I Blog With My Face

Every once in a while, a tragedy happens.

It is tragic, to see lives snuffed out. It is tragic to see people lose hope, go past that line, and do horrible, unspeakable things. It scares us all. It concerns us all. We should never forget that there are awful things in this world, and we should do what we can to combat the evils of violence and the tragedies that scar us. Everyone, it can be agreed, wants this sort of thing to stop.

The question then becomes how.

Do we need cops in schools? Do we need fewer guns? Do we need psychological evaluations? Do we need to crack down on violent video games?

Of course violent video games are the answer.

This is an entirely predictable and altogether terrible way of dealing with the massacre at Sandy Hook. It’s predictable because this is what the media, anti-video game pundits, and legislators have done, time after time after time. Literally. The 109th, 110th, and the 113th Congresses have proposed the same bill. We know that as soon as the guns come out, and the blood is spilled, and the tears are shed, that it will take about a month for everyone calm down, and point their fingers at the consoles. Jack Thompson and Senator Leland Yee have been the subject of some of my posts in the past, but they’re not the only ones going on this crusade against video games.

Which brings us to the terrible part of their crusade: It’s ultimately useless. Not only has it failed a constitutionality test every time the bill’s been brought up, but it’s not the source of the problem. Pesky First Amendment rights aside, prohibiting the sale or rental of video games to minors isn’t going to teach children a damn thing, and I’m tired of pretending like it will. What it will do is frustrate me, and gamers like me, who don’t really need to be told what to watch, or what to play, or what to think. It is unnecessary and wasteful legislation, particularly in light of the tragedy. Could you lawmakers kindly focus your efforts on either gun control or mental health initiatives, instead of trying to penalize and judge a subset of people who are just as moved by this tragedy as you are?

In the end, I am happy that President Obama is calling for more research into the link between video games, violent imagery, and violence in our society, but I ultimately think that the research will be ignored. People are eager to find a scapegoat, and no amount of guarantees of free speech or already existing data are going to convince people that violent video games are not the culprit. No force on the planet can convince people that proper parenting means being a God damned parent, and being with your children, instead of just letting them babysit themselves in front of a screen. This kind of tunnel vision is already at work: Lanza had an elaborate set up for Call of Duty and Starcraft, and loved electronics. That must make him a killer.

Him, me, and about 80% of my generation.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about player buy-in. That developers should have to pay attention to this resource should be a given at this point, but what do players have to do with their investment? How should they treat it, and what does it afford them as players?

First off, I don’t think players should be stingy with their investment. It’s not something that should be hoarded or treasured without ever expending. The cool thing about investment is that nothing sells like it. When all your friends convince you you should play in and be enthusiastic about a game, you tend to listen. That doesn’t mean that you should give 110% to everything. That’s going to just drain you until you don’t care about anything, much less a game. To that end, I suggest that you at least give yourself a chance to be hooked by a game. Read its synopsis. Read a blog article about it. Listen to your friend extol its virtues. Merely hearing about it isn’t going to hurt, and it may in fact get you involved in something you’ll enjoy. But be prepared to give constructive feedback, and let the developer have a chance to better his game with it. If your friend comes running up to you and tells you that he has an amazing idea for an Exalted game, give him the chance to pitch it. When he tells you it’s an Abyssal exalted game, and you’re all playing Heroic Mortals, then you may want to tell him why it’s not your cup of tea.

Similarly, do the developer and yourself a favor: be honest about your buy-in. If you have only a little to give because of other commitments, say that at the start of any game you’re going to be playing. “You know guys, this sounds really awesome, but I’ve only got a weekend a month to devote to it. Could we make a character that doesn’t need me to be there all the time?” People (and by this, I mean the game’s storyteller or developer and the other player) will listen. Their ability to listen gets clogged by signal-to-noise ratios though, so make sure the message is heard.

With so many people involved in the creative process, telling people how you feel about investing in a game is tricky. In a tabletop game, lots of these points would be easy to consider. It’s just six people, so there’s not a lot of other opinions to take into account. If you’re a potential player in a game that meets at your friend’s Bob house every Wednesday night and you know everyone there, your communication will be relatively clear. Alternatively, when you’re part of the Mind’s Eye Society or helping to develop inXile’s next RPG, there are going to be a lot of people talking, all at once, and not all of them will want to hear you. Not all of them will be paying attention. This is not always a reason to give up though. If you are enthused about a game, if you’re prepared to invest in it, you should keep talking, and encourage people to do the same. Work out what can be done with something you’re prepared to spend time and energy on and make it the game you want to play. You have a reasonable expectation to be entertained by a game, provided that you come in good faith to the table, just like everyone else.

If, at the end, you don’t feel like you’ve been listened to, or the game isn’t going to be what you want, remember that it is just a game. This shouldn’t devalue it, or your experiences with games, but please be mindful that if the investment you’re putting into it isn’t giving you back what you want, you have every right to walk away from it, and find something else that suits you. It’s up to everyone at the table to play with each other, and create an environment to play in.

This seems like a nice place to start the discussion on investment. How do you become invested in a game? How do you encourage investment? Take a look at the new mechanics for Requiem’s Majesty Discipline and think about how the very fabric of the power requires and promotes investment on both players. The Boon system, teased about in that article, suggests that if you play along as a victim of the power, you get rewarded. Buy-in is created on the part of the user of the power, the victim of the power, and the Storyteller. Tell us your thoughts about buy-in in the comments below.

Eight days ago, Riot Games banned competitive player IWillDominate from playing League of Legends in any sponsored tournament for a year. Though this isn’t the first competitive ban, it’s definitely one of the more noteworthy, particularly for this side of the Pacific. In addition, it’s the first ban of a pro player I can find for League of Legends at all, and it’s worth a deeper look.

I’ve long held that Riot’s system is innovative and the standard by which other games, particularly those that want to make a name for themselves in the competitive gaming arena. DOTA, as a genre, has long been known as a place for trolls and griefers to get their kicks, due in large part to the somewhat unbalanced areas of play in the original maps that spwaned from Warcraft III. As more polished versions of DOTA came out, a more forceful change than simple graphics needed to be implemented if any were to distinguish themselves from their competition. Riot’s solution was the Tribunal, a system by which players could review the conduct of other players, and see if it breached , a set of loose rules and guidelines to promote good behavior and sportsmanship. Balanced on the other side of rewarding players for good behavior (with the Honor Initiative), the twin facets of carrot and stick have generally enhanced peoples’ experiences with the games, according to many accounts.

Of course, there were still some people who were abusive and toxic to the environment, at all levels of play from the low brackets of 600 Elo all the way to Dignitas’ jungler, IWillDominate. In a indictment of his behavior, Riot’s Senior eSports Manager
, letting the community know in no uncertain terms that even players of IWillDominate’s caliber need to comport themselves by the social contract all the members of the League of Legends player base have agreed to.

I think it’s brilliant.

When we start talking, as gamers, about gaming being taken seriously, we have to embrace that notion. Games as art must be able to share human experiences that are not easily conveyed, and be able to transform the witness. Games as entertainment have to be genuinely pleasant experiences, rather than just something to frustrate and annoy our friends, neighbors, and parents with.

But games as sport must hold themselves to a greater standard, for two reasons: money and respect. Though these two don’t often go hand in hand, they do with real life, traditional sports. We pay our athletes a great amount of money, and challenge them to be better than us. We revel in their accomplishments, erecting Halls of Fame to immortalize our great competitors. We bring charges against those who betray our trust, going all the way up to the highest levels of government. In short, we build pedestals for those who compete to put themselves on, and we extol them when they get to the top.

As competitive eSports comes into mainstream society’s awareness, we must be ready to build those pedestals for our own digital competitors. We have to be ready to praise their acts of honest, good natured gamesmanship, and we have to be ready to scorn them for their misdeeds, as Riot has done. By prohibiting IWillDominate from competing at the highest level of play, Riot reinforces the very ethos behind competition: the thrill of the game, and the joy of victory. Going hand in hand with the fines levied against AzubuFrost in October, Riot seems ready to treat this just as seriously as they need to, as we move into the future of gaming’s potential. I commend Riot, and their VP of eSports RedBeard for taking this step, and hope they continue to act as a leader in the competitive gaming world for a long time.

