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Walter Koenig we love you madly

If you are reading these lines expecting to read an article from a star trek fan girl you will be sorely disappointed.  Yes, as our regular listeners know, I am indeed a Star Trek fan as is my sister and co-host, Sister Frances.  In fact, that is how we met. 

But that is not why I am writing this. 

I am writing this because the death of this man’s son touched me deeply and more profoundly than few things in my life ever have…

More than waiting with someone as the last hours of their life ticked by….

More than the death of my own mother…

More than standing, watching, unbelieving, the words “Oh my God it’s gone” escaping my lips as the second of tower of the world trade center collapsed.

Perhaps stranger still is where this all happened – at the 2010 Chicago Comic Con.

Fandom is a strange thing, no matter what level it is on. There are fans of the No Prisoners, No Mercy show, up to several thousand of you at high points in the month (so say the data counters). We get the occasional letters, such as one listener who described my co-host and I as “the fabulous sisters” and another who thanked us for thanked us for including her in the “No Prisoners, No Mercy experience.”  The time was when I even performed on stage, and afterwards took my bows (along with the rest of the cast) to the applause of  thousands of people.

But this is the rarety rather than the rule.

Usually we get letters when listeners are angry and they come out swinging like the pendulum on a grandfather clock on speed. Fandom on any level is fickle.  There’s a line in the movie “Mad Max” where Tina Turner, as Auntie Entity, proclaims “One day the cock of the walk, the next day a feather duster.”  This was driven home like a spike through my heart as I walked autograph row at the 2010 Chicago Comic Con.  There were the popular stars to be sure; Brent Spiner (a great guy) had a long line.  There were also stars whose fickle fans no longer saw them in the lime light…among them was Walter Koenig and John de Lanci.  I read a story once where Mr. de Lanci was at Con despite having a bad case of the flu.  He sat there through the presentation, drinking a glass of water. At the end of the talk, a bidding war began for the glass that the actor had begun drinking from.  The winning bidder presented his 50 dollars, and finished the glass of water, proudly proclaiming “I have the Q virus”.

Yet here sat John de Lanci,  his current project a kind of a sci-fi/slasher film called Recreator . Mr. De Lance and Mr. Koenig both sat at the table, with no fans around them; no one asking for their signature. Eventually, Mr. Koenig got up and walked away in what must have been the saddest moment I have experienced in decades.   It was at that moment, and I still don’t know why, that I felt the depth of the tragedy of the death of this man’s son. Not because I too had been where he is, and where his son was before his death, even though that is certainly part of it.  Perhaps what affected me most profoundly is that once the lights faded, and the next “next generation” Star Trek cast took over, few people around me seemed to care what Mr. Koenig was like, not as an actor, not for his body of work, but for the kind of human being he is.

Hopefuly my co-host will be able to go back today and speak to Mr. Koenig.

Still, I will relate my own miracle that is the reason I am still here, having escaped the fate of Andrew Koenig,  Mr. Walter Koenig’s son – divine intervention.  Years before, I had been to the meeting of a group that raised money for charity by dressing as Klingons.  At the meeting a woman named Lee Busco gave me her phone number on a small slip of paper, telling me to call her if I ever needed help.

That scrap of paper sat at the bottom of my wallet for years.

Then the day came I arrived home from work, to be greeted only by one of our dogs, and only one, where there should be two.  “Winston” I called out.  No answer.  No dog, which came running.  Then I saw a letter on the desk. Opening it, I read a letter that brought my world crashing down around me.  The person to whom I had been married for 9 years left me for a younger woman.

Conveniently the younger woman had the same first name.  At least the ex wouldn’t have to be careful about what name to call out.   Now I can laugh and say “My ex left me and took my dog – gee I miss that dog.”  Then, I realized I had been hiding out in a relationship that was a lie for 9 years. I felt my life was over, and even went to the drug store looking for sleeping pills to make sure it was – I didn’t find them.  What I  did find was that same scrap of paper in the bottom of my wallet with a phone number.

