My weekly community round-up column at GuildMag is now online. I spent a bit of time talking about the GW2 guild system as we’ve seen it in the beta events and offering some criticism based on the current system. With my luck, about an hour after the column goes live, ArenaNet will announce a raft of changes that will make my commentary obsolete. After my bit of spleen-venting, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 fan community.
July 6, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
June 30, 2012
Top 10 post-launch thread topics for Guild Wars 2
I found this video while doing my morning trawl for material to put into next week’s GuildMag round-up, but I liked it so much that I had to share:
Comments Off on Top 10 post-launch thread topics for Guild Wars 2
June 29, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly community round-up column at GuildMag is now online. The big news this week was the announcement of a release date, which rather overshadowed any reports from the stress test earlier in the week. I had the misfortune to publish my own post about the stress test about a minute before the news broke about the release date — it’ll probably be the least-read item I’ve ever published. In addition to announcement celebrations, stress test reports, and speculation about the July beta event (the final beta event), there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 fan community.
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
June 28, 2012
Yesterday’s Guild Wars 2 stress test…and today’s release date announcement
I wrote about some of my brief time in the Guild Wars 2 stress test yesterday for GuildMag, but the really big news is that we’ve finally been given a formal release date for the game:
I might as well just block off the last week of August…
Update: We’ll be having the final beta weekend event from July 20th to the 22nd.
Comments Off on Yesterday’s Guild Wars 2 stress test…and today’s release date announcement
June 24, 2012
QotD: The kids really are alright
The phrase I use all the time is, “the kids are alright,” from the Who. It’s amazing to me, you know, I’m 54 years old, and it’s amazing to me watching my peers turn into these cartoons. They say, s*** like, “well you know, when we were kids we weren’t this rude, and we wouldn’t say this stuff. I would have never done this.” And it’s absolute f***ing bulls***, and we certainly have records going back thousands of years that adults always hate the younger generation. Adults always find a reason to hate people that are 20-years-old, and I don’t know why it is. Clearly and provably every generation gets better. Every generation gets healthier, smarter, more sophisticated, and that’s always been true. Twenty-year-olds are just better than us. Old people just can’t seem to get it through their heads that things are getting better and that’s wonderful. Not only do young people not have polio, not only are young people less racist, less homophobic, and less violent – not only is all that true, but they also have some really really cool art, and some of that art we don’t understand. The problem is a question of time.
You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games. The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong. The cliché of the nerdy kid who doesn’t go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it’s also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It’s beautiful. That kind of obsession is going to lead to a sophisticated 30-year-old who has a background in that artform. It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably s***ty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.
Penn Jillette, “Penn Jillette Is Tired Of The Video Game Bulls***”, Game Informer, 2009-11-20
Comments Off on QotD: The kids really are alright
June 22, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
This week’s community round-up column at GuildMag is now online. Again this week, there’s lots of footage from BWE2, mass foaming-at-the-mouth over the dye system changes, and a brief stress test to be held next Wednesday. Oh, and the usual assortment of blog posts, podcasts, and videos.
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
June 15, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. Lots of footage from last weekend’s beta event, plus some new speculation about a release date announcement.
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
June 13, 2012
Clang!
Neal Stephenson wants your money to help him create a realistic sword fighting game:
Hi, Neal Stephenson here. My career as an author of science and historical fiction has turned me into a swordsmanship geek. As such, I’m dissatisfied with how swordfighting is portrayed in existing video games. These could be so much more fun than they are. Time for a revolution.
In the last couple of years, affordable new gear has come on the market that makes it possible to move, and control a swordfighter’s actions, in a much more intuitive way than pulling a plastic trigger or pounding a key on a keyboard. So it’s time to step back, dump the tired conventions that have grown up around trigger-based sword games, and build something that will enable players to inhabit the mind, body, and world of a real swordfighter.
H/T to Tom Kelley for the link.
Comments Off on Clang!
June 12, 2012
What happens when you play Civilization II for a decade?
I don’t mean playing the game for that length of time (I’m sure there are still fans who do that now and again), but playing the same session for that long:
I’ve been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I’m not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.
- The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
- There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.
-The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn’t a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.
-As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it’s peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn’t any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.
H/T to Charles Stross for the link.
Comments Off on What happens when you play Civilization II for a decade?
June 11, 2012
The final day of the Guild Wars 2 beta event
The third and final day for ArenaNet’s Beta Weekend Event number two is now history: here’s my wrap-up post at GuildMag.
Comments Off on The final day of the Guild Wars 2 beta event
June 10, 2012
The second day of the Guild Wars 2 beta event
The second day for ArenaNet’s Beta Weekend Event number two went smoothly enough: here’s my post at GuildMag.
Comments Off on The second day of the Guild Wars 2 beta event
June 9, 2012
The Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event
I’m taking part in this weekend’s beta event with some notes posted in lieu of serious analysis over on GuildMag. Here is my initial report from yesterday’s activities.
Comments Off on The Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event
June 8, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. With everyone eagerly awaiting the start of this weekend’s beta event, it may be my least-read column for months.
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
June 7, 2012
Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
Martin Robbins in the Guardian on another “study” linking teenagers who play video games to negative results:
Not that the ‘research’ cited says anything about violent video games to begin with. BAAM conducted a survey of 204 parents of children aged nine to eighteen, asking about their use of computer games: anything from Tetris to GTA IV via SimCity. This produced the following results:
“Forty-six per cent said their sons or daughters had become ‘less co-operative’ since they started playing video games. Forty-four per cent said they were more ‘rude or intolerant towards others’, 40 per cent said they were more impatient, 36 per cent reported an increase in ‘aggressive behaviour’, 29 per cent cited more mood swings and 26 per cent said their offspring had become more reclusive.”
26% of parents thought their teen offspring had become more reclusive in the years since they started playing video games. No doubt pedantic nay-sayers will whine on about the other SEVENTY-BLOODY-FOUR PER CENT of kids who either didn’t become more reclusive or became less reclusive, or ask how ‘reclusive’ is even defined or measured in the first place; but if that incredible correlation doesn’t persuade you, well then by golly-gosh I don’t know what will.
Even the most ‘persuasive’ of those figures stands at just 46%. That, astonishingly, is the proportion of parents who think their teenaged children are becoming less cooperative with time. This is put down to video games, rather than something silly, like… oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re teenagers?! 46% is a shocking figure only in the sense that I’m shocked it’s only 46%. Perhaps video games actually make kids more cooperative? We have no way of knowing, because there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to survey kids who don’t play video games as a control group.
Comments Off on Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
