I think I've been able to upload crappy 2d avatars to chat rooms since the 1990's. Heck, I think I could even have played crappy, monotonous browser minigames with random people back then. Where's the web 2.0 connection? Are they tacking on a gameplay wiki? Can a user make a special website with a bigger version of her purple pot-smoking Pikachu avatar? Will it link with his iPod to tell the world how many minutes and seconds into DJ MixSMore's latest track he is?
...Come to think about it, maybe I should call my broker...who ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of bored people?
If WoW were more serious about PVP (a la EVE Online, even with its...quirks?) then I'd call this a really egregious violation of player rights.
However, since I regard WoW as largely PvE, that's where I would look for disadvantages. The harms here come up when someone doing something somewhat unique gets screwed out of grouping/looting/guilding/whatever because someone checked out some stats, and says "that's not what I think a fighter/healer/caster should use," and snubbed them. I play nonstandard builds as a rule; I've taken flak a number of times from people who expect a cookie-cutter response from me and find something slightly different. This is especially true for folks performing central roles in nonstandard ways: clerics, tanks, crowd controllers, and such. When I play those classes, especially with groups I'm less familiar with, I sometimes have to play a role I'm less than perfectly suited for. I get by and so does the group in the end, but you sometimes wouldn't have thought it likely given the builds I run. Making this information available shifts the social burden of being a "good player" one more step towards equipment and away from play skill. Is that shift outweighed by the very real convenience of having your character gear visible outside of the game environment? Maybe, but that's the question at hand here, not just a blanket statement about player privacy.
OK. If I were the type to take bets, I'd posit that it won't take long for someone to find a non-destructive way of bringing back old prints.
Your average office worker (or even executive) doesn't intuitively understand that hard drives retain imprints of old data even after "erasure." What's going to happen when re-writable paper shows up and wants used? There are a lot of internal documents that have a limited use life and would, from a purely mechanical sense, qualify as candidates for reusable paper. Plus, even if reusable paper is only two or three times more expensive than standard bond, office policy will probably encourage paper re-use as a budget maintenance measure. However, this makes it likely that some poor clerk will at some point take the paper used for internal docs and "rewrite" them as something uncontrolled. Or, a corporate spy could grab a stack of material, feed it to an internal "rewrite" copier, copy it once, then rewrite over it with something like the company's public financial statement, and exit carrying nothing but "legitimate" public documents.
Just a caution: I really, really advise that this tech not be used for controlled data...
While we're on the topic, here's a question: presuming that we're on the fast track to lab/host-grown organs, is there any reason why regrowing a testicle (or ovary for that matter) might be more difficult than regrowing other glands or organs? There's more than a few cancer survivors around who would love to return to being productive members of the gene pool...
OK, I think I see your point. Too much TFA, not enough actually looking at what you were saying; my apologies. My only real addition on my previous post would be advising the single-player gamers to dump the "gotta catch em all" mentality; while I'm a couple years dated on my single-player RPG experience, in most SP RPGs I've played, you can take care of business with 2-waypoint old gear so long as you do a quick catch-up run when you run across a higher-level but easy-to-kill monster set (say, flame jellies when you have an pointy stick of frostiness to swing at them, something like that). Plus, killing the final armies/bosses rarely require anything like a complete collection of late-game gear...but even if they do, at that point, you're hopefully not doing the boring milk runs you're talking about anyway, and then it's just a question of whether the game is any good at all, right?