You might know of a professional gamer known as Destiny. Steven Bonnell has about 27k followers on Twitter, and a very active presence in several Reddit communities, as well as a popular website. He truly is a professional gamer, and by that, I mean he makes a living through streaming, advertisements, endorsements, and gets to play video games all day.

Which is good, actually. We need more professional gamers if we want to be treated more seriously as a culture. But professional shouldn’t just mean that you’re able to make a living from it. Like in “real” or perhaps “mundane” sports, if we’re going to hold these people up as examples, we need to actually hold them to a higher standard than your typical flamer, troll, griefer, or 12 year old boy in a 23 year old’s body.

About 3 months ago, a female fan of his going by the handle “Bluetea”, was exposed to a few of Destiny’s fans. He had shared naked pictures of his with two of his friends.

This was uncool.

In retaliation, she gained access to his Twitter account and shared pictures of his dick to all of his followers.

This was also uncool.

But here’s where the real crux of my problem: In response to the beginning of this drama, what Cloud Nine Labs, one of Destiny’s major sponsors and the designers of his website said, was largely “That’s just Destiny being Destiny.”

“The principals at Cloud Nine Labs, including myself, remain in support of Stevens PR decisions. Furthermore, we encourage his brutal honesty, snide remarks, controversial comments/subjects, humor, etc. as it brings a uniquely dynamic and highly entertaining element to the streaming experience. His strong personality is what makes him Destiny – one of the most successful SC2 streamers of all time. Other SC2 personalities should take a cue from Mr. Bonnell because the SC2 pro circuit is not just “gaming”. It has become a powerful industry that can be monetized by establishing a strong, widely talked about brand which Steven has managed to accomplish.

In short: stop bitching, change your tampons and up your game”

Contexual language aside, this is really disappointing to me. Not in a sexist way (though it is) and not in a greedy sort of way (it’s that too). It’s disappointing is that this is what we want our role models to be. Snide, arrogant, assholish, and proud.

While admitting that we’ve got a way to go, I’ll also point out that in mundane sports, we don’t accept this behavior. Manny Ramirez, OJ Mayo, and even Mike Tyson aren’t people who we hold up for the next generation to be.

We should be forgiving of flaws of character. We should understand that people have lapses, and people are jerks from time to time. I talk about people behind their backs, I gossip, I carry opinions of people that are less than favorable. You do too. We all do. But we don’t encourage that sort of behavior, and we shouldn’t. It’s certainly not the kind of thing we should hold as an ideal.

So what do you think? Are we hopelessly doomed to being assholes forever. or can we step up our own games? Lemme know.

I have been playing a lot of League of Legends lately. Alliteration aside, I think it’s a solid game that’s let me reconnect with some friends back at home while I’m on winter break here in Korea. I won’t get to play quite as much with them once school starts, but I’ve deeply enjoyed my time so far. Except for one, small, tiny problem.

Griefers.

They’re becoming a more ubiquitous sort of problem in video game culture in general, and LoL and other DOTA clones are well known for the amount of trolling that goes on in the game. “Fucking retards”, “My team has downs”, “Oh God, it would be better if you just went AFK.” Actually, I got told that in a game I played just tonight. “Fizz, ur useless. just afk.” And I’ll admit, it hurt. I mean, it always does. That’s the point, and also the problem. A certain amount of teasing and ribbing is in line with competition of any kind. There’s a natural, primal instinct to gloat, to roar in triumph. I think it’s part of our ancestry, actually. To be able to cry out, to shout that you had achieved something gave you recognition, gave you status. If you could do what you said you could do, then you wanted to be known for that. In competitions that’s primarily “Beat the other guy”, and we celebrate it even today when we ask sports stars and athletes what they think of their performance in the game today, or how they trained to be so God Damned Fast.

