tl-dr

Hello! Today is a repost of the tl-dr inaugural post last year on 12-7. That’s right! One year strong! (I also updated the $$ count in the middle of the post)

Thanks to everyone for reading!

Welcome to the inaugural post for tl;dr, a blog dedicated to bringing together games, gamers, librarians, information scientists, and information about games.

In keeping with the tongue in cheek title of this blog, let’s get right to it shall we?

Child’s Play

To give a brief summary from the Child’s Play Wikipedia entry:

Child’s Play is a charitable organization founded by the authors of the popular computer and video games-based webcomic Penny Arcade that organizes worldwide toy drives to children’s hospitals. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins founded Child’s Play in 2003 to improve the lives of sick children by donating toys and games to hospitals worldwide. The charity is also seen as a way to refute mainstream media’s perception of gamers as violent and antisocial.^[1] Through Child’s Play, donors have sent over ten million dollars in toys, games and books to children’s hospitals all over the world.

Short and sweet: gamers are people too, and they care. This is coming to be a more mainstream idea because of advocacy from gamers, and studies that have been done, but I think Child’s Play is a hallmark example of how gamers are good people.

Statistics:

Annual totals

• 2003: $250,000
• 2004: $310,000
• 2005: $605,000
• 2006: $1,024,000
• 2007: $1,300,000
• 2008: $1,434,377
• 2009: $1,780,870
• 2010: $2,294,317
• 2011: $3,512,345
• Running Total: $12,510,909

The best part about gamers and the Child’s Play charity, is by their very nature of playing competitive games, gamers are competing against themselves for a new high score every year (read: beating last year’s donation numbers). To add to the sense of contributing and the feeling of being a fellow gamer, check out the xp bar they have on the Child’s Play Homepage.

Why should gamers care about Child’s Play?

Because this is how you (we) are portrayed to the media and the world. Would you rather have them think of gamers as a group of thugs from GTA? or like this?

Why should librarians and information scientists care about Child’s Play?

Did you read my last link? It’s ok, I’ll post it again. That person writing in to Penny Arcade is a Health Sciences librarian. Libraries and librarians are helping the world, but they were also helped by gamers. The new world of the internet and cyberspace is not limited to a web browser; the cutting edge is games.

tl;dr

If you have the spare change, donate it to Child’s Play, it will be doing something great.

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

I’m serious. Gamers LOVE to draw penises. There are many opportunities to do so, what with the amount of creative games around.

Let’s take exhibit A from Penny Arcade. Quoth the Tycho:

You almost certainly know about Draw Something already – like Words With Friends or Hanging With Friends or Inadvertent Castration With Friends, it is an asymmetrical nod to some absolutely commonplace entertainment which modern life has made difficult.

“Photoshop Hero” may not exist as such, but the prevalence of touch displays means that more games may leverage its noble spirit.  Gabriel’s ChatRoulette mod “The Game” provided hours of entertainment, for example.  Draw Something Else, his newest release, may reach a wider audience.

And here are the mentioned/accompanied comics from Gabe.

 

I know what you may be thinking: This isn’t that big of a problem. It’s an isolated incident and doesn’t happen very often.

Oh, how I wish that were true.

Miiverse actually had to hold a contest to find the best “penis detection” software it could, so that people wouldn’t be drawing them all over the place. It’s endemic.

Side note: this quote from the above article is pretty funny.

Kurisu-san suggested we study different types of penises in order to create figure out the relative shape and size people would draw. We spent a week doing that before we realized that we should have been looking at drawings of penises rather than real-life pictures. (laughs) We were very embarrassed about that.

Personally, when done in a mature setting, with the right people, and in the right context, drawing wangs can be hilarious.

Hell, even just talking about drawing wangs is pretty funny.

 Also, why penises and not a vagina?

tl-dr

Gamers (and probably others as well) love drawing penises. Good/bad?

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

P.S.

You really don’t want to see the meta tags I put on this post. Seriously. I feel kind of dirty now.

