It has been a long week — lots of 12 hours days. I have a huge backlog of polished, AAA, commercial games to play. But instead, I find myself drawn here:
The Retro Remakes Competition 2008 Entries : Retro Remakes.
At the company’s holiday party we were just talking about the old Bruce Lee game… and there it is. 🙂 Controls just as stiff as ever, too! And there’s Fort Apocalypse…
It is like playing a giant game of telephone.
Accurate (The Guardian):
Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW.
Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the headline “How to be jobless in a down economy”):
Raph Koster at Massively picked up on a thread at the f13 forums in which we learn that a recruiter in the online media industry has been told by employers numerous times to straight-up avoid World of Warcraft players as potential hires.
Completely wrong (Softpedia):
Employers Don’t Like World of Warcraft Players
They make bad employeesOnline gaming journalist Raph Koster has posted on his blog a statement he received from a job recruitment consultant accurately showing that even though some people cite the leadership experience gained from establishing a guild in WoW, employers tend to avoid such persons.
Not only did this little story bring down the blog, but it also managed to reach the Times of London, Silicon Valley Insider, etc etc. Yeesh.
Of course, this comment on BoingBoing did crack me up:
We are now running the latest.
Once again, we triggered an automatic shutdown at the host. I blame the WoW/hiring story, which made it to the Times of London, the Guardian, and hundreds of other sites.
Spotted this on the f13 forums:
I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in conversation I happened to mention I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online games, which I described as “the ones before World of Warcraft” (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a handful of days into MMOG playing – as opposed to discussing them – I’ve obsessed over bicycles and cycling instead).
He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc. I mentioned that some people have written about MMOG leadership experience as a career positive or a way to learn project management skills, and he shook his head. He has been specifically asked to avoid WoW players.
I think the funniest bit is all the MMOG players in the thread agreeing with the recruiter…
If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.
So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.
This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.
For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?
— “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired
