That wonderful resource and community Board Game Geek is running a board-game Secret Santa program. The rules are simple: You get the contact information of a participant somewhere in the world, and it’s your job to send that person a game, ideally one from his or her wish list, by Christmas. At the same time, someone else will get your name, and you can expect to receive a game-based holiday package of your own.
This sounds grand to me, so I just finished signing up. The only problem: waiting till late November to find out whom I’ll be “spoiling.”
October 17th, 2007
Alec Bings
If we gamers consider ourselves Homo ludens—humans who play—we can’t ignore that we have subspecies. Many call themselves “gamers,” but most mean something more specific. What distinguishes Homo ludens from people who don’t call themselves gamers, what unites us, is the perceived geek-factor of the games we play.
Within our geeky species, though, we’ve got varieties so distinct from one another that they can hardly be considered the same animal.
- Homo ludens sangoculi
Those whose eyes begin to bleed after avoiding blinking for five hours during an important raid. In other words, video gamers.
- Homo ludens terataleae
Those who play with monstrous dice. In other words, tabletop roleplaying gamers.
- Homo ludens con-concilii
Those whose definition of “diplomacy” is almost the exact opposite of Webster’s. In other words, board gamers.
- Homo ludens shovelens
Those who shuffle. In other words, card gamers. This subspecies is broad enough to encompass such infraspecies as homo ludens shovelens economica (trading card gamers).
No taxonomy is perfect. As with life taxonomy, the borders are blurry and subject to change. Unlike life taxonomy, in which separate subspecies rarely mate outside of unusual circumstances, Homo ludens is basically engaged in one enormous, non-stop orgy of crossbreeding. In common with Douglas Adams’s Hagunenonns of Vicissitus Three*, Homo ludens is a super-evolutionary being that morphs from one life form to another several times over lunch.
Despite that, though, most gamers do seem to wind up identifying more as one particular subspecies than any other, at least for a given time. For instance, although many MMO players also play roleplaying games, the vast majority of WoW players seem to be Homo ludens sangoculi, and many have never touched a icosohedron in their lives. A quick survey of gaming blogs supports this hypothesis. There are many video game blogs, many roleplaying game blogs, and so on. But there are very few blogs that embrace both kinds of games.
I enjoy different varieties of games with equal fervor. Surely, I’m not the only Homo ludens ecclecticus, right? Who else is out there? And what other subspecies belong in the taxonomy?
*If you don’t know about the Hagunennons, do get your hands on a copy of the original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio production. It has quite a few gems that didn’t survive to the many later versions of the property that will absolutely tickle a fan of the setting.
October 16th, 2007
Alec Bings
Still enjoying taking my time in LotRO, I did something about a week ago I’ve done once before but didn’t expect to do again: I re-rolled a character to create almost exactly the same one.
I enjoy a certain brand of roleplaying in MMOs, one that’s compatible with actually playing the game and that favors emergent narrative. As such, I tend to create characters and envision their personalities and histories with a few bold strokes. I choose the character’s class based on what I’d like to play, the character’s race based on what can play my class of choice. If I have a choice of races, I’ll choose the one I haven’t played before, since in most MMOs each race gets to experience some different content, at least at the beginning of the game.
When choosing my character’s sex, I generally alternate between male and female. I like playing characters of both sexes. No, I don’t choose female characters because of the appearance of their posteriors, nor for any prurient reason whatsoever.
But as my female hobbit burglar reached level 17 and I began grouping more and more, I realized I just didn’t want to deal with the reaction to my obviously male voice in voice chat. I know most people don’t have a problem with men playing female characters, and I know people actually expect male voices for female characters. And I even know that hobbits of both sexes actually look pretty much identical in LotRO.
But I didn’t want to add another element to the already immersion-shattering effect of voice chat.
That alone wouldn’t have been enough reason, though. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’m tempted to achieve the “Undying” title available to those who achieve level 20 without once being defeated. With my first burglar, I died rather stupidly in an easily survivable situation at level 13. I got over it pretty quickly, but when I came up with a second reason to re-roll (changing my character’s sex), that was enough justification.
