kip/bot/blog

“Our guild just moved up to number 20 on our server.”

I’m riding the subway home with a friend, the guy who, among many other contributions to my life, got me hooked on World of Warcraft (WoW). I haven’t played in forever, but the night before I logged onto WoW specifically to talk to him. (We’re at a point where I log on to WoW and we schedule subway rides home to get caught up.)

We talk a little bit longer when I realized what he said. “Wait. How do you know your guild’s rank?” Well . . .

Turns out (how often do I use that phrase? this is the last time) that Aspir from the guild Ludicrous Speed has created a site that taps into the WoW Armory and, using an algorithm all his own, ranks guilds. He’s doing for World of Warcraft what Bill James and the SABERMetricians have done for baseball: created an objective data-driven way of understanding and evaluating a game while at the same time giving fanatics and geeks a whole new way to spend endless hours talking about something they love.
So let’s unpack the sentence for nonWoWers (and make sure I’m getting it right).

One of the best things about Wow is that, while you can in fact play solo, the most crazy over-the-top (or, as the kids say off the hook) fun to have is doing group activities. These include quests, which every player needs to do to efficiently advance and which requires working in concert with 3 – 5 other players. Then there are raids. Raids are special places in the WoW game which are restricted to players of certain levels, contain really nasty hard to beat bad guys, and yield nifty treasures. To beat the nasties, you usually need over a dozen people with the right mix of skills and who work well together. Players create guilds for a variety of reasons, but most guilds are heavily focused on raids.

I’ve only been on raids three or four times. They are time-consuming to actually do, since most raids are complex and require multiple tries. They even take time to coordinate. Raid parties are usually organized by the in-game chat system, then people have to fly to the location, often stopping at a bank to pick up supplies, or going to a store to buy “mats” (materials) so they can make potions, bandages or other items needed for the raid. That’s a prohibitive amount of time for me, but the few times I have done it, it’s been some of the funnest gaming I’ve ever done. For a better feel of a raid, check out youTube for videos that guilds publish of their raids. (There is a whole genre of videos celebrating raid completions or mocking the d-bags who get a little caught up in it. Some of them show quite elaborate planning processes, including spreadsheets, maps, Xes and Os that look like a football playbook.)

So, that’s a raid. The WoW Armory is an API where players can check out other players and guilds. Here’s my main character:

The character name is Vishniak (named after Floyd Wayne Vishniak, from Neal Stephenson’s Interface. most of my characters are named after Stephenson characters and it’s great fun to run into other Stephenson characters — could I be any dorkier? oh yes . . .). Vishniak belongs to the guild “Victory not Vengeance” (I didn’t come up with the name, but I am proud to have been a charter member). Most important, Vish owns the “Destroyer’s Mantle”. If you look at the description, you’ll see that it “Binds when picked up.” That means that once I pick up the object, I can’t give, sell, or trade it to another player. Certain objects which bind on pick up (“BOP”), can only be acquired after the successful completion of a raid. Put another way, I can only own certain objects if I was present at the killing of a particular bad guy.

So, we have a classic web2.0 thing here. An open API that exposes data, a small, fanatical audience with no small amount of technical chops, and a larger, less technical audience that is curious about the data and will engage spiritedly in detailed conversations.

When Bill James began crunching through baseball stats by hand, he said he wanted to find baseball ‘truth’. Aspir describes his beginnings in slightly less exalted, but equally geeky terms:

I’ve been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, “Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?”.

Gruul is a baddie in a raid. Notice, that he says “for the first time” (this becomes significant in debates about his scoring system). What Aspir did to answer this question was create a formula that would measure the strength of a guild. The formula is based on the BOP items possessed by a guild’s members. If you look in Vishniak’s bag above, you can assume that I am carrying around my best gear and you can tell from the BOP items which raids I have participated in (I can only have a Gruul BOP item if I was there at the time he was dropped). You can ladder up from Vishniak to my guild and find the other BOP items owned by other guild members.

So you could create a formula that assigns points to a guild like so:

gather a list of the BOP items owned by individual players in a guild, distill that list (de-dupe) to a list of bad guys beaten, assign values to those bad guys, add up the points and that’s the score of the guild. Rinse, repeat, and rank as needed.

