In 2004, for the launch of World of Warcraft, I was in college, enjoying the benefits of a lightning-fast internet connection. When WoW came along, I was burned out of MMOs, having had a string of intense experiences paired with my classwork. I wanted something light and casual, and while everyone was talking about how awesome WoW looked, I was in the camp deriding its cartoony graphics and lack of player-controlled features– I’d just come from games where I could build entire cities, and the idea of “questing” to level up brought back memories of Everquest’s somewhat laughable chat-to-NPCs system.

I got into WoW’s beta and immediately fell into my old tricks, because I knew it was ephemeral and would get wiped. I rolled on a PvP server, burned through levels, and became immediately disappointed with the lack of PvP features. I could fight and kill other players, but there didn’t seem to be much of a point other than bragging rights. It was fun for a little while, because I played a class (warlock) that, in beta, was an unstoppable PvP machine and could feasibly take on parties of players by themselves, but outside of the fun of getting into fights I shouldn’t be able to win and coming out on top, there wasn’t a lot going on for someone who’d just come from multiple PvP games. I decided this wasn’t going to be a game to test my skill in, but it had some very cool stories so it would make for a good roleplaying game.

Come the game’s actual launch, I jumped in very casually, testing out a few characters I thought might be fun to play before settling on one, the rogue that a lot of people are familiar with. I started up a small but close roleplaying guild (themed around my old PvP class choice from Shadowbane), would write and play out stories with the group and with other people I met, and mostly had a leisurely route up to max level. As I got close to the level cap, my old instincts kicked in because I had a guildmate who was already max level and wanted more people to group with. I burned through the last 10 levels and immediately started running dungeons. It quickly became apparent that this was the skill focus I’d been looking for, and I started making a name for myself as a group organizer, putting dungeon parties together and running the groups.

I spent enough time in those dungeons that I was able to pick up rare gear– I never got the pieces I *actually* wanted, but I picked up things that were just as good and that forced me to look at stats in the game differently, which would give me an edge later on.

Flash forward a few months. The rest of my guild and friends had caught up to the level cap and we’d fallen into a pattern of running things together. We were in pretty good gear and had gotten used to working with one another, so when we saw an open invitation in a major city’s general chat for a raid team, we signed up. We kept chatting in our little group, since we suspected that it was going to be a tragic failure (we’d had enough bad pick-up group experiences that we were pretty jaded about players we didn’t personally know), but we jumped into this raid as a full group and rapidly all died… to the first pull. For an hour or so, before enough people had dropped that the group disbanded.

We had our laughs and called it a night, but when the call came out again for a probably-doomed run, we laughed again and jumped in. The cost of repairs was worth the laughs, and we weren’t doing anything else.

Within a couple of weeks, we’d stopped dying to the first set of monsters in the raid and had started (slowly) moving forward. Success begat stability, and people hung around because maybe this was going somewhere. We got to know regulars, individuals who’d joined the group. We were slightly more outspoken than others, because we had our own little group as a support structure. We became anchors in the group very quickly.

I fell into old patterns, analyzing the groups and making quiet suggestions to the person in charge. Raiding in WoW was like a mix of raiding in EQ and keep sieges in DAoC, so I had some idea of what I was talking about and my suggestions were successful enough that they started getting listened to more. I also got to know more of the people in the group, and started adjusting my suggestions to fit.

Our raid was a late-night group, well past the usual primetime hours, which meant we had a lot of west coast players and Australians in our group, complete with lag issues. This healer isn’t necessarily as strong as that other healer, but has faster reaction times. This tank is geared really well but is bad at stance dancing. This DPS is really competent but has an ego, this other one could be just as good with a bit of encouragement, without the ego problems. These people are totally awake and functional at 1AM and are raring to keep going; these other people aren’t. I took all of these observations in from my position as a participant but not a leader and passed them onto the group’s leader.

never got that 200g.

I quickly became the “personnel manager” for the raid, and started getting pulled into “officer” conversations, until I had an important say in a lot of various things. The group’s leader was extremely organized and very structured, but hated confrontation and had a hard time dealing with people whose personalities he liked but who weren’t performing well. Filling a need, I wound up being the person who’d talk to people behind the scenes and make sure they were okay, and help them get up to snuff if needed. I wound up learning a lot of other class’ mechanics than my own to help with this, and it gave me an edge in working out strategies.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the need to coordinate and motivate people without any tangible, reliable reward structure was a non-trivial problem. The only thing anyone was assured of in a given night’s raiding was a potentially fun time and an increasingly-expensive repair bill. Really exciting loot was a possibility, but a given boss might drop one or two items, and a raid had 40 people. Even assuming a full clear of the first raid (which took us months to accomplish), that’s 10-15 drops total per week split among a group of 40 people, and that’s the ideal case where there’s no repeated drops that no one needs (very rare). Keeping people motivated in that kind of environment was my job, and I took to it because it needed to be done.

Most of my strategy for this revolved around being personable and cheerful. I knew that pushing people too hard would drive them away; there wasn’t much tangible motivation to be had, and while someone could slack off and not be noticed, if too many people were doing it we’d fail, which often happened. I was one of the first to download and install performance-tracking addons, running them behind the scenes so I could check on people. In one particularly notable case, I had another raid member set as my focus target so I could watch their resource bar. Every attack in WoW consumed some of a given resource, so watching resource bars could often be an indicator of performance and attention. In this case, I would watch the resource bar dip slightly at the start of a fight, refill, and never move again in the next 5-10 minutes of combat– a clear indicator that the person was doing next to nothing.

When I brought this up to that player privately, I got some apparently-genuine contrition and a marked performance improvement the next night, followed by an identical dropoff the night after that. It became apparent to me that this person was only going to put work in if they were directly being watched, and with 40 people to monitor, they weren’t worth the energy. I slowly upped the stakes. I’d spoken to them privately and that proved to be ineffective. I suggested replacing them to the group’s leader, who was averse to the idea of booting anyone. They were clearly holding us back, but I was limited in my tools to deal with them. I took a slightly different tack, and called them out in the raid, while they were slacking off. There had been an ongoing chat conversation that the underperforming player had been a part of while not actually participating in combat, and I called them out for spending time chatting rather than actually helping us.

The defensive denial response was immediate, which I’d suspected would be the case. Being called out directly was a lot different from being spoken to privately, and the player in question hoped to trade on their popularity with the group to make up for poor performance. I knew it was likely to escalate quickly, so I immediately followed up with collected stats– the player’s entire damage-output contribution to the raid for the night amounted to less than one of our healers, who had thrown in a handful of damage spells between keeping people alive.

The raid leader was angry with me for turning it into a confrontation, but I stood by the fact that I’d done everything I could to improve performance short of that, and that the direct approach had become necessary. In what I think was intended to be an implicit punishment, I was made to find that player’s replacement– if I was going to make us kick people from the group, I’d be responsible for recruiting as well.

I already had someone in mind. By the next raid, I’d found someone who I’d already vetted at some length and who I knew could perform. His gear was significantly behind the old player’s gear, because the old player had soaked up a lot of drops while not contributing. Despite this, his performance was instantly better than the person he’d replaced, and it was clear he was really *trying*, because he could see immediately that he was behind the curve. The same stat tracking I’d used to indict the previous player was used to praise the new player, and I discovered a secondary benefit.

