“It’s Just A Game” – Or Why We Can’t All Just Get Along

I’ve been ping-ponging back and forth from a series of blog posts, enjoying a great range of shared perspectives about PvP.

• Doone discusses if PvPing and bullying are very much intertwined. (There are older posts that are linked in his post, feel free to explore back, I can’t link ’em all.)

• Eri and Izlain, our staunch PvP enthusiasts in this part of the blogosphere (though I’m sure we’re missing the opinions of a great many Eve Online PvPers who don’t frequent this part o’ virtual blogtown) respond with a spirited sharing of why they enjoy PvP and why they feel rather put upon by assumptions made by PvE enthusiasts

• We get equally spirited responses from Dahakha and Aywren, who share their personal values and how they’ve chosen to apply them in a game

• Somewhere along the way, Zubon produces an informative little aside about a new term that may be useful when discussing PvP – “Contested”

• And the Mystical Mesmer chimes in with his own philosophical and reflective analysis on ganksters and carebears

Naturally, when I read so much thought-provoking stuff, my mind goes into overdrive and starts to try and make sense of it all.

Mostly because I’m super-puzzled by my own reactions, where I generally agree with a good part of most of the things said in -every- post, and then come to a screeching halt at certain paragraphs and think, “Er, no, sorry, I don’t share that particular viewpoint” or “Wait, I’m like that in this one particular game, and like this in some other game.”

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Also, one of the things I like most about reading other people’s opinions on their blogs is that I get to try and pick out the reasons for why they hold a particular point of view, and then attempt to bring it together to form some kind of generalized theory about why people play the games they do – it’s a fascination of mine, if you can’t tell from the name of my blog.

I find it’s also helpful for further discussion, since players are better able to articulate what precisely they like or dislike, and for future developers to then try and design games that put these various preferences together in unexpected ways, rather than just clone whatever has worked before.

Let’s start with some ground rules, since PvP vs PvE can end up as a very loaded and heated subject matter, and I’m simply -not- interested in the same old boring rehash of “PvPers are evil, PvErs are carebears. WE don’t want to associate with THEM.”

Name-calling and dismissing another person’s interests, or unique perspective thusly, is not productive for a shared dialogue.

I’ll be doing my best to try and avoid it for this post, though of course, it’s sometimes fun to write with a very subjective slant for hyperbolic effect, or useful as an emotional release to vent and so on.

You see, I recently attended a talk on mediation, where the speaker shared something I found rather insightful and helpful.

There are generally three ways human beings use to resolve a conflict:

1. War – Being ”right” through might or power. The victor gets to rewrite history to suit themselves.

Yep, through history, this has been a well-used means of settling disputes. Basically, you wipe out or defeat or otherwise try to dominate the other party into agreeing to your point of view.

I’m sure you can think of so-called “marriages” that have essentially descended to this level of negative-sum combat, where one party wins at the expense of another, and both may have bled or been hurt during the conflict it too.

2. Logic / Justice – Determining who is “right” or “wrong” through a series of arguments and fact-finding.

This is the realm of our legal system, where countless lawyers are paid to debate in front of judges (or a jury) over which individual is “objectively” right or wrong. Someone wins and someone loses, the loser usually has to pay the winner in some way and usually isn’t left very happy at all.

The problem with this style of conflict resolution is that it’s very binary and not at all suited for certain situations.

The example the speaker gave was being a grandparent to two siblings involved in a dispute over toys. If one turned it into a farcial trial where one takes each sibling’s statements and uses CCTV cameras to properly determine “who started it” and “who should be punished,”

a) The siblings’ relationship wouldn’t improve at all and they might grow up hating each other.

b) The children’s parents would probably think the grandparent had gone around the loony bin.

c) The overall objective of having a harmonious family where the siblings learned how to get along and play with each other and share their toys wouldn’t be achieved.

I might even suggest that this is something that gamers have been doing for a very long time now and that none of us have got nearer to any sense of satisfaction beyond “Duty calls. Someone is -wrong- on the Internet.”

So what’s the third method?

3. Diplomacy / Mediation – Bringing all parties to the table to talk things through and try to come up with mutually agreeable solutions to everyone involved

It’s not an easy thing, of course. That’s why there’s a whole profession or two dedicated to it.

And long, entrenched conflicts that stretch generations can take an equally long time to resolve, or serious amounts of dedication and perseverance to the overall goal (be it peace, understanding or just a mutual agreeable separation which still caters and cares for the kids.)

But it is this third solution that leads to a potential net positive for everyone involved.

(I’d add on that there’s a fourth method of dealing with conflict – which is less conflict resolution and more conflict avoidance. I’m guilty of resorting to that quite a bit, sometimes. It’s useful when the conflict is really quite trivial in the larger scheme of things and you don’t really mind letting the other person “win,” but there -is- a loser in this situation, and this can build resentment and grudges when it’s more important an issue.)

The speaker then told a story of two sides in history that were so entrenched in hate and a cycle of violence that it took years of patience to negotiate a peace agreement – and even then, certain key individuals were killed off by violence and the passage of time before the remaining parties could come to any sort of understanding.

Anecdotally, an old woman who was very invested in the conflict (after all, her whole life had been centered around it) asked one of the leaders that was instrumental in pushing the peace accord through how he could conceive of doing this, after all, wasn’t he honor and duty bound to kill or defeat his enemy?

His reply: “Do I not defeat my enemy by making him my friend?”

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You may, or may not, share this same belief or think it’s a worthy goal.

But I’ll make an appeal to your self-interest and suggest that it is only the third solution that can actually expand the pool of people you can play with, that increases the number of people interested in playing the game you like.

In every other solution to conflict, you separate yourself from a bunch of people you won’t ever play with, because eew, they’re different from you.

So how do we start coming to the table and finding commonalities with which to work from and begin?

We move from arguing about positions to focusing on interests – the WHYs behind our positions – and listing out what they are.

