Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2023

The mass spell to destroy Hogwarts Legacy turns out to be a squib

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

All the angry people on social media had a new thing to be angry about: the release of a new online game based on the works of she-who-must-not-be-named (that’d be J.K. Rowling if you haven’t been keeping up with the woke’s ledger book of cancelled persons). They’d gather in their mighty legions, denounce the evil woman and the tech company would shiver and shake and then apologize for offending them and pull the game from the market, just like so many other companies had fallen to their online rage before.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, as Tom Knighton relates:

The extreme left, those we term as “woke”, like to think they have a great deal of power. They think they’re the majority of the nation, and that they can shift the world based on their own whims.

And, in the past, it sure looked like it.

They’d get on Twitter and scream in outrage and brands would back down. They’d issue apologies and capitulate with the mob.

Then JK Rowling got on their bad side. She doesn’t think transwomen are women, that they haven’t lived with the struggles that women grow up with.

So, they decided to destroy anything they can associate with her.

That included the new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. Before the game came out, they tried to sabotage it on Steam, describing it as a “genocide simulator”.

I’ll be honest, that made me want to play the game. Apparently, I was far from alone.

    Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data).

    It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn’t a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie). Even compared to that week, Hogwarts Legacy was still bigger by 2%.

    This result is more impressive when you consider this is just for physical sales. Hogwarts Legacy would have received a substantial number of digital downloads (that data will come later in the week), whereas Philosopher’s Stone didn’t have any digital sales back in 2001. Therefore, the success will be even more pronounced once all the data is in.

In other words, the woke don’t have the pull they like to believe they do.

In a rational world, companies would see this and take it to heart: despite their apparent popularity on some social media sites, the very very woke are a tiny layer of froth on the ocean of non-woke customers. It’s often said that the terminally online think that Twitter is the real world — which is why Elon Musk taking over their preferred online megaphone was so traumatic to so many of them — but they’re mostly bellowing at one another, not at the population as a whole.

April 10, 2022

QotD: Most MMORPG portrayal of iron-working is incredibly unrealistic

As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. And I want to stress that broad framing: iron was made into more things than just swords (although swords are cool). If you are here wondering how you go from iron-bearing rocks to a sword, these posts will tell you, but they will equally get you from those same rocks to a nail, or a workman’s hammer, or a sawblade, or a pot, or a decorative iron spiral, or a belt-buckle, or any other of a multitude of things that might be produced in iron.

Iron production is a unique topic in one key way. If the problem with farmers is that the popular understanding of the past (either historical or fantastical) renders them effectively invisible – as indeed, it tends to render most ancient forms of production invisible – iron-working is tremendously visible, but in a series of motifs that are almost completely wrong. Iron is treated as rare when it is common, melted in societies that almost certainly lack the furnaces to do so; swords are cast when they should be forged, quenched in ways that would ruin them and the work of the iron-worker is represented as a solitary activity when every stage of iron-working, when done at any kind of scale, was a team job (many modern traditional blacksmiths work alone, often as a hobby; ancient smiths generally did not). The popular depiction is so consistently wrong that it doesn’t really even provide a firm basis for correction. We are going to have to start over, from the beginning.

[…]

In most video games, if you are looking to produce some iron things, the first problem you invariably have is finding some iron ores. Often iron is some sort of semi-rare strategic resource available in only certain parts of the map, something that factions might fight over. Actually finding some iron might be a serious problem.

Well, I have good news for historical you as compared to video game you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a billion tons (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. And that’s the point.

One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just so damn abundant. Of course iron can be used to make better tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was cheap. Now, as we’ll see, while the abundance of iron makes it cheap, the difficulty in working it poses technological problems; that’s why the far rarer and also generally inferior (to proper, work-hardened, heat-treated iron or steel; bronze will often exceed the performance of unalloyed iron) copper and bronze were used first: harder to find, easier to work. […]

Very small amounts of iron occur on earth as pure “native” metal; the term for this, “meteoric iron” is an accurate description of where it comes from (there is also one known deposit of native “telluric iron“); in practice, the sum total of these iron sources is effectively a rounding error on the amount of iron an iron-age society is going to need and so “pure” iron may be disregarded as a meaningful source of iron.

Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.

August 29, 2021

QotD: “LEEEERRRROOOYYYY JEEEEENNNNKIIIIINS!”

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Would it be confessing too much to admit that one of my generation’s formative moments happened in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft?

The year was 2005, and a diverse collection of mages and warriors were about to storm a mythical castle swarming with flying dragon-like creatures, particularly deadly to their guild. Like true and proper nerds, they met beforehand to discuss their strategy, and with all the detached analysis of a corporate board discussing the latest results of a focus group convened to discuss a brand refresh.

“Christ. OK. Well what we’ll do I’ll run in first, gather up all the eggs,” the leader begins. “I will use Intimidating Shout to kind of scatter them so they don’t have to fight a whole bunch of them at once. When my shout is done, I’ll need Anthony to come in and drop his shout too so we can keep them scattered.

“We’re going to need Divine Intervention on our mages … it is a pretty good plan. We should be able to pull it off this time. What do you think, Abdul? Can you do a number crunch real quick?”

The resident numbers guy responds: “Uh, yeah, give me a second. I’m coming up 32.33 — repeating, of course — percentage of survival.”

“Ah, that’s a lot better than what we usually do …”

Then one of the guild’s resident numbnuts breaks into this dull planning.

“Thumbs up. Let’s do this.

LEEEERRRROOOYYYY JEEEEENNNNKIIIIINS.”

“Oh my God, he just ran in.”

His team dutifully follows … and proceeds to get slaughtered by the dragon things.

“Goddamnit, Leeroy. You moron.”

Whether or not the scene was staged is irrelevant. The guild, “Pals for Life”, may have died in that fight, but glory lives forever. Or, at least, meme glory does. It was a perfect encapsulation of what happens when the best-laid plans come to nothing, when life goes pear shaped, when the odds are bad so, fuck it, you storm the castle anyways.

Jen Gerson, “Alberta goes Leeroy Jenkins on Summer”, The Line, 2021-05-28.

May 15, 2021

Baelin’s Route review, a discussion on why Viva La Dirt League’s Baelin’s Route is such a great story

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writers Block
Published 10 May 2021

In this video we will discuss why Viva La Dirt League’s movie Baelin’s Route is such a masterpiece of story telling.

Viva La Dirt League — Baelin’s Route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe-Z…

May 10, 2021

Baelin’s Route – An Epic NPC Man Adventure

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Viva La Dirt League
Published 9 May 2021

Baelin (Rowan Bettjeman), a simple background NPC in the video game Skycraft has been walking the same route for as long as he can remember. However, his peaceful (and mindless) routine is violently shaken as a short-tempered Adventurer (Ben Van Lier) drags him off his path and into a dangerous quest to escort a mysterious NPC girl named Willow (Phoenix Cross) across the harsh world of Azerim.

ORIGINAL ‘BAELIN’S ROUTE’ SOUNDTRACK: https://mikenewport.hearnow.com/​

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From the comments:

Young Dad Gaming
36 minutes ago
Okay, I know people keep talking about how good the choreography is … and we need to discuss that a little further. That was almost a full minute of a single take of a fight scene from guys who make comedy videos. That in itself is impressive and should be lauded as one of the best action scenes on YouTube.

February 27, 2021

Overwhelming video game tutorials – Combat Tips

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Viva La Dirt League
Published 25 Nov 2020

When a game tries to give you all the tutorials at once

Get a 12% discount off all SteelSeries products by using our code VLDL12. Not only do you get a special discount but we make 8% on all sales! So get a great deal and help support us!
Link: https://bit.ly/31ltYT2
Code: VLDL12

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August 17, 2019

How Diablo was completely Reverse Engineered without Source Code | MVG

Filed under: Gaming, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Modern Vintage Gamer
Published on Jul 1, 2019

In 1996 Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo, an Action RPG that sold over 2.5 million copies and defined a genre. In 2018 a developer known as GalaXyHaXz almost completely reverse engineered the code in 4 months and released it as open source. How was this accomplished? Find out in this episode!

