Day: December 12, 2005

It Takes A Village (Idiot)

Probably the funniest thing I’ve read in the last 15 minutes is this piece by Andrew Orlowski attacking Wikipedia. Wikipedia is certainly right there at the bottom of trustworthy sites, but one of the few things I’d trust less than a Wikipedia article is anything written by Orlowski.

Between them, Orlowski and Wikipedia demonstrate that idiocy is just as well at home in large groups as it is in lone crusaders.

On the Wikipedia side, the case of John Seigenthaler has brought Wikipedia’s inherent problems to the forefront. Seigenthaler was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. As a joke (which pretty much sums up Wikipedia right there), someone edited the Wikipedia entry on Seigenthaler to accuse him of having a suspected role in the Kennedy assassinations. Contrary to Wikipedia defenders who claim the sites public editing process means errors get corrected quickly, this libelous claim was allowed to stay on the site for months before someone alerted Seigenthaler to it. The person who posted the bogus article has since come forth and been fired resigned as a result (he apparently edited the entry at work to make a point to a co-worker).

So Wikipedia is largely untrustworthy garbage — that was apparent long before the recent controversy. But most traditional media and online media outlets that allegedly have editors are no better, and nothing illustrates that point better than The Register’s Andrew Orlowski who has repeated published some of the most inane, inaccurate and downright bizarre pieces to grace a semi-legitimate online publication.

Just how bad is Orlowski’s “journalism”? Consider a November 2004 article in which Orlowski treated readers to the fact that Google returned garbage results for searches even on famous historical events such as the Battle at Guadalcanal. The only problem was that Orlowski and his source, Scott Middleton, apparently thought that Guadalcanal referred to a battle at a canal, and so were searching Google for “Guadal Canal” (Guadalcanal is, in fact, named after a Spanish village, which in turn takes its name from an Arabic word).

Not searching on the correct term, they ran into pages set up by other people who had a similar problem in correctly identifying the name of the battle.

Orlowski is the epitome of the sort of lousy tech writers whose only skill is jumping from one bandwagon to the next. For example, on June 4, 2004, he hyped an Apple software saying,” Apple today cemented its position as the smartphone’s best friend.” Less than 24 hours later, however, Orlowski bemoaned that “Apple’s iSync software needs a health warning: use at your peril” and complains the software suffers from errors that should have been caught in Beta testing — this from someone who, himself, couldn’t be bothered to give the software a legitimate evaluation before hyping it in The Register.

Frankly, everytime I run across a completely inaccurate Wikipedia entry, part of me wonders, “Did Orlowski write this?” Certainly the bulk of what’s in Wikipedia is no better or worse than what appears on a daily basis in The Register.

Why PK-ing Is So Much Fun in MMORPGs (Or Pretty Much Any Other Game)

Where were classes like this when I was an undergraduate? I remember writing a 100-page analysis of George McClellan’s footdragging, not spending time on MUDs (the closest equivalent at the time) and writing “ethnographic analyses.” But I’m not bitter.

Anyway, for a communications class an instructor had her students write ethnographic studies of World of Warcraft. The resulting papers and student weblogs can be found here. The papers range from the utterly ridiculous to the insightful. The paper I found most interesting was the student who covered the issue of player-killing.

The World of Warcraft game has dozens of servers. When you’ve logged on with your account you can create a character on any of the servers. At least with the group of people I play with, we tend to just pick a server and create characters there. You can only play one character at a time, so while I’ve got three characters on the Stormscale server, only one of them can be active and playing at any one time.

There are two types of servers to pick from when it comes to player killing. The most numerous is the basic Player-vs-Environment server. On this server the main focus of the game is killing mobs, finishing quests, etc. You can definitely do player killing in this game, but for the most part you either a) have to do it in a special area set up for PVP play, or b) the other players in the area have to explicitly opt-in to PVP play by selecting an option that makes it possible for them to kill or be killed for the next 5 minutes.

The other type is the PVP server. On a PVP server, most of the areas of the world except for some low-level beginning areas are open killing fields. If you’re trying to complete a quest and someone of the opposite faction comes along and decides to attack you, they can do so at any time (and vice versa). Moreover, there’s no penalty (though also no in-game benefit) for players of very high level killing players of very low level.

In WoW, there are two basic factions, the Horde (undead, orcs, etc.) and the Alliance (human, elves, gnomes, etc.) Players are either on one side or the other — I only play Alliance characters.

I play on Stormscale which is on a PVP server — and I couldn’t imagine playing on a PVE server. Moreover, I pretty much try to kill every player I come across where I might actually have a chance to do so. So if I’m just riding through Alterac Valley and see some 18th level player who only has half his health points left? I’ll dismount and send my level 50 Warlock after him to finish the job.

There is also the group PVP-ing, like getting a large group together to go raid a nearby Horde village or town, which might end up with 20 Horde vs. 20 Alliance (or more) in an hours-long back-and-forth battle.

Of course the other side is that this also happens quite a bit to me — I’ll be questing with my wife when some level 60 rogue comes along and wipes us out before we’ve even had a chance to figure out where the attack is coming from. After awhile though, you learn to adapt, and customize your character and your strategy to the constant PVP action.

There are also the folks who try to do something other than PVP, even on a PVP server. As Aaron Delwiche’s paper notes, some players will try to wave, smile or even dance as a sign of “lets not fight … at least for now.” Again, the way I play is that if the person waving is too high to kill anyway, then fine we can play nice. But if I think I’ve got a chance to kill him, then a wave pretty much means, “hey, come over here and try to kill me.”

There is also some debate in the forums about things like ganking (attacking a player while he’s already fighting a mob — and likely has less health points, etc). and other tactics. Occasionally people in the forums complain that such fights aren’t fair. As far as I’m concerned, though, the last thing I want is a fair fight. If someone else wants to play all chivalrous, more power to them, but my goal is to win in PVP encounters and typically the best way to win at any fight is to have an overwhelming advantage.

There is also the meta-criticism hinted at in Delwiche’s paper of the “can’t we all just get along” variety. The WoW beta and even the version launched in November 2004 had some features that allowed players of different factions to communicate. Those have all been removed. Anything, in fact, that might make it easy for co-op play between factions within the game has been removed. Delwiche and others seem to see this as a defect of the game, and are interested in the few attempts to do cross-faction cooperative gameplay.

This criticism might make sense if WoW was the only game of its kind, but there are always games like Second Life if you want to play UN Peacekeeper. These sort of analyses make about as much sense as discussing why American football gives the player so many tools to committ acts of violence against the opposing side, but such few tools for opposing factions to get together at the 50 yard line and just play catch with the ball.