I’m pressed for time to write this post due to a number of RL issues, but I’m pretty fired up so I’ll see how many words come out. I encountered this #1ReasonWhy thing last night in a Gamasutra article. #1ReasonWhy is a Twitter hashtag being used by women who work in the video games industry to state 1 reason why “they don’t feel comfortable in the game industry.” I’m not mad at the campaign itself; I’m mad that it needs to exist.

I’ve never worked in the video games industry, but I have worked in IT, both in corporate and in academic settings. So I can say based on firsthand experiences that for women, it’s not a picnic. I could share stories about what I experienced in those past lives, but I don’t even need to go back that far. Even now, I teach technology courses to library and information science students. Most of them are women, and most of them don’t feel comfortable with technology. But when I share teaching stories with my male colleagues who teach the same classes, I learn that they don’t have the same challenges I’ve had with students challenging grades and so on. I’ve known for years that as a young (or at least a young-looking) female teaching classes that are typically taught by a member of the boys’ club, I’m at a disadvantage. I know I have to work twice as hard to hold my ground with the students so they will give me half as much respect as they give the men. Why is this the case?

This overcompensation phenomenon is not just based on my past as an IT professional or as an IT instructor. It happens in the gaming realm too; unfortunately, it seems to come off as militant feminism. Due to my time issues, I can’t find links to them, but I’ve seen so many things online where women are working so hard to hold their place in the gaming world as players. But generally, the message is driven into viewers’ heads: we’re here to play, not to fuck you. (I’ve said this before: what if men worked hard to communicate this same message? Everyone would think they were crazy!) I think girl gamers take overcompensation to an extreme, but maybe not. Take a look at Fat, Ugly or Slutty or my recent post about when I was “raped” in World of Warcraft and make your own call on this.

Some men have been pretty shitty to me over the years. I’ve been raped. I’ve been in abusive situations. I’ve been treated by male IT colleagues like I don’t even know how to turn on a computer. While this doesn’t make it hurt any less, I know that these awful behaviors are based on their own insecurities and weaknesses. But why should us women have to work so damn hard to prove ourselves to be above their weaknesses and their lack of e-peen?

That is my point today. Women shouldn’t HAVE TO do any of this: the tweets about why women feel uncomfortable in the games industry, the working twice as hard for half the credit, the pleading with assholes to not “rape” their battleground team members (read the post). My political leanings aside, I’ve always had an issue with affirmative action because I believe that people should be given opportunities and rewards based on what they do, not based on their gender or race. I don’t want special treatment just because I’m a woman, only the same treatment.

Feminism, to me, means that women should have the same chances and opportunities that men have to do what they want to do. For some women, that might mean having kids and staying home. For me, it means pursuing a career in information science and playing video games. Both sets of goals are fabulous, and neither one is less valuable. But don’t trash me because I’m in what’s generally considered a boys’ domain, just like I don’t trash women who have no interest in this stuff. The more “traditional” women do work that is less valued in the world, but the work I do is also maybe not something women are supposed to do. So if poppin’ out kids and raising them isn’t valued, and women are undervalued if we go out in the larger world, what are we to do?

Dr. Marcia J. Bates received the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science and Technology (my primary professional organization) in 2005. This is the highest honor that you can receive from the Society. Her acceptance speech made me cry when I heard her deliver it, and I still get chills about it when I read it. You can read it yourself, but I want to highlight the end of her speech:

Finally, when it comes down to it, there’s a big difference between going through life with the wind at your back, and going through life leaning into the wind. I retired at 61 not because I really wanted to, but because I was worn out.

Fair treatment of women can happen only when we ALL self-consciously ask ourselves what we are doing every time we apportion work and rewards to men and women. Fair treatment does not happen without a self-conscious effort to change.

That’s why THIS recognition, the Award of Merit, is so very important to me, and I value it so highly. After all, I’m only the 8th woman to have received this honor, in the 40-plus years it has been awarded. Thank you.