► Consider supporting me – https://www.patreon.com/ModernVintage…

Links

DevilutionX (Open Source Diablo) https://github.com/diasurgical/devilu…
► My Nintendo Switch Port – https://github.com/lantus/devilution-nx

August 14, 2017

The schizophrenic nature of gamer complaints over Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 from the very first demo weekend, but I’ve never really become an “expert” player … I’m just another one of the huge mass of “filthy casuals” that the really good players complain about. And people do complain about GW2:

It’s long puzzled me that GW2 can both have a reputation as one of the most casual mainstream MMOs, demanding a low level of player skill and little in the way of dedicated discipline and organization, while simultaneously being castigated for the unforgiving difficulty of almost all of its high-level open world content.

As soon as the first cohort of players started to trickle into Orr, five years ago, the complaints began: the mobs were too tough, there were too many of them, they didn’t play fair. Orr got a good few thumps with the nerf bat and the complaints quietened down, only to return with just about every new piece of max-level content or large-scale, open world set piece event we’ve seen since.

I haven’t played many other MMOs, so perhaps I’m taking the nature of GW2‘s combat for granted:

Talking about whether a particular MMO is or is not “casual friendly” isn’t going to get us far when we can never agree on a definition of “casual”. That’s always been a stumbling block to my own understanding of why it should have been that I, playing with what I would self-identify as a casual mindset, experienced Heart of Thorns [the first GW2 expansion] as a liberating, exhilarating explorer’s paradise, while others, similarly self-identifying, found it a constraining, frustrating turn-off.

UltrViolet, returning from a long sabbatical from the game to give the demo a run, found it confusing and frustrating in a whole number of ways, most of which I heartily endorse. As an advertisement for the game it has all the welcoming warmth of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. What I found particularly interesting, however, was his description of the combat experience:

    “It is a typical GW2 fight – totally chaotic, a million bad guys throwing a million AoEs and other effects at you all simultaneously.”

Exactly, in other words, just what I love most about combat in GW2. It’s explosive, colorful, exuberant and above all utterly chaotic. It’s the kind of combat I think many of us dreamed about back when we were root-rotting treants in West Karana, standing motionless, casting a spell every thirty seconds or so then sitting down to meditate so we’d have enough mana to cast another thirty seconds later.

GW2‘s frenetic, rolling, dodging, mayhem, where everyone is healing herself and everyone else, where buffs last seconds and part of the gameplay relies on battle-rezzing anyone who goes down, is exactly the kind of free-rolling, liberating fun many of us could never even have dared to imagine, back when we were huddled together in the corner of a dank cave beneath the Crypt of Nadox, shaking with fear as we prayed our tank could hold agro and no roamers would wander along and add.

You mean other MMOs aren’t a blazing, eye-searing mass of particle effects as soon as combat begins?

So why isn’t everyone loving it the way I do? Jeromai can explain:

    “The number one killer of people used to other MMOs – staying stationary or facetanking mobs in GW2. Every time.

    You can observe this phenomenon on Twitch or if you watch newbies in the lowbie zones and so on. They lumber up and just STAND THERE because that’s what they do in other MMOs to attack. They expect a tank to deflect the aggro and a healer to take care of their health.

    You’re thinking, “OMG move move too much damage incoming you can’t heal that up with your self heal OMG red circle why u stand there still plz MOVE”

    Couple minutes later, they fall over. RIP.”

Well, no wonder. No wonder people are finding it hard. No wonder they aren’t enjoying themselves. I had no idea.