Now I have a bit of a quandary, though. As I said, I enjoy characters of both sexes. Will my concerns about voice chat doom me to creating only male characters henceforth? Will I get over those concerns and freely create female characters in the future? Will I avoid voice chat even when it’s just so useful (such as for dealing with the fellowship maneuvers key to the burglar class)?
Playing cross-sex characters is a big issue in MMOs, an issue that goes way beyond the scope of this blog post. But has anyone out there ever made a similar decision? Has anyone’s choice of character sex—or other character attribute—been influenced by the prospect of voice chat?
October 10th, 2007
Alec Bings
Take a look at this post concerning Ubisoft’s new “Imagine” series of video games targeting girls aged 6 to 14.
Based on Ubisoft’s study, the first games in the line, to be released in October, are “Fashion Designer,” “Master Chef,” “Animal Doctor,” and “Babyz.” [My wife observed that “Babyz” looks a bit like the detestable “Bratz.”] “We did research, and we are studying the market… that’s what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfill their needs,” Shara Hashemi, Ubisoft’s Brand Manager for the Imagine line, told Multiplayer in an interview last week.
My response: Ugh!
I don’t have special access to the “research” Ubisoft did, but from the descriptions it sounds as if they’ve fallen into the same trap that so much research in general does. However good their data gathering, they’ve asked the wrong question. They claim the main goal of Imagine games is “to have fun.” Then they turn around and say, “The games are built on ideas and concepts that every girl can relate to and they allow girls to expand their creativity while they’re learning real facts and real-life concepts.”
In other words, as with so many girl-targeted products, these games give girls a chance to play at being older girls or women . . . and little else. These games give girls a chance to change diapers, shop for clothes, and cook.
The boy games that the Ubisoft representative said girls aren’t interested in, in contrast, give players a chance to involve themselves in larger-than-life stories and activities. In other words, the results of this “research” confirm industry and cultural expectations that while “boys will be boys,” girls will be women.
The one Imagine game that sounds like it offers something other than a pixelated version of dolls, babysitting, and dress-up is “Figure Skater,” a game in which the player strives for career-life balance in pursuit of an Olympic gold medal. That actually sounds like fun, with a narrative and an opportunity for escapist fantasy.
Okay, Ubisoft just wants to sell games to girls, so they did research that tells them what they can expect will move off the shelves and into girls hands. Unfortunately, such girl-oriented games have performed notoriously poorly, because even though many existing games have elements hostile to female gamers, women wind up playing the fun ones anyway. On the other hand, almost nobody buys the pink boxes.
I bridle at this game line because, as the parent of a two-year-old daughter, I can see the onslaught of cultural expectation coming hard and fast. By the time a girl is “6 to 14,” she’s developed her own tastes, but she’s also been given heavy-handed lessons in what she’s supposed to like.
Remember, Ubisoft began this effort because “A quarter of DS owners are young girls but less than 10% of DS games are aimed specifically at them.”
The point is not that a quarter of DS owners—the girls—are stuck with a toy that doesn’t target them. It’s that a quarter of people who find the DS appealing are girls already! Already, one in four DS owners is female, no doubt mostly playing some of the 90+% games targeted at people.
The most interesting question is: which ones?
October 2nd, 2007
Alec Bings
Last week, I wrote a post about what’s wrong with asking “what women want” from hobby games. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about why I think people keep asking the question.
It’s weird, isn’t it? No one asks: “What can we do to get more women into sports?” Male sports fans grin and talk about how lucky they are to have girlfriends into football, but those whose sweethearts don’t care about sports don’t usually push.
And even though I belong to a “Men Who Crochet” Yahoo! group, I’ve never heard anyone say: “What do men want out of yarn arts?” Knitters expect anyone who knits, male or female, to do it for pretty much the same reasons.