I have felt for many years that I’ve been living my life “leaning into the wind,” but only when I have to deal with people who don’t understand. When I started playing video games at age 6, I didn’t know that it was supposed to be wrong. I played with my dad, and with a male friend who lived in my neighborhood. I had no female friends. I didn’t know this was supposed to be a problem until I was a teenager – when I started to see boys as more than people to hang out with – and even then it wasn’t a problem because boys actually liked the fact that I could talk about things they enjoyed as well: games, computers, whatever. This holds true today; just ask Fox the gamer. Even when I found my love of information science and started building my career, I didn’t think about the fact that information science is considered to be “library science for boys.” But I could never see myself reading story time to a bunch of kids in the children’s section. That’s a wonderful thing to do, it’s just not me.

We all should have the chance to be who we are. Unfortunately, people who don’t know this get in the way. Prejudices against people who don’t fit whatever mold is floating around in their heads is due to their own closed mind. But those of us who are just out there enjoying what we love shouldn’t have to be the ones doing the work needed to open their minds. It rarely seems to work, anyway.

Until we figure out how to open minds, see you in the battlegrounds, I guess. But beware. My DK is OP.

tl-dr

We are all created equal… until somebody tells us we’re unequal. Don’t let anyone do that to you.

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

The use of the word “rape” [...] is getting used more and more and I’m sure I’ve caught myself using the word although I prefer the word “gank” and the same to have similar meanings except “gank” doesn’t have that real word connection, at least not that I’m aware of.

– Orkela, commenting on Jacob’s post about griefing and trolling and all that other shit

OK, people. Yes, we’ve had posts about corpse camping (and how to handle it) and how Riot is handling these things. But it seems like no matter how much we post about it all, we find more to say about it. Today, I need to talk about “rape.”

It feels empowering to know this will be posted publicly on the Internet: I was raped. It was a long time ago, but it changed the direction of my life in ways I can’t even begin to explain. I became a stronger person for it, but that took many years to achieve. It didn’t turn me into a militant feminist. I don’t believe all men are bad. I think candlelight vigils and marches to observe the horror of rape are kind of pointless because I don’t know that they really fix the problem. I still have occasional horrific anxiety attacks; these only started after it happened. But I’ve had no choice but to move on, and my strength impresses people who know me well.

A couple of nights ago, I was in a battleground, and it was clear we were losing. This prompted one of my team members to say “we’re getting raped” in bg chat. I had decided a while ago that anytime I saw that word used in game, I wasn’t going to let it go. Ignoring casual use of that word is almost as bad as pretending rape itself doesn’t exist, or isn’t as bad as it is. So I replied with something like this: “please don’t use that word – I was raped irl and it bothers me to see it here.” When I do this, typically they stop, or at least don’t reply to me.

But, that night, that person did reply. He said things, horrible things, in response, such as “I’m re-raping you” and “I like rape” and some other things I have blocked out of my mind. Out of shock, I called him an “asshole” and some other things I shouldn’t have said, but he continued. I started sweating, shaking, and crying. I certainly couldn’t concentrate on the bg anymore. I /ragequit.

The amazing man sitting next to me on the couch asked the troll what was wrong with him (peppered with all kinds of great language, of course!), but the room was spinning too much for me to see the response, or to see if the disgusting talk continued. I sat there, in shock and devastation and anger at the mean people we share this world with, my hands covering my eyes. I heard him typing furiously next to me. Eventually I looked up, and saw him sending a ticket to a GM about the troll. After he finished, he said he told Blizz that if they didn’t do something, we’d stop our subscriptions. Then he held me and reminded me of this very essential truth: frequently, on the Internet, people don’t remember that there are real people at the other end of the line. I knew he was right, but that didn’t stop my flashback or my disappointment about humanity’s meanness. I went to bed and slept fitfully, and in the morning wondered if I’d had a nightmare. Maybe I had a few nightmares, I’m not sure. But I remembered the incident was real, and then wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about starting the day.

