tl-dr

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.

Maine is not a state I typically associate with controversy, but there is a current controversy in Maine politics that has made international news. Are you ready for it? Wait for it… Wait for it…

A Democratic candidate for Maine’s state Senate, Colleen Lachowicz, plays World of Warcraft.

Maine Republicans are arguing that because of this abominable pastime, she is in no way fit to be a politican, and they have set up this ridiculous website, called Colleen’s World, meant to prove her status as a horrible person. Their argument goes: a woman who plays an orc rogue – and, therefore, spends her free time stabbing everyone in the back – shouldn’t hold office.

This exemplifies so many things that make me really angry. I hate the negative political campaigns that Americans have grown accustomed to. In a way, maybe her mad virtual backstabbing skillz help her campaign because that’s all so many candidates do irl. American politics have become like a train wreck of a reality show that we can’t seem to look away from, such as Honey Boo Boo, or a bad song we can’t stop listening to, like “Call Me Maybe.” But I digress.

The negativity in the Maine Republicans’ attack plan is rooted in that famous media myth so many gamers love to hate: people who play video games are violent. They think they can prove Colleen is unfit for the Senate by highlighting things she’s posted on discussion forums – “crude, vicious and violent comments” as they call them on the website. They clearly have no understanding of gamer culture (nor do they want to); they highlight comments she makes about WoW play and jump to the conclusion that these comments can be somehow correlated to rl? What??? If people took seriously everything I’ve ever posted on gaming forums, I’d never land a full-time faculty position at a highly respected research university… oh wait… I already have one.

We’ve covered the “video games are violent” thing in previous posts on this blog, such as “Taking Aim at the Issue: Real World Guns and Games”, “Violence vs. Conflict in Video Games”, and “Violence and Video Games: Looking beyond the obvious”, so I’m not going to get into that discussion in too much detail in this post. But one part I’m alternatively annoyed with – and I want to explore this some more – is the idea that we have to hide our identities as gamers to be taken seriously in the world. Here is a quote from the BBC article I cited at the beginning in which a games researcher named Ladan Cockshut discusses gamers’ place in the world (I’ve never heard of this woman, and I couldn’t find her on Google Scholar, but whatever):

“In my work, I’ve spoken with many people who in their regular lives have roles of significant responsibility (as doctors, managers, or educators) but who choose carefully with whom they disclose their gaming activity,” she told the BBC. “And disclosing their gaming activity is often accompanied by a degree of apology or embarrassment.”

But, she added, having a gamer run for office was a “heartening” development.

“This would seem to run contrary to the other stereotypes that we love to assign to gamers: that they are lazy, antisocial people who don’t have a ‘real life’,” she said. “Maybe this will trigger some dialogue about our perceptions of gamers and the role that games can and should play in modern society.”

If us gamers do have to hide the fact that we’re gamers, then it’s no wonder why we want to hide from the real world! Seriously though, why is it that our society thinks some free time activities are acceptable and others are not? Have you ever heard of a person who hides the fact that they like watching football or baseball so others will respect them? Hell no – and, guess what people, football and baseball are games too!!!! And as for gamers wasting away all our free time on games… we’ve all known people who spend hours memorizing the RBIs or the ERAs or whatever of their favorite baseball players, and nobody thinks twice about it. But, obviously, if WoW players like Colleen are focused on improving their rogue’s Agility, they’re violent, lazy time-wasters.

I went to high school in Texas, in an area known for political and religious conservatism. (hint: America’s most recent past president lives there now). At our football games, they always said a (Christian) prayer before the game, right alongside the national anthem. I questioned how they could do that given potential separation of church and state issues. I also remember other people pointing out that it was odd how they could say a prayer before they went out on the field to kick the other team’s ass. It was ***real life game violence*** somehow made softer with pre-game prayer and the school’s participation in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I remember so many players getting hit so hard they couldn’t get off the field. There were even rituals in place for it: for example, the cheerleaders would get down on one knee until the player either stood up or was carried off the field. But would any of these football players, or the coaches and parents who directed them, ever have to answer questions about their participation in football before they could do something visible or important? No, and at least in Texas, this involvement would be a highlight of their qualifications.

