Warcraft and Racism

Is this a problem?

Long-time readers of Be Healed! would rightly guess that I am an Alliance patriot. I mean that in the best sense of the word "patriot." I make no bones about it: the Horde is the instigators of most horrors brought on Azeroth. Yah yah, the ultimate evil of the Burning Legion played a hand in that, but the orcs made their own choices and need to reap their own consequences. And anybody who wants to stand next to them can get what's coming too. The basic orc point of view-- that they should be able to take whatever they need to survive because they have the strength to do so-- is no different from how a bully justifies his actions. And I won't stand for it.

Anyway, That's not really what I wanted to talk about today.

What I really want to talk about is, "Am I being racist when I slam on the orcs or Blood Elves?" I am always struck by a lot of people using a morally flexible point of view to justify actions or plot twists in Warcraft: WoW presents a "morally complex" story with many shades of grey and no absolute rights or wrongs. Or is it really a lot simpler than that?

And, yes, Warcraft is a game and that's a good thing. But playing games gives us chances to make bad choices and to explore morally gray areas in a context where the consequences aren't as dire as they are in real life. In order to get this benefit, though, we do have to examine the quandry.

Battlepet Blitz!

I think the bandicoon has got this one.

It's about two years since Pet Battles came along. How are they doing on the eve of Warlords of Draenor?

I'm pretty sure if you go back into my archives at this site, you'd find that I was a skeptic of this pet battles. Pokewow, I'm sure I called it, and didn't see a lot of value in co-opting a Nintendo game into WoW in the first place. 

Well, I stand corrected on that. It was good, mostly-mindless fun for those long waits between raids or whatever other downtime you're experiencing. I think I've enjoyed pet collecting more than pet battling, per se, but the whole thing was more entertaining than I ever expected. God help you if you're OCD though.

The Warlords of Draenor battle pets model has no significant changes to the system. There's a bevy of new pets, some things to do in your garrison and the new black market auction house will have rare pets that you might not have found in Pandaria. But the basic model of getting your pets to level 25 and then going out to beat up some trainers continues with no respite. Right now, there's no sign of a new Celestial Tournament, but you've got to believe that it will be a feature of patch 6.X announced at some point in the future.

As far as I'm concerned, this is just fine. I do wish they'd consider some refinements however:

Blizzard Got It Wrong: It's not a "Timeline"

What kind of portal is it?

Well. It's been two years since I posted. What can I say? It's been a rough two years, personally. Too much Real World business to do, diminishing returns on fun in game. I took a break from Azeroth and buckled down to mastering my universe.

But all things come in some variety of cycles and time has opened up somewhat and I'm back, at least for now.

It is the eve of the Warlords of Draenor. It's about three months out. The beta is allegedly going swimmingly. Garrisons are being considered, half my favorite abilities are being culled in The Great Ability Culling of 2014, and those are topics for another time.

Even when I wasn't playing, I was reading the blogs and caught all the Warlords reveal at the last Blizzcon and I've experienced the befuddlement of the greater WoW community in trying to figure out exactly what is going on with the premise of this expansion. At best, it seems very timey-wimey (if I may borrow an expression from The Doctor). At other points, it makes no sense whatsoever.

The big problem here is that this time travel business is the farthest edge of science fiction fantasy. There are some who have invested some serious thought into the business of this thing, but the facts are that we really don't even have a real-world working hypothesis for how time travel should play itself out, much less a theory or ... god help us... some laws of nature on the issue.  The point is that each universe pretty well makes things up as they go along. But, I'd argue, that some sort of crowdsourced understanding of temporal mechanics has risen to the top of the public conscious and should be observed.

The point is: Azeroth is not dealing with an alternate timeline in Warlords of Draenor. Azeroth is being invaded by a parallel universe.

It Was the End of the World As We Know It, Part 2

This is Not Our Story

It's his story.

