noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

WAR is truly everwhere. At home Xstine and I are havin' a blast playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and almost every itch we had from leaving WoW has been epicly scratched. And boy were we itchy because the end-game in WoW left some unhappy scabs.

Outside of our world of epic vritual battles, one has already been fought an lost on Wall Street. Some friends have asked for my perspective on the bail-out mess, and I want to use a WAR analogy. In WAR lore, the evolution and advancement of warriors comes from the endless combat between the legions of Order and the minions of Chaos. A great story and its great heroes can only be made with this precarious balance. Too much one way is complacency, too much the other way is anarchy.

You may think it's far-fetched to compare a fantasy video game to financial crisis in this way, but there's one thing to consider. In Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel he recounts his finding that over the historic rise of civilizations, what built the greatest ones was a combination of geography and natural resources that promoted an optimal state of controlled competition. To have less was complacency, to have more was anarchy. Sound familiar?

Now look at the bail-outs. Chaos has lost, if you believe the anti-free-market crowd. Order has failed if you know better than to believe the Fed. The problem was that Order assisted Chaos, and vice versa. No one knew their roles. The Fed answers to the market now. The market believed the Fed would save them.

What I'm trying to say is that a healthy distrust between the private and the public was lost, Freddie and Fannie being prime examples. What we face now is an extreme reaction as the Fed and Paulson nationalize the market. Chaos has learned that losing the battle means being saved by Order. Where's the impetus to fight?

Now, I give the Fed credit for not bailing out Lehman brothers, as they knew the books were probably so toxic nothing could be done. And F&F? Ok, sure, they were a GSE, blah blah. But bailing out AIG? An insurer? Forcing BoA to take on Merrill Lynch? And now hints at extending help to foreign banks? Unlimited Sec. of Treasury power? For those who think cash is safe, I'll point out that the (maybe) $45 billion left in FDIC divided by the $100,000 insured per account is not a happy number. Plus each of these banks going under have tons of employees; Lehman alone has 26,000+. NY is depressing. I can't even make a conhesive paragraph out of all of it.

And somehow Bernanke is in the back saying a recession is imminent if there is no bail-out. Hello, the recession has arrived, but the punishment for misdeeds has not. Will not? Well that depends on how many tax-payers realize it's angry mob time.

Love PC games but hate the mouse+keyboard setup? Want to just kick back with an ergonomic controller in your hand, feet up on your desk? Ever wonder what it'd be like to hook the wiimote up to your computer? Well, wonder no more, Pinnacle Game Profiler let's you do just that and more!

<takes off infomercial hat>

After wearing out the cartilage in my index finger with that brutal combination of WOW and animating in Maya, I started looking for better mice, touch-pens, trackballs, anything that could let me continue gaming on the PC without jeopardizing my hand health. I've tried them all. I finally decided to try using a gamepad for my PC, and after trying several programs, I've found my calling in PGP's excellent and dirt cheap solution. So far, I've connected wireless XBox 360 and PS2 controllers to it flawlessly, and it even supports the wiimote. My co-workers were impressed.

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I haven't time to comment much on the economy recently, thanks to Super Smash Bros. Brawl and... oh who am I kidding... I didn't even do a portfolio postmortem for last year. We are clearly in a recession right now, something I predicted in 2005 after much research, and my wishes go out to everyone in the American workforce... except those in the game industry! We don't need it! We are recession-proof! Hah!

Well, predicted sounds arrogant... I didn't predict a recession, I just tried to point out the mountain of evidence that it would happen. It's no surprise to me that games are recession-proof, though. Entertainment in general follows different fundamentals than other industries. Games often get compared to film, but there are two key differences that have made us an industry that has begun to intimidate Hollywood in size.

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Yes! We FINALLY got our hands on a Wii. Xstine had been calling every EBgames and Gamestop every week for the past godknowshowlong when she had nearly given up on it, and handed the torch to me. Calling the service centers for Best Buy, Circuit City, and Fry's, I had them scour the whole of the bay area for any remote shard of salvation. It was futile. I typed "Wii tracker" on a whim, letting Google do my searching. Wal*Mart was the only online vendor with available Wii's and even then, there were only their 7-game mega-bundles.

I decided to call Wal*Mart anyways, even though I had foresworn never to shop their again after buying three shattered Kingdom Hearts in a row from one. A teenager so greasy you could sense it through the phone static answers me.

"'Scuse me, just wanted to know if y'all have any Nintendo Wii consoles." You can tell how jaded I was.

"Yeah, just got a shipment in, they're selling fast."

I screamed at him to hold one for me. I damned his ancestors when he said he couldn't. I tore downstairs into my car, crushed the pedal, nearly side-swiped eight old ladies and a dozen squirrels as I barreled down the freeway. I glared at each car I passed, wary of their intentions on my Wii. MY WII.

Fifteen minutes later, I was on the other side of San Jose. I forgot to wear a belt, but I charged into the store anyways, holding up my pants. Hoochimamas cocked their eyebrows at me. Had they never seen a geek in the wild? Breathless at the software counter, I yelped for a Wii, but the lady there seemed to already know what I wanted. In a cute latina accent, she told me there had been ten in the shipment, and now I was staring at two remaining.

"Do you want any games, sir?"

"I have to pull myself together first. There's time for games later."

As I stood jubliantly at the check-out, like Robert E. Lee at Manassus #2, like Alexander the Great looming over the frayed ends of the Gordian Knot, like Sir Galahad preparing to spank the virgins, a phone rang.

