words of wisdom from the Frag Dolls

A couple weekends ago I was playing an online game with some friends (hi Vyxxen and Strix!) and we got to chatting about being a girl gamer. One of my friends had just that evening been chatted up by another player, and things started innocently enough. But before she knew it, he was describing himself and asking her for a description of herself, asking if she was hot, etc. This sucks for a girl. There you are, having fun in a game, chatting with someone who you might be able to trade items with or help out on a quest, and next thing you know he is telling you he has great pecs and likes rockclimbing. If you aren't interested in enabling the world of one-hand-typers, yet want to be friendly and not piss someone off who might trash talk you as a bitch in forums and the game, how do you politely get out of this discussion? Really, if you know, please tell me! I don't feel like I should have to pretend to be a guy online to avoid this sort of thing.

Valkerie over at the Frag Dolls has some words of wisdom, but they are more for the guys than helping the girls out of this situation. Check out The Top 10 Most UNORIGINAL Things You Can Say to a Girl Gamer.

~Elphie

Weekend geekery

I pre-ordered the LOTRO MMO game and will be click/slash/looting my way through middle earth this weekend. w00t!

~E

The enemy of my enemy is my friend...

Microsoft names the Nintendo Wii as their recommended secondary gaming system. Nintendo, not Sony's Playstation 3. Duh. If you have been paying any attention you might have noticed that Playstation and XBox are fierce competitors in the game console space so this won't be much of a surprise to you.

Sony names the Nintendo Wii as their recommended secondary gaming system. Nintendo, not Microsoft's XBox 360. Duh*2. If you have been paying any attention you might have noticed that Playstation and XBox are fierce competitors in the game console space so this won't be much of a surprise to you. (deja vu!). On top of that, in the article Sony tries to make a case for the lofty PS3 price tag with the whole Blue Ray justification. Some folks just aren't buying that argument though, and I must admit that I tend to agree...

So in a moment of blinding clarity and insight, one blogger points out: doesn't that mean that the Nintendo Wii will be the primary gaming system with the most market share, and Sony and Microsoft will be the secondary systems? uhm, well, it depends on whose marketing team you are on.

I think though that primary and secondary console crowns shouldn't be driven purely by market share but mind share. I've got an XBox 360, and expect I'll get a Wii (despite the truly unfortunate name). But which will I spend more time playing? That is the true measure of which console is master and which is slave.

wii wii wii, all the way home
~Elphie

We'll get around to making first contact as soon as I clear this level...

I've been meaning to make this post for a week now... seeing as I'm now taking abuse for not keeping up to date on blogging, I figure I better eat lunch at my desk and get down to business...

On May 1, Seed Magazine published a fascinating article by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. Dr. Miller suggests that the reason we haven't made contact with aliens is because they too have created x-boxes and other diversions such as porn, and are no longer investing time and energy in things like space exploration.

Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain's ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

Obviously the larger message is that we here on Earth have messed up our priorities and need more rocket scientists and fewer game developers. The article ultimately ends up being fairly anti-technology and anti-consumerism, suggesting that the only people who will survive long term are the super-family oriented breeders who eschew trivial diversions like computer games or even reading novels.

The article is right up my alley - the intersection of humanity and technology. I've wondered for years if advances in electronic communication were really bringing the global community together, or isolating us from real people and real life just outside our door. But even I'm not as big a cynic as Miller appears to be. Sure, you have people becoming so engrossed in virtual life that they are living fraudulent existences, creating in some case multiple personas for the identity they want to portray to others and carrying on 'relationships' with people they not only have never met, but never will meet. All the while not interfacing with the real people just down the street and developing real relationships which result in reproduction of our species. But on the other hand, you have people who do not have the means to travel learning about far off cultures and becoming better global citizens for this expanded understanding, or meeting their soul mates on eHarmony or whatever the matchmaking website du jour is. Technology itself isn't a bad thing, it is people's lack of willingness to live in reality and the allure of an ideal existence that leads to mixed up priorities. And that sounds like a problem that will happen regardless of what the particular diversion is (computer gaming, porn, television, etc). The path to enlightenment is not the rejection of all entertainment, it is finding a way to make entertainment an inspiration for real life action instead of a substitute for it.

