Category Archives: General Game-related Blathering

MMO Melting Pot Publicity Weekend

2012-07-29General Game-related BlatheringDoggerel Shakespeare, MMO Melting Potflosch

Most people who come here to read my posts probably already know about the MMO Melting Pot. In fact, I think a lot of you ended up here because I was featured there. Repeatedly. Hugh obviously considers me a better writer than I do myself! In fact, here’s a small secret: One of the main reasons I finally started blogging again is because I felt like I let down some people by simply disappearing. And by “some people”, I mostly meant Hugh. (And a couple of others, but you won’t find out until you run your own publicity weekend at some point!) So I think I owe him.

Why do I write all this? Because this weekend is “feature the pot if you like it” weekend.

There are some prewritten statements on the site that you can use to help raise publicity for the pot, and if you like it, I encourage you to do so. I’ll use my own words, however: I think the pot is a great idea, and very well-done. It scouts many more blogs than I could possibly read myself (seriously Hugh, you still haven’t told me how you manage to do that!). It allows me to find out about new blogs that I might add to my feed reader. It identifies ongoing trends and discussions in blogs, and focuses and fosters debate about topics that way. And finally, it is there pretty much every single day from Monday to Friday with at least one new post.

All of that makes it much better in my opinion than most “gaming news” or even “MMO news” sites, which often are hopelessly biased. The Melting Pot, on the other hand, showcases different opinions on topics by different authors. While of course the pot staff picks and chooses featured blog articles, this still leads to a far more balanced view on things, and can lead to meaningful debate. Besides, who else would provide you with the news about ongoing debates on topics such as dungeon design, attunements, or morality crossovers between game and real world? So, in short, the pot is the very model of a modern major blog news site.

Oh no, I think he’s going to rhyme!

I am the very model of a modern major blog news site,
I’ve information where and what does happen every day or night,
I scout the blogosphere until I know who is to praise and blame
(as long as it concerns a massive multiplayer online game).

Sometimes I feature single posts although they seem pretentious,
but realize: I do it ’cause that topic is contentious!
At times I present various posts with thoughts on a single topic,
[hm…. topic… such an annoying rhyme and meter… who stresses “topic” on the second syllable?!… Ah, got it!]
my goal is that the debate will progress from being myopic!

At other times, I inform you about the staff behind the pot
or manage a most curious google map: each blogger is a dot.
In short, in matters where and what does happen every day or night
I am the very model of a modern major blog news site!

Sorry! Just felt like it. I’ll spare you the rest. I’m all rhymed out for today. Just go already and read the pot!

Non-MMO Weekend: Gray Matter

2012-05-01General Game-related BlatheringGray Matter, Jane Jensenflosch

I used to be a huge fan of Point-and-Click adventure games. What I could get my hands on, I played in the 90ies. Sadly, the genre more or less died when 3D came around. (I hated 3D back at the time, not only because I blamed it for the death of adventure games, but also for the hideously blocky models that replaced beautifully crafted 2D sprites. It took years until the 3D models were even close. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.) Grim Fandango probably was the last masterpiece, though I remember Gabriel Knight 3 to be a lot better than people remember it for these days. Not that it reached the glory of the first part of the series. But I’ll attribute that at least in part to the 3D graphics, which just couldn’t tell a story as intensely as 2D for many years.

Which brings me to Gabriel Knight, and its main designer. Jane Jensen has done marvelous work, and if you’ve never played any Gabriel Knight, go and do so! Please. If you can stand the pixels these days. Take the first part, it’s probably still the best. Jane Jensen has a knack for interweaving science and facts with paranormal fiction, and it shows in many of her works, such as Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter. Religious studies, voodoo, and New Orleans; or history, templars, the grail, and southern France (years before Dan Brown).

The story of the production of that game is quite complicated. It was supposed to come out many years ago, in the early 2000s. After a lot of back and forth, and near-deaths, I lost track of it at some point, thinking that it had been scrapped for good.