For example, I’m pretty well stuck on certain positions and values. I get very twitchy and intolerant of games that put vertical progression front and center, and I really hate elitist or close-minded viewpoints being outwardly expressed.

Why?

I don’t want player improvement and learning to be masked by a number that merely grows from time invested. I don’t like that old artifact and hold-over from the devs trying to incentivize people to hold on to subscriptions. I basically don’t have such constant chunks of time to invest simply to stay competitive, and want games that demonstrate that they value my time more. I don’t want players to fall back on a number as an excuse for not increasing their skill or knowledge at a game. (That last, you’ll note, is a little value judgement that has slipped in.)

Why?

Because I believe that a player would appreciate a game more when they have sufficient skill or knowledge to play the game at a certain baseline or level, and when they see the depth that a game is capable of. Because I want to play with players of equivalent skill or knowledge so that we can progress or learn together.

I also want a level playing field where a new player has a decent chance of coming in and right away defeating a veteran player, if he or she plays in a smart, strategic or more skillful way than the old player.

Why?

Because that encourages new blood to join in at any time. Because new blood joining at any time is what keeps a game I like going. Because I might be that new blood and I’d like to have a locus of control and useful things I can do even when new, and aspire to victory, without having to spend 3-6 months “paying my dues” and “earning my way” – I don’t have the time for a game if it makes me do that.

I don’t know if anyone else is seeing this, but when I list all this explanatory stuff behind the simple “I hate vertical progression” statement, I also see the opportunity for different ways to tackle these issues.

You can put players of equivalent skill or knowledge together by -good- matchmaking, or even ensure that only players with the same stats meet, even if the rest of your game has vertical stat progression because you know, Achievers like that sort of thing, incrementing numbers.

You can also try your darnest to bootstrap more players to a skill or knowledge baseline by plenty of tutorials or other means of learning/teaching or if you’re a player, writing guides till your hands fall off or teaching via mic until your tongue turns blue.

You can make sure that your stat progression isn’t absurd to the point of removing all possibility of victory from the new blood or low level, if you -must- have stat progression. Maybe 2-3 low levels can gang up on a high level or highly geared player and achieve victory that way, rather than have it completely impossible or require a raid of 50 low-levels to take down a high level or something of that nature. That might be a balance point that becomes more acceptable to more people.

You can also see that I personally don’t have an intrinsic aversion to PvP, if presented in the right way and with the same kinds of values or philosophies.

Another position: I don’t like bullying. I don’t approve of encouraging this sort of negative, toxic behavior, even in a game, and will not support or play a game that produces safe places for griefer and troll types to feed on others and thrive.

(Note: I do not lump all PvPers as trolls or griefers. I am very specifically referring to those players that are out to ruin another person’s fun and will go through all kinds of hoops to do so, as well as people who enjoy low-skill easy fun “fights” – ok, I’m having a hard time calling it a fight, a “gank?” a “walk over?” “not even a speedbump?” – by one shot killing other players via a massive stat advantage and repeatedly do it, in the hopes of getting some sort of explosive or frustrated reaction from their victim, or even PvE-only players that are used to using abusive or racist slurs on other people as a matter of course, flinging blame around on everyone but themselves and generally “not playing well with others.” )

This one comes very close to being about fundamental values and nears intractability.

Why? Because I believe bullying behavior does result in emotional stress and hurt on the part of the bullied, even if the bully thinks that their victim should just “man up” or “get harder” or “grow thicker skin” or “why so serious, lulz.” I do think that what happens in a game can leak emotions back onto the player behind the character and that we naturally behave the way we are conditioned or have become habituated to behave. I think the world would be more of a better place if games encouraged players to be decent people to each other more, rather than throw hostilities and toxic slurs at each other.

I do however recognize though, that other people may not feel that a game has that much importance in the larger scheme of things.

Or that a particular game is set up with a particular set of rules and boundaries and design to prompt players into acting in a certain way, because it’s the point of the game, to a large extent.

(I personally don’t equate the killing of a game avatar to the killing of a person. Especially not if it’s a MOBA or FPS where respawns are quick and consequences aren’t persistent and don’t last beyond the match. Other people seem to apply a distinctly more elaborate honor code to the whole affair. Couldn’t begin to tell you why, maybe those who have this belief can share.

But I’m not really interested in playing a game like DayZ where I get to act out or experience Lord of the Flies scenarios, because I’d rather not “be content” for groups of friends that play in this fashion. Especially if they’re talking on voice, I’m calling emotional leak into real world right there. Not feeding that sort of predatory desire. Other people are cool with it, cos that’s the whole premise of the survival game.)

Or that a game is in fact a safe place to harmlessly vent or release emotions and behaviors that they would not dream of expressing in real life, because games can be a form of escapism too.

I would, in fact, agree that it’s much safer and probably more preferable for someone to experiment with these things in a game, and get it out of their system that way, even if I might disagree and believe that it’s probably habituating them to behave in a more hostile and combative and domineering fashion, having learned that it’s a viable form of conflict resolution and practising it so regularly.

I would also agree that it’s in our mutual interests to BOTH have games that cater for our specific needs and values. Someone publicly acting like an ass in Guild Wars 2 will get promptly slapped around by the Anet GMs with a suspension or a ban. I have my safe place to game in. I see less trolls and griefers around in my game, while I still have PvP options that I enjoy and plenty of PvP here too.

They’ve got to have somewhere to go. Their safe place that allows them to enjoy themselves. If another game is brave enough to take them on and take their money, then who am I to demand that that game cater to me too? I’m busy over here in my game anyway. In fact, there’s a certain poetic justice in that those who share the same beliefs are spending time with each other, engaged in behavior they understand and find natural.

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It may very well be that we find that one of us won’t play a particular game for whatever reason, but are perfectly fine playing another together.

In the same way, it may very well be in all our interests as gamers, to encourage a diversity of games – even those we won’t play personally – so that others may have places where -they- can play together.

Landmark: The Next Step

That mithril pick and rubicite axe arrived sooner than I’d expected.

