Read with a critical eye: XBL Lesbians (rant)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So you can’t have missed all the nonsense about this Consumerist article (I’m not going to dignify it by linking to it) that claims that “Teresa” said she was harassed on, and ultimately suspended from, XBox Live because she put in her profile that she was a lesbian.

It saddens me to no end how many people are upset about this.

Why? Am I a homophobe just like the entire Microsoft Corporation is (according to some comments I’ve read)?

No, quite the contrary. I’m rather disgustingly liberal, in fact.

But I do READ CRITICALLY. And I think about what I’m reading and I think about plausibility and I don’t believe something just because I see it posted on a website. I also understand the economics of websites and ad serving and page views.

Who is “Teresa?” No one knows. If anyone at the Consumerist knows, they aren’t talking or lending any credibility to their story. I don’t think they care. They got a juicy controversial story that has generated thousands and thousands of page views which has translated into “making their numbers” on ad revenue this week. Bully for them.

Teresa says “No one will help me get the word out about Microsoft’s anti-gay policy.” Well, don’t worry Teresa, the Consumerist will and all they need is your story to be juicy enough to get them page views…they don’t need anything as mundane as “facts” to convince them.

Mysterious Teresa. I’ll tell you who *doesn’t* know who “Teresa” is. Stephen Toulouse, Xbox LIVE Policy Manager. Y’know, the person who could fix the situation.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has an opinion about Microsoft’s anti-gay policy, too. XBox Live, Homophobia, and Online Gaming Policy

Sony, Microsoft, and many others have been trying to address this [using the word ‘gay’ in a derogatory fashion, and in general the shitty behavior of the online gaming community towards gays – pete] by putting policies in place to prevent subscribers from using the online shield of anonymity to harass, verbally assault, and generally defame others. Are they the best policies? No. Are they working to improve them?

In the case of Stephen [Toulouse] and Microsoft – they have been nothing but open, welcoming, and willing to discuss ideas for positive and inclusive changes during these conversations. Microsoft has invited GLAAD out to its headquarters in Redmond, WA, for multi-day meetings with developers, executives, and policy enforcers in the upcoming weeks.

Taking that Consumerist article at face value is just plain and simply stupid. If you read it and immediately became outraged at how some (as far as we know, fabricated) person was mistreated, then it’s time you took a moment and reflected a bit about how readily you accept stories as facts.

Your community needs you to think critically, people. Don’t be a sheep, don’t be a doormat. Ask questions, get facts, then make an informed decision about whether or not what you’re reading is true.

If Teresa’s story is true, then you are right to be outraged. But if its true, Teresa needs to come forward and back up her story with some facts.

I’ll end by duplicating Toulouse’s ending paragraph here…let’s get the word out:

Theresa from the Consumerist article, if you’re reading this, I don’t have your Gamertag or any information about you at all, the article was extremely vague. I’d love to get your feedback and talk to you about how we can make the experience better. Please email me at Stepto@microsoft.com.

Damned anti-gays at MS…

Sony gets in bed with its enemies

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s irony for you.

Shortly after the Sony PSP launched, industrious hackers started figuring out how to run homebrew apps on it. From then until now, Sony kept patching the firmware to lock out the homebrewers, and the hackers kept working around the patches. Sony’s message was clear, if ineffectual: thou shalt not homebrew.

Today, the Playstation Blog breathlessly announces that No Gravity: The Plague of Mind will be coming to the PSN tomorrow. In a very ernest attempt to part us from our dollars, the blog says, without a hint of hypocrisy, [No Gravity] hit the headlines for the first time in 2007 as a “homebrew” game for the PSP. It was acclaimed as a game that “puts tons of retail games to shame with its incredible polish.”

So apparently homebrew is evil and vile… unless suddenly Sony has a chance to make a buck off it.

Got Game?

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Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever
Rating: 1 of 5 stars

Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck & Mitchell Wade

This book was a big disappointment. Part of the reason for that was basic timeliness; it was published in 2004 and we all know how quickly our world is changing. The entire volume is basically reporting the results of a survey the authors conducted, and that data must have been gathered at least a year before the publish date.

So a lot of the facts are out of date; for instance they talk a lot about what a solitary activity gaming is, and today that’s often not really true. But you can’t blame the authors for the passage of time.

What you can blame them for is creating a divide where no divide exists. The book is written for “Baby Boomer” managers who are wary of hiring “Gamers.” And the authors apparently tag all of us with one of those two labels. You are either a Boomer or a Gamer, and that distinction seems to be based on the year of your birth, with little regard for how you spend your time.

