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The Soapbox: Why we grief - a therapy session
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Welcome to the Massively Psychiatric Center for Gamers, Griefers, and Greater Internet F-wads (link NSFW). I'm Dr. Reahard, and while I'm most definitely an armchair psychologist, psychiatrist, and MMOlogist, pay no attention to any of that. I'm more than qualified to help you determine whether or not you're a bleep (sorry, a griefer). So please, have a seat, make yourself comfortable, and let's talk about you. Tell me about yourself. Do you relish that feeling of power you get when messing with another human being? Is there a certain sense of being alive, a rush if you will, that only comes around when you bleep with another person? Does said bleeping happen exclusively in video games where your actions carry no perceivable repercussions? Are you secretly frustrated with a banal and disturbingly meaningless white-collar existence? Does releasing your inner bleep in a (theoretically) anonymous online environment scratch the itches made manifest by a minivan, 2.3 kids, and the otherwise inescapable confines of suburbia?
GDC 2011: BioWare's Damion Schubert on designing for loners
Nothing stirs up a good MMO debate like the age-old question of whether or not the genre should cater to solo players. BioWare's Damion Schubert, lead systems designer on the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, recently added a bit of fuel to that particular fire during a presentation at last week's GDC in San Francisco. Schubert's talk focused on loners in the massively multiplayer space, and while it's no surprise to anyone that TOR is being built with the solo player in mind, it may come as a bit of a revelation that BioWare isn't aiming to "dumb down" the MMORPG as some fans have suggested. On the contrary, Schubert states that MMOs feature "hardcore stuff. This is hardcore gameplay, and we have to figure out how to get the solo player in a position where they want to take part in this, where they feel comfortable with the social circles, where they feel like they can be contributors."