Landmark is called a “social building game,” and at this stage of closed Beta, where the floodgates haven’t -quite- opened their way to allowing in bored griefers, many people are still in a civil and cooperative communal mindset.

(Though I hear some people are trying – digging holes around people with excavators, kind of pointless when the “victim” can grappling hook out or evac to safety or even log out and switch servers as a last resort or following people mining all the ore before the other can get to it, a shared node system wouldn’t work here, I guess, so I’d jump servers as a solution, methinks.)

Being in a nomadic frame of mind and needing heartwood to build the stations on my claim before I could settle in, I thought to pop by and surprise visit an MMO blogger and chop trees along the way.

The easiest one to track down was Syl (#totallynotstalking), mostly because she helpfully included a picture of her claim location on her blog , with nearby Portal Spire as easy point of reference – and provided server and island in there too.

Besides, her Twitter said she needed dirt, and I had tons of it from OCD mining.

Trouble is, I hit 360ms ping on EU servers.

The pause time between actions is noticeable. Not completely unplayable, but not that great either.

It’s fine to visit with, or engage in very solitary and slow wood-chopping or mining, but it does feel more molasses-like than usual. (And I hit 220ms on US servers, so lesser of two evils, really. I’m not sure if I can still play Landmark once hostile monsters and/or PvP is introduced, if optimization doesn’t happen.)

After randomly visiting a bunch of claims near the Portal Spire in slow motion fashion. and grumbling to oneself about how lucky Syl is to have a public works guy right on her doorstep (no loadscreens required,) I finally tracked the place in the screenshot down. (Fun self-created explorer minigame, though.)

Syl wasn’t home.

Bah.

From prior WvW experience, EU prime time happens right after SEA prime time, so I figured it’ll only be a matter of time. MMO bloggers being all excitable about Beta launches and all that.

I didn’t quite want to wait around in a 360ms world though, so I popped out and switched to a US server. Confidence, since it was turning out to be home. It was kind of fun to walk around the same area and see how different the same map was, due to the presence of different players.

Syl’s mountaintop was unclaimed in Confidence, but stumbling down a steep mountain into a valley, I came across a moss-covered fort.

The owner was home.

As I walked up to check out the place, he came right up, said hi, and offered a Mithril Pick and Rubicite Axe completely unasked for.

I love those generous-minded sandbox veterans.

I was a bit puzzled at how he was willing to give away the top tier pick and axe, but as it turns out, after more closely reading the forums, these items have a random quality assigned to them when first crafted. And it’s a pretty wide quality range. Truly obsessive individuals end up randomly rolling more than a few times for the really good stuff, I suspect, and end up with a surplus of didn’t-quite-make-the-cuts.

And since it’s not (yet) possible to salvage the items for any return of materials, the only options left are hoard ’em, trash ’em, or give ’em away. Which makes newbies pretty lucky if they socialize with an older player.

I do enjoy observing veterans at work in these crafting sandboxes. You learn so much from what they are doing.

In A Tale in the Desert, I picked up by osmosis (just hanging out around more experienced players) things like scaling up the number of machines operating at one time in order to give higher returns, where to put various buildings for more synergy and efficiency without having to run around, and so on.

This fellow had a most intriguing board.

My goodness, it was like he had a premade set of voxel paintbrushes to work with.

“You mean it’s possible to get shapes like -that-?” was the thought that ran through my mind. “I gotta look into this building thing more. I need those frickin’ building tools.”

So that was next on the agenda after the Syl visit was complete.

Run around, mine tons of tungsten, finish the set of building tools. Good thing I set a claim in a Tier 3 desert, so I did that while at home, so to speak.

—

Conclusion: This voxel building thing has promise.

Lots of it.

And as of right now, Landmark is the only place you can do in it.

Obligatory home claim screenshot. Feel free to friend me (Jeromai) or stop by to visit @Confidence – Tor.

It’s an ugly misshapen sort-of arch.

But it was made with no prior reading or watching of any guides or tutorials, just trial-and-error learning with all the building tools available.

I hit a self-learning limit with this guy’s (lack of) beady black eyes, so next sandbox goal, watch and read all the available building tutorials on the Landmark Wikia.

I won’t spoil it for any of you here, but I do suggest watching at least the basic ones once you’ve got experimentation out of your system.

There are some fairly unintuitive keyboard commands that I would -not- have known about, without watching them.

I think I hit one of them accidentally, yielding a fairly awkward voxel size range, and could have used the other when trying to make the pathetic little arch.

Ah well, so it goes. It’s a learning process.

And the fun of these sandbox crafting games (at least for me) is the stuff that’s unique to the game in question, that learning curve of devouring information and applying it, until one groks all the systems in play.

And so it begins: learning about voxel sizes.

The only thing that I can’t quite shake off though: I feel like I’m learning how to be a 3D graphics artist for SOE, working free-of-charge. On my leisure time.

(Though granted, they’re probably eyeing other folks’ creations that are much less amateur-ish than mine.)

What am I getting in return here? Bragging rights? Showing off pretty screenshots to my friends? Maybe possibly a trickle of Station Cash if another player decides they like the stuff I make – and presumably only a very small percentage of real artisans will achieve that level of demand?

I don’t quite feel that way in Minecraft, where all block creations are exchanging about freely and exist on maps that one can save, whereas I just keep feeling a big corporate specter of “we own everything you’re making here” looming over me in Landmark.

User-generated content may be a bit of a double-edged sword. Players entertaining other players, selling and trading with them, while big brother takes a cut because one chose to do it with the tools that big brother made.

LOTRO: Weatherstock 2012 (and Analysis)

On Serendipity

I’ve always wanted to attend Weatherstock. The very concept and idea of the event is fantastic, a player-created player-run concert for players in a fairly modern triple A sort of MMO (which is usually the antithesis of player-created content), let alone the sheer scale of it – hundreds of attendees gathered in one place (again in typical MMOs, that’s usually unplayable lag city the moment 100-200 players converge together.)