In kicking an underperforming player, a number of other people who’d been less invested suddenly became moreso, and this was amplified when a new, undergeared player started quickly outperforming some of the group who’d been there for a while previously and had significantly better gear. Within a few nights of kicking and replacing an underperforming player, three things happened: First, the overall performance of the group shot up, and we started winning where we previously weren’t. Second, the morale of the group improved, as did confidence in its leadership– it became clear that we were committed to the group’s success and willing to make even severe changes if needed, and it put everyone on the same page as far as the group’s goals. Third, a number of people started coming to me to ask for help in improving; many weren’t very good, but wanted to become better for the sake of the team.

It was the first time I’d been directly involved in managing people on an individual level. I’d worked with groups and directed big-picture strategies, but actually getting into specifics with individual people was a very different experience. I grew to appreciate the people who genuinely wanted to try and improve, versus those who were already skilled but weren’t inclined to listen to directions. When vetting potential new recruits, I had a fairly simple ethos: I’d rather bring in someone with a good attitude who can improve and learn than someone who already has the skills but doesn’t have a good attitude about it. We turned down many high-performing candidates because they had clear issues with ego, excessive demands, or other attitude problems, and brought in a goodly number of people who blossomed as part of the team.

More MMO stories next week, probably. It turns out I can’t tell all of my stories in a week.

I left off yesterday with my taste of serious, I’m-a-superior-player PvP, and a foray into shady dealings. I left Dark Age of Camelot when I logged in as one of my spies and saw the effects I’d wrought. The players in my faction didn’t suspect I was a spy, but one of the others did, and chat was laced with misinformation and slander. Apparently some players had started griefing their own faction by delivering false “scouting reports” that led raiding parties right into traps. They were reasonably high-level players, which to me made the betrayals make even less sense.

It bothered me to see these players resorting to infighting and disorganization even given their relative disadvantage, and I wound up talking to one of them at some point as my spy, commenting that I knew some directions he’d given a few days ago had been a trap and asking him why he did it. His answer was blunt: “We can’t win, they’re spying on us and know our moves ahead of time, so it’s funny to me to watch people eagerly run into traps. The other factions own this server, we’re just bait.” I’d taken some pride in my duplicity before that, but it evaporated after talking to him. I retired my spies, but the damage was done. I’d helped set up too strong a stranglehold for the faction to make a comeback– their own heroes had turned on them, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I quit DAoC shortly thereafter.

I’d gotten a taste for PvP, though, and not long after I got into the beta for Shadowbane. This was a game I was excited about– lots of customization, a world with fascinating lore and interesting non-standard races, and full, open PvP with player-made cities you could fight over. Very exciting, and I jumped into the beta with both feet. I’d gotten in fairly early on the the beta, so I had a very good idea of hunting spots and places to get rare items. In Shadowbane, special powerful class options were hidden by drops in certain specific places, and while the world was somewhat randomly generated, there were ways of finding them if you knew what to look for. I did, and quickly became a very nasty duelist, using skills most players hadn’t seen and using lots of tricks I’d learned in DAoC to win fights. I particularly enjoyed picking on spellcasters, because I’d carefully arranged my kit to make myself extremely deadly against mages, who were squishy and usually couldn’t mount an effective defense in time.

I’d gone from playing a healer in EQ to playing, essentially, a rogue in DAoC and Shadowbane, and I revelled in proving that I was better than other players, even with the handicap of satellite connection lag. It went to my head, and as beta session after beta session rebooted things, I got faster at becoming powerful and more callous about my target picking. It was a little shady, because I was beelining for rare skills and items and telling no one else about them, but I told myself I was just playing the game, and wasn’t even doing anything I shouldn’t.

At one point I ran into a pair of players sitting at the edge of a zone, chatting and emoting. There’s a particular cadence to roleplaying text compared with normal, utilitarian text that I recognized– these two players were RPing, and I was hunting them. My ego was engaged, though– PKers — player-killers — were usually thought of as lowlifes and brutes; skilled but not intelligent. I came up with what I thought was a clever scene in my head, stepped out and started roleplaying with them. They engaged, and as I’d planned, the scene came to a head and I drew my weapon and murdered one of the two of them. It had all played out as planned, and seemed to me like a fantastic arc in the game. Rather than killing them outright, I’d tried to make it fun.

“Oh. I guess that figures. I thought you were going to be better than that. Oh well, I’m going AFK, kill me or whatever.”

The other player had dropped character entirely and left herself standing there. Both had put me on ignore, shutting me out from any discussion. I’d thought it would be a fun thing in the game, death stung but not too badly, but I’d clearly sapped their enjoyment of things and without them putting up a fight, it wasn’t fun for me. The remaining player could’ve made it a good fight, but she wasn’t doing so. I didn’t like being brushed off, so I waited.

About an hour later, her AFK flag went away. She saw me still sitting there and made a comment, one I couldn’t reply to because she was /ignoring me.

“Oh, you’re still here? Hope it was fun, asshole. That was my brother you killed. He’s in the military and we get a few hours of playtime a month, which we spent running out here to RP and tell stories. Thanks for ruining it.”

And then, she logged out. It stung, and I had no way of saying anything in my defense. I knew how the ignore system worked, so I created a new character so that I could say something when she got back. I saw her a bit later on, hopped on my alt character and sent her a tell, mentioning that I was the person from before. I was swiftly ignored again, without so much as a return comment.

A search on the forums revealed that she did a lot of roleplaying on the RP forums for the game, using an alias that was the same as her character name. Mine wasn’t, and I didn’t want to say anything directly, but it got me reading the RP forums. I was fascinated by the stories people were telling– I could tell stories like that too, and how much fun people were having with just text and without the game to play. When the game was down or when I couldn’t play it, I lurked the RP forums and read stories, eventually starting to participate myself.

I’d forgotten about the brother and sister I’d griefed until she appeared in one of my RP threads, taking an active part in a story. In it, she was playing the character I’d seen, and spoke often of her weak younger brother, who she’d periodically take on adventures to see the world. She called herself Challi, and her roleplaying mimicked the high-level player I’d seen chatting with the much lower level player, and I realized that her RP was a mirror of what she actually did in game. It was inspiring to see, and I got the impression that Challi’s forum roleplay fueled her storytelling with her brother, and vice-versa. I was roleplaying as a duelist, effectively a mirror of my existing character but with a more fleshed out story.

Over time, I noticed my forum RP leaking into the game. I picked targets differently, and hunted other PKers. I had a few dozen macros ready to say precise lines to put whatever I was doing in context for the character. It was fun, but as the game got closer to launch, I realized that while I’d spent a ton of time as a loner, there were big guilds forming that I didn’t know how to become a part of. I was leery of joining another big guild after what had happened in EQ less than a year before, but I knew that they, together, would make my solo play obsolete. I’d be able to have my fun until the game launched, but after that it would quickly end.

