At left are the games chosen: Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., DOOM, and World of Warcraft. These games beat out others in a finalists' field of 15 video games.
I think the Museum picked a great series of games to start out with. All of these had a significant impact on the industry, and were all game-changers (pardon the pun). However, I really feel like they should have allowed more than 6 for the inaugural session-- if for no other reason than help shore up the displays in the hall a little, and then fall back to six for every year after that. The pulled froma lot of history, especially for an inaugural year. I think that of the other announced finalists-- Angry Birds, FIFA, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, The Oregon Trail, Pokémon, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog and Space Invaders-- will be future inductees to the Hall of Fame.
It's a familiar homily to those looking at a satisfying career: "Do what you love, and work won't seem like work." It sounds all well and good, doesn't it? Imagine, a job that not only give you a paycheck to fill your wallet, but satisfaction to fill your soul. Creative industries abound where workers are not just happy to be there, they are passionate about the work they do, or want to find a place where they feel like they belong.
Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the 300-pound gorilla of MMOs, World of Warcraft, looks to tap into that very feeling, that yearning for a sense of belonging. And in the company's latest recruitment video, they leap right past the Army's "It not just a job, it's an adventure" type of pitch and goes straight into "We a family of people, just like you". Take a look:
In just six minutes, the video has tons of variation on passion, family, fulfillment and even love.he message is hammered home that this is not a job, it’s a new family. One part in particular that caught my ear was a few employees emphasizing that all of the departments in Blizzard, even the purely creative ones, are considered part of the company's success. There is one part of the video that also confused me. One talking head says that the first thing you see when you start a Blizzard game is "... 'Designed by Blizzard'. And it's very true."
Um... I sure hope so. I mean, it seems obvious that a Blizzard game made in-house by Blizzard is designed by Blizzard. This statement seems like it was written by one of the Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As Ian Williams and Austin Walker outline in their anaylasis "Working For the Love of the Game: The Problem With Blizzard's Recruitment Video", peel back a layer and you see it reflects nearly everything wrong with video game companies as employers:
It is telling of the ideological and material conditions of the games industry that the simple act of giving a full group of workers credit on their production seems like an accomplishment. The irony, of course, is that those employees, beaming with pride, aren't themselves named or credited in the recruitment video. But the video makes no mention of the concrete benefits that working at Blizzard provides. There’s no mention of benefits or wages; nothing about crunch time, that specter haunting the industry; nothing about the sort of material, tangible things that make a difference in how one is employed, rather than how one feels during employment. There are perfectly acceptable, subtle ways to talk about these things without veering into the gauche. Employees could talk about their own financial security, or about being able to plan for the future while simultaneously being fulfilled with their work today... But your recruitment will be based in love, not on wages. The mentions come rapid fire, culminating in the grand pronouncement from one employee: Blizzard employees are “just a bunch of geeks,” just like you. This is a window into how the industry as a whole views employment... this is [also] an industry with a layoff rate twice the national rate across all industries and a culture of crunch where 68% of respondents work more than 50 hours a week for months at a time in order to get a product out the door. It’s a bad tradeoff: In exchange for being quiet about wages, hours, benefits and the like, you’ll get to hang out with like-minded people you’ll love to be with. The Blizzard video is the distillation of this pitch in a very blunt form....Blizzard’s video is just one more artifact of a culture that preempts demands for fair remuneration with a prodding reminder that, after all, if you love what you do, then the pay shouldn’t matter. This is the same story told by Twitch executives who say that its streamers “aren’t interested” in being paid. It’s the same story that crops up any time someone wonders if modder labor is exploitative. It’s the same story that is so often leveraged to blur the line between fandom and promotional labor. It’s a story told so well and so often that it doubles in on itself: Exploited fans become exploited modders. Exploited modders become exploited developers.
You might wonder, though, in a pitch that aims to capture a creative's sense of fulfillment, or a fan's love of playing games, what's wrong with focusing so much on passion?
