Typing

I have always been interested in writing. So as a teenager in the early 80's I owned a piece of state of the art word processing technology: An electric typewriter. And I even went to a typing course, where I learned to type 50 words per minute, error-free, using all 10 fingers without even watching them. At the time that was unusual for boys, it was usually girls who became typists. In a typical company every middle manager or creative type who had to write a document instead dictated it onto a tape recorder, and then a typist would type that on paper.

Well, computers came and changed all that. Now everybody in a company needs to write his own stuff, many people spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard both at work and at home. For me that meant that the typing course was one of the most useful courses I ever took, as I'm typing twice as fast as the average computer user because of it.

But as I spent this weekend using my typing skills to write a self-made D&D adventure, it struck me how very different the process is from playing a MMORPG. Pen & paper role-playing games are very creative, I write adventures, I play roles, I interact with my players in a back and forth where we all have to invent stuff all the time. In comparison MMORPGs feel a lot more like typing, especially when it comes to the dungeon and raiding part: You want to hit a lot of keys fast and in the correct order. And if you do it wrong, your tear up the page and start over, hitting the same keys faster and with less errors the next time. In a MMORPG I am downgraded to the role of a typist, and my success is based not on the creativity of my ideas or the entertainment value of my expression, but on how fast I can hit those keys without errors.

So right now occupying myself with Dungeons & Dragons feels like a huge liberation of my creative energies, a big step upwards from being a typist in WoW or SWTOR. Needless to say I ended up playing very little of SWTOR this weekend. I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually going to make it to level 50 or will give up before that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Developments in maps

A quarter of a century ago I still produced campaign maps for Dungeons & Dragons by hand, using hex paper and colored crayons. Now that I am preparing a new campaign, I realized that I had better options these days. I now own a color laser printer, and drawing software has come a long way. So I invested in Campaign Cartographer 3, with added Dungeon Designer 3 and Fantasy Floorplans. Not really cheap, and like all CAD programs a bit difficult to learn, but the result is well worth it. Not only was I able to make a map of the island my first adventure will play on, but more importantly I created my first battle map.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons in some ways has gone back to its roots of miniature wargames, and those are best played on some sort of a battlemap with a square grid on it. There are quite a lot of options on how to do those. You can take a big piece of paper with squares from a flip chart and draw on it, which is fast and cheap, but not very pretty. You can take use Dungeon Tiles, Flip-Mats, Map Packs, or similar commercial products; but then you are limited to the designs on the product you bought. So if you want both pretty and complete control, using software to draw the battle maps yourself is the way to go. For example I printed mine on 2 by 2 sheets of A4 paper, so now I got a battle map with 16 x 23 1-inch squares, which works best for the usual size of miniatures. And it looks very nice, with a green grass texture, boulders, trees, and even a camp-fire. I can make similar maps with caves, dungeons, and whatever else I want, and they serve both as play surface and visual aid for my players.

The downside of these self-made battle maps is that by the time you designed them, printed them, and glued them together with sticky tape, you spent more time on making the map than the players will spend fighting a battle on it. Thus I'll also work with commercial printed maps, and just design the adventures around them to make them fit the story. And if all else fails, my group is using a laminated blank battle map and white-board markers to draw on it. Nevertheless I love maps and I'm quite happy with the progress that software made in this area.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:48 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
A call for donations

One of the major themes of this blog is how people react to incentives. Unfortunately the disadvantage of observing how this works in games is that you realize how much of that is going on in real life, and that tends to turn you into a cynic. Unless you already started out as one. Thus I am rather critical of most charity drives: If I see how Blizzard promises that half of the money for buying a virtual pet goes to charity, I can't help but notice that the other half goes to them, although their cost of selling them is minimal. But if 100% of the collected money actually goes to charity, and the charity drive is about games, I am willing to support it.