By the next evening, Blizz had replied and said they’d do something about the troll, but they didn’t say what they would do. I didn’t want to play that night. I still don’t want to play. I will face it eventually and create new fun times in game, but I’m not ready right now. And that is ok. If I had truly faced my pain over the rape years ago instead of stuffing it down with too many antidepressants and food and general withdrawal from life, maybe I would have recovered sooner. It’s taken me almost 20 years to realize that if you shed a few tears on occasion about something horrible, it is healthier for you and the people who surround you.

Yes, don’t forget that entire communities (including our gaming communities) surround us rape survivors. Rape is everyone’s issue. Talk with my mother or that awesome man next to me on the couch about their thoughts on my rape if you don’t believe me. It’s also not just a woman’s issue. The questions like “What was she wearing?” and “Where was she?” that are typically asked of female rape survivors make us think we should have done something different to prevent it. But we would never ask these questions of a man who was raped, would we? Read this post from a male gamer who survived rape as a child for a powerful perspective.

But the question becomes: how do we stop it? I think a lot of these comments – not just the word “rape,” but anything nasty that any troll says – are due to ignorance. I wonder whether that person would have pushed it with me as far as he did if his mother or sister had been raped. Simple policing such as reporting the player, or self-preservation acts like putting the player on our ignore list, is sometimes all we can do, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem: these people, and their shitty attitudes, exist. People frequently lack knowledge about other categories of things and people that they are mean about, which is odd because we’ve all got defining characteristics that set us apart from others. Perhaps the troll’s father died when he was 4 years old, or he hates his red hair, or whatever… something would set him off if I pushed enough buttons, I’m sure.

I’d like to end this post on a positive note, and say “it will all get better after librarians know how to give people all the knowledge they need for achieving personal intellectual enlightenment” or proclaim “Google will save us all” or give some other Infogameristic words of wisdom… but I don’t have any of those words right now. To fix a lack of education, or to open your mind up and sense the broader world, you have to want it intrinsically. The existence of information, professional educators, Internet content providers… none of it can force your brain into recognizing how your words and actions affect the people with whom you share the world. Including the World of Warcraft, it seems.

Thank you for sharing in my catharsis. And if you write hateful comments in response to this post, I will approve them. You know why? Your words speak for who you are. Including these people.

tl-dr

it was me and a gun
and a man on my back
and I sang “holy holy”
as he buttoned down his pants
you can laugh
it’s kind of funny
things you think
at times like these
like I haven’t seen Barbados
so I must get out of this

–Tori Amos, “Me and a Gun,” singing about her own rape

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

I would love to not write about harassment, trolling, griefing, and racism anymore. It would be grand.

The good news is that, today, I get to write about a positive spin for it! This isn’t another “u fuked up” post, but a post giving kudos to a specific game: League of Legends.

There are two things they have implemented recently that have shown a positive affect on the community (both from a statistics perspective, and also from my personal perspective): Honor System, and ranked judging (or whatever they’re calling it officially).

The Honor System

Quick Overview.

And it works! Kind of crazy, but it does!

The Mary Sue did a write up about the honor system that says exactly what I want to, so I’ll just link you to over there. I’ll also throw in this quote to show why the honor initiative is so awesome:

I initially thought it would be a disaster. No rewards? Ha! Like that’s going to work!

This is where things get serious. Isn’t this what Scott has been talking about the whole time? The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. People don’t need rewards to stop acting like assholes. They just need some intrinsic motivation to do so. In this case, it’s the honor system. Sure, you could argue that receiving honor is in itself a reward, but I see it as an almost intrinsic reward given from the community. It’s a recognition of “yeah, you do have the correct intrinsic motivation, keep it up big guy/gal!”

It sure works too. Before, when playing LoL, I would try and tune out all chat during a game. Now I actively try and participate because of the change to be a positive voice in the community. Before, chat only had the consequence of being trolled, harassed, or yelled at. Now, there’s an opportunity for honest to god human interaction! (inorite?)

So, Kudos to you Riot.

