Defiance: The social failure of Trion Worlds and Syfy’s MMO

Link, via YouTube.

The Social Impact of Player-Driven Dynamic Events in Firefall, Thumping

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

Google Glass: The strange things we’ll see, and do…

…of course, not all of it will be good. So I wrote a bit over at SiliconANGLE about how Google Glass could go wrong. Expect commentary that runs the gamut from where privacy might go out the window, how “Girls Around Me” could be made worse, and what might happen if someone hacks your Glass and spies on you that way.

Of course, that’s not the end of it. Getting Google Glass hacked may mean getting spied on or have personal information pilfered; but it could also mean malware would have a much more prominent place to throw advertisements. Right out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer where two sentences describe a man who had bionic eyes hijacked by hackers (or malware) that now forever would display a scrolling advertising across the lower 1/3rd of his vision.

via SiliconANGLE

Google Glass, the Free Market and the Future of Privacy with Mark Hopkins

Near the 7:00 minute mark, Mark Hopkins talks about the future impact of ease-of-sharing when it comes to Google Glass. While he already spoke about a potential app that could connect a persons' real life personage with their YouTube comments hovering above (now that would be hilarious) but that would require a lot of sensitivity and a database of facial recognition and possibly even an opt-in by the person in question.

As Mark explains, privacy is always changing and is being modified by our cultural capabilities. Already people have greater amounts of data visualization at our fingertips with just the Internet and smartphones together. Never before have people been able to instantly "win an argument" by pulling out a small interface, looking something up on Wikipedia, and go from there. Add in augmented reality and the "pull out the smartphone" is removed.

With all the speculation flying about how Google Glass will be used (and it's all speculative) we may just get the moral panic portion of the introduction of this technology out of the way even before it reaches mainstream.

Tropes vs Women in Video Games part one: Damsels in Distress

Zelda, Princess Peach, the “Damsel in Distress” trope

In writing, lazy tropes abound—I certainly use them time to time—many reasons for this are that tropes are a very easy to communicate an idea to an audience by generating a sort of symbolism. Anita Sarkeesian of FeministFrequency is beginning to release her Kickstarted project “Tropes vs. Women in Videogames” after her astonishingly successful campaign (her ask was $6,000 but she netted almost $160,000.)

In this video she explores the history of the “Damsel in Distress” trope and how it works. It’s suggested that she’ll be going over the more recent incarnations of this trope in a later video—this is a series after all.

I’m happy to see it coming out so soon! As with many video projects, I expected this one to take a bit longer in editing and preparation. However, getting almost 27 times the original ask can certainly help to speed the process a little bit.

The Ada Initiative vs. Violet Blue Over a Cancelled Talk at BSides

Recently a hew and cry rose up from the hacker community because a noted feminism in technology group, the Ada Initiative, advised the BSides security conference to cancel a talk by noted sex-educator, hacker, and feminist Violet Blue. There has been a great deal of back and forth on the subject of the cancellation that amounts to a great deal of she-said-she-said and clarifications.

The timeline follows pretty much via the accounts of the participants. First, the Ada Initiative spoke to the cancellation claiming that Violet Blue’s talk was off topic and thus should not have been done. In response, Blue posted her own experience when the BSides organizer cancelled her talk after receiving a complaint from the Ada Initiative. The Ada Initiative quickly developed a clarification of its involvement in the cancellation. Finally, the BSides SF organizer “verbal” published his own experience that led to him choosing to cancel Blue’s talk.

TLDR background; Violet Blue was going to give a talk about sex and drugs at a hacker conference, the Ada Initiative complained to the organizer, after some discussion between Blue and the organizer the talk was cancelled.

The end result of opposed viewpoints and hacker conference culture

The opposition in philosophy between the Ada Initiative and Violet blue can be summed up succinctly, but may be best to compare them side-by-side.

The Ada Initiative’s coda statement is thus (emphasis theirs),

Discussing sex creates a “sexualized environment” which many people take as a signal to treat women as sexual objects rather than as fellow conference attendees, resulting in a higher incidence of harassment and assault of women. Too many women have been raped at technical conferences; we should do everything we can to prevent future rapes.

Sex in many societies is strongly tied to the objectification and humiliation of women. Many people are unable to separate “talking about sex” and “saying derogatory things about women,” and take the introduction of one for permission to do the other. While many pro-woman, sex-positive people and communities exist, most technical conferences are not safe spaces for discussion of sex.

Simply put, even the world’s most pro-woman, sex-positive, pro-consent talk about sex is likely to have negative effects on women at a technical conference.

