dev_chieftain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-06-12 10:25 am
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-06-12 10:25 am
A comment in response to a blog post
First, check out this awesome blog post (it's written in a friendly and funny tone, which I like): Viking Women got More Respect Than That!
Then, below, if you are curious, my comment (which was far too big to post in reply to the blog entry!)
Hey there! You linked to this from the FeministFrequency Kickstarter, so I followed here to read up on your proposal and see what you were talking about.
There are a lot of points to make here! I'll go from top to bottom. Some of my responses come from the comments.
1. MMOs and experience with MMOs
I think the big problem here is that you DO need to have some experience to be able to have an idea of what appeals about the industry in the first place, who's tried to make the changes you're talking about, and why efforts have not been successful so far. So often the blame for a lack of diversity in gaming is laid at the feet of the developers, the people writing and drawing and programming the games. It's really not them: it's the investors that are the problem. This is what makes things like Kickstarter so amazing-- you are given the opportunity to personally fund something that embodies the kind of work ethic and design philosophy that you personally WANT to see in a game / series / comic / whatever!
There are a lot of MMOs out there that offer various attempts at trying to make combat slightly less important in gameplay (since mainstream MMOs thus far have that element, even when trying to de-emphasize it). My main examples here are going to be Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, and the Star Wars Online MMO that preceded Star Wars: The Old Republic. (I'm actually kind of puzzled by your earlier comment about the Old Republic; did you mean some different game? The Old Republic had not yet been released at the time of the other comment, so I was confused.)
Anyway:
Vanguard is a non-standard MMO in that it is more like a MUD. (You may have experience with MUDs; bear with me, I am writing as if you do not just to be sure to cover all bases!) This means that when you do something, you are raising a skill in it. Your experience with paper RPGs means you know what this system is like, since ultimately MUDs are based on paper, tabletop RPGs anyway. You put points in X, and you're good at it; you keep doing X, and you get better at it. Vanguard actually offers three separate types of gameplay to advance as. You can advance as a crafter (eventually building boats and houses, fancy armor, and so on), you can advance as an adventurer (running around and killing things), and you can advance as a diplomat. The diplomacy game is actually what's unique about Vanguard. It exists to make talking to NPCs mean something: an NPC with a problem may require you to sneakily use your diplomacy to either trick them into helping you, or reveal the information you need to go help them. Here, diplomacy is represented as a musical minigame with cards that represent different types of diplomatic strategy. This is interwoven throughout the rest of the game, at least in the early levels. (I have not played past level 20, but for reasons I'll get to.)
Vanguard's big problem, by contrast, is the attempt to keep the whole game as one continuous map. Due to the fact that there are not separate areas, as you might see in a modern MMO (or a regularly updated one, like WoW), Vanguard suffers from crippling lag most days, even though the playerbase is understandably pretty small. This is a game that dreamed very, very big, but had a very big failure because it pushed too hard in the graphical department. Since nobody could run the game on release, it was abandoned, and then the graphics dumbed down to try to keep the project afloat.
Then you have Lord of the Rings Online, which is a heavily adventure-focused game, but also intermixes adventure of the standard variety with adventure of the traveling variety. Exploration is one of the most exciting untapped parts of MMO design, because it's easy to make travel worthwhile and meaningful for a character. LOTRO features a wealth of non-standard quests and minigames mixed in with the main ones, particularly in the Shire. You can acquire missions to deliver the mail to new locations (timed runs across the Shire's landscape, which is quite beautiful) until you re-establish the mail service (a quest with story, which has a reward). During the mail missions, you must avoid other hobbits, because they are nosy and will delay you by talking to you to try to find out what's in the mail; likewise, missions to deliver pies must be done while avoiding hungry hobbits who want to eat your pie. LOTRO also introduces the idea of an MMO-wide storyline that IS progressing. You can participate in the questline that progresses that story, which leads to involving your character in cutscenes with characters from the books, and advances your personal storyline as connected to them; you can ignore that questline once you've done the first bits of it if you prefer to focus on other questlines or activities.