I wanted a group, but the known guilds were snapping up people left and right, and some of the requirements of the guilds that tried to recruit me were too strict for my tastes. I wanted the freedom of being a loner with the benefits of having a group. Total nonsense, but there you have it.

What bridged the gap was my newfound set of roleplaying friends on the forum. I’d become close to a number of people who didn’t know I was the ruthless PKer mentioned elsewhere on the forums, and I realized I could reinvent myself when the game launched. I scoured the game’s lore until I found a tidbit I could use as a hook, then introduced a new character– the brother of my previous roleplaying character, who was a mage-scholar. I planted the seed for a guild of lorekeepers and scholars, trying to rebuild an ancient lost library mentioned in the lore. I started going to the big guild battles near the end of beta, lurking as my rogue but keeping notes, and then reporting on the battles, complete with carefully-edited screenshots, as my mage-scholar, talking about events in the game.

not actually us– i’ve long since lost my shadowbane screenshots. same blue and white robes though.

It sparked interest among the writers in the crowd, and when the game launched I quickly had a small group who wanted nothing more than to travel the world telling stories on the forums. I set up a website for us, the first one I’d tried to make, so that we could type our entries and report on events in the world. I knew the PvPer ego, because I’d been one, and got good at crafting stories to appeal to it. People loved reading about themselves, and we started having guilds who were about to participate in battles give us advance warning and ask us to witness their battles. I got everyone in the guild a set of distinctive, brightly-colored newbie clothes, blue-and-white robes, obvious on the battlefield and obviously inferior gear for anyone looking, and it became our uniform. We’d be able to take pictures as the battle swirled around us, and our caveat was that if we died, we wouldn’t report. Both sides would fight to keep us safe, so that we could write and inflate their egos.

One of the people who joined the guild was Challi, the girl whose brother I killed, and I kept quiet about who I really was. I was happy to have reinvented myself and, in a twisted sort of way, gotten forgiveness for my previous asshat behavior. It was frustrating that I couldn’t participate in the major battles, which had been my favorite part of DAoC, but it was worth it to see the stories that came out of them, and knowing that people would remember them after the weekend or night they happened.

We were a small guild, though, and while our goal was to rebuild the forgotten library, realistically we would never have the resources to do so. To build a city in Shadowbane, you needed a city-seed, which planted a huge tree and was incredibly expensive, plus more expensive walls and buildings. We’d never afford those. This was okay, but we never really had a home city, which was a crucial part of the game’s progression. There was only so much we could do without one. We chafed under the lack of resources, until one of our guildmembers came up to me and dropped a city seed and over a million gold on me– enough for a modestly sized city and enough money to pay upkeep for a while. He wouldn’t say where he’d gotten it, just told us to build the city that night, before he had to log off.

Building the city was a party. We had a ton of fun with it, and when it was all over we had a replica of our library, right in the middle of the map where it was easy for us to get around. I’d already used my game knowledge to hook up the rest of the guild with a rare teleportation skillset, so with a home city we could travel almost anywhere we wanted with relative ease.

A week later, the player who’d given me the tree and all the gold was gone. Banished from guild roster, gone from friends lists, had never put any buildings in the city, just gone. I had a message on our shared website: “banned for duping, sry.”

All of the gold he’d gotten had been from cheating, and he’d given it to me so that when they banned him the city would work. I’d been suspicious, but the windfall was too good to pass up, so I’d taken it without questioning. I debated for weeks whether I should tell the guild about it, particularly given how a great many members had come out as heavily against cheating, to the point where my own beta knowledge of the game was considered shady. Actual duping would have been an unforgivable crime, and our whole city was built on it.

I had no idea how to handle the situation, and I knew college would be starting soon for me, so I fled. I went on vacation with my family and beat myself up over the situation, enough that my parents thought I wasn’t enjoying the trip. When I got back, I logged into the game, said my greetings, and started a private conversation with Challi, who’d become my second-in-command. I told her everything– who I was, where all the money for the guild had come, and that I was leaving Shadowbane because I couldn’t take it. I passed guild leadership to her, and as the chorus of surprised voices popped up in guildchat, I logged out and cancelled my account.

I told myself it was because I was going to college, and that I wouldn’t have time for games there, which lasted until an e-mail popped up in my inbox, informing me that I’d been invited to the beta test for Star Wars Galaxies. I’ve already told this story, but suffice it to say I played it for nearly a year before it broke me and caused me to ragequit the only MMO I’ve ever ragequit.

——————————————————

I found out later that Challi had told the guild that I’d had to quit because I was moving to college, and that she’d kept everything else she’d heard from me to herself. I never found out how she felt about my self-reinvention, but she kept in contact for a while and I continued forum roleplaying with the guild afterwards. Challi had no idea how to run a guild, and I fed her tips from what I’d seen in DAoC and EQ, both what to do and what not to do. Apparently, I quickly became something of a legend within the guild, particularly as Challi would tell stories about me, and several of the guild members who came after I’d left thought I was a lore NPC that stories were being told about, and that the guild had been themed on.

I wouldn’t run into any of them until SWG, when the Library in Shadowbane got destroyed by a guild of PKers who decided to raze it and the guild couldn’t afford to rebuild. Rather than sticking around, the group all moved to SWG, and I wound up a satellite part of the group again, until the aforementioned ragequit.

Sorry about the lack of images. This post got eaten in a server outage and has been reconstructed.

No heavy stuff today, after the last couple of days. This week is apparently “old MMO memories” week, but rather than jumping a year gap to talk about more relevant lessons learned, I figured I’d take a short break to talk about Dark Age of Camelot.

I played DAoC after EverQuest, on a lark. I knew it was a PvP game and my only prior experience with PvP had been in Ultima Online, where I had become an awful griefer after spending a lot of time getting griefed myself. It left me with a sour taste in my mouth regarding PvP, particuarly because my UO tricks were simply that– tricks– and for the most part I wasn’t able to hold my own in a straight-up fight. I was very good at stealing things from unsuspecting people and setting up awful traps for them, but my successes there were based on me being clever, not me being good at the game.

Post-EverQuest, I started to think that I possibly could actually be good at games rather than just trying to use smarts to make up for a lack of skill. I was done with EQ, and the games I was following weren’t yet out. I didn’t want to go back to UO, and Anarchy Online didn’t hold my interest very long, so into DAoC I went. At the time, a couple of local friends joined me, getting multiple-month subscriptions for their birthdays and jumping into the game with me. They’d missed the EQ boat but liked my stories, so wanted to try a new game where we all started at the same point.

By the time we got into it, Camelot was already fairly populated and a lot of stuff was going on. I quickly realized how far “behind” I was and wanted to catch up. I rolled an alt to play alongside my friends (knowing that I was going to leave them well behind as my main) and started trying to understand the game. It happened quickly, and I flew through levels as my Nightshade while hopping to a different server to level my Friar with my local friends.

I quickly found myself in RvR (DAoC’s large-scale PvP game), and spent a lot of time watching people’s movements and scouting. I realized quickly how important unified fronts were, and I started getting in on assassin teams, there to disrupt lines, break ranks, and drop reinforcements. I was good at this, but it wasn’t until a bit later where I found an edge.