And Violet Blue’s thesis is thus,

I fear that hacker culture risks becoming disconnected from high-risk or controversial information sharing. I fear that hacker culture risks losing the fight to prove wrong the harmful idea that information equals advocacy. I fear that hacker culture risks harm to itself when people are allowed to label things as wrong or bad but not be held accountable to also explain why.

What appears to be going on is two different methods of applying feminist theory to conference culture. The argument by the Ada Initiative is that any discussion of issues involved with an at-risk group (i.e. women) at technology conferences endangers women further and therefore cultural discussions of this sort should not happen. Violet Blue’s argument conveys that by not discussing a thing not only does it not cause the problem to go away, it obfuscates negative effects and sweeps them out of sight therefore promoting isolation and ignorance instead of attention to the problem.

It is obvious that the Ada Initiative is in the wrong here and walks right into Violet Blue’s rebuttal.

Advocating shutting down discussion of hacker culture at a hacker conference will tend to do exactly what Blue suggests it will: further alienate members from the ability to discuss things that directly affect hackers in relation to taboo subjects.

By calling for Blue’s talk at BSides to be shut down the Ada Initiative demonstrates a misunderstanding of the very culture they’re trying to mingle with. Perhaps this might make sense for tech-only conferences that focus on hardware, technology, and the principals of that technology through the context of corporations and brands; but this sort of suppression doesn’t function for conferences that are frequented by hackers and developers.

In the clarification on the Ada Initiative’s involvement in getting the talk cancelled, the group makes pains to point out that it does not oppose harm reduction talks or talks about sex--instead that off-topic talks involving sexuality are dangerous to women at these conferences. The crux of arguing that the Ada Initiative is doing the opposite of their stated mission is that they are incorrect about the “off topic” nature of the talk itself for the given audience.

Hacker security conferences are about code and people as much as they are about technology.

Code, politics, and social culture mix tightly between hackers as they’re a community who depend heavily on one another for contacts, highly complex interrelations build between hackers that quickly become inseparable from who they know and how they code.

To claim that talking about hacker culture at a hacker conference is off topic is representative of an outsiders misunderstanding of hackers in general and what directly affects them as people. A number of talks at security conferences do involve how people act directly as well as how to speak to the press, how to engage with one another about discovered vulnerabilities, and sometimes how to interact with police and other authorities. It seems that a talk about how hacker conference culture interacts with itself.

It’s time to talk about the necessity of feminist talks at conferences

As a culture, hackers are already an at-risk population and women are a minority. The treatment of women in hacker culture is extremely poor right now, but that fortunately doesn’t chase them away. In fact, there are numerous notable hackers who are women and even historical figures who led to modern computer science (Ada Lovelace, the namesake of the Ada Initiative among them.)

Hackers are people and technology integrates as much with gender, romance, sexuality, and even death as it does with the advancement of careers or the production of new code.

A security conference is exactly the place where the topic of how we remain secure ourselves when seeking sex or love (especially amidst our own culture.) Noting that many hackers are also engage in risky behaviors outside of coding that involve parties, overwork, and drug use alongside all the other usual human needs and necessity.

Suppressing this sort of talk for this audience does that audience a terrible disservice that strips from them the ability to express or define how they should behave as a culture with respect to their very nature as humans. It denies both women and men a chance to speak about their experience with that culture in how they interrelate and keeps these taboo subjects swept under the rug and hidden from view.

Farewell, City of Heroes

It was a rough weekend for many. Friday, November 30 of 2012, City of Heroes was finally shut down by NCSoft. Here, I’ll just leave a set of links to the news generated and some of the videos involved.

No doubt, I’ll be writing some formal articles on this matter for various outfits; but right now, the death of one of my favorite MMOs is just too close.

End of a Gaming Era – spyral of DestinyInk.com wrote a solemn blog post about the end of City of Heroes and her experience watching the servers shut down for the last time.

City of Heroes: The Final Hour on MMO Anthropology YouTube -Released the raw footage from the live stream of the end of the event. All footage takes place during the final 5 hours of City of Heroes on the Champion server.

A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Remembering my time in City of Heroes on Massively – “Even now, after having played the game consistently for several years, I'm still amazed at the number of different things players can do at any given juncture. There's just so much stuff, things to explore and stories to experience, something that comes only from years of development devoted to player choice and ease of play.”

Other videos have been made about the end of the era, and how it will affect so many in its wake: Sundown for City of Heroes and a Fan Petition to Keep it from Setting.

LOST CONNECTION TO MAPSERVER.

For the final time.

Like the Desert Misses the Rain

I miss the rain.

That misting sluice of sudden downpour that thunders down mountainsides, rattles against windows, and shakes the bridle of leaves wreathing the tree outside.