Now maybe my experience is atypical, but I can’t remember a manager ever saying to me “This kid’s resume looks pretty good but we shouldn’t hire him; he’s one of those damned Gamers!”

Essentially the two authors conjured a problem out of thin air, then surveyed a bunch of people and spun their findings to apply to their fake problem, and wrote a book about it all. And apparently then they repeated a process with a second book published in 2006.

Avoid this one. You’re not going to learn a thing from it.

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I’ve been memed!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have to confess, I’ve never been meme-tagged before. That kind of thing generally doesn’t happen to us grumpy soloers. Usually people tag their tanks from the night before, or once in a while the hot elf chick (or dude, depending on gender preference) who threw ’em a buff the other day.

But Ysharros tagged ME! I feel like Charlie Brown opening his mailbox to find his first ever Valentine!

OK OK, kidding aside, it really is the first time the blog has been pinged on one of these viral social-networking fun meme things, and I thank Ysh for it! My only disappointment is that I couldn’t come up with a properly alliterative title for the post.

To recap, this is the Sixth Screenshot Meme. The idea is to go into your screenshots folder, then into the 6th subfolder and post the 6th screenshot. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should go you go into a 6th sub-subfolder. We’re saving that for the Devil’s Screenshot Meme.

Sadly for me, my Sixth Screenshot is from EQ2 and one I’ve posted not too long ago:
09_01_raffes_feastIt’s the Feasting Table inside my character’s house.

In order to dig up something more interesting, I sorted my screenshot folder in reverse chronological last-modified date, then did the same with the images inside. Here’s what I came up with that way:
mule
This is a “mule” from the live then canceled then live again MMO Saga of Ryzom. I really should revisit that strange world while it is still around. I haven’t played since the Ryzom Ring was added. The Ring is supposed to allow for player-created quests.

Like Ysharros, I don’t have a lot of really old screenies any more. At some point I do run out of space and just purge old stuff.

Anyway, now it’s my turn to tag more people. Woot!

Looking forward to what you all come up with!

Jumpgate Evolution to release in June

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yeah, just to be different I deliberately avoided the “launches” jokes.

Anyway, the MMO blogosphere is a-buzz with the news that Jumpgate Evolution will go live in June. Source is the Codemaster’s site, which simply lists it as “available from June 2009.”

So there’s that. I’m vaguely bummed that Champions Online and Jumpgate Evolution are both going to launch in the same month. I’ll have to take a leave of absence from my job or something.

Change is Life (An Open Message to my blogging friends)

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It’s been a little over a week since I started my job blogging for ITWorld.

Today I noticed my XFire Profile:

“This Week: No Games Played” Huh. Now in all honesty this isn’t accurate because I’ve played 8 hours of Too Human on the XBox since I bought it last Saturday morning, but the bulk of that time was on Saturday and Sunday.

I’m finding it an interesting challenge to come up with 1-2 tech-related topics to write about every day. Some days, like when Facebook changes it Terms of Use, the topic is obvious. Other days I have to stretch a lot more.

I feel strongly that this experience is good for me as a writer. It’s enforced discipline to put butt in chair and *write* every day (well, except weekends…my contract only covers week days) and to expand my knowledge of technology, which is one of my ‘natural’ passions anyway.

But in order to feed the muse, so to speak, I’ve had to expand my cloud of Twitter Followees and have added a ton of tech-related RSS feeds to my news reader. My posts tend to be a mix of condensed and regurgitated tech news & research mixed with my opinion, so I need to be in constant scan mode to know what the big story is on any given day. Then I spend a good chunk of time doing the research (sometimes I have to do very little because its something I already am well versed in, other times I have to do a lot) and finally I write my posts.

All this scanning, researching and writing is taking a lot of time, and by the time I finish that, then catch up on all my “personal” (aka, gaming-related) RSS feeds, it was time for bed. Some nights I don’t even get caught up before midnight comes creeping around and then I was starting the next day with a backlog.

So last night I just had to give in and start deleting feeds that I’m not super interested in. Warhammer bloggers, for instance. I’m not playing, don’t plan to go back to playing, and had to make the tough choice to cut people I really enjoyed reading just because their topic was no longer relevant to my life. I feel really guilty about this, like I’m letting friends down, though I know they won’t know I’m not reading them anymore. But *I* know.