I called the number.

I reached out and that person put me in touch with someone else I had met through the same Star Trek group. That person was my co-host and mother superior, who invited me to her house, and promptly took my car keys, telling me I wasn’t going anywhere. I reached out, I dearly wish Andrew Koenig had reached out.  And today I cried for the death of a man I never even met…Walter Koenig’s son.

Would it were that Fran and I had the opportunity to get to know Walter Koenig better. Not the actor, but the person.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Your cargo bike blasts through the Arizona morn, Maim

Your clone is among the first born, Maim
Your bike runs through the desert hummin’
And kickin’ up a lot of desert sand,
Your shot gun is ready for some pumpin’
Out in post apocalyptic land.

And so I asked myself, as I so often do when I reflect back on some of the mmos I have played, why I left.  Aion Online? That game was so grindy that keeping my nose to the grindstone took my nose right down to my medula oblongata.  Age of Conan? As much fun as it was our meager computer turned parts of the new content into a slideshow.  World of Warcraft? Well I am back but, when I left it had to do with being called a “huntard” one too many times.

Fallen Earth?

That one I had to think about a while – a long while.  Then it dawned on me…it was budgetary constraints.  But a good friend solved that problem when least expected and now we are able to once again bring you all the news from post apocolyptic Arizona with the same glee we always did.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

part one in a two part series about Social Games

[Author's note, if a bit of harsh language by a few irate game developers is likely to bother you than read no further - this article will get blunt]

When is a cow evil?  In two cases of which I know. The first is a vampire cow movie (there really was one in the making at one point, and that is one cow I wouldn’t want to come home). The second is when they are representative of something far more insidious (at least to some) and that is social games.  Those of you who haven’t already abandoned Facebook (I have) will find a new application called Cow Clicker.  If you go out to the application you will find this in the header:

However would I live with myself if I didn’t get all of the cows? Seem silly? What if that “cow” was the Celestial Steed offered by Blizzard for World of Warcraft that many thought was only available for a limited time? If the game seems like poignant satire that’s because  it is.  Ian Bogost, designer, and Kotaku guest editor at one point designed the game. For those one or two of you out there who haven’t heard of it, here is how Cow Clicker creator Blogost describes it:

“You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.” – Ian Bogost

It is pure coincidence that Cow Clicker currency shares the same name as Zynga’s vice president, Bill Mooney. In a recent interview over at GameSetWatch designer Bogost told readers “Cow Clicker is a satire that asks players and developers alike to examine the explosive popularity of Facebook Games.”  He goes on to tell readers “It’s particularly easy to be a negative critic, to talk down about something from on high, by making a game to deliver that message, I hoped it would be taken more seriously.”

If you, dear readers and listeners, think our end of the industry is both divided and contentious over the issue of Facebook games, it turns out the production end of the industry is just as divided. In GameSetWatch, Bogost describes an increasingly wide schism between social game developers and those that produce more traditional games (if there is such a thing anymore) such as console games. It is a schism that appears to have been made even wider at the last Game Developer’s Conference by Bill Mooney’s speech on behalf of Zynga [full  text here] Particularly infamous, it turns out, was the end of the speech:

And in particular I wanted to call out one last thing. I want to thank our People Ops group, and I want people to know that, whether you go into the space [social games] alone, or whether you want to join us [Zynga] — there’s something like 200 openings at Zynga, and many more opportunities across other places — seriously, think of Facebook and the social games space as the last big realm for indies. If you’re interested in making your own mark, please come join us [social games developers]. – Bill Mooney, Vice President Zynga, 2010 Game Developers Conference.

