Racing grief

Can you grief a top-down fully competitive racing game?
Would anyone?

Both are trick questions of course. You can grief (practically) everything and someone always wants to.
But how do you grief this one?

Well, playing the game I thought it was a lot of fun to bump into other cars. But the thing was that at one point my car would be disabled with a reference to the “pro rules”. So I was wondering why on Earth the designers would instate this rule against bumping into other cars. But of course: Anti-griefing. Turns out that an earlier version of the game had huge problems caused by some players driving in the wrong direction to wreak havoc. As one player puts it:

“The main reason is to prevent backward driving. It was unbelieveably popular in version 0.86. There were times where one couldn’t find a server where there wouldn’t be 1-2 jerks driving backwards and destroying everyone else’s fun. “

These players did not respect the “spirit of the game” but found it more appealing to go against expectations, found pleasure in causing displeasure or whatever.
The present rules, on the other hand, cause great deals of discussion as they also inhibit playing styles that are not actually meant to be grief (newbies, for instance, find it hard not to bump). On the whole, the solution is quite a good example of unelegant grief control (not that I have any alternative suggestion ready).

Half-Life 2 made me not do it

There’s something just not right.

Here’s what effect researcher Craig Anderson writes:

…venting fails. Different terms have been used to describe this idea, but in the United States “venting” refers to things like hitting something or playing a violent video game to get your aggressive tendencies out in a relatively safe and socially approved way. This has been called the “catharsis hypothesis”, an idea that comes from the ancient Greeks, was brought into western civilisation by the writings of Freud, and is now a part of our culture. It is a beautiful idea, but it is not true: catharsis does not work. There was clear proof of this by the late 1960s, and catharsis is one of the most widely tested and discredited notions in all of psychology,
yet it continues to reappear in different guises again and again. An Australian government-sponsored report published in 2000, for example, quotes a socalled “video games expert” saying that some of these violent games might actually provide a catharsis-type effect. It is incorrect.

This seems familiar, it is a conclusion on the “catharsis hypothesis” often heard.
But something’s bugging me. If I were to look inwards and explain why I enjoy playing games one very large component is certainly a catharsis-like feeling. But maybe “the release of tension” is not on target. Maybe it’s more a bracketing of the outside world to engage with a predictable (if complex) system. Either find, gaming to me is really therapeutic (some games at least). And so it is that I’m wondering: If catharsis has been so repeatedly disproved, what label should then be used for that very specific anti-stress feeling of playing a good game…?

Sources of constant amazement

I don’t know, maybe it is just me.
But I am amazed that in 2005, running an online game requires an advanced degree in military cryptoanalysis. OK, so the game itself is not new, but still..
Wanting to play good old Age of Kings (Conquerors) I had to spend a considerable number of hours opening ports on my standard-setup router. If you don’t know what that means, take heart – I had no clue myself until I entered the misty lands of router arcana. “Considerable number of hours” was the main point.

Then, when I get to zone.com where one goes to play this timeless (if hard-to-get-to) masterpiece the system repeatedly fails to accept that I am logged in, the ActiveX applet which lists game rooms fails to load several times, and getting to the AOK sub-site I have to go back to the front page two or three times on every visit because of the obscure redirect system at work.
Mind you, this does not happen once. It happens every time I (and you, probably) go the The Zone. Now, if this had been some freeware hobby-developer creation then by all means I would not have ranted, but this is Microsoft displaying that they cannot get a reasonably simple player matching system to come anywhere near working order.

Ahh, you might be thinking, this is just some anti-MS crusader who’s actually just enraged that his Firefox is not welcome on The Zone. Well, there’s also that of course. But in fact I don’t consider this a particular MS issue. In my unsystematically formed opinion, and feel free to express your own, this year of the Lord, 2005, continously sees the release of games which suck (in the academic sense of the word) in terms of basic usability. Oh no, the gameplay parts often work fine. But the setup screens… The menus… All that which is the subject of basic go-look-it-up user interface design is often embued with a logic directly out of the darkest dreams of H.P. Lovecraft. Often these games will be fun to play, but they’re really, really, really hard to use.
No idea what I’m talking about? Go play Need for Speed Underground online. But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

Another world


OK, I did it. I let myself be logged on to World of Warcraft (EU beta). Just to have a look, purely for research purposes, and with no intention of staying. Taking the form of a purple-haired female gnome I went for a bit of sight-seeing. There’s no denying that this world looks extremely stylish and it all feels awfully atmospheric (in a comic book kind of way). Whether or not it’s actually fun to play (casually) remains to be seen. But I think I’ll continue the wolf-slaying a bit once the actual game opens (late feb). See you there.