Justice Review

So it’s officially called Justice Review, and it’s basically a meta-game add on to the justice system that LoL has. Where the honor system is for those players that “done good”, the Justice Review is for the asshats, but it’s player run. Players (of a certain level), vote whether to “punish” or “pardon” an offender, then Riot hands out the final punishment. Pretty straightforward.

Now, they’ve added stats for the reviewers, % of cases judged the same as the majority (I won’t say correctly because I don’t think that’s always the case), # of Toxic Days prevented, # of players PermaBanned, and the coolest, in my mind, an honest to god ELO ranking system that mirrors the LoL in game (ranked) ranking system. It has definitely motivated me to participate more often (even though I was doing it quite often anyway).

Here’s a taste:

Again, pretty solid work on the part of Riot. I think my Accuracy is a bit lower than most people because I’m fast with the “punish” button for almost any offense.

Side note: I hope there’s a way for them to make sure no one is gaming this system to just get ranking points. I would like to see people voting how they think someone should be dealt with instead of “oh, this person is a dick, but everyone else will pardon him, so I will too.” 

tl-dr

Good on ya Riot, you’re implementing systems to get rid of trolling, griefing, harassment, racism, and many other bad things in your game. Keep it up.

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

About two weeks ago, this happened.

In case you’re feeling finger lazy today, the link leads to PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) latest attempt at rallying the masses against animal abuse, an absolutely excellent and necessary cause mind you.

It’s an embedded game on their site called…

wait for it.

“Pokemon, Black and Blue” …clever right?!  The goal of said game is for the player to “Help Pikachu and his Pokemon friends as they struggle for Pokemon liberation!”

AND furthermore, from the official PETA press release:

“Games such as Pokémon send kids the wrong message that exploiting and abusing those who are defenseless is acceptable when it’s not,” says PETA Director of Marketing Innovations Joel Bartlett. “But with Pokémon Black and Blue, children can experience the great feeling that comes from saving others from harm.”

 

OOoooook.  So I realize this connects much more intensely with my generation than perhaps others, but there is a big BIG issue here for everyone.

This is a serious game.

It was made to deliberately address a very serious and prominent real world issue.

It was made to be “educational”.

It was made.  Period.  And while this last piece of “being made” doesn’t qualify it as a serious game like the two above, it’s the most alarming part here.  Time and time again people throw back to “with great power comes great responsibility” when talking about the future of serious games.  Well folks, I really didn’t expect it to come from PETA, to be honest I expected it to come from Wall Mart or Apple, a big profit driven corporation, but this is a serious game used wrongly none the less.

Now, before we move any further here, let’s quickly debunk any semblance of truth about what this game (and PETA) is claiming.  I grew up watching and playing Pokemon, and for many reasons I can honestly, whole-heatedly say doing both made me a better person, for the exact opposite reasons PETA states.  Countless times I would run desperately through a forest to get my Pokemon safely to the next town’s Nurse Joy.  Countless times I would make in-game special food and treats for my precious little pixelated friends.  Countless times I ran headlong into bad guy lairs to save other Pokemon in harms way.  Everything in those damn games is about saving Pokemon and helping humans live in harmony with their Pokemon friends.

How does PETA portray this?

And frankly, the number of Pokemon gifs I just found in the last 20 seconds of searching which show Pokemon snugling/playing/frolicking/loving people, and people returning those feelings.. it’s like over 50.

So whatever.  PETA is lying about fictional relationships between mutant animals and people.

OH WAIT.  An entire generation *raises hand* loves these creatures more intensely than the burning core of the Sun.  Pokemon, for many of us, is like purified childhood in a bottle.