For a first hand reaction I had to look no further than the blog of Josh Sutphin, lead designer for Lightbox Interactive (via CNET.com) (bear with the long quote – I didn’t want to quote it out of context)

There was an odd moment in the show, and that was when FarmVille won Best New Social/Online Game. FarmVille winning the award wasn’t strange — it was, in fact, depressingly predictable — it was the acceptance speech that followed that kind of set the room on edge. The Zynga guy (whose name I’ve completely forgotten) opened with a blatant shot against the indie community, asserting that games like FarmVille are “just as indie”, and that indies should jump into the social games space and put their money where their mouth is. Apparently Zynga guy has no fucking idea what the indie community is all about, i.e. precisely the opposite of commercialized Skinnerian time- and money-sinks driven by business and user metrics instead of love of the art. It was frankly insulting to the half of the room that had just concluded an hour-long awards show celebrating its prolific creative output. And then, just to make things even more awkward, he started pitching Zynga as a great place to work, going so far as to directly ask for people to send in their resumes. Hey, Zynga guy: There’s a time and a place for that, and your acceptance speech at the Game Developers’ Choice Awards is neither. Learn some fucking tact.- Josh Sutphin, Lightbox Interactive.

W.C. Fields once said “there’s a sucker born every minute.”  Either there are an awful lot of suckers out there (a definite possibility) or a lot amount of social game publishers with a seriously cavalier attitude toward their market.  Gamasutra’s David Hayward seems to feel the later is the case, at least where Zynga is concerned:

“Secondly, Zynga have a ‘fuck the users’ approach to game development. Their games extract revenue and multiply users in every way possible. Mark Pincus himself is on record saying ‘I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away’. They ran offer scams, and, while it was misreported as far more scandalous than it actually was, they nonetheless piggy-backed some very lucrative business on people’s charity.” – David Hayward’s Blog at Gamasutra

Is the controversy simply a reaction to Zynga? Perhaps the most telling are the words Ian Bogost relates to GameSetWatch

“I think a great many social game developers are mistaking the success of their games for positive contributions to humanity,” – Ian Bogost

But why such ire? Why the seemingly vile hatred of social games from some corners of the industry? Well for a discussion on THAT my friends you will have to come back tomorrow.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]

It’s seems that CCP developers and publishers of Eve Online just don’t give a damn about their customers any more – certainly not in this case. 

My grandfather used to say that he never waited in line to spend his money.  With the age of the internet there is even less reason to stand in line. But stand in line is exactly what I have been doing all day now; and it is CCP’s line I have been standing in.

We live in an age where our computers are constantly under attack.  The office where I work has firewall software that would but the proverbial “great firewall of China” to shame.  We have safety percautions so stringent that they even ticked off President Obama when his staff moved into the Whitehouse.  And so it is that we have long passwords (very long) that constantly rotate and always have to be remembered. This I understand.

So occassionally with all these passwords to be remembered and changed one needs to be recovered.

I haven’t played Lotro in a while – Turbine recovered the password in less than a minute

I haven’t played Star Trek Online in a while – Cryptic Studios Took about a minute and a half.

I have Eve Online in a while – I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR OVER ALL DAY AND INTO THE NIGHT and their password recovery system still has yet to respond once. The spam filters, blockers, and virus checkers did not stop their replay. They news letter comes to me just fine.

So why then is it that a company with a triple A mmo tries to tell us they care about their customer base when something as simple as password recovery is useless?

Not only have I been “waiting in line” but the money has already been taken and CCP doesn’t seem to care to render any services in return.   The suggestion was made by the Corporate CEO to simply block their payments – and it looks like CCP cares so little about their client base that this is what will ultimately transpire.

Even if this situation ultimately resolves itself the fact of the matter is that CCP cares so little about thier customers that there is no other option but to hang on the line like a lonely teenager waiting for the boyfriend to call.

And that, my friends is EPIC FAIL.

 

That sound you hear are the dominoes that keep falling, the latest to hit the hallowed free 2 play/premium service ground is Everquest 2.

