Way back in the day, maybe at the end of TBC, the cats were raiding 12 hours a week. It seemed pretty easy to pull off at the time. Early on in WotLK we decided that the content was easier and less time was needed, so we dropped to 9 hours a week. Near the end of WotLK, as people lost interest in WoW, we dropped a day and went down to 6 hours a week. That dropped again in SWTOR. The content was casual, and so were we, at a robust 4 hours a week over two days. I usually attended at least one of those days.

And yet I find myself now coming up with excuses to avoid group content. Is my life actually so action packed that I can’t spare a couple of hours? Of course not. So what’s the deal?

I’ve written before about how the year-long doldrums at the end of WoW’s WotLK expansion and my own hyper-sensitivity combined to change Liore from overly protective guild leader to angry attendance rage monster. Even though I haven’t really managed a raid group in 18 months (dear Gab and Corr, I don’t know if you read this but you are both the bestest) the mere hint of having to do so brings on the sense of an impending panic attack. While I enjoy doing the group content itself, I seriously cannot mentally handle anything that even vaguely looks like responsibility for the group.

Yes, in my ideal world I would log on whenever I want and have a selection of awesome people online to do group content with if I felt like it, with no other expectations. Oh, and they would also be good players who like a challenge! Unfortunately as someone who was once very involved in creating exactly this scenario, I know that it is damn unlikely to happen coincidentally. It takes quite a bit of effort to recruit said awesome people, to find ways to peaceably and politely identify the best players in the bunch, to create a community that encourages people to log on outside of scheduled events.

Seriously, just writing that paragraph made me almost break out into hives. My dilemma is this: knowing intimately how much thought and effort is required to run a good guild, how can I expect someone else to take on all that work while I just log in when the mood strikes me and soak up all the benefits? I don’t begrudge others taking that advantage, but somehow as someone who I know CAN organize such a volunteer group it seems selfish for me to not do it. And yet.. I don’t want to do it.

No one wants to run the Cats like a serious guild anyway, I don’t think. I could check out another guild for a game while still being part of the Cats’ social scene, which would be perfectly reasonable, but again is it fair to expect someone else to do all the work to make my playtime more fun? Isn’t that abdicating my own responsibility, even if I don’t really want it?

When I sit down to play SWTOR I think about how raid attendance has been dropping off and I really should do some team-building and cheerleading but I just don’t like the game as much as others do and I’m sorry. When I sit down to play RIFT or WoW I feel guilty for not playing SWTOR, and I’m sorry. I have this group of smart, awesome players who right now are sort of aimless but I could probably sort and recruit them into a reliable group with more of a focus on group content and events but then I don’t and people wander off and I’m sorry. Lately after work I seem to just endlessly surf social networks and cat gifs until bedtime, hiding from my virtual life.

The other day in IRC a guildie made a joke about how control of the Cats would have to be pried from my cold, dead hands, and although he meant well I felt pretty stung. I don’t want it! Take it. Take it. Take it and build something amazing that we can all enjoy so I’ll stop berating myself for not wanting to do it.

I know it’s only April, but if I had to name the big theme for the gaming industry in 2012 I’d say it’s the rapidly developing animosity between players and developers/distributors. Seen from one side, it’s honest working man David vs. bad business practices Goliath. From the other, it’s entitled gamers vs. art and market realities. I’m usually pretty firmly in the former camp, as can be attested to by the quasi-socialist rants I keep posting on other people’s blogs (sorry, Azuriel) about personal purchasing power and not puttin’ up with crap from The Man. However, to be completely honest I haven’t actually followed any of my own advice.. until now.

I bought the Day 1 DLC for Mass Effect 3 even though I do not in the least accept the argument that DLCs are created in some magical free time when otherwise talented video game professionals would be put out on the streets. (I was literally told by a fellow who works for a known MMO company that denying the legitimacy of Day 1 DLCs is condemning small children to starvation. Why do I hate ART and BABIES?) Despite my misgivings, I am stupid for Shepard and there was no way I was going to miss out on an arguably critical piece of lore like meeting a Prothean, so I held my nose and bought the DLC.

So anyway, now I find myself staring at the Guild Wars 2 pre-purchase website. Not pre-order — pre-purchase. Blizzard really formalized the idea of selling MMO beta access with their Annual Pass, and Arenanet has run with it and decided that only people who pay for the game in its entirety right now will have beta access. This is a game, by the way, that is already years over their first admittedly optimistic estimated release date (they’ve had a “playable demo” at the last three PAX Primes I’ve attended), and in fact there still has been no indication of when players can expect to actually play the thing.