But in games online, this sort of gloating is tainted and transformed by the medium that the sport takes place in. Before there were online games, there were online forums. Chat rooms, BBSes, newsgroups, where people could come together under the veil of anonymity and discuss their opinions. But given that safety net, people began to let their darker sides out. The more vindictive, angry, violent, and frankly cruel sides. We gave a name to these shadows of the Internet, who delight in getting a rise out of people.

We called them trolls.

For a long time, the advice was “Don’t feed the trolls”, and it was relatively sound. If you ignore them, then you beat them. You don’t give them what you want. If you can just hold your head, and not submit to their taunts and jeers, their threats and insults, then you can continue on this great big thing we call the Web, undisturbed. Maybe a little bloody, but unbowed.

Video games didn’t have this much of a problem in the early days, because they were often against a computer opponent. But games, particularly online games, require a certain amount of commitment to your teammates. Cordial behavior, teamwork, respect, and the same goal in mind. As the games we designed grew more and more social, then the inherent problem of anonymous assholes who get their jollies off by making other people feel bad bled into this new frontier. Suddenly, we had problems trusting our own teammates. We thought that we could at least count them on being civil, but “gg noobs” and “just uninstall the game fagtard” became part of our vocabulary.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s any one solution that can ever beat out trolling. Which is not to say that we should give up, and just wash our hands of these games. It simply means that we must be ready to accept that there will be a period of time when our experience with it will be less than ideal. Even frustrating. But there are ways of dealing with trolls that are effective.

1. Don’t play with them on your team.

This is perhaps the ideal, and may be impossible in some cases, but is relatively manageable in team games. Do your best to find a community that you feel is worth your time and be a part of it. This may mean you play with your friends only, or it might also mean that you stumble upon a subreddit or a newsgroup concerning your game, and find that the people there are exceptionally friendly or helpful.

Once you’re there, play with them rather than (at least in League of Legends’ case) solo-queue. This has a couple of advantages of not only minimizing your contact with trolls, but also probably improving your game, depending on the size of the community. You learn how to perform your role better, and wind up enjoying the game more.

2. Combat trolling.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is not the same thing as combating trolling. In the former, you’re frustrated, probably angry, and just break. You start swearing, yelling, maybe you go AFK in your game. The troll wins. Even in the defeat of your team, he still gets the satisfaction of knowing that he beat you, and that’s all he wants.

But in the later, which is a bit more situation dependent, you can at least stem the tide. If the troll is on their team, you can report him through any means you have available to your game. In League of Legends, this takes the form of the Tribunal, a peer-reviewed system where other players make determinations on how the game played out based on final score and chat logs, and then Riot employees mete out punishments. I think it’s a pretty good system, and if the statistics gathered by Riot are to be believed, then it’s marginally effective as well.

If the troll is on your team, giving shit to the other players, ask him to stop. You might suffer a bit of your own hazing, but you let your other teammates know that that shit isn’t acceptable, and you fight it, just a tiny bit. It does work better if your teammates are people you know, since they might actually listen to you in that case, but we can’t all work with the ideal.

3. The ignore button.

This isn’t as effective a way to deal with trolls as I would like, but it’s pretty ubiquitous, and follows the internet’s oldest rule about trolls. Most games have some sort of function where you can ignore a certain user. This can be taken advantage of within the game to let you ignore them, and thereby, never deal with them again.
This is my least favorite way of dealing with trolls because it doesn’t actually solve the problem of their behavior in the first place, but there’s only so much to be done about that, largely involving actual remorse on the part of the troll. Really, it feels like you’re just pawning the problem off on other people, but it is an effective strategy, as about 25 years of being online has shown us.

I think as gamers, we have to adapt to the idea that there are people in our games who, just for the lulz, want us to be miserable. The first defense against such behavior is knowing it exists, and then dealing with the emotions generated by that behavior in a responsible way. If you’re just going to ragequit because some guy calls you a “fagtard n00b”, then you’ve lost, and they’ve won, and you wasted your time.

But if you can get the better of them, even when they are kicking you while you’re down, then you can appreciate the high points of your games much more than if you’re being so angry that you can’t see straight. So please, don’t feed the trolls.