There’s a twist. Where the other freemium games let subscribers and freeloaders mingle, EQ2 will be setting up a walled garden with the subscribers in their vast playgrounds, and the freeloaders in their ghetto.” – Tipa from West Karana

It’s interesting that SOE is giving their reason for the “beta/extended” servers as, “Extended is an accessible game purposely developed to grow the gaming community through new players. The free adventure service allows new players to experience more quality content and increased participation than the previously offered 14-day trial.” Yet they have built the equivalent of the Great Fire Wall of China to keep the “Alpha” players (what they call the subscribed servers) separate from the new wave of players they are trying to attract. Don’t tell me you actually had visions of gaming with your long time EQ2 friends? Not if John Smedley can help it.

It seems that the only way new blood will get into the game with the Roman Citizens…er….subscription players are for the pleebs who are persona non-grata to find a way to hurl their characters over the wall to the servers that are free of freeloaders. But that may just be a bit hard to do in some cases with your spells limited to the adept level. For those of our readers who have never played EQ or EQ2 think of this as strapping a ball and chain around Frodo’s ankles and THEN letting him loose on the Dark Lord.

So lets mix a few metaphors and talk about the two bandwagons that have come pulling up to the gates of our little mmo kingdom. The first are Facebook games intent on telling us that “social” is defined as getting spammed by people you have never met before with virtual gifts of sheep and plants along with requests to tend the same. The second bandwagon is redefining the word “free” for us. What was it my grandmother called it? Oh yes, “being nickel and dimed to death”.

Yes look to the horizon and see the waves crashing on our shores like a mighty tsunami. That’s Mickey Mouse telling us how much fun we are going to have tending HIS sheep, and growing HIS potatoes now that they many Facebook developers that Playdom has been acquiring are about to take up residence in the Magic Kingdom. See the many game publishers waving all the glittery pretty ponies in our faces yelling FREE, FREE, FREE…no really.

The opposite side of this particular coin, is that if you really can contain your excitement and resist the temptation to buy the magic potions of level capping, the elixer that will make you level quicker, and don’t mind staring over the mighty wall that the players who AREN’T persona non grata you can still have a bit of fun…yes, for free.

Thank you we will still keep our Eve Online and World of Warcraft subscriptions firmly in place.

See you online (in Azeroth and somewhere in Caldari space)

The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team

Welcome to the Fi, Fi, Fo, Fum issue

They’re big enough, they’re scary enough…

update: No closed deal (yet) but there has been an announcement of terms: $562.2 million plus “performance liked earn out of up to $200 million. (source) So it looks like its full speed ahead for Disney version of Facebook games. Are we in for treats like “Down on Mickey’s Farm”, “Duck Wars”, and “Minnie’s happy little aquarium”? Get out your barf bags ladies and gentlemen it promises to be a bumpy ride.

No word as of yet if Disney has actually gone through with the purchase of Playdom and it’s ever growing portfolio of Facebook game developers for a reported $500 million plus. But that isn’t the only merger/acquisition in the news today. Senator Al Franken, the man who fought tooth and nail to get the job as senator in the first place, was addressing the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas this last Sunday, as reported by TheWrap.com. Calling Net Neutrality “The first Amendment issue of our time” Senator Franken had the following to say about the proposed Comcast/NBC merger:

“If Comcast merges with NBC, how long do you think it will take for Verizon and AT&T to start looking at CBS-Viacom and ABC-Disney”

“Imagine if what is happening with television, the senator went on to say, where an independent producer can’t get a show uon the air unless a network owns a piece of it, where to happen to the internet. There would be no next Youtube or Twitter. There would only be what the R&D departments at the few megaconglomerates could invent and profit from.”

If you don’t think the Senator is right, consider the following:

Vivendi SA (formerly Vivendi Universal) divisions are Vivendi Entertainment, that in turn owns the Canal+Group (a French film and television studio), Universal Music Group, ACTIVISION BLIZZARD, Global Village Telecom, Maroc Telecom, SFR (a French mobile telephone company), and a 20 percent interest in NBC universal (the remainder is owned by General Electric)

But wait, we’re just getting warmed up here.