So… why the split? Why does the media, and the people who are brainwashed by it, differentiate between “this kind of game is great” and “this kind of game is bad”? Virtual violence is more dangerous, and more telling about our characters, than rl violence? I’ve played video games since 1981, and I’ve blown up a lot of aliens and monsters and even a few rogues, but I’ve never hit a person in reality. Honestly, the most I’ve ever done wrong is park in the wrong space on campus – but I paid for the ticket. I might have said a few bad words when I found the ticket on my car, and it might have relieved my stress to run some bgs with my frost mage… but in reality, the ice stayed in my freezer. Throwing ice at campus police won’t get me tenure, but Frostbolting a freakin’ orc in Arathi Basin certainly makes me feel better. And I’ll proudly tell everyone that I did it.

tl-dr

Gamers are everywhere, and we do everything. Just like you muggles.

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.

This week, all the gamers who aren’t talking about good things like GW2 – or bad things like the latest Zynga “game” that invades my Facebook news feed until I hide it – are talking about the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. I knew several days ago that I would have the first post-MoP post (that’s redundant, but it makes sense) on this blog, but I’m not playing it. Why not?

I could easily get on my late-night rant soapbox and talk about the silliness of a freaking panda and proclaim I’ll never sell out to Blizzard’s stupid idea. I’m not playing it because… well… I’m just not playing it right now. I’m flying out to present at the #influence12 conference today, and I knew that if I bought it now, I wouldn’t get all my work done before I left. So I will get it next week. Sorry for the lack of a highly principled soapbox.

I must sheepishly admit, however, that I logged into my boring Cataclysmic WoW tonight so I could at least say hello to my friends. The ones who were starting to level from 85 to 90 told me this unanimously: the scenery in the new areas is amazing, but it’s going to take them a while to level. I don’t remember the exact number, but I think just to level from 85 to 86 is something like 13 million XP, and if you’re doing a quest that’s only worth 120,000 XP, you’re gonna do a lot of quests. Try switching to dungeons or bgs, perhaps? On second thought, why do we bother leveling at all?

We level in WoW because Blizzard keeps making us. They need a way to work in new content to keep us short attention span gamer types interested, so they throw in a new continent, new classes, new races on occasion. According to Scott Nicholson’s book Everyone Plays at the Library, one characteristic of a “game” is that it has goals. Video game creators set goals for us by deciding how many levels we need to go through, how many XP we need at each level, how many things we need to kill before we can get the XP for the quest… game creators give us goals, and we work to achieve them, regardless of whether we get frustrated or bored along the way. When you think about it, the goals are somewhat arbitrary, but we live and die by them in game. (Typically, I die more than I live in game, but I don’t want to lose my gamer street cred, so I won’t talk about that little issue).

But what motivates us to achieve those goals? Reaching level 90 in 12 hours (which some players did, according to the battle.net forums, if you want to believe them) won’t change your life in any real way. You won’t have more money, or more love in your life, or a cleaner apartment… but you will feel like you’ve accomplished something you’re proud of. And, despite the frustration of getting killed by the thing, or the fact that you got in trouble at home because you neglected to clean the bathroom like you promised your spouse you would because you were trying to kill 10 of the things so you could at least get to 86 on your main before the end of the evening… you will have enjoyed the process.

That is what gaming is about. Goals and fun. While not everyone claims to be a gamer, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like reaching goals or having fun, and that fact could take me on an entirely different tangent. But, back on the leveling issue, I must admit I’m a little frustrated with the MoP level increase. I’ve still got Cataclysm endgame content to play, and I would have been happy with only new endgame content for MoP, and maybe a new battleground and new dungeons, but I guess I’ll be leveling for a while again until I can see what the new endgame content is like. I can’t reach 90 in 12 hours of play, but I don’t want to… the fun would be over too fast!

