Just another nerd.
My life has been completely overtaken by World of Warcraft. Currently I’m spending all my time on the Stormscale server as Dennett.
The Unofficial World of Warcraft Papercraft has plenty of amazing papercraft projects from the world of Azeroth. Each papercraft has a downloadable PDF so you can give it a try, and ranging from the extremely simple to the mind-boggling “how did they do that” like this Illidian Stormrage,
That is some awesome nerdcraft right there.
DC Unlimited is producing World of Warcraft Collectible Coin Sets — one each for the Alliance and Horde — that should hit in June 2010 for about $70.
The Alliance one is depicted below. Each set will feature a gold, silver and copper plated coin in a display box with a metal plaque featuring the faction emblem.
The Border House blog has an interesting look at the way sexual stereotypes are expressed in World of Warcraft gear. What is especially annoying in WoW are items that when equipped by a male toon results in rather bland and nondescript clothing but when equipped by a female toon becomes 1337 Victoria Secret gear (see, for example, the Lofty Leggards for an example of how ludicrous this often is).
The Border House article is a very thoughtful analysis of both the issue and, frankly, whether we should even care about it,
How much does the sexualization of female video game characters matter, anyway? Why does it matter? This is ultimately part of a much, much larger conversation about images of women in pop culture — advertisements, movies, sitcoms, music videos, and so on. In “Sexuality and/in Representation,” art historian Lisa Tickner writes “Representations enter our collective social understandings, constituting our sense of ourselves, the positions we take up in the world, and the possibilities we see for action in it.” Again and again, we see women represented one way: idealized into a narrow standard of beauty, bodies put on display, (un)dressed to highlight secondary sexual characteristics, photographed and painted and animated to be admired by straight men. Now that we’ve achieved near de jure equality in so much of the world, do these images still harm us and limit us? Or have we become so enlightened, so progressive, so media-savvy that we’re immune to their influence?
Since World of Warcraft is a game, after all, I think there’s another dimension as well — do these choices by the WoW developers affect the fun to be had in the game? I’d argue they do and negatively. WoW has a marked lack of ability to customize toons, and too often the approach seems to be “your character can have any look it wants as long as it conforms to some high fantasy trope.”
The result is a homogeneity in character appearances that is a bit maddening at times — here’s this huge world where all of the residents fit into a very small number of idealized forms with little ability to customize them.
I realized the other day that I’d finally quite playing World of Warcraft (though I still haven’t canceled my subscription). Oddly, it wasn’t that I woke up one day and suddenly said “no more WoW” but rather that I just gradually stopped finding reasons to log in and just sort of stopped while I carried on with other things in my life.
Part of the reason is the Xbox. On the one hand, I have never found playing games on a console nearly as captivating or engaging as games on the PC. With PC games, you feel like you’re playing the game; on the Xbox it often feels like the games are playing you, since they tend to be far more linear and have fewer options.
But that’s not a bad thing in that it is a lot easier to hop on the Xbox and play for an hour or two, and then actually stop and go back to what I was doing. I could rarely do that with a good PC game.
The second thing that’s nice about the Xbox is precisely that it isn’t my PC. So laptop=writing/web browsing/productivity. Xbox=blowing off steam for an hour. And ne’er the twain shall meet.
Still, I can’t bring myself to actually cancel my WoW account — feels a bit like permanently putting my toon out to pasture. Maybe in a few more months I can reach some sort of closure there.
WoWInsider reports that the Battle.Net mobile authenticator is now live in the iTunes store for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Some developers of add-ons for World of Warcraft were so angered by Blizzard’s new policy essentially forbidding the creation of add-ons that are commercial or feature in-game donation buttons that they have pulled their add-ons from public distribution. This includes some very popular add-ons, such as Outfitter, QuestHelper, and Group Calendar.
John Stephen, the developer of Outfitter, posted at WoWInsider on why he ended public distribution of Outfitter,
1) I’ve never charged for or advertised in my addons and I don’t want donations. I don’t care if this “must be free” policy has been around for years in the gaming community, it’s still wrong and it’s abusive of the time and energy it takes to develop and support a major addon. Even the open source community has accepted the “pay for support” model as a viable way to provide free software, but even that is forbidden by the new policies (can’t charge for addon-related services).
2) I’m not asking anybody to stop using their existing copies of my addons. Also, I’ve been on the PTR prior to this and Group Calendar and Outfitter both seemed to work just fine with 3.1 so far.
3) I’m not stopping development, I’m stopping public distribution. I still have my addons available on my site and I don’t mind if you want to re-distribute them to your friends and guildies via email or a private download section on your guild’s site.
4) I’m waiting to hear Blizzard’s response to all of this. If the developers who need or desire compensation for their time are happy with the outcome, then I’m happy. None of this policy change directly affects my work, but it does affect my sense of right and wrong.
Just more Blizzard heavy handedness toward the WoW community. In general, Blizzard has not had to pay any price for its past mistakes and errors because the game is so damn popular no single blunder has ever cost it any revenue. Only when game related policies — such as the brief ban on GLBT guilds — have percolated beyond the gaming press and into mainstream media has Blizzard had to reverse itself.
But in the case of add-on developers Blizzard has, to a large extent, relied on people essentially donating their time in non-commercial projects to create UIs for WoW that work for a wide variety of people. And now, Blizzard is turning around and giving the finger to those same folks who have been providing third party support and enhancements for WoW.
As usual, when Blizzard strays from actual game development its policies and pronouncements tend to be beyond stupid.
