Games and massacres - again

I thought I had dodged this, when nobody had called me all through Monday, after the massacre on Utøya. I did not want to stand there and sound like I defended a mass murderer, by claiming that no, computer games are perfectly innocent, particularly not after glancing through his manifest. Luckily I don't have to go through the manifest step by step with you myself, Nick Ross at ABC went through it for us all.

Oh, by the way, I am not linking to it. Find it yourself. I am not linking to anything any more, that's written by that wannabe. Actually, from now on I will refer to him as the wannabe or the n00b, because he is a wannabe that doesn't get what it means to be a hero, and a total n00b when it comes to stringent, rational, critical, political thought. I don't even want to hate him. He wants hate. The only thing I want to feel for him is contempt, and I want to drown him in ridicule. Like this.

Anyway, the wannabe was a gamer, and he did great in PvE. He writes about how he uses games to strengthen himself when he is in doubt. This has lead to the inevitable conclusion: Computer games made him a monster. Dagens Næringsliv, otherwise a pretty sober newspaper, neglects the caveat, but at least they are honest enough to tuck it in at the end:

Hun presiserer at dataspill ikke nødvendigvis skaper mordere, men legger til at mennesker med personlighetsforstyrrelser kan være svært mottagelige for slike inntrykk.

Their expert points out that games don't create murderers, but that people with personality defects can be vulnerable to that kind of impressions.

The world is full of impressions a man like the wannabe can be vulnerable to. He quotes them happily, and spends a lot of time for instance on religion. He thinks of himself as a Christian, and struggles with the sin it is to use prostitutes before he plans to go on a killing spree. He decides however that, like a holy crusader, he is about to do so much good that minor sins will be forgiven him. Now you'll claim there are crusaders in games, but there are crusaders in history, in poetry, in literature, as Knight Templars and Freemasons, and in a whole lot of graves all over Europe and the Middle East. If you want to be a crusader, you don't need to make the effort of leading a raid guild to get your ideas confirmed.

And then there are the political debates. Even now, after the shooting, people manage to write things like "we don't agree with how he did it, but he is right, the multiculturalists are dangerous and are ruining our culture, and should be stopped." Even as he was killing people in Oslo, the website "for promotion of Nordic culture" nordisk.nu (where the wannabe supposedly was a member, and where there are people he emailed his manifest to) had members claiming that somebody needed to clear out the multiculturalists once and for all. The n00b didn't need to play games to feel like his ideas were justified.

OK, back to games, violence and wannabes.

Yes, there is research which states that murderers like the wannabe play games, but also research that shows that there is no causal link. Let me link to an article I have linked to before, The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?. Ferguson writes: "Although much speculation persists regarding the role of violent video games and school shootings, this speculation is seldom based on factual evidence." Ferguson goes on to cite and quote studies specifically of school shooters, where the scenes tend to look like first-person shooter games. I am attaching a long quote here, because I know many will not go on to read the article itself:

The FBI report (1999) had included ‘unusual fascination’ with violent media amongst its potential predictors. As most young males consume considerable amounts of violent media (e.g. Griffiths & Hunt, 1995; Olson et al., 2007), ‘unusual’ consumption necessitates reaching a very high bar. The report also suggests that incessantly reading/viewing a particular book or visual media with violent, or school violence content, may be a predictor. The FBI report appeared to focus on individuals who approved of hateful or destructive messages in the media, rather than merely enjoying the media for entertainment purposes. For instance, an individual who praised Mein Kampf and its message of racism and hatred would arguably be considered more ‘at risk’ than would someone who enjoyed playing the violent video game Medal of Honor because it was fun. Indeed, related to violent video games, the FBI report specifically stated, “The student spends inordinate amounts of time [although inordinate is never defined and is left subjective] playing video games with violent themes and seems more interested in the violent images than the game itself ” [italics added]. Thus, an overall interest in causing harm is potentially predictive of violence, not exposure to violent media in and of itself, a conclusion supported by the recent Savage, (2008) meta-analysis.

This is what the research shows. If you have learned that violence is the solution to problems, then you may show an interest in violence, including games.

Now who are these experts Dagens Næringsliv have contacted? Deborah Schurman-Kauflin is a profiler. Her list of publications is impressive, with a heavy bias on imported violence and female killers. The other expert is Pat Brown, who offers cost-effective profiling if you have a problem with serial killers.