Just as often, every year, I completely forget the date because I’m not a dedicated LOTRO player in tune with the pulse of the community.

(One of the things I’m most disappointed about in my LOTRO experience is the misfortune of accidentally choosing a server that didn’t evolve a strong community name for itself like Landroval, Brandywine, etc. It’s just a run of the mill kind of server, not crowded, not extremely notable, and didn’t help to keep me attracted to the game. Since that learning experience, in any other game I make a beeline to the most crowded servers there are, I’ll put up with lags and queues to see crowds and life in a server.)

I wish I could say that this year was different and this year I marked the calendar and set the alarm clock and what not.

Well, no, I didn’t. I happened to be awake at 1am on the transition between Saturday and Sunday night, and idly clicking on posts in my RSS reader looking for a good read when a PC Gamer post popped up out of the blue – Listen to beautiful player-made music at LOTRO’s Weatherstock music event today.

Cue double take. WTF, Weatherstock is TODAY? Like, RIGHT NOW?

Shit shit shit. And my LOTRO client is about 9 months out of date, I last logged in some time in October 2011.

On the bright side, it’s a 3+ hour event, if I started now, I -might- conceivably manage to get in before it ends. Up went the client, with me rolling my eyes at the usual glacial pace but egging on the program regardless, and I opened up the livestream hosted by MMO Reporter in the meantime to get a sneak peek.

On Anti-Serendipity aka Murphy’s Law

Unfortunately in retrospect, I seem to have gotten hit by an infamous ‘black screen’ screenshot bug. Updating a client in a hurry does that kind of Murphy’s Law thing on you, no prior time to have found and fixed the issue, and I just assumed screenshots would work normally. You know what they say about assumptions.

Only after the event and wanting to write this post now, do I find that I have 56 jpegs of completely black screens which are worthless in terms of recording the memories. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to shamelessly rip off two promotional posters from other websites as my only visual accompaniment (presumably additional promotion is fair use), and that you’ll have to deal with my descriptions and check elsewhere on the web for videos and pictures – of which I am sure there will be plenty soon enough.

First Impressions

Awesome. Spectacular. Both the visual and audio spectacle, that is.

Not as laggy as I feared, all things considered. The livestream hitched occasionally and there was one unfortunate client crash but most of the music could be heard and listened to. And when I finally made it into the game with the client, it was even better as I had control of my own camera and could position myself somewhere within auditory range. Less hitching on my own client.

Graphics were set to very low in tune with the advice, and I actually managed to get up to high graphics on my six year old DX9 desktop. Very high graphics crashed me out. Not that you or me would be able to appreciate the lag risk I took, since all my screenshots turned out black anyway! *wry grin* Stupid bug. Maybe next year.

On the Event Organization

You know, the work put in by the Lonely Mountain Band in organizing this event blew me away. Intensive amounts of effort went into this and making it run so smoothly.

My visitor to Landroval was an ancient low-level hobbit made gods-know-when in the mists of time. I read as level 7, though I’m sure if I hit something that got me xp, I’d probably shoot to lvl 12 at least from the level revamps. I was in a blinding hurry with no access to the Riding skill as a free player (I think) even though I opened a five year giftbox and found an event mount of some kind in there.

So I hoofed it barefoot from Michel Delving to Bree by swift travel and then ran like hell down the safe roads, calculating in my head the chances of strategically staying the hell away from the aggro radius of any scary Lone Lands mobs while dashing to Weathertop.

(One thing my City of Heroes experience taught me, after the gauntlet of the old Hollows hazard zone and Steel Canyon south to north, I don’t shy away from running abysmally low levels through crazy scary red and purple con mobs.)

Except I didn’t have to.

I hit the Forsaken Inn, grabbed the stable waypoint and locked in my milestone (no way I was runnning back from Bree if I died) and was set to go all gung-ho hobbit when a LMB member just automatically beckoned me to follow and smoothly cleared the way of any nasty wargs and crebain and critters and escorted me right up to the peak.

That was the role of the LMB Security Team, who also stood by at the top of the circle and cleaned out the perimeter of any respawning mobs that might disrupt the event. Impressive. Especially when you consider that a lot of these guys were miles away from the actual concert and thus not able to hear anything on their own characters. Maybe they used a stream, ventrilo or maybe an alt account to still be in touch, but selfless and generous all the same, in my opinion.

There were also other teams working their arses off as covered by Keli in this blog post – Freakout Zone for tech support and lag ridden players to recover, Vending to distribute hope tokens and pipeweed and ale, and Stage Crew that manage the bands, stage effects and all the background preparation work for an event of this magnitude – and it’s a lot considering that people have to create new characters on this server, get leveled up and trained in musical instruments, get costumes and what not.

(Imagine, just a bit of foresight by the devs in ease of server transfers or a not-completely-segregated-and-isolated server system and a lot of this work needn’t be done by players that have to push up against the restrictions of the game’s design. Fortunately, roleplayers and their immersion-seeking ilk are infinitely resourceful in dealing with the hand they are given, which is often, not much.)

Big credit and props and kudos to the Lonely Mountain Band for all that event organization. I am seriously hard put to envision many other guilds in other games doing similar things on this scale – I’m sure there are megaguilds out there that could, but few would, if you get my meaning. To run a social altruistic style mega-event that isn’t as handily supported by game design, versus a big mob kill or a pvp gankfest that are more in tune with the mechanics of a game.

(LOTRO does innovate some on this social front with the whole music system, the costumes and the emotes and pipeweed, etc. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we do have to credit the devs for the music system in the first place which allowed such a wonderful emergent property of a Weatherstock concert to evolve. Everquest is probably the other MMO to watch and see if the SOEmote idea goes anywhere.)

On the Bands

I am a new-made fan. I’m seriously going to have to go through all their Youtube videos at some point because there was some really exceptionally sounding stuff I heard up there.