Iron Man Mode is collecting money for Child's Play. Iron Man Mode is a blog about playing video games until your character dies, then quitting. The authors wisely stick to harder games, many of them older, because these days there are a bunch of games out there where you would have trouble finding a way to die even if you wanted to. But the stories they tell also teach a lot about death in game design. A worthy cause and a worthy read, what could you want more?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:31 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Will Blizzard keep you from getting rich in Diablo 3?

Diablo 3 is going to have an auction house in which players can sell virtual items to other players for real money. Which prompted some people to start dreaming of getting rich by playing video games. I've been chronicling the negative consequences of that for some time, from the difficulty of getting rich in face of strong competition, to the expected negative social consequences. But it seems I have neglected one aspect: Blizzard might actively stop you from getting rich. My favorite virtual snake-oil vendor Markco posted that Blizzard kicked him out of the Diablo 3 beta for earning too much gold and beta bucks in too short time.

While of course I don't have all the details of the story, it appears to me that Diablo 3 has some sort of hidden code which is designed to ban gold farmers and bots, but which could end up banning players that are too good at making gold as well. Now some people will call that "unfair", but what it is not is "illegal". Blizzard has the absolute right of kicking out players they believe are harmful to the game at large. And if Blizzard doesn't want "professional" players in the game, they can kick them out. In the end it doesn't matter whether you are a Chinese guy working in a sweat shop, or an American college student who would rather get rich by playing video games than studying. If Blizzard thinks that you are just out for the money, and not just playing, they can ban you.

While I think that this is a good idea, I am certain that this will still cause a lot of controversy in the future. Players will want the "Chinese gold farmer" to be banned, but will insist on their right to farm gold and make money, without seeing that this is exactly the same thing, and mostly indistinguishable by Blizzard (unless you add an illegal racist bias to the criteria).
- posted by Tobold @ 10:23 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Reviewing the D&D 4E reviews

I've spent like 10 minutes yesterday playing Star Wars: The Old Republic before I got bored, and watched video reviews of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons on YouTube instead. And read some written reviews of that game. I couldn't help but smile when noticing how much the discussion resembled us discussing the latest MMORPGs: There are the dinosaurs who hate every change, the hypers who find everything that is different great, the fanbois, the haters, the trolls, and many of the same arguments. So having come 3 years late to that discussion, and armed with hindsight, a fresh look at 4th edition, and all my MMORPG experience, let's have a look at the main discussion points on Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition:

4th Edition is different: This is certainly true. Depending where you read it, the opinions go from "this is so different, it isn't D&D any more", to "this is very different and I like it". I mentioned before that I detected influenced of MMORPGs in the 4E rules, but ultimately it goes much further; 4th Edition D&D rules are recognizably "modern" in a way that spans many different game genres. This includes them being more balanced, more accessible, less prone to one-shot player deaths, and more streamlined. And just like in MMORPGs, each of these modern features has its fans and detractors: Balanced is good because finally a D&D fighter is as interesting as a D&D wizard, but balance is bad because two different damage dealers feel more same-ish. And so on. Personally I generally like "modern" rules in many different genres. And not having played D&D in recent years, I'm not bitter about this or that change to my favorite race or character class.

4th Edition rules are a mess: True again, although not necessarily a change from previous editions. Basically Dungeons & Dragons suffers from being printed on paper. Imagine you had a printed set of rules on how a priest worked in World of Warcraft v1.0, plus a list of how that priest changed in every patch from then up to 4.3. That would be a *lot* of paper and rather unwieldy. Dungeons & Dragons is a bit like that, although there are a bit less changes to the rules over the years than in WoW. You start out with the rules in the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and the monsters of the Monster Manual. Then there are numerous updates and errata on the website. Then there are tons of optional game supplement books (because WotC needs to sell stuff). Then WotC decided to reprint the rules in a different format, including the updates, and released D&D Essentials. And in addition to that there are lots of house rules not only from your own campaign, but also that of others published on the internet and seen by your players. Dungeon Masters with some experience have long ago learned to limit what kind of rules and supplements can be used, and they are the final arbiter anyway. Personally my situation as future DM is somewhat different, because I am going to play a campaign in French. Much less material has been released in French, and I actually had to scramble to get rules books, because it appears that some of them are out of print.

