xenophobia
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Ads force German xenophobes to hear the plights of refugees
People searching for anti-immigrant YouTube videos in Germany are going to have an awkward time doing so thanks to a novel advertising campaign by Refugees Welcome. The organization has put together a series of 30-second spots featuring real refugees who discuss their situations using a potent mixture of perspective, fact and humor to counter the country's rising xenophobic tide.
Wings Over Atreia: A rant against xenophobia in Aion
You know one of the great things about a weekly opinion piece? The ability to about-face and change topics when inspiration strikes... or you just can't bite your tongue any longer. And I am going to exercise that right right now: I'm diverging a bit from my intended thoughts about more of Aion's upcoming 3.5 goodies and addressing something that has been gnawing at me for the past few weeks. Actually, address might be too gentle of a word because the more I think about it, the more it is turning into an outright rant. And you know that it takes quite a bit for me to get riled up enough to unleash; with only three rants in over two years, I definitely lag behind in the rant department! What could be getting my goat enough to actually fire up the ol' rant-o-matic? It's not anything that's been done -- or not done -- by NCsoft. The company is in the clear this time. It's actually the players. More specifically, it is the unacceptable attitude of bigotry and intolerance that's being heaved about in Aion against other nationalities and other languages. A great big W. T. F. here folks. Now I am not accusing all players of this, not by a long shot. But the fact that it is cropping up with any frequency is a problem. Something needs to be said. So I am saying it.
Free for All: Turbine's pristine payment plan perfects pay-to-win
There is one recurring statement that bothers me to no end, largely because it is simply not true. Most of the time if I pursue the player who uses the term, he will admit to using it only to justify his dissatisfaction with a handful of free-to-play games. That term is "free-to-play is pay-to-win." Essentially, the term refers to gaining advantages over other players through one's pocketbook, by buying power. As someone who has played, investigated, talked about or interviewed developers of over 100 free-to-play games, I can tell you that a "pay-to-win" scenario exists in the minority of games, not in the majority as some would have you believe. Most of the comments from the "pay-to-win" playbook come in more recent times, but that could be because my column has provided a nice, fertile space for everything anti-free-to-play. But I have found the most vocal of the detractors to be referencing recent free-to-play games like Allods Online, primarily because they may have loved it so much, yet did not want to pay a single dime for it -- and because they simply had not played many free-to-play games before that. Allods Online was, essentially, their main experience with free-to-play. Meanwhile, I am often shown DDO (or now, Lord of the Rings Online) as some kind of "proper" way to do a cash shop. Ironically, Turbine is now not only the largest, but the closest to a true pay-to-win developer. Anything larger would exist outside of North America.
NPR sympathetic to goldfarmers
When Friiv tipped us to the recent NPR interview dealing with goldfarming, I was eager to take a listen. Finally, a non-gamer media outlet will hear our frustration. How wrong I was. The interview, which ran on May 14th takes a completely different view of the goldfarming phenomenon. A lot about what bothers me about goldfarming is imagining the conditions in which the farmers must be working, and indeed the interview did liken the goldfarming companies to Nike sweatshops. Tens of thousands of Chinese workers sit for 12 hours shifts hunched over computer screens, standing in the same spot in game and killing the same monster over and over. The gold they make in a day's work goes for around $13.00 in the , but would only sell for $4.00 in .
Zombies, Aliens, or Nazis? Designing the perfect game enemy.
The net's full of debate about the perfect game protagonist (ninjas, pirates, or robots?) but too little real debate about what makes the perfect in-game enemy. In comments on yesterday's post about upcoming Xbox 360 (Japan) zombie stomper Oneechanbara, Joystiq reader Gimbal posited that risen corpses may well be the ideal enemy: "Zombies, like Nazis, are the perfect enemy for video games." Zatso? What makes a perfect enemy anyway? The perfect enemy is:
