Alone Again Or

Naithin at Time To Loot has a post up, bouncing off a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes. The video, which I've embedded below for those who don't feel like clicking on a link, is called How the MMO became less social and it's three-quarters of one of the best analyses of the much-discussed phenomenon that I've seen.

I would recommend watching it all the way through... or listening to it in the background while you do something else, for example play an mmorpg. It's basically a lecture. It would make more sense as a podcast than a YouTube video although I did discover from watching the first few minutes that Runes of Magic is a better-looking game than I remembered.

The first three sections are lucidly argued. I found myself agreeing with most of the points made. It was the fourth segment that Naithin's post highlighted, though, the chapter entitled "The shifting of social interactions to 3rd party platforms", and that was the part I found the least convincing.

Josh draws threads from the previous three parts together to make the case that socialization in mmorpgs hasn't disappeared altogether, it's just gone somewhere else. As someone who's very much part of the problem he describes under the second and third headings ("The genre popularity boom and rise of the solo player" and "The catering of systems to the solo player"), a player for whose increasingly solipsistic tastes the entire genre has been redefined, I find myself in a precarious position, discussing how players might these days find themselves engaging in what passes for organized content.

I'll take Naithin's word for it that such players today often "organise dungeon content. Raids. Heck, any group content" on external platforms like Discord (It's always Discord, isn't it?). If that's the case, though, I would question just how much of a change it represents.

You call it bragging, I call it socializing.

Larger formal content like raids has always been organized externally but even in the early days, most quasi-formal appointments-to-play, from guild events to weddings, were generally handled outside of the games themselves. As far back as 2001-2 I was having to make accounts with various hosting platforms, register for services like Magelo, set passwords and sign in to forums, just so I could find out what guilds I'd joined were planning. And those were family guilds, not raiders.

I remember it now because I found it so irritating then, but I knew you couldn't get by as a supposed "social" player just on the in-game communication channels alone. The people for whom those were paramount were, ironically, those most resistant to the overt social aspects of the genre. People who were focused on ad hoc content, on character-based activities, on leveling up and playing alts.

Socialization in those days was gameplay, even if you weren't social about it. Even for a soloist, the experience was defined by relationships with others, in that case as much by a refusal to participate as a wish to be included. I do think one long-forgotten aspect of solo play in pre-World of Warcraft mmorpgs is just how proud solo players were of their skills. They soloed not because no-one would group with them but because they didn't need anyone to group with them.

There's a whole different post to be written about how the genre's drift towards soloability has contributed to the attritional decline of true solo play. Maybe I'll get to that another time. Sticking with the topic at hand, the slow but steady transition of the mmorpg genre from one in which gameplay is predicated on in-game socialization to one in which the overwhelming majority of content is available to all regardless of willingness to socialize represents a fundamental change that can't be hand-waved away by a misconcatenation of interactions that share only a few surface similarities.

In the beginning, mmorpgs were ultra-social. Everything Josh says about the early days rings true to me from my own experience. Being able to fight monsters side-by-side with people on the other side of the world and talk to them while doing it was mindboggling. The games operated as de facto social media platforms even before the term "social media" had currency. 

If you need a favor you still have to ask.

 

These are not new insights. They're concepts often discussed and widely accepted nowadays. But Josh does highlight something much less frequently noted: some of what we glibly term "socializing" was, in fact, core gameplay content. 

There's a kind of accepted wisdom about the old LFG days. How much time was wasted, standing around in a city or at the entrance to a dungeon, spamming /shout or /ooc with your virtual CV, hoping someone would at least acknowledge your existence before you had to give up and log out. It all makes things sound quite pathetic and painfully dull. 

And it could be. But what you hear far less of, something Josh alludes to but doesn't elaborate on, is how putting groups together could be fun. How coming up with effective ways to sell yourself as a useful, desirable group member was a skill as satisfying to improve as two-hand blunt or evocation. How people became as well-known for their group-building prowess as their tanking skills. Much is said about the value of reputation in those days: in my experience almost nothing gave higher social status than a rep as someone who could build and run really strong, effective groups.

Generally, when older players harp on about what was lost, they make too much of how "we sat around between pulls and chatted". Yes, we did do that, a lot, but for my money real "socializing" never revolved around fireside conversation as we waited for the cleric to get her mana back. It wasn't swapping stories about what we were doing outside the game that made for strong bonds. It was discussing what we were going to do in it.

My strongest memories of social interactions from the golden age of the genre mainly involve planning sessions as we brainstormed tactics to achieve some immediate gameplay goal. That's what no longer happens in most of the mmorpgs I play, largely because, as Josh explains, the need for such tactical concerns has been designed out of the genre.

Once it was groups. Now it's maps.

 

It's why I'm looking forward to the return of the Marionette fight to Guild Wars 2. It's a rare example in modern times of content that regularly generated the kind of in the moment tactical discussions I relish. That's the kind of social gameplay I enjoy.

And that's why I don't see the burgeoning acceptance and use of third-party platforms for communication between people with a shared interest in mmorpgs as a replacement or even a corollary for the kind of gameplay-based social interactions upon which the genre made its name. And that's if we accept on face value the argument that the average mmorpg player is making widespread use of social media these days.

I wonder if they are? Discord, as has been discussed in this corner of the blogosphere a number of times of late, is far from being accepted as a universal good. Some people like it, some people put up with it, some people can't stand it. In the games I play it's not at all unusual to hear people being critical of out-of-game platforms, not because of any inherent flaws in the software but because they're deemed to be an inappropriate way to communicate.