Of course I would very much like to meet aliens or colonize another planet (or even our own moon for heaven's sake) during my lifetime. That would be cool. So kids, stop playing Oblivion and get back to your telescopes and dreams of becoming an astronaut when you grow up. Maybe by then we'll have political leaders in place that will actually put some funding behind space programs... OOOH, and cloning and hybridization, that's pretty slick cutting edge research too. Go study genetics and biology if space exploration doesn't do it for you. Remember Dark Angel? See if you can't do that in a non-evil way. See? Entertainment for real life inspiration. hah.

~Elphie

I hate girl clubs... but not this one.

I've never been a fan of women's career networking groups, women's conferences, sororities, etc. I espoused a 'suck it up and play with the boys' attitude for the vast majority of my life. Most of my friends in life are/have been guys, and its been that way for as long as I can remember. I firmly believe that by creating a special group, you make yourself more different, not more equal. Besides, girls can be bitchy and irrational. How can you be friends with people like that?

That said, I've learned in the last year that not all girl groups are bad. I think this comes from the fact that I've seen crappy things happen in the workplace to insanely smart, hardworking female engineers that were just not fair - and without a network of women to ask the advice of and share experience with, these women would have been totally isolated in dealing with the situation.

QUICK DISCLAIMER: So you'll see on the con calendar that I've listed the Executive Women's Forum in Information Security - which might make no sense now that I've broadly bashed women's conferences/organizations. Here is why I think EWF is cool: having been to a ton of conferences, EWF is different because everyone is trying to build each other up (and I don't mean self esteem but skills, business opptys, etc). I've never seen so much positive group energy and trust. I've only been to EWF once because the typical attendee base and content really isn't an applicable fit for my role in 'the industry' but it was still a good experience overall, and a conference I've recommended to a few colleagues. And if you are wondering if an all women's conference is boring in the evenings after the malls close, let me just say that unlike men, women don't need members of the opposite sex around to party their asses off until all hours of the night.

The reason this post started to begin with is that this weekend I found another all-girl group that not only merits a 'not bad' rating from me, but is getting added to my fave sites list.

FragDolls

Yes, thats right, FragDolls. Girl gamers don't have to be dumpy nerds or ecclectic comic book addicts who start gaming to hang with the geek boys. Girl gamers can be hot. Some might say that they are objectifying themselves, using their bodies to get ahead/noticed... well DUH. But 'so what' I say! Being hot, knowing you're hot, and *appropriately* leveraging that advantage is not a crime and doesn't make you a bad person. I'm sure professional women in uncomfortable business suits and sensible shoes are likely horrified by this statement... :)

But here is why I think FragDolls is a great thing for the feminist movement (whatever the hell that means): if hot, smart girls are gaming - and maybe even beating the pants off the boys - it starts becoming socially acceptable for girls to get into gaming and technology. If this catches on, maybe someday it will be cool for chicks to have badass code-fu instead of being varsity cheerleaders, and go to college not for psychology or social work or english lit but for computer science or electrical engineering degrees.

That and I don't have to feel like quite so much of a dork for being a hard core PC gamer. My last job I'd come in to work on Monday and co-workers would ask about my weekend - when I'd tell them (with great enthusiasm) about how we played Age of Empires at a LAN party until 3am every night they'd look at me like I was a freak of nature. One of them asked once "you know you're a girl, right?". Damn right I'm a girl. I'm a FragDoll.

~Elphie

Elphaba is ready to take on forces of evil...

I fired up Dungeon Siege 2 this weekend and discovered that in the week I'd been away, an evil fairy sprite attacked my character with an ugly stick. The thumbnail portrait displayed on the playing screen was NOT what it had been - she is much more, uh, industrial looking. Confused and dismayed, I opened inventory, zoomed in on my character, and took off my helm. Nope, she's still the hottie she should be - it is JUST the thumbnail portrait that changed. I fiddled around for awhile, trying to figure out how to get it back the way it is supposed to be when I realized:

This is the most trivial and vain thing I've wasted time on so far in 2006.

I'm quite sure that Elphaba kicks just as much Morden ass regardless of image. So that's what I went back to - hack/slash/looting my way through the town of Darthrul...

~Elphie