LOTRO also has a rich, involved and interesting crafting system, and attracts roleplayers in a way that many MMOs do not. It has a lot to offer!
Finally, there's the now-defunct Star Wars Online MMO, which I've heard had a complex player economy and allowed players to make their own jobs. I knew multiple people who played the game as crafters, engineers, designers, who were protected by players who enjoyed the fighting experience, but never had to fight, themselves. These could be diplomats who were escorted by their fighting friends from place to place, or frontline emergency techs who would build replacements for armor and weapons while covered by their fellows. I think this game sounds like a VERY close example to what we're talking about going for in your comments and post, here: a game that encourages a cooperative element.
The reason I started off by saying that you need experience in MMOs to really make suggestions with regards to MMOs is precisely this: while I highly enjoy the idea of a non-combat MMO (and will suggest you check out a couple below!), I think that your proposal is unrealistic in the sense of actually SOLVING the problem. Some people do enjoy fighting in games, and we shouldn't turn them away any more than we ourselves are currently being turned away. The true solution would be to seek out a game experience that permits anyone to do ANYTHING, where a person could play a soldier and work cooperatively with a non-combatant to help them in their travels doing things that don't involve combat at all.
2. The idea that there's a genetic difference or chemical difference between male and female gamers
This was noted in a comment, and I have to say this attitude is fundamentally offensive and disturbing to me. The problem isn't that men specifically enjoy the activity of killing or being violent more than women (I have taken savage joy in playing a violent game like Wolfenstein 3D, and I have had many male friends who delight in spending hours on meticulous character creation and developing stories and backgrounds for their OFTEN female characters in MMOs or other games with customizable characters): rather, the problem is that the people being marketed to are the people who take savage joy in violent activity, and everyone else (male and female alike!) who would prefer to play a non-violent game that focuses on storytelling is being completely shafted. Men like stories too, and women are not wholly excused from enjoying violent games.
The attempt to make some gender delineated distinction makes me very uncomfortable; as a woman, I don't agree with any assertion that societally assigned values have any bearing on what I am genetically predisposed to do or not do.
3. The proposal
Your proposal sounds interesting in some ways, but also highly generic in others. We have had lots of games and stories and movies and books and comics and television shows set in Fantasy Mideval Europe, which is often an excuse to:
1) recreate traditional views of sexism with the excuse that it's "period accurate"
2) recreate traditional views of racism with the excuse that it's "period accurate"
So I have a problem with your proposal on that first level. How fantasy is this fantasy? I would be completely all right with a fantasy setting in which players could be any person of color and any gender they like (including trans, since there is magic, so why not?), but a fantasy setting that is too steeped in so-called realism as an excuse to reinforce prejudice leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Since you are yourself female, I assume you prefer a fantasy setting, however, so I'd like to know more details!
4. Existing non-mainstream MMOs that are working on these problems and how they are accomplishing the goal of providing a non-violent gaming experience
EVE Online is, indeed, a good example of an MMO that offers an unusual experience. Total PVP is really not my bag of tea, but it does provide a completely player controlled economy. The player-sects and factions change the setting, which makes it very dynamic and charged with excitement. The space exploration elements are combined with a constant sense of danger, however, since you're always at risk of being shot down if you venture outside of safe space (and you're still in danger there, sometimes). The game also is intentionally designed in a way that privileges any player who's been playing longer than you with higher skills, and provides absolutely no means of evening out the disparity between player skill level as a four-year player, and player skill level as a two-year player. Since all skills are learned over a set amount of time, and there are too many skills to learn them all, this is a significant problem with Eve, I'd say.
As for non-mainstream games, however, there are actually totally-sandbox games where violence doesn't even have to enter the equation. I can think of two off the top of my head, though I know I've seen and played more.
Uncharted Waters Online is the first; this is a relatively successful MMO in which players CAN engage in combat on the high seas if they so wish. However, the game depends on players trading goods from port to port, and your main goal is either to discover new places for your noble patrons, to sell goods from place to place, or to explore the seas and discover new people so you can become more acclaimed with the nobility. How your character dresses is important to convey the character's class to nobility, or trustworthiness to potential buyers. Combat takes place on the sea and is generally only initiated by NPC ships that may attack to try to steal your cargo. Since it's so minimal and you can run away from these combats by sailing away from incoming ships, the game is largely non-violent.
Then, there's A Tale in the Desert, which I highly recommend you try out. A Tale in the Desert is a cooperative, creative, crafting based MMO. The 'Tale' lasts several months (possible a year) before being re-started. During the Tale, you and other players throughout Egypt (as it is set there) go to the various schools located throughout the land, learning new technologies, collecting materials to advance your personal growth and development, and donating materials you collect towards the research and development of NEW technologies-- the game is entirely non-violent and the only competition you might have is for resources, later on in the game.
This sort of play experience IS available, and extremely fun. It encourages a cooperative, friendly playerbase and atmosphere and it works! But because the games are not mainstream, nor funded by mainstream, many people who are less familiar with MMOs don't even know that they exist-- which leads to complaints that such projects have never been tried.
I think it's important that we are aware of what the industry has tried (whether mainstream or not) both so we can make an educated assessment of what the industry is doing right and wrong, and so that we can support the things that it's doing right while accurately pinpointing what hasn't been tried enough to our satisfaction. (Just because something has been tried, after all, doesn't mean it was done right!)
Then, below, if you are curious, my comment (which was far too big to post in reply to the blog entry!)
Hey there! You linked to this from the FeministFrequency Kickstarter, so I followed here to read up on your proposal and see what you were talking about.
There are a lot of points to make here! I'll go from top to bottom. Some of my responses come from the comments.
1. MMOs and experience with MMOs
I think the big problem here is that you DO need to have some experience to be able to have an idea of what appeals about the industry in the first place, who's tried to make the changes you're talking about, and why efforts have not been successful so far. So often the blame for a lack of diversity in gaming is laid at the feet of the developers, the people writing and drawing and programming the games. It's really not them: it's the investors that are the problem. This is what makes things like Kickstarter so amazing-- you are given the opportunity to personally fund something that embodies the kind of work ethic and design philosophy that you personally WANT to see in a game / series / comic / whatever!
There are a lot of MMOs out there that offer various attempts at trying to make combat slightly less important in gameplay (since mainstream MMOs thus far have that element, even when trying to de-emphasize it). My main examples here are going to be Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, and the Star Wars Online MMO that preceded Star Wars: The Old Republic. (I'm actually kind of puzzled by your earlier comment about the Old Republic; did you mean some different game? The Old Republic had not yet been released at the time of the other comment, so I was confused.)
Anyway:
Vanguard is a non-standard MMO in that it is more like a MUD. (You may have experience with MUDs; bear with me, I am writing as if you do not just to be sure to cover all bases!) This means that when you do something, you are raising a skill in it. Your experience with paper RPGs means you know what this system is like, since ultimately MUDs are based on paper, tabletop RPGs anyway. You put points in X, and you're good at it; you keep doing X, and you get better at it. Vanguard actually offers three separate types of gameplay to advance as. You can advance as a crafter (eventually building boats and houses, fancy armor, and so on), you can advance as an adventurer (running around and killing things), and you can advance as a diplomat. The diplomacy game is actually what's unique about Vanguard. It exists to make talking to NPCs mean something: an NPC with a problem may require you to sneakily use your diplomacy to either trick them into helping you, or reveal the information you need to go help them. Here, diplomacy is represented as a musical minigame with cards that represent different types of diplomatic strategy. This is interwoven throughout the rest of the game, at least in the early levels. (I have not played past level 20, but for reasons I'll get to.)
Vanguard's big problem, by contrast, is the attempt to keep the whole game as one continuous map. Due to the fact that there are not separate areas, as you might see in a modern MMO (or a regularly updated one, like WoW), Vanguard suffers from crippling lag most days, even though the playerbase is understandably pretty small. This is a game that dreamed very, very big, but had a very big failure because it pushed too hard in the graphical department. Since nobody could run the game on release, it was abandoned, and then the graphics dumbed down to try to keep the project afloat.