A lot of that is most likely based on age and experience. Older players are less likely to want to move their conversations to new and unfamiliar platforms, partly out of an innate resistance to change but also from previous failures. How many different communication media will a ten-year veteran already have signed up for and then found themselves not using a few months later?

Some of the resistance, though, is structural. Communication that takes place outside of the game is by definition not part of the game. It's related to it but not of it. To some players that's not why they're playing. They want to be part of a self-contained imaginary world that has internal consistency. That's hard enough already without making further concessions to asynchronous social media or voice chat.

Some people never speak. Some people never shut up.

 

I'm not going to fight for the flag on this one. I have no way of knowing how widespread the use of 3rd party social media platforms within the wider mmorpg audience might be. In a way, though, the more widespread it is, the less it means. 

Josh refers to a whole range of providers - YouTube, Discord, Twitch, Facebook - as though a shared interest expressed across those for a commonly-held hobby makes for some kind of cohesive social bond. If that's true then it must also apply to all fans of, well, anything. It's just too general to have significance.

As he says, at the start mmorpgs were doing something new, something unique. Now they share those functions with much larger, more popular, more successful platforms, processes and providers. That mmorpg players also use those platforms says much about the pervasive influence and acceptance of social media but it doesn't necessarily indicate a straightforward change of venue.

Everyone uses social media. Of course that includes mmorpg players. Just because we socialize outside the games we play doesn't mean we've simply transferred our in-game social structures and practices to a new host. The games aren't social any more, not in the way they were. Talking about them on social media doesn't change that. Making plans with our friends about what we're going to do when we see them in game doesn't change that. 

Josh had it right in the set-up: for mmorpgs, socialization was gameplay. His conclusion, that "the social aspect has simply moved out of the game" won't stand up.

If the socialization isn't in the game, it's not part of the game. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Not everything has been lost. The genre hasn't become asocial, just differently socialized. I prefer things as they are now. I like the new forms of socialization that have replaced the old.

That's why my game of choice for much of the last decade has been Guild Wars 2. Of all the mmorpgs I play, it's the one that's most successfully managed to integrate the genre's older, socially-reliant gameplay with modern, solo-oriented expectations.

But, once again, that's a whole other post.

Talking To Strangers

This corner of the blogosphere seems to be passing through some kind of reflexive wavefront right now. Everywhere I look I see thoughtful, analytical, detailed discussions. Mechanics, metaphysics, motive, all the tropes of academia - or at least a lively student bar - directed at dissecting, discussing and determining what makes an MMORPG.

There's more to react to than there is time to react, which is both frustrating and energizing. I note with pleasure the long comment threads (and the long comments) that trail many of these thought-provoking posts. Blogging dead? Doesn't seem like it right now.

One of the recent wave of posts that particularly struck a note with me was Naithin's commentary on the Transition from Social to Solo in MMORPG gameplay. We've been round this track more than a few times but there's always more nuance to tease out.

For one thing, I hadn't ever really thought about the provenance of the term "Pick Up Group" before. I tried to think back to when I first heard it. I'm not at all sure it was in use back when I was joining - or recruiting - pick up groups most evenings and every weekend. Google, for once, doesn't have an awful lot to contribute. The earliest reference I could find only went back to 2006. There's a very interesting and detailed game-by-game rundown of usage at TVTropes , which strongly implies a much older heritage, but it sheds little light on provenance.

As far as I recall, we used simply to refer to "groups", without any need for further definition or clarification. I'd probably played MMORPGs for several years before I ever heard the term "Guild Group". People often used to speak of their guild responsibilities and it was commonplace for people to have to leave to "help a guildie" or go on a guild raid, but I can't recall anyone ever leaving a group I was in because they preferred to join an exclusive group of people from their guild just for regular, everyday play.

When I was in a cross-guild chat channel in EverQuest that satisfied most of my grouping requirements, we would fill spots from outside the channel by asking if anyone had friends or guildmates who wanted to run with us. If those people fitted in to our culture we'd invite them to join the channel.

We prided ourselves on being competent and capable but there was a wide variety of skill and experience. We had some very casual players who were great company but needed a degree of direction and some top-end raiders who were there just to chill and relax. We liked to get things done and we liked to challenge ourselves but clearly what was cutting edge content for some of us was slippers and cocoa for others.

In twenty years of playing MMORPGs, the couple of years I spent with the people in that chat channel represent the zenith of my grouping experience. It offered the flexibility and variety of pick up grouping but with the familiarity and structure of a guild or static group. In some ways it prefigured, in social terms if not mechanics, the kind of open group play that eventually grew out of Warhammer's Public Quests.

While, as I said, the members of that chat channel liked to get things done, the real reason we were all there was to chat. Okay, not everyone would have listed their priorities in exactly that order, but fitting in socially was the defining factor on whether guests ended up getting an invite and the way we assessed social suitability had much more to do with affability or snappy repartee than whether you mistimed the odd heal.

In the comment thread that follows Naithin's post there's a discussion about the changing role of text and voice. Jeromai has a theory, to which I also cleave:

"...the design of action-focused games has steadily made it physically impossible or inconvenient to maintain a good typed conversation. Typed conversation has more stately pauses, and takes your fingers away from WASD, causing your characters to pause in whatever they are doing. Given that most people want very much to be actually playing during their game time, every potential sentence is briefly weighed (subconsciously or otherwise) for whether it’s worth utterance."