And herein is the danger PETA unleashes upon its self, and the animals it cares about helping.  Until seeing this, I was another teen that doesn’t know much about PETA.  I knew what they stood for, and I have three pets I wouldn’t want to suffer so PETA seems like a legit cause, but I also knew they have an occasionally radical way of doing things.  By trying to reach out deliberately to me and my fellow millennials (alternatively called the Pokemon generation) with this game, PETA has thoroughly alienated me.  By creating a tool that can so widely reach and preach as this game does, many MANY others who love Pokemon, and what Pokemon are all about, will lose even more regard for PETA (as multiple reddit threads spreading the game revealed).  They used a game irresponsibly, and are hurting their own cause for it.  They send the message that animal rights advocates are a little bit psycho and more than a little bit out of touch.  This, in turn, can effect popular support for other legitimate animal rights pursuits PETA carries out, marginalizing their voice and ability to actually do good even more, as well as potentially dragging other lesser known advocacy groups down with it.

tl-dr:  Fighting animal abuse IS important, but when you jump on the crazy train you can’t expect everyone else to follow, and you can’t expect to get far without anyone else riding your train.  And dammit, this will NOT be the future of serious games.  (I don’t really think it will, but still).

And just for kicks..

Leodar and I had a good conversation over twitter the other day. The tl;dr of it was that we both felt the eSports community is seriously lacking in both maturity and role models. Leodar thought the role models could be fixed pretty easily, but the problem right now is twofold in my mind: lack of a “mentoring” community, and the gaming community as a whole needing maturing.

The reason he brought this up with me was because of the Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri incident. While what Stephano said can be debated, it brings for the wider problem of what needs to happen in the community. It will never be rid of problems like this (FIFA, the NBA, NFL, NHL, ATP, and all others still have problems like this), they can still hope to get better.

Lack of a Mentoring Community

For most professional sports, a mentoring community of some kind is generally in place to teach the rookies how to mature beyond high school or college. This is lacking for the eSports community for a couple reasons, the two biggest being: 1) The eSports community is pretty new, so there isn’t much depth of experience to bring in. 2) Many of the “pros” are still young. Younger than professional athletes. Some of the pros in the eSports community are still in high school, or even just starting high school. The public spotlight of being a professional gamer is beyond most mature adults, and it’s even harder the younger you go. Especially without guidance.

There needs to be some type of mentoring community for new pros that are joining eSports. No matter the game, no matter the age. There needs to be a “rookie training camp” of some kind to help players deal with the new stage. I’m not talking about playing the game either, I’m talking about how to deal with the PR, the media; how to be mature and present as a true professional.

The Gaming Community as a Whole

While I love the idea of a rookie training camp, it has one glaring problem, but I think the training camp will help fix that problem as well. The problem being how the gaming community acts. The “boys club” of the gaming community. The sexism, jokes, homophobia, trolling…everything. I’m not saying that it’s unique to eSports, because it’s not (I played varsity tennis in college, it’s pretty bad in every locker room), but the community needs to change and be changed before it starts getting more out of hand and gets even more ingrained into the culture. The suspension and fining of Stephano is a good step, but it’s an isolated incident and does nothing to create sustainable change. eSports as a whole need to be forward thinking and create the right environment for competition and sportsmanship. This, above all, is needed for eSports to gain acceptance for a wider audience (beyond gamers), and to also show the world that gamers are not violent assholes that preach homophobia, sexism, and racism.

Plus, it’s a trickle down effect. If the pros adopt these codes of behavior and are mature and sportsmanlike, people who admire and follow them will behave the same way. I think of professional tennis at these times, because it is generally held as an example of good sportsmanship, but high competition. Sure, there are problems, egos, and fights, but the sport of tennis is looked upon favorably by most people. How many non-tennis fans would think of tennis players as homophobes, violent, and racist? I’m not saying eSports has to become tennis, but it needs to move close to that side of the spectrum to gain more acceptance.

tl-dr

The eSports community needs to advance in perception, maturity, and sportsmanship, and it needs to start with its rookies.

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

Guilds within games are a very funny thing, and running them is even stranger. They are a weird conglomeration of people, and come in so many shapes and sizes no one has time to describe any of that. Karen over at Massively does a regular column that attempts to bring order to the guild chaos (and does well), but I think there is always more to add to the pot.

I help run a multi-game guild that spans WoW, League of Legends, and Guild Wars 2 (and a few others, but those are the main ones right now).  I find leading a guild to be a very fickle thing, but mainly, it’s all about the morale of the guild.

