Vox ex Machina » anthropology

Star Wars: the Old Republic Ilum PvP After Patch 1.1 and Faction Imbalances

Helvetica — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:06:35 +0000

With patch 1.1, Star Wars: the Old Republic discovered that faction imbalance can really wreck open-world PvP and by offering incentives for players to play open-world, but without a mechanism that permits regrouping really amplifies the problem. As a result, BioWare discovered with SWtOR culture that some things come with unintended consequences.

As a relatively new property, SWtOR is still growing up.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

BioWare Responds to Bans/Suspensions Involving ‘/getdown’ Exploit and Looting Boxes on Ilum

Helvetica — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:00:09 +0000

You too can become invulnerable in Star Wars: The Old Republic but just getting down and grooving — with the /getdown bug — although BioWare has fixed this exploit as of the 5th of Jan 2012. Also, keep in mind that looting boxes on Ilum could lead to getting suspended (or banned) from the game.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

After 5 Years “Serenity Now Bombs World of Warcraft Funeral” Still Speaks to the Ethics of Griefing in Video Games

Helvetica — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:44:19 +0000

Jerks are ubiquitous in the video game community and PvP servers additionally self-select for their sort of behavior.

It’s impossible to have a community the size of World of Warcraft and not having at least one guild willing to ruin someone else’s day on any single shard that permits PvP. In this case, a Horde guild holding an in-game funeral learned the hard way that when you stand around in no armor, in a contested zone, a small band of people can totally bring ruin and sorrow onto you. And also, at the same time, many people condemned the actions of the attackers of taking advantage of the ritual.

In the end, Serenity Now got their "fifteen minutes of fame," but Fayejin — the dead PvP player memorialized in the "bombed" funeral — will be remembered for how her funeral led to a flashpoint in griefing and the MMO community.

Link, via MMO Anthropology.

Tavelogue Azeroth: The Darkmoon Faire and Patch 4.3 The Hour of Twilight

Helvetica — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:19:39 +0000

The Darkmoon Faire had some upgrades come World of Warcraft patch 4.3 and now it has its own island. With the advent of the Hour of Twilight patch, you can now visit the Faire out in their strange recesses–but you can’t fly there–and there’s a great deal of weird things going on.

Get tokens, get shot out of a cannon, have your fortune read.

A lot of things for any anthropologist to get up to.

American Anthropologist event in Second Life, Sept 1st 2009

Helvetica — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:00:00 +0000

While Second Life isn’t exactly a video game, it does touch very closely on the digital world paradigm of gamers and influences our rights and abilities in this medium. So when we hear tell that a prominent anthropologist who studies these things is getting interviewed in a readily accessible virtual world, we like to bring it to everyone’s attention.

Can’t get there in real life? Second Life is only an Internet connexion away.

The UK Second Life community and the UK Department of Anthropology invite all to attend — in real life or in Second Life — an interview by AJ Kelton with Tom Boellstorff (SL: Tom Bukowski), Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association and author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008). Mark your calendar and be sure to join us:

Tuesday, September 1st
2:30 pm Second Life Time (5:30 pm Eastern)
CHSSSouth Amphitheater in Second Life
OR
UK Student Center Theatre in real life (near the UK Federal Credit Union) – we’ll have the interview available for viewing and a microphone on hand in case anyone wants to use Randolph Hollingsworth’s SL avatar (Bella Yan) to ask questions and interact with the inworld participants.

Link, via the University of KY Island Blog.