When I was googling "pick up groups" I came across a fascinating piece of academic research at Wiley's Online Library, entitled "Where Everybody Knows Your Name". It's a dense and very heavily referenced paper and I haven't even begun to dig into the detail, but just on a quick scan some paragraphs positively jump out:

"Text‐based interaction in such worlds is incessant and ubiquitous. There is not just one chat channel but multiple simultaneous ones: public, private, and various group channels. Together, these function as both a one‐to‐many and one‐to‐one communicative space..."

Despite the encroachment of voice chat, that seems to me still to be the case, at least in the MMORPGs I play. In Guild Wars 2, for example, voice communications are almost de rigeur in many World vs World squads but that doesn't mean no-one talks in type. Quite the opposite, in fact. It just adds yet another layer.

It's become a truism to state that the exponential growth of social media and the mainstreaming of instantaneous global communication has stripped the magic and mystique from talking in real-time to strangers on the other side of the world. And it most likely has.

Whether that has very much to do with the changing attitudes to running dungeons with strangers, I'm becoming less certain every time I think about it. As for the accepted narrative that people no longer want to talk to strangers in MMOs these days, the more I think about that, the less convincing I find it.

I talk to strangers every day, in GW2 and EverQuest II and pretty much in whatever MMORPG I happen to find myself. Not, as I once did, in group chat seen by no more then five or six other people, but in open channels where the conversations bounce between dozens of participants in front of an unknowable audience, any of whom might join in at any moment.

It's entirely commonplace for me to be calling out scouting information in Map chat, arguing with someone in Team, making sarcastic comments to Mrs Bhagpuss about other players in Guild and bantering in Squad, all while I'm on auto-run across the map in the middle of the Zerg. It's much the same as I've been doing in a variety of channels in  a multiplicity of MMOs for two decades.

The only element that's missing from the mix are those rambling group chats on personal and out-of-game topics we used to indulge in between pulls and those, it seems to me, were more a function of the specific combat mechanics of those games than any kind of end in themselves. If you have to sit down and do nothing for anything up to five minutes after every big fight you have to pass the time somehow...

I don't feel there's been quite as much of a move away from the old methods, either of communication or socialization in MMORPGs as has sometimes - often - been claimed. I'm not sure there will be, either. People do like to talk, and text is orders of magnitude more efficient than voice in the context of the shared "third spaces" of MMOs.

Which isn't to say that online games in general aren't travelling in a different direction. They are. The widely-praised non-text, non-speech communication system built into Apex Legends suggests that mainstream gaming is evolving away from the kind of personalized, intimate relationships we've so long taken for granted towards a more functional, gameplay-directed future.

Battle Royales aren't MMORPGs, though. Not hardly. MMORPG players like to chat. If they can't do it during fights they'll go sit somewhere safe and do it there instead. I don't see any sign of that ending any time soon.

Get Smart : GW2

Festival of the Four Winds ends today. I had to be at work by eight in the morning so I thought last night's session was the last I'd see of The Crown Pavilion and Labrynthine Cliffs until next year.
I spent most of the evening on the newest of my three accounts, the only one that wasn't around last time we saw this content, grabbing bundles in the Treasure Hunt and doing any event I could find to earn Festival Tokens.

I just managed to scrape up enough treasure to by a kite and with my tokens I got a hot air balloon on a string and that yellow flower that goes on your back. The sense of satisfaction when I was finally able to buy them, just before the clock passed the absolute latest I could stay up and still be half-awake in work the next day, was disturbing. I haven't been that keen to get something in an MMORPG for a long while.

Then I get home tonight, have my tea, read Feedly, log in and find the Festival's still there! I'm  listening to the sounds of preparations for Boss Blitz in the background as I type.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I had something to say about Boss Blitz. I really enjoy it as an exciting, involving event  but I also find it fascinating as a social and psychological experiment. Or perhaps it's a demonstration.

Boss Blitz isn't hard to understand or to do. The optimal way to run the event is for everyone to split into six teams of eight to ten people. Ideally, certain classes or builds concentrate on particular bosses that suit their abilities. There are some mechanics that need to be explained, such as Boom Boom Baines' healing turret, but most of the bosses are tank&spank with a lot of dodging.

Once set up, preferably under six Commanders using different colored tags for clarity, each team goes to its designated Boss. All teams then attempt to bring their Boss to 10% health at the same time. Some inevitably get there first, meaning they have to "hold" the Boss at that point without doing further damage.

Someone needs to call out the health of each boss at frequent intervals in a public channel. I often took it upon myself to do that bit. I like yelling. I got suppressed a few times for spamming map chat, something which is all too easy to do in GW2, where you can be banned from sending items to your own characters after two deliveries in quick succession. I should have used /squad which doesn't use the same anti-spam mechanics.

Once the slowest team gets their boss to 10%, their Commander gets to give the "Burn" command, whereupon everyone goes flat out to kill the boss in front of them as fast as possible. The reason for the co-ordinated kill is that each boss passes its signature ability (bombs, adds, banishment) on to all the other bosses when it dies, meaning each kill makes every other boss more difficult.

If everything goes to plan a good, organized map can complete this in about five minutes. The timer for the Gold award is eight minutes. This year I didn't get one Gold in three weeks. Four and five years ago I got plenty. I'm not sure what to read into that. Have GW2 players got worse? Is the event harder? Was I just unlucky with the maps I picked?