Okay, knitting isn’t as complex as video games. (Oh, there’s just as much complexity about yarn types, equipment, technique, and so on, but knitting is fundamentally about transforming one form of fiber into a useful or decorative fabric.) And sports, though geeky in their own way, have a completely different set of cultural expectations (and even more difficult gender issues).
Obviously, the main reason people try to figure out what women want from games is to attract more women to a hobby in which they’re underrepresented. Existing gamers (of both sexes) do it because they’d like to play games with more women. Game developers and publishers do it because they’d like to make more money, and a bigger audience has more money.
Here’s the heart of the matter, though: the gap may be narrowing, but relatively few women are “gamers.” Oh, more and more women play games. For some games, the player base comprises mostly women.
But hobby gaming—historically the sphere of men, heavily influenced by the male-dominated sf genre, weighed down by the perception that it’s the sphere of children rather than adults—is hostile to the entry of women into the community.
Some women don’t really notice the hostile elements, or even like them. Others get “grandfathered” in by having become interested young enough not to even mind the nastier bits. Many women gamers, though, like games enough that they just overlook the nasty stuff and get on with the fun.
Calling hobby games hostile to women isn’t new, but it does explain why more women don’t game. In a day or two, I’m going to spell out what I see are the elements of the hobby that are unfriendly to women.
October 2nd, 2007
Alec Bings
We kicked off our new Buffy campaign (set in the Spanish colonial town 170 years before the show started) with a character creation session. This was the first time any of the players had experienced Unisystem, and they appreciated the super-graininess, used as they are to GURPS. One player has never, ever played a roleplaying game before, so it was her first time experimenting with the concept of character creation. (Seriously, for the first time ever, she touched a die that had more than six sides.)
She absolutely shined. She’d come up with an interesting background (daughter of an American Protestant missionary family, venturing through unsettled Indian territory to the Spanish town of Valle del Sol), and she’s agreed to play a “potentia” Slayer, partly because not one of my three established players wanted to take the role of Slayer proper.
I did find one problem with the graininess: the players all gravitated toward a heavily overlapping set of Qualities and Shortcomings. The two combat-oriented players appear almost identical (although one is a werewolf). The two non-combat characters (one a potential witch, the other a Watcher who happens to be a man of the cloth) are similarly similar.
With this crew, though (my wife, a couple who’ve been the core of our gaming group for a while, and the new woman), I don’t anticipate this being too much of a problem. Oh, we’ll have two or three people rolling for lots of skill checks, but they’ll come up with different plans and deal with situations differently. With a bit of clever GM manipulation, I think I’ll be able to give everyone good screen time without too much trouble.
That said, I want to hear any suggestions anyone has for fostering “niche protection” in a system that’s mildly hostile to it!
We had a quick play session after character creation was finished. Normally, I have a good idea of everyone’s character a week or more in advance, so I found it quite challenging to place and integrate everyone’s characters into the plot believably. In the end, I felt a bit off.
My wife tells me, though, that if I hadn’t said anything, no one would have noticed. And G— (the woman of the couple) sent me an IM this morning gushing about the game. So I won’t worry.
Instead, I have to figure out how to schedule a follow-up session, along with sessions for the fantasy campaign, the pirate campaign, and the Lost-inspired campaign I’m running. As well as get-togethers for all the great board and card games I want to play.
October 1st, 2007
Alec Bings
Okay, this new xkcd.com comic isn’t not about games, but it certainly applies to some things I see in game forums. Since we’ve been talking about things that prevent women from getting in to our hobby, I thought I’d post it here.
It’s funny ’cause, man, I wish I had an EMP cannon for just such occasions!
September 28th, 2007
Alec Bings
Asking what women and girls want from games is the wrong question. The question probably has no real answer, and if anyone ever found one, it’d basically be useless.
I’ve put off writing about the topic of women and gaming for a while for two reasons. First, it’s a difficult and big topic. Second, it happens also to be a topic I care a lot about.
Thanks to a minor synchronicity, I’ve decided that today’s the day I begin to tackle to subject, though I’ll have much more to say on the subject in the future. The synchronicity that sparked this post involves reading this one at female-gamer.com and discovering the following video (thanks to this post on Feministing.com).