Two American profilers who have not done research explicitly on games and gamers, where the one with the more impressive list of articles tries to point out that there isn't necessarily a causal relationship between games and mass murderers; and Dagens Næringsliv goes out and reduces the entire political agenda behind the wannabe's horrible act to something to do with games.

I didn't want to talk about this, because I felt it would be insulting and misleading to push the debate into yet another "dangerous media" discussion. This goes far beyond computer games.

The truth is that I have no idea what exactly set the wannabe off. Anything could have caused it. Perhaps he dated a girl who went to Utøya and fell in love with somebody else. Perhaps his teen-age friends who were muslims turned him off multiculturalism by being too conservative islamists and displaying the unlucky, but existing, opinion that white women are all asking for it if they get raped. Perhaps his father wasn't there in those formative years when he could have learned that real men protect others, rather than harm them. And so I was hoping not to have to stand there and say "No, games don't lead to violence."

But here it is. Political terrorism is committed in the name of ideas and conviction. Ideas are the most dangerous thing on this planet. Ideas created the wannabe, not games.

And a last, deeply felt statement: If I thought abolishing games would lead to world peace, I'd never play again. If I thought forbidding rock was the way to go, I'd never dance again. If I thought the reason why people hurt each other was because we have television, I'd break it, right now. But it isn't that simple. We had war, violence, crime and fanatic killers - some of them real crusaders - long before we had modern media.

The world falls apart

For those out there who still play WoW, the last few weeks have been some ride, right? With the preparations for Cataclysm, the expansion arriving next week, Azeroth is changing, and I find myself wondering about how much I have relied on the stability of the game world.



This week-end I took my original game character and rode around Durotar and the Barrens, her starting area. It was shocking. Where I had quested as a newbie, where I knew every nook and cranny, every quest and bug, it was all different. A huge rift split the land. The Alliance (ouch, that hurt) has several more strongholds in Southern Barrens, and the orcs have been pushed back into the mountainsides. Stonetalon Mountains is the site of fierce battles between gnome and goblin technology, Ashenvale is being stripped by gnomes and orcs working together, Thousand Needles is almost gone, and Feralas has large human and elf settlements. Azshara is a low-level goblin zone - I remember grinding bloodelves for cloth and gold when saving for my first fast mount - and Tanaris has a lot of new beaches. I find the changes hurt me in a way not too dissimilar from when they built a road right over my favourite mushroom place in Ørsta. It's not like I was hanging out in that spot much except when I looked for mushroom, but I always knew it was there.

Now, it's gone, like the great lift into Thousand Needles.

It's cool though, in a way losing the mushroom patch was not. It has made me drag out the low level characters I haven't bothered level, and re-explore with the sense of risk and adventure I felt way back then, more than five years ago. It's beautiful and different and terrifying, and I feel like a newbie, disoriented and frustrated and happy at the same time. The sensation of something being at stake is back. So far, I love it.

Games and e-learning

Sometimes I just forget that I have done something, and then it pops up and I go "Oh, yeah, right, I did that." It sounds horribly arrogant, as if I don't care, and I don't like this part of myself. You see, I do care about the articles I write and the work I do. It's just that when I have finished something, I put it behind me and move on, and sometimes I put it a bit more behind me than I really planned, you know. And then, more times than not, I go: "Oh, I wrote this as well. Huh, I almost sound smart!"

One such item is the upcoming article in E-learning. Issue 7 is on Game Design Literacy Practices, and my article in it is "Training, Sharing or Cheating? Gamer Strategies to Get a Digital Upper Hand." Heavily inspired by Mia Consalvo, I write about theorycrafting and the use of specialised gamer sites, where gamers go to help each other learn or develop those mad skills they later use to impress each other with ingame.

Moral panic goes horribly wrong

This extremely sad tale from China demonstrates only too well how dangerous extremes are - in either direction. While China already is the source of many of the horrible stories supporting the idea of internet-addiction in North America and Europe (such as the person who died after 20 hours of non-stop gaming), it is now becoming the source of the horror stories about what happens when a nation blames one object only for the cultural changes that are challenging the established order.

Deng Senshan was another victim to fear, lack of knowledge and massive propaganda.