Number geeks, baseball fans, and AD&D players will immediately see the logic of the formula and quickly identify at least four areas for intense theological and dorkily fun debate: how do you assign point values to the raids? how do you handle guilds who have completed a raid several times? shouldn’t you divide the points by the number of members? aren’t there other things that we should factor into a guild’s strength like average level, complete sets of equipment? It’s like asking who is the better baseball player, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? There are so many factors, objective, subjective and somewhere in between, that the arguments can go on forever and be entertaining for almost that long. (The most recent definitive answer to that question can be found in Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s Babe Ruth, btw. Bonds ekes out wins on hitting and fielding, but Ruth’s pitching — which the guys at Baseball Prospectus convert into runs contributed, the only measure that counts — puts him over the top. That discussion is also a good overview of baseball statistics’ current state of evolved geekdom. The exercise of converting pitching — the quintessential run prevention activity — into runs contributed — the atomic unit of baseball stats is — nerdazzling.)

And these debates are already starting. The FAQ on the guild ranking site, called Wowjutsu, is a quick look at the major issues under discussion (the equivalent of on-base percentage explanations, at the beginning of a baseball stats book — it’s important, but there’s so much more). The issues that have bubbled up to the FAQ indicate a rich future for those so inclined: the scoring of multiple kills of a boss, how to handle guild alliances, dealing with guild defections. Dig into the notes and you’ll see updates about tweaks to the formulas.

This is yet another testament to how good a game WoW is. No matter how many hours you’ve played it, no matter how many times you’ve done every single thing there is to do in the game, there is a way to breathe new life into it. Over the last three years, I have grown bored of the game to the point where I have uninstalled it to reclaim disk space, only to hear about something that pulls me back in This time, for players, it’s the Bill Jamesian search for WoW truth.

My Name is Earl is my new guilty pleasure TV viewing (still on iTunes, so each episode is only 23 minutes of my life that I could have spent reading Tolstoy).  (And, yes, I know I am very late to this, like every other, party.)

Julia was baffled as to why she was having trouble following Catalina’s jags in Spanish.  Turns out, context is everything.  The translations turn out to be the kind of self-aware gags that made Earl famous when they screwed around with the border space and easter eggs for HDTVs:

In “Barn Burner”(1.11), while it appears that Catalina is cursing out Joy, she is actually saying: “I want to thank the Latino audience that tunes in towatch the show every week. And to those of you who aren’t Latino, I want to congratulate you for learning another language.”

“In “Number One”(1.24), Catalina appears to be matching Joy’s drunken insults with insults of her own, but she’s actually saying:  “With this, we conclude our first season of Earl! We’re very grateful for your company, and we hope to see you next fall!”

In “Robbed a Stoner Blind”(2.8), the cartoon version of Catalina delivers this message: “This was going to be me taking my head off to dust with it, but animation is so expensive, it’s better you see me dance!”

In “The Trial”(2.23), after being asked to be a character witness for Joy, Catalina replies: “Thanks for watching our show; we will miss you this summer.Doesn’t it seem funny to you that Earl thinks I’m saying how much I hate Joy while in reality I’m saying how much I love you?”

In “The Frank Factor”(3.4) Catalina explains that a continuity error was noticed by the producers.

In “Frank’s Girl”(3.6) Catalina says after being photographed in the bathroom: “if you were offended by these jokes, we’re very sorry but we thought they were funny.”

Barely an hour ago, I twittered the following: “koyaanisqaatsi: meeting a friend on the subway on the ride home to get caught up — twisted.” I’ve received three communications (one email, one FB, and twitter message, asking what that word is). My language base is slipping into oldness.

Koyaanisqaatsi is a 1980s movie with images of modern life scored by Phillip Glass. It comes from a Hopi word, meaning life out of balance, out of control, crazy life. I think I have used that word dozens of times over the years, thinking it cliche, but not having any other references to cover what I wanted.

But it looks like this word is falling into the same phrase trashbin as other phrases like-aged friends have had to abandon. Reagan-era+ political phrases “you’re no John Kennedy”, “they’re you go again”, “I paid for this mic”, “morning in America”, “stay the course”, “where’s the beef” no longer work (I’m not sure there’s any phrasemaking from politics anymore after “mission accomplished”, and the “tubes” of the “internets”). Monty Python references, like the “we’re coming with you” line from the stupid guards scene, they don’t work or they backfire — like using Lucy lines. Buckaroo Banzai, not so much. Single. Word. Batman. Constructions. Seem Dead.
I need to get back to the Simpsons (post season 3, pre season oh I don’t know 12?), take notes on SouthPark, read more Klosterman . . . I’m slipping.

