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So this here blog is almost 100% functional, there's still some pages I need to upload and some plugins what need plugged in, but it's close enough to done now to be called live, and you're here reading and I'm here writing and I'm glad you'll be my neighbor.
I'm having more fun installing pointless functionality and stuff that pings other stuff than any person should reasonably be allowed. Oh, and don't get me started about the ads. I've never been so excited to sell out in my entire life. I installed the Project Wonderful ads three days ago and I've already made a shiny nickel. Back the truck directly up to the internet, I am here to collect my winnings.
One of my favorite plugins is the Meebo widget, visible on the blog's main page, in the left sidebar sort of midway down. Whenever somebody loads the page it automatically creates a temporary meebo account for you and you appear on my buddy list:
Chances are pretty good you don't even see the widget at first, because you need to scroll down a bit to get to it. But I can see you. I won't know who you are until you tell me, of course, but I can still send you unsolicited messages that will beep at you until you've been sufficiently creeped out that you don't come back.
And that's really what web 2.0 is all about for me, folks.
Why aren't there any MMOs (or really multiplayer games of any sort) that put you in the role of one of a crew of people on a spaceship? I'm kind of shocked that the videogame industry has been humming along for about thirty years now, and despite being populated more or less completely by nerds who should know these things, hasn't created a videogame that functions this way yet.
WoW and other fantasy MMOs are pretty much designed to encourage players to team up to take advantage of the diversity of character classes - if you're going to do a raid, you need your tank, your healer, some other spellcasters, whatever. I don't know too many specifics, I'm like one of the last three dudes on the internet who still hasn't played WoW. But when I was a teenager I played D&D, so the mechanic isn't totally unfamiliar to me. I think that the party-forming and raid-launching mechanic would translate beautifully to space.
You'd think that the crew-a-vessel mechanic would be a no-brainer, after being exposed to exactly that sort of mechanic for years of sci-fi tv shows: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etcetera. The mechanic was laid down for us in Moby Dick: some wealthy player or NPC owns a vessel and wants to send it on a specific mission, and so has it in port to enlist a crew, and thereby allow players the opportunity to grow their characters until such a point that they themselves are able to own and captain vessels and fleets, and launch expeditions and wars of their own.
The top dog of space MMOs at the moment is Eve Online, which pairs every player with their own vessel, and it's sort of developed this huge culture of players basically being shitheads to each other in the name of piracy and privateering in space. It's a famous favorite of griefers for the degree of backhanded behaviour it engenders, and one of the more entertaining scams I've read about took place there.
The skill trees and advancement paths would be familiar to anybody who's already played any kind of RPG. Bigger, badder vessels require larger crews, and as technologies available to the starship become more sophisticated, they'd only be available to characters who had developed the necessary proficiency to be able to exploit them. Communications officers could jam hostile vessels abilities to coordinate their efforts and higher-level comm officers would be able to open voice chat between a larger number of friendly vessels; tactical officers can only operate weapons they know how to use, each turret would benefit more from having a human operator than an AI, and so forth. The bigger the ship, the more minigame-style activities are necessary to be executed concurrently by several players to keep it ticking.
And on top of all the complexity that multiple-player vessels would introduce, it would probably also turn the nature of piracy and griefing in space as established on Eve Online upside down. How are you going to spam cheap vessels at your targets juggernaut if even the smallest craft requires four dudes to operate it? I'm not going to say it wouldn't happen, but I'm willing to bet it'd require clever assholes to get a whole lot cleverer.
I did some digging and it does look like a Star Trek MMO is in the pipeline somewhere, with the option of multiple players staffing a single starship, but Star Trek's legacy in the videogame sector (ha!) hasn't really been stellar (ha ha!) so I'm not holding out too much hope there. Does anybody know of any other games that have been made or are in the process of being made that fit this description?
You know, I've kind of grown deaf to the news articles that get published every other week trying to scare grandma about how the next Grand Theft Auto game is going to turn everyone under the age of 16 into a generation of killers; a lot of news is just entertainment itself and it's all part of doing what it has to do to draw an audience in the slow news periods between starlet pregnancies. The games industry is pretty well entrenched by now that that sort of nonsense isn't going to make a dent in games today, and the latest generation of parents now has grown up playing videogames, they're not going to be as terrified as the previous generations are of entertainment technology.
It's a different story, though, when the alarmist arglebargle finds its way into the games press itself.
We have this essay in the Escapist from a gentleman named Robert Marks, a student at the Royal Military College of Canada, and who from his tone and style of writing we can infer probably has a ponytail, at least one trenchcoat, and a collection of replica Japanese swords. Some of the peculiar ideas he puts forward as truisms are very familiar from this class of individual: for instance, if the debate of an issue becomes 'polarized' then any further discussion is useless. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he is also the sort of dude that would say that if you are 'emotionally involved' in an issue than for some reason your opinion on the subject is without merit. And that only autistic people, Vulcans, and Objectivists can weigh in on the subject and have their voices heard.
Anyway. The whole language of his opening paragraphs is constructed in such a way as to diminish the value and credibility of the minds that have previously (and vigorously) threshed out the question of the connection between violent behavior in kids and violent videogames, dismissing the years of conversation and study as 'heated rhetoric,' this haze of anger and confusion that he is here to save us all from, with these entirely new ideas and discoveries presented in this sacred text he's discovered: Dave Grossman's On Combat, which for Marks is the One True Voice of clarity that will finally deliver us from years of all this useless, confusingly nuanced discussion and scientific rigor.
I mean, who the fuck needs rigor anyway? Lietenant Col. Grossman is in the military, dude knows a few things about what it takes to kill people, right? Marks' prize source is a self-described expert in the comically-named field of Killology, a pseudo-psychological discipline that he himself coined. With this in mind, it is probably easy for most of us to keep from mistaking his book for science.
Most of us except Mr. Marks, anyway.
The essay is stocked with bubbly, gee-whiz sophistry, ideas that might look like Science! at first blush, but don't stand up to scrutiny: For instance, Marks repeatedly makes reference to the 'fight-or-flight' instinct as being part of the 'mammalian brain,' or 'middle brain,' which suggests that he may have a passing familiarity of the Triune brain model, like maybe he heard about it on discovery channel or something, but had he done his homework he probably would have called it the Reptilian brain, and understood the distinctions between the lower, or reptilian brain, and the higher brain functions that are unique to mammals, rather than repeatedly calling the lower brain functions as being part of the "mammal brain." It is with this kind of sloppiness that Marks pads out his work, brachiating from one softheaded, impossible conclusion to the next.
Marks takes us on a meandering exposition of how videogames are supposed to be psychologically conditioning us to become killing machines - by repetitive actions of seeing violent activity on a tv screen, and playing out that action via a controller, I'm somehow more likely to be willing to throw a blue turtle shell at the driver ahead of me in real life. I haven't seen anybody do this yet, so, you know, I just don't know. But if he's to be believed, videogames are an appropriate substitute for time spent in a shooting range or the rigorous training given to military recruits and police officers.
He's very careful to stress that 'context is everything' and there are a few small pebbles of interesting substance in his article, but then he follows it up with this extraordinary line:
While we haven't been conditioned to be murderers, however, the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings prove that some of us are capable of committing heinous acts of violence under ostensibly mundane conditions.
After some very sensible talk about how important 'context' is for determining what makes it possible for somebody to kill somebody else, whoosh! Here we are, in a stunning lateral leap of logic, arriving at this proof that -- well, something, we can't be totally sure what -- made these school shootings possible, having given us no context at all for this conclusion. Maybe it was videogames? Who knows. I'm tempted to assume that's the connection he's trying to make here, but maybe he decided not to show his work for this proof so that he could maintain some kind of plausible deniability should he be pressed to defend it.
And this conclusion prompts a number of questions I'd like to ask Mr. Marks: does he play violent videogames himself? Has he shot anybody? Does he know anybody who has? Has he conducted any control-group sort of studies to test his ideas? Conducted any polls? Or does he rest his faith in the truth of the 'serious problem' that he's trying to call our attention to solely in this one book? Do LTC Grossman's ideas stand up to peer review? Is Robert Marks familiar with the concept of peer review?
In a way, I almost envy Marks' approach to the subject. Unburdened with inconvenient things like facts or prior research, he is then free to tackle, huge, huge questions with unwavering moral certitude - like being able to blame videogames makers for arming "90 percent" of people who play violent videogames with "the capability to use deadly force." I don't know if I'm prepared to call that kind of assessment ballsy, though there's a number of other things I'm prepared to call it. Fortunately, he's got every unsubstantiated claim covered with an equally unsubstantiated get-out clause: You're welcome to disagree if you like, but violent videogames are a problem, "no matter how vehemently we deny" that they're a problem. Touche, I guess?
What is most frustrating about this article is not that it is poorly researched or that its thesis is poorly supported, but that it is these things and it comes from the Escapist. Grossman's book might make some waves with that segment of our population that is still trying to make a buck off of keeping older people afraid of younger people, and there's not much to be done about that. We're used to seeing sloppy fact-checking and breathless sensationalism about the dangers of videogames from the mainstream press, and we've more or less gotten used to it and are okay with it because like Dr. Bartle says, the fight to legitimize videogames and overcome censorship is one we've already won. But we just shouldn't have to put up with this caliber of dumb from one of our own outlets, especially one as entrenched and respected a voice of Serious Games Writing as this. Let's hold ourselves to a higher standard.
I want to make houses like this. This is totally rad. A family commissions an architect to renovate the interior of their home, and gives him some vague suggestion to make it 'playful,' and hide a poem written by the previous owner somewhere in the house 'like a message in a bottle,' and said architect then spends four years turning their house into a walk-in game of Myst, with encrypted poetry written on the radiators and tiny scale models of rooms hidden behind panels in the walls, and storybooks full of clues commissioned specifically to be written for the house.
The internet's gone completely apeshit with images of abominations created with the Spore creature editor, an incomplete version of which was "leaked" a few days ago, spread all the hell all over the internet on Bittorrent, and is now being offered from the EA website as a trial download. (Full version of the creature editor available tomorrow!) I don't know how many people actually believe that the leak was a legitimate mistake; but if I were to start talking about Spore being viral, the collection of specific words and phrases required to frame the discussion would no doubt put me on a short list for government monitoring re: biological weapons terrorism.
Thus, EA, Maxis, Will Wright, Serpentor, et. al, have effectively pre-emptively silenced any questions of chumming the waters on their part. Well played, gentlemen. Well played.
And it's not, you know, hard to guess what kind of sophomoric nonsense dudes are going to be creating with this thing pretty much immediately. In point of fact, this territory's been so thoroughly covered that I'm not even going to dare to weigh in with any creations of my own; I am a rare and delicate snowflake and I will not have my beauty lost in the blizzard.
No, my contribution to this conversation is the neologism that is this entry's title, one that I am surprised (and relieved!) to have not heard anybody else use yet, and so that will be my claim to fame. I will be the one to give a name to this daring new medium of expression, which has enabled every man and woman and child to boldly explore the depths of their frustrated sexual neuroses and to each become their own personal Cronenberg nightmare factories.
Yes, Sporenography. Sometimes I am just so clever I amaze even myself.
Edit: Well, drat, it looks like Kotaku had me beat by 48 hours.