Michelle D'israeli's blog

Earlier this year, I decided to do something about missing regular queer company, and got myself along to the Brum Bi Group. This turned out to be a lovely bunch of people of all genders, and amongst all the new friends I found that several old ones where regulars, too!

It was at the Brum Bi Group monthly meets that I heard talk of BiCon coming up in the summer. As a long time LGBTQUA+* activist, I’d heard of BiCon, but for various reasons I’d never actually attended one before. Now that I had a car and regular income, though, was this a possibility?

• I checked my calendar – that weekend was free!
• I checked with the girlfriend – she wasn’t going with me, but was happy for me to go!
• I checked with the bank – I could afford it!
• I checked with friends and family – several of them were going! “That settles it, “, I said, “I’m totally going to BiCon 2011!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough leave from work to go for the Thursday and Friday, but cost-wise that about worked out to my benefit (as I couldn’t afford a full pass). So after work on Friday, I spent the night with my girlfriend, then headed up to BiCon for Saturday lunchtime.

My past experience with similar events was strictly limited to Anime conventions, small student day-long events, and the occasional corporate event. Sadly as a science and engineering student, my course load made it hard to attend NUS events.

Even though I was only there for barely two days, every hour was eventful. Rather than try and remember all the details, here’s an unordered list of the highs and lows of BiCon 2011:

• In terms of the grounds, the location was quite nice, and managed to create a relaxed feel
• By arriving at midday on Saturday, there had already been two whole days of BiCon by this point. It felt very much like everyone had already met, so mingling was very hard
• …and on that note, BiCon does suffer very strongly from cliques. As a first-time attendee, it would have been easy to feel lonely. Thankfully I had some family there to support me, but it still felt closed. I suspect this relates to joining on the third day, though
• I fell totally in love with the con badge sticker system. BiCon has for a number of years done a craftwork badge system, wherein you are given the bare minimum of pre-made card and are pointed to a stand to decorate it yourself. This alone is cool, but what really make this work is the sticker system (from BiCon 2010) – the community agrees that certain stickers on a con badge have certain meanings. Unfortunately there tends to be a lot of sticker meanings, so they are hard to remember, but you tend to recall the ones you are most interested in. Very cool, I wish every event had something like it!
• …Sadly by the time I arrived, though, there were only a few stickers remaining. So I had to make do with only a few and a lot of “ask me!” stickers. Still, the system’s so cool, here’s a photo of my badge:
• BiCon started as a conference, but the name grew out of the Scifi convention community. This holds true across the whole of the event. In parts it felt like a student-organised workshop conference, with poor organisation but great workshops and lots of inclusion. At other times, there were some very hard-hitting talks, like an academic conference. All the while, though, there was the party atmosphere one expects from a convention. Definitely took some getting used to!
• Some of the more academic talks were very good, and quite surprising to see come up. Very much approved of the opportunity to attend these
• I heard that some of the workshops sounded good, but were aimed at a less experienced audience than the one that attended. This shows great things about the people who attend BiCon, but perhaps is something to think about
• Some of the workshops I missed, however, sounded positively fascinating. The brainstorming walls from a few of them remained up afterwards, revealing some incredibly deep discussions about Being a bi person. I was tempted to photograph them, but it didn’t feel respectful of their creation within a safe space
• One I felt safe to photograph, however, was one of the clear similarities to a scifi convention. There was at one point a discussion about bisexual fiction, and afterwards their recommendations were posted for everyone to enjoy:
• As the party unfolded on Saturday night, update newsletters about tomorrow where handed out. This was a great idea, and something I wish they had done at Ayacon a few weeks previously
• BiCon was one of the most inclusive spaces I have ever been in. I noticed a number of people with impairments, there were quite a surprising number of out trans people, and generally everyone was able to be themselves
• The party on Saturday night was good, however I missed my normal rock DJ
• …However there was a period on Saturday night that felt like “get hitched hour” – people’s body languages became distinctly about sleeping with people, it seemed
• Although staying with family off-site was cheap, it did prevent getting an early start
• The BiCon closing ceremony felt like a community love-in. This is understandable, since every community needs one, but as a first time attendee I didn’t get anything out of it (other than the location and committee of next year’s BiCon)
• Something that appears to be a yearly meme is accommodation issues. I didn’t meet anyone with anything positive to say about the accommodation this year or in previous years. People are optimistic about next year’s arrangements, however I know people who have stayed in the halls that will be used, and no comment
• BiCon was a very white-dominated event – which thankfully the community is already working to address
• In fact, there was a workshop about BiCon itself, and from the wall of notes, it seems that the event is aware of almost all it’s failings. This is very much a rarity, but the real test will be how they act on these
• Finally got to meet some incredible people I’d known online for a while!