4th Edition is combat heavy: Actually it would be fairer to say that *rules* of 4E D&D are combat heavy. Which then in turn prompted some authors to publish combat heavy adventures. It is today possible to play 4E Dungeons & Dragons in a way which resembles a miniature wargame a lot more than a role-playing game. The idea is that you don't *need* rules for role-playing, thus if you want to run a city adventure with a murder mystery and no combat at all, you can. The books don't talk a lot about that, but that is because the philosophy is that rules books don't have a lot to say in that sort of situation. I'm currently as a player in such a city adventure full of intrigue and mystery, and frankly we wouldn't even notice if the DM switched to a different rules system, because our interaction with the NPCs in this case isn't governed by rules, but by our creativity. Having said that, I welcome the opportunity as a DM to run some interesting combat sessions in the future. As players get older and don't meet for play sessions all that often any more, running a city intrigue adventure gets increasingly difficult; people simply don't remember all the details from their last session 2 weeks ago, and if the adventure spans months, you spend a lot of time reminding people of what happened previously. The 4E rules are quite good for creating more bite-sized adventures and encounters. Just remember that doesn't mean you can't have epic adventures in that system, it just means the books won't tell you how. Epic adventures always needed the DM to use his head, in any rules system.

So I do think that for my specific purposes, the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition rules are quite suitable. And if there are rules me and my players don't like, we always have the option to change them. This is the great advantage of pen & paper games over MMORPGs: You can adjust everything! The whole "WoW is too easy! No, it is too difficult!" discussion simply doesn't exist for pen & paper games, and with a decent DM the game will always be perfectly balanced and adjusted to the needs of the players.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
What is Dungeons & Dragons?

While googling for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, I discovered there is a "Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition for Dummies" book out there. I found that extremely weird. I know that there are "for Dummies" books about everything, including Farmville. But as D&D comes in the form of books, this is basically a book on how to read a book. But I also got comments like "I've never played a "pen & paper" RPG so I don't understand yet what you'll be doing" on my blog. So it dawned to me that so much time has passed that there are now a significant amount of people who play MMORPGs, but who have never seen a pen & paper roleplaying game. This post is for them.

Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons & Dragons brand claim that 5 million players play the game at least once a month. I consider that possible, but as playing with your friends around the kitchen table doesn't give any feedback to WotC, I would say this can only be a rough estimate. Nevertheless that leaves us with a game which has about half as many players as World of Warcraft, and more than any other MMORPG. So let's look at Dungeons & Dragons from the view of a WoW player:

When you play World of Warcraft (or another similar MMORPG), what exactly is the computer doing for you? The computer displays the virtual world with all its inhabitants and items, and it gives you a feedback on any input, telling you how this virtual world reacts to your actions. In pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons there is no computer, and that function of representing the virtual world is performed by one of the players around the table. He is called the Dungeon Master (DM) (other systems use the term Game Master), while everybody else are the players.

The obvious disadvantage of having a Dungeon Master representing the virtual world is that the graphics are lousy. :) Most of the time the players just get a verbal description of the world around them, sometimes with some visual aid in the form of sketched maps, or handouts, or miniature figurines. So if the DM tells you "you stand in front of a tree", you will need to imagine the tree for yourself, and if in doubts ask the DM for details like what size of tree.

But while the graphic representation might be less good than in WoW, a pen & paper roleplaying game comes with a huge advantage: There is no limit to what you can do with the virtual world that is described to you, except for human imagination. Thus the above-mentioned tree can be climbed, burned, hacked down, hugged, carved into an idol and worshipped, or whatever else you can think of. Try doing any of that with a tree in WoW!

