Everyday Gamer

The statistics are kind of alarming, though. It made me remember a documentary I saw once about this kind of thing that didn’t really register at the time. It basically said that if you’re accused of a crime in Japan and it goes to trial, you might as well consider yourself guilty and focus instead on trying to get the lightest punishment you can rather than proving your innocence. It’s a little disheartening. Of course, I come from Canada, where we’ll believe you’re innocent as long as we can’t see your fingers crossed behind your back, so I admit to being fairly idealistic. “Yeah, he had the knife ‘n all, but he said he didn’t do it, and it’s not like he’d lie, eh?” – Dora

In response to “Pardon My French” from The Escapist Forums: I teach English as a second language for a living, and I can’t stress the importance of video games (and games in general) as a teaching tool. Not only are games much more fun than rote exercises, they also often provide a level of immersion that is quite similar to studying abroad. After all, using English isn’t just about knowing vocab or grammar rules; it’s about being able to function in an entirely English environment (even a virtual one). – boholikeu I’ve had the same experience, but substituting your French with Spanish. I’m from Spain and I mostly started learning English through videogames. I remember trying to decipher those mission briefs in X-Wing when I was little, and a few years later playing through Final Fantasy IV while translating with the help of a dictionary those bits I couldn’t understand. Nowadays, I just can’t stand material that has been translated to Spanish, it just feels wrong. I’ve seen a fair share of bad translations, like the “Hollow One” monster in Diablo II becoming the “Hueco Uno” in Spanish (which would translate back to “Hole (Number) One”), but even a good translation seems off. And it’s quite bad too when I get a translation that is in fact in American Spanish, which is understandable but sounds completely alien in choice of words and accent. This frantic translation of every material that is published in Spain (and other countries like France) is in the end bad for the education of people in these countries, and for their economy too. Most Spanish persons don’t know a word of English, because they’ve never had the need to learn it since everything has been spoon-fed to them in Spanish, and thus will never think bigger than the country for anything they do. Heck, even some of our recent Presidents/Prime Ministers didn’t know how to speak English, and had need of interpreters in international meetings. Of course, this means it’s impossible for them to keep a conversation with many other leaders, and makes their reactions slower than they should be. As for me, I’m practically trilingual in Spanish, English and French, and I’m trying to learn Japanese. And I’ll never regret having learned any of those languages. – Kaorael

In response to “Physician, Gank Thyself” from The Escapist Forums: Very interesting article. I’ve recently started playing WoW, after years of avoiding it, and other games like it. I never really saw the appeal in it as a player of FPS games. I got onto it after my PS3 broke and had to be repaired, so I needed something to fill the 6+ hours of MW2 that I would usually play a night. What better to do this then to replace the grind-tastic leveling of COD’s multiplayer with WoW. Now to be honest, I probably played less WoW then I did MW2, but I could definitely see the addictive qualities of this epic new world. No longer was I limited to 10 or so small locales, of which I knew every corner to hide in, but know had miles of open land to explore at my own pace. With Modern Warfare once the fight was over, I’d put the controller down and go on with my day. With WoW I find myself thinking about the world and my character long after I’ve turned the PC off. What gear I need, best way to level, where to go next. The six hours of play are only a small part of the experience. In essence you are playing every waking hour of everyday, and in this lies the problem of addiction. It’s like the game you can never turn off. I’m lucky that I haven’t fallen into the 16 hour a day cycle, but then I am just a level 35 Blood Elf Warlock, far from the hours of time-bending end game content. I guess we will see how that goes when I get there. – XinfiniteX

The key is to be able to find balance. It’s been hard, but I’ve weaned myself off when things get busy (now that I’m back in school, that’s usually a good chunk of my time.) I’ve been glad to see WoW become more casual friendly. Raiding no longer requires 20+ hours a week. (My own guild raids about 9 hours per week, with a relatively lax attendance policy.) The biggest thing about raiding that people outside of Azeroth have difficulty understanding is that it’s really a team sport. There have been plenty of times, particularly in the more “serious” guilds I belonged to where I logged on to raid desperately hoping I could sit out and go do something else. But, I hated the thought, especially when recruitment was slim and we had some attendance problems, that my not logging on could mean that 20+ other players wouldn’t be able to raid. (Ok, I play a DPS, which is hardly crucial or hard to find, but still). I think that is where the biggest challenge comes in. You don’t want to let down your team. I’ve been frustrated on nights where a tank or healer didn’t show and we had to call the raid. I made time to be there, I felt they should too (or at least give some kind of notice so the guild could alter the plan accordingly.) – Jaded Scribe I liked the article a lot; it gives a perspective from someone who understands both the psychology of addiction and the appeal of WoW. It seems like any time the words “addiction” and “WoW” end up in the same sentence, you see people take a stand one way or the other. Either WoW is evil and everyone who plays it should quit immediately because sooner or later it will take over your life, or WoW is fine and it’s just the screwed-up people with addictive personalities who play it who give it a bad rap. The truth is somewhere in between: WoW is designed to keep you playing, but it’s a matter of your own self-control whether you let it take over your entire life or just become a (time-consuming) hobby. Look, I’ve played WoW since a month after its release, when I was a sophomore in college. I’ve raided in all three expansion cycles (up to C’Thun in vanilla, killed Illidan in BC pre-nerf but only cleared Sunwell post-nerf, and with both 10 and 25 man Lich King kills in WotLK), I follow WoW news sites and forums, and I’m working on my 8th 80 (seriously). And in the meantime I graduated with honors from a well-regarded university, landed pretty much the best job out of school I could ask for, and actually get out of my apartment on the weekends. Could I have used my free time better? Probably, but there’s no fun in min/maxing your life like that. If WoW destroys the life of everyone it comes across, then if my life hadn’t been “destroyed” I’d be a multi-millionaire by now or something. On the other hand, everyone knows That Guy who started playing [insert MMOG here], ended up dropping out of school, gaining 100 pounds, holing up in his parents’ basement, and not seeing his friends for 2 years. Okay, so that particular story is a bit of an exaggeration in most cases, but there are certainly people who don’t have any self-control. I see guild recruitment ads all the time making a big deal about how “hardcore” they are, that they raid 6 nights a week for 5 hours a night (never mind that the best guilds don’t actually do this except maybe for short periods). This isn’t healthy, and it’s a big problem that no one gets that fact through to these aspiring guild leaders. All of which tells us that saying “WoW is evil” or “WoW is never the problem” is shortsighted. There’s very little research on how MMOG addiction, and video game addiction in particular, compares and contrasts with other kinds of addiction, and we need people to do it who aren’t beholden to one extreme position or the other. – incoherent

In response to “Gamers of the Third World” from The Escapist Forums: This was a fascinating article. I always thought of India and China as countries of inexpensive electronics – I figured they’d be more prone to gaming than us because comparatively speaking, it costs less for them to buy it. I guess I didn’t take into account the variences between class-based income and the lack of things like minimum wage and government pensions. I’ve never really felt rich – and right now on a student income I feel downright poor! But now I can see ‘Holy hell, my government actually pays me to study full time’. And if I picked up ten hours of work a fortnight (all I am allowed to do without cutting my payments in half) that’s almost $200 a fortnight I could then spend on games. Or food. And this is me living BELOW the poverty line in Australia. – VondeVon The best article on the site, by far. I hope this puts a lot of things into perspective, because I’m also coming from the side of “piracy as only means” since where I grew up buying a game was prohibitively expensive so we either rented or bought them pirate cartridge (in the few cases it was worth owning something.) But consoles not being sold until they were cracked to play pirate games is still the norm in a lot of places (you could get them still from big retailers, but for double the price and since you have to pay 200% for the games, you’ll end up cracking it anyway eventually if you want to play anything.) In any case, I bet everyone who grew up away from Europe/America/Japan will identify with all this to some degree. Or for example someone’s first exposure to gaming was a Chinese NES knockoff that had 50 games in memory or whatever (hell I first knew the NES through the dozens of Brazilian clone consoles.) It’s all rather commonplace stuff that I bet many people “on the other side” don’t think about, or don’t see it as valid experiences for some reason because it involves “piracy.” But really now, I see it as access to culture. If the economics are retarded, piracy will make things accessible and that ultimately is what counts to me. It’s not the method, it’s the end result (getting access to culture denied by politics/economics/etc.) Oh yeah I specially liked the art-gallery comment. That’s a fantastic analogy. In many cases it would be like taking a photo of some famous painting and showing it to people who can’t see it personally. Sure it’s not the real thing, but depending on the photo you can still get an idea of what it’s like. – Ytmh

title: “Everyday Gamer” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-15” author: “Tiffany Roberts”

– serenegoose This, 100%. So how is a 32-man TF2 game less massively than a 32-man raid party? How are the millions of people outside the dragon’s cave different from the millions of people playing on different servers? Just my food for thought. Also, I’ll be damned if any of my raids were as satisfying as a simple 4v4 CTF on a Quake Live server, which has something like 600,000 active accounts…MMOFPS, somewhat? Not like Planetside, but in its own sense. 🙂 Starcraft may be a MMORTS, in its own sense, too, but not about to get into it. I think the only real difference are things like Wintergrasp battles that end up being like 300v300 sometimes, (but even then it devolves into smaller skirmishes most of the time), or the way EVE has more than 300,000 players on just one server, (though every star system is instanced as far as I know), and TF2 will never create an environment like that. But Steam and its players might create the same community that would come of sitting in trade chat talking and interacting with the other hundreds of players online – because even in WoW, it’s not like you play with every single one of your friends all at once. – Valiance

In response to “Change We Can Believe In” from The Escapist Forum: Exactly how are they gonna do this without interference from the mega publishers? Take Two, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Blizzard/Activision… I’m sure these big wigs enjoy the freedom in laying off workers once a game has completed development. They wouldn’t just sit by and allow a serious union to form… Actually…scratch that. Not every developer would join IGDA…and given the current technological feats we have…where developers from the east can divvy up certain assignments for others in the west, I don’t think there is a real threat of boycott… – hansari It seems to me that the biggest way the IGDA can make a difference is through direct benefits to its members (such as the subsidized legal services idea mentioned in the article). I really don’t see how how any of the other proposed changes would do anything since the IGDA doesn’t have the bargaining power a union does. An angry letter from the IGDA condemning Kotick is still going to be an empty gesture, even if every developer in the industry is a member. – boholikeu

I do concur that the ESRB, in the greater scheme of things, doesn’t control anything. They are a creature of the ESA, lest we forget; and the membership of that parent organization includes the console manufacturers themselves. What’s more, when explaining the tendency for certain types of content to always produce particular ratings, the ESRB has repeatedly reminded us that they don’t create the social standards of our society (however bizarre) but that they merely follow them. However, I would contend that the ESRB is at least complicit in the de facto censorship of content in the games industry, chiefly through the farcical “Adults Only” rating. The console manufacturers and retailers may be the ones who summarily ban AO titles from commercial release, but when I look at the rating, I find myself hard-pressed to dismiss the ESRB’s role in this nonsense. The “Mature” rating supposedly covers games appropriate for individuals seventeen years of age or older while AO is somehow exclusive to those of us at least eighteen years of age? Absurd. How can any entertainment ratings system possibly be accurate enough to advise consumers on suitability of product content to within an age gap of one year? Even more ridiculous, it is implicit in the mission and rhetoric of the ESRB that the suggestions their ratings offer are universally applicable to all families. The perceived difference between M and AO is essentially arbitrary, exactly as the ESRB has designed it. For all intents and purposes, the AO rating is nothing more than the broom that the ESRB uses to sweep potential troublemakers under the rug. – ReddHeretic Is the MPAA less relevant because people aren’t paying to have their videos rated before they post them on YouTube? Or because it didn’t warn theater-goers that they might overhear someone engaging in risqué conversation in the seats behind them? I find this critique of the ESRB to be equally absurd. Regardless of how it may appear to an uninformed consumer’s point of view, the ESRB is not a regulatory body established to label every piece of software ever created. It is an advisory committee, established to provide content-based age-appropriateness suggestions for mass-produced games from major publishers, based on a subjective but (hopefully) consistent set of criteria. That is how it was always supposed to work and that is how it does work, no matter how those suggestions may be enforced elsewhere in the games industry The ESRB received the praise and accolades noted in the article for doing what it was set up to do, not for overstepping its mission or interfering with First Amendment rights, as the author seems to hint she thinks it now should consider. As long as there are kids who want to play those games, and as long as there are parents who are concerned about the content those kids may access, the ESRB has its relevant purpose. – Stinking Kevin Be glad that your ratings board -has- a rating for every game. Mine does not, and it’s the cause of nation-wide anxiety when a popular, yet risky game faces the censors. They don’t call them censors, of course, they call them “Classifiers”, but since they lack the ability to “classify” everything, and have a status “refused classification”, it’s censorship. I think the ESRB does quite a good job, though. I’ve been alerted to their educational advertising on multiple occasions by independant sources, and I feel that, were I a parent in the US, I could make an educated decision based on the rating given, and cursory research on my part. Videogame ratings and classification is a complicated issue, but it’s not solely up to the Board to ensure that people do the right things. As a game retailer myself, I actively and deliberately will ask for photo ID, I’ll ask for parental consent, and inform of “restricted” level ratings. Admittedly, that’s the law in Australia, but I’d do it anyway, I think. It’s not often that I see a parent ask independantly what the content of a game is like, or see them turn a game down based on my advice. That’s fine, though. That’s their choice. It’s not the responsibility of any Board, Council, Group, or Government to parent people’s children for them. And ultimately, that’s the point of the ESRB – To be an aid for parents. Whether or not this is achieved through regulation or education isn’t the point. – Fenixius

In response to “TGI: Power in the Making” from The Escapist Forum: This is certainly an interesting and encouraging read nonetheless. Returning from VGXPO a founder of a small NJ studio putting out their first game recommended moving to the West Coast if you want a job in games, as there just isn’t as much on the East Coast. However, it would be great to see a larger presence here, and it’s looking like that may happen. With this triangle, Harmonix and newly found Moonshot Games in Boston and developers like Atari in NYC and Vicarious Visions in Albany, getting a job in games on the East coast may be easier. – ccesarano