Monthly ArchiveJune 2007



General 25 Jun 2007 01:05 pm

QuickyFeed

Wordpress v2.2.1 now. woo.

Comments (1)

Games 15 Jun 2007 05:40 pm

Deviance in Gaming

There is an excellent post on deviance in gaming (‘Deviance Revisited’) at The Gaming Bitch that I find very interesting. Online games are a very interesting thing to study from a sociological perspective: they provide a microcosm of society that presents itself in very unique ways. I love being able to take what I learned in some of the ‘other’ courses in college and apply them!

mertons_social_strain_theory.gifSociologist Robert K. Merton’s theory of deviance describes anomie as “a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means for reaching them”. This provides a set of modes of adaptation on how to reach (or not reach) goals set up by society. Criminology uses this theory quite extensively.

The Bitch equates society in this theory with game developers (or really, a game design in general), where a set of goals is put forth for the players to achieve. The players then fall into one of the modes of adaptation from the diagram above to achieve (or not achieve) the goals.

Conformist: These are the players who play exactly as intended. Obviously these are the designers’ best friends, and this is probably the majority of players. These are players you typically will NOT see complaining on the boards, unless of course its about one of the other types messing up their current goal reaching adaptation mode (look at that use of terminology!).Obviously conformist players are great for a game as they’re doing exactly as intended, and not making things difficult, but in many ways nothing new is learned from these players.

Ritualist: These are players who play the game as intended, but don’t buy into the goals. The Bitch sees this as one who will stay below certain levels, or goes exploring in the game instead of leveling. In many games, and depending on your point of view, this could include a lot of the craft-only type people, or the primarily socializing people. By perfect definition, this is a hard one to pin down.

In my mind, the name ‘ritualist’ describes what I think this category may consist of within MMORPGs: the catass or pure grinder. They use accepted means to grind their way to the end game, instead of using grouping, quests, etc. They would rather bypass much of the content that the game designers wished players would go through just to get to the end game. Like I said, this isn’t a perfect fit for this type of player, but I think its probably the best fit.

The group that exhibits ritualism more obviously is the gold/account farmers. They use accepted means (for the most part) to grind out money, not for the purpose of playing the game, but for another purpose.

For the most part, ritualistic players players are a detriment to the game, but may indicate that something in the design is driving this sort of activity - whether it is by demand (in the realm of RMT) or because the content in the game is not interesting to the player (the catass).

Innovator: These are the ones that accept the goals, but don’t believe in the accepted means to get to those goals. Like The Bitch says, the title is misleading, because in the realm of MMORPGs, this is the exploiter, or the RMT buyer. These are the players who will do anything to get to the goals, regardless the means.

In some ways, innovators are as valuable as the name implies. Innovation means inventing new ways to get to the goals, and thats what these players do. There is probably a lot to be learned to either stop this activity or to adapt to bring it into the realm of the acceptable goals. Games with legitimized RMT (like the EQII Station Exchange) change some of these users to being in the Conformist group.

Retreatist: As The Bitch states, this is the griefer. They don’t care about the goals, and they don’t care about the gameplay. There is little positive that these players contribute to the game. A lot of these characters border on the Innovator or Ritualist to get to higher levels of Retreatist so they can just grief some more.

It’d make everyone’s lives easier if retreatists just… retreated - went away. Lots of time is spent in customer service, or within development dealing with these users, building ways to thwart their griefing. I’m not convinced that the existence of griefing is the result of any specific design problem or decision.

Rebel: Players who ignore the means and goals, and invent their own. Some of the examples The Bitch uses I think actually don’t represent this group. Mastering tradeskills, or completing every quest are sort of built in goals already, and typically they do this by accepted means.

Who I do think works in perfectly rebels are those that invent what are typically called ‘emergent behaviors’, or games within games. EQ raiding may be a good example of this. Other examples are doing footraces around areas hide and seek contests, or other, mostly social, games within games already there.

Many developers see rebel behaviors as good signs and are typically encouraged. It says the game is accepted and powerful enough to warrant good invention and ideas which do not negatively impact other gameplay systems. It definitely gives you a good feeling about the game and community as a whole when emergent behavior happens, because its typically a heck of a lot of fun.

Thanks to The Gaming Bitch for bringing up this topic, because it is definitely one of those things I think is really interesting. There is chance for a heck of a lot of sociology and psychology within virtual worlds. It can help describe behaviors we see already, and help to design new games and gameplay systems to bring more of the players into the conformist group - which is the goal of game developers and designers in general.

Comments (3)

General 15 Jun 2007 10:37 am

QuickyFeed

YouTube’s post-played interface is quite nice now - the roll-over effects on the ’similar’ videos, and the animation of the different tools is very spiffy. GG YouTube.

More Fun stuff.

