X-Com: The Enemy With- It’s the Game. The Enemy is the Game. It Is Terrible and the Enemy is the Game.

I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of *~news journalism*~ sites (Kotaku, Wired, Game Informer, etc).  I also have a problem with “clickbait” titles to news articles, and I also also have a problem with news article headlines telling me what is best.

And here I present: The Worst Article In Ever.

Technological Evangelism and Why I Am the Devil’s Advocate

So, lately technological evangelism has come into my scope of vision a lot more than it used to.  People like Clay Shirkey are unapologetic and un-critical (each of those four words are a link to one manner or another of Mr. Shirkey’s preaching) of technology, and are diametric to people like Sherry Turkle who often times come across seeming like they’re saying “Fire is bad, Thomas Edison is a witch, and computer’s are the Devil’s playground.”

Either way that you go with it, there’s a good and bad.  With Mr. Shirkey, I find a lot of fault in his books written for the common folk and masses because of the HUUUUUGE logical fallacies that he perpetuates.  With Ms. Turkle, you can become debilitatingly scared of technology and take WAY too critically negative a view point.  But, on the flip side to that, there are great things to take away from both.  Being accepting of technology that could revolutionize the world?  Hell yeah.  Being self-aware of your social media habits and policing yourself?  Double hell yeah.

Here’s where I stand on it.

Warlords of Draenor Has Me Feelin’ Some Type Ah Way: My First Day

So, I haven’t slept in a day and a half, I’m sick as a dog, and my WoW addiction is still in the “worrisome” category.  You see, Warlords of Draenor came out last night.  And I haven’t stopped playing it.

With past WoW expansions, I’ve been on track to server firsts for leveling, professions, boss kills, mounts (server first Alani says hi), etc.  BUT.  With this expansion, I’m taking it easy, and I’m gonna just play for fun and see where it gets me.  WoW has become a second job for me, and that’s not right.  So, with Warlords of Draenor, I’m gonna make it my un-job, and I’m gonna make it so that I have fun again.

I am also only typing this right now because I d/c’d and I need something to do to while I wait for my queue to pop.  82 and counting.

I’ll report back in l8r

3:02

The lag is so fucking bad that I can’t even play.  Now, with every expansion thus far that I’ve played from launch (BC onward), there have been varying levels of unplayability, and honestly, this one isn’t even really that bad.  During Cataclysm, the server that I was playing on crashed so much that it was five days before I was max level/could even stand to play.  It was pretty bad.  During WotLK, the server was buggier than owl shit, and there was so much lag and rubberbanding that the game was, actually, unplayable.  Here, though, there’s just a lot of lag, and it isn’t *quite* unplayable; it’s just unpleasant to play right now, and I actually got kind of motion sick trying to.  I’ll come back to it later.

5:17

990th in queue.  On Aerie Peak.  Where I think there are possibly 990 active players.

Current mood: “-_____________________-”

5:45

Still waitin’.  Down to 330.  *exasperated sigh*

Attention! Why You Should Shut the Hell Up and Focus

I promised a part 2 to my Attention! post about my online experiences with the new-ish console based shooter game called “Destiny.”  In the my previous post, I did a little bit of outlining on Howard Rheingold’s book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online and I related the general message of his book to my experiences with World of Warcraft and how chat interfaces can be infuriating, and how it can directly affect gameplay.

In “Destiny,” the chat interface is… well… non-existent.

A Matter of Metaphor: Like Jamming a Fork Into One’s Ears. Right?

Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day wrote a book called Information Ecologies.  In this work, they critically examine critical viewpoints of certain technologists, philosophers, and other branches of thinkers.  Within each argument, they find the good and the bad, and there you have: the basis for this book.

In the third chapter, though, they started in on “affordances.”  JJ Gibson coined the phrase in respect to technology.  So, technological affordances, right?  These are the intrinsic values of a piece of technology.  This started to get me thinking about the physical “affordances” of gaming hardware.  Now, it’s no secret that peripherals for video games seem like they have fallen completely to the wayside in development.  When I cracked open my new PS4 about 8 months ago, I was expecting an actual head-set.  Instead, I was greeted with this:

Now, I couldn’t really pin down why this made me mad when I saw it, but it made me mad when I saw it.  Even with basic “I just pulled my system out of the box” headsets of the past, there has been an actual headset.  This was… I’m not even sure what to call it.  But now that I understand that this peripheral completely lacked any of the “affordances” of its predecessors, I understood why it made me mad.

“Why DID it make you so mad, Josh,” you ask.  “What’s so wrong with that?”

Attention! Why Parties and Notifications in Video Games Gets Old, Fast

Recently I read a snippet of Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online and it dealt with attention and relaxation.  Rheingold really delves into how we can affect our ability to focus and pay attention.  Deep breathing, not giving into the Pavlovian response of a “ding” or a “boop” when a text or email comes in, basically divorcing ourselves from the base, instinctual notion that this beep could be a predator and we must be prepared to deal with something going wrong.  It all sounds like easy stuff, and the way he writes it, it *is* easy stuff.  But what happens when the interfaces we interact with every day aren’t built to be divorced from?

This all got me to thinking about focus and attention in video games (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one, right?).  How distracted am I when I’m playing video games?  The sole philosophy of a video game is to focus and either kill this thing, get to the end of this level, or complete task x, y, and z.  Well, what’s happening that’s preventing me from doing that in the most efficient way possible?

Alone Together: The Fallacy of Connectivity and Community in Video Games

If you haven’t ready Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, you’re doing yourself a great disservice.  In the text, Dr. Turkle outlines a majority of problem areas that we are facing in and with connectivity today, ranging from the existential dread we (may or may not) feel towards profile building/buffering in social media arenas to privacy rights and the deficiency therein to how video games can create a sort of false-positive feedback loop that we can easily become trapped in.  Don’t get me wrong, being hardwired into a veritable Mother Brain of information isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but, as Turkle points out time and time again, we are forsaking the human touch and human interaction.  Kind of like selling your soul to the Devil, or in this case PayPal-ing it to him.

At one point, in the chapter Reduction and Betrayal (by FAR the chapter that hit home the hardest for me, and you’ll see why in a moment) Turkle interviews a young man named Adam who basically forsook everything in his life to feel closer to video games, specifically Civilization 5 (hereafter referred to as Civ) and an iteration of the Quake series.  He describes the two real-life jobs he keeps as boring, and states “They are slipping away.”  Turkle states “They [the games] are essential to his self-esteem, for it is inside these worlds that he feels most relaxed and happy.”   She goes on to describe that Adam used to play Quake with a group of people from work, but as normies tend to do, they gravitated to other games and the group sort of fell apart.  Now, Adam is left to his own devices in Quake, saying that sometimes he plays with other people, but mostly with bots.  He states that “…conversations with the [human] players…are about things that bots can talk about as well.”

As someone who has spent WAY more time than I’m willing to admit to playing online games (World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Ultima, Everquest, Wildstar… I mean the list goes on), this chapter was quite scary.