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Random Bytes #6 - “R.I.P., Mr. Gygax”
By Cameron Sorden | March 5, 2008
It’s a busy day for me, so it seemed like a great day for another short Random Bytes column. Here’s some quick news commentary for you all.
Random Byte: Gary Gygax, co-creator of the much-loved Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper game, died recently. I never met him, but I feel immense gratitude towards him for creating an activity that I enjoy greatly. His legacy will live on in both the continuation of his original game and all of the modern spin-offs which DnD inspired.
Lots of people are commenting on this today, but one article in particular annoyed me… I normally like Razorwire quite a lot for both his quick news posting and his irreverent tone, but I can’t help but feel that his article title was in poor taste: “Gary Gygax fails Saving Throw vs Death.” Come on, man. Isn’t that a little unnecessary? Also annoying, though not quite as bad, is the Ars Technica article title: “D&D Cocreator Gary Gygax Now Beyond the Scope of Healing Spells.” A little respect for the deceased, please? It’s not a cute joke to his friends and family, I’m sure.
Random Byte: Wolfshead wrote a good, if slightly alarmist, article about WoW’s upcoming hero class, the Death Knight. I think it’s definitely worth reading, and I agree with many of his points about the class. Tobold commented on a similar issue a while back, too, but I can’t find the article for the life of me. In any case, I’m of the opinion that instead of a new class, hero classes should be power extensions of existing classes. Bleh. We’ll see how this works out.
Random Byte: It turns out that it’s not just the guys that like to role-play as the opposite gender. In fact, women are much more likely to do so if a recent report can be believed.
Boffins from the University’s International Gaming Research Unit, part of the Psychology faculty, discovered that women were more likely to take on male roles in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with 70 per cent admitting that they had done so. Men seem to be less inclined (although not by much) to explore their feminine side with only 54 per cent strutting their stuff as a female persona.
I think that that’s really interesting, as its not traditionally what you’d expect. I wonder if it has anything to do with getting harassed as a female avatar (which I find hard to believe, given how many males play with female avatars), or whether it’s for another reason entirely? Fortunately, they investigated:
Chief researcher, Zaheer Hussain, commented: “It seems that women gender swap for a variety of reasons, such as to avoid unsolicited male approaches on their female characters, or because they felt male characters were treated better by other males during the course of the game.”
The main reason males gave as to why they took on female personas was so that they could flirt with male characters to gain game perks like extra money or weapons. Yeah, right.
Interesting.
Random Byte: Ryan Shwayder tackles the problem of mature gamers and readers seeking heavier fare. He suggests that games aren’t going to change for the players– you either need to seek out something different, or deal with what you have. This makes me a little sad, since it implies that games which appeal to veteran players will not become the norm, as there’s always a new crop of players (though this makes sense). It seems that older, more experienced gamers will just have to wait for a company to make games that cater specifically to them. *cough*CCP*cough*
That’s all for today. I’m off to do some work.
Topics: Random |