Vacation

I'm tired. I'm tired of being online. Tired of comments about my personal and professional life from people who have never met me. I need a vacation from morons like this fellow, who writes in that "Your website is misleading":

"what the fuck my friend linked me to gamegirladvance and i was expecting
naked chicks

you fuken fags don't make a website with "girl" in the url unless it's porn
because that's the only use for girls on the internet you assholes"

- Robert Morgan [smeg_in_the_head@hotmail.com]

Yeah, okay. Thanks for the tip, buddy. Sigh.

I'm tired of the spam. Spam in my mailbox, in the comments. It seriously makes me almost cry. When there's something you've built up, it breaks your heart to have idiots piss all over it.

I'm going to France for five weeks. During that time, GGA will be on vacation, sort of, until I decide what to do with it. I'll still post when I can and when I'm inspired; Justin and Clockwork and Bowler and you guys will all post too, as you feel like it.

But we'll take it easy this summer and relaunch in September, probably with a different format. I may take away comments, or force registration. I hate to close down the dialogue, but it's driving me insane.

If any of you have good ideas about how to handle comment spam better, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks, and see you all in August. Have a lovely July.

Children of Heroes - Avatar Aesthetics

Posting photos of your online MMOG characters is kinda like showing people baby pictures maybe? There's a measure of pride, and definite investment. After seeing Professor Burke's post on City of Heroes from last month, with a picture of his own character Faust, I was inspired to foist these photos on you folks.

As I wrote in my first GGA post on City of Heroes, I was laughing and chortling and enjoying myself immensely designing my characters for this game. I like to experiment with different character types in MMOGs so I end up with a number of lower-level characters. This is fun in CoH because I get a chance to develop my character-making technique, to improve my avatar aesthetics.

	Phyrric - Technology Blaster Virtue Server My first character - let's make him look like a gleeful idiot! I thought - Phyrric, a victory that defeats. And it looks like fire - many of the powers in City of Heroes are based around the elements, so making a fire character was easy. And making him look silly, like a winner who has lost his marbles, was easy too - wide grin, silly glasses, tall hair, lines on his chest, non-sequitor radiation symbol on his chest, pink fingerless gloves, flaming metal jodhpurs, boots with fins. Then I found out I'd mispelled Phyrric (I used Google as my spellchecker) and I felt even better about the whole thing.
	Delphine - Mutant Controller Pinnacle Server You ever notice: in many role-playing games, men are the brutes and women are the enchantresses? I didn't exactly break form here - I wanted to make a more magic-type of character, and play with playing a woman. City of Heroes offers three gender choices - male, female, and giant brutish male. And astonishingly, the fashion choices for women are rather limited if you don't want her to be wearing a bikini or bustier. I was working on a mutant controller - someone who can manipulate gravity and energy to help friends and hurt foes. Powers of the mind, unknown, perhaps erratic - like the Oracle at Delphi! Delphine was her name then. Playing on this idea of someone from the Mediterranean, near the middle of the old world, I outfitted her in a mix of dark, formal Western business attire and the closest I could get to a muslim head scarf, or shadour. Beneath that, glowing eyes and a beaming third eye. Subdued pink and black colors, with just some superhero freak freak happening in her legs.
	Maggma - Magic Tanker Protector Server A friend was on Protector - I wanted a character on that server. And I wanted to play one of the thick characters that could charge into combat without fretting hit points so much. The brutish male gender-type was a natural for this style of play, and the chracter class "Tanker." It would be differently fun to play a tiny shrimpy person who was a tanker, yes, and a brutish male healer maybe. But this was not the image I had in my mind. I wanted something earthy thick and powerful. I was playing with the different effects in the character designer, the tattoos and art you could inscribe on your hero, and I found this electricity effect on his shoulders might look like lava if you colored the lines orange on a brown body. So I created this idea of a volcanic force - power of rock, power of fire. Born of unspoken magic, that's why he has those goofy glyphs on his pants, and celtic boots. I wanted him to have bare feet, but that's not an option here yet. Magic horns on his head. Deep earth tones with orange accents. This is my latest character, and probably my favorite to look at.

Part of the fun of City of Heroes is playing through these character creation choices from an aethetic point of view. Not - I'm a sneaky archer who can make robes. But I'm a volcano-inspired creature of magic who wears earth-tones. It's an important evolution in these kinds of games to be able to approach character creation from the outset as an aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the gameplay is filled with people expressing themselves, using the City of Heroes toolset to make some kind of personal statement on heroism, play and identity.