All this talk of passion sets a very real paradigm, limiting the acceptable actions of those in poor labor conditions. Why is the industry so insistent that game development is “more than just a job?” Because if it’s just a job, just a 9 to 5 workday in a cubicle pounding out code or testing content, then the crunch time is something you can object to. In fact, you would (or should) be expected to object to a 60 hour week. If, instead, protesting crunch time means letting down a grand artistic vision (one which Blizzard reminds the viewer all employees contribute to) or, even worse, letting down your new family, that’s a very different proposition. None of us wants to let down our family and friends, but we can probably get away with letting down management. That social pressure is what keeps crunch time and other bad practices in place as a normal part of the industry. The mythology of crunch and a culture of layoffs have naturalized them, erasing their histories. Instead of being able to identify key shifts in industry labor practices, we’re told that we’ve always been at war with the 60 hour work week. There’s a sheepish air when people at leading companies bring up issues such as crunch, as if it’s unavoidable, like a downpour or an unbidden burp. This is nonsense. Crunch is certainly a disaster, but it is not an act of God. There is nothing that says that crunch and layoffs are unavoidable. The laws we write about how we work are products of men and women, not natural forces imposed upon us by an unseen hand.
And that's the heart of the issue, isn't it? The video seems directed at super fans but it really just hides the reality of grueling work conditions and preys upon people's need to belong and sense of pride. Honestly, for all of the rah-rah about being a part of Blizzard, it all sort of comes off a little defensive.
Luckily, Paste Magazine bucks the comments section trend by both being not awful and having relevant and insightful commentary. Here what one former video game worker of 20 years had to say:
After over 20 years in the industry I finally had to pull back. They'd squeezed every last drop of passion out of me. Games haven't really been "design driven" for a long time anyway, and with F2P gaming gaining dominance the impact of the bottom line is only growing stronger Yes, they're beautiful, but all the innovation is happening in the back end. As for all the extracurricular stuff, that won't mean much when they hand you your walking papers, and you suddenly realize that for all the hours of your life they took may help you get your next job, but is meaningless for the job after that. Meals, games, entertainment are all about one thing... keeping you on campus for as many hours as possible.
So just because things have been this way, and are this way now doesn't mean they have to stay this way. But what will it take for that to happen?
Following the passing of actor and comedian Robin Williams earlier this week, tributes have poured in across the globe, and across all forms of media, from career retrospectives on television to celebrities tweeting and writing essays on Facebook. The most surprising tribute to Robin Williams so far though is one announced by Blizzard earlier yesterday evening: Robin Williams will be immortalized as an NPC in World of Warcraft.
Williams was an avid video game player, counting Call of Duty, Wizardry, Half-Life and the Portal series among his favorites. He also was way into the lore behind the Warcraft franchise, especially of Warcraft 3's single player campaign. Acording to a petition by WoW players addressed to Blizzard campaigning for a tribute to Williams to be put in the game, he had a character on the Mannoroth server, and "was something of a troll in trade on good days or when anonymity allowed..." him the luxury of tweaking players in the chat channel. The petition went on to request that Blizzard honor the comedian's love for the game and its lore by memorializing him in the game as a non-player character.
A little more than a day later, Technical Game Designer Chadd Nervigg announced on Twitter that Blizzard was working on it.
There are two more great articles released in the wake of Gary Gyx's death that I wanted to call your attention to:
Jeremy Parish and the 1UP.com editorial staff compiled a wonderful article entitled Five Things Games Have Learned from Dungeons & Dragons that shows just what sort of far-reaching effects on video games and computer games Gary Gygax has wrought.