A closing thought: somebody found this blog the day after MoP’s release by Googling “Wow, pandas suck.” I’m slightly proud of that.

tl-dr

A gamer’s relationship with leveling, and other goal-related gaming activities, is complicated – perhaps even codependent? What do you think?

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.

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

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.

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

Yesterday, September 12, Ace and I were again interviewed on the fabulous Contains Moderate Peril podcast. This time, the topic was “Are gamers a unique type of customer?” Talking with Brian, Roger, and Ace always equals a great event. I could talk games with them for hours.

Listen to the podcast if you have time, but perhaps the overall points discussed in the podcast could be described as this: the relationship between gamers and the vendors who make our games is perhaps best defined as “complicated.” We buy games and expansion packs weeks or months before we see them, we trash talk games but continue to play them as we threaten to leave them, we tell the vendors what we think without hesitation, and so on.

When we were talking, and in the hours after our interview, I couldn’t stop thinking about library vendors. Before I became a full-time faculty member, I was a systems librarian at an academic library. I was the first point of contact with our integrated library system vendor, and I was very active in their user group.

Additionally, I’ve done library consulting work – mostly conducting usability tests, and training people on how to conduct usability tests – for libraries in different places and different orientations. OPAC and single search interface usability has been (and continues to be) in question for libraries. So, while I’ve never worked for a vendor, I have plenty of experience with library system vendors and their products.

I mention this because the relationships that gamers have with vendors, and the relationships that librarians have with vendors, are unique for different reasons. Us gamers love to complain when our vendors do things we don’t like (the pre-MoP WoW patch is a perfect example; I’m still in mourning over how badly my mage has been nerfed) and we complain when they don’t do things we think we would like. As we discussed in the podcast, we commune around the bitching. Regardless, we continue to play their games. (That said, I did ragequit a battleground recently because my mage kept dying at an unacceptable frequency, and an overpowered druid called me a “retarded mage” as I was struggling to live, but I won’t go there right now.) But, overall, the game vendors use our input much more than vendors in other domains, even though we might think it’s not enough.

Conversely, us librarians don’t expect enough from our vendors. I’ve seen this unfortunate phenomenon manifest itself in so many ways. For example, in the early 2000s, a vendor could say to a library, “Look! It’s all XML!” and the library would think it was the best product ever made because XML was the newest and greatest thing. But once the library purchased the product, the library’s ability to configure and deploy the product was in question, since not all libraries had the resources to do that type of technical work.

Another example: libraries pay maintenance fees to vendors despite the fact that (1) librarians don’t feel comfortable telling vendors what changes they need and (2) vendors don’t necessarily respond well to technical concerns, bugs, or desires for system changes. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the library system vendor I worked with agreed to implement three (and only three) enhancements per year for each part of the system. Library automation system migration is a time-consuming process; in some smaller libraries, there is a lack of staff who can “talk techie” enough with the vendor to communicate needs and problems effectively. These and other elements make it easy to feel like we’re at the mercy of our vendors.

From a business perspective, you can’t blame the vendors for their position: some development changes are too time-consuming to address from a cost-benefit point of view, and it’s a better use of their time to develop new products and services for us. I have friends who work for library system vendors – I don’t at all believe they represent the Dark Side of Libraries, but I do believe they have their own (understandable) agenda that becomes easy for librarians to forget when we’re feeling passive-aggressive over a glass of wine with colleagues at ALA.

So we have gamers with tremendous amounts of feedback opportunities, and game vendors who are mostly willing to make as many changes as possible because they know that’s what will keep us playing. And we have librarians who feel like their hands are tied when it comes to changing the products that their automation vendors provide. I don’t understand why these different relationships exist. As we said in the podcast, we don’t put much effort into the relationship with the company who made our TV. And chances are that if our TV dies, we’ll just go buy another one because it’s an excuse to buy one equipped with the latest technologies anyway. But we won’t pay for a new TV months in advance with little knowledge of what that TV’s going to do for us (I’m looking at you, gamers) and we won’t keep using a TV that doesn’t do what it needs to do for us without taking some sort of action (I’m looking at you, fellow librarians).