After all, why would I? Here’s my description of how I play, from my own comment at Why I Game:

    “My tactics, if you could flatter them with such a name, are to fire off every ability on my hotbar as often as it becomes available, while moving constantly. I don’t just dodge all the time, I run about, jump on objects, strafe and generally behave like a toddler on a sugar rush who just peed up against an electric fence”.

It’s a slight exaggeration. I don’t always do that. If the situation requires it, I can be more tactical and anyway I do have a few channeled skills that require me to stand still. In general, though, I like to keep moving.

May 9, 2015

A rather satisfying way to punish an in-game cheater

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

BBC News picked up the story of a Guild Wars 2 player who’d been cheating on a massive scale:

A character controlled by a hacker who used exploits to dominate online game Guild Wars 2 has been put to death in the virtual world.

The character, called DarkSide, was stripped then forced to leap to their death from a high bridge.

The death sentence was carried out after players gathered evidence about the trouble the hacker had caused.

This helped the game’s security staff find the player, take over their account and kill them off.

Over the past three weeks many players of the popular multi-player game Guild Wars 2 have been complaining about the activities of a character called DarkSide. About four million copies of the game have been sold.

Via a series of exploits the character was able to teleport, deal massive damage, survive co-ordinated attacks by other players and dominate player-versus-player combat.

To spur Guild Wars‘ creator ArenaNet to react, players gathered videos of DarkSide’s antics and posted them on YouTube.

The videos helped ArenaNet’s security head Chris Cleary identify the player behind DarkSide, he said in a forum post explaining what action it had taken. Mr Cleary took over the account to carry out the punishment.

H/T to MassivelyOP for both the original story and the BBC News link.

March 4, 2015

QotD: The macroeconomic insights of MMO gaming

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Yanis Varoufakis, talking to Peter Suderman, “A Multiplayer Game Environment Is Actually a Dream Come True for an Economist”, Reason, 2014-05-30.

January 31, 2015

QotD: MMO economies

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A multiplayer game environment is a dream come true for an economist. Because here you have an economy where you don’t need statistics. And elaborate statistics is what you use when you don’t know everything, you’re not omniscient, and you need to use something in order to gain feeling as to what is happening to prices, what is happening to quantities, what’s happening to investments, and so on and so forth. But in a video game world, all the data are there. It’s like being God, who has access to everything and to what every member of the social economy is doing.

Yanis Varoufakis, talking to Peter Suderman, “A Multiplayer Game Environment Is Actually a Dream Come True for an Economist”, Reason, 2014-05-30.

January 24, 2015

ArenaNet formally announced first GW2 expansion #GW2HoT

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:28

I just finished watching the ArenaNet livestream from PAX South, where they introduced the first expansion for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.

Lots of unanswered questions, a few of which are answered in the new FAQ.

Dulfy has the livestream notes if you want to read about what was revealed.

January 13, 2015

Rumour confirmed – Guild Wars 2 expansion coming

Filed under: Business, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

NCSoft, the Korean company that owns ArenaNet has registered a trademark for a Guild Wars 2 expansion called Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. Here’s the Reddit thread.

GW2 Heart of Thorns

December 31, 2014

The psychological value of online gaming

Filed under: Gaming, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

At Massively, Andrew Ross talks to the lead author on a recent paper that — unlike the pop-psych headlines in the newspapers — shows a much more positive side to gamers and online gaming:

Every time we talk about scientific research on Massively, readers argue that results from game studies should be “obvious” and are a waste of time/money or that everyone knows MMOs are filled with anti-social trolls. Kowert told me that game studies are “not unique in these criticisms,” though “they may seem stronger within this field due to the perceived frivolity of games and gaming as a field of study”:

    Even though gaming continues to grow in importance and popularity within society, there is still so much that remains unknown about how and why people are using this medium and what are its potential uses and effects (both positive and negative). For example, it has long been assumed that online game players are all reclusive, overweight, lonely, teenage males. This is reflected in the cultural stereotype of the group as seen in the news media and popular culture (Make Love, Not Warcraft, anyone?).