The end of the magic?

I have been playing World of Warcraft for almost five years now, and a lot of my research and writing has come out of that play. I am both fascinated with online games as a medium and cultural artifacts, and an enthusiastic happy player. Or, at least, I was the last until the new patch - 3.3.0. Now I have suddenly lost it.

In order to play WoW well at the high end - intense heroic grinding and raiding - you needed to have friends and connections. To function well as a gamer in World of Warcraft meant to function well as a friend to a large group of people. You had to be reliable, follow a certain set of rules and know your players in order to get good groups and easy "runs". After a while you had a friends list and was in enough such lists that you would be accepted, included and assisted. If you did a mistake, people would forgive, as they'd know it wasn't common, and you could play well and share generously the next time. In short: You invested social capital and it had value.

Now, not so much.

In order to advance now, you need to grind enormous amounts of emblems, and to grind those emblems you either have to have the above mentioned friend group already established, or you need to group with strangers who you will most likely never meet again. (Check Cross Realm Dungeon Finder and User Interface Section: Dungeon Finder.)

Knowing you won't ever meet said strangers again makes people behave oddly. Suddenly old rules are thrown over board and people become greedy and cruel. The new group set up allow things like "vote to kick", which is extensively used to kick people who for instance have low dps. Low dps comes from bad gear, and in order to get good gear you need to do instances. However, if you get kicked from the groups you participate in due to bad gear, you can't get good gear. Further, it allows for rudeness and impatience. Healers and tanks are still hard to find, but you don't need to be polite to your tank or healer any more. Tanks run to rush through the instance as quickly as possible, then get angry with healers who don't keep up. If the tank is slow, the entire group goes ballistic, insisting on higher speed through the instance. It's all about grinding as many badges as quickly as possible. As for conversation: Why talk, why be polite and say hello or goodbye? It's not like we will meet again, after all. And so the "tip of the day" shown on log-in about "being polite in group may get you invited back" is put to shame. There's no way to pre-sort the group for the instance, no way to screen out the ninjas or the flaming idiots, and hence no reason to be nice. The 3.3.0 patch makes niceness a less efficient gaming strategy.

And then we come to looting. At one point the looting options are better. Blizzard has included a "disenchant" option, which lets a person choose "disenchant" if there is an enchanter in the group. This option is equal to "greed", and if three people choose greed while two choose disenchant, it will be a greed roll, and people receive enchanting materials or the object, depending on their preference. But there are still people who pick "need". And they pick "need" on all kind of weird things, most notably trade materials such as frozen orbs. Frozen orbs used to be rare but important, now they are plentyful due to the fact that there are other orbs replacing them in crafting (crusader orbs, for instance), and they can be had at a reasonable price at the AH. Normally people would pick "greed" for that kind of craft objects, but that has suddely changed. Now it's all about "need". And you get a particular type of "need" - people who avoid needing until the roll bar is almost gone, then they hit "need" after all others in the group have chosen the more politically correct and polite "greed".

So, why do people still use the automated cross-server group-finder? Because one of the vital emblems for buying new gear is most easily obtainable through using it. Hence, Blizzard forces the players into very uncomfortable, conflict-fraught situations where they can not utilise their social capital. Although there is one way around that. If you already have a group of good friends, you can make pre-set grinding groups and enter with healer, tank and three dps into the instance-finder system. Then you get to play with your friends.

So, the new instance finder is good for: People with experience and good gear. People with a well-established group of friends. People who don't care about social play, and have no qualms about abandoning a group, kicking a slow player or ninjaing loot. The new, unattached casual player has absolutely no chance at having fun in this system.

Shame on you, Blizzard. But, well, I guess you don't want more new players. Perhaps 11,5 million is enough, really?

I am sick! Really!

I got the flu at perhaps the worst moment for my credibility in years. Wednesday November 12th I gave up, settled on the couch with cough medicines and paper hankies, and spent the day salvaging what I could for the students I would not be able to lecture the day after. At midnight the 13th Wrath of the Lich King was released.

When I logged on Thursday afternoon, I had already been asked several times how the expansion to World of Warcraft, the game I have been playing and writing about for several years, was. I had to respond to all that "I don't know, really, I know I am here with my laptop and the expansion uploaded and account upgraded but I still don't know! I am sick! It's true!" Even guild mates ruthlessly teased me when I finally came online. Nobody would believe my characters were not all level 71.