Jacob and I weren’t trying to answer any questions in our podcast, and I’m not trying to answer any questions with this post. However, I hope we can help everyone reflect on how we relate to game vendors, library system vendors, and any other business we support with our money on an ongoing basis. Starbucks (a vendor I support a little too often) guarantees that if we don’t like our coffee, they’ll remake it for free. I’ve taken them up on that once or twice, like when they put sweetener in my drink that I ordered unsweetened. That’s customer service right there! But how is that level of service different from other products?

I’m not happy with the new talent system in WoW but Blizz won’t change it just for me; however, might they change it if all of us nerfed mages and warlocks banned together and requested changes or canceled our subscriptions? We can work on it for sure. They want to continue feeding our addiction.

If enough librarians complained about the OPAC because we think it’s silly to make people omit initial articles in title searches as well as make them type the author’s last name first, would that be addressed? Not likely… unless it’s “all XML,” in which case the library is more than welcome to make the change themselves.

I realize there are likely contradictions in my post, but the complexity of these relationships makes contradictions hard to avoid because you can’t speak in absolutes on this issue… maybe you can’t even use logic. I’m not an economist, but I think I learned in that Economics 101 course they made me take in college that our capitalist society is supposed to work itself out through competition. But with so few vendors making library systems and large-scale video games, perhaps we don’t have as many choices in these areas as we have in who makes our coffee. That said, I hope gamers as well as librarians – two groups that play a large part in defining my own identity – can find ways to make sure that our vendors are giving us what we need, and that vendors are compensated fairly for their efforts. Until then, I’ll be bitching on the battle.net forums. See you there!

tl-dr

Gamers, librarians, and their respective vendors they love to hate… yeah, it’s complicated.

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

This article is a bit of a rebuttal to a Medium Difficulty article. While I agree with that article, and it hits many good points (especially the history of the arms industry and its relation to politics), it does not give a way to actually change or help the system, and also does not give the other side of the argument. It’s just a cry of “This is bad and wrong!”

So I want to talk about how I think it could be fixed (if it needs to be). I’ll let you decide whether it needs fixing, and then suggest how I think it could be fixed (or not).

I’m going to avoid a lot of the politics involved with this topic, as I’m extremely moderate in my politics, and try and present both sides of what’s going on here (as I see it).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to what I wanted to talk about today, which is a subject mired in complexities. I’m going to try and present what I think is really going on and break it down as much as I can without getting into too much opinion, and will try to present all sides of the argument that I can.

The promotion of real world weapons in a video game

The tl;dr of the article is that EA is using the new Medal of Honor game to promote real world guns of the military variety.

Per my statement above of me being political moderate, this poses a HUGE issue with my beliefs, because I am both for, and against this idea at the same time. Quite a quandary.

Let’s go through it and see what happens:

Against - The Broken Record: Violent Video Games Make People Violent

Whether I buy into all the hype or not, there is a huge contingent of people that believe video games make people violent.

The media is awash with news articles about it. Like the killer in Norway. Or even the Columbine Massacre. (I grew up less than a mile from Columbine, I could see it from my back porch. I had many friends there, remember what the old library looked like, and knew a lot of people involved with it, so this examples hits home to me.)

Long story short, the argument saying violent video games make people violent is complete bunk. The statement that violent people may become more violent after being exposed to violence (e.g. violent video games), can hold some truth. But, as a whole, video games are not a culprit for violence.

So what’s my problem with EA using a different set of advertisers during a game? My problem is really the ease of access the original author describes in the article.

Like the way the gun drops terrorists or racks up headshots in multiplayer? Feel free to visit Warfighter’s official website and click on a sponsored link that will take you to McMillan, the manufacturer of the gun. There you may purchase a real-life TAC-300 to your own specification (night-vision kit is optional!) and have it shipped to your local federally licensed gun dealer for pickup.