All in all, BiCon was a very mixed event for me. Some of best things about BiCon was less the new, and more the time I spent with my family and old friends. Some of the worst would have probably been addressed by attending for the full duration.

There’s a strongly related unConference called OpenCon. Sadly I wasn’t able to attend this year, so I was very much pleased to find that Ludi had done a rather wonderful write-up of OpenCon. Although this was written about OpenCon, one passage applies to BiCon:

I think it was because many people had very little chance to talk about sexism in their everyday lives

For a significant group of people attending, BiCon is their only chance to be Bi or otherwise queer. I’m guessing most people would have never noticed this, since I’m more sensitive to body langauge, but it certainly created an odd atmosphere at times. It makes me wonder what can be done for these people outside of BiCon. I think events like BiFests and the local Bi groups are an important start, but clearly more needs to be done.

All in all, BiCon 2011 was a very mixed event for me. On the journey home, I was unsure about going to BiCon 2012. But almost two months on, I find myself remembering all the good bits and really wanting to be in such a space again. And as an activist, I know there’s only one way to improve community-ran events – to dive in and do what you can to make them even better!

Next up in my calendar is Brum BiFest, which clearly still needs some work on understanding the gender spectrum. I’m going to get involved with the community and see about improving everything I can. And, with any luck, see you at BiCon 2012!

* Lesbian, Gay, Bi*, Trans*, Queer, Undefined, Asexual and plus all the rest. Bit of a mouthful, but at least it’s now properly inclusive

Following setting WoW up, I’ve now had a chance to play for a few hours, and get an initial impression of what WoW is actually like, and how it compares to my expectations.

Following launching the game, I act like a typical PC gamer and head straight for the graphics options. Pleasingly, there are lots to tweak*, so I the pretties right the way up but turn down shadows. In my opinion, shadows don’t add all that much, and are very computationally expensive, so I prefer to have a longer draw distance and blob shadows. Even at this early stage, however, I am finding issues. The dropdown lists don’t function entirely correctly. I know how hard UI is to code, but this is a poor sign.

I log in, and select a preference for an RP server. irritatingly, the only one available is an RPvP, but it doesn’t warn me of this at all. I only notice this after I have created a character, so I have to drop all the way back out, manually select a server, then redo the character creation work.

Character creation is a staple of the RPG genre. It’s where you create the avatar that will represent you, embody all the awesomeness you want to be. Often, it is your first exposure to the mechanics of the world and the lore. In most roleplay games, this happens before any tutorial or exposition, and WoW is no different.

I get presented with a list of races. Finally there is some hint at the underlying mechanics, but no numbers to back it up, or any explanation as to what it all means. As all the details (such as “increased spirit”) are in the same text field as lore flavour text, I can’t just select them to get more information on what this will actually mean. However, I’ve played enough RPGs and read enough fantasy novels, and WoW feels fairly generic from all the descriptions. As a rule, Humans are a balanced race with few downsides, and as WoW seems no different, I go with that. Similarly for classes, it is unclear as to what they all mean. To be fair, most MMORPGs fall into this same trap, giving vague descriptions intermingled with strange words like “tank”, “dps” and “aggro”. Guild Wars might give cool descriptions, but they are similarly vague. There are some class archetypes that are staples for the genre, and tend to nicely define certain types of play:

• Warrior/fighter: Up-close meleé class that’s all about armour and hitting things with sticks, swords and axes
• Mage/wizard/sorcerer: Long-range magic casting and being made of wet tissue paper
• Cleric/healer: healing people
• Ranger/archer: distance attacks with a bow, often with an animal companion
• Paladin: Like the warrior, but with a little magic, and OCD about smiting evil

WoW seemed to have something to cover all the above, so I decided to try a warrior to see what the meleé game was like. Given it’s all about hitting things, it should be hard to get warriors wrong, but the industry has shown time and time again that it can. In table-top land, it wasn’t until 4th edition D&D that playing a fighter became as fun as playing some of the other classes. Ultima Online warriors generally needed a bit of magic to smooth the edges of the world, and in one expansion added some new casting skills specifically for fighters. Unfortunately I’ve not played a warrior enough in Guild Wars to really comment, but the joy of the Guild Wars skill system should mean that playing a warrior should just feel very up-close-and-personal.

Now that I’ve decided on a Female** Human Warrior, I have to give her a name. They insist on unique names, which is nice, but then they go and prevent spaces in names and restrict the length. If I recall correctly, my actual name isn’t possible due to the apostrophe, which always sucks. Without the use of spaces, and with the need for unique names, I’m forced to use something that sounds elvish. Ultima Online had restrictions on name length, but thanks to its international nature you could have some more interesting characters present. Ultima Online also didn’t require globally unique names, which was nice in some respects, but meant that you had to be careful when talking to people. Guild Wars, on the other hand, does require unique names, and does this by insisting on a surname. ArenaNet/NCsoft cunningly included a nice random name generator, which managed to not suck at finding nice surnames. There’s a distinct theme already emerging here, it seems. WoW tries really hard, but just ends up being a bit pants.

I’d say that I shouldn’t be too hard on WoW, given it’s age, but it’s really not that old. Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron’s Call and countless MUDs all pre-date WoW and had to address many of the same issues. And aside from things like name selection, they could have fixed many of them with time.

So, I now have “Mykaellis”, a female human warrior, and she’s ugly. No, that’s not me roleplaying, that’s the poor graphics of WoW. Don’t get me wrong – I know that they were going for a stylised look, but somewhere they tripped up. The big problem is that the texture detail outstrips the mesh detail, showing up the low poly count in the player mesh. If they had stuck to lower resolution textures, it would have looked better. The appearance options open at this point as just as ugly – a dozen heads, a couple of (bad) faces, and a selection of skin and hair colours. I can also have piercings, which are just an overlay on the texture. I make the best of a bad lot and create my standard female character, whilst thinking about how much better other games have done the same. Ultima Online is a strange example, given the 2-and-a-half D graphics, but what it lacks in dimensions, it makes up for in detail. UO has a large selection of hair styles, and players were able at character creation to dye their starting outfits. Guild Wars similarly gave you heavy customisation of starting gear colours.

Getting character customisation right is no small matter. Character creation isn’t just about making a character, it is also about bonding with your character. You want the player to fall head-over-heals for their character, to care about them deeply. This is one of the things that pulls players back in to play more. There are more advantages, too. For roleplayers, being able to completely design your character’s look is a real boon, as it means that you could have the right character immediately and jump straight into the politics without having to kit up. It also means you can wear your guild’s colours, or have a way of showing that your character has a deep and meaningful history behind them (that’s why they’re wearing black).

So, an acceptable compromise reached during character creation, and I jump into the game! Immediately I am presented with an in-game cinematic, a sweeping reveal across the landscape with voice over, setting the post-catacyslm scene. This is very impressive, and the first real sign of promise so far. It seems that I do get to experience the new, redesigned, post-catacylsm new player experience (NPE) after all! But not before I have a chance to hate everything about the default UI.

Everything about the User Interface is ugly. As I play, it becomes increasingly clear that the mouse buttons only pretend to act in a consistent fashion. Movement is heavily keyboard based, defeating immediately the classic combination of piloting with mouse and commanding skills with keyboard. The standard quest scroll font is just a little too small. In fact, everything is just a little too small. Except for whitespace, which is often over-used. The spellbook is a good example of this – tiny icons and tiny text, separated by a sea of whitespace, then dozens of tabs to make up for the lack of content on any given page. ARGH! They also commit some total faux pas, like at the bottom of tutorial pages having the marker “next [->]“, where only the “[->]” is actually a clickable button. It seems very much like the design team for WoW thought that Fitt’s law was about gyms, and not about making your buttons nice and big and easy to click.

One of the first things I am given a quest for is to go kill some things. This is promising, as it means I am getting straight to the action! Or, as it turns out, I have to manually move myself to the action and make sure I’m facing exactly the right way. This may again sound petty, but this means I can’t focus on my skills, but instead have to manually pilot my character in an awkward fashion (using both mouse and keyboard) to just the right distance and orientation. Both WoW and Guild Wars are twitch games, but WoW focuses on the meaningless aspects (movement and facing), whilst Guild Wars focuses on the player-skill parts. Ultima Online also required that you move yourself into location, however it also allowed you to pilot entirely with the mouse, making it much easier and left your other hand free to fire off skills and spells.