I did get lots of high Silvers (time limit sixteen minutes, we did it often in nine or ten) and any number of Bronzes (no time limit). I used the LFG tool to swap maps often until I got one that was at least trying to get Gold or Silver. There were fewer of those than you might expect.

Most of the maps were barely organized at all. Instead of doing it as described above (a description that I saw repeated in map chat many times by patient or frustrated players) people did what they do everywhere in GW2 - ran around in a huge zerg trying to overwhelm all opposition by weight of numbers. Some of the squads advertizing in LFG even said "zerg" or "bronze" in the description, indicating an active disinclination to make more than the minimal effort.

Of course, zerging means that not only does each boss get harder as it acquires the abilities of the ones who died before it, but GW2's scaling mechanic means every boss also gains a gigantic health pool to reflect the army of players opposing it. An event that is self-evidently intended to take between eight to sixteen minutes often stretches out to half an hour or more.

The fascinating part is that by the second week of the Festival everyone knew this and yet the majority of players carried on doing it anyway. Angry and embittered experts railed against the idiocy but it seems clear to me that most players preferred to zerg. They knew it would take longer and they just didn't care.

After all, it's not like they had anywhere else to be. This is the event of the moment so they were doing it. The rewards for finishing faster weren't significantly better so there wasn't much incentive to organize. And in any case, zerging is a social activity, not a competetive one.

Watching this drama enacted over and over again was instructive and entertaining. Some people were so angry they must have had steam coming out of their ears in real life. The accusation was almost always that those who wouldn't organize were too stupid to know what was expected of them but the replies very clearly indicated the opposite. Everyone knew what they "should" be doing - they just didn't want to do it.

I very much did want to do it properly. I love organized content. I like events where everyone has to get into teams and go to different places and do different things to achieve a collective success. I love Dragon's Stand and Auric Basin and my favorite event of all time in GW2 was Scarlet's Marionette.

And yet I still enjoy a good, mindless zerg, even when I'm well aware it's inefficient and even counter-productive. Running around in gang of fifty, taking on massive hit-point sponges and wearing them down by sheer bloody-mindedness has its own appeal.

I guess you can have smart, clever fun or dumb, stupid fun. Either way you're still having fun.

Give me the choice and I'll go for the smart option, though. Well, eight times out of ten.

Join The Club

Belghast alerted me to an interesting post at Digital Initiative, which was also a new blog to me. I added it to the blog-roll. Then I read the post. It breaks down the typical guild membership by type and Tamrielo, the author, clearly speaks from experience.

It's been a long time since I was in an active guild that had more people in it than just Mrs Bhagpuss, myself and one or two others but I instantly recognized just about all of the personalities listed. I could put names to most of them - if I could only remember the names. Actually, I could go "Oh, that sounds just like that guy, remember him, oh what was his name? Always wore green and used to sit in Plane of Knowledge all day moaning nothing was as good as the old days..."

Reading through the list was a little disturbing. I felt like I was auditioning for the lead in one of those T.V. movies about multiple personality disorder - that's me, and that's me and, oh, wait, that's really me!

I would lay claim to being any guild's lead Things Explainer - one of the "good" ones, I'd like to think, although other opinions are no doubt available. I literally left a guild over a stand-up argument with the Raid Leader because my You Need Yours position was so unwavering. I could make a strong case for being labeled Side Projects and I have certainly played the Chill AF role to the hilt on occasion.

The sumptuous and largely forgotten interior of the Guild Initiative Office.

There's probably a smattering of several others in there from time to time. I was certainly The Positivity Canon for a while in Vanguard, when I was having the best time of my MMORPG life while all around me people were just praying they could get the game not to crash for five minutes in a row.  I've been the Backpack to Mrs Bhagpuss's Hiker in a few guilds, too.

There are a few categories I am pretty certain no-one could ever accuse me of representing. I do talk a lot in guilds but apart from that I'm no Socialite. Come to think of it, one category that's glaring in it's absence here is The Chatterbox. /em raises hand.

I'd like to think I've never been The Downer or The Griefer but sadly neither have I ever been The Ninja or Silent But Competent. (Noisy But Incompetent - now you're talking...or more likely I am, while we're wiping).

Not sure if this is decoration or fly-posting.

Although all of this seems very familiar from the increasingly distant past, I wonder how accurate it is in terms of current guild practice and experience? Do guilds even work this way any more?

My view may be colored by five and a half years in Guild Wars 2, where guild membership is a very malleable affair. Apart from my own guild, where I spend most of my time, and a bunch of "Bank Guilds" I made for storage, I'm in two fairly large guilds each numbering somewhere in the hundreds of active members. Neither of them seems remotely like any guild I was ever in outside GW2.

They seem to be relatively structureless for a start. There's a nominal hierarchy with names for the ranks but no-one seems to refer to it. If we have "officers" I have no idea who they are (and I've been in both guilds for several years now). Events, when they occur, seem to be ad hoc and while someone got us a guild hall and did a bang-up job decorating it I have no idea who that might have been or when it happened.

Despite my apparent disconnection, I remain a member in good standing and if it all seems fairly anonymous and impersonal then that's because it is. In GW2 you join guilds by your Account rather than by your character and each account can be in up to five guilds simultaneously. Since it's common to have more than one account (I have four) the number of guilds you can be in at the same time is potentially quite large.