There are a host of other guns, knives, scopes, and weapon accessory companies listed as “partners” on the website for Warfighter. (There are 11 listed at time of writing, and EA says they’re revealing a new partner each week.) In October, you’ll be able to purchase a limited edition Medal Of Honor: Warfighter tomahawk for $75 from SOG Knives that features “an extended cutting head.” It’s certainly a bit more intense than, say, the pewter dragon from the Skyrim Collector’s Edition.

I think I had the same gut check reaction that many people do when they read this.

OMG! Someone is going to sell a gun to someone who is going to shoot a bunch of people!

Because of this reaction, I think, “How dare EA do this! They are promulgating the decline of our society into violence! There is going to be an even bigger increase in gun violence now!” Which is a normal reaction for many people, especially in the wake of the Aurora Theater shooting and the A&M shooting. It’s scary stuff. Getting rid of guns would  definitely stop that kind of violence, so EA should bite the bullet (hah!) and end this advertising campaign right away. (That’s what my gut tells me at least)

But, that’s just a gut check reaction that doesn’t really look at the details of what’s going on. Let’s take a look at the other side of the argument:

For – It’s a free country!

While cliche, it’s very true. The 2nd amendment is very clear in the ability for people to bear arms, and I’m fine with that when done in an educated and safe way (which it usually is). I’m not a huge gun person, but I’ve spent enough time around them to respect them and know how to use them. I think we’d be better off without guns as a country (U.S.), but I’m not one to give up the constitution lightly; it’s good stuff.

For this EA problem that we’re talking about though, we’re not talking about a 2nd amendment “right to bear arms” issue. It’s a 1st amendment freedom of speech issue. Why is it the 1st amendment and not the 2nd amendment I’m bringing up as a “for” argument here? Because the sale of a weapon still happens through the same channels as always. The quote from the article even states: (Emphasis mine)

 There you may purchase a real-life TAC-300to your own specification (night-vision kit is optional!) and have it shipped to your local federally licensed gun dealer for pickup.

It’s not like gun laws are being changed and everyone is allowed to purchase these weapons. EA isn’t changing gun policy.  They are just advertising the weapons in a place people aren’t used to seeing them. People think of video games as fantasy and fake weapons, but this really brings it into reality. It’s no longer a fantasy setting of violence and war, it means real people and real weapons. I think people have a hard time with that.

Back to my point: This is a 1st amendment issue because EA is only advertising and making money in a capitalist economy. Is that bad?

The advertising that EA is doing is not directly harming anyone. The company selling the weapons will still exist even without EA. This is just a new business opportunity for both companies. Therefore, there is nothing that should be done (from a policy or government standpoint) to stop EA from what they are doing.

Like I stated at the beginning, I am a moderate. And like I stated in the previous section: I think outlawing guns would save a lot of (gun) violence. I also believe that guns should not be outlawed (per the constitution). I also think EA should not be censored in their games, or in their advertising because of the 1st amendment. It offers a serious dilemma because I see the value in all sides of this argument.

Vote with your wallet

My own moral/political issues aside, what can be done to fix this problem (in either direction)? There is an easy answer, and it has to do with what games you play. Paying for a game sends the company a message. The message of “this game is great and I approve of what it’s doing.” They take that message and make more games that are the same, because it’s making money!

Take Diablo III for example: People bitched and moaned and cried and whined about always on DRM, the Real Money AH, and plenty of other things before the game launched, yet it still became one of the hottest games of all time on launch day. Even with all the errors and bugs and problems. People voted with their wallets. Blizzard was too busy rolling around on their pile(s) of money (and fixing errors) to care what bloggers were whining about.

If the Diablo III launch had flopped because of the concerns people had about the RMAH and the DRM? Blizzard would have changed their tune VERY fast.

So next time you feel like a company is doing something you don’t like (or do like), vote with your wallet. If you don’t like this new brand of advertising that EA is using, or you don’t like who is advertising with them, stop giving them your money.

tl-dr

Don’t blame EA if they are advertising something you don’t like. If you don’t like it, don’t buy their products. If you’re okay with it, then buy their products.

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.”