So what’s the point of this post? I guess I just felt like I needed to explain why I’m not reading and commenting on your blogs as much as I used to. (Actually, a lot of you might see that as a blessing, not having Pete S gumming up the works all the time!!) It just occured to me, this is a bit like when Ysharros talked about people leaving a guild with no explanation. I feel like I’m leaving a “guild” in a way, and I just wanted the chance to explain why. It isn’t that your blogs don’t still rock, because they do. It’s just a question of a finite number of hours in any given day. By cutting down the number of gaming blogs I read, I hope to free up time to actually do some gaming. I hope you’ll understand this decision.

A Farewell to War (Warhammer)

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I got a notice today that my 60 day time card for Warhammer has run out, and my account is now closed.

My reaction, frankly, was a huge sigh of relief. No more guilt over not playing a game I’d paid for a subscription to. Followed by a touch of sadness. I still have a Warhammer Online Poster on the door to the office (yes, I am still 12 in some ways, plus it covers a hole in the door!) I have Warhammer novels strewn all over the house. I have a head full of memories of all the great times I had in beta and those early days. I have a tag cloud on this blog that still features Warhammer most prominently.

But it just never clicked with me. It was like one of those “love at first sight” encounters that fizzles as you get to know the other person on a deeper level. You try to cling to that early passion, but you know that things just aren’t working out. And yet you hang on, go through the motions, hoping for…what? The world to flip on its axis or something? Nothing is going to change, so finally, you have The Talk.

So Warhammer and I have had The Talk. I can’t visualize ever going back to the game, unlike so many others that I do return to every now and then: City of Heroes, Guild Wars, WoW, EQ2, etc. With many MMOs I go back to see what’s changed and sometimes I end up staying a while. But with Warhammer, I’ve come to like the Mythic Message less and less over the months. I’ve come to like the community less and less. When I joined CoW I was naive enough to think those good folks represented what the Warhammer community would be like, but over time the testosterone-fueled e-peenery that always follows PvP seems to have taken over.

That sounds pretty hostile. Well heck, I guess it *is* pretty hostile. But everyone deserves a place where they can gather with like-minded individuals, and that extends to the testosterone-fueled e-peeners of both sexes. So, hostile or not, I’m glad they have Warhammer Online because quality PvP games are few and far between.

So, farewell, Warhammer Online! I’m really sorry things didn’t work out for us, but I know you’re going to be OK, because you have plenty of enthusiastic fans. As for me, first I have to eat a huge helping of crow because I was a fierce defender of the game back at launch (but I swear, the beta really *was* fun!) Once I choke that down, I’ll be OK because I have a skillion other games to choose from, and now I don’t have the ever-present guilt of “I really should be playing War…after all, I paid for it.”

Freedom!!

Too Human First Look Pt 1 (XBox 360)

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When Too Human released to pretty horrible reviews last summer, it seemed there was more talk going on about Silicon Knight’s Dennis Dyack trying to socially engineer scores than there was about the game itself. I remember downloading the demo, feeling pretty “Meh” about it, and then forgetting all about the game.

Over the past week, someone I follow on Twitter (http://twitter.com/SAGExSDX) has been playing and enjoying the game *a lot*. Whenever I see someone really enjoying a game that got bad reviews, I get intrigued. And it so happened that I’ve been casting about looking for a good loot-centric hack&slash action-rpg to play, and that’s exactly what Too Human is. And the nice thing about picking up a poorly reviewed game 6 months or so after release is that you can get it for cheap. Target has it in the discount bin for $20, but I couldn’t find it in my local store and didn’t want to wait to mail order it, so I hit Best Buy and picked it up for $40.

At this point my played time is around 6 hours and my first character (a Berserker — melee focused, low armor) is level 17 or thereabouts, and so far I’m in SAGExSDX’s camp: I’m having a good time playing this game. I’ve gone back and read some of the reviews and they all feel pretty vague to me when it comes to explaining why they gave it such low ratings, and I can’t help wonder how much the controversy and expectations shaped the review rating landscape.

But again I’m only 6 hours in.

Gameplay is a nice combination of Diable-style kill/loot/level and a fast paced action game (think Shinobi, or if you don’t remember that one, Devil May Cry). Melee attacks are mapped to the right thumbstick; push the stick towards an enemy and you’ll charge it and attack. If you push it towards another enemy before you reach the one you’re sliding towards, you’ll combo off to that next enemy. Pretty soon you’re a human pinball of death. Or you can leap into the air and come crashing down. Or double tap the stick to juggle the enemies into the sky. Pushing both sticks in the same direction unleashes a “fierce” attack, which is, oddly enough, a ranged attack pulled off with melee weapons.

