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| It's 1986, I'm 20 and this is as good as it gets :D |
Success is defined, in it's most basic form, as
the favourable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavours. You set out to do something, you manage it, you succeed. Back when Pretty In Pink was the film to watch (hey, there was flirting in the Computer Lab. THERE WAS A COMPUTER LAB :O) personal success was less about "showing them they didn't break me" and more about having the courage to be out in the first place. If there was a basement room as far away from cool as it was possible to get, that's where you'd have found me back then (and no, I'm not just being self-depreciating. I was woefully naive and unprepared for what the World was about to throw at me.) I often wonder how I'd fare if I was twenty now and I reckon the world I find myself in is a lot more geek-friendly than it was back in the 1980's. Mind you, back then we had James Spader before he went to seed. You win some, and then you lose some...
I had a couple of conversations on Twitter this morning: one on what it is to be cool, and another on how people determine their personal success in game. There are lots of finishing lines to make it to in Azeroth, after all: Glory of the Raider, 8/8 Heroic, Server First... or the first person to 150 Vanity Mounts, or to grab the Professor title. Any of these have the
potential to bestow Coolness upon their recipients, depending on which of the Cool Kids' Tables you happen to aspire to sit on... though of course the
really Cool Kids don't have a table with the rest of us (at least not one you'll ever get to see...) I'll stop there, because I have real problems sometimes taking myself seriously when I have a conversations with that particular C word in them. Being cool and having success are both horribly subjective states. On certain days, for instance, logging in at all can be considered successful. Saying 'thank you' when someone helps you out in Trade has the potential to be an immensely cool thing to do, if the world around you is slinging mud at each other. You have to take your victories sometimes when you can find them.
This week's been a lot like that, if I'm honest. There's a discussion going on that started with
a request that I can both identify and agree with, and which was subsequently
addressed on a wider forum which has produced a not-unexpected reaction. It was proof, if it were needed, that there is vast breadth of difference between what people consider acceptable and what is inappropriate in a Gaming Environment. I'm still desperately trying to work out where I stand on all of this, having spent the best part of two days trying to find an answer. The closest I've managed to come until this post was via Twitter:
Even though I can't tell you where my personal definition of Cool currently resides, I know deep down in the fabric of my being that trampling over people's personal feelings if they consider the objectivisation of women in gaming as bad and wrong is just NOT COOL. It's not just women either, it's anything/anyone that marginalises a person's rights. So what if it's just a game: this may be where people come to relax and unwind, but does that mean it has to ignore the basic codes of conduct that we live by? Reality is big and mean and horrible, yes we get that EVERY DAY on the news, but for an average early teen (for instance) if the signals that are sent by designers to those people playing aren't strong and decent ones, we could all be in a lot of trouble. I feel sometimes I'm an exception as a mother who actually watches what her son plays and takes time to understand how the world he inhabits is portrayed. I also know gaming companies always like to roll out the 'we have a rating on our games, you need to understand the complexity of the content' statement when people try and blame games for bad behaviour. The reality is far more complicated than I think a lot of people want to consider.
I recall the horrible feeling that resulted with the quest you'd get in Northrend from the Kirin Tor mages before you headed to The Nexus, where you'd be forced to torture a mage for the information he had. That quest remains, I still hate doing it, because torture
even in a game is not something I can cope with. If Ji Firepaw's dialogue remains when the game goes live I'll do what I did when I played him first on beta: ignore it and roll Alliance. However, there
might be a chance that dialogue will change as a result of this discussion being instigated. There's the key, right there,
someone started it. Even if you don't agree with the sentiment there are many, many people who consider them valid. That should be enough to make the Devs consider a change. This isn't asking for a Mass Effect about face in direction or ending, it's not expecting that it will be done (at least in my mind), it is simply an understanding that words have a great deal of power, and when used well they have the ability to alter your World. What you say, and how you say it, defines what you are after all...
If this happened, at least in my mind, Blizzard will have done a very cool thing indeed, and I won't have a problem saying it. If I've also managed to make any sense with all this, I'll consider that a major success to boot...