Crap:

It’s even got fiction right now, but I can’t put it out there.

NYT as an article about the brand identity of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.  The creator, Brian Collins, keyed off of Gore’s use of the phrase of “we the people” in his book, and then went a step further to see the me that makes up the we.

“What’s good is that the idea of ‘me’ — and personal initiative — still lives inside the idea of ‘we’”, he says.  It is also a word game that forces the ‘reader’ to decipher, and, once that is accomplished, makes the logo even more memorable.

Zzzzzz.  Mii/Wii, Women’s entertainment network, yawn.

But.  The reason to note it here is that this is Muhammad Ali’s coinage.  At the end of When We Were Kings, George Plimpton tells a story about Ali’s enduring charisma.  Ali is at Harvard commencement, he is sick and has slowed down.  While giving his talk, someone yells out “champ, give us a poem”.  Ali points to his chest, says “Me,” points out to the crowd, says “We.”  Plimpton, smiling with delight at memories of Ali throughout the interview laughs, says he looked it up and it is in fact the shortest poem known.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Interesting memory exercise.  I saw the movie a few years ago (it’s fantastic, I had forgotten what an amazing force Ali was) and I very distinctly remember Plimpton describing the poem as a union of audience and speaker.  Wikiquotes, however, has it as “While I’m talking to you I’m thinking up the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feels to be great as I am: Me — wheee!”
Until I rewatch the movie, I prefer to rely on my memory.  I think, and hope it’s better than the champ saying wheeeeee.

Yet another immensely useful link from business thinking sherpa Todd, this time about how Blizzard software stays innovative. The list is interesting, if unsurprising:

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own products
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different kinds of customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics boulster experience
9. Demand excellence, or you’ll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

Blizzard is the creator of Diablo and World of Warcraft, two games to which I have given many, many hours of my life. They are also two games in which a sense of place has really taken root. Just last night I twittered:

Elwynn Forest is where I started my first character. When I bought a horse, at level 40, I travelled all the way back to Elwynn Forest for it, “local boy makes good” and all that.

A street sign that I saw with a fun graffiti prompted me to write “mmmmm, fresh meat”, a line from a character called the Butcher in Diablo (one which players often heard too often, since this was a tough, hard-to-beat, mid-game boss).

And finally, screenshots with amusing sense of places, like this labor dispute that I had walked into:

The article focuses on WoW, which has been the focus of the company’s efforts for several years. There were some fun bits, such as how the “Samurai panda” managed to put off both Chinese and Japanese players, the heavy emphasis on working with high level and low-level players (probably WoW’s greatest strength), and the way in which they specialize:

At Blizzard, small teams focus on narrow elements of the game. For example, different teams of artists specialize in trees, rocks, the game environment, and monsters, said lead producer Brack.

Multi-disciplinary “strike teams” serve as critics of how the different aspects of the game work together.

Point number 8, about the stats, is also interesting. WoW is constantly being tweaked to maintain game balance and players are keenly aware of, and generally glad for the game balancing. Blizzard has character class committees that meet regularly to decide if a character’s skills, equipment, and attributes are too strong or weak in comparison to other players. Patches, which happen with great frequency and remarkable ease, frequently “nerf” or weaken a class attribute that has proven too strong or easy in the field. Blizzard also spends a great deal of time watching emergent gameplay to see what players are doing that they hadn’t planned or expected . . . creating a nice feedback system to get creative ideas.

But, I think it’s really important to point out the level of focus Blizzard has. It has a very narrow range of game types and titles and works to make them incredibly good. Anyone who has played RPGs before WoW is regularly impressed at how they’ve improved nearly every mechanic of the genre — the quests are fun, funny, and interesting; resource collecting and skill acquisition are generally fun; major things like the introduction of a mount or a class item/skill come at just the right time; and exploration and paying close attention to things (like the plane crash in the fly-over to IronForge) always pays off. WoW is also does an amazing job of combining directed activity with emergent gameplay. They’ve picked a genre — RPG — and chosen to do it really, really, absurdly well.

A few other companies have hit the billion dollar mark with a similar focus. Rockstar Games started with the memorable insight that not all gamers read Lord of the Rings, some of them watched Goodfellas, and Bioware just wanted to bring the AD&D game system to the computer.