NBC Universal in turn has the following divisions: NBC, Universal Studios, NBC Universal Television Group, NBC News, USA Network, SYFY (the Sci-Fi Channel), CNBC, MSNBC, NBC.com, MSNBC.com, IVillage, Bravo, qubo, Telemundo Television Studios, The Weather Channel, Hulu and the A&E Television Networks.

If you add Comcast into the mix that includes five more networks (source: Arstecnica as well as The Philadelphia Flyers, The Philadelphia 76ers, the Global Spectrum Management company, Front Row (a marketing firm), as well as non-controlling interests in In Demand, TV One, MGM, Sportsnet, New England Cable News, and the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel

When you are all done chewing on that you can go watch the following movies on Netflix (while Comcast still allows it to run) – The Running Man, Robocop, and one of our personal favorites, the John Cusack movie called War Inc. The common theme with all three is, of course, “egaconcongomoerate” corporations run amok vie to control the world (or destroy it).

Is the senator from Minnesota being alarmist? We tend to think not, and if he is, a large portion of the Federal Government is being alarmist right along with him. If nothing else you have to like an actor from Saturday Night Live who fought hard to be a senator; and as the Senator’s Stuart Smalley character used to say, he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doog done it, people like him. Just like California, Minnesota may have an actor for a senator, and had a professional wrestler for a governor (Jesse Ventura) but none of the governors are, to my knowledge, wearing prison uniforms – and that’s something that we here in Illinois won’t be able to say for some time to come.

　

Another one bites the dust?

You had to see Warhammer Online Free 2 play coming from a mile away. It certainly didn’t take a telescope to spot Dungeons and Dragons Online coming up the Free 2 play street either. Lotro was a bit of a shock – we will certainly hand you that. Now in a move that we will claim you could have seen with a blindfold on (never mind that hind sight is always 20-20) Everquest 2 is going free 2 play [http://everquest2.com/free_to_play/extended_faq] with what they are calling Everquest II Extended. Now there are many of our listeners who will, of course, remember Paul Barnett speaking of such matters on a previous show shouting “I TOLD YOU THE SUN WOULD FINALLY EXPLODE.” We will let you look up exactly how much is “free” in Free 2 Play, after all no matter what anyone said our grandmothers were right…there is no such thing as a free lunch. Does this mean that I will be able to get out my gnome and get back the key to my enormous mansion and 1 Antonia Bayle? I sort of doubt it. If the past is in any way precedent I sort of doubt it. John Smedley once said that he considered a game a success if the profits paid to keep the servers open and pay the bills; lets hope the new business model does at least that.

No reviews for you

Today is the day that Blizzard finally takes the chains off that giant of industry IP’s Starcraft 2. As we all know by now, Blizzard would not allow reviews ahead of time. Our first thought was to consider movie Studios like Paramount that refused “professional” reviewers into advance showings of some of their movies after they had been blasted one to many times by reviewers, who later ended up with a few dozen eggs on their face after the same movies where hits at the box office. Still, a comment on one of our regular must reads claimed that Blizzard could defecate in a box, slap the words “Starcraft 2” on the box and still sell it (or words to that effect) and we tend to agree.