To be fair it would be incredibly surprising if Arenanet were to disappear with everyone’s pre-purchase money, and common sense says that the game will be on the shelves before the end of the year. However, I really do not like the new business practice of selling “beta” access. (I put that in scare quotes because if I’m paying for it, it’s not really just bug testing.)

What am I buying by giving Arenanet my money an estimated six months in advance (and that might be a generous estimate)? Broken down to its purest economic logic, that $60 could be sitting in my bank account accruing interest instead of doing the same for Arenanet. And let’s face it, it’s not like some indie Kickstarter* where they need the money to even create the game.

I have frequently joked with friends that all MMOs that are under development are amazing while all released MMOs are trash, and I’m sure distributors have taken notice of that hype cycle. Why NOT try and get our money now, when the future is filled with promise and Reddit hasn’t yet turned on you like an army of angry, neckbeard-ed howler monkeys? Hell, The Secret World is letting people buy Lifetime Memberships now, and even the gaming press hasn’t seen half of that game.

I regret my decision to buy the ME3 DLC. I liked the content but I really should not support bad business practices, and with that in mind I’m not going to pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. I feel it just opens the door to routinely selling beta access as a game perk, I don’t want to encourage companies soliciting full retail or subscription payments before even having a release date, and I think we gaming types should be more demanding about trying before we do any buying.

I am just as notoriously bad as any gamer about following through on my purchasing threats, but it seems I really do have a line in the sand and today.. today I’m not crossing it.

——————-

* Speaking of indie Kickstarters, the folks at Glass Bottom Games would like our help in creating an anti-gravity racing game for desktop computers. I know a few good folks at GBG, and I loved Wipeout way back when, so now I’m letting you know.

The inspiration for this post came from two other posts that I don’t even want to link to, because giving them hits seems wrong. One was a post by an MMO blogger about how all feminists are part of a cult of angry man-haters (and the ensuing comments about how much people hate those crazy bitches). The second was a post by a video game correspondant for a well-known news site who wrote that “geeky” women shouldn’t try and stand out in a crowd or they’re just fake geeks doing it for male attention.

Seriously, what the hell people?

If you read this weblog with any regularity you know I’m a feminist and I’m not afraid to drop 600 words of social justice theory on you at the slightest provocation, but that’s not what I’m gonna do right now. Instead, I wanna talk about the main way I personally try to be more understanding about the world, instead of just getting upset and writing crazy insular posts about how everyone who I don’t like is a slut.

Are you ready? Here it is: My experiences are not everyone else’s experiences.

Pretty much my favorite phrase in the whole world of rhetoric is “anecdotes are not data”. My personal experiences and stories other people have told me during my life and shit I see on television does not equal the entirety of human experience.

For example, I have never been harassed in a scary, overtly sexual manner in an MMO. I’ve had some people try to good naturedly push the line, but never out of anger or as a power play. One of the big arguments against the original plan for RealID was that using real names on the official forum would expose people who were victims of stalking and other scary sexualized harassment. If I’ve never been harassed in that way, does that mean I didn’t support people who objected to RealID for that reason? Does that mean I think Apple Cider’s story of harassment isn’t real or significant? Of course not!

I was the guild leader and occasional raid leader for a heroic raiding guild for quite some time. Thanks to recruitment methods and just guild culture out of the hundreds of people I’ve recruited over the years only 2 or 3 at the most ever had a problem with having a woman as “the boss”. Does that mean that women raid guild leaders are a common occurrence, or never experience any struggles with being respected? No, of course not — hardcore raiding is infamous for its general “get back in the kitchen” culture. It may not have held back my raiding experience, but that doesn’t mean no one else has ever found themselves in the position of not being listened to or being marginalized in a raid group because they’re a woman.

I had a really good discussion in IRC this morning with a guildie about PVP in MMOs. He was explaining that what he’d really like to see is PvP where no advantages are granted for the time invested — basically a Team Fortress 2 mini-game in an MMO. And to be honest, my very first response was to get my back up. MMOs are all about time investment! I like to invest in my character and be an achiever! What is this “everyone is a winner” crap!

But.. hang on. My guildie said he’d like it to be an option, not the final word in online PvP. Okay, so maybe a game could cater to both of us. (In fact, I believe GW2 will do this, but that is for another post.) But.. well, now that I think about it, why would it have to cater to both of us to be acceptable? There are a ton of MMOs that grant superiority based on the time invested. Why couldn’t there be one game that just has “casual”, TF2-style PvP? Must every game cater to my whims?

Of course not. Despite my bad attitude and PvP experience I am in fact not the final arbiter of what a “real PvPer” is, just as being a woman or a geek does not make me a final arbiter of what a “real woman” is or a “real geek girl”.

