screw you

Quote of the Night:

(While talking about the new raid being totally broken and people not being able to move at all in it, let alone play)

"Dominance¹ is playing trivia bot."

¹ The top guild on our server at the moment.

So as some of you know... I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft in the last months. Everyone knows that the video game industry is a male dominated space. Regardless of people's gender, one default assumes that the player is male, unless given a reason to believe otherwise. They do outnumber us be a large margin after all, although I play with probably half a dozen other female gamers on a regular basis. The assuming people are male on WoW thing didn't bother me much, because I do the reverse in fandom. Although there are male fans (spectralbovine springs to mind), most of the people involved in fannish dialog on livejournal are female. I've obviously thought about what kind of societal assumptions lead to these mirror communities on the internet, and I certainly have a lot to say with thy way that being made up of women informs the way in which fandom operates, but recently I've started thinking about more hostile sort of gender issues manifest in my MMO world.

It is largely acknowledged that certain girl WoW players, or men pretending to be women, use the rarity of female players to gain special treatment in the game. I've always scoffed at both, although I do take pride in playing the game with other women and do not think gender as irrelevant as we might like to pretend in this circumstance. But recently, I guess the feminist critic within me has started making comments. And I feel torn, because I love a lot of things about this online community I've become a part of but I also feel I am a traitor to a lot of things I believe in by going along and participating without questioning.

In the current game expansion, there are three different group sizes used in dungeons/raids. Although nominally called regular and heroic dungeons (5 players) and raids (10 people for regular, 25 people for heroic), even on the official forums in posts made by Blizzard employees they are mostly known as
"5 Mans", "10 Mans", and "25 Mans". Back in the old days there used to be "20 Mans" and "40 mans" rather than the current raid groups, and I believe (based on my boyfriend's comfort with the terminology that the "X Man Raid" as a description dates back to Ever Quest). I've found myself using the "man" terminology and feel disgusted with myself. Recently I've been consciously using the other nomenclature, because the common one is clearly patriarchal in the extreme, but I hold my tongue and I don't say a word to those I play with about their usage of these terms. I don't want to be "that girl" and truth be told I haven't even brought it up to Jeremy (the last time I brought up gender issues in something he liked when I pointed out women's power being the taking away of free will in one way or another in Legend of the Seeker... well it was a long and interesting conversation but we was a wreck the next day from sleep deprivation).

So I'd been thinking about this terminology, but not really holding Blizzard accountable for it, because technically it's not their term and internet culture comes up with a lot of stuff without prompting from the host site or server (I think we can be pretty sure that livejournal developers never imagined what fandom would do with it). But then a new announcement came down that they are combining three different attributes (armor penetration, spell penetration, and haste) into one new one: potency. As a mechanic this change is consistent with their current trend and I have no problem with it... but the word choices... well it gives me pause. Because potency to me really invokes a connotation of virility... masculinity, manliness. Which pretty much becomes explicit and sexually aggressive in some sense when you link it to PENETRATION. Then you add haste and basically I am seeing a ninja fast assailant, asserting his dominance over the world.

And of course I am building sandcastles, or dungeons as the case may be, in the sky. Of course the whole concept and mechanic of the game is about dominating an invented world and proving your untouchable skill and prowess. Of course the developers probably weren't trying to invoke the image of rape into their new attribute. But doesn't that really make it more to the point? Isn't that insidious understanding, the unconscious reaction, really our biggest hurdle?

And yet... I have no idea what I am going to do, if anything, about these things. I guess it never hurt to think, but I feel like my hands are dirty and I need to scrub at them.

Level 80 y'all. Level 80. It tastes so sweet.

*dances*

Dear Blizzard,

I want my World of Warcraft back. KTHNX.

Sincerely,

Me and everyone else still trying to log on

After missing work on Thursday and Friday last week and playing video games all weekend, I have had a surprisingly impressive first day and a half back. I have been accomplishing a lot, even closing out things I've been putting off for months. I feel like I'm finally ready to get rid of the backlog that pulls me down when I think about being the good employee I try and seem like.

My arm hurts from playing Wii... I may have been overly enthusiastic and my mouse arm was already pretty tired from all the time playing WoW(level 57 yay!) and browsing the internet at work. Seriously the last 3 days have been painful, but I feel like I am recovering. Other than that I've really been enjoying the system, which is living up to my expectations.

Zelda: Twilight Princess
I feel like this game really encapsulates what is good about the Wii... that is that it is new and innovative but at the same time it maintains all of the best things about the old version and keeps true to the heart of Zelda/Nintendo. Playing this game (once you get past the controller stuff) feels like playing Zelda. It's beautiful and swinging your sword with the motion detecting capability is awesome, but in a lot of ways it is exactly like when I played Link's Awakening on Game Boy. My brother said it was like playing Ocarina of Time for the first time again (I cannot attest or deny since the N64 3-D rendering totally made things impossible for this girl to play). It's Zelda-like in theme, but also in function. The town sections feel like all the other in their sort of rhythm and logic and the balance of different aspects is just right. This means I find myself saying "this is impossible" and "I swear I've done everything there is to do" so much that I think Jeremy doesn't really understand that I am loving it. But I am.

She-Ra: Princess of Power
I've watched 4 episodes so far and I am loving it every bit as much as I did when it aired and I was barely out of diapers. Some of my reasons for loving it are different (a heroine who's main power is super strength, an apocalyptic world...) and some are the same (she's a princess, she has a sword with a gem on it, she's pretty and has pretty friends and a winged unicorn (or Pegasus with a horn), and the girl villains are sort of sexy). I had forgotten a lot of the plot details, but I still want to be She-Ra on some level and I am glad that she existed for me to want to be. Much as I love Lady Lovelylocks she preached a philosophy of good sugaring the sour and sweetness, passivity, and receptiveness, being appropriate virtues for females rather than action. She-Ra is a force for change. She takes action and chooses to work on making the world a better place, even though she has the option of escaping to a better place. She's a mover and a shaker.