Let me try to redirect away from my customary gamekiller instincts for a sec, though. I'll admit to being hard-pressed to find a strongly story-driven game, RPG or not, that can't be digested as a zero-to-hero tale. You can even apply the label to some purportedly innovative games like Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (the lead, an arguably trivial tech dude in a firm, is struck and alienated from society by supernatural intervention, discovers that he's caught in a plot to destroy the planet, then does something about it). That game, as a rhythm game, is pretty secure from grinding (so long as your reflexes are with the program at all). RPGs are worse in this respect, at least for folks wanting to design a game as a plot-driven RPG; their focus on increasing power over time is heavily ingrained. You go too far away from the battlefield, make it all about plot, and folks will call it some sort of interactive movie (Do you follow the dwarf? Turn to page 83.) Do the same, but make the advancement about social status or social organization and you'll get tagged as a *dun dun dun* political sim. Or, you hit the battlefield hard and make it all about strategic fighting, and you're an either an RTS or a tactics game. Allow players wide-ranging freedom, and you have a difficult time sculpting a plot (whoopsie, didn't MEAN to head for San Francisco and get the Vertibird plans that early...!) Add to this the number of action games that are madly gluing on RPG elements to stretch content durability and dubbing themselves "tactical-RPG-platform-shooter-sims" or fluff like that, and there's some serious pressure to make an RPG...an RPG. Plot-wise, if collecting usable trinkets is a big part of the mix, you almost have to start out a wimp with empty pockets (or, if you HAPPEN to be qualified for your job at the beginning, you have to either quickly discover a greater world of combat to stumble into or immediately lose your crutch; either way, you just bit the monomyth again). If you start strong and degrade, you start running into user motivation issues; while my own preference is for game quality and difficulty over arbitrary rewards, a lot of folks seem to really want bigger, badder, shinier toys as the game goes on.
I fear I'm still falling into my old pattern; let me try again. Most sci-fi and fantasy plotlines don't even hide their resemblance to hero stories; whether it's a peasant or a prince, a debris merchant or an interstellar tycoon, they get an extraordinary call to action and have to shed their former lifestyle to combat the dragon/cosmic horror that threatens all. In seeking to toss aside that structure, could you easily put a Macbeth as the lead in an RPG, doomed to die discredited? Could you make it a biographical/modernist push through a character's life, where a headstrong character bends to fit the world and not the other way around? Something nihilistic, perhaps, where the moral of the story is "everyone dies" or "nothing changes?"
Now in all seriousness, here's the best semi-non-hero tale I can come up with. Protagonist (let's name it Pat), a renowned hero or leader, senses a threat to self and soci
While I do agree with you about the hero tale getting over-used in entertainment, video games included, I think that grafting narrative theory onto the reasons for the grind is kinda over-thinking it a bit. Please excuse my own narrative, but I believe it will illustrate my thinking.
Three multiplayer videogames that I've played to a light level of expertise are Starcraft, Everquest, and Unreal Tournament 2004. In each of these cases, I had to "grind" in one way or another to "get good" at the game; endless matches, endless dungeon-running, endless target/movement practice, it all looks the same after awhile from a competitive perspective. In each of these games, most of my time was spent mastering the controls, mastering the maps (forwards and backwards, in the case of UT2004), keeping up with content updates, and getting a feel for how people generally play the game. Now, my efforts to improve would have been greatly hampered without some sort of "bozo filter" in place in each of these cases assuring that I was playing with quality folks. In all three games, that filter existed on two levels: social and structural. In Starcraft, I had a clan which offered me good players to practice with, saving me from monotonous, useless open games -- the social aspect. There was also a ladder system which helped to match me off against moderately skilled players -- a mechanical aspect. In Everquest, it was really similar: I had a guild full of people all attempting to expand our capabilites and a level/equipment system that allowed us to go to places where underleveled and unconnected folks could not go. In UT, it was probably less formalized than the others, but I again played with a clan to refine my talents, and the clan established a reputation (and a ranking on several ladders) which got us access to some pretty elite play channels and matches with even better players and teams. In all of these games, our victories led us to tougher opponents requiring better gameplay and tighter teamwork.
This is the thing that gets left out of some of these discussions about grinding: networking. I've played a lot of games, and I have never failed to find a social network willing to help me jump past the newbie crap one way or another. In action/RTS games, a week of play with a good clan can take you light-years further than a month of unguided practice. In "grind" games, any decent clan can have you up and running in a few days if you're willing to spend some time studying game mechanics to supplement your lack of in-game expertise. Sometimes, this even results in your being more knowledgeable about the game than some "veterans" who have made careers of rushing to adopt "best practices." And, there ARE other ways to advance; there are always clans that are short on logistics: people willing to set up or operate websites and message boards, people willing to drop a few dollars on server hosting fees or in-game currency, people who excel at both internal and external negotiation, mediation, and organization, or even those folks willing to engage in some extra-game skullduggery and social engineering; the paths are out there.
I guess I'm really trying to say two things here. One, whether it functions through player ranking systems, level/gear systems, or even tournaments, the system is mostly there to allow newbies to practice with a minimum of unfair molestation and veterans to play with their own ilk. Two, for a pragmatist, a combination of gaming skill, relevant real-life talents, and social networking abilities will always trump time spent just grinding. Like other regulations, game rules were made to be transcended.
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Hang on...honest question. What do you call the theory that there is no such thing as an "origin of the universe" or a "creation?"
If WoW were more serious about PVP (a la EVE Online, even with its...quirks?) then I'd call this a really egregious violation of player rights. However, since I regard WoW as largely PvE, that's where I would look for disadvantages. The harms here come up when someone doing something somewhat unique gets screwed out of grouping/looting/guilding/whatever because someone checked out some stats, and says "that's not what I think a fighter/healer/caster should use," and snubbed them. I play nonstandard builds as a rule; I've taken flak a number of times from people who expect a cookie-cutter response from me and find something slightly different. This is especially true for folks performing central roles in nonstandard ways: clerics, tanks, crowd controllers, and such. When I play those classes, especially with groups I'm less familiar with, I sometimes have to play a role I'm less than perfectly suited for. I get by and so does the group in the end, but you sometimes wouldn't have thought it likely given the builds I run. Making this information available shifts the social burden of being a "good player" one more step towards equipment and away from play skill. Is that shift outweighed by the very real convenience of having your character gear visible outside of the game environment? Maybe, but that's the question at hand here, not just a blanket statement about player privacy.
OK. If I were the type to take bets, I'd posit that it won't take long for someone to find a non-destructive way of bringing back old prints.
Your average office worker (or even executive) doesn't intuitively understand that hard drives retain imprints of old data even after "erasure." What's going to happen when re-writable paper shows up and wants used? There are a lot of internal documents that have a limited use life and would, from a purely mechanical sense, qualify as candidates for reusable paper. Plus, even if reusable paper is only two or three times more expensive than standard bond, office policy will probably encourage paper re-use as a budget maintenance measure. However, this makes it likely that some poor clerk will at some point take the paper used for internal docs and "rewrite" them as something uncontrolled. Or, a corporate spy could grab a stack of material, feed it to an internal "rewrite" copier, copy it once, then rewrite over it with something like the company's public financial statement, and exit carrying nothing but "legitimate" public documents.
Just a caution: I really, really advise that this tech not be used for controlled data...
While we're on the topic, here's a question: presuming that we're on the fast track to lab/host-grown organs, is there any reason why regrowing a testicle (or ovary for that matter) might be more difficult than regrowing other glands or organs? There's more than a few cancer survivors around who would love to return to being productive members of the gene pool...
OK, I think I see your point. Too much TFA, not enough actually looking at what you were saying; my apologies. My only real addition on my previous post would be advising the single-player gamers to dump the "gotta catch em all" mentality; while I'm a couple years dated on my single-player RPG experience, in most SP RPGs I've played, you can take care of business with 2-waypoint old gear so long as you do a quick catch-up run when you run across a higher-level but easy-to-kill monster set (say, flame jellies when you have an pointy stick of frostiness to swing at them, something like that). Plus, killing the final armies/bosses rarely require anything like a complete collection of late-game gear...but even if they do, at that point, you're hopefully not doing the boring milk runs you're talking about anyway, and then it's just a question of whether the game is any good at all, right?
Let me try to redirect away from my customary gamekiller instincts for a sec, though. I'll admit to being hard-pressed to find a strongly story-driven game, RPG or not, that can't be digested as a zero-to-hero tale. You can even apply the label to some purportedly innovative games like Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (the lead, an arguably trivial tech dude in a firm, is struck and alienated from society by supernatural intervention, discovers that he's caught in a plot to destroy the planet, then does something about it). That game, as a rhythm game, is pretty secure from grinding (so long as your reflexes are with the program at all). RPGs are worse in this respect, at least for folks wanting to design a game as a plot-driven RPG; their focus on increasing power over time is heavily ingrained. You go too far away from the battlefield, make it all about plot, and folks will call it some sort of interactive movie (Do you follow the dwarf? Turn to page 83.) Do the same, but make the advancement about social status or social organization and you'll get tagged as a *dun dun dun* political sim. Or, you hit the battlefield hard and make it all about strategic fighting, and you're an either an RTS or a tactics game. Allow players wide-ranging freedom, and you have a difficult time sculpting a plot (whoopsie, didn't MEAN to head for San Francisco and get the Vertibird plans that early...!) Add to this the number of action games that are madly gluing on RPG elements to stretch content durability and dubbing themselves "tactical-RPG-platform-shooter-sims" or fluff like that, and there's some serious pressure to make an RPG...an RPG. Plot-wise, if collecting usable trinkets is a big part of the mix, you almost have to start out a wimp with empty pockets (or, if you HAPPEN to be qualified for your job at the beginning, you have to either quickly discover a greater world of combat to stumble into or immediately lose your crutch; either way, you just bit the monomyth again). If you start strong and degrade, you start running into user motivation issues; while my own preference is for game quality and difficulty over arbitrary rewards, a lot of folks seem to really want bigger, badder, shinier toys as the game goes on.
