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Eh, any publication can use that rationale, for whatever range they score between. Hypothetical example: ‘Nintendo Power doesn’t score below 4 because…’

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As for the atomisation of gameplay and experience; in the manner in which it is brought up in the article, seems to suggest an approach by whch, as you say, ‘there is no going back’. To reach the kind of philosophically motivated calls in the article suggest a vocabulary beyond that you would find on any widely read blog.

Which is why I would ask again what I commented in the article. Is this kind of writing still journalism?

I would prefer a more modest call – for the ‘I’ of NGJ; the ‘personal experiences’ to be grounded as a reflexive, intersubjective experience. That being said, being reflexive and self-critical in such pieces can end up seeming as adolescent soul-searching; but asking for the ‘I’ of gaming experiences to be a (socially, culturally, materially) situated knowledge I don’t think is too much to ask of NGJ – it requires a form of socio-cultural reflexivity that doesn’t require specialist vocabulary. You may run the risk of having politically charged pieces, but that is no bad thing.

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Tei says:

@Crispy: “Most importantly, it removed a lot of the unneccessary grind/reward in WoW and saves you time.”

Since the bot is online, it pay as much as a human player will do. The flat subscription rate. I guest what Blizzard want is stop a beavior players don’t like. There are people that avoid games with bots, and thats what Blizz want to stop.

If someone has a job and they use the bot to grind while they’re at work so they can do the fun stuff in their spare time, they are reducing the overall time spent in the game, thus reducing their overall money spent on subscriptions. IIRC subs make up the majority of Blizzard’s annual turnover, so if botting were to become mainstream they would be losing out on a considerable proportion of their yearly earnings.

Botting does have other negative effects. Gold mining or flooding the market with valuable items for sale can destabilise the in-game economy. There’s also the fact that by botting for rare items, even if not sold, their perceived value is decreased. It’s like how in TF2 in the first two months of the Medic achievements anyone who actually got them legitimately without resorting to organised farming on specialised servers was not regarded as highly as they would have been otherwise. Bragging rights were nullified by the common perception that most people with all of the achievements unlocked had done so through farming.

However, I will accept that -like the WoW example- this was down to the developers of the game making unreasonable expectations of the players. Here are some upgrades you will WANT to try out, and here’s a list of achievements you have to get before you can unlock them all (most of them achievable during normal play, some of them grindsome, some of them actually counter-productive to gameplay).

Let’s see there was:
Grindly
Accumulate 10 million total heal points (since reduced to 1 million)
Tardly
Kill 5 enemies in a single life, while having your ÜberCharge ready, but undeployed.
Twatly
Assist a fellow Medic in killing 5 enemies in a single life.
and Pratly
Assist in killing 3 enemies with a single ÜberCharge on a Scout.

People farm those achievements. People bot through the grind in WoW. Is it wrong? For those reasons, no.

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KG

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Deconstructing gender in GoW in relation to historiographic examples and cultural media more generally is possible without resort to terms such a ‘ludonarrative’…

But you can’t do it. Even in claiming it’s possible to escape ‘ludonarrative’ (In 0145/0146, no less!), you bring in historiography, deconstructionism and the notion of ‘cultural media.’ I thought this was maybe a joke, so I went back to have a gander at what you wrote originally:

Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism – one implying and transforming the other – we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things.

So, last night, in the RPS chatroom, in discussing what would be an effective reaction to the PSX piece, I proposed the only thing that would make sense would be something written from the perspective of a moronic PC-games fanatic. But then I tried to give an example:

Citizen Kane and Killzone 2? Are you kidding. Part of what made Citizen Kane a great movie was cutting-edge technology that allowed precision camera placement and deep focus to give lush layers of apparent meaning to an ultimately meaningless life. Combining this technological innovation with skillful framing and narrative genius, Welles made perhaps the best movie of all time. So too, part of what makes an FPS a great FPS is a cutting-edge technology video card that allows greater draw distances to give layers of insignificant significata to the ultimately meaningless slaughter at the core of the game. Combine this with precision aiming via a mouse, and you can get a great FPS. Killzone2 has none of this.

‘Academic speek’ may be a bad thing, but if we forego it, we end up, like Mr. Gillen writing for fourteen-year-olds, in the uncanny valley of drunken disingenuity. There’s no coming back.

Or, put it another way, John Madden speaks in germanic monosyllables, and yet manages to convey an idea.That makes him a successful sportscaster. Yet the rumour is that, outside of football, he doesn’t really talk much about anything.

At one point, a US network (ABC) brought in comedian Dennis Miller to do commentary on Monday Night Football. Miller’s whole schtick was to spew out a series of empty cultural references (e.g., if the team would dunk Gatorade on the coach, he’d yell something meaningless like “and it’s Watership Down for the Colts!”)

Miller got axed after one, maybe two, painful seasons. Madden is still making money.

So if Madden were to reflect on his job, or even to increase his vocabulary or interests, he wouldn’t appeal to such a broad audience, and he’d be worse. He’d probably also lose the association of his name with one of the most successful video game franchises ever.

You can’t go back.

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Is it me or is this creepy cabal comprised entirely of the game developer/publisher companies that either do not make many PC games, do not have a significant share of the market or otherwise do anything they can to encourage PC owners migrate to consoles? The hardware companies we know have a very vested interest in the PC, but every bit of behaviour from Capcom, Microsoft and Epic in the last couple of years has been nothing but destructive or non-contributional to PC as a platform.

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Which PC Gamer are you talking about? Though yeah, I think both PC Gamers tend to score a bit higher than Edge and Eurogamer.

@Ginger Yellow

Well, Eurogamer does actually score things “1″, while I can’t remember Edge ever going below a “2″.

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It’s like people scoffing at cheaters in singleplayer games. Okay, you wouldn’t cheat in that game. Bravo. Neither do I, mostly. But what does it matter if they do? It’s no skin off your nose.

Mind you, I’d never bot myself. If I find that WoW requires me to do time-intensive things that I don’t enjoy to get ahead, then I’ll stop playing and go do something else. So far that hasn’t been a problem. And I’m not obsessive enough to want to grind for uber-rare minipets or mounts or the like, so meh to those.

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The opening action on our part regarding the exploit included the total destruction of all the POS complexes involved.

This entailed flying to each one and basically nuking everything in sight – a fireworks show of epic proportions but with no witnesses except the GMs in the demolition team. </blockquote

Now that’s how you deal with exploiters in MMOs.
BIG SPLODES

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Couching it in academic-speek not a good thing.

Deconstructing gender in GoW in rleation to historiographic examples and cultural media more generally is possible without resort to terms such a ‘ludonarrative’…

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