A very funny fake ad from SNL, but unfortunately it’s not really all that outlandish. The early 90s saw the introduction of “Battle Trolls,” macho versions of the bright-haired plastic dolls popular with girls. Although I saw the original ad over fifteen years ago, I still remember the narration: “Everyone knows that girls like trolls, but what to boys like? Battle Trolls!”
It made me shudder then, and it makes me shudder now, especially when I watch my two-year-old daughter putter in her kitchen for a few minutes making imaginary cakes, then switch over to her pirate ship for some high-seas adventuring.
I don’t pretend that, within our culture, a person’s gender doesn’t influence what he or she looks for in games. I won’t bother to speculate on how much game predilections depend on the biology of gender (my instinct an experience suggest biology has almost nothing to do with it, but that debate goes hopelessly beyond the scope of this blog).
But every time someone asks, “What do women gamers want?” We get the silliest answers—from men, from women, from everyone. For instance, a fascinating article in The Escapist a few weeks ago on the topic of heroines in video games included quotes from a variety of women in the industry. While one woman wished that female video game characters would “be wearing pants,” another said
Give my heroine a PMS day where she, unexpectedly and without reason, decides to pull the ears off small bunny rabbits. Have her try to leave the house and go back to change shirts four times. Let her have some upper body limitations and figure out how to manage using her legs.
Seriously? I game almost exclusively with women, and I don’t know a single one who wants menstruation in her escapism.
Here’s the main reason the question of “what women want” is stupid: We all want exactly the same thing from our games. Oh, some of us may prefer puzzles, others strategic board games, and still others vicious PVP, but what we really want is fulfilling entertainment.
In games with a narrative (most video and tabletop roleplaying games, for instance), this means that we want to be heroes—reluctant heroes, action heroes, and antiheroes, perhaps, but heroes nonetheless. On the more abstract, gamey side, we all want to be challenged, usually progressively, but not overwhelmed.
Do some women want the chance to decorate their avatars in MMOs in greater detail? I can assure you that an equal percentage of men want exactly the same thing. Do some adolescent men like to drool over cheesecakes in chainmail bikinis in their game books? Well, plenty of men are turned off by such illustrations, too.
In the end, the reason fewer women than men are attracted to all genres of gaming has everything to do with culture and almost nothing to do with “what they really want.” Almost all video and roleplaying games fail with women not because women don’t want to play such games, not because the games haven’t been successfully targeted to women, but because the games have been targeted at the hard core of a niche market. Most developers still market to the passionate minority. As soon as they start developing for people, not for “Men aged 18 to 35″ or “Women with $50,000 median income,” they’ll really start seeing a profit.
—
I could go on and on about this topic. As I said, it’s very important to me. I’m an unashamed feminist and an unashamed gamer. My regular gaming group comprises one man and four women. And, straight male though I am, I too bridle at the absurd physiques that decorate the books and the sexist language (see he or she) that even my favorite game company ridiculously insists on using.
So I’ll have more to say on the topic in coming posts.
September 27th, 2007
Alec Bings
In early September, I downloaded the intriguing Sword of the New World, a Korean fantasy MMORPG that is “free to play,” although the game ultimately favors players who buy in game items and money with real money transfer (RMT).
I had planned to write a detailed review of the game, but an excellent write-up appeared a couple of days ago at Hardcore Casual that really tells you all you need to know
For myself, here’s what I very much enjoyed about the game:
- The characters look amazing. The costumes are richly detailed and beautiful, and even though you can’t do even one thing to customize their faces, they are appealing. This game has truly captured the anime look and wedded it to the setting.
- The setting is unique: pseudo-Spanish exploration of a (not the) new world. It has some of the flavor of the popular pirate genre but winds up carving out a unique niche. The setting doesn’t try to be believable. Lavishly decorated ballrooms and opulent halls line the streets of a city on the edge of an unexplored continent. But when you’re playing, you just don’t care.