What struck us about the release was not the game itself . No, as usual Blizzard doesn’t release anything unless it is polished to the point where it could be used as the mirror in a refracting telescope. Just as striking are the CGI trailers that Blizzard released about the game. Mind you these are not all that uncommon in the mmo industry. But it is not the quality of the trailer that we find lacking – it is the fact that in most cases they are not at all representative of the game. For a game that, as we understand it, is mostly an isometric (albeit highly detailed) view the trailers seem more akin to the hype we see in movie theaters for movies that are big on special effects but low on script quality – rarely do they represent the actual movie. In fact in such cases, if you have seen the trailer you have seen the best parts of the movie with boring filler in between. Mind you in this particular case Starcraft 2 is obviously a “killer game”. Still a bit more of a pragmatic approach, and a lot more honesty in depicting what the gamer is actually getting would be honest and no doubt more productive in the end.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

 

No doubt you have all heard of the Man with No Name – the movie featuring tough as nails actor Clint Eastwood. Now meet the nun with no ass. No, not me…I still have plenty of ass to go around…and around, and around, and around.  The nun with no ass is my co-host Fran who worked it off over the Fourth of July Weekend.

Yes, she still did the usual holiday routine: cooking enough food to feed the Eighth Army and scouring the house (and ensuring the occupants did the same) until they all met what we call “Fran specs” (a standard of clean that would make even an Army Drill Sergeant shudder).  But once the fireworks died down, including the neighbor who apparently raided same said Eighth Army armory for what must surely have been a Howitzer Cannon based on the strength of the explosions….

Once the uproar was settled down there was still work to be done.

Yes I refer to the fact that no sister has greater love than she, a dedicated hordie, work her buns to the bone leveling up a night elf druid 10 levels so she can team up with me -  Now THAT my friends is sisterly love.  This is a woman who tanks with a tough Tauren and loves every bit of it.  This is a woman whose level 80 healer lives the expression “once you roll troll you never re-roll.”   Yes, same woman who death knight kicks butt and takes names agreed to level up a front flipping, rail thin, valley girl night elf who is so saccharine sweet those who group with the character risk instant diabetic coma.  And the toughest part of it all is that it was one of my characters, left languishing on our family account after I saw the light and wisely decided to roll troll.

And what made all this possible?

A wonderful new game mechanic introduced by Blizzard I call the “O.K. play nice kiddies system.” That works like this….

The functionality of the Vote Kick feature in the Dungeon Finder will now behave differently according to a player’s history with the system. Players using the Dungeon Finder who rarely vote to kick players from a group, or rarely abandon groups before a dungeon is complete, will find that the Vote Kick option will have no cooldown. For players who frequently abandon groups or vote to kick other players, the Vote Kick option will be kept on a cooldown. This functionality will adjust itself as a player’s behavior while using the Dungeon Finder changes. – WoW Patch Notes, Patch 3.35

 

The ever so wonderful result is much like the opening moments of the commercial for Life Cereal with that urban legend Mikey.

Gnome Mage: You kick the tank.

Healer: No YOU kick the tank.

Gnome: I’m not going to kick the tank, get Mickey to do it, he doesn’t care if he gets kicked or not, he’s a hunter.

And so friends, let us pause for a moment and stand in a well deserved ovation to the developer that thought up this wonderful addition to World of Warcraft. Yes, let’s cheer as we utter those words that are so well deserved…

What took you so long?

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Side Notes

 

Do you play Star Craft?  I am not aware of anyone on the No Prisoners, No Mercy team who does play Star Craft. However we received an email (see below) today from someone who wants to give YOU (or at least one of you) a copy of Star Craft II.  So what say you? Is there an interest amongst you to win a free copy of Star Craft II from Henley Chiu at Sunbr.com? 

Let us know.

Hi there,

I’m the founder of Snubbr, a recommendation site. We’re interested in giving away a free copy of Starcraft 2 to 1 of your readers as part of a giveaway/contest when it comes out. Would you be interested?