So, what have I found out in the now 36 hours since then?
My characters are all still below 71, and they have a long way to go. I did however get three of them 1/3 each to 71, so levelling is not going to be such an impossible grind once I no longer have a fever and headache.

I tried out a deathknight, and I was absolutely delighted! I'll blog more about that elsewhere and in Norwegian, here I just want to say that the interface and the storyline felt fresh and different. Already the story potential is grinding away in my head, and my deathknight is getting a life of her own. Yeah, I'll reveal that she's female. No surprise there. I get a kick out of having female characters with tragic backgrounds and not too easy futures. Too much Marion Zimmer Bradley early in my career as a fantasy reader, I guess.

Getting new skills in crafting and new areas in which to use them is a thrill. I haven't tried out inscription though, although I can definitely see the use for it. But getting to practice the skills is not that easy. As everybody else are out gathering, everything but skinning and, oddly, fishing is really hard. It's also tough to get the quests done in starting areas, as I have to fight other players for them, not just the mobs. I am very happy it's a pve server, as the fights are not literal. It's more a question about tagging fast, something a warrior isn't the best character for. By the time my shot goes off, a mage, a priest, a warlock and a hunter have tagged the next four mobs I need for the quest. And with my luck a druid has taken the fifth.

Do I like the expansion? So far I am exstatic. The "feel" of Northrend, where it all happens, is very different from Outland. I haven't been able to explore more than the very basic starting areas, but I have seen two of those. They are very different both from each other and from other areas, even if they are established by respectively the forsaken and the orcs - two well established factions with the Horde. I don't know about the Alliance side, we'll have to look for some of "the others" for reports from the other side... but I have no reason to believe they don't have the same experience. After all, a lot of the quest areas are common for Horde and Alliance.

I have only finished one instance. The other attempt was stopped by a paladin tanking in dps gear. While that can work out if the pally knows how to tank, this was one in gear which had clearly not been found in instances. Despite its epicness it was not made for the very specialised task which tanking is, and we kept wiping for 20 gold worth on my healer character. Which means the tank got to pay more than enough for the wipes, plate is a lot more expensive to repair than mail.

Both Utgard and Nexus are interesting instances. Utgard I did with an extremely experienced tank, so it felt easy. It still held some great upgrades for my dps character. Nexus was where we wiped, so I took a quick dislike to it. Where Utgard felt like the Hellfire Instances, Nexus felt like the Tempest Keep instances. Both instances had more in common with the Outland instances from The Burning Crusade expansion than those had in common with the classic instances.

And that's all so far. I am still not able to focus on playing for too long at the time, so I don't think I'll be raiding in Northrend this weekend, but I will try to use the rested bonus on the characters, and look at the quests. It's a lot more fun than to dwell on my lack of a voice and the fact that I would be mistaken for Rudolf if I went out right now, what with the glowing red and sore nose and all.

Living in Hyboria

I am playing around with a couple of things now. First, I decided to try twitter, and made a profile there. I have to admit I fail to see the intense popular demand for details about what happens RIGHT NOW in my life. OK, I am occasionally an attention whore, but really - one thing is posting a good recipe and some angsty confessions here and there, but a minute-for-minute update on them is a little too far even for me.

What I do think is fun though, is reading about other people's experiences in different types of projects, such as work at or around conferences, a quest to reach a deadline, experiments with food, more general topics which is about something slightly beyond their immediate self. Subjective, but a subjective I can relate to without feeling we should be in a committed relationship.

Hence, I have for the time being decided to devote my twittering not to what happens here (it's same old same old anyway: I get up in the morning, eat, go to work, work, occasionally remember lunch, shop, make dinner, go for a walk or do some pilates, read, play games, call the family, fiddle with pictures on flickr or just on the computer, go to bed, rinse and repeat) but to what happens in Hyboria. So far I have been treated to a solid dose of genderconscious outrage, only tempered by extreme annoyance with the game performance. I am only at level 5 though - I know from WoW that I didn't really start liking it until around level 30. And I didn't understand anything about what was going on until level 50. Yeah, I am a little slow.

