Quizzical Play #1: How to Not Play Dishonored

This month, everyone except me has been playing Dishonored. I read the blog posts, watch the Let’s Plays, and fantasize about the choices I might make – but right now, £39.99 for a new release is the difference between making rent and borrowing money. At the same time, I can't bear to be left out of the blogging frenzy that's struck up around the game. So how can I write about Dishonored without having played it? Simple: maybe nobody else is playing it either.

Conference Report: GameCamp

At a lecture given to the RSA, Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson asked: “Where do good ideas come from?” In five minutes he outlined a theory that the most fertile environment for ideas is one where they can meet, bounce off each other and joyfully breed – where half-formed hunches can combine through conversation to emerge as beautiful butterflies. That’s why the coffee houses were the intellectual centre of 18^th century London - and it's also why GameCamp is a good idea.

Moral Psychopaths: Blizzard's community policy is a sense-free zone

Once upon a time, on a little World of Warcraft server where I used to play, there was a guild called <LAZERYATTACKPEWPEW>. And that would have been the end of the story – but this was a Roleplaying server, where special rules demanded that guild names accord with the game’s atmosphere of cod-medieval fantasy. One day, the guild’s leader got a letter from a community moderator. which said the guild’s name had been reported for violating the roleplay naming policy and changed accordingly. With a wave of his magic wand, the moderator had given the guild a new name, far more in keeping with the ethos of roleplay: <Sword attack klangklang>.

This was the story that came to mind last week when Fox Van Allen reported on Joystiq that Blizzard’s swear filter had until recently censored 'homosexual' and 'transsexual' but let through 'fag' and 'faggot'. The connection struck me not because the whimsical flouting of policy and the predictable wailing and gnashing of roleplayer teeth that ensued are any way comparable either to the scandal of the swear filter or the hubbub surrounding it, but because it demonstrates how frequently Blizzard are either unwilling or unable to understand the purpose of their own rules. Come with me, traveller, on a journey into the crazy world of Warcraft.