- The music is gorgeous and setting appropriate (really, you just have to listen to it), and the game allows you to control what music is playing.
- The chance to control three characters simultaneously means a person like me, who loves to explore every class available, doesn’t have to split time among quite so many different groups. You can easily make characters of all classes and choose whatever combination seems interesting when you set up an adventuring party.
That said, I quit the game after about a week, because for all the good points, I find it’s just a terrible game. Here’s why:
- It’s too “gamey” for me. As I’ve said before, I prefer a more immersive environment, and Sword of the New World instead reminds me that I’m playing a game. Controlling three characters means I’m not really roleplaying any one; instead, I’m operating three virtual chess pieces simultaneously. The NPCs talk openly about game mechanics.
- Combat is either entirely too easy or almost too hard. One thing I actively dislike about most current MMOs is that they’re too easy. WoW and LotRO are both designed to be accessible to anyone, and even the most difficult challenges are met primarily with time investment, not with skill. In SotNW, though, adventuring can be so easy that you can literally leave the game running for hours at a time, then come back and see how far your characters have leveled. Seriously, the game is actively designed to let your characters grind while you eat lunch. On the other hand, the challenging dungeons and encounters require such careful management of your characters’ abilities and positions to handle the onslaught of monsters – something you won’t have practiced in the super-easy leveling you’ve done so far – that even experienced, skilled gamers may be unable to handle them consistently.
- RMT pisses me off. There are some good arguments for a revenue model based on real cash for in-game rewards, but as someone who prefers immersion, I find such options break my suspension of disbelief. Also, I happen to prefer games in which those with more abundant real-world capital don’t automatically have an advantage.
The worst problem with the game is that I was just plain bored with it after four or five days of exploring. Without a reasonable challenge, an interesting storyline, or a chance to interact in a fun way with other players, even the beautifully realized setting couldn’t hold my interest.
Instead, I felt as if I were playing ProgressQuest. That’s not really fair, of course. The game has lots more to offer. But it doesn’t have lots to offer me.
September 26th, 2007
Alec Bings
On vacation, I had time to read the core rulebook for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game
. I picked it up because a friend who has never played a roleplaying game in her life but who seems like a good candidate absolutely loves the Buffyverse.
In fact, our very first session will take place this Friday. Introducing a new player to roleplaying is fun and exhilarating. This woman is friendly, fun, and creative. She loves good stories and acts in the community theater. Unless the utter geekiness of our activity sends her screaming, she should be a wonderful addition to our group.
I like the Buffy system. This is my first encounter with Unisystem, but from what I can tell it will be a genuinely fun game system that actively supports the genre. The very grainy rules (one skill covers all melee weapon use) mean that players can focus on doing the cool stuff they’ve seen on TV without worrying about a dozen possible techniques for any given weapon. (Note, I absolutely love games that let you worry about such things. GURPS is my system of choice, after all. But that sort of detail has no place in Buffy.)
The text itself does a pretty good job capturing the feeling of the show (the name of that one melee skill: “Getting Medieval”), although sometimes I thought it got a bit heavy handed. Yes, it’s clever to use Buffyspeak in the text, but sometimes every single sentence in a rules-heavy paragraph seems to drip with Whedonesque wordplay. Funny and fun, but not all the time.
This Friday, we’ll spend most of our time creating characters. I’ll need to refamiliarize myself with the rules (I get lots of great players, but none of them ever seem willing to read the damn rules, even though doing so would make our games richer) and put the finishing touches on our introductory adventure.
Before I do, though, I’d like to ask anyone who plays or has played the game one question: How important are the various supplements? I have one player set to take on the mantle of the Slayer, one who wants to be a reluctant witch, another who can’t resist the alure of a lycanthropy, and the last who’s eager to play a Watcher. Will we be missing out on lots of great rules of we don’t have the The Slayers Handbook
and the The Magic Box
within easy reach?
September 26th, 2007
Alec Bings
Next Posts
Previous Posts