We’ve done many giveaways in the past (just Google us up). We could setup the giveaway such that your readers have to leave a comment, and maybe answer a question such as “What are you looking forward to the most about Starcraft 2?”. We then will pick our favorite comment, and mail him/her the copy when it comes out. Let us know if you’d be interested. =)

Henley

Snubbr

 Mind you no one here knows anything about Henley Chiu, nor Snubbr.com.  Here is what we found out:

Linkedin profile

Chiu, Henley  henley@snubbr.com

34-62 60th street

Woodside, New York 11377

United States

(917) 385-9365

It’s like running with a pack of lemmings that never quite reaches the proverbial cliff…like the ever read/energizer bunny they just keep going, and going, and going…

So here we are again.  On the cusp of the great outpouring of hype, or hope, that is the release of every new game.  Yes of course eventually there will be Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic.  But now we are all anxiously awaiting the news of the big one…

World of Warcraft – Cataclysm

The release of the changes that Blizzard once said would never come.  Remember back when the powers that power the mighty Blizzard 800 ton unbeatable zombie gorilla said they would never redo classical “old world” Azeroth? Yet here we are – and I am as excited as the rest of you (well the rest of you who don’t loathe WoW with the burning passion of a thousand suns). 

Even back when I had just about had it with WoW, between the neck deep asshatery that has become the pick up groups who rate your armor like a credit agency scores your credit…

Even through the days of “getting keyed” for instances in Outland – back when Jeff Kaplan said sure you could skip Karahzan “but enjoy storming the castle”.  Yes those were the days, back when static groups had membership so closed it would have been easier to sneak into the gold vault at Fort Knox.  Those where the days back when even Jeff Kaplan admitted the keying process was tearing apart guilds wholesale (I was in a few guilds that it ripped to shreds).

Yes even then…

Even then there was still that siren call in the back of my mind.  Something that said, “yes other games are fun but what happens in this one really matters.”

Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and if you think those guild mates of yours (with rare exception and I know more than a few) are true blue friends ask them to help you move…as in back up the truck to your driveway and start hauling them cardboard boxes.

Yet just like everyone else I am back again, chomping at the bit like Secretariat about to run the third race of the Triple Crown.  I think the big difference this time is that Rob Pardo has been listening to our show and decided to take our suggestion. 

Yep. You read that right.

Back before anyone said, “hey wouldn’t it be great if…” Fran was listening to me clamor for a chance to play a goblin hunter named Inktomi. (Don’t even think about taking the name I already have a character with the same name).  Now is the chance, and soon is the time.

Exciting times ahead.

See you online.

Julie Whitefeather

Just Imagine.

 

Imagination is a wonderful gift; and make no mistake, it is a gift.

 

Imagine

 

A cardboard tube becomes a telescope, a folded sheet of newspaper becomes a tri-cornered hat, four chairs and blanket become the quarter deck of a three mast schooner sailing the Caribbean.  It is just as easy to imagine that the gift that allows such a miraculous transformation is increasingly rare, being a casualty of Marshall McLuhan’s global village  made reality. Yet even before the advent of the age of Internet, Playstation and Nintendo, whatever ephemeral process that allows creativity to flow often gets lost somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons and the Monday morning rush hour of adult life.

God rest ye merry gentlemen

 

Somewhere between the cartoons and rush hours some fortunate few of us where able to take a marvelous detour provided by Gary by Gygax and Dave Arneson. For me, the roadmap to that particular detour took the form of three booklets packaged together in a box with the words Dungeons and Dragons on it. When I was younger I spent many hours co-authoring a world that was a collective effort existing simultaneously in the minds of a room full of people. Yet those days, like the world they created, fade to the dim recesses of our minds as the world of the Monday morning rush hour looms ever larger.

 

ars gratia pecuniae

 

As much as we here at NPNM love MMOs (after all we wouldn’t spend so much time writing and podcasting about them if we didn’t) they often exacerbate the issue by acting as a catalyst that confounds creativity. As much fun as they can be, MMOs only provide a product of someone else’s imagining in which to play. Even when the virtual world is cast by the imagination of someone else, there is still room for creating your own stories and sharing them with others – the chief among these being role-playing. Even this process is a lot like the weather…everyone talks about it, but few ever seem to do anything about it.