My friends stuck with the game for a while, but it didn’t stick. They still had a few months on the accounts, so they gave them to me because they weren’t going to use them. I had no idea what to do with three accounts, other than multibox, which I did a little bit of but never really excited me. It felt too mechanical and not enough like I was playing the game, though having a buffbot was nice. On the other hand, I had a second computer next to my main gaming one, that I’d set up for when friends were over and we wanted to play something on LAN. I’d loaded up the game on it but started thinking about how else I could use it.

DAoC only allowed you to play on one faction on any given server, to prevent spying. You picked a faction when you entered a server to create a character and couldn’t change it unless you deleted all of your characters on that server. My friends had never made characters on the server that my main was on, so I could easily make two characters in the two different factions on that server, then camp them in specific places to watch the flow of chat, particularly the organizational stuff. I set up my second computer to run the game at the lowest possible settings in a tiny window, only showing me the chat boxes and occasionally the map. It was unplayable, but those accounts weren’t there to play on.

Instead, I used them as a direct, live feed to plan my assassination runs with my stealth team. We went from attacks of opportunity to coordinated lightning strikes at key targets, and I would occasionally run the group by places I knew big forces would be moving so that we could “scout” them and report their location. Spies were heavily looked down on in DAoC, at least on my server, so I kept it very quiet how and where I got the knowledge I did. We became a terror on the field– neither of the other two factions felt safe reinforcing their lines with anything other than large groups, which made them clumsy and unable to react.

I got a taste for PvP, and especially organizing groups subtly and in ways most people didn’t expect. I felt pretty bad about my duplicity, but it was incredibly effective. I wound up wanting something more permanent, though, and that’s about the time I started heavily following both Star Wars Galaxies and Shadowbane.

I talked about Julie yesterday. I never heard from her after her e-mails, but she left me with a bit more than lasting impressions. I kept playing EverQuest, and I was later approached by someone who knew Julie: a guild leader whose raid group was short a healer and who’d heard good things about me from her. He wanted someone unassuming who could take orders and not cause drama; I fit the bill pretty well.

I got plunged headlong into the world of raiding in EQ. I’d reached max level and had, up to that point, spent most of my time camping rare spawns for items and gearing up alts. My druid wasn’t my most powerful character; my Enchanter was, but this group needed a healer, not a chanter, so Druid it was. Anyone who raided in EQ is probably cringing at the idea of replacing an established raiding cleric with a relatively newly max-level healing druid. Let me add onto that that I played EQ for years on an iffy dial-up connection, so I lagged out constantly and would often have my connection stall without it actually kicking me from the game. From the perspective of anyone watching, I was just standing around, doing nothing.

I was horrible. Absolutely, appallingly bad. The other healers in the group carried my weight for me (with a smile, because they all missed Julie), but it was painfully apparent to me that I was contributing next to nothing. Occasionally, someone would speak up about how terrible I was, and a chorus of people would shout them down. It was extremely uncomfortable, doubly so because I knew that most of them were thinking of me as a memory of Julie; she’d apparently talked about me a lot.

Prior to this, I played aggressively casually. I really wasn’t very good at the game, and had gotten to high levels mostly through sheer stubbornness rather than any actual skill. I very, very quickly started picking up skill at the game, reading what few guides existed online and discreetly talking to some of the other healers about how to improve. It was the first big lesson of working in a team for me– I learned very quickly that the chorus of people shouting down the naysayers couldn’t give me useful advice; I got a lot of “no, you’re fine, don’t worry about it” saving-my-feelings kind of responses. Instead I started asking the outspoken critics– okay, so I’m terrible, what do you want me doing better? Most backed down when confronted, but a few gave me tips, and I started using those to improve.

This was really enlightening for me. I couldn’t get useful help from the people who were ostensibly on my side, but I could from my critics. I hadn’t heard the term “echo chamber” before, but it would have resonated with me (ha!) if I had. It changed the way I started working on mods for games like Morrowind and Oblivion in my free time– rather than listening to the people who said only good things, I got a lot from the people who criticized me. I started to crave brutal criticism, and it wouldn’t be until later that I realized the value of positive feedback. At the time, I felt like I didn’t deserve positive feedback– that was for people who were actually good at things, whereas I was demonstrably not. I reserved my praise for other people who I thought were more skilled than I was (read: everyone) and retained the criticism for myself.

I also started intentionally subbing out for other healers. It would be easy to say that it hurt my pride to do so, but it really didn’t– I was a pretty insecure teenager at the time and I wanted the group to succeed, so I’d show up on time but then opt out for someone who I thought was better (read: everyone). On the rare times I played at a friend’s house who had DSL, my performance was dramatically better, enough that people commented on it. I took this as a sign that I shouldn’t continue holding the group back. I eventually said I couldn’t play anymore, making up some nonsense story about me using too much internet time, and while the group was sad, they told me I should come back if I could get playtime. I thought that was unlikely, but I agreed, and figured they’d forget about this terrible player and move on. For me, it was a relief, because I was still hyper-insecure about my skill and thought it would be better if I wasn’t dragging down the group.

A little while later, we got a satellite internet connection at home. It was laggy, largely terrible for games, but perfectly functional for MMO speed and, more importantly, STABLE. I hopped on EQ and immediately had tells waiting for me– want to hop in a raid? I couldn’t imagine why, but it turned out they needed a healer badly enough that I’d make or break their ability to go. I didn’t like it, but I figured I’d do my best and see.

I had already had terrible ping from my out-in-the-boonies dialup connection, so I was used to that, but the stability of satellite meant I could actually predict what might happen. I had things down cold, and it felt like it was easy to see what was going to happen and prepare for it. It was obvious to everyone who was paying attention that I was much, much better, and it was at this point where I got to see my first massive leadership failure.

The raid leader was thrilled that I was back and now actually *good*, and wanted to give me a permanent spot on the raid. This annoyed a number of people, particularly those who had criticized me before but now didn’t have a leg to stand on because I was legitimately skilled. It was seen as the leadership playing obvious favorites, and it absolutely was. I watched as I became the reason why this raid group and guild imploded. In retrospect, the problems were there and I had just been a catalyst for everything, but at the time it felt like I was the problem, why this otherwise perfectly functional and successful group was now failing.

I couldn’t take it, and after the guild shattered, I quit EverQuest for good. I hated the drama, and hated myself for causing it, but it did leave me with a little seed that became really important later: I could be good at these games. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about for myself before– I liked games but wasn’t very good at them– but now I was thinking it. Not just “good”, but “better than other players”. It got me eyeing a new sort of game, one where I could prove that I was better than other players. I got into DAoC shortly thereafter, where I did a number of things I’m not proud of and tried to atone for them, though that’s a story for later.

My experience with Julie’s guild left me looking at organizations though, especially online ones where it’s easy to miscommunicate, and thinking about how it could be done better. It would be a little while before that took root, but that’s where the seed was planted. I thought a lot about how groups functioned after that, spending my time in the next few games I played looking at how things were going. It eventually drove me to start my own guild– also a story for later.

Advance warning: some feels in here. I haven’t told this story in a while.