The game of Dungeons & Dragons thus ends up as an interactive story, a dialogue between the Dungeon Master and the players. The DM describes the situation, the players describe what they do, and the DM gives them feedback on what the result of their actions are. As the reactions of the players are very often unpredictable, the DM must be able to come up with a response on the fly. Thus if the DM tells you that there is a 20-feet high tree in front of you, and you as player tell him that you want to lift that tree, the DM has to come up with a response like: "You wrap your arms around the tree and try to lift it. The tree doesn't budge. The villagers around you pause in what they are doing, and start watching you, while you get increasingly red in the face from the effort. What do you do?"

But what if the tree was only 10 foot high, was described to you as having been partially disrooted by a storm, and you play a burly fighter? Maybe you should be able to lift that tree? Ultimately that is the decision of the DM, but the general idea is that if an outcome of an action isn't very obvious, you use a combination of rules and dice rolls to determine the outcome. Thus the DM could reply to your action of trying to lift that tree with: "Lifting the tree has a difficulty class (DC) of 15, please make a strength check!". A "strength check" means you roll a 20-sided dice (a d20) to generate a random number between 1 and 20. You then add modifiers to that roll, in this case half your level plus a modifier based on your strength stat. And if the result is equal or higher to the announced difficulty class, you succeed. Thus if you roll high enough, you uproot and lift the tree, leading to a further development of the story. Maybe somebody had asked you to help him with that tree, or you just did it to impress the villagers with your strength. You tell the DM what you want to do next, and the DM tells you what happens next. Through this interaction between the DM and the players, the story evolves, and hopefully everybody ends up having fun.

The situation which is covered by the most rules and needs lots of dice rolls is combat. You and your friends come round a corner in a dungeon and see a group of hostile orcs. While (unlike WoW) there is at least a possibility of other solutions, like negotiations, often you will want to fight those orcs and gain experience points and treasure, just like in WoW, as well as advance the story because the orcs block the way to the princess you're trying to save. So who reacts first? What spells can your wizard cast? How hard is it for your fighter to hit an orc, and how much damage will he deal? All that is covered in the rules and often determined by dice rolls. Playing through a combat is obviously more complex in a pen & paper game than in a MMORPG, because there is no computer to handle all the random number and rules. But the rules are simple enough and are quickly learned, so apart from unusual situations you won't need to look up anything in a rule book. The mage knows how his spell works, the fighter knows what modifiers to add to his to hit roll, and the DM will just need to tell him the difficulty of hitting that orc.

Compared to World of Warcraft, combat in pen & paper Dungeon & Dragons is a lot more tactical. It matters where you stand in relation to the monster, which is where square tiles and figurines come in. There is no "taunting" or aggro management, but which monster attacks which player is decided by the DM based on position and common sense. And of course combat is turn-based, thus the speed with which you can roll your dice or shout out your actions doesn't count for anything. While combat is important, ultimately it is just part of the story in Dungeons & Dragons. The concept of wiping at a boss fight, rezzing, and starting over doesn't exist in D&D. If your whole group gets killed, either the DM has to come up with a Deus Ex Machina story twist, or everybody has to roll new characters. But because the DM is more flexible than a computer, he can also adjust the difficulty on the fly to avoid wipes. The general idea is to drive the story forwards together, and a wipe would be a defeat both for the players and the DM.

While historically pen & paper roleplaying games came first, computer roleplaying games came later, and MMORPGs are the latest development, the rules for pen & paper games evolve and take inventions from MMORPGs into account. In previous versions of Dungeons & Dragons, fighters mostly used standard attacks, while wizards had lots of spells and were a lot more interesting to play. In 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons every class has exactly the same number of abilities at the same level, just like in World of Warcraft. For example a level 3 D&D character has 2 at-will powers he can use as often as he wants, 2 encounter powers he can use once per combat, and 1 daily power he can use only once per game day. He also gets 1 utility power. For a wizard these "powers" will be spells, while for a fighter they are other sorts of combat moves.