Singled Out

 

If MMOs at least provide a medium which caters to a degree of creativity, many single player games are closer to an aspect of gaming that digs a hole and throws creativity in the grave. As much as I enjoyed games like Half Life and Portal that leapt out of The Orange Box and on to my computer screen, such games are little more than a ride on rails. As witness to this I relate the fact that I got stuck in a water filled basement in Half Life 2 with no apparent way out – bringing an abrupt end to my participation in the half life series, and turning the game into an expensive door stop.

Playing in the Sandbox – Sandbox games provide many an enjoyable hour of entertainment, letting lose the bonds of scripted game play. Yet taken by themselves,  a sandbox game is still only an MMO with only one person in the world.

 

Light at the end of the Tunnel

 

There are times when the light at the end of the tunnel could very well belong to an oncoming train – this is not one of those times.  One of the brightest, though sometimes poorly travelled, paths to creativity are those provided by game developers with enough foresight to put the tools of the trade in the hands of the community. Such is the case with Bethesda’s GECK that allows the community to breathe new life into the game. Fortunately few are the developers that look on modding tools as a crutch, enabling a somewhat diminished understanding of the phrase “finished product”, leaving the community to finish the job (at the moment only one recent case comes to mind).

Re-imagined

 

It is said that the only constant in the Universe is change.  Sometimes that change brings us a new set of tools – cardboard tubes, chairs, blankets and folded paper hats get replace with a graphic user interface. For those fortunate few who are able to step back from the office cubical, the tools may change, but now they allow us to build a world of the imagination that persists beyond the moment.

And that can be magic.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

No Pandering to Pando

 

If you have been having mysterious problems with your internet slowing to a snail’s pace, the place you need to read is Syp’s post here. The culprit in Syp’s case is a program called Pando Media Booster (pmb.exe). A quick check of both Windows Explorer and an “oh yes” moment later as I remembered wondering what the program was, found the same program lurking on one of our hard drives.  As Syp points out, the intent of said program is to help with downloading large files. I search the net and a short while later found  this over on the website belonging to the producer of said software:

How, why, and when was Pando Media Booster installed on my computer in the first place?

Pando Media Booster was installed on your system when you chose to download, install or stream a large media file from one of the many publishers who use Pando to enhance your speed and experience. 

The company quickly goes on to point out that Pando Media Booster is not “Spyware, Malware, Adware, Virus or SPAM.” My point of view is much more practical – anything that takes up residence on one of our hard drives without our permission ismalware, no matter what the intent of the programmer.

Taking a dip

As our regular readers already know, Brad McQuaid recently announced the start up of a new company. Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys feels that the company will produce Facebook games. If so, Richard Garriott seems to agree.  As we discussed on an earlier show, even if that particular ship hasn’t sunk it just may have already sailed – at least Game Politics.com  seems to think so. But don’t tell that to Playdom who is still busy buying up Facebook game developers for some big bucks.

And while we are on the subject of Facebook one of the blogs that we regularly read, Q Blog, belonging to Dr. Richard Bartle, had an interesting entry this week on the subject called Early Re-adopters. (Yes I will admit sometimes I just like to take a peek over the virtual back fence and see what’s going on).

(posted by The Webmaster for Julie Whitefeather)

Early this morning…

Fran (waking up): What was that moan?

Julie: I’m really disappointed in you.

Fran: Why?

Julie: Where was my five o’clock beating with a sack full of rocks?

Fran: Even if I beat you unconscious it won’t help.

Julie: I’m trapped. I won’t do it. Maybe there’s an appendage I can chew through.

Fran: Mind, yours, someone else’s…it won’t help.

Julie: I won’t go.

Fran: You have to go.

Julie: Hell no, I won’t go.

Fran: Call in sick.

Julie: I’m out of sick leave.

Fran: Call in dead.

Julie: Well there is one good thing about attending training for six hour straight about filling out government forms….I will never have to go to hell.

Fran: Why?

Julie: Would have already been.