It used to be that you had to "Represent" a guild (which means specify it as your active guild) and you could only speak in the Guild Chat of that guild. Guilds were also server-specific. Over time all that has gone. Now you can speak in the chat channel of any of your guilds and you can join guilds on any server.

The even more sumptuous interior of the even less-frequented Arena in the Windswept Haven Guild Hall.

I wonder if that dilutes the intensity, indeed the cabin fever, that used to characterize the clubhouse mentality of many guilds in the past? It must be much harder to develop and maintain the kind of obvious idiosyncratic character traits listed by Tamrielo in an environment where guild membership is so much more tangential and fractured.

Finally, a reason to visit!

It also removes that whole "I quit" drama that made guilds so enervating in the past. If you get fed up, or someone's annoying you, you can just start chatting in another guild and go play with them instead, then come back to the first when The Drill Sergeant or Ready To Go has logged out.

I certainly have never seen anything in the two large guilds I'm in that comes anywhere close to the kind of emotional hothousing that so strongly put me off guild life back in the mid-noughties. It's a far more relaxed, casual, laissez-faire experience than anything I remember from EverQuest or EQ2.

As I do my dailies in DCUO, slipping my Qwardian coins into my wallet as I save up for Krypto, I'm still getting random drive-by guild invites. I haven't yet accepted one because it seems a bit louche to join and then never turn up for anything. At best I'd be a classic What's Going On Lately, dropping in for fresh events, grabbing the freebies, maybe staying for a week of dailies then disappearing until next time.

Even so, I am tempted. I never want to have to deal with proper Guild Drama ever again but I wouldn't mind being Things Explainer or Chill AF in a nice, quiet, steady guild somewhere. Maybe that time will come in Ashes of Creation or Pantheon, if either of them ever happen for real. Pantheon particularly strikes me as a game where a good guild would be more of a necessity than a luxury.

Meanwhile I guess I'll carry on as I have been, with the personalities I know from map and wvw chat standing in for guildmates. I could allocate a few names to categories there as well...

Playing In The Big Leagues : DCUO

If you run around in just about any MMO without a guild tag up you can expect to get unsolicited invites. Sometimes it's a whisper asking if you're looking for a guild. Sometimes it's a drive-by pop-up.

Occasionally you run into that annoying recruiter who hears "I'm not looking for a guild right now" as a challenge to his recruiting skills but usually all you have to do is make the right polite demurral or simply not respond at all and you're on your way. Which is what I always do.

Except last night, playing DCUO, I didn't. I was in a Metropolis Police Station shopping for clothes (as you do), when a League Invite window popped. Leagues, naturally, being how guilds are known in the game.

And I accepted it. I don't know why. I liked the name - DC Bombshells - and I also liked the name of the person who'd sent the invite, both of which are always positive indicators, but mostly I was just in a mellow, "it's a grouping kind of game" frame of mind.

I said "thanks" and no-one replied so I guessed it was going to be one of those "we recruit the entire server" kind of organizations. Which is fine. Being in one of those is like still playing solo only now you have a tag so you're more anonymous than ever.

With that ice broken I was in for more socializing. Since returning to the game I'd taken a minimal amount of trouble to read my skills, check my loadouts, spend my Trait Points and grab a couple of upgrades so I was about as ready as I was going to be.

The next step of the Episode story arc was a four-person instance. I queued it and it popped in a matter of seconds. The Episode instances so far have been role agnostic so queuing as DPS isn't the drag anchor you'd expect.

The instance went very well. In keeping with modern practice no-one spoke as we followed the quest tracker instructions, which could largely have been condensed to "Kill everything and go through the next door that opens".

As battle progressed it occurred to me that, as DCUO has one of those rare, welcome, native screenshot functions that auto-hides the UI, I might be able to get some decent combat shots. Getting screen grabs of fights involving your character that don't look like an explosion in a firework factory is hard enough but doing it without dying can be next to impossible so I was surprised and delighted with the results.

When I came to look them over, it wasn't just that I had a few nice pictures for the blog: I could actually see - for the first time ever - what my character does in a fight. I had no idea that when she uses her "Whirlwind" attack she flies around her enemies at ankle level, parallel to the floor, for example.

I'll be taking a lot more in-combat shots because they look great. I wouldn't go quite that far in describing what my character looks like but she certainly looks a lot better than she did in yesterday's illustrations. It was looking at the unseemly outfit she was embarrassing herself with in yesterday's post that made me open the Style tab and rethink.

DCUO may not match the legendary superhero fashion show that was City of Heroes but the Style system is a robust entry in the MMO appearance stakes. I don't have a whole lot of Styles earned and learned yet but I was able to put together something I'm a lot happier to be seen rescuing citizens in.

The instance proceeded efficiently and without drama until someone spoke up to question one member of the party who seemed to be in the wrong place doing nothing very much. There was no reply but a couple of minutes later I noticed the slacker had dropped from the group and been replaced by a new person. No "Vote to Kick" window popped so I guess he left of his own accord.

That was as awkward as it got. Well within my tolerance levels for pugging. We got to the final boss - Owlman - and knocked him around for a few minutes. Then we stood there like lemons while he and bad Commissioner Mayor Gordon played "pass the buck" for a while before Owlman pulled some trick from his Owlbelt (I'm guessing) and made his escape.