So how many character classes are there in Dungeons & Dragons? That is actually a trick question, with the correct answer being "as many as the DM allows". Dungeons & Dragons is a game whose physical representation comes mostly in the form of books. But there are a LOT of those books, from the essential to the optional, and if that isn't enough you can add house rules. Dungeon & Dragons can be played in many different fantasy worlds, from classic high fantasy or low fantasy to exotic worlds like the harsh desert world of Dark Sun or the nearly steam-punk world of Eberron. Each of these settings can add new character classes, new powers, new monsters and lots of other stuff to the game. It is the responsibility of the Dungeon Master to filter the rules and tell his players what rules are valid in his campaign. For starters you can play with everybody having just a Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Player's Handbook, and the DM having a Dungeon Master's Guide and a Monster Manual. The DM might also want to use pre-made adventures, so he doesn't have to come up with all stories and handouts on his own, although he will probably alter them to fit his campaign.

Once you have an agreed set of rules, and the DM has prepared a campaign world and a first adventure, you can start playing. Players will create characters, usually of level 1, the DM describes the initial situation, and the players tell him what they do in that situation. It is not a competitive game, you can't really "win". Either everybody "wins" by having fun, or nobody wins because you couldn't play together. Just like in WoW there are experience points, levels, and treasures to be found. But the main purpose is for the DM and players to all together create a story and have fun. And that fun can last many years. Groups of players often stay together for a long time, meeting regularly to play, starting and ending adventures and campaigns, even changing from one rule system to another. Besides the actual game, of course this is also a great opportunity to regularly hang out with your friends, talk, joke, eat junk food, and have a good time. It is not so much a "game", which you start playing and the stop, but often rather more of a "hobby", which you keep playing for a long time. And what a great hobby it is! Not only is it fun, but it is also essentially an activity about communication, about social interaction, and thus can teach you a lot of things that are useful in real life. It is harder to get going than starting your computer and playing WoW, but in the end it is also a lot more rewarding. The possibilities for fun are endless!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Bad customer service of Bioware

When EA Bioware refused all my credit cards and Paypal as payments, I naturally opened a customer support ticket with them. I've used the cards elsewhere since, so I'm sure it is a problem with them, not any of my banks, which would have been extremely unlikely to happen to 3 financial institutions at the same time anyway. I would consider payment issues to be rather fundamental, and worthy of a swift response. But I had to wait a full week before I heard back from EA Bioware. And what did they say? They said that since I had used a game time card since, they considered the ticket closed. They wouldn't even look at the issues with the credit cards!

Well, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that I will want to subscribe beyond the 60 days of that game time card. And their bad customer service isn't helping their cause here.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Minimalist vs. Maximalist in pen & paper roleplaying rules

It didn't take long after me mentioning Dungeons & Dragons until the first commenter popped up saying that this wasn't the best system to roleplay with. Specifically Inquisitor said: "4e doesn't *stop* you running an actual story, but it really doesn't help you, either". Which brings us back to a debate which is over 30 years old: What is the role of a rule system in a pen & paper roleplaying game?

Basically there are two extreme positions, and lots of shades of grey in between. The two extremes can be called minimalist and maximalist. The minimalist point of view is that the rules only get into the way when roleplaying, thus ideally you'd have as little rules as possible. Rules are there to solve situations that can't be solved by talking, e.g. the old problem of children playing cops and robbers: "Peng, peng, you're dead!" - "No, I'm not, you missed!". While Dungeons & Dragons produced hundreds of rule books, the basic rules of the game have always been on the minimalist side. Thus Inquisitor's comment that these rules "don't help you roleplay". He is right, they aren't designed to. They are rules for a tactical squad based combat game, initially made by a company that shortened it's names from "Tactical Studies Rules" to TSR. The story content between combat is a lot less regulated in D&D, and has far more degrees of liberty. Including the option to not do very much at all, and basically run just a miniature wargame in a fantasy setting.

