「マリア様がみてる」

Struggling Democratic Demands

2007-04-25T11:56:00.000+02:00

Every charismatic President Union
To fire the affect on the other
A mockery of Yeltsin's Russians

Vladimir Volunteer
The decision of his Saviour stunt
The shift; standoff; death

Yeltsin furious for his reformer
Military fairy Kevin
The Yeltsin legend

Source 01
Source 10
Source 11

Virtual Worlds

2007-04-11T11:17:00.000+02:00

The World vs. the Game

MMORPGs are more than just games; I would argue that they are social spaces in which user interaction becomes largely independent of the game as such. Since I was introduced to the genre, I have had the (sometimes questionable) pleasure of spending a significant amount of time in three such game worlds: Ragnarök Online (RO), EverQuest II (EQ2) and World of Warcraft (WoW). As far as gameplay goes, all three games are of relatively poor quality, almost exclusively relying on the player performing various repetitive tasks ("grinding") until the end of time. As you can probably tell, I do not particularly enjoy these games, yet I have spent three years in RO and approximately one year each in the other two game worlds.

What makes these games special is incidentally the same thing that draws people to Second Life: the sense of a world outside reality, where you can choose (to a certain extent) how others perceive you. Most of my time in RO, EQ2 and WoW was spent sitting in towns (Payon, Qeynos and Ironforge, respectively, but I digress) and chatting with friends and guildmates, rather than fighting monsters and... fighting more monsters. To me, and others with me, the actual game is never more than a distraction and a way to kill time when everyone else is offline or busy.

To summarize, the experience of MMORPGs and similar applications can be divided into two parts, one of which is the World, i.e. the notion of leaving reality and entering a virtual space. The other part is the Game, which is essentially the "work" you perform inside the virtual world, be it to kill monsters or to heal other player characters. One might argue that the design and construction of objects functions as a kind of Game in Second Life, although that particular application is not considered a game in the traditional sense.

The Massive Multiplayer Delusion

Games such as World of Warcraft proudly market themselves as Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online RPGs. While it is true that they have a large number of users, the actual gameplay generally takes place on a significantly smaller scale. Using WoW as an example, a normal player group can consist of up to five characters. A so-called "raid" consists of multiple groups, allowing for a total maximum of 40 characters, but such raid groups are rarely formed except in Player versus Player (PvP) settings and a small number of endgame dungeons. While in a group, you are generally best off ignoring (or killing, in PvP) any other players you come across. Thus, one might say that the game's World consists of thousands of players, while its Game (the game's Game... Wow, that sounds dumb) only consists of five.

In fact, even groups of five are rare in standard WoW gameplay. RO and EQ2 handle parties slightly differently, but full groups are uncommon in those games as well. The reason for this is that experience points (a character's means of becoming more powerful) and treasure are divided equally within the party. In other words, smaller parties equal greater profit for each individual player. Therefore, player groups in MMORPGs are generally as small as they can possibly be while still successfully completing whatever task they strive to accomplish. More often than not, soloing (i.e. playing alone) is considered the quickest and easiest path to wealth and power. MMORPGs may be massive multiplayer environments, but do they encourage teamwork? Hardly.

My Avatar and I

I am one of those people who spend several hours trying to make their avatars look exactly right. For the record, I am not satisfied with the looks of my Second Life character (image at the bottom of the page), even though her hat is pretty nice. I usually consider my avatar a medium for artistic expression, rather than a direct representation of myself. In some virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft and Ragnarök Online, the avatar customization options are somewhat limited. This bores me and often causes me to delete and remake my characters because I am not satisfied with them, much to the frustration of whatever guild I am in at the time.

I think I had something else to say, but I'm suddenly way too tired and can't remember what it was, so this will have to do for now. Hopefully I'm allowed to say such things since this is a... blog...

._.

My thoughts on YouTube

2007-04-03T19:51:00.000+02:00

YouTube is, in the words of the creators themselves, "an online video streaming service that allows anyone to view and share videos that have been uploaded by [their] members." For the sake of my argument, let us assume that they are telling the truth.