I spent much of the weekend watching Sword Art Online with Kodra– as of this writing, we’ve watched everything that was available on Netflix, so the first two seasons. The central premise of the show focuses on the concept of a relationship borne of a game and a relationship borne of a real-life meeting. Specifically, the show’s underlying message is that while most people have a hard time understanding it, the relationships forged digitally are every bit as ‘real’ as ones forged in ‘real life’.

I’m in a not-so-unique position to comment on this. Of my closest friends, nearly all of them are people I interact with digitally above all else. I have friends that I’m physically close to that I interact with more online than I do in real life. I’ve heard this described as ‘sad’, and I find that sort of dismissiveness irritating.

Let me tell you a story, of the first online friend I made. I was in high school, playing Everquest shortly after its launch. I had just hit level 29 on my Druid, which was an important level for that class as it unlocked a bunch of potent spells and let me travel and hunt like I hadn’t been able to previously. It was a big deal, and so I very quickly started using my new spells and got myself killed while soloing. Everquest had experience loss on death, so I was looking at a level drop to 28, locking me out of my new spells and setting me back days of progress. I was out in the middle of nowhere, on an island in one of the ocean zones, but I thought it was worth shouting for help, seeing if anyone could assist me. A reasonably-high level cleric could resurrect me, restoring enough XP to return my level to me. I didn’t really expect anything, and I told myself I’d wait an hour to see if anyone might come.

Forty minutes in, I’d gotten ten or so private messages asking for my location, and each one had said “too far, sorry” when they found out how out-of-the-way I was. When I got a response that was simply “omw!” I was genuinely surprised. It took nearly an hour for the cleric to make it out to where I was– I was THAT far out of the way (anyone remember trying to navigate those EQ ocean zones, particularly the islands the boats DON’T go to?), and we chatted all the while. I kept half expecting to hear “ugh, this is ridiculous, sorry man” but it never came. Instead we joked about the boats, the sharks, how I died, how exciting level 29 was for Druids, etc.

When she got to me, he was pretty battered. She’d had a run-in with some wildlife (who largely didn’t bother me, a perk of being a Druid that I’d forgotten about) but was still okay. It took her a while to recover and then resurrect me, and bam, I had my level back. I could get us both out of there, and cheerfully did– using the (level 29!) Druid ports to get us to safety, near a major city. I went to tip the cleric, per the standard etiquette, only to find that he was trying to tip *me* for the port. We laughed about it, I expected we’d part ways, and got a last PM for the day: “oh hey, friend me? lemme know if you need a rez, if you don’t mind porting me sometimes :)”.

We were never close in level (he was much higher level than I was, and he was gone by the time I got up in level), but we talked a lot, almost exclusively about game stuff. For the better part of a year, one of us would bug the other for a rez or a port and we’d come running to help out, often from the other side of the world, and we’d chat about whatever while we did so. I knew nothing about him in reality, but it didn’t matter– we were fast friends and the context of the game world gave us plenty to bond over. Instead of having lunch together and sharing the food experience, we’d chat while waiting on boats and bond over (lack of) inventory space.

Near the end of the year, I got a message from him: “hey, I’m probably gonna have to stop playing soon but I wanted to say thanks for hanging out with me. i know it’s rude to ask, but can i have your e-mail address? i want to send you something.”

Players left EQ on occasion; this was not a new concept for me. I was sad that he was leaving, but didn’t think much of it. This was the first time anyone who’d left had tried to make a connection after the fact, though, and I hesitated. Bridging that gap between game and ‘real life’ was sort of taboo– that was how all of the “abuses” and “scary people” on The World Wide Web got to you, to use the scare quotes of the late ’90s/early ’00s. This was my cleric friend, though, and if he’d been hiding his true self for a year, he’d done a really good job of it. With as much as we’d talked, it would’ve been very hard to hide anything, or so I told myself. I gave him my e-mail, not sure what to expect.

The next morning, I woke up to an e-mail in my inbox from a “Julie”, which I didn’t expect, with a character name, class, set of items, and a bunch of other identifying information to prove that it was, in fact, from my cleric friend. At the bottom was a link “to some pictures, nothing bad, I promise” and a note “thanks for everything, I wanted to show you the real me”. Having spent a lot of time on the internet up to this point, I was leery of clicking any links I didn’t recognize, but it was a livejournal link (yep, one of those) so I figured it was safe.

The LJ page was someone named Julie, the cleric I’d spent a year hanging out with. She was wheelchair-bound and a cancer patient– every picture from the last year was of her in the hospital. The post I’d been linked to read simply: “To my druid friend Tam: Hi.” and included a bunch of pictures and links to old posts. I wound up reading her livejournal back entries, finding out about this girl’s struggle with cancer and the ways she took her mind off it, and started to realize that all of the references to “my best friend” were me.

We never spoke after that– when she left EQ she also dropped off the internet, and her LJ stopped updating. It was updated one more time, six months later, by her brother, with a “rest in peace, thanks for reading” message. At the very bottom of the post, there was a picture of her, happy, in her hospital bed. Next to it was a laminated picture, clearly a computer printout, taped up on the wall. It was a shot from Everquest, of a druid and cleric.

There’s nothing less real about online friendships than ones in physical space. RIP, Julie.

from http://www.dex-rpg.com/index_en.php

I started playing Dex tonight, a 2D cyberpunk sidescrolling RPG. As a bit of forewarning, I’ve only gotten a couple of hours into it, so this will not be a complete review. Expect more once I get more playtime in. Throughout this, there will be very mild spoilers, so be forewarned. I’m going to try to keep it light, but I can’t really critique a game without talking about what happens in it.

In Dex, you play as the girl on the left in the above picture. The game opens up very directly, with a short tutorial of you escaping some unknown assailants and being led to safety by a mysterious benefactor. It’s very The Matrix. I spent a little while unsure of what was going on because the initial tutorial doesn’t make it clear what I need to click on vs move through, and which of the three different interaction buttons was the appropriate one to use.

In general, I feel like the tutorial doesn’t adequately explain how to play competently, but this isn’t terribly important as the first segment of the game is extremely easy. I’m basically shunted into a quick dungeon run, as I work my way to safety through that ever so convenient escape route: the sewers. Thus far, I’ve met a grizzled old veteran who works a bar, a teenager-like hacker, and a mysterious, cryptic benefactor who everyone else reveres.

If this sounds a little cliché, you’re hearing my biggest criticism of the game thus far. It’s great that the dialogue is all voiced, but several of the characters feel like caricatures thus far, and the writing feels somewhat forced. There’s a lot of dialogue, but the quality is all over the place. Some is great, some is iffy at best. It feels like the game is trying to sell me on a dark, gritty, hedonistic future and is getting way too heavy handed with it. I’ve picked up three different items that suffice as the game’s “trash loot” that you sell to vendors for money that are all types of porn. Of the five vendors I’ve found in the game, three sell condoms for some reason. It isn’t quite enough to turn me off of the game quite yet, but the details feel very sophomoric.

That being said, the overall plot arc (such that I’ve seen) is interesting, and I want to find out what happens next. The characterizations are effective– I may dislike some of the characters but they’re better than vanilla, robotic dialogue. The biggest problem I have is that I feel like I can see the entire arc of the game within the first hour of playing it. I may be wrong, and I’m hoping I am. Expect more on that once I’ve played it a bit more.