I just can’t keep up with stuff. Gray Matter was released 18 months ago, and I totally missed it. Thankfully, Jane Jensen is getting ready to start on her next project, and she set up a kickstarter, which I conveniently was pointed to by… I can’t remember who? It might’ve been spinks, she had written a post about Jane two weeks ago. So I went there, liked what I saw, and immediately pledged $30. A real adventure game by someone with a good track record? That’s worth the 20-odd Euros to me. It was then that I realized that Gray Matter had not been canceled, after all. So I ordered it, and had time to play it this weekend.I’ll keep this description spoiler-free, or at least free of anything you won’t learn in the first 30 minutes of playing.

I said Jane has a knack for interweaving science, facts, and paranormal fiction, and she does it again this time. The main characters (and the two you take turns playing) are Sam(antha) Everett and Dr David Styles. Sam took me a moment to get used to, she was a bit too gothic for my taste in the beginning. But it blends well with the story, and her history as girl with a troubled youth, and street-smart street magician/con-woman works out quite well. When her motorbike breaks down, she happens to end up in the mansion of Dr Styles, a neurobiologist who became a recluse after the death of his wife, and, as you will learn, is maybe a bit too obsessed with it, even several years after the fateful car accident.

Maybe a bit too large and pretentious for my taste, but I'd still take it if I got it for free.

Again, David’s model heavily relies on stereotypes: his phantom-of-the-opera-esque mask that hides the disfigured part of his face was maybe a bit too much. The game revolves around two main goals: get Samantha an invitation into the prestigious Daedalus Club for Illusionists in London, and find out what really happened the night of the accident, and what’s behind the mysterious sightings on David’s deceased wife in the mansion.

The characters are maybe not likable, but they work well in the story, and you can’t help but become at least a bit attached to them. The strength of the prior games, faithful representation of the town in which it plays, seems to show again: I’ve never been to Oxford, but I’ve seen photos, and the skyline looks very much like the real thing.

That's Oxford alright.

In adventures, story is the point that decides whether they succeed or fail (style can be a close second). The story, again I want to say in the case of Jane Jensen, works very well; and that’s coming from a person who’s neither in King nor Brown nor any such stuff. It might not have the pull of the first Gabriel Knight, where around day 4, I simply could not stop playing any more, but I still liked it. It was captivating enough that I played through the game in two days.

There are a couple of smaller things that irked me. First, some things felt more American than English to me. Do they say “cell phone” these days in Britain? Then again, the Brits maybe just tried to be polite toward (US) Sam and used the American word. And second, sometimes it felt quite arbitrary whether you had to “do” things or whether “knowing” was enough. In many cases, you simply had to read or overhear things to use the knowledge later on. However, in other cases, that was not enough. For example, in one case, you had two lists that you had to compare to find a missing name. It required you to tick all the names on one list, so that Samantha would note how was missing. It was not quite clear to me I had to do the ticking; but you needed to do it to trigger the next puzzle. These are all smaller nitpicks though.

Difficulty-wise, it was about middle of the road. I only got seriously stuck twice, in which cases, I looked up what I was missing on the Internet after about an hour. One was a “how stupid of me” moment, the other a “that didn’t make that much sense to me” moment. I probably would’ve figured out both eventually, but I’m such an impatient person! I wanted to know how the story ended.

Overall, it took me about 12 hours to play through the game. I’d say it cost me about as much, per-hour, as a hardcover book, and it was worth that to me. That’s for the “Collector’s Edition”, which comes with additional goodies, one of them the soundtrack on CD. Which was worth it: the score is very atmospheric (done by Jane’s husband Robert Holmes, who also did the music for the Gabriel Knights) and well done, and I still catch myself humming the song “Safe in Arms” that plays a vital role in the story.

If you like adventures, and live behind the moon like I do, pick up the game now. If you don’t want to spend as much money, amazon.com seems to have a cheap digital download version. Oh, and definitely have a look at the kickstarter project. Of all those that I’ve pledged so far (ok, that’s not been that many), this is the one I have highest hopes for. After seeing Gray Matter, I increased my pledge to $50. That’s how much I liked it.

