it was). (Check out this link for a great evolution of the different gaming consoles)

Console gaming has now evolved into advanced online multiplayer networks. Being able to play with upwards of 8 or 16 players at the same time in the same game from different rooms is astounding. This was the dream back in the early ’90s, and it has come about. You can sit on your couch holding a (wireless) controller, wearing a headset, and talking to your friends across the country while you all play the same game. This is the reason (I believe) why people who play Facebook games are not considered “gamers.” Facebook games cannot reach this level of depth for community or use. Not even close.

Community and use for console gaming has even gone a step further in recent years, morphing into a hybrid of PC gaming.

PC Gaming

When looking at this short list I have compiled (Facebook, Console, and PC games), the list has continuously become more deep in terms of both community and use. Facebook has a very large community, and many users, console gaming less so, but in a much richer way, and PC games continue this trend (except perhaps in terms of total numbers).

PC games provide the largest breadth and depth for use in gaming because of how the platform works. Games can be designed specifically for the pc, can run on other programs that run on the PC (like Facebook, which runs in a browser on a PC), or can even be emulators of console games. You can even use controllers that mimic console games on the PC. The downside to PC gaming is the complexity; it is hard for new gamers to start playing many PC games because of their complexity.

So why even play on a console if the PC exists? Because of the community. If you have 4 people sitting in the same room with 1 computer, how are you all going to play the same game? It’s possible, but difficult. It’s much easier to play Rock Band or a game on the Kinect though. The PC may win for the most in depth and broadest use platform, but the console will always have the advantage of in person community. Unless you want a good ol’ fashioned LAN party!

Do you agree with my assessment? Are use and community good ways to measure different gaming platforms?

tl;dr

Facebook, consoles, and PCs are the gaming platforms of choice, but each have their own advantages of use and community.

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