Fun times. The group broke up while I was reading my reviews in the window of shame that pops after an instance. I was, of course, lowest on every count - DPS, Healing, the other one. Well, I did beat the guy who left halfway through, but not his replacement. Still, no-one yelled at me and you could at least see I'd been doing something.

I went back to my Lair to go through my bags and sort out any upgrades that had dropped and I was standing around doing that when I heard voices. DCUO is a game with a lot of voiceover work so I just assumed it was Superman or someone nagging me to do more pro bono but gradually it dawned on me that DBG probably wouldn't pay voice actors to chat at length about their builds in some kind of simulated in-game version of a podcast.

I'd completely forgotten that DCUO has inbuilt VOIP. What I was hearing was a couple of people in my new League, chatting away. That was freaky. They sounded quite pleasant though so I turned the sound down a little and left them on like a radio station in the background.

That got me looking at the League tab. I don't think I've ever opened it before. I discovered that I've joined a League that only accepts female characters. Googling the League's name makes it clear why that is. Once upon a time I'd have known that without having to look it up but my obsessively detailed knowledge of the DC Universe stops dead in its tracks around 1989.

I don't know what counts as big in DCUO terms but DC Bombshells has over 400 members and there were twenty or twenty-five on the whole time I was playing. It looks as though I've joined an active organization at least.

Whether that's going to encourage me to log in more often or make me find something altogether different to do remains to be seen. Joining guilds has had both effects on me in the past. Whatever, it makes a change.

I'm not a fan of "getting out of your comfort zone" in principle. I've always held comfort to be aspirational not problematic. I do need reminding sometimes, though, that a comfort zone can stretch a fair old way and still stay pretty comfy.

I think I might be able to push this one a little further yet.

Anyone Want To See Some Pictures Of My Pets?

Atherne observed in a comment to my last post that she had no idea I played so much PvP. Ravanel said that her blog doesn't accurately reflect what she does in game either.

Meanwhile, Gevlon, who's recently been trawling the entirety of Syp's extensive blog roll in search of something worth reading (sooner him than me!) likens most of the bloggers he's found there to people who put up pictures of their breakfast on Instagram.: "They are alike the facebook pages of random nobodies that are full of everyday busywork that no one cares about (not even the poster) and literal photos of food. Why does someone cares to share a meal? Or a minipet? Or a storyline."

When I was growing up, one of the very many aspects of the adult world that mystified me and made me mildly apprehensive at the thought I'd one day have to learn to do it was "small talk". I was nervous about small talk without really knowing what small talk was. The concept came up occasionally in books that I'd read but it never seemed to be properly explained.

I could tell it was something that the characters were instinctively either good or bad at but being good at small talk didn't seem to confer any great value or status, while being bad at it was often pointed up as a problem or a drawback, even for those characters who clearly found the entire idea an anathema.

In retrospect I recognize this probably says more about the authors than it does about either the characters or about small talk itself, but as a teenager I found a lot of adult life looked like that: opaque, mysterious, worrying. Then, when I finally worked out what the grown-ups were talking about it often often turned out to be an anticlimax; usually it was something I already knew how to do, had been doing all along, without even thinking about it.

Writing a blog turned out to be very much the same. It took me a good while to decide to start one and even when I'd picked a platform and a title and a layout it was well over a year before I found the nerve to upload my first proper post.

Once I'd got started, though, it ended up being just about exactly the same as several things I already knew how to do and had been doing for a long time. As I've mentioned before, blogging is really nothing more than the internet-enabled version of the APAzine scene that took up so much of my time and energy throughout the 1980s. All I was doing was picking up where I'd left off about a decade before only now I didn't have to keep buying glue.

Writing a blog is also not a huge step up from commenting on the blogs of other people or even on pontificating or arguing on Forums, which is how I'd bridged the gap between my last zine and my first blog. Honestly, now I look back it's like I started with my first fanzine in 1977 and never really stopped.

Blogging is an activity that also fits extremely well into the Bartle gaming schema . Bloggers can be Explorers, Achievers or Killers (that would be an interesting way to subdivide a blogroll) but they pretty much have to be Socializers. 

Or do they? Certainly the kind of blogs that puzzle Gevlon are very heavy on the socializing, which is, I guess, why he finds them so puzzling.

Posting pictures of your mini-pets is the blogging equivalent of small talk and as such it's both trivial and essential. The success of any social gathering (and for many of us doing it, blogging is a kind of social gathering) often relies not only on preparation and organization but on the willingness and facility with which those attending are able to engage with each other by finding common ground on which to stand. Small talk is the grease on the party wheel.

Which is all very well as far it goes...only there are some of us who really do love to talk about the weather - not because it's a safe, neutral topic but because weather is bloody amazing!

I grew up in a house with a barometer in the hall. My grandfather would tap it every day and tell us
what the weather was going to be. It wasn't a very good barometer so he was mostly wrong but I grew up with an understanding that talking about the weather was just something people did because weather was something worth talking about.

I love weather. I could talk about it for hours. Mrs Bhagpuss would tell you I do talk about it for hours. It's still my go-to topic for small talk but if I sense the slightest flare of interest then "small" drops out of the picture.

When it comes to MMOs and blogging about them, storylines, mini-pets and everyday busywork are exactly like weather. Yes, they provide a simple, uncontroversial backdrop for a little mild socializing, which is what many people want from their blogging, as well as their MMOs, but to some bloggers and readers they're not the sauce but the meat.