In Which I Lament The Depiction Of Males In Computer Games

2012-04-25Even More General Blathering, General Game-related Blathering, Where The Dead Horses Roamfeminism, gender stereotypes, masculismflosch

I had sworn I’d never write a post about the topic of topics, the filler of comments with gall and spite, the one topic you must not write about as a male, lest be scorned…

Oh Boy! (or Girl, I guess, to genderize correctly.) In all honesty, I’m scared. I hope the relative obscurity of my blog will prevent me from the dreaded 100-comment discussions. Anyway, here it goes:

I’ve heard the question over and over again. Why do women complain about the depiction of women in computer games, but men do not about depictions of men? The often-cited reason is: Depictions of females in computer games are sexualized to fuel male fantasies, while depictions of males are empowered, to also fuel male fantasies. Hence, guys don’t have anything to complain about, that’s why you don’t hear about it. This is called “false equivalence”.

So I guess it’s my time to speak up and claim that, to me personally, this “false” is a “true”. I want to complain about the depiction of men in computer games. There are two points I want to look at and refute:

Sexualization is bad, Power Fantasies are good?

Maybe the problem is that the female stereotype shown is more offensive than the male one.

That would imply either a) sexualization is inherently bad in itself, or b) power fantasies are inherently good. Now, you can argue that “sexualization” is an over-reliance on sexual attractiveness, and this is bad as it is a stereotype. I will even agree, I hate chainmail bikinis with passion. But on the same level, “power fantasies” are an over-reliance on bullyism, and this is also a stereotype, hence bad.

Now, let’s reduce it from the stereotypes to the underlying concepts. Sex and physical prowess. Sex isn’t inherently bad. We all like it, we like to do it, and unless we cheat nature, which we also all like to do all the time, we actually need it to survive (as a group). Physical prowess also isn’t inherently bad. Back when we had to run 5 hours chasing a gnu, we actually needed it to survive. But we don’t need it any more. Physical Prowess is much more archaic than sex. Therefore, it often gets sublimated: the power of physical prowess is converted into more intangible power over other people.

If that is true (I’m not 100% sure, I admit I haven’t read more than a couple of introductory texts on psychology and psychoanalysis), the male depictions in computer games hint at having power over other people. I find that even more offensive than being sexually available. Why do I, as a male, have to subjugate others to fill my gender role? I don’t like having power over others, it makes me feel queasy. I’d rather “make love than war”. I reserve my right to be offended at those male depictions, because they pigeonhole me into something I find highly problematic.

There is no choice for women?

This has become less and less true over the years. Of course, there are still bad apples. The last wave of posts about this topics was motivated by the TERA demo. I looked at the youtube videos featuring the classes, and I see a problem there: about 90% of the women are scantily clad, about 90% of the men are heavily armored or at least properly clothed. But even in TERA, there are the occasional properly-clothed and even armored females, and the half-naked guys. Then again, the game is going to tank anyway, and we can get worked-up about it all day. What can you expect from a game that has a brainless muscle beating up your target audience as advertising campaign?

On the other hand, many games at least give you a token choice. And if you don’t like that one, you’re equally out of luck as woman or man. Don’t like over-sexualized females? (I don’t, so I follow the rules laid out here.) Better don’t play a Demon Hunter in Diablo III, or a Blood Elf in WoW, or a Norn in GW2. If you’re hell-bent on playing a female character, switch to the Barbarian, Orc, or Sylvari, respectively. If you’re hell-bent on playing the class/race, switch gender, and chances are you’ll be happy (with the exception of the Norn, I guess), because stereotyping in games seems to run along races rather than sexes these days.

Don’t like over-muscled males? (I don’t, so I follow the rules laid out here.) Better don’t play a Barbarian in Diablo III, or an Orc in WoW, or a Norn in GW2. If you’re hell-bent on playing a male character, switch to the Demon Hunter, Blood Elf, or Sylvari, respectively. If you’re hell-bent on playing the class/race, switch gender, and chances are you’ll be happy (with the exception of the Norn, I guess), because stereotyping in games seems to run along races rather than sexes these days.