The other extreme of rule sets, the maximalist one, thinks that the rules should aid and encourage roleplay. To achieve that, they are often a lot more elaborate. Their proponents often praise them at being "more realistic", as far as that makes sense when you are roleplaying a wizard. For example maximalist rule sets don't simply reduce your health by X points when you are damaged, but use tables with hit locations telling you how those X points that landed on your right upper leg is affecting your movement speed. Maximalist rule systems also tend to have more rules on the non-combat interaction between players and non-player characters. If a character wants to haggle over the price of a sword with the NPC merchant, a minimalist Dungeon Master has to invent the reaction of the NPC on the spot; a maximalist Dungeon Master gets "help to roleplay" in form of a table in the rule book where based on a dice roll, some stat, and some skill the exact rebate from the merchant can be calculated.

Personally I much prefer the minimalist approach. Of course it requires a more creative Dungeon Master, but then it gives that creativity a wider range of freedom. The last thing you want your pen & paper campaign to become is an exercise in rules lawyering and endless looking up of tables. Roleplay is better than rollplay, we used to say. But the debate is certainly still alive, and not everybody has the same preferences.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:23 PM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
And now for something completely different

I am strangely excited about a new game opportunity, more than I have been for years. If I had to sum up my gaming history in one phrase, I'd say that I played Dungeons & Dragons in the eighties, Magic the Gathering in the nineties, and MMORPGs in the noughties (or whatever you want to call that decade). But I never completely stopped playing pen & paper role-playing games, I just play a lot less now, and as a player instead of a Dungeon Master. So now I am excited about a possibility to become the Dungeon Master again, starting a fresh campaign, probably with Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition rules. Our current Dungeon Master needs a creative break, and at the end of the current adventure I'll first do a test run, and if that works out run a campaign.

When discussing how MMORPGs should be designed, you sooner or later come across somebody asking the snarky question of why I'm not designing my own MMORPG if I know better than the developers. Obviously there are about a hundred million good reasons for not launching a MMORPG, or whatever making a MMORPG costs these days. But being a Dungeon Master in a pen & paper roleplaying campaign is about as close as you can get to designing your own game system. While the rules appear to be written down, in fact the Dungeon Master has a large degree of freedom inside the framework described by those rule books. There are usually lots of house rules, and just by selecting the difficulty of encounters and the rewards a DM already can change the nature of the game more than lets say the change of the nature of WoW between WotLK and Cataclysm.

Thus I do believe that there I things I learned from MMORPGs about motivating players and how to make a game enjoyable to its players that I can use in running a pen & paper campaign. But it isn't just me who evolved in the last 20 years, the Dungeon & Dragons system evolved as well. It is impossible as a MMORPG player to look at the changes in 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons and not see how they derived from MMORPGs. These days all D&D character classes have an identical number of spells and abilities per level, and the adventures actually have "quests" in them with an objective and a specific reward! What I like a lot about the 4th edition rules is how tactical the combat is. This is the sort of content I'm missing in MMORPGs: Tactical combat with no twitch at all, and a lot of time for everybody to consider their moves, where the challenge lies in thinking what the best move is, and not in how many milliseconds it takes you to perform it. And then of course a pen & paper game has some actual roleplaying, a feature long missing from most MMORPGs.

So what does this mean for this blog? Not a radical change, but you will see some posts with my thoughts about Dungeons & Dragons, and maybe less posts about MMORPGs. The jury is still out on whether SWTOR was "a failure", but it certainly failed to stem the tide of a general declining interest in MMORPGs. Thus widening the scope of the blog might be a good idea anyway. Assuming there are still people out there with an interest in pen & paper games. Are there?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
The death of the used game

The current generation of consoles is getting long in the tooth, and the next generation is starting to get announced. But some of the features of the next generation consoles are likely not to please gamers very much: The XBox 720 reportedly will have a system that makes it impossible to play used games.

Of course on a MMORPG blog that is kind of non-news. Or would you like to buy my used copy of World of Warcraft (without the account, which isn't transferable)? Basically a MMORPG client these days is free, and you pay an initial fee to open an account, plus a monthly fee to keep it going. Or the game is even Free2Play and you only pay for what you buy in the item store.