The trigger buttons are used for firing ranged weapons. You also have a little spider bot “pet” that you can use as a debuff, and a Ruiner attack that trades combo level for a potent area-of-attack, the style of which depends on the weapons you have equipped.

I’d be lying if I said combat was all about pin-point precision. The controls are more visceral than precise, but since fights tend to be about 10+ enemies vs you and some wimpy underlings, that doesn’t matter too much. Too Human is about wading into swarms of baddies and sending them all flying.

And these baddies (all of which are robots, which pleases me — I’m not a huge fan of over-the-top gore and body parts flying) are definitely monster pinatas. Looting is automagic…stuff just kind of gets sucked into your backpack. At any time you can “Salvage” gear, turning it into Bounty (the game’s currency) so there’s never a need to head home to sell vendor trash. In fact, you can set an ‘auto-salvage’ setting so that a particular level of item you pick up gets turned into Bounty, or use a “Smart” setting that will salvage the worst gear you’re carrying if your inventory fills up. These are really nice features that keep you focused on the action and not on inventory space.

When you die, rather than having to reload a saved game, a Valkyrie floats down to whisk you off to Valhalla. But then I guess she changes her mind because you’ll respawn close to where you fell. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about this system, but I love it. As an MMO player, I really don’t like save/load systems; they break me out of the world I’m playing in. But the rebirth cut-scene is long enough to feel like a death penalty (your gear also takes an endurance hit and will have to be repaired if you die often enough — I speak from experience) without being overly onerous.

If you find you’re dying just a bit too often, you can head back to your HQ (that’s a menu option, you can do it from anywhere) and from there, teleport to an earlier level to replay it and level up a bit. These earlier levels seem to scale somewhat. So at character level 15 I went back to the first game level for a bit of grindy fun, and it was still a light challenge for me, vs the total walk-through that I’d expected it would be. Again, the focus is on keeping you gaming, earning new gear and new levels, and not about a lot of pointless running around.

Anyway, I’ll say for the third time, I’m only 6 hours in. But so far I’ve been having a blast. In my next post I’ll look at some of the downsides. I’d like to get to 12-15 hours before I post again, so it could take me a few days.

The Last Wish (Book Review)

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The Last Wish
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

I first discovered Geralt the Witcher via the computer game The Witcher. Some of the mechanics of that game bothered me enough that I still haven’t played a lot of it, but I played enough to become intrigued by the main character.

I knew he was the creation of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski who was a bestselling author in his homeland, but it was only recently that I found this translation to English. As far as I can determine, this is his only work readily available in English, though a second volume (Blood of Elves) is on the way.

Anyway, to the book itself. Once again we have a selection of short stories woven into a novel; this seems to be a trend in my reading lately! In The Last Wish, this mechanism isn’t hidden though. Instead we have one ‘meta story’ that introduces and launches the various stories in a manner similar to The Canterbury Tales (I’m using that example to compare frameworks, not authors). This wasn’t immediately obvious to me; hopefully if you read this review before you read the book, I will have spared you a bit of confusion.

Geralt is a Witcher; an individual who has been mutated by magics and alchemy into something more than human, and who has been trained from a very young age to fight monsters. Geralt’s world is an interesting melange of magic and science, but not of technology. We never see machines at work, but scientific knowledge seems to be more advanced than what we normally see in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world. This gives Geralt’s world a unique feel.

It took me a while to realize that Geralt was traveling through familiar fairy tales with a dark, adult and slightly modernized twist. For example, we see Sleeping Beauty as a banished princess who becomes an outlaw during the struggle to reclaim her rightful place on the throne, while those who would oppose her spread rumors about the debauched lifestyle she shares with seven gnomes.

As a Witcher, Geralt lives a mercenary life. He kills monsters for money, not for glory or fame. He tries not to kill sentient monsters if he can avoid it (that description extends to people) but violence has a way of following him. Witchers tend to be reviled in this world (until such time as they are needed, when suddenly they are sought out with much enthusiasm), so his is a mostly solitary life, though later in the book we meet his unlikely friend, the troubadour Dandilion.

Reading the The Last Wish, I feel like I was peering at a fantasy world through a narrow slit. What I saw was wonderful, but there’s the sense that the world is much, much bigger than what we see through Geralt’s eyes in this one volume.

A final note; if you pick up the book and open it to page one, the first thing you’ll read is a sex scene. It isn’t exactly explicit, but it’s reasonably steamy, and it is not indicative of the book as a whole. Geralt does have his fair share of intimate encounters, but they’re not the focus of the book and I think in some ways that first two page chapter sets an inaccurate tone for what’s to come.

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