So, is there no choice in female characters? No, there sure is. Is there less choice in female characters than in male characters? Hard to make a blanket statement, but I can’t see it. Elves are typically a great avoider for the male stereotype, and it seems we’re getting to the point where either evil-ish or hunky races avoid the female stereotype. In that respect, I disagree with Spinks; I think there indeed are different female models available in most games, and that there is choice.

The Final Rant

Stop reading here. Seriously. (Actually, I decided to delete most of it before I hit “publish”, because it detracted from my point.) Just one short summary:

I find many male depictions in video games offensive, because they imply I need to be a power-hungry hunk to be really male. I don’t like to have power over others, and I’m not athletic. Stop exploiting this weird gender image, it’s not working for me. Then again, most games give me a choice to avoid the stereotypes I don’t like. So get over it, all genders and sexes.

SW:TOR: Second Impression

2012-03-19General Game-related BlatheringPleasure Not Doing Business With You, SW:TORflosch

Good things first: I tried out a few characters, and brought an imperial agent to level 10, and a Sith sorcerer to 14. I liked the stories for the most part, playing full-of-themselves characters. The dark/light mechanic is a bit strange though, it seems quite random at times what qualifies as dark or light; as an effect, I ended up with a relatively even distribution, which seems to be a bad thing, stat-wise.

The game is also quite polished. It didn’t crash on me at all during the weekend, though I had to close it manually once when I got disconnected and the game didn’t recover properly. My server lagged badly for some time on Sunday, though; not sure whether they were overloaded by the amount of people during the trial weekend. Then again, there were a lot of people, but not that many that it should influence the server like that.

Performance is a bit of a problem overall. I heard in December that responsiveness was pretty bad, and I still had problems with that and the spell animations at some points. In addition, SW:TOR seems to use the same engine as Rift (Hero, or something like that), which… I’m not a huge fan of. My GPU fans go crazy during the game, not only, but especially during the cut scenes. Not sure why the cut scenes are that demanding. During “normal” play, the Hero engine has these weird lighting effects, where every character and much of the fauna seems to have this strange glow around the outer edges, which looks very out of place, like things were sprinkled with fairy dust. Then again, I could complain about most other engines used for MMOs, too, so eh.

I’ve already talked about the huge distraction that the alien gibberish is for me. That seriously degrades my enjoyment of the game. I hate to make this such a big deal, but it is for me.

Finally, EA puts a massive limitation on trial characters: they can neither whisper other players nor talk in chat channels. Grrreeeat. Especially if you are a healer, and see a group looking for one in General for 30 minutes, and you can’t do anything about it because you can’t contact them. I understand that EA probably wants to reduce chat channel spamming from bots, but there must be some other way. Put a severe rate limit on how often you can talk on trial accounts if you think you need to (though I don’t see how this is a big problem with a game that doesn’t even have a free trial yet, outside of friend passes and weekend events), but having no way of communicating with people unless you happen to stand right next to them is quite silly. I wasn’t able to test any of the group content because of that. It further underlines the lingering notion that SW:TOR is more of a single-player game that happens to run on a server so you can be charged 15 units of your local currency every month.

Overall, I have to say it is a cute little game, and I’d probably continue playing it if either 1) it was box-price only and no subscription (preferred), or 2) the other way round. I probably would see this differently if I cared about Star Wars, but whatever little interest I had in that series died with Jar Jar Binks long ago (I was young enough when I first saw the Ewoks that they didn’t ruin it for me). That pretty much leaves me with a slightly boring vanilla gameplay, with story line elements that seem nice enough that I would play through the game once or twice to see a couple.