I do want to see pictures of other people's mini-pets. I do want to hear their accounts of quests they've done and how that turned out. I find reading this stuff and looking at the pictures entertaining. The fact that it also gives a warm burr of social inclusion is a welcome bonus.

It is indeed a warm, pleasant feeling and as I  blog, I increasingly feel an obligation to pay it forward. When I began Inventory Full I was writing almost entirely for myself but as the years pass I have come to accept that, as Ravanel says, all of us who publish blogs are "writing for (some sort of) an audience". 

An audience is not compulsory. There is an option in Blogger to make your blog accessible only to people you permit to read it or even to make it entirely private. There will be people out there writing MMO blogs that no-one has ever read but them.

If I truly only wanted to keep a diary of my MMO adventures then I'd be one of those people. When I took the plunge six years ago and submitted my first post for the approval or otherwise of the entire world (I got 13 page views) I was crossing the threshold to join a party already in full swing.

The party's still going on and having chosen to hang around it's on me as much as anyone to help keep the plates spinning. Some days I just feel like slumping in a corner of the kitchen, letting the buzz of conversation filter through from the next room. Other times I find myself talking too loudly and spilling my drink over someone's photos of their mini-pets.

So, I try not to bang on too much about the weather or how we lost Garrison last night because it was Reset in four hours and everyone was goofing off. I try to think of interesting conversation starters but I always have my wallet-full of pictures of the pets to hand in case there's an uncomfortable silence.

Whatever it takes to keep the party going.

Alone Together Or

Ravious has a very interesting and thought-provoking post up at Kill Ten Rats concerning the desirability, necessity even, of player interaction in MMORPGs. He references something Turbine producer Jeffrey Steefel once said that rings very true to me:

"Players don’t want to ‘play’ with thousands of people, they want to play with a small group in the presence of thousands. It’s like an old-school arcade. You don’t want to play pinball with 10 people, but playing by yourself in a crowded room is a lot more fun."

I hadn't happened upon this quote before but I've expressed those sentiments countless times. This, often, has been the experience I've looked for, playing MMORPGs. Over the past decade-and-a-half and more it's been an experience that I've, sometimes, been lucky enough to find.

The analogy I've tended to use is of reading at a pavement cafe; one of the finest, most complex experiences to which a human being can aspire. It's one of those magical hinterlands, where awareness fades towards the ineffable as inner and outer worlds move tectonically against and through each other, building up layers of sensual, intellectual, imaginative and creative involvement, hallucinatory in their intensity.

The play of sun and wind on the skin, the ambient sounds of the street, snatches of conversation with their flurried undertows of emotion, rubbing up against and abrading the mind's firm determination to recreate the imagined world of characters, themselves acting out the creative imaginings of an author both absent and present: at the best of times, under these assaults, my sense of self breaks down and for a glorious moment I lose myself in who I am.

Reading alone at home can be deeply moving, intense, absorbing, memorable, life-affirming, all of those things readers so often claim for books, but it remains deeply solipsistic. It can't begin match the humanity of reading in the presence of others. Similarly, playing video games alone sacrifices the outer for the inner, gains focus at the expense of scope.

I still read alone but playing MMOs broke offline games for me. Maybe forever.

Looking back, playing video games alone seems like an aberration, anyway. Gaming has always been a social activity. My first time was in a pub and for a few years that's what gaming meant - drinking, talking, laughing, playing, all together.

Playing Space Invaders, Breakout, Frogger, Galaxians and the rest, it was as much about being with people as pixels. More. Even in the home that was understood. The Atari 2600 I owned in the early 1980s came with two joysticks. The increasingly sophisticated consoles of succeeding generations found their place in the communal, shared, family rooms as much or more than they did hidden away in bedrooms or studies.

The migration of digital entertainment to the internet attenuated, stratified and confused the simplicity of that shared experience, though it continued and continues. So many anecdotal nostalgies of days and nights spent playing Everquest or World of Warcraft stem not only the distant togetherness of raiding with guilds made up of members from all around the world but from the intimacy of sharing a dorm room or a bedroom with another addict.

It's hard to disentangle the emotions and the memories. Did we love the games because of the friends we made in them or make the friends we did because we loved the games? Was life better before Trammel, before PoP, before the NGE, before Dungeon Finder, because the games were better then, the interactions closer, more meaningful, more real? Or was it just because we were younger, less worn-down with responsibility or failure or ennui or cynicism?

Did we talk to strangers as we waited for spawns at the Splitpaw spires or between pulls in The Deadmines because the pace was slower and we had more time or was it because our minds were more open, then, to new experiences? At the turn of the Millennium, for many of us, being online, not just talking to someone in Sao Paulo, Seattle or Singapore but seeing his avatar moving, acting in real-time there in front of us on the screen, in our own house, how could we not respond to that? It wasn't merely magical; it was actual, real magic.

And now it's not. Everyone does it. Without thinking. There's nothing magical about the internet any more. It's in your pocket, in your car, in your office, in the air, everywhere. There's nothing amazing any more in joining with dozens of people of all ages and races and genders and religions separated by thousands of miles and an infinity of experiences, coming together to imagine killing a giant dragon or a destroying a titanic spacecraft. Happens all the time.

The experience of playing alone together in MMORPGs always lacked the physical, sensual layers that can make reading a novel at the table of a pavement cafe so overwhelming but for a while it had instead a vast and mesmerizing sense of wonder that worked as well in the annihilation of the self. That's gone and it's not coming back.