There’s a muted particle animation and small message in my text notification area. Apparently WoW must be attempting to be post-ironic, with the most minimal level-up fanfare I’ve seen. In most roleplay games, levelling up is a big event. In table-top games, your Games Master (GM) would proudly announce that you had leveled up, and suddenly they would have an excited room of gamers, fighting for the books to see what they get. In most classic computer RPGs, there would be a triumphant sound, sparkly lights, and a big message in the middle of the screen, then you could open your character sheet and level up like you did around the table. In Guild Wars, there’s a very noticeable sound and animation, and you gain attribute points***. Ultima Online, err, doesn’t have levels, so we will ignore that for now. Basically, levelling up is supposed to be the big moment in an RPG, and WoW makes it as boring as breathing. Actually, that’s unfair – Breathing’s more exciting, everything about how it works is cool and when it doesn’t you really know it.

The new player experience quests should introduce a player to all the key mechanics required to progress in the game, so I wasn’t surprised to soon find myself on a quest to acquire a skill from a skill trainer. What did surprise me, however, is that they expected me to pay for it. This isn’t me being tight – players of games generally don’t like to lose stuff, so a quest that is basically “lose some money for something you didn’t know you wanted” is a huge “screw you” to the player. The better way would have been to do this over two stages – firstly have the player acquire a free skill from the trainer, then have the trainer give them money to purchase a second skill. Now the player is both comfortable with acquiring skills from a skill trainer, and with paying for them.

That skill I acquired from the trainer was a rather awesome sounding “Charge”, and so I was excited to be asked to go try it out. I approved of this, as it is good design to get players to try out their new abilities immediately after learning them (Infamous on the PS3 does this very well). I head over to the training dummies, and… the skill doesn’t work. I try again, and it doesn’t work. I try a third time, and it still doesn’t work. Huh.

In my last post, I lamented the poor quality of the WoW community. Thankfully since then I was able to find the rather nice WoWpedia and WoWhead, both of which are very well maintained and documented wikis, full of very useful guides and information. So I looked up Charge, it made it clear what I had been missing – that I needed to be far enough away from my targets. Whilst there was a little tiny bit of text on the skill listing it’s range, this should have been made clear in the quest text to begin with.

Charge instantly made things better. The skill would bring me right next to my selected target, fixing the movement issue. It also was the first time I had felt cool and awesome so far in playing. This, however, was let down by the cool-down timers. Most of the UI, you see, is black. Most of the skill icons are dark colours. And the cool-down indicator that visually shows how long until a skill is ready? Yes, that’s right, it’s black. Part of the problem with figuring out the charge skill was also that the only indication of a skill being available was the quickbar button number turning from red to white, a number which is also very, very tiny.

I continued for a while, and found a couple of interesting side quests. Quite what a fire extinguisher was doing in the world was beyond me, but the firefighting sidequest was certainly amusing. However, this also let me find out that the backpack window, whilst looking in every way like a moveable window, was fixed in place on the screen. I also managed to find a bug with the quickbar.

Eventually I found myself on a quest to a neighbouring village, where I then found some Halloween celebrations underway. Given that they are special events, I’m not going to complain about them. But thanks to them, I died and got to experience the death mechanics. WoW has fairly standard death mechanics that feel a little inspired by Ultima Online, only in reverse. I don’t actually have any issue or great love for them, so instead I shall write more about death mechanics in MMOs another time. I returned to the town and camped up in the inn, having found out about WoW’s rest mechanics. I think WoW does get things right there, and that also might have to be the subject of a dedicated cross-game post.

Since I last played, I’ve had a look into replacement UIs. I have a lot of respect for Blizzard for making this moddable, however this should have never meant that the default one has so many flaws. All my investigations have found is that the WoW community is obsessed about raiding, and sadly I wasn’t able to find a nice UI to use at this time.

My adventures in Azeroth shall continue, as there’s still quite a lot more yet to see and comment on. Tonight I’m going to explore my first instanced dungeon, and perhaps encounter craft skills. Later on, I may also try out another class or two, to get a properly balanced picture.