Lots of work to do today. See you in the virtual world people.

Silent CSI: NY Episode Filled With Annoying Tropes, Poor Direction

Warning: contains spoilers, criticism

When I think of a groundbreaking episode of a popular show that used silence as a means to convey meaning I think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the episode entitled Hush. The silent episode of CSI: NY aired Monday, October 22 2012 entitled Unspoken is trivial and obnoxious by comparison—although the music contained in the episode, played by Green Day, is quite good, the episode itself is contrived and terrible.

First, the inexplicable silence of the characters is barely explained as they go throughout their daily lives and jobs not conversing with one another, especially in situations where they would speak. There’s a certain amount of background vocalizations, but nothing from any of the main actors in any given scene. As a result, the scenes are punctuated by Green Day music and sometimes odd sounds that instead convey meaning.

The lack of communication lacks context, as a result it feels senseless and without a frame of reference. This fact makes the episode feel gimmicky and soulless—as a result, in order to heighten the emotional reaction to these wordless exchanges, the writers introduced gut-wrenching situations that tug at the heartstrings instead of telling a story.

In other episodes, the procedural aspect of the narrative led the day and that required a lot of communication between actors in order to build the mystery and boil the onion’s layers.

The most galling trope used in this episode in order to heighten emotional impact while giving up substance happened to be the shooting of a little girl near the beginning by her playmate. A totally unnecessary addition to the story that distracted from the main story instead of building on it—in fact, it felt so tacked on that it bent credibility and beggared disbelief that the writers felt like this was a good time to use this particular plot device.

The music did feel somewhat poignant to the conversationless scenes that it was inserted into; but instead of making the show feel like it was a silent story, it began to feel like a succession of montages. In a normal show, music would get played when evidence was being processed. The beginning has both the crime, the events thereof, and some of the procedure.

Then there’s the voiced second half as the story begins to wrap up. Instead of stitching the story together, it feels out of place—a strange juxtaposition built out of an island of words amidst an ocean of silence. It demonstrates the previously mentioned need for conversation in order to play out the procedural portion of the show and makes the quiet parts all the more aberrant.

The existence of the voiced section made the beginning forgettable—it gets referenced through the voiced section but it just makes the silence segment feel altogether less relevant. Almost like a dream before waking and the rest of the story, told with sound and voices, dominates.

The “hurt child” trope becomes even more obnoxious at the end when the shooter, who dropped the gun that was picked up, is confronted with the death of the child in the accidental shooting. Not only did it feel like cheap emotional manipulation initially, the full-circle back to the beginning made the entire episode feel like it had failed to use the silence to do anything other than highlight the vacancy of the investigative and procedural aspects.

Try again CSI: NY we’ve seen this done better both by Buffy and by you.

Playing World of Warcraft May Be Good for Your Resume

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

Painkiller Already #110 Ended After WoodysGamertag was Banned by Google

The now-weekly broadcast of Painkiller Already, shortened to PKA, was ended prematurely when WoodysGamertag was blocked from Google Hangouts. It is through their interface that this livestreamed broadcast is brought to YouTube viewers.

The PKA broadcast is a well known gathering of YouTube Call of Duty commentators and friends who gather to speak their minds on Thursday evenings and has become a central nexus of thought for that corner of the YouTube community.

Host WingsOfRedemption from YouTube was quick to put up a video explaining why the video was suddenly cut off, including a comment that Woody had received a message noting that it had been done due to “Reason Code 39.”

To this moment, the actual meaning of “Reason Code 39” is unknown.

Speculation mounts that it is potentially Code 3.9 which means that it’s a subsection of the Google Policies & Principles document outlining no use of hate speech:

3. Hate Speech

Do not distribute content that promotes hatred or violence towards groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity.

Although it does seem somewhat premature or strange that this has happened to PKA. The speech and conversation ran into places considered offensive to some; but none of it crossed into hate speech territory. The discussion certainly angled through racism as well as transgender topics (and not artfully handled)—but not in any sense not previously covered on previous PKA broadcasts. The PKA hosts are well known for a vulgar attitude; but nothing that has ever exceeded even the feverish expectation of “hate speech.”

Google themselves do not speak to how they determine when a Hangout has infracted their policies & principles guidelines document.

Someone could have flagged the Hangout or a bot “listening” to the broadcast could have procedurally decided to terminate the broadcast and throw the error.

The strike occurred during a story told by another host retelling a story involving a transgender prostitute in Japan that included “colorful” terms (read: actually offensive epithets related to transgendered individuals) and a trigger-worthy narrative that included violence against a transgendered individual. The violence itself was not the point of the story nor was it central to the post discussion.