On the other hand, the art is FANTASTIC. I’ll let it speak for itself, here’s the trailer:

The environments are evocative and stylish, the characters are varied and interesting, and the animations hit that old-school 2D platformer sweet spot– it all looks really good, and messages surprisingly well minus some of the details. I want to wander around the streets of this cyberpunk city, and that appears to be the point of the game, which is great.

The controls feel fairly tight and responsive. Movement feels fairly good, but I feel needs some more interesting options. I may be able to unlock those with time. My biggest issue is that enemies with melee weapons outrange my fists, causing me to awkwardly chase them around, but I also haven’t unlocked various weapons or anything, and the enemy variety is interesting and messaged well already, within the first hour of play. Combat is simple: attack, block, dodge-roll, with new options opening up as you level up. You can also get guns, though I haven’t figure out how to use the one I just got yet.

One of the other big gameplay features is the hacking game, which is a fairly full-featured minigame that’s akin to a scaled-down Geometry Wars. It might be interesting, but I haven’t seen enough of its features yet to make a judgement call. Currently it’s a bit underwhelming but I suspect it will scale up quickly– I haven’t done much with it yet.

As you play, you level up, and can put points into a variety of skills. These seem to have either noticeable flat bonuses (like more health) or new combos or special abilities. There are also a set of “special” skills, things like lockpicking, charisma, etc, that appear to be used to unlock additional options, whether that’s getting into a locked door or charming your way past someone. Me being me, my first two levels’ worth of skill points went into charisma and lockpicking. Thus far, I’ve already seen significant returns on these points. Multiple characters have had “charisma” dialogue options, and lockpicking has come up enough times that I’m glad I took it.

Right now, it’s a game I’m looking forward to putting more time into. It’s got some rough edges, and some questionable content choices, but none of it is enough to turn me off completely. I’ll be back with more once I’ve had more time to play it.

I watched The Wind Rises again last night. It’s a movie I really enjoy, though I’ve heard criticism (and heard it again last night) that the ending is weak. It reminds me of another conversation I had about the endings of long-running shows, and which ‘delivered’ and which didn’t.

It got me thinking about endings in general, for any kind of media. I think I’ve come to prefer the endings that acknowledge that time goes on after the events you’re watching have run their course, rather than the kind that tie everything up neatly and leave nothing left to worry about, until the Next Big Thing occurs (read: sequel).

It’s hard to put words to this preference. I can sense the shape of it, but it’s hard for me to define. It would be easy and simple to say that “time goes on” endings are more ‘realistic’, but that’s not really it. Nor is it accurate to say that I feel some kind of rebellious urge against the concept of “happily ever after”, though that’s not entirely wrong either.

I think it’s because I relate with things that don’t clean up nicely, but that you have to move on from anyway. I read a blog recently written by someone who had been blogging her weight loss over something like two hundred pounds. Her goal was to be in the 120-130 range from being over 300, and as of the writing of the post I read, she’d accomplished it. Rather than a victory cry, though, the post read as a profound statement of loss and uncertainty. For months or years she had blogged about weight loss, working ever closer to a goal that seemed impossible, and when she accomplished it, she realized that it doesn’t end. She couldn’t just relax, or she’d backslide. It wasn’t an ending.

When I was growing up, I used to come up with games for my friends and I to play (it’s honestly shocking that I never played D&D growing up), and when I started seriously pursuing work in the games industry, my drive was to make a big game– one people had heard of and that all of my friends would play. It was my dream, and one that seemed impossibly far off.

Last year, I did it, and the question arose: what now? I accomplished my dream, I proved to myself I could do it. I could keep doing it, but I wasn’t sure if that was what I really wanted to do. When I took a moment to relax and really think, I realized that I’d put many, many things on hold for that dream and it wasn’t like credits rolled and everyone went home afterwards. Time went on, and there are other things I want to do. I developed skills working in games that I want to build on and explore, that I didn’t realize I had, and weren’t really an important part of the job I was doing.

It’s not a story I talk about often, because I don’t feel like telling it in a nice, compact way is really accurate. There’s no real ending, and it doesn’t tie itself up cleanly. It’s an experience I value too much to reduce to a one-and-done story.

I think I like my stories that way as well. I value the experience more when I feel like there’s more to it that I’m not seeing, that comes after the end. My favorite games have extended epilogues that suggest that more happens that I don’t see, but can imagine.

I like that. Time goes on.

Organizing people is hard. No matter the number of people, organization is the place where many otherwise noble endeavours fall down. I’ve had the privilege of being a part of and sometimes helping form and lead a goodly number of organizations of varying types, ranging from professional teams of 5-10 people all the way up to massive disconnected virtual teams of up to 100. They’ve all had their strengths and weaknesses, and some have fallen apart while others have come together to accomplish something awesome. Having an organization fall apart can be painful, and it’s worse when everyone involved (particularly those in charge) are trying to hold everything together. A group that works well can stay close for years or decades, and a group where everyone is invested but still winds up shredded can linger for a long time.

I’d like to talk a little bit about what I’ve learned while trying to bring people together to accomplish various goals. I’ve been reading a lot of management books as part of my studies, and they often talk about what it takes to be a successful leader. While I think that’s important, I think that the organization itself is more important than its leader, because if it can’t function without its leader it wasn’t a very solid organization to begin with.

In the various things I’ve read, there’s been a few recurring concepts that are touted as important things for a leader to develop. I think they make a good set of pillars for an organization as well, but I also think they’re double-edged swords. Everything requires moderation, and these ‘swords’ can help your organization cut through obstacles in its path or they can shred your group to pieces.

Here are the ‘swords’ that need to be wielded by successful organizations:

Communication

This is the first, most important thing. Everyone in the group needs to be able to communicate. The more open the communication, the better, to a point. Organizations with insufficient communication see drama, siloing, and inefficiencies borne of a lack of spread knowledge. We live in a world where a quick chat with someone should be a couple of keystrokes away, but we often fall into patterns of noncommunication for various reasons.

A healthy organization needs to be able to communicate, which is more than just status reports. Praise and criticism need to be available, and the most successful groups I’ve worked with are able to handle both. This isn’t something a leader can accomplish on their own; it requires that the group develop an atmosphere where speaking one’s mind, whether that’s to praise someone, provide constructive criticism, or ask for help is not just allowed but encouraged. Sometimes, this communication may need to be private or anonymous, but the the very best groups it doesn’t need to be, and either way it should exist.

Communication has a downside, though. There is a time to talk and a time to act, and any organization needs to know the difference. Planning is very important, but it’s vital not to get bogged down. One of my rules as a raid leader is that any explanation of any boss fight can last no longer than thirty seconds. I’ve (frequently) made exceptions to this, and they’ve always been mistakes. Often we face encounters that require more than thirty seconds of explanation, but this doesn’t change the rule. I’ll explain everything I can in thirty seconds, we’ll take a crack at it, fail, and move forward with another thirty seconds of explanation. More than that and people lose interest.