If EVE doesn’t work out, I might pick up the game after all to tide me over until TSW is released. If I can find a good deal. I’m not keen on paying more than 30 Euros or so for the box, considering I’ll also have to pay the monthly subscription. Even if I don’t buy the game, I might pick up my good friend Thuul on the offer to play another 7 days on a new EA account at some point. I’m still a bit embarrassed I totally forgot to ask him before or during this weekend trial, seeing how I told him in January I might get the game at some point to play with him for a bit. Sorry Thuul!

Heimweh, Lost Worlds, and First Game Experience

2012-03-04General Game-related BlatheringCataclysm, Everquest, Heimweh, Sayonara Norrath, World of Warcraftflosch

Yes, it’s “learn German words” week in the MMO blogosphere, it seems. At least I’ll just claim that, since Syl started earlier this week with (re-)introducing “Vorfreude” after coming back from a move-induced break (Hi Syl!), and I’m going to continue.

So let’s get the terminology straight first: What is Heimweh? As with Vorfreude, it’s a term that seemingly has an English translation, but one that falls short of the meaning the German term encompasses. The most straightforward translation is “homesickness”, and it certainly also applies to kids going on a summer camp for the first time in their life. But it’s certainly more. It is an intense, inconsolable longing (or “Sensucht”, another hard-to-translate term; C.S. Lewis tried and failed, so I’ll not even try) for a place, but that place doesn’t necessarily have to exist any more. In fact, the most poignant form of Heimweh is “Sehnsucht for a place that never was”. In this respect, it is more related to nostalgia than homesickness. I will stick with Heimweh for this post, though, because it means feelings bound to a place, even if it is unreachable, rather than feelings bound to a time.

Why do I want to talk about this? I’m a quite reactive blogger. Sometimes, I come up with my own ideas from scratch, but most of the time I write because I read about something, and then can’t get stop thinking about it until I write down my thoughts. This time, the trigger was Wilhelm starting to post WoW movies, and a link to an Everquest nostalgia video. When I looked at the EQ video, the Heimweh feeling that was being evoked was obvious to me. Despite the blurry pictures, despite the clipped and sometimes distorted music, and despite the fact that I never even played EQ much. I only very rarely pass through the lands of old Norrath as a tourist, so there is not much connection to these places.

Heimweh for virtual places

It occurred to me that Heimweh for computer games at first sounds silly, but if you look at them in the context of virtual worlds, it is quite a natural thing. We “lived” in many of these places like in a second home, for months or even years, so they grew on us. If these memories and feelings are in our head, does it even matter whether the places we long for exist out in the real world, or in a virtual one? It doesn’t, because we do not only long for a place, but also the feelings, experiences, and memories we tie to it. I think Heimweh is an important factor in the problem of “first game experience”, the fact that many of us can’t find a game to live up to what our first game was like. When we remember those times and places, we remember the awe of doing things for the first time, before they became a daily activity. Other games will have a hard time living up to those memories.

So why don’t people just go back when they feel like it? The problem is, they can’t. They can physically (well, physically as in “with their avatar in the virtual world”), but the places have changed. Bustling trade hubs will be deserted, dungeons overwhelming to enter alone without other people around, cities dead except for a few NPCs. In short, they can’t go back to the place as they remember it. There are two typical outcomes: closure, that is, realizing that things have changed and it is time to move on, or idealized nostalgia for the things that were.

But at least you can go back and see whether that gives you closure? Lucky if you can. If the game closed down, that’s out, too. Or if your game company decides to destroy half a continent and rebuild everything from scratch. Hello Cataclysm! At least for me, that’s one of the reasons I disliked that expansion. The world as I know it is gone, and there is no way to go back. I didn’t realize it at that time, but I think I felt disconnected from the world because it had changed, and I hadn’t.

P.S.: For an MMO company, Heimweh also can drive an interesting business model. Anecdotal evidence has it that EQ’s two time-locked progression servers have the highest population of all servers. And for at least 2 years I’ve heard people asking Blizzard for something similar for WoW. Of course, EQ’s progressions servers are anything but a faithful representation of how things were, but it seems the feelings of nostalgia attracted many many people.