Here on Summer Holidays, I've been able to catch up with a few titles on my XBox, in addition to WoW-- particularly the new content for Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim.

These two titles and so much WoW makes me think a lot about how games do a story. There's a lot of questions that come up in regards to the story the developers give us and how much of that story belongs to the players.

That last one is a doozy. Many game writers would hear me ask that question, sit up straight, aim their nose at the ceiling and tell me to go to hell. The whole controversy revolving around the ending of Mass Effect 3 has put writers in a corner trying to take control of their artistic license and come up with polite responses like the one suggested above. "We should be able to tell the kinds of stories we want to tell and make the games we want to make." There is some approach being taken here to suggest that the story in a game is inviolate as the printed words of a book.

I want to be sympathetic to that. And I don't suggest story-building by committee is the way to go, but these writers are forgetting the first lesson I learned in media classes a freshman in college: each medium for presenting a story or set of information has its own set of rules, its own strengths and weaknesses. The media are all different and you mustn't come to a new medium with the expectations of the old.

It Was the End of the World As We Know It, Part 1

A Familiar, Yet Broken World

The Talondeep Pass: Proof that there was more than one cataclysm to hit Azeroth.

The Midsummer Fire Festival started this week and I took the time to take a couple of characters on a tour of the world. Desecrating some fires while praising some others is a relaxing way to gain some cash, but more importantly, these sorts of world events are a chance for me to look over my history in WoW and put things in perspective.

It's been a while in coming and it's time for the Cataclysm Post-mortem. The Cataclysm is over and getting to stack a few things up in my mind helps to formulate things that need to be said.

Personally, there has been a great deal to take me away from WoW: a really big move, new social pressures, new job, and graduate school all made it so that a lot of my social structure in WoW vanished from beneath me, and I never got to raid properly in this expansion. Those two things are the most important parts of WoW to me and I half expected my interest in the game to wan this past year, but yet that hasn't happened. Nevertheless, it has colored the way I look at most of what went on with the Cataclysm. I have tried not to let this unduly affect my perceptions of the state of the game.

But make no mistakes: Cataclysm was a bummer.

Peaking Under the Hood of the MoP Resto Shaman

Come to think of it, I'm not quite sure where Merinna's hood is.

Hey, did you guys know that "merinna" seems to mean "sailing" in Finnish? Oh the things you'll discover via Google Image Search. I want desperately to put a picture of a newborn Merinna I found at the same time on here, but that's not a nice thing to do. Rest assured, if you Google-search "merinna" you'll get a lot of pictures of sailboats, this oddly big-headed baby, born last month, and your friendly neighborhood shaman.

I miss healing. Because of the strain of the past year and a half and a general dissatisfaction with the model of healing they cooked up for shamans this expansion, it's been a year since I last really healed anybody doing anything. I leveled resto back in the days when everybody had one specc that cost too much money to respec    all that frequently and I healed dungeons all the way up to the level cap.

So that said, I think I might need to get back to my first profession because ...

The Good Things - 

No major tools are being taken away - Of course, Blizzard doesn't really much take spells out of the game, but they do things like change the mana costs to make something ineffective in their "vision" for that class. My first take on the major spells a healing shaman needs suggests that everything is on the table. For now. 

Diablo III is (not) Here!

booooooo!

May 15! Diablo is here!

Sort of.

This morning, I got up and set my computer to downloading Diablo III files and installing them all so that when I got home from work this afternoon, I could put my things away, change clothes, and really give Diablo a whirl.

But no.

We are in the process of performing an emergency maintenance for Diablo III servers in the Americas to resolve several issues that are currently impacting the game. Thank you for your patience.

This is the result of that zealous Digital Rights Management (DRM) plan Blizzard is using. I want to play a solo campaign, using files I've downloaded onto my own computer that just doesn't need any updates from centralized server. And yet Blizzard feels the only way they can protect their property is for me to be connected 24/7.

So, yeah. My Diablo III experience is off to a great start.  Not.