I fear I'm still falling into my old pattern; let me try again. Most sci-fi and fantasy plotlines don't even hide their resemblance to hero stories; whether it's a peasant or a prince, a debris merchant or an interstellar tycoon, they get an extraordinary call to action and have to shed their former lifestyle to combat the dragon/cosmic horror that threatens all. In seeking to toss aside that structure, could you easily put a Macbeth as the lead in an RPG, doomed to die discredited? Could you make it a biographical/modernist push through a character's life, where a headstrong character bends to fit the world and not the other way around? Something nihilistic, perhaps, where the moral of the story is "everyone dies" or "nothing changes?"
Now in all seriousness, here's the best semi-non-hero tale I can come up with. Protagonist (let's name it Pat), a renowned hero or leader, senses a threat to self and soci
While I do agree with you about the hero tale getting over-used in entertainment, video games included, I think that grafting narrative theory onto the reasons for the grind is kinda over-thinking it a bit. Please excuse my own narrative, but I believe it will illustrate my thinking.
Three multiplayer videogames that I've played to a light level of expertise are Starcraft, Everquest, and Unreal Tournament 2004. In each of these cases, I had to "grind" in one way or another to "get good" at the game; endless matches, endless dungeon-running, endless target/movement practice, it all looks the same after awhile from a competitive perspective. In each of these games, most of my time was spent mastering the controls, mastering the maps (forwards and backwards, in the case of UT2004), keeping up with content updates, and getting a feel for how people generally play the game. Now, my efforts to improve would have been greatly hampered without some sort of "bozo filter" in place in each of these cases assuring that I was playing with quality folks. In all three games, that filter existed on two levels: social and structural. In Starcraft, I had a clan which offered me good players to practice with, saving me from monotonous, useless open games -- the social aspect. There was also a ladder system which helped to match me off against moderately skilled players -- a mechanical aspect. In Everquest, it was really similar: I had a guild full of people all attempting to expand our capabilites and a level/equipment system that allowed us to go to places where underleveled and unconnected folks could not go. In UT, it was probably less formalized than the others, but I again played with a clan to refine my talents, and the clan established a reputation (and a ranking on several ladders) which got us access to some pretty elite play channels and matches with even better players and teams. In all of these games, our victories led us to tougher opponents requiring better gameplay and tighter teamwork.
This is the thing that gets left out of some of these discussions about grinding: networking. I've played a lot of games, and I have never failed to find a social network willing to help me jump past the newbie crap one way or another. In action/RTS games, a week of play with a good clan can take you light-years further than a month of unguided practice. In "grind" games, any decent clan can have you up and running in a few days if you're willing to spend some time studying game mechanics to supplement your lack of in-game expertise. Sometimes, this even results in your being more knowledgeable about the game than some "veterans" who have made careers of rushing to adopt "best practices." And, there ARE other ways to advance; there are always clans that are short on logistics: people willing to set up or operate websites and message boards, people willing to drop a few dollars on server hosting fees or in-game currency, people who excel at both internal and external negotiation, mediation, and organization, or even those folks willing to engage in some extra-game skullduggery and social engineering; the paths are out there.
I guess I'm really trying to say two things here. One, whether it functions through player ranking systems, level/gear systems, or even tournaments, the system is mostly there to allow newbies to practice with a minimum of unfair molestation and veterans to play with their own ilk. Two, for a pragmatist, a combination of gaming skill, relevant real-life talents, and social networking abilities will always trump time spent just grinding. Like other regulations, game rules were made to be transcended.