No Comments Yet

General 13 Jun 2007 09:48 am

DreamHost still rocks

DreamHost rocks. Yes, they have downtime, but every shared hosting company has downtime - especially when they grow as fast as DH does. There is not one hosting site that I’ve ever experienced that has not had some downtime here or there. Its one of the risks you put up with for only paying less than $10 a month for all the services you get from a good host. And DH is better than most - real shell access, good ‘one-click installers’, and a knowledgeable staff, even if they are overworked and it takes a while for them to get back to you on a question.

So when someone ‘big’ complains that some startup cant provide a demo to potential investors, I have to say that maybe a real company would set up on their own server. When you’re on a shared service, you are ALWAYS at the mercy of others. If you need to have uptime, you probably need your own box. Even VMs or VPS hosting has the same issue if someone decides to essentially take down the box.

Long story short - if you are hosting a blog, personal site, or some other site that is not critical for your livelihood, you can’t go wrong with DreamHost. If you need your site to stay in business, so you can pay rent or for food, think about investing about $100/month in a dedicated server somewhere like ServerMatrix.

No Comments Yet

General 13 Jun 2007 09:42 am

QuickyFeed

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
- PG Wodehouse

No Comments Yet

Games 12 Jun 2007 01:52 pm

RTD’s Game Ads Controversy

This starts with a letter from the Parents Television Council to the Denver Regional Transportation District, which calls for a ban of M and AO rated games on RTD Buses and Trains. They state that these advertisements are for games which promote violent and illegal behaviors. The PTC has also petitioned Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts for similar bans.

GamePolitics picked up on the story on Februrary 22, saying there is a New Mass Transit Ad Controversy in Denver. Westword had a pretty good article titled ‘Bus-ted‘, with a short interview with George Robinson, PTC Denver chapter president, as he plays GTA. George Robinson also wrote an editorial for the Rocky Mountain News calling for ‘No more violent video game ads, RTD‘, mentioning ‘countless research studies’ and the irresponsibility of RTD to accept advertising dollars to promote violent video games. RTD was still considering the issue a month later (RTD weighs parents’ pleas to ban violent video game ads).

The RTD Board eventually voted it down (’RTD won’t ditch video-game ads‘). Kotaku editor Brian Crecente (a Denver resident) interviewed the National Grassroots Director for the PTC, Gavin McKiernan about the whole process. At least RTD did not decide to wrap entire trains in ads as mentioned in a Westword article.

All of this generated plenty of discussion in the gaming news/blog arena as well as more mainstream press. The Rocky Mountain News states that RTD has the freedom to say ‘no’, choosing whatever advertisers they want. Crecente fires back about the editorial (as he used to work for the RMN) saying it missed the point, that the more interesting issue here is that they decided to go after games specifically, not all violent media. Joystiq mentions Throwing free speech under the bus.

Enough with the summary and linkfest. Though this is an issue a good few months old, I still had the links in my ‘to write’ category because I think its still an interesting issue to discuss, and I do have some thoughts.

I mentioned in one of the GamePolitics posts’ comments that RTD can certainly advertise who and what they want within the usual reason. There is certainly some controversy around violent movies, music and video games being advertised in public places, and I do understand that. I don’t think that any free-speech argument is going to hold up for these sorts of things (nevertheless that advertisements are not protected speech in the first place). They would be able to pull ads from any advertiser at any time (they just would no longer be paid for those spots, obviously).

I am a Denver resident and I’ve ridden RTD many times - both the light rail and bus systems.  Round trip ticket prices already started to raise - and I know that advertisements can bring in a lot of revenue to offset rider costs.  I’ve never seen a game related ad myself - but I haven’t ridden regularly in a few years.   As long as ads aren’t distasteful or annoying, I don’t see any other reason to keep a specific ad off a bus.  The GTA ads in the pictures in the links above don’t even depict many of the things that are so ‘evil’ to the complainers.

What is of concern, though, is that agencies may choose where to draw their line, as far as what ads they will show, on medium over actual content. They may show ads for The Departed and The Sopranos, but not show GTA: Liberty City Stories. This just seems odd to me. There is discussion in the above link with PTC Grassroots Director, Gavin McKiernan who specifically says games may be more influential because of the medium, where motion pictures are not as bad.

This brings up the global ‘violence in videogames’ discussion, which I won’t get into very deep in this post (I’ve got a couple more topics in my queue that cover this). What I will say here, though, is that the studies for video game violence have not conclusively shown that it is any different than movies, TV or music. This is a topic of ‘moral panic’ concerning a specific medium which is new and insanely successful. Motion Pictures, Television, and Music have all gone through much of the same criticism at one point or another - so its really nothing new.

My final word on the matter is that if one medium is going to be not shown because of content, it should apply to other mediums as well - so if theres not going to be GTA on busses, I shouldn’t be seeing The Departed, The Sopranos or KMFDM advertisements on buses either. Not showing them in the first place, of course, is silly to begin with, but at least be consistent!

No Comments Yet

Next Page »