Music is subjective, and while I admit to having a preference for the immersive type of songs which are either entirely composed and set in Tolkien’s world (as opposed to famous real-world songs replicated and played) or a recognizable real-world tune which set to Tolkien-related lyrics, one of the things I noticed and was most taken with was the differences in sound that the music system was capable of producing.

One memorable piece was entirely made out of drumming. Drumming! Who would think you can replicate the rhythms of percussion groups like Stomp in a frickin’ MMO?

Another thing I was taken with was the amount of care taken with the costuming and racial detail. There were white robed elves, an all-dwarf band in blue, hobbits representing, as well as bands of all races unified by clothing design. I have to say my favorite most memorable costume of the night was the dwarf in the Don’t Tempt Me Frodo band in a crazy horned hat all-red get up of some kind, almost ‘metal’ in style. (Not that I could see much with graphics on very low, and not that you can see ANYTHING considering I have black screenshots. *grumbles*)

I’m going to have to watch all the video recordings of their pre-concerts someday soon. Weatherstock for me is just a way to get a sampling of what these bands can do. There simply isn’t sufficient time for a longer format – it was scheduled for 3 hours and it was about 5+ hours by the time we were done.

No wait, my timing calculations are off, it was 1am where I learned about Weatherstock, 3.30am before I finally made it into the game, and it closed about 8.30am-9.00am (in my local time. Americans can just transpose by 12 hours for “normal people” EST times.)

That’s easily eight hours of concert, and god knows how many hours of prepreparation.

On the Audience

Now I understand the appeal of all the LOTRO costuming and outfitting fashion blogs around the place, such as LOTRO Fashion and Landroval Style.

The costume options have come a LONG long way from the much maligned pathetic mismatched color armor and silly hats that were endemic to LOTRO’s launch. I felt quite ashamed to still be in that sort of cheapo brown yellow green red purple clown outfit on my lowbie character when there were scads of people all around me in much more faithful and setting-appropriate, beautifully color-coordinated clothing designs.

That sort of dedication to detail completely added to the immersive aspect. Tolkien’s world has power, and there is a good subset of the LOTRO community dedicated to maintaining the lore of the setting. Utterly fantastic.

Just as a random memorable example, there were two hobbit ladies in a beautiful flower headdress get up of some kind (I’m sorry, I’m not a fashion and dress kind of person, that’s about the limit of my descriptive power without illustrative pictures where clothing is concerned) who danced together in a folksy circle in front of the bands. Wonderful accompaniment and not at all obstructive, since hobbits are so short and they’re such a part of Tolkien’s world.

Also somewhat amusing were two chickens that managed to make the run to Weathertop. These were player-controlled chickens (you can play a chicken in LOTRO Session Play, that I can recall) and while I was somewhat torn between trying to determine if they were out to grief and seek attention as they sometimes jumped recklessly in and out in front of the bands, I have to admit that when a chicken started dancing and tapping and drumming its feet in time with the music, it made an entertaining picture.

I suppose the point of holding such an event in the first place is that the audience also has a part to play in contributing to the concert. Naturally you get the more expressive folk, who dance, cheer, clap, bounce a bit and holler, as well as the quieter folk who stand wordlessly in the back rows or sit and lie back to enjoy the performance and serve as wall decoration and scenery. Both are just as important in their own way. And naturally, you will have a balance of folk who heed the rules by the letter, the spirit of the law, or not at all.

On Griefers

Which segues me right onto our next topic. I am going to detail and describe some of the incidents which happened, though I won’t give the griefers any credit by referring to them by name. This is not to feed or reward trolls in any way, merely that I find some of the sociological interplay fascinating and am fond of musing on such topics to figure out if there is any sort of game design that can influence or tweak player behavior one way or another, or if there’s anything players can do to regulate their own and other peoples’ behavior in a game or virtual world as opposed to real life.

I’ll say one thing right off. I’m actually optimistic about human nature as demonstrated by the Weatherstock 2012 subset. There were only 2-3 people who appeared to have a motive for sabotaging the event, and 3-4 relatively minor incidents, in a crowd of 500 people who were there to play and listen to music. That’s barely 1%.

Considering the potentially possible alternatives like a big group crashing a funeral gathering, or an organized mass griefing by the Goons (google them if yer curious, I’m not linking to those), the internet fuckwad radar didn’t ping much at all.

Griefer #1 – Livestream camera blocking

Some guy ran into the view of the MMOreporter’s camera angle. And stayed there. Not out of ignorance as people were advised to sit down, but willfully, because need attention, dammit. Did some emotes. Didn’t think it entirely through because it was a pretty booty, rather than an butt-ugly one, but the motive was there. Disrupt the view of the playing bands. Didn’t affect folks there who could adjust their own camera angles, but affected those who were watching from the MMOreporter’s viewpoint.

Disappeared within 5 minutes. I presume some behind-the-scenes work by the LMB Stage Crew contacting the GMs. Either that or got bored, but probably the former. Obvious harassment of a single player is obvious. Terms of reference breaking? GM smackdown, done.

Griefer #2 – Forced emotes

Some guy triggered some item that made everyone in the vicinity bow. Or some other emote along those lines. Except there were about 300 players in the vicinity, which means massive text spam that scrolls past the point of even knowing what the forced emote was, all the audience forced to stand up, the musicians may have been affected by the forced emote too, massive stuttering framerate lag and an interrupted song as the audio grinds to a halt.

Twice.

You know what? This one I blame on the devs. Enabling through game design. Bad devs! Whatever were you thinking when you create items in your game that can force other nearby players to do something they don’t want to do?

This is old history since MUD days and A Rape in Cyberspace. Learn from the past, fer heavens’ sake. Voodoo dolls and causing players to lose control of their characters to another player has never been a good idea. At its best, it is a mild amusing prank between people who were friends to begin with. At its worst, well, see the link. Stupid idea is stupid.