We may never know as YouTube and Google are not known for good customer service in this department.

There is already a question up for Google (potentially staff) asking what “Reason Code 39” is and ideas are being posted tonight. Although we may not know until WoodysGamertag posts on his YouTube channel to explain.

UPDATE: From WoodysGamertag,

EVE Online’s “Vile Rat” aka Sean Smith Killed in Libya; Memorialized in Game

It’s been a rough few weeks with Muslims rioting in fury and anger over the release of the “Innocence of Muslims” video trailer from a would-be-unknown dumbass—of course, the protest in Libya was hijacked by violent militants who used it as an excuse to assault the embassy. Four US citizens were killed; amid them Sean Smith, aka Vile Rat.

In the coming weeks, he has been memorialized in text and video.

The death of this amazing individual was unnecessary, and even the Libyan people have shown an understanding of that with the production of “The Sorry Project.” As they’ve stood up against the villains who caused the death of these people. That’s how the culture of the country where this happened have reacted to the event.

Gamers have seen a different way to mourn the passing of their favorite in game diplomat.

They have done tributes in videos, even CCP Games and Something Awful have posted articles remembering Vile Rat’s contribution to their community.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

Interview with William McCormick from Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online has come a long way from when it became free-to-play all the way to Season 6. There have been people with the game since it came into being as a pay-to-play game.

Here, MMO Anthropology interviews William McCormick who is with a reasonably sized fleet in the game who has been doing a video series about fleets and the new content. Fleets are the essential part of Star Trek Online social structure, they are essentially guilds, and recently STO added “fleet starbases” which act as a sort of player housing applied to the in game guilds.

Link, via YouTube and MMO Anthropology.

RaiderZ is actually a fairly good game

It’ll be my review this week, the closed beta test has been ongoing and I got in as soon as it splashed down.

Needless to say, it’s pretty well built, and fun; although I can see the enchantment wearing thin very soon.

That is all.

Around Rage: The Bigger They Are…

At least at near the beginning of the game they were kind enough to give me a ride… I must admit, though, I do not like driving games and I dislike racing. Fortunately, Rage allowed me to escape most of the racing and driving for greener pastures (such as blowing people’s heads off.)

Still, the segment there was felt a little too frustrating for me. The controls are awkward and racing itself is annoying.

The good doctor is nicer than he looks.

 

At first, I thought this guy was huge—he seems to be wearing a refrigerator on his back. It took me quite a few sniper rife rounds to eventually take him out…

But then… Well--

 

I met this notable fellow.

He was kind enough to telegraph where the bits of that parking garage would land when he threw them; but it didn’t mean he was a pushover. I wasted lots and lots of missile launcher ammo on him, his shiny chest, and his shiny head.

MMO Anthropology Interviews Magicman Editor-in-Chief of MMOBomb.com

Magicman (Michael Byrne) editor-in-chief of MMOBomb.com came onto MMO Anthropology to speak about his experience with MMO gaming. The meeting took place in Aion Online and brought up topics such as having friends in game, the free-to-play model, and how people interact through MMO game worlds.

Link, via YouTube via MMO Anthroplogy.

The Critical Path Project and the importance of games

As an anthropologist—and in particular one who studies cyborg culture through video games—the fact that games change the world is something never lost on me. We’re in an advantageous period of development for human communication and culture, that splendid moment when spark meets fuel in the luminiferous aether of social gaming.

We have entire communities that evoke themselves from simple MMO games, where Minecraft can become a cult phenomenon just because of its simplistic form and infinite creativity, and where Call of Duty and other similar online games have minor Internet-celebrities on YouTube pulling in millions of viewers a month.
Gaming is the next-bright horizon that culture will-yet-consume and we’re watching it happen.

http://criticalpathproject.com/

Visit the page, click on a few of the links and, if you’re at all culture minded like I am, perhaps you’ll enjoy some.

Visiting Minecraft: Little House on the Quarry (Part 2/2)

A castle and a beach home—in Minecraft

Let’s see where this takes us, shall we?

via MMO Anthropology.

MMO Anthropology Interviews Nelson Williams Editor-in-Chief of Vox Ex Machina

Friend-of-the-blog MMO Anthropology interviewed Nelson Williams, editor-in-chief of Vox Ex Machina recently and here's the resulting footage. I hope that you forgive the fact that apparently the normal transition zoom is missing from the beginning--but otherwise it seemed to come out rather well.

Link, via YouTube via MMO Anthropology.

Visiting Minecraft: Little House on the Quarry (Part 1/2)

Minecraft, a place to make homes…

Not a bad examination of how Minecraft can be used to build and create – a sort of organic approach to constructing a world.

via MMO Anthropology.