P.P.S.: I just realized I started this post about Heimweh with a mention of a move from an old home to a new one. Oops. Hope that’s not a bad omen…

How to Preserve Games as Cultural Assets

2012-02-09General Game-related Blatheringculture, preservation, transienceflosch

Zubon from Kill Ten Rats is getting all existential today:

And, behind the veil, this is our MMO gaming world. You will come and go, and nothing you do will have mattered except to the people who experienced it.

As some people have already pointed out in that post’s comments, you will arrive at this point of transience with everything you do, and with life itself, if you zoom out far enough, save for the minimal amount of people who will be remembered for exactly one thing they did in their life, for better or worse.

In fact, it reminded me of two powerful movie scenes. (Both movies are novel adaptations, but I think neither book contains the quote I’m going for.) The one is the famous replicant monologue from “Blade Runner”:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain.

The other one is the epilogue to Stanley Kubrick’s not-so-famous “Barry Lyndon” (it is a shame it’s not more famous, it is one of the most beautifully shot movies I’ve ever seen):

It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor; they are all equal now.

So yes, in the long run, nothing you ever do in your life will matter. Deal with it.

But let’s not get all fatalistic, shall we?

Games as Cultural Assets

Now that we’ve established that nothing really matters anyway, why are some things perceived as more important than others? Specifically, why is our notion of “culture” so all-encompassing that basically everything that somebody perceives as culture is culture, but only a small subset is widely accepted as culturally significant enough to be preserved for posterity?

There is of course age. Things can be culturally significant just because they’re old enough that they’re the only surviving cultural expression of their type left from that age. That is why Beowulf or the Merseburg Incantations are part of our cultural canon. Computer games will have to wait for a long time until they’ll be eligible under this rule, except for Pong, maybe.

There is the sheer amount of collective expressive and engineering work funneled into a singular, awe-inspiring creation. We still admire the great (gothic and otherwise) cathedrals, or large palaces, that sometimes took decades to build. Of course, age helps here too, but even in our time, there are great works created that are almost immediately considered symbols of our contemporary culture.

Games have become more and more like the cathedrals and palaces of old. They started as modest huts that a single programmer scraped together from wood and mud, and are growing in scope year after year. A game like SW:TOR probably cost as much as a lavish earl’s palace in its time – maybe not quite Windsor Castle, but still. And Everquest has been constantly extended and refurbished for more than a decade now. Who knows, maybe in our lifetimes, we’ll see a game cathedral erected or two.

Finally, of course, significance is decided by a bunch of people often derided as uppity, snotty, or smug: the critics. These people get a lot of flak, and there sure are bad apples in the bunch, but you have to step back and admit that these people probably do know better than you, just because they spend most of their life looking at culture. They will have the experience to tell you what is just a weak rehash of things that have already been there, they will be able to tell the copycats apart from the real gems; at least in theory, and at least to a certain degree.

Of course, to reach that level of experience, you also need a certain age. I don’t think we’re at a point yet where the leading lights have grown up with the culture of computer games. Many of those people therefore lack experience with this medium – experience that is vital to their work as critics. This insecurity naturally leads to wariness and in some cases even hostility. Look at how long it took comics to become an accepted expression of art, and they’re still not 100% there yet.

So maybe it’s just a question of waiting long enough until computer games get accepted as cultural assets?

Preserving Online Games for Posterity

But this is where it gets complicated. Zubon already pointed it out in his post:

Within your lifetime, the computer environment that ran these games will need to be emulated, because no existing computer will run your MMO without more effort than goes into playing a game off a 5.25″ floppy on your laptop.

Computer games are a kind of interpretative art that is worth nothing without the interpreter. To preserve games, you will need to preserve the original hardware, or, if you’re not quite as purist, create emulators. Preferably emulators that aren’t hardware-dependent themselves, so you could “stack” them to run one in another in another in another, like Matryoshkas, so you don’t fight an uphill battle creating up-to-date emulators over and over again.

It gets even more complicated with online games. How do you preserve an MMO? There are two things that form an MMO, and both are worth archiving, in my opinion.

Preserve server and client software: You need to get your hands on the software to make sure that at any point in time, the game will be accessible by booting the servers, installing the clients, and playing the game. This is actually quite a hard problem. Not only do you now need emulators for both the client and server platforms. Luckily, they might both run the same computer architecture (x86 rules supreme these days), but as soon as you need to emulate a server cluster, because the servers were not designed to run a whole world on a single machine, you’re in a world of trouble. It would be possible, but very cumbersome.

There are projects that try to find out how to properly archive and preserve virtual worlds. I’m sure I read about a funded research project somewhere, but I can’t find the source any more. Maybe I should ask Michael Thomét a.k.a. incobalt, he might know. “Research project” means though that it will probably be years before we have a stable, off-the-shelf solution for archivists.

There is also the problem of intellectual property and patents. While the client side software is readily available, the server side is practically never published by the game company. The best we can do these days typically are emulation servers, like Project 1999 for Everquest and SWGEmu for Star Wars Galaxies. But these come with two problems. First, they’re never 100% the original. Second, they’re on shaky legal terrain. Today, a game company can simply shut down their servers, and if it was hellbent on it, probably still hunt emulation servers and get them taken down.

Preserve the experience: But even if you have a server and clients available, what worth is a virtual world that you are in all by yourself? It’s like preserving an opera house without performing any operas. Ask yourself: what are the things that you remember from the time you played? It bet it isn’t the 10 million rats you killed over the course of 1 million quests. What we remember are those special moments, those attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, that we witnessed – and this is important – with others. You can’t capture these moments by emulating the server and client software, and playing the games years or decades after their death. Many of these moments are special because of their transience: Your guild’s first kill of Nefarian, that epic quest that you finally finished after weeks with help from your friends, the surprise attack in nullsec that annihilated a whole fleet of supercapitals. And even though it was plagued with lag and server overload, many people still speak fondly of the day their server opened the gates to Ahn’Qiraj.

I’m not sure it is technically possible to capture these events, even if you logged the state of the server and who is where and doing what at any given point in time. Just as computer games are interpretative in that they need a computer to run, these settings are interpretative in that they need the view point of those people who remember them to really matter.

In this respect, game videos become more than just a pastime. Those people that created them and uploaded them on youtube obviously considered them important enough to spend some of their free time on editing them to share them with others. I was overjoyed when I found two resources I had long searched for in the last week. The first one was a hard disk I had misplaced that contained some Fraps video I captured when I raided WotLK content with my guild. The second one was a website that contained videos of Curse-Guild raiding Old Naxxramas. I wouldn’t hesitate one second to suggest them as “culturally significant” in the context of WoW videos: they document a raid setting that has long been lost except in the source code repositories of Blizzard, and they do so in quite a good way, documenting both fight tactics (without being “strat vids”) and the overall experience. (We can discuss the choice of music, but at least it’s something else than cheese metal for once.)

In a way, even we bloggers can serve as a resource. Well, I’m not a good example myself, because I don’t have a lot of posts dedicated to a certain game, and my blog is still very young. But bloggers like Wilhelm Arcturus or bhagpuss often focus on their experience in specific games, and often very specific parts of one game (an instanced dungeon, a low-level zone, etc.)

All of these out-of-game resources are immensely important to preserving what a virtual world “was like”. They are similar to a time capsule, documenting all those peripheral bits and pieces that seem insignificant, but may prove invaluable for future historians. There is a reason many archaeologists love digging through kitchen dump. All these out-of-game resources form something akin to a midden for virtual worlds. (And no, I’m not implying either Wilhelm or bhagpuss produce rubbish! I love reading them!)

If we want to document for future generations the cultural significance that virtual worlds had for us, we will need to draw a broad picture. We will need to document why these games were more to us than “kill 10 rats” repeated 1000 times, then “kill the bad guy with 24 random strangers”. Or else all those moments will be lost in time… like tears in the rain.