What's left? With what can we replace that which we have lost? Ravious, pushed out of his comfort zone by connections and friendships, finds a faint echo in the unfamiliar experience of rolling a character on an RP-PvP world in WoW. After a sequence of unexceptional, predictable encounters he says:

"None of that would have happened if I had not been on a PvP server. Except for my one foray into the dungeon finder, I would have had virtually zero interaction with other players. There would have been no story for me to tell except “I did the quests in three zones, and it was what you would expect.”

Of course it's true that none of that would have happened. But something would. Whether he'd have had a story to tell us about it would depend entirely on how good a storyteller he is. A good storyteller can keep an audience spellbound with a description of a single character in an empty room. The tale is in the telling, always.

The last half-decade and more of MMO history is characterized by developers' attempts to mechanize human interaction in MMOs, to codify and commodify it. From Warhammer's Public Quests through Rift's eponymous planar incursions to GW2's Dynamic Events, from Dungeon Finder through Instant Adventures to LFR, they seek to find that magic, bottle it and sell it back. It can't be done.

Here's what happened. We got older. We lost patience. We gave up. A whisper from a stranger, new to the game, new to the world, lost and looking for someone, anyone, to help, ceased to seem like a chance to show off our experience and expertise. After fifty or a hundred times, who wants to answer the same old questions? Isn't it obvious? Go read the wiki or just google it ffs! You must know how to do that - you're playing this game on the frickin' internet, aren't you?!

I used to abandon plans just because I saw someone having a tough time. They wouldn't even need to be asking for help. I knew things and I wanted to share. I had a Chipped Bone Rod and I knew how to use it and what's more I knew where to take you so you could buy one too. I knew how to get to the sewers under Qeynos and I knew how to get out the other side. I knew barbarians couldn't see in the dark, while my half-elf had infravision, and even though I'd only just met you I trusted you to give me back my Greater Lightstone at the end of the tunnel to Blackburrow because otherwise what were you going to do? Stay in Everfrost the rest of your life?

That was when we were all living a shared imaginary life in a shared imaginary world. Before we all started playing games. How long did that last, really? That it took years to wind down to an ending is maybe the most amazing thing of all.

And we miss it so much. Perhaps that's why we chase every new game almost before it appears, hoping we'll catch the unicorn by the tail and swing back astride before it vanishes around the corner, yet again. All we get are a few strands of silver that quickly lose their shine or, worse, a thumping kick, a humiliating stumble, a painful fall.

So, I don't hold out hope that imposed PvP rulesets or autonomic grouping systems or any clever, mechanical intervention can bring back the wonder. Our friends lists won't refill with all those people with whom we shared formative or traumatic or hysterical moments, one night, one session, out of the blue. The MMO experience has moved on. It's no longer about wonder and awe and strangeness, just dailies and achievements and gear.

And that's okay. Those aren't bad things. Just not the same. Nothing stays new forever. Let it go. Love it for what it is, not what it was or what you wish it would be. Then maybe, just maybe, if we remember once in a while to answer that question in map chat or send a tell, a little of the magic might flicker on again.

At the pinball table or the pavement cafe, when someone asks you for a light for a cigarette, you don't always have to tell them you don't smoke. Maybe you could even carry matches, just in case.

Broken Social Scene

 No not this although that would break pretty much anyone's social scene, I should think...

Stargrace was talking about how socializing has changed in MMOs. It's a topic that comes up often nowadays, usually around the campfire in the rosy glow of nostalgia.

Are you sure that's nostalgia ?

 
I get less and less social in MMOs as time goes on. I started off mostly soloing, back in Everquest nearly a dozen years ago. After a while I began grouping and developed a friends list but it was only when I moved to DAoC when it launched that I started joining guilds. From then, going back to EQ, then to EQ2 my MMO experience was mostly social, in guilds, groups, chat channels and so on.

By the time I went to Vanguard the social side had already started to decline and for the last four years or so my interest has been mainly in soloing and duoing with Mrs Bhagpuss. We keep saying we're going to join guilds, get to know people and do more group stuff but we never really do.

EQ2 housing, now with added PvP.

Most of the things we like doing , like decorating houses, crafting, harvesting and questing are better done alone anyway. While talking in chat channels, in my case. I really do talk a lot in chat.

That said, we now have a very nice, very small guild in EQ2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I created it for ourselves when EQ2X started but we soon had a couple of people join and though they didn't stick with EQ2X for long it was quite jolly while it lasted. Pretty soon Mrs Bhagpuss met a couple more people through her interests in housing and it wasn't too long before they joined our guild.

A little later they brought some people along with them and everyone who's joined has been a real pleasure to chat to and play alongside. They looked after the guild while Mrs Bhagpuss and I went to Rift and now our guild is Level 30.

Yeah, yeah...just show me the bank space.

It's fun to log in and see what other people are doing and occasionally get together and do something without anyone feeling there's any kind of agenda or plan.

The way MMOs are developing I think socializing will be an option not a requirement. Public quests, open grouping, open raiding, solo dungeons, mercenaries, henchmen, companions, no-one will need any kind of formal arrangement or conversation with another human being just to get stuff done in an MMO. And that's fine. 

There must be someone here who likes model railways and Rammstein.

 

 

None of that is going to replace actually talking to people because you have things you want to say to each other, though. Nor doing stuff in game together because you like each others' company. Nothing's going to change that.

Is it?