Then you have Lord of the Rings Online, which is a heavily adventure-focused game, but also intermixes adventure of the standard variety with adventure of the traveling variety. Exploration is one of the most exciting untapped parts of MMO design, because it's easy to make travel worthwhile and meaningful for a character. LOTRO features a wealth of non-standard quests and minigames mixed in with the main ones, particularly in the Shire. You can acquire missions to deliver the mail to new locations (timed runs across the Shire's landscape, which is quite beautiful) until you re-establish the mail service (a quest with story, which has a reward). During the mail missions, you must avoid other hobbits, because they are nosy and will delay you by talking to you to try to find out what's in the mail; likewise, missions to deliver pies must be done while avoiding hungry hobbits who want to eat your pie. LOTRO also introduces the idea of an MMO-wide storyline that IS progressing. You can participate in the questline that progresses that story, which leads to involving your character in cutscenes with characters from the books, and advances your personal storyline as connected to them; you can ignore that questline once you've done the first bits of it if you prefer to focus on other questlines or activities.
LOTRO also has a rich, involved and interesting crafting system, and attracts roleplayers in a way that many MMOs do not. It has a lot to offer!
Finally, there's the now-defunct Star Wars Online MMO, which I've heard had a complex player economy and allowed players to make their own jobs. I knew multiple people who played the game as crafters, engineers, designers, who were protected by players who enjoyed the fighting experience, but never had to fight, themselves. These could be diplomats who were escorted by their fighting friends from place to place, or frontline emergency techs who would build replacements for armor and weapons while covered by their fellows. I think this game sounds like a VERY close example to what we're talking about going for in your comments and post, here: a game that encourages a cooperative element.
The reason I started off by saying that you need experience in MMOs to really make suggestions with regards to MMOs is precisely this: while I highly enjoy the idea of a non-combat MMO (and will suggest you check out a couple below!), I think that your proposal is unrealistic in the sense of actually SOLVING the problem. Some people do enjoy fighting in games, and we shouldn't turn them away any more than we ourselves are currently being turned away. The true solution would be to seek out a game experience that permits anyone to do ANYTHING, where a person could play a soldier and work cooperatively with a non-combatant to help them in their travels doing things that don't involve combat at all.
2. The idea that there's a genetic difference or chemical difference between male and female gamers
This was noted in a comment, and I have to say this attitude is fundamentally offensive and disturbing to me. The problem isn't that men specifically enjoy the activity of killing or being violent more than women (I have taken savage joy in playing a violent game like Wolfenstein 3D, and I have had many male friends who delight in spending hours on meticulous character creation and developing stories and backgrounds for their OFTEN female characters in MMOs or other games with customizable characters): rather, the problem is that the people being marketed to are the people who take savage joy in violent activity, and everyone else (male and female alike!) who would prefer to play a non-violent game that focuses on storytelling is being completely shafted. Men like stories too, and women are not wholly excused from enjoying violent games.
The attempt to make some gender delineated distinction makes me very uncomfortable; as a woman, I don't agree with any assertion that societally assigned values have any bearing on what I am genetically predisposed to do or not do.
3. The proposal
Your proposal sounds interesting in some ways, but also highly generic in others. We have had lots of games and stories and movies and books and comics and television shows set in Fantasy Mideval Europe, which is often an excuse to:
1) recreate traditional views of sexism with the excuse that it's "period accurate"
2) recreate traditional views of racism with the excuse that it's "period accurate"
So I have a problem with your proposal on that first level. How fantasy is this fantasy? I would be completely all right with a fantasy setting in which players could be any person of color and any gender they like (including trans, since there is magic, so why not?), but a fantasy setting that is too steeped in so-called realism as an excuse to reinforce prejudice leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Since you are yourself female, I assume you prefer a fantasy setting, however, so I'd like to know more details!