Take a step back, everyone. Are you assuming that your life experiences are the same as everyone else’s? Or that yours are more “correct” for some reason? Perspective is your friend. Go get some.

(note: no spoilers in this post)

“Some people have argued that in Mass Effect 3, BioWare has delivered something different from what it promised. This is irrelevant. In its role as both an art object and a consumer product, Mass Effect 3 remains the property of its maker. As a final product, it is the expression of those who created it, and its sole objective is to be consumed–not re-created–by its audience.” – Laura Parker, GameSpot

“There are some things that don’t make a ton of sense—can someone explain the actions of the Normandy in those final moments?—but many of the complaints about the game’s ending ring false, and show more about video game fans than they do Bioware.” – Ben Kuchera, Penny Arcade

In my opinion the most interesting aspect of the whole Mass Effect 3 ending has been the line it has drawn between (many) game journalists and (many) players. A lot of players are angry about the ending, even raising almost $70,000 for charity in an attempt to get the attention of Bioware. The response from a number of the popular gaming news sites, however, has essentially been to tell players to settle down and stop whining. It’s a fascinating divide.

Are the professionals right? Honestly, it’s hard for me to tell as I’m one of the people who are dissatisfied with the ending. I wouldn’t have complained if I stumbled into a traditional happy ending, but I don’t think I’m unable to accept sadness or dark themes. And there are some definite weird plot holes in the final moments that even the pros agree were poorly realized.

On the other hand, as usual the internet has managed to take everything to extremes. There’s telling people that you don’t like the end of ME3, and then there’s filing a complaint about it with the FTC or threatening Bioware employees with violence. I have no truck with those people, though, and neither do most gamers.

However, the repeated argument that games are untouchable art and players are just entitled whiners is, in my opinion, ivory tower nonsense. It reminds me a lot of the response of game developers and publishers in the face of criticism about DLCs: both groups are telling consumers that they should stop worrying their pretty little heads about the details and just keep consuming. We bought a game, not the right to an opinion, apparently. If we are upset about the ending it’s because we just can’t understand it.

I am happy to argue in favor of video games being art as much as a television show could be art, but what the journalists who use this argument ignore is that the most artful game available for sale in the world is still very much a good in an extremely active market. (Oddly enough the only news site that seemed to understand this was Forbes. Yes, I’m linking to Forbes.) These journalists apparently think that players are sullying up the genre with our coarse insistence on making a game a consumer product, but that shows remarkably little understanding of real world context.

We buy games. Can you review the Mona Lisa on Amazon? Has there ever been a multi-million dollar advertising campaign for Rodin’s The Thinker? I will agree that games are an art form completely independent from their critical success and perceived commercial value when Michaelangelo tries to sell us a Sistine Chapel DLC.

What these big news sites have written off with a wave of the hand as “entitlement” is in most cases actually just being an empowered consumer.

Is the ending of Mass Effect 3 automatically terrible because a lot of players say it is? No. Popular does not equal correct. However, it’s foolish for professional gaming journalists to write off player opinion because we apparently just don’t appreciate good art. In this day and age games are a commodity, albeit an artful commodity, and trying to pretend otherwise just alienates players and makes you look out of touch.

tl;dr: TOTAL BOLLOCKS.

———- note: massive spoilers below ———–

I finished Mass Effect 3 last night at 3:30 in the morning, which is very much past my bedtime but I knew I was at the end and I wanted to see it through. In retrospect, the hours of sleep would have been a better investment.

I don’t mind that the ending was pretty grimdark. I expected my Shepard to die, to be honest. My bet going into the final battle was that Shepard, in fact, was the Catalyst through some Avatar of Vengeance thing and would have to sacrifice herself directly to save the galaxy. That would have been very sad, and very poignant, assuming it was written right, and that would have been fine.

Don’t mistake my complaints for those who demand that their space dramas be less gritty.

In fact there are two reasons why I hate the ending of Mass Effect 3:

1) It undoes everything you accomplished, and provides no closure for the player. In my game, Joker, Garrus, and Javik escaped to live together I guess on some space eden planet, lonely and unprepared. Garrus — my lizard boyfriend — will never see his family again. The quarians are stuck halfway across the galaxy from their newly reclaimed homeworld, with possibly not enough time and definitely not enough fuel to make it home again. The krogan army is stuck, flightless, in Sol and it’s looking pretty unlikely that they will ever make it home to their krogan ladyfriends again, so I’m really glad I cured that genophage.

Not only that, but I think Bioware somehow totally misunderstood what their players wanted. Yes, war is hell and things will never be the same again, but we have spent 6 years and a lot of money defending the current galaxy. While I appreciate some gritty realism, I don’t know how they thought we would be satisfied by seeing our beloved galaxy not defended, but basically smashed into something we no longer even recognize.

2) The ending goes against everything before it. During the entire course of Mass Effect 3 people are telling Shepard that she doesn’t have a choice in how to save the galaxy, and she has been telling them to stuff it. “Humans have free will” has been a message through the entire freaking series. And yet at the end some space kid tells Shepard that she MUST choose one of three terrible options and she’s just “oh, okay, thanks for laying out these incredibly stupid, limited options for me. I guess I’ll pick one now.”

It also comes up repeatedly in ME3 that past cycles have faced a conflict between those who want to destroy the reapers and those who want to control them, with the controllers being the bad guys. Then the space child gives you the EXACT same decision, but this time controlling is an acceptable choice too! Despite hours of quests about how trying to control the reapers only leads to madness! This makes perfect sense!

It boggles my mind that Bioware is the least bit surprised that people wanted to save the galaxy. Not blow it all up, not destroy life as everyone knows it, and not turn everyone into some kind of magic half robot synthesis species (really, what the fuck?). I expected (some) friends to die, I expected a truckload of civilians to die, and hell I even expected Shepard to die, but now it feels like it was for nothing.

In my mind, the game ended when Shepard and Anderson sat down, both dying, after docking the Citadel with the Crucible. It wouldn’t be a perfect ending, and Shep would still die, but it has a hell of a lot more closure than what I really got.

Confidential to Bioware: If you ever, ever try to make me spend money on a DLC to change the ending, I will find a reaper space ghost child and have him synthesize your brains.

Did y’all get a look at the Bioware “drama” yesterday concerning Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, and SWTOR writer Jennifer Hepler? Some dude found an article with her from 2006, literally put words in her mouth and took other statements out of context, and posted it to Reddit. Reddit took the bait of course, and Ms. Hepler was slammed with a wall of enraged dude gamers on forums, on her social media accounts, and even on the telephone. She received death threats, and was called “the cancer that is killing Bioware”, “no better than human waste”, and of course those perennial favorites, a “fat bitch” and “obese cunt”.

What were Ms. Hepler’s horrible crimes? At the time of the interview she was pregnant and lamented that she didn’t have much time to play games. She said that she had a hard time getting into a game if it doesn’t have a good story. And most incendiary of all, when asked how she would change games to better attract a female audience Hepler said that sometimes players just want the story and might enjoy a “fast-forward” button to skip combat, like the button to skip dialog that is available in most RPGs. Said Hepler, “A fast forward button would give all players — not just women — the same options that we have with books or DVDs — to skim past the parts we don’t like and savor the ones we do.”

And that, my friends, is apparently grounds for being harassed. Well, that and the crime of being a woman with an opinion in the gaming industry.

I wrote a post here a few weeks ago titled “Maybe SWTOR Wasn’t Meant For You” which was my attempt at a feminist-tinged critique of general player reaction to SWTOR. Yesterday’s nonsense only strengthens my belief that Bioware’s insistence on not making the typical “gamer dude” their sole target audience enrages some players to the point of insensibility. I don’t even think they know or can identify the root of their anger, but only that Things Are Different and they don’t like it.

Really, at the end of the day, what’s the problem with a “skip combat” button in theory? I certainly would have skipped a few bits in Mass Effect 2, and both Dragon Age games as well. My motivation to reach the end of the game is wrapped up in the story and the characters, and sometimes I found myself getting frustrated with having to clear yet another long hallway of bandits to see that story. Whether you’d use such a button or not, discussing it as part of a theory of game mechanics seems entirely reasonable.

But no — apparently we must fight in our games, or we are no better than a horrible wasting disease that kills people. I’m not even sure that saying “chicks dig plotlines” isn’t a gross generalization in itself, but the mere suggestion that games change slightly to allow options that appeal more broadly across genders is enough to cause a gamer dude meltdown. Heck, there was more than one tweet from Hepler-bashers accusing her of forcing them to play gay characters in Bioware games, which wasn’t even brought up in the original article! The gamer dudes doth protest too much.

I doubt any of these gamer dudes read this blog, but on the off-chance that one does: suck it up, buttercups. Games are going to keep changing to appeal to a wider, more diverse audience through capitalistic desire if nothing else, and I suspect that this will makes games BETTER as more people and more perspectives get involved in the industry. Mass Effect 3, in fact, has a option to choose “story mode” with less combat, while folks who love fighting can choose a mode with extra combat. Looks like Hepler and her evil band of lady-gamers already won this fight.

UPDATE: Bioware has released an official statement about this mess and has made a donation to Bullying Canada in Ms. Hepler’s name. Also, if you’re on Google+ we have a pretty good discussion on this stuff going on there.