The game doesn’t matter.

The people can change.

Keeping the morale of the guild up is the most important aspect of being a guild leader. Even if people are hating the game they’re playing, if they are happy with the people they are playing with and having a good time in the community, people will keep playing the game.

To quote Felandis, who also helps lead the guild, (from another statement he made, not that post)

When it comes to running a guild, it is my belief the most important thing is to truly understand the morale of the guild, from the ground up, and to understand what has to be tweaked to keep that morale high (often easier said than done).

So what keeps the morale of your guild high? Raid clears? PvP wins? Community forums?

tl-dr

Make sure to keep the morale of your guild high, it will keep all of the people together and having a good time.

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

Massively had a nice write up about forum censorship and trolling, related to Firefall’s forums. There are a few good gems I want to pick out of it:

From the original Firefall forum thread:

If you intended to frustrate me, you have. From now on, we’re going to start moderating the negativity on these forums for the sake of healthier discussions.

Back to the Massively article:

 Our tipster used the word “censorship” in suggesting that Massively write about this particular situation, and he joined a huge list of folks who have implored us to expose the evil that game companies do by muzzling free speech on their forums.

The problem is that it’s not so much evil as it is common sense. When you join a forum, you’re agreeing to play by the company’s rules; there’s really no such thing as free speech in that environment. If the powers-that-be don’t like what a user has to say, they have every right to limit the ability to say it and/or moderate it however they see fit. It’s doubly true in the case of a beta product like Firefall because unless you’ve purchased a Founder’s Pack, you’re there on the company’s dime (and probably not doing much actual testing unless you’re more conscientious about it than most of the folks signing up for betas these days).

The second:

Gamers are continually surprised and outraged by game company censorship, but in my opinion, they shouldn’t be. What for-profit firm in its right mind doesn’t put its own financial interests ahead of nebulous notions of fairness and free speech? Controlling the message is as important, if not more important, than developing a good game in today’s high-pressure (and high-dollar) production environment, and censorship on some level should be expected.

While I agree that the company has the right to moderate their forums however they want, my nerd rage has reached supremely high levels after reading these quotes. The sad part is, that my nerd rage is both in defense of the developer, and in defense of the community. Which voice do I listen to?! Which decision is right?!

Censorship is bad…mmmkay?

Censorship is a topic that will get me fired up right away. Part of me wants to say “All censorship is a horrible thing!” but I would be lying to myself. 99% of censorship is bad.

Book burning is a horrible thing.

Free speech rules.

I want access to all the information I can.

Because of that, the Firefall guys are doing a bad thing in censoring their community! It’s oppression!

So child pornography shouldn’t be censored?

Whoops. That hit the brakes pretty quick. Here’s where that last 1% comes in. Some things need to be censored to protect society as a whole. Child pornography is a perfect example of it. Hate speech is another (in my mind).

So what does this have to do with a video game company policing their forums? Quite a bit, because it depends on what kinds of content they’re policing.

If you look at the original forum post, there are indications of what the censorship will be about.

… the amount of shortsightedness and selfish trolling and self-important pontification I see from armchair game analysts is stunning … We welcome your feedback, but not your Chicken Little “sky is falling” ranting from those whose imaginations are not capable of looking further than the nose in front of their face and who ignore everything we say and DO and have done in the game for YOU.

Some definite passion going into this post, which is both good and bad.

The good:

Getting rid of the “selfish trolling and self-important pontification”. Like a handsome, intelligent blog writer once said, “Racism, Harassment, Griefing, Bullying, Trolling…whatever you call it…just stop.”

The bad:

We “have done in the game for YOU”. While I get the company is there for the fans, because the fans support them, this is definitely a slippery slope when it comes to censorship. It can easily move forward to the level of “we eliminated that bug for YOU” to “we burned those books for YOU” to “we illegally sabotaged the other companies for YOU, so our game would be the only one you love”.