As the stakes get higher (in, say, a professional environment with money on the line), that threshold increases, but there’s still a limit to how much talking can occur before most people tune out. Agile development operates on a similar concept, with “sprints” being a small subset of a larger picture and covering that attention threshold. In the raid, we explain a bit, pull, wipe, then course correct. In Agile development, you plan a bit, execute for a few weeks, then come back, see what worked, then course correct. Same strategy, broader application.

Direction

This is almost as important as communication, and is kind of a “well, duh” concept. A group needs a task, a goal that it’s working towards. This can be as specific as “complete this assignment” or “defeat this boss” or it can be as vague as “make a place to call home” or “support each other through hard times”. A really solid group can be pointed in a direction and go, getting everything necessary done along the way.

An idea that I’ve found difficult to internalize is that a lot of times, simply telling people what to do is extremely effective. I’ve been a part of and even led a lot of groups that have fallen apart because the directing force is too weak. Sometimes it’s trying too hard to accommodate everyone’s schedules, or it’s overly worried about what everyone in the group wants to do, and winds up doing nothing. I personally spend a lot of time trying to work out what everyone in my groups wants if I’m leading them, and sometimes I just need to tell people what’s going on and let them figure out the details for themselves. The key to this is to respect and appreciate the people on your team, understanding that they’re often trying to make things work. A secret I’ve found out about myself, and that I suspect is true of others, is that when I’m told where to be, what to do, and when, and I have to change my plans to make that work, I’m a lot more invested in what happens, so I’m more into it.

The dark side of this is twofold. When direction is wielded as a weapon, it leads to micromanagement or closed communication. People in the organization should be capable of knowing what needs to be done and doing it without needing excessive oversight– if this isn’t the case, that’s what training is for. If direction is used to excessively shut out avenues of communication or topics raised, it closes communication lines. Obviously some suggestions, comments, and ideas won’t work or aren’t appropriate, but there’s a line between staying focused and clamping down that shouldn’t be crossed.

Motivation

Motivation is the last ‘sword’, and it’s the trickiest one. It’s important that everyone in the group is motivated, but it’s also important that the motivation is genuine and not forced. When I posted a few weeks ago about limiting my raid’s focus on a given encounter to two weeks at a time and no more (there’s that direction thing again), it was the result of a vibe I was getting that mirrored my own feelings. We weren’t making progress because we were all bored of the same thing, but we wanted to raid together and so were all forcing the motivation.

In the past few weeks, we’ve hit other targets, and beaten every single one. We’ve progressed through a ton of bosses that we’d never seen before, and when we returned to the original boss we’d been fighting, we instantly made progress into a portion of the fight we’d never really cracked open. I’m confident that we’ll have the boss down soon, just from the break and the breather we’ve had.

My motivation for the “two weeks” rule was partly selfish. I was getting bored of the same boss week after week, and at the time I wondered if I was misreading the vibe I was getting– projecting my lack of motivation onto everyone else. As the group’s leader, I’m not sure there’s a difference. Motivation in a group often trickles down from the leadership, and I think it’s significantly more important as a leader to motivate yourself than try to motivate your team when you aren’t fully invested yourself.

This can backfire on you– you need to be empathetic to your group’s needs and desires beyond your own– this much is obvious. Trying to force motivation is the more insidious trap, though. Every group needs to be motivated, but trying to force it feels shallow and will quickly make your team bitter, which undermines both your communication and your direction. Motivating people is often about being motivated yourself and letting that energy flow outwards, rather than trying to create it from nothing. In a good group, however, this can often become a positive feedback loop, which is ideal.

This is just scratching the surface of my take on managing an organization, but hopefully it was interesting for someone.

Some of the best games I’ve played recently have been recommended to me by other people. I know my tastes, and I’m pretty proactive about finding games I know I’ll like, and as a result I tend not to listen to the games people suggest for me. A few things slip by, usually stuff that isn’t in my usual wheelhouse, and I usually get them from other people or the occasional errant thing I read on the web.

I’d like to add a feature where I suggest games I’ve played that I think are worth looking into for one reason or another. These will be “Tam Suggests” games, and I’ll be following up with another feature called “Tam Tries” which will be more of a standard review, done my way.

I’ll lead these off with a disclaimer: The game I suggest here are worth playing. This doesn’t necessarily make them good, and I don’t necessarily think everyone will like them. I’ll talk about why I think they’re worth playing, but don’t expect a lot of hard criteria-checking. In a review, I’ll be looking at the game holistically. For the Suggests series, I’m going to be focused on a small number of reasons that, despite its flaws, the game is worth your time.

Let’s start with one that’s been lodged in my brain for a few years now. Here we go.

Kentucky Route Zero is a weird game. Aggressively, intensely weird. So weird it’s able to drive the casual observer far away.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best examples of art in videogames I’ve ever seen.

The premise is very, very simple. You are a deliveryman, driving through Kentucky and trying to get to your last stop of the night, and you’re fairly far away. On your way, you find yourself taking a supernatural shortcut, a mysterious route called Route Zero, or just “the Zero” by those in the know.

It’s played like an old-style point-and-click adventure game, and you move around solving puzzles and exploring, seeing the sights and pushing ever onwards towards your goal. You meet interesting people who’re going the same way you are, and sometimes make friends. The whole thing is done in an almost impressionistic art style, shadow play and simple shapes hinting at what’s there, rather than showing you outright. Here’s the trailer, see for yourself:

Things get weird pretty fast. Then they get really weird, even faster. I have a pretty high threshold for strange, so it didn’t really faze me, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve tried the game and couldn’t handle how strange it gets. I don’t think it’s nonsensical, it’s just a little bit sideways, and the logic of Route Zero is more Through The Looking-Glass than you might expect, complete with weird, non-Euclidean geometries.

It’s worth playing for the art alone, but the sound design deserves a mention (in fact, its sound design has won awards). It flits between the dreamlike and the ominous, but keeps the running theme of “it’s late and it’s lonely out here on the road” going strong. I’ve commented before that there’s no alone like 5am, and KRZ captures that feeling very well.

It’s got great visuals and music, though that’s not why I think it’s worth playing. It’s worth playing because it does some very creative things with game narratives that only games can do. A lot of games, even very beloved ones, imitate movies for their storytelling; one-sided projections of the story to the audience. Kentucky Route Zero appears to do that until the first time you talk with an NPC. It shows you what to prepare for by introducing your dog.

It’s a simple, apparently meaningless choice. When you pick a name for the dog, a short blurb about the dog’s personality follows, and for the rest of the game, that’s the dog’s name and personality. Later, it comes up again, only you already know the dog’s name and whether or not the dog is friendly towards other people you meet is no longer your choice.

It’s a really simple concept as shown here, but it slowly gets deeper. When talking to NPCs, I can pick which conversation options tell which parts of the story I want to tell. It gets more complicated when I’m getting to choose what both sides of the conversation are saying, or even what multiple people in my slowly growing party have to say and when. Who interrupts whom, and who’s quiet while the others talk?