Anyway: I have put in a sidebar here, a little widget, that posts my twittering. I am by the way quite happy with the options of Blogger, now that I have finally gotten around to using them. Once over the hurdle of updating and moving my links from the old template to the new, I have become a fan of the options in the new template. I may get a little over enthusiastic for a while, but bear with me.

Understanding Games

Want to understand games, but can't get to the lecture? Well, go play this educational game about games! I have to admit I haven't gone through the whole thing, after a while they wanted me to actually INTERACT and that got too exhausting. But it's a fun idea, and should be interesting for academic gamers.

The game is a thesis developed in Potsdam, Germany, copyright is 2006-2007, so most likely submitted in 2007.

Understanding Games is a diploma thesis project designed and developed by Andreas Zecher at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany. The project was advised by Prof. Boris Müller, Prof. Klaus Dufke and Mattias Ljungström.

The game has been around for a while, and if you want to read more about the responses to it, Cory Doctorow has a pretty good description in Boing Boing.

Researching Age of Conan

Are you a researcher and planning to play Age of Conan? There are a few of us who are planning to look in on that game over the summer. For Norwegians it's almost obligatory, after all. Nobody have made any decisions yet about server, method of organisation or anything else, but it can be a good idea to know some other n00bs when we start playing. Friends are the best buff, after all.

So, if you do game research and plan to play AoC on a European server, feel free to get in touch and I'll see about spreading the word once we have our games.

Tikken, kogg, sisten

I am looking for the English word for a very common game. It's the game where one person is "it" and has to touch another, to pass "it" on. It mostly involves a lot of running around and touching quickly, a competition of speed, endurance and tactics. It's played pretty universally I think, in one form or another, and in Norwegian there are endless words for this depending on local dialects. This means that it's hard for me to get a decent translation. "Sisten", the east-Norwegian word, shows up as "lastly, latest", while the others just don't register.

So, if anybody know what I am talking about, then please, you are IT, and you have to tag me with the right word to give it back and run free.

The Icefalcon

She had another name once, another life, but she never suited the expectations connected with it. She wasn't overly smart or delicate, despite her dainty appearance, but she had qualities which put her up front. She was fiercely protective, unafraid and brave, and would rush into conflict head first. The goal would be to keep hurt from those who were hers, as dangerously fierce a den-mother as her little tribe of humans had ever seen. And so she was made part of the guard and given the title "Icefalcon", named for the small but fierce birds hunting prey twice their size in the clean air of the mountains. Soon she was nothing but The Icefalcon, her childhood name lost in the pride of her position, the passion of her responsibility. She lived with that until she died.

Her death was painful and without honour. She had failed to protect the other guards with her, she failed to obtain the information her tribe needed about the curse, the scourge, she failed even to die cleanly at the blades of her attackers. She crawled, like a beast, into the shadows of a once-proud stronghold. The Icefalcon's last living breath brought the bitter taste of shame and failure to her tongue. Then she died, in the ruins of Lordaeron, alone among rotting debris.



It should have ended there. But even the dignity of death was taken from her. The curse of her enemies had embraced her, and made her one of them. Her broken body got up and walked, carried by a will to life which fed the stubborn passion which had made her The Icefalcon. Dead, she was undead.

In this undeath, she found company. Despair and a common enemy creates strange alliances. Her fear and disgust of the rabid orcs, the sly trolls and even the strange animals, the tauren, was no longer important. The only emotion left in The Icefalcon was her own hatred of the scourge and its source. The demonic energies and the putrid pollution which ruined her land and made her what she now was became the main reason for her unlife. Somewhere in her world an icefalcon soared in clean air over white mountain peaks. She had to protect that. It was the last spark in her decayed heart.



And so she passed through the dark portal of demon energy. A slight warrior, too fragile for her blade, too delicate for her shield, but with a total disrespect of these limitations. She made her way towards the source of her curse. This is where we can find her now, scouring the Outlands, driving for the frontier where the pollution can be stopped, the demons driven out of her life forever. There is no way back for The Icefalcon. Such as her have no space in the world she protects. In every battle she faces her own decay, her own rejection of the course of nature. But The Icefalcon never stops to consider this. For her the only direction is a charge into the face of her enemies, until she wins peace for the memory she protects, or until she is, finally and forever, free to soar.