I am seriously hard put to think of any redeeming qualities to something that cedes player control to another. Perhaps if you interrelate this vulnerability with a lot of other benefits to some kind of partnership, then -maybe- you can develop the deeper aspects of trust and a relationship forming. Even then, it is best for both parties to consent.

(There’s an MMO, Perfect World maybe?, that lets guy characters carry around girl characters. Except both players have to agree, I believe. A Tale in the Desert has a big trust/vulnerability interplay in the Test of the Marriage, but both players have to participate in the act of marrying each other. Embers of Caerus want to implement permadeath pvp duelling, but hey, both parties have to agree to it.)

I guess it makes for a good story and drama if there is nonconsent by one party. See one-sided ganks in Eve Online and Darkfall and their ilk. Some people like that sort of tension and adrenaline rush and storytelling. That’s seriously the best silver lining I can think of. I’m all out of ideas now.

I don’t know how it stopped, but it did. Presumably more behind-the-scenes warnings given. Presumably if you spam a forced emote one too many times, it counts as harassment and the GMs can act on it then.

Griefer #3 and #4 – Letter-of-the-law chat trolls

These two guys were sharp. The first two broke the standard MMO terms of reference, rules, code of conduct type of deal, and opened themselves up to GM action.

These two guys pounced on the fact that ‘technically,’ very technically so, the musicians were actually spamming Regional chat with their singing.

This was a workaround because the reach of the ‘say’ channel cannot touch everyone in Weathertop, and presumably creating a private global channel and getting all 500 interested people to join would be an exercise in technical cat-herding frustration as opposed to just asking a couple of musicians to use Regional. (And you gotta admit, MMO roleplayers have a bit of an exhibitionistic streak, the very point of acting-in-character is that you gotta show it off to someone. Hopefully for their appreciation.)

So they first officially registered their protest on Regional (disrupting the singing) to the musicians, officially requested them to stop and use say only (most of these musicians have already scripted their songs for both say and regional according to event guidelines), officially registered disappointment that the musicians were ignoring them and continuing to spam (which technically, is rules-breaking, even if you have majority support), and officially made reports about spamming against the musicians. All very officiously obnoxious, of course. Obvious troll is obvious.

Pretty devious too. You see, despite the 10-20 odd people who got baited by the trolls and leapt blindly to the musicians’ defence, spamming regional further in a disruptive debate, a majority does not necessarily make right. Imagine the carnage if an organized group like the Goons formed a majority to harass a singular player or two. “We want to do it! There are a lot of us! We all agree!” cannot be a valid defence when a GM is called up to protect the interests of the poor victim who just wants to do his own thing playing the game.

In the same way, the GM must fairly defend the right of the troll to (as he so claims) continue slaying his wargs and goblins in the Lone Lands in peace and quiet, unharrassed by the irritating spam of some guy throwing strings of text into the Regional chat channel at a very fast pace. Let’s face it, on any other day, if some random guy decided he wanted to start singing something ridiculously immersion-breaking like Lady Gaga into Regional, you’d want the GMs to react to it.

That’s what GMs have to do. No one said it was easy. You have to balance and mediate and try to adjudicate between two parties, one usually highly aggrieved and one with the sole dedicated purpose of said other-person-aggrievation as a minigame.

GMs hired by a commercial MMO company are subject to the vagaries of a bureaucracy, of a hierarchy, of petitions to their superiors, of differing ranks of power as opposed to the ancient MUD days or small indie MMOs where essentially, dev immortals are god and tyrant, dictator, benevolent or otherwise, where what they say, freaking goes and they have the power to enforce it.

And I presume you have to follow the letter of the code of conduct as a GM, even if you try to heed the spirit of things. I think it was fairly cleverly handled all told.

A GM gave a warning on two channels, then left the players to sit around and debate on a Looking for Fellowship channel as the trolls got distracted by the flames and attention of people who intentionally or otherwise took the bait and diverted them from Regional to the LFF channel. Players who wanted peace and quiet could just dump the trolls on ignore. (I very quickly just clicked on their names and hit ‘report as harassment’ for good measure too as I ignored them and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the concert.)

I’m going to presume that behind-the-scenes again, the event organizers would be talking to the GM to handle matters. Weatherstock is a big event with community and dev support, and attracts positive press and attention, so it’s not as if there wouldn’t be extenuating circumstances by the time the incident reports wound its way up to the food chain and back down again.

And there were only about 10-20 minutes left of the event, so you know, if folks (meaning GMs and organizers) were both clever and diplomatic, it would be quite a simple matter to sit there in conversation with a GM and pretty much stall and delay the issue, while officially ‘mediating and arbitrating’ and ‘reaching consensus in discussion’ until it became a nonissue.

On Player Power and Other Social Solutions

We’ve been at this from a very standard MMO angle, GMs as arbitrators, because the incident happened in one, and that’s how it’s set up. It makes me wonder if other MMOs would have ways of dealing with such situations. I may have to leave off hypothetical cross-comparisons and analysis for another post, because the word count of this one is starting to alarm even me.

Lastly But Not the Least

Two more things. Along the spectrum of full fledged griefing and trolling down to the more harmless player participation in an event level, we have fireworks. People are requested not to fire them off as they cause visual lag, and the basic goal is preserving the sound quality of the performance, after all. And there was specific stage crew who were presumably tasked to create the special effects and probably used fireworks to do so.

What makes me curious is, how many of the fireworks that were fired off, unplanned, and fired by players who weren’t part of the planning committee, so to speak? Do we consider that griefing? It’s not as annoying as it’s more immersive, but you know, these things are a spectrum of grey. Same with those two chickens. Or how about the tall guy who is always forever blocking your view and refuses to budge at concerts? We had quite a few of those players. It’s not just black-and-white all the time.

And finally, I want to call out the professionalism shown by the band that won the Free People’s Choice, Mornië Alantië.

Silence is always less noticeable than bluster – and we had some bands that did bluster, comes with the territory I expect, some personalities are made that way and they’re charming when they do. 🙂 But I noticed, and I want to point out my appreciation of it.

If memory serves, the forced emote griefing incident occurred right in the midst of their very first song. Quite disrupted the audio and not a few folks in the audience wanted them to begin the set again. Out of fairness and respect to the other teams and the time limit given for each performance (or due to technical issues, I don’t know how their scripts were set up, but the resulting impression was positive), Mornië Alantië ignored the griefing incident with silent professionalism, adapting with the flow, and played right on, segueing to their second song then the next.

Essentially, the show must go on. Choosing to ignore the equivalent of hecklers in a digital realm, they let the power of their music speak for them. And it was great indeed.

And at the last, when they participated in the Battle of the Bands (and the chat troll police were out in full swing,) I noticed that their lead singer had swiftly removed all Regional singing, only doing so in Say. Couldn’t have been easy to alter his script midway through the concert, but he did without making any kind of fuss about it. And in the end, they just played on.

Fine examples of true musicianship.

(Disclaimer: I do not mean to denigrate any of the other bands by pointing one out, because I am sure there were other bands who did similar things which I missed. From my perspective, this is simply how I interpreted this one band’s actions. There were so many good bands.  My one regret in the Battle of the Bands was that I had to choose to go to one when there was plenty of great music echoing from all direction of the stones of Amon Sul.

I have so much catching up to do on Youtube. And next year, I’ll try to actually mark the date! And get screenshots. Functional ones. Sheesh.)

Why You Game – Think About It

Today, I’m going to advocate the unthinkable, I’m going to suggest that more people should emulate griefers.

WHAT?

In one important aspect at least: to have examined your own motives for play, and be clear about your own objectives.

We get angry with griefers because they spoil our fun. They’re not playing the way they’re supposed to. They’re not “following the rules” of the game, and their objective is often diametrically opposed to most other peoples’ goals in the game. They’re out to make people angry, frustrated, ragequit, or get some manner of reaction in some way, because they find it fun to mess with people like that.

But one of the things they subconciously (or purposefully, if they’re the type to think through and articulate their reasons) do  is become very clear about what they want to get out of “playing” the game (their way,) and defined their own victory conditions (number of people getting angry or ragequitting or comment threads or attention paid to them or whatever.)

—

Of course I morally disapprove of griefers for two main reasons – I don’t think their chosen behavior is healthy for themselves, and certainly not for other people either. It doesn’t seem like a long term strategy for getting along, just a short term “one-upping” that has to be constantly repeated for kicks, and turn into a bad habit or addiction. For me, it’s a real world philosophy seeping in – I think it’s dysfunctional and small minded for people to be happy when they are making other people unhappy. I meet some people in the real world like this – they need to put others down in order to make themselves feel better, they demand attention and get loud and strident when ignored – and it just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

Essentially, they’re playing a very zero sum game. I win, you lose. In their minds, they can only get ahead of others if you’ve lost. If they lose and you win, then they just get more furious and pissed off and try even harder to shift the balance to the other side of the slider.

Thing is, the world isn’t so two-dimensional. There’s another side of the matrix. Too much of the above kind of fighting and it all becomes “I lose you lose.” In which case, no one wins, no one had fun or a good time, and the net misery level of the world went up (which is all very well if that’s specifically your goal, but I’m not that nihilistic, even if it’s 2012 and the Mayans tell us we’re doomed.)

The old prisoner’s dilemma thing – which we will touch on more in ATITD related posts – and the trust factor.

There’s also “I win you win,” the last corner of the matrix,  and “I get by, you get by” which is sort of the middle path, an emergent property from the win/lose matrix.

—

Griefers are an extreme case. If we dial back several notches from chaos (from not respecting other players or the game’s rules) and into lawfulness, we land in the territory of competition.

Now competition is a necessary and healthy counterpart to cooperation. Without that drive to be the tiniest bit better, to improve one’s self, we’d probably be back in the Stone Ages or likely dead as a species. The force of evolution works by only keeping those that are a bit better than the rest, so it’s no wonder it’s ingrained in us to not be the last guy that gets eaten by the sabre tooth cat.

Looking at the amounts of Achieving going on in MMOs, of  in-groups of raiders or PvPers, matches and tournaments and leaderboards, suffice to say that competition is well and alive in MMOs, reflects much of our real world competitive psyche, and is a source of fun for many people.

But I’d like to ask everyone to pause here and reflect for themselves if this really is the case for them specifically.

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Why am I so obsessed with this? It has to do with my prior history in games.

When I first began playing online games in the form of a MUD, I fell hook line and sinker into the stated premise of the game. Get more levels and hit max level. The faster you can do this, the more “pro” and hardcore you are. The more characters you have at max level, the more respected you are, you must apparently know so much about the game and have so many tools you can use to overcome game challenges. Join newbie guilds to get to know people, and you might get invited to a more elite guild type known as an “Order” if you are a promising young padawan. At max level, and with groups of people, you can go on “runs” to defeat big bosses (essentially raids in simplified form) for better gear, which would help you to kill bigger mobs until you get to the (current) ultimate big bads of Seth and Merlin.

In addition, the MUD had ‘quests’ which were human-created, they were essentially competitions run by volunteer player staff known as “immortals.” These often comprised of answering trivia knowledge questions about the MUD and its areas and mobs and lore, or running around the world killing special quest mobs or picking up special items – whose locations you would put together from given clues and also tested MUD knowledge. Again, I fell into this by chance. It so happens that I type quite a bit faster than most people, and maybe pay a bit more attention to the words on a screen that formed MUD ‘rooms.”

As a newbie, I started winning these competitions, and started gaining a reputation to the point that some people would see my name appear and go, “Dang, there goes my chances of winning.” As I got into more runs and joined an elite Order, my gear got better and better, making quest mob kills easier. I learned from my idols and heroes at the time, veterans of the game who were better than I, and strove to emulate them. I started leading runs for newer players, then leading quests, and even leading a guild (while maintaining my connection to the elite Order so that we could feed in the promising players into the Order.)

Our Order in turn took off from the ground up to become pretty much the ultimate (or penultimate, there was one more secret Order that never let on what they were up to, and contained a lot of old immortal player alts – they kept themselves to themselves, and stayed out of the MUD grapevine, possibly because they didn’t want accusations of cheating with their immortal characters) guild. We had our own ‘server first’ by being the only guild that could get to and kill Merlin for quite a long period of time.

I basically bought into the fame and the image that others had and expected of me. I had responsibilities, and expectations to live up to. And winning has its dark side.

This article in particular – How to Lose at Golden Demon – spawned my post today because it resonated so much with me.

After you win, and have a series of wins under your belt, comes the fear. The fear of one day losing. Of not being good anymore. No one wins forever. One day, some new and younger person turns up to upstage you. Your limelight is gone. Your self-image, which you constructed from the surface impressions of other people, shatters or at least takes a heavy beating.

Every loss makes you more focused to win once again. And danger of dangers, you end up focusing on the goal and the end results, rather than the means or the present activity. Therein lies “grind.” Therein lies the threat of not respecting anything or anyone other than the altar of first prize. I turned pretty ugly in those days when a guy showed up who managed to upstage me a few times. Though I tried to control it, I have been guilty of lashing out once or twice at fellow guildmates whom I thought “slowed me down” at the time and let the other guys win. Temper and obsession do not a pretty picture make.

My ruthlessness even shocked a fellow guildmate when we were having a friendly in-guild PvP tournament, and when there were three of us left, I concocted an alliance with the other person to defeat him first because we knew he had the best gear of us all. He never quite got over the revelation of how calculating I was and focused on “playing to win.”

Competition can change you. Take a look at these Neptune’s Pride epic diaries from Rock, Paper Shotgun and Electron Dance. It’s interesting to see how different people react to competition. One or two simply shut down and become avoidant (Me, I don’t think that’s a fair way to go about it, because I would respect the rules of a game if I decide to play it, but hey, it worked for them.) Some just do their best but balance their real world and game time. And a few gamers (and I empathize with them because I have those tendencies) get really deadly obsessive and they can even frighten themselves in retrospect.

There are positive aspects to competition, don’t get me wrong. It makes for high drama, and good memories and a grand story to be told at the end. There is an adrenaline rush that can never be replaced. It makes you push yourself further than you would go on your own, left to your own devices. It offers a good challenge, the opportunity to test one skills, etc.

But it’s also easy to glorify competition in our society. Which then leads to getting carried away by competition – it’s the nature of the beast. There’s a very male monkey hierarchy thing going on.

And in the end, it behooves us to take a step back and examine ourselves to see if that’s really the way we want to keep going.

We don’t have to go to extremes either way. I’m not saying that oh, all competition is bad, and we should become communists and hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” together. That way doesn’t work either, not all of us are cut out for hippy commune living.

But we aren’t -just- monkeys all the time. Life works on a balance of competition and cooperation. Human society succeeds with a fair share of altruism, connected groups may get ahead better. (In later posts about ATITD, we’ll touch more on this, ATITD reflects life in microcosm really well.)

Brian Campbell from the Escapist Magazine suggests we might be able to let up once in a while and be a little altruistic even in our competitions (as long as it’s not a professional tournament where folks have to be serious and such.)

Even Sirlin quantifies that playing to win doesn’t have to be ALL THE TIME, ALL-OR-NOTHING. There’s also putzing around for nonproductive fun or experimentation with strategies that can be a balance point to being competitive.

And he also acknowledges that for many people, playing to win isn’t everything in life. He writes his stuff for those who have decided and articulated the goal they are striving for, to improve themselves and win tournaments, which to me is fantastic – all power to them, and it gave me insight into a way of thinking that is personally quite alien for me.

I finally realized this, based on examining my experiences. When I bought into the goals of the masses on the MUD, I became another person. It was someone with all the trappings of success and had reached the top, but secretly, inside, I was not happy. I was proud, fearful, and most of all, lonely. There’s awfully rarefied air at the top. You push away connections or they push away from you. They put you on a pedestal to be admired and become distant. Your in-group becomes very small, as you stomp on others to get up there, and everyone else is out-group to be despised or feared or hated or looked upon as a threat. And in turn, they don’t like you much either.

—

For some, while I’ve been saying is probably unthinkable. “Why -wouldn’t- you be happy when you win? -I- love winning!”

Possibly it’s like winning the lottery, you won’t know until you’ve been there. Turns out we’re poor estimaters of our own future happiness as hedonistic adaptation kicks in.

Or maybe you really are different from me, and your brain is structured in a way that really enjoys those kicks of winning and you love the spotlight of fame and it would never make you lonely or miserable or sad. In which case, all power to you, if you’ve examined that for yourself. There are games out there that really suit you.

But please, do take time to examine your motives and goals to see if they are your own, or someone else’s or what society (in-game or real world) thinks you should be doing.

It’s too easy to get caught up in what the game says you’re supposed to achieve, or what other people expect of you, and end up striving to match those expectations. Ultimately even if you achieved them, they may end up feeling quite hollow if they don’t match with your internal compass.

—

For myself, I feel happier when I’m helping others, teaching them, expressing understanding and loving-kindness and patience. I feel happier when I’m improving my own skills and learning at my own pace, rather than feeling obliged to keep up or match some standard of achievement. I feel happier when I’m playing for the sake of play, to experiment, to wander, to wonder, to discover and marvel.

Striving against obstacles (people or computer controlled or inanimate) to achieve a victory state is core to many games. But I treat this Achievement or rather the act of achieving (we too often focus on the end result these days, and that leads to “grind”)  as just a subset of my play. Now and then, I indulge it, because that’s also a part of myself that I must acknowledge. I enjoy the dings and the progress bar increments and even team-based PvP match “wins” from time to time. The sense of fiero as a reward is fun, but I remain aware of it and am careful to avoid jumping down the pit of the dark side. Been there, done that, really didn’t like it.