Eventually people will ask about your motivations, and this can lead into entire varied asides and different sorts of paths and conversations based on what you choose to say. At one point, I was helping set up a TV for someone, and at a certain point I could reminisce in a couple different ways about my parents and how they felt about TVs, or I could brusquely say “I know how to set up a TV”. I chose the latter, favoring action and displays of competence, and I was able to set up the TV without help. Later, a similar conversation came up and I opted to comment about my background as a mechanic and fix what needed fixing, rather than talking about it. The min-maxer in me enjoyed being able to just be good at whatever I wanted to say I was good at.

Some time later, two of the characters talked about how standoffish and aloof I’d been as Conway, and that control over the conversation came up again. I could have them argue, or mutually decide they didn’t like Conway, or show compassion.

As the game unfolds, you see more and more of the surrounding story– the colour gets filled in, if you will, but which colours you see vary based on your choices. It tells a very complex, winding story, but does so in a way that lets you explore it– not just the physical space, but the relationships with the characters.

It’s not for everyone, and it takes some excruciatingly weird turns, but the way in which it’s presented is really interesting, and I find myself looking forward to new chapters so that I can see where the story goes –where I can take it– next. It’s an experience I can’t really have outside games, and it shows off what the medium is capable of.

It may not be your cup of tea, but I think it’s worth a look.

Games journalism. It’s not really about ethics. It’s about money. Shocker, I know.

You can get to the heart of almost any organization’s strengths, weaknesses, issues, and successes by following the money. If you’re looking for motivation of almost any business, follow the money. Specifically, figure out where the money is coming from and where it’s going. If there’s something happening that you don’t like, it’s probably because you are not the part of the group that’s the primary contributor of money to the organization in question.

If you’re looking at a company that’s doing things that you don’t like, things that fundamentally don’t align with your interests, it’s pretty likely that you’re not the target audience (and thus not giving them any money) or you’re not the customer, you’re the product. You can rail against this, but no matter how loud you get, it’s not going to change unless the flow of money changes.

The common saying is that money is the root of all evil, which I honestly find to be something of a cop-out. Everyone needs to pay the bills, keep the lights on, keep food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. These aren’t easy things to do. If you’re looking at a professional games journalism site, something that posts multiple times a day (every other hour? more?) and that you can rely upon for coverage of a large number of events, you’re looking at someone, usually quite a few someones, who need to make enough money to essentially spend all day posting. Odds are good you don’t pay a dime to any games site– most don’t even give you the option. So, you’re looking at something you consume for free, that takes up someone’s entire workday, who needs to pay the bills somehow. Follow the money.

If you’re not paying, someone is, or no one would be writing. So, who would want to give someone money to write about games? First, advertisers, though too many ads and you, the reader, won’t read the site anymore, so getting all your money from ads isn’t likely. Second, game publishers, who want people to know about their games and know that games sites are a good marketing platform. Both of these groups have money and motivation. This is all pretty obvious, but it’s where the whole “ethics” question gets thrown into the mix.

Is there a conflict of interest when it comes to accepting money directly from the people you are reporting on? Certainly. Pretty much every type of enthusiast press deals with this. Why? Well, what’s the alternative? Gotta keep the lights on somehow, gotta keep food on the table. The relationship pretty much has to run this way because otherwise you don’t have the money to keep the site up. Does this absolve the enthusiast press of the conflict of interest? No, but “real journalism” is going to take a backseat to “paying the bills” any day of the week. Because it’s enthusiast press and not life-and-death reporting, there’s no value in martyring yourself to report on “big issues” because this is entertainment media; “big issues” pretty much don’t exist.

There’s an alternative model that’s been suggested for games reporting sites: Webcartoonists. The vast majority of webcartoonists don’t sustain themselves on their comic alone; it’s a very rare few who can focus exclusively on their work, and they’re almost all solo endeavours. They also post, at most, once a day, usually less often than that. Not counting sponsored posts and reposts, Kotaku posted ten times today (Sunday, May 10). Destructoid posted 11 times. MassivelyOP, a niche site, posted 9 times today. BlizzardWatch, an even more niche site than Massively, posted 7 times. It’s not a coincidence that those numbers are all really close to one another. While a webcomic can update once a day or less to remain relevant, a games site needs to update multiple times a day– in some cases upwards of ten(!) to stay relevant– that’s where the market equilibrium is happening. The model doesn’t seem to work.

I originally planned on making a graph to show this off, comparing today’s pageviews to the number of posts made. Pageviews are relevant because that’s what gets people to see the advertisements and the marketing that funds the site. Your eyes looking at these sites is the traffic that drives revenue (you are the product). However, the divide between games sites is pretty stark. The readership of sites with 10 or more posts versus the readership of sites with less than 10 posts in a given day is STARK. We’re talking orders of magnitude here, it makes for a silly looking graph. I don’t have a complete picture of the data to support this, but I strongly suspect that if a site updated, say, 15 times a day, they wouldn’t see a significant increase past about 10 or so posts. I do have some supporting data, however.

IGN.com updated 32 times this past Sunday. Here’s their Alexa rank:

IGN.com, Alexa ranking

For comparison, here’s Kotaku, with less than a third of their post count:

kotaku.com, Alexa ranking

As a final point, here’s the Escapist, with 4 posts:

escapistmagazine.com, Alexa ranking

These are all pan-media outlets with a focus on gaming. They all have relatively similar curves, with a spike of readers in the last quarter of 2014 and then some levelling off, and all taking a dive in April (as news hits the doldrums). The Escapist is notably even more pan-media than Kotaku, but Kotaku is right in the 500-700 rank, whereas the Escapist is between 4000 and 5000; an order of magnitude. IGN only gains 300 or so rank over Kotaku, a fairly meager gain in absolute terms, particularly for triple the output. I’m not suggesting that post count is the only (or even necessarily the most important) factor in readership, but there’s definitely a correlation, and all of these sites are posting FAR more than once a day or a few times a week.

The difficulty is finding a model that supports the interests of the audience while providing enough income to support the sites themselves. It seems unlikely that readers are going to be willing to pay for access to games news sites– the current games news sites are the old game magazines, which almost wholly died out with the advent of the internet. The audience was more than happy to become the product in return for getting content for free.

Cory Doctorow in his hot air balloon

The other model I’ve seen is the very egalitarian, very grassroots “bloggers can be the new games journalists”, suggesting that the content created by bloggers, in aggregate, can cover the news and be honest and reader-oriented about it because there’s no real money in it for them. It’s the same concept that drives the idea of twitter-as-international news. I’m not sure if it can work; the idea of crowdsourced reporting is still really young and I suspect there will be barriers to entry put in place by both existing games sites (who want exclusive coverage) and game publishers themselves (who want to be able to control what people say about them). It’s definitely a problem with the Youtube scene by most reports– people either allow themselves to be bought or are shut out.

I’m not sure what the future of games reporting is going to look like, but I think the first place to look to see where it’s headed is the flow of money. You can boil a lot of things down to a follow-the-money problem, and if you figure out how that flow is working, you can get a picture of how it’s likely to change and what would need to be different to get what you’re looking for.

I suspect that a site with no advertising, that charged a $10/month subscription fee and managed to get a critical mass of readers would deliver some really top-notch reporting, but I also doubt there are enough people willing to pay for that.