From the 1Up article:
It's taken three decades, but videogames are finally catching on to one of the most fundamental elements of D&D: emergent gameplay. Because the rules and guidebooks for the tabletop game were merely a suggestion, a set of conditions and constraints for building an adventure, the actual content and outcome of every group and every session varied wildly. This wasn't a matter of the random math, though -- it was the human factor. The dungeon master was a sort of guide, nudging the heroes in the right direction and adapting rapidly when they strayed. Not surprisingly, videogames have generally kind of sucked at this. The computer serves as a dungeon master by proxy for the creators, and computers aren't known for their boundless imagination. But they're catching up thanks to canny design. MMOs are very much the successors to D&D, bringing people together to deal with the randomness that results from so many real players gathered in a single place (not to mention the occasional interference of the game masters). But even smaller-scale games like Battlefield and Halo 3 have become sandboxes for goofing around, and single-player games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto give players enough freedom to make their own fun.
And Wired has a great article chronicling the life of Gary Gygax, and includes lots of little-known games and some photos from Gygax's family. A choice personal bit of trivia from the article:
Gygax and a few of his buddies carried that DIY spirit even further, devising a game of their own around WWII tank combat. He was determined that his game would avoid the "goofy bell curve"that resulted from rolling a pair of six-sided dice (2s and 12s are rare, while 6s, 7s, and 8s are comparatively frequent). To achieve a more linear curve, he determined that players must pluck 1 of 20 numbered poker chips from a hat, so that there was an equal 5 percent probability of each outcome. Gygax later found the perfect replacement for this clunky system: In a school supply catalog, he discovered dice shaped like all of the Platonic solids, including the icosahedron: A 20-sided die.
But don't just take my word for it; check 'em out!
The quote that makes up this entry's title comes during the slideshow presentation where he says
"... the Neal Stephensons dreamt of the infinite promise, and you wonder how it addresses the things that we wrestle with in the real world... The collective venture capital at the summit has to be north of 50 million; enough to replace the FEMA trailers the people of New Orleans are living in. "I sit and I look at what we do and I think 'Goddamn we're irrelevent.' Have I brought you down enough yet?"
But all is not lost, he says. Gaming and virtual worlds do have importance because
"What we do in this room can have an impact... We see windows into virtual worlds when we download the [World of Warcraft]client. The metaverse is more windows -- breaking down the barriers between the worlds. We're heading for a world full of windows -- the question is what we'll be seeing through them. Will it be like a mirror or something new? We're not playing with toys but with people. We need to use what we already have and make a difference. Whether we empower each other makes a difference."
Definitely a lot of food for thought. It's not just video games, but our everyday lives are becoming more and more virtual every day: online banking, shopping, craiglist, ebay, online dating, message boards, blogs, you name it.
How can we harness this focus and energy to help others? It's not like there's zero reach. Ralph said "We have cybercafes in rural Senegal -- people without food and water still have Google. ".
Is this pie-in-the sky idealism, or will virtual world building lead to real social change for the good of others?
And even if it can, does that mean it should? OR should games be games, social movements be social movements and never the twain shall meet?
A college student is attempting to level two pacifist characters up to the highest level of World of Warcraft's character progression, characters he's playing without attacking anything.
Why is he doing it?
As he explains to WoW Insider, t's partly to try out the philosophy of pacifism in a decidedly violent virtual world, and partly to see if he can do it. From the interview:
Show us your kung fu: what's the actual nuts-and-bolts reality of this character?
Both my priest and my rogue try not to hit anything, although there's always a chance of a misclick when trying to open a quest item with mobs fighting near it. Both of them always wield a fishing rod, so any accidental hits won't increase their weapon skills. Neither of them will do quests where they have to kill things. In battlegrounds, my rogue will throw bombs to interrupt flag captures and stun people and may even accidentally kill players low in health or nearby critters. My priest only heals, so he is actually closer in roleplaying terms. Neither will "get around" these limits by grouping and having other players do their dirty work. In terms of bragging rights, I intend to keep my rogue's weapon skills (dagger, thrown and unarmed) at all 1s. My priest will also have all 1s, but it won't be obvious on WoW Armory that he has no offensive spells beyond the level 1 Smite all priests start with.