* It’s actually debatable as to if having a large number of options is a good thing or not.
** For some reason, the client defaulted to male. I’m going to pretend that this is randomised, otherwise Blizzard will have a lot to answer for….
*** Until you reach level 20, at which point you don’t really gain any new levels, but instead gain skill points. It’s rather… unique

Well, this is a surprise. After all these years of avoiding it like the plague, I’m giving World of Warcraft (WoW) a try. I’m still a little in shock about it myself, but I keep reassuring myself that I’m doing the right thing, if for dubious reasons:

• Given my claim to know about MMO design, I should really play WoW at some point
• …and on that note, I have in the past debated WoW’s design having not actually played it. Whilst Raph would understand, having credibility is a good thing
• I’ve lost many good friends to WoW in one form or another, so I’d like to confront their drug face-to-face
• Having played Ultima Online (UO) far too much in the past, fallen hopelessly in love for it, and yet hating it like a passion, I doubt any other MMO could come as close to UO’s darkside for getting me addicted
• …and my experimentations with Guild Wars * has shown that I’m mostly immune these days to MMO addiction
• …as have my playing around and running like the plague from Facebook ‘MMOs’, Runescape and Second Life (SL) (the later two of which I may have to write more about another time) – who would have thought it, UO may have cured me of MMOs!
• I happen to have some free time at the moment, a desire to play an RPG, and a yearning for fantasy landscapes. And sadly Ultima IX: Ascension has not magically became not-crap with age
• Most importantly, WoW is now free to play! Huzzah!

Since I claim to be playing WoW for academic purposes and not at all for personal enjoyment (oh no, of course not, whatever would give you that idea? Good heavens!), I’m going to be blogging my thoughts as I play through WoW’s free trial content. As previously mentioned, I think I’ve a pretty good idea about WoW, so I’ll be seeing how it compares to my impression of it, to the other MMOs I have played (UO, SL, Runescape, Guild Wars and various Facebook things), and what I know of product and game design.

WoW is currently trundling along installing itself in the background, but already I’ve noticed a few things:

Firstly, the WoW main website is pretty and has a good overview on what it feels like to play the game, but it is lacking in real figures and in-depth content. As a total geek and life-long roleplayer, I’m comfortable with hearing of “+2 epic kingslayers”, so I felt a little dumbed down to. I suppose this is good for getting more casual players involved, though! After digging around the site for a while, I found that I could no longer see the “Play for free!” link, which was a pain.

Once I had the link back, signing up was gloriously painless. I wish most games had a sign-up this straightforward. Few basic bits of details later, and I’ve downloaded the installer and received a welcome email explaining that I’ll need the details I just entered to log onto the game. There’s also a handy link to the free account limitations, which seemed fairly standard.

The installer itself looks very pretty which, whilst non-standard, helps you feel immediately immersed. I ignore the manual link for now and get the install going, then… wait, were’s the manual link gone?! Without being able to get to the manual in one click, I’m forced to rely on the internet for my new-game-information fix – more on that in a moment. The installer itself is tiny and downloads most game content, and is actually pretty swish. I can launch the game before it’s finished, making it quicker to get playing. As a long-time Steam user, I’m not used to this at all! Thumbs up, Blizzard!

So, the game is busy being schlurped** down the interweb pipes and I set about trying to learn all I can about my new addictionobject-of-academic-study. As previously mentioned, the Blizzard site for WoW is short on game facts, and the beginner’s guide isn’t written for hardcore geeks. To be fair, most other games are exactly like this, too. Ultima Online has always relied heavily on UO Stratics to provide newbies with information. Second Life’s website looks and reads more like a realtor’s site – because they’re more in the business of virtual real estate than games, anyhow. Almost all Facebook games are as incomprehensible as they are boring (which they are). Runescape I recall had a fair amount of beginner information available, probably because of it’s younger audience and the need to get those free players hooked fast. I guess runescape can also cheat because it’s all about the ad revenue anyway***. Guildwars, however, beats everyone. There’s a great big obvious link to the Guild Wars Wiki, which is well-written, complete, and has starter guides.

The fascinating thing about the Guild Wars Wiki is that, despite being officially hosted, it is entirely community maintained. ArenaNet/NCSoft (the publishers of guildwars) really know how to generate a community around a game and keep it active and accessible. Blizzard, on the other hand, suck. Most of the major WoW wikis and blogs are awful things, that read like puff-pieces and are just impossible to understand. They also make the game sound entirely boring, which I’m really hoping it’s not.

The install is still underway, so I’m going to fire up Guild Wars to visit Nicholas the Traveler. So far it looks like WoW is living up to my expectations – all polish with little real substance. Well, we shall have to see….

* I originally accidentally typed “guidwars” here, and got images of an MMO based around Globally Unique IDentifiers. now that’s a MMO for coders! *ponders*
** Yes it is a word, because I say so
** Not actually true, but ads do cover the operating expenses for Jagex.