Here's a screenshot of Delphine standing with a fellow adventurer named Messiahnator, who fights with a large gun, yelling "bless you my children" as he shoots people down:

As expansive as the City of Heroes toolset seems after Dark Age of Camelot, for example, it's still nowhere near as fun as Second Life. But the gameplay here is different - City of Heroes players are in a much more structured environment. As the medium of massively multiplayer online games evolves, these tools for personalization and avatar customization should continue to expand to allow for more play. And that's fun!

Republicans Play Games, Apparently

It used to be that only Iraq War protesters made political statements with games, but no more. Enter Tax Invaders, a vertical shooter that allows you to take out aggressions against John Kerry's tax plans. Experience thrills previously known only to America's wealthy elite as you control George W. Bush, shooting down tax proposals like a Texas cowboy.

It is interesting to note that whoever made this game decided that enemy bullets cannot actually harm dubya, meaning that as long as you just keep clicking, the game is impossible to actually lose. Is that, in itself, a political statement, or was the perceived audience for Tax Invaders so gaming-averse that the difficulty had to be removed?

Illegal Aliens

Sometimes the really cool stuff on the web is hidden in plain sight. Take space-invaders.com.

A masked Parisian artist has taken his love for classic gaming aesthetics into the streets with a series of Space Invaders-themed mosaics. He's been plastering up his pixellated graffiti since 1998, and has attracted a few copycats who have invaded their own towns. Of particular interest may be the maps he provides to many of his pieces, if you happen to find yourself in Paris, Tokyo, New York, or one of the other cities bombed by the aliens. If you're like me, however, you'll just have to use the requisite photo archives.

Be warned that the site runs a little slow on the Western side of the Atlantic.

Non-Linear Super Mario Bros.

Found an interesting article by Erin Bell of GameCritics over on Ludonauts talking about an experimental hack of a Super Mario Bros. ROM that removes all the enemies, blocks, pits, and coins. In other words, the game is changed to a single endless level where you can control Mario as usual, but all goals are removed.

Interestingly enough, the traditional time limit remains, and the music still speeds up when 90 seconds remain. Mario can run and jump forever across scrolling backgrounds, but will never reach any sort of terminus before dying when the clock reaches zero.

I'm sure there's a metaphor in that somewhere.

Bell goes on to talk about the ways that different players dealt with the game environment: dashing ahead forever, jumping to make rythms with the jumping noise, etc.

Say, children, what does it all mean?

Robin's Wrap Up

GGA pal Robin Hunicke has posted an E3 Wrap up on her site, the usual blend of engaging photographs and provocative text. She's a smart person and demonstrates a willingness to have a studied opinion on the games industry. Combine that with a good eye and an itchy shutter-finger and we're looking at some of the premier photojournalism happening in video games. Go Robin! More to come, she says.

Robin on E32004

Gamer Dating

It started two days ago when my friend sent me a link to a Boston craigslist personal ad, and then a few days later another friend found a whole website devoted to gamer dating. I've often been dubious of subculture-exclusive dating services, since I like having partners who can expand my horizons now and again, but I can't argue with the desire to find somebody who can get as excited about City of Heroes as me.

But who has time for dating? I've just pulled off 5 straight 12-14 hour days, with slim chance of working less this Saturday and Sunday. Such are the sacrifices of living the game designer's life. Life is too short to make bad games, so I hope you like what we're all working so hard to make for you!

The Future of Communities

David "Masters of DOOM" Kushner contributes a story on the presence of women in online gaming spaces like EA's Pogo. We've known this for a while of course: there are LOTS of female gamers online, but because they are classified as "casual" gamers we don't hear a lot about them. As the industry expands, though, that's going to change.

A related article in AdAge adresses attempts to market to these female gamers - for example, Coca-Cola's Vanilla Coke Mystery Game.

Get Paid for Gaming

... if you're a girl, that is. UbiSoft is looking for female gamers. Check out the Craigslist posting. Basically you'll be a gamer ambassador - playing videogames and going to represent the company at trade shows. Booth babe? But at least you're a real gamer, right? As Kat put it, "I 'figure if they want to pay me money to play games from home, then so be it." Word. Sounds like a dream job for someone! Check it out.