| Talking With TL |
[Mar. 1st, 2005|12:35 pm] |
I think that our conversation with TL was more productive than our conversation with Yee for several reasons. First, the game that we were using was much more conducive to chatting than WoW... while we tended to draw attention to ourselves in WoW because of the oddity of a classroom-looking discussion, and had to deal with animal attacks and random channel spam, in Second Life we were able to find a relatively undisturbed little part of the landscape and had a "private" discussion (in that we were not constantly interrupted). One of the main advantages of Second Life was the ability to know when TL was still responding to a question becuase of her Avatar's "sign language"... in World of Warcraft, too many times someone would jump in a lull in the conversation only to find that Yee was working on a lengthy response, and there would be several trains of thought going at the same time. Although Second Life tended to have an incredible amount of lag, in our use of it (as a visually stylized AIM) it was tolerable.
I also found TL to be a more interesting speaker than Yee for several reason. First, she approaches MMORPGs from a different standpoint than Yee, and she is interested in all sorts of studies concerning the genre. She had a wider, if less specific, range of knowledge and the conversations had more freedom to ebb and flow from topic to topic. She also gave us much more time for questions; while Yee did a good job of responding to questions, it felt as if he spent the first half of the session giving us his background. When discussing communications (especially concerning the internet), by the time you open your mouth to speak what you are going to say is already obsolete. It would have been interesting to have gotten more of the "what's going on now" approach to the industry that TL provided. There were a couple of topics (such as gender and gaming concerns) that were given a good deal of time, and it felt as if we were fleshing out aspects of the industry as it is today. Perhaps that is my bias as well, since I have never been one for methodology and prefer to kick theories around and play tag with them.
I was most interested in the discussion of women gamers and how that demographic exists today. When I asked if it was the women's job to identify themselves as a marketable demographic, I was playing demographic, but TL's response (that assumes that women and men want different things out of a game) was very common sense and something I had, for one reason or another, not thought of. I still think that there is more to it than just that, though; while men and women, for the most part, desire the same things from a game, the marketing of MMORPGs and video games in general are decidedly centered around men. While I am sure that Dead or Alive: Volleyball can be just as much fun for women to play as for men, it is obviously targeted towards men. I think that when women become a more recognized market this will be reflected not in content and advertising that appeals to women, but gender neutral advertising that put emphasis on gameplay and content as opposed to male targeted sexual appeal.
Moving on, as for my paper topic, I'm still working on putting together a coherent idea of what I'm looking for. The other day I ran into someone in my guild who, during just idle chatter, mentioned he had read the entire storyline from worldofwarcraft.com the other day because he was bored. I whispered him, identifying myself as a researcher and asking him some questions, which he answered willingly. I was hoping to find some sort of storytelling bias as to how his desire to play alliance fit into the storyline, and I was pleased that he mentioned he played as an Alliance because he liked being the "good guys". He followed that up by saying he also wanted to play as a dwarf because they get gun bonuses, and guns kick ass in a roleplaying game, but generally I got what I wanted to hear. In the next week I think my goal is to put together some sort of short essay that I can post on message boards that will provide me with the information I want.
Interesting in game experience, in fighting in Southshore as my level 29 dwarf I ran into a troll that I became fast friends with. We initially fought two or three times, me chasing him away with practically no health and me dying twice, but for some reason we decided to ally and kept watch over eachother in the area. It was a deal made in heaven... Southshore is rampant with gankers, and whenever I would get killed he appeared to be pleading my case with whoever killed me (asking them to stop). I, in turn, would tell any Alliance characters in the area that he was a friendly opponent, and we would also watch eachother's back if we had any trouble with the NPC creatures. We developed a very crude system of communicating through emotes (if I got killed he would come over to my body, kneel down, and cry) and a primitave l337. Although I did not get a lot accomplished during that day, it was very interesting to see the way people cohabited in neutral area with towns belonging to both sides. In fact, it gave me an interesting alternative idea for my project... but we'll see.
Finally, I found several things on the internet this week that filled what little down time I had. First, you can order pizza ingame in EverQuest 2. All you have to do is type /pizza and a web browser will pop up, allowing you to order your dinner online if you're too busy gaming. This gets more interesting the more I think about it... more at the link: http://everquest2.station.sony.com/pizza/.
Second, my roommate also introduced me to two webcomics that deal pretty much exclusively with gaming. http://www.penny-arcade.com http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com While I'm sure some of you are already familiar with these (I'm a good 20 minute late to ANY party), I was able to catch up on practically the last 10 years in computer and video games just from reading these strips. They also have some pretty funny looks at WoW in there as well. So if you're tragically l337 and need some good gaming humor to get you through the day, take a look at either of these. Disclaimer: violence, profanity, blah blah blah. |
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