Nuts and Volts is one of the few magazines I subscribe to that I go through cover to cover each month. This is odd, cuz I don’t really understand it and read very little of it. It’s one of those magazines, like certain books I own, that I aspire to read and which I benefit from looking through.

For the uninitiated (or well-adjusted), Nuts and Volts is an electronics hobbyist magazine. It’s got product reviews, news (including the circuited contact lens), projects each month, loads of advertisements (which is a big part of the charm – electronics geeks writing copy and figuring out images that sell), tutorials, circuit walk-throughs.

My knowledge of electronics came from a month between jobs where I mucked around with the Arduino and some solderless breadboards. I’m better than a beginner, but the intermediate stuff in Nuts and Volts is beyond me right now. So, each month I browse it looking for content that helps me past my current plateau of understanding and, more importantly, I revel in the making culture that I admire.

The April 2008 issue (cover above) had particular charms for me. The cover story is “High Voltage Power Supply”(!) featuring a nixie display board and the line: “It’s fun to collect and experiment with forgotten technology! But, you will need a stable high voltage power supply to get started.” This might be the equivalent of the swimsuit issue for Nuts and Volts readers . . . I really can’t tell.

I loved this piece, a project for a timed/self-monitoring bird feeder, requested by a reader:

Retired, limited income, limited mobility guy . . . and they do a project for him to build a bird feeder. love Love LUV it.

And, lastly, you gotta love the advertisements:

I just had my first twitter exchange of real, compelling value. Whitney Hess, whom I know only by reputation (she gets lot of trackbacks and twitter-points from my network) is responsible for it.

It started with me twittering something like: “Just put Shirky’s new book in my bag. That’s a pretty good first step toward reading it.”

The twitters continue:

To which she responds:

A collaboratively generated insight and gag. These twitter people might be onto something.

Seen in Dumbo just this morning:

A very special moment.  This Dumbo bus stop has been moved to yesterday . . . until previous, or should I say advance, notice.

A friend in Facebook has an album called “pick me ups”:

I wish this were bigger on Facebook, because it’s a great way to help clients and others understand the varied uses of photo-sharing and having personal information on the web. This is an album full of great pictures of friends in very happy states, nieces and nephews, a few outdoor shots. From the title, she’s put them there so that she can browse through her pictures for a little emotional lift.

I’m sure meta is the wrong word, but there’s something meta-seeming about the title itself. It’s originally for her own consumption, a way to have her favorite pictures readily available, but there’s a willingness to share. It might be even stronger, that there’s an indifference to an audience — I will build it and don’t care if anyone comes, cuz I built it for me. That might be the reason for lower-case in the title.

My flickr photostream is kind of a mess in that sense. I put up pictures I want people to see, I put up images that amuse me and which I hope will amuse others, sometimes I use it as a note-taking device (a handyman sign on a light pole where the little number strips at the bottom are all taken away). I post a lot of screengrabs and scans there, cuz I want them for future reference.

Among marketers, the emphasis on audience size is still the first filter for any understanding of an internet experience. There are still concerns about quality of the audience, but size is a gating factor.

This emphasis on size of audience misses the complex relationship internet users have with their “audiences”. We’re not necessarily seeking one. My friend’s album above is indifferent to the audience. “Come if you want, I don’t care. This gallery is for me, I expect some of my friends will like it, but that’s not the point. So much so, that there might even be pictures I’d rather some of my friends not see, but that’s OK, cuz I want my pick me ups right here.”
We probably all have contacts on Flickr where the pictures get a little too personal, the jokes are a little too in, or they’re just getting insider goofy with their friends and there’s no reason to share. The only reason they’re being shared is because it’s too much work to lock it down. My own photostream is amused by the possibility of/semi-hopeful for an audience. The pics are there for me so I can send links around and have them available, but if someone shares my sense of humor or interest in Rosicrucian symbols, cool. I’m doing this blog partially to help sort out all the stuff I’m reading (I’m in a very unfocused stage right now, hoping it’s an plateau or inflection point). I am risking an audience rather than seeking on so that I’m forced not to write anything too stupid, and put a little thought and care into the writing.
Even within my industry (internet marketing), it’s a struggle to get people to understand the normalness of flickr and other types of sharing. A colleague of mine returned from a vacation in South America several months ago.  Eager to see pictures, I suggested now would be a good time to get into the Flickr stream. “Why would I want to put my pictures out for everyone to see?” My reply was “Not everyone . . . me!”, at which point, an offer was made to bring the pictures in. Sigh.