"Hello, Wal*Mart electronics department. Sorry sir, there's only one left. No, we can't hold it for you."

I nearly shouted out "SUCKER!" but I was already dashing out the door. Long story longer, it's all hooked up, and in fact I'm looking at my blog right now on my telly, amazed at how fantastic Opera Wii is. And last nite, Xstine and I watched Robot Chicken on Youtube, on our couch! Brilliant! The packaging, the interface, the feel of the console, it's all so planned, so... Nintendo. Critics of materialism wouldn't get it. There is something very immaterial about the Wii. It's like owning a physical brick made out of accessibility. For the nerdcore in me, it also represents bloodlust and victory, something hitting 70 in WoW hasn't even given me. I'll post more, after I take my medication...

Last nite, hungering for a challenge, we grabbed a guildie cleric and three-manned Tempest's Spine, one of DDO's raid instances. I finally just couldn't take another run hearing people bark out desperate orders that inevitably led to group wipes as they cowered behind their shields and took the most weak-kneed route to a demi-victory.

And we did it! Albeit with a couple mishaps, as none of us knew Tempest's Spine that well. I think despite the lack of content, what DDO has done to keep us as players is the relative de-emphasis on gear, unlike MMORPGs of other ilk. To design games around gear checks is unfair, and insulting to all but the most hardcore players. People should be rewarded for taking risks, not for sinking massive amounts of playtime into epic raids repeated ad infinitum.

Guild Wars had headed this route, and it did seem to reward skill over play-time, but not to the extent that DDO does. It offered an increasing options base to choose from, but sadly some gear advancement is necessary to keep players interested. On the other side of the spectrum is World of Warcraft, which offered a tremendous diversity of content and perfect treadmill of gear advancement, but that left working folks like us frustrated at losing to people with sickening gear and the patience to wait for all their timers to reset.

It was Russian Roulette, with some folks having way more chambers. But hey, with 13 Tzameti looking so good, maybe that's just some folks' prerogative style.

Nerd par excellence Sirlin, the man who can never stop telling us about the life lessons he learned form being a pro Street Fighter 2 player, and the creator of a site about game design, always gets on my nerves. But usually, he's got a seed of truth sequestered in his geekspeak, and this rant about WoW is, for the most part, summary of why we quit.

Let's not talk about the lowest depths of hell each soul logs in to delight in on the PvP servers, the torture and abject disregard for life and decency of the weaker player. Honor system... what a fuckin' euphemism for wholesale slaughter. Let's talk about why it exists. It exists because Blizzard has set an example for arbitrary rules. This is ok, this is not, that is not, that is ok. Sirlin is exactly right in that their abuse of their own ToS has left a culture that respects no boundaries, except those profitted from and still under the radar.

In a sense, this form of control has yielded Blizzard a co-conspiring consumer, complacently paying away and assuming fault when their flawful system offers yet another exploit. Xstine and I dealt with this since beta, and we learned that there is no which way about it. It's completely at Blizzard's behest.


Which brings me to this picture. And ones like it.

Having lately read Dogs and Demons, I felt that, despite the book's failings, it is essentially correct. The Japanese society too is held in a thrall of social control so cleverly surreptitious that it permeates every level of the ladder. When asked at a job interview what he would do to improve the company, one applicant responded immediately by saying "Goodday" and being polite to all.

Like World of Warcraft, arbitrary rules have become culture. The Tea Ceremony, once a simple and spontaneously hallowed ceremony, was turned into a veritable manufacturing process post-WWII. And taking the way it is today as "tradition," no one is able to deviate from a cultural paint-by-numbers given to the people by the state. Same goes for flower arrangement, today an ugly cyborg completely devoid of the awe of nature it once had.

And just like WoW, there is a need for an outlet. When I looked around Gadgetzan, I saw Nanking. In Japan, where everyday every hour every moment you are stapling your life and hopes to your work or your study, tossing away personal achievement in their world of kamikaze sacrifice, your identity warps. In WoW you see unbridled violence, often the dishonorable repeat killing of the same person by the same hunting party to the point where the person logs out, resolving to do the same when he is empowered one day. I was shocked at the things I did in-game, having considered myself a chivalrous gamer. In Japan, violence and perversion is enacted in hentai, love motels, the streets of Shinjuku, the noise scene.

It's funny that we embrace Japan in the West as "hardcore." We think of them as extreme, pushing the limits for all cultures. We don't see a school system that abandons all but the highest scoring, condemning unsatisfactory detritus to a shameful future. The "world's most advanced educational system" in which you study more and make less progress? In Japan, talent is defined differently than America: it is the ability to get along with others. The ability to conform. Women in particular are disposable, becoming housewives, eschewing the path their education suggested. We don't see a workforce that has words describing "death by work exhaustion." We see their lone company of creativity, Nintendo, and then ignore the lack of imagination that led to a befuddling collapse in economy.

We've confused their outlet with their strength.

At the entrance to Onyxia, my first raid, I realized what stupidity it was to have waited for two hours for forty idiots to assemble and be wiped within an hour. I realized that moment that WoW was headed in a direction that would never recognize the feats of one person outside its unspoken rulesets. I realized that if my raid had survived, I wouldn't have been any more satisfied, as Blizzard would continue to heap more hitpoints on more lowpoly models for bigger and bigger player mobocracies to attempt an extraction of fame. I realized that anime's lure was addictively drawn glistening eyes and intricate robots, and permutations thereof, which after a certain volume, began to insult my intelligence. I have not yet regretted leaving Azeroth, for it lies in the hands of confused, fate-wrought masses, much like Japan.