The various movie clips hosted on the site are divided into a number of fairly broad, predefined categories. However, the site also allows the author (or uploader; not all members of youtube own the rights to the material they post) to add a number of "tags," or keywords that do not necessarily conform to any previously defined structure. As far as I can tell, other users cannot add tags to a movie clip, but they are able to rate the quality of the clip from 1 to 5 and can also post comments.

By combining strict categories with free-form tags, YouTube manages to capture the best of two worlds, in a sense. It offers precision and flexibility in allowing the uploaders to pick the words that best describe the content of their (or others') creations, while simultaneously dodging the trap of nonsensical keywords by allowing the alternative route of a more traditional hierarchy. A possible drawback is that users cannot add tags to movie clips posted by others, but I'm guessing that it is a choice they have made to prevent abuse.

Next to each movie clip is a brief list of "related" files, apparently based on tags. Most of the clips linked in this way seem relevant. Indeed, I have spent more than just a few hours hopping between related movie clips on YouTube. Rarely have I been disappointed while doing so.

Another highly interesting function that I have noticed is that each movie clip comes with a record of sites that have linked to it. This offers an effective overview of the clip's popularity in a global context and fits well with the notion of user-created networks, social or otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/

Blog Genres

2007-03-27T19:28:00.000+02:00

There are as many genres as there are individual blogs.

Just kidding.

I would say that blogs can be divided into genres by their medium and the number of users as well as their content. The word "blog" itself signifies a rather broad spectrum of online media, from the traditional single-user text-based blogs (perhaps with a few images) to collaborative video blogs. Having said that, these are the blog "genres" that I can think of, just off the top of my head:

Entertainment blogs
Personal blogs
Political blogs

As previously stated, sometimes the medium itself can be thought of as the blog's genre:

Music blogs
Video blogs

Obviously, these genres can be combined into hybrid blogs, or divided further into an infinite number of sub-genres. Furthermore, the possibility of multiple authors adds a whole new layer of possible genres.

I have left out one obvious genre, since it seems somewhat redundant: News blogs. All blogs are essentially news sources, albeit sometimes dealing with matters of questionable public interest.

My view on digital cultures

2007-03-27T19:14:00.000+02:00

To me, digital cultures are online communities, built around topics and common interests rather than geography (unless, of course, the topic itself is related to geography). I choose the words "built around" because digital cultures, as is the case with all cultures, expand and evolve over time and gain a life of their own, as it were.

I have a fair amount of personal experience dealing with various online communities, from multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and webrings to discussion forums, collaborative writing sites and, in the past few years, several massive multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). While these examples are different in many ways, they all (more or less) share the focus on users as contributors and social interaction as a primary selling point.

Discussion forums are something I find particularly interesting, since they so often tend to grow beyond the boundaries of their initial topics. In almost every forum I have frequented, the "General Discussion" section has eventually outgrown the more specific sections, and by far. Furthermore, as a forum grows bigger, it seems that many of its members begin to spend more and more time there, not only discussing but indeed "living" on the message boards. Users make friends and enemies on their forums, fall in love and... well, then they leave because of some ridiculous drama, but such is life in the world of Internet forums.

Similarly, MMORPGs offer a great deal of social interaction, but contrary to what one may think, most of it is (at least in my experience) completely unrelated to the actual gameplay. I tend to think of these games mainly as a single-player experience in a multi-player environment. In other words, my character in [Insert game title; right now it's World of Warcraft.] minds her own business, merrily massacring a multitude of mediocre monsters and making massive amounts of money while my chat box offers, for example, spontaneous opinions about the latest Hollywood film or "those fucking noobs in WSG." When I do bump into other players in the actual game, they usually just get in the way of my own ambitions.

To summarize, I believe that digital culture is the practice of allowing virtual spaces to be defined not by what they are, but by the user communities that surround them.

Links
AnimeLeague - http://www.animeleague.net/
Dyre MUD - telnet://dyremud.com:2424
World of Warcraft - http://www.wow-europe.com/

ブログのポスト

2007-03-21T09:33:00.000+01:00

今日は。始めまして。
これはブログです。
本当です。
宜しくお願いします。

私のセコンドライフのカラクタアの名前が夜死川涙です。
夜死川さんの画がこのポストの下にあります。見て下さい。