4. Existing non-mainstream MMOs that are working on these problems and how they are accomplishing the goal of providing a non-violent gaming experience
EVE Online is, indeed, a good example of an MMO that offers an unusual experience. Total PVP is really not my bag of tea, but it does provide a completely player controlled economy. The player-sects and factions change the setting, which makes it very dynamic and charged with excitement. The space exploration elements are combined with a constant sense of danger, however, since you're always at risk of being shot down if you venture outside of safe space (and you're still in danger there, sometimes). The game also is intentionally designed in a way that privileges any player who's been playing longer than you with higher skills, and provides absolutely no means of evening out the disparity between player skill level as a four-year player, and player skill level as a two-year player. Since all skills are learned over a set amount of time, and there are too many skills to learn them all, this is a significant problem with Eve, I'd say.
As for non-mainstream games, however, there are actually totally-sandbox games where violence doesn't even have to enter the equation. I can think of two off the top of my head, though I know I've seen and played more.
Uncharted Waters Online is the first; this is a relatively successful MMO in which players CAN engage in combat on the high seas if they so wish. However, the game depends on players trading goods from port to port, and your main goal is either to discover new places for your noble patrons, to sell goods from place to place, or to explore the seas and discover new people so you can become more acclaimed with the nobility. How your character dresses is important to convey the character's class to nobility, or trustworthiness to potential buyers. Combat takes place on the sea and is generally only initiated by NPC ships that may attack to try to steal your cargo. Since it's so minimal and you can run away from these combats by sailing away from incoming ships, the game is largely non-violent.
Then, there's A Tale in the Desert, which I highly recommend you try out. A Tale in the Desert is a cooperative, creative, crafting based MMO. The 'Tale' lasts several months (possible a year) before being re-started. During the Tale, you and other players throughout Egypt (as it is set there) go to the various schools located throughout the land, learning new technologies, collecting materials to advance your personal growth and development, and donating materials you collect towards the research and development of NEW technologies-- the game is entirely non-violent and the only competition you might have is for resources, later on in the game.
This sort of play experience IS available, and extremely fun. It encourages a cooperative, friendly playerbase and atmosphere and it works! But because the games are not mainstream, nor funded by mainstream, many people who are less familiar with MMOs don't even know that they exist-- which leads to complaints that such projects have never been tried.
I think it's important that we are aware of what the industry has tried (whether mainstream or not) both so we can make an educated assessment of what the industry is doing right and wrong, and so that we can support the things that it's doing right while accurately pinpointing what hasn't been tried enough to our satisfaction. (Just because something has been tried, after all, doesn't mean it was done right!)
Re: Whoa, cool! Good to hear from you!
I see what you mean-- and I think that'd be an awesome way of doing it! To go back to the MUD concept, it's sort of like having NPC factions that new players can join, with the possibility of player-run factions that might be created later on by players who rise to the top ranks in the NPC factions (and privilege). I've always thought it would be super-cool to have an MMO where you could actually build a kingdom. On a bright note, the Pathfinder MMO that is currently in its earliest stages of conception purports to be just that when they finish. I'm really hoping they deliver, because I would be delighted!
I like the idea of setting the game around a port town to allow players a full range of character creation options, too. That's a great way to keep arguments out while also providing a full, enjoyable character creation experience!
There have been a couple of MMOs that did character creation as sort of a story, though none quite like MUDs. I've played MUDs where you sort of plot out your backstory as you're doing character creation (ie, you pick skills and abilities and clothing, etc, as you go through rooms that describe what your personal story is as you build it), and that was pretty cool! By contrast, SW:TOR lets you determine your character's personal story as you go but sort of assumes your backstory prior to the start of the game. I also feel like Bioware's big problem is that their illusion of choice is so patently illusory-- we don't get to really decide where to go because our options are pretty limited. Even when there is a choice between ABC, you eventually will probably go to B and C even if you start with A, and vice-versa.
I'm glad you don't think I am! And you're right-- there are lots of problems, and change is needed throughout the medium of gaming to really fix them. But, I do think that there are a lot of programmers, designers, etc. who are trying to get their ideas through and make changes like the ones we're talking about. Hopefully between things like Kickstarter and those programmers / etc. already in the industry, we have the tools to make visible change!