Some seriously scary stuff when you start censoring. The trick is to not let emotions get involved. When emotions get involved in censorship, then it becomes personal. It should be about information, freedom, and free speech, while protecting vulnerable minorities, not “making things how I think they should be!”

A good example of handling trolling and harassment without it becoming censorship (or personal) comes up with the GW2 bans. tl;dr of the reddit thread: Arena Net banned thousands of people for inappropriate names and chat, and then would publicly post why they were banned if they were specifically asked in the reddit thread. Complete transparency and following of their policies. /win

How is GW2 different than Firefall in this case?

Arena Net is not making it personal. They are enforcing the TOS, and the behaviors that are supposed to be followed while playing the game. There is no emotion involved.

Basically:

Whereas Firefall is making the censorship personal because of the amount of trolling that’s happening. It’s policy and censorship based on personal feeling. Perhaps that feeling is completely legitimate, but there needs to be hard policy grounded, not in emotion, but in logic, so that it can be followed and understood by the whole community.

tl-dr

Censorship is bad, even to protect a community. Don’t be a dick and take advantage of censorship, because protecting a community from trolling and harassment is not censorship.

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Felandis has been playing games since the 80′s, and started playing MMOs about 10 years ago. Since then, life has changed for Fel (getting married and starting a family), and gaming habits/perspectives have changed accordingly. Fel was a founding officer of a guild and eventual gaming community (www.vanguardgaming.com), focused on these changes… in other words, RL > gaming, and when we do game, we keep it fun. Fel focuses primarily on the PvP aspects of MMOs.

Just a random thought here that has been floating around my head for the past few days.

I’ve been keeping up on the backlash to the derogatory Muhammad film trailers that some nut job released. I read each article, and on multiple websites, they have a comment section. The vast majority of every single comment section are arguments/fights between pro-Islamics and anti-Islamics.

So I always scroll through the comments, which are 99% garbage, but again, on every website you will find Islamics in the Middle East posting responses about their view points on Americans.

Here is what I’m getting at:

For all of human history, a country’s population has formulated opinions on the rest of the world based on what their government and media tells them (depending on the type of government/society). Very rarely did you have people who made direct contact with others across the world. When you look at the amount of people who travel the world, it is an extremely small percentage compared to the global population (point being, the vast majority of the world formulates their viewpoints based on what they hear/see in their own life, they don’t directly experience it when visiting another country).

With the internet being so readily available across the world now, that has changed. These comment sections probably do more harm to international relations than politics do.

Take this for example… A single guy in Iran is on one of these news websites, he reads the article, and starts reading the comments. He is enraged when he sees some dumb American spouting off stuff that is completely wrong. Hell, the American could just be an internet troll. Doesn’t matter. But the two of them go at it.

You all know how gaming and the internet can affect RL. Hell, if someone is trolling in a game, I’m usually thinking about it a lot IRL on how to get them to shut up, or to show them how they can’t troll.

Now imagine you really have no sense of “trolling“; that you’re an internet noob.  Imagine in that mindset, that you get into a heated debate with someone from another country, and that other person is a complete ignorant jerk to what your religion is about. How would you react? How would that SINGLE conversation, impact your view of that other country?

Unfortunately, I’m betting it impacts that viewpoint a LOT.

And it spreads from there. That guy tells his buddies about the argument, his buddies can’t believe someone can be so stupid and ignorant to say those things about their country and their religion. Now you have a whole social circle thinking the same thing.

Multiply that by the thousands of people who are falling into these same flame wars around the internet.

Suddenly, it doesn’t matter what each government says or does. The people of these different countries with different view points are fighting (verbally) directly with each other.

That may not seem like a big deal, but it is a very extreme shift in the way the world works. The internet can be a great machine to share information, but it can also do a hell of a lot of harm. It is like international policy is beginning to be shaped by the internet. And unfortunately, those trolls who try to start this stuff up? They could be influencing an entire group of people in another country, in a bad way.

tl-dr

The internet used for the right reasons, is incredible. The internet used for the wrong reasons, can do more harm than most can imagine. Don’t feed the trolls.

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