Interview: Jason Rohrer wants you to come home and find your family dead

...and in the game? (Honestly, he said it! It's at the bottom!)

Jason Rohrer was the final developer I interviewed for my New Statesman article. His forthcoming game, The Castle Doctrine, has become embroiled in the political storm over gun rights and self-defence. What fascinated me about it was that it simulated a little world with the specific intention of bringing about numerous armed robberies. After the Trayvon Martin, the Colorado theatre shooting, CeCe McDonald and Sandy Hook, it doesn't get much more political than that.

Jason Rohrer has a long indie pedigree. Five minute mortality simulator Passage did little for me but was played by many; Sleep Is Death allowed players to create stories for each other, while Chain World turns Minecraft into religious mythology. He's 35 years old and has been playing videogames almost his entire life. He became a programmer and studied Computer Science; these days he's able to make a full-time living from his games, and lives with his wife and three kids in Davis, California.

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.