In her paper Reconsidering the Stereotype of Online Gamers, Kowert and her colleagues examined the validity of these stereotypes. As we discussed yesterday, the results proved that the opinions people hold about gamers don’t quite match the media’s stereotypes, even among non-gamers. Without research, we wouldn’t have this information, and for me as a gamer, it’s encouraging to know that times are changing. Plus, it gives you ammo when Uncle Frank tries to put down your hobby this holiday season.

During my examination of the research into online games and real world friendships among emotionally sensitive users, I realized I could see myself in the findings. As a child, I was very shy; part of the problem was that I didn’t know how to react to people’s emotions. One article about social gaming and lonely lives argued that people who game a lot can sometimes have trouble connecting with non-gamers. Many “enthusiastic hobbyists” also have this issue, whether their hobby is sports or soap operas or games.

Kowert says this is correct to an extent; we’ve all met the hardcore sports fans who spouts sports jargon. “There is some uniqueness in the social profile of individuals who choose to exclusively engage in hobbyist activities that are mediated by technology, such as online games,” Kowert told me. “For instance, you state that you were shy as a child and preferred standing in the background rather than diving right into new social situations. Knowing this about yourself, you may have been more apprehensive to join, let’s say, a sports club or a board game group, than popping in on an online forum discussing sports or joining online gaming club.”

In other words, it’s not that all people who play online games are shy or are using the internet to overcome some of their social problems, but for those who suffer from those problems, online gaming could be a good way for them to meet others. Being online allows people to share a social space without the fears and consequences associated with face-to-face socialization. For example, I rarely went to parties in high school, but I did run events in the online games I played, especially in older MMOs. In more raid-oriented MMOs, people constantly told me I was doing something “different,” something unique or strange, and that made me stand out as also being different. In short, I was using the game world in a different way than other more mainstream gamers did, which echoes Kowert’s research about emotionally sensitive players using game spaces in unique ways. She explains:

    Previous research has largely focused on the relationship between MMORPG play and social outcomes, as MMORPGs are believed to have a unique ability to promote sociability between users (see Mark Chen’s 2009 book Leet Noobs for a more in-depth discussion of the social environment of MMOs). As cooperation between users is often crucial to game play, the social environment of MMORPGs differs from other genres, such as multi-player first-person shooter games where gameplay is more about competition than cooperation and the social environment is more often characterized by competitiveness, trash-talking, and gloating (for more on this research see Zubek & Khoo, 2002 [PDF]). These differences in social environments are likely to differentially impact the social utility of the space as well as the social relationships that may come from it.

December 22, 2014

A new paper on the exaggerated claims that MMOs are harmful

Filed under: Gaming, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

By way of Massively, the abstract of a new paper by Dr. Rachel Kowert and her co-authors, investigating claims that massive multi-player online games are a public health threat:

Highlights
• The psychosocial causes and consequences of online video game play were evaluated.
• Over a 1- and 2-year period, evidence for social compensation processes were found.
• Among young adults, online games appear to be socially compensating spaces.
• No significant displacement or compensation patterns were found for adolescents.
• No significant displacement or compensation patterns were found for older adults.

Abstract

Due to its worldwide popularity, researchers have grown concerned as to whether or not engagement within online video gaming environments poses a threat to public health. Previous research has uncovered inverse relationships between frequency of play and a range of psychosocial outcomes, however, a reliance on cross-sectional research designs and opportunity sampling of only the most involved players has limited the broader understanding of these relationships. Enlisting a large representative sample and a longitudinal design, the current study examined these relationships and the mechanisms that underlie them to determine if poorer psychosocial outcomes are a cause (i.e., pre-existing psychosocial difficulties motivate play) or a consequence (i.e., poorer outcomes are driven by use) of online video game engagement. The results dispute previous claims that online game play has negative effects on the psychosocial well-being of its users and instead indicate that individuals play online games to compensate for pre-existing social difficulties.

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