Most of the PC single-player games I bought over the past 2 years I couldn't possibly sell either, because I bought them on Steam. Steam has a trading market, but you can't trade used games there, only stuff like Team Fortress hats. Other PC games now frequently come incomplete, with a coupon for a free day zero DLC for the other half of the game: People buying the game used will end up having to pay for that DLC.

All of these anti used games measures rely on the internet, and work reasonably well because there aren't many game PCs left that aren't connected to that. Consoles are catching up in connectivity, and thus the system which will enable the XBox 720 to tell a new game from a used game will presumably be based on some online registration. If that is true, that could possibly lead to an even bigger piece of news, because it would mean that you can't play anything on your next XBox if that console isn't connected to the internet. I do believe there is still a rather strong demand for offline game consoles, and thus that move could backfire badly. Even on the PC there are lots of people complaining about "always online" DRM systems. It will be hard to convince people to buy a game console that doesn't work when offline.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Spooky mind-reading

I don't know what's up with that Rohan guy. He used to write a blog about paladins and raiding. But these days he writes one post after another which describe completely what I am thinking. Is he channeling me, or mind-reading? Spooky! Anyway, it saves me a lot of blogging, I can just link to the latest Blessing of Kings post about listening to the hardcore. Quote: "And what was the result of the best efforts of these "community assets"? Two million lost subscriptions. Our set is not as important as we think we are."

I totally agree, although that "set" includes me. We aren't as important as we think we are, and game companies are realizing that more and more. I couldn't even get a SWTOR beta invite, and I doubt I'll get one for Guild Wars 2. Listening to the hardcore lost Blizzard 2 million subscribers. I would bet that doing exactly the opposite of what your hardcore players ask you to do would be a better strategy to improve subscription numbers than doing what they want. So maybe the developers could use that forum input after all. ;)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:26 PM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
Dear Meaningful Following!

This week Google+ officially changed their name policy to not necessarily require real names. Specifically in cases like mine, I am allowed to be Tobold on Google+, as long as I can provide "Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following". So you, my readers, now officially gained the title of being "meaningful following". :)

Blizzard, after having failed with their RealID idea, has also come to the same conclusion that a permanently used pseudonym has basically the same benefits with regards to avoiding the negative effects of anonymity than a real name has. So they introduced the Battle Tag as alternative for Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft. It is "a unified, player-chosen nickname that will identify each player in all Blizzard games, on the official websites and in the community forums". Needless to say I already reserved my Battle Tag.

The odd man out is still Facebook, who appear not be willing to change their requirement of using only the name printed in your passport. Unless you are famous enough to get your complaint in the New York Times, like Salman Rushdie, who got his Facebook account first deactivated, then renamed to "Ahmed Rushdie", before Facebook caved in to massive protest.

As the Economist recently noticed, social media worked in favor of the dissidents in the Arab Spring only because the Egyptian secret police were "digital dullards". In other countries, like China, social media with a real name policy are more likely to work in the advantage of the state to identify dissidents than to the advantage of the dissidents to organize protests. But those concerns are mostly extreme cases, which journalists like to discuss. The far more common reasons for wanting not to use your real name have been listed by Danah Boyd, and span everything from teachers that want privacy from their students, to gays in small towns that only want to "come out" online, and not in real life. A lot of good reasons to avoid leaving a very public display of all your interests on the internet are work related, as some sort of separation of work life and private life is often a good idea. If I was developing online games, I sure wouldn't want all those internet crazies to know where I live. And most people with "serious" jobs and "frivolous" hobbies don't want the link made between the two.

As Facebook's $100 billion valuation rests solely on the goodwill of its users and customers, I consider their real name policy and repeated breaches of privacy a real risk. It is easy enough to imagine a "Facebook scare" after some criminal or organization used Facebook to target / identify victims. Many people tend to neglect to value their privacy sufficiently up to the moment when they are reminded of the possible negative consequences, at which point they tend to overshoot into the other extreme. It is better for people to protect their privacy early on, and for companies to give them the technical means to do so. Fixed pseudonyms are a very good option here, and should be more widely accepted.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post