Something less work orientated now, I dug out my graphics tablet which I brought down to Ipswich with me however forgot I had and thought I'd put it to some use. I was actually waiting for one of the overpopulated servers on WoW to free up a space for me to play which forced me to think about what I could do for 20 minutes to occupy myself. I recently bought a months subscription to try out the new expansion Blizzard have developed, Cataclysm. The whole theme of the expansion is based around a dragon named Deathwing, so with that in mind I just started drawing some kind of dragon...thing whilst I waited. I ended up missing my space in the queue because I got slightly engrossed and have just spent the last 2 hours messing about in Photoshop! Anyway, I've got this so far:
(Click image for bigger picture)
I've ended up taking it a bit further than I was planning so I thought I'd carry on with this and make it a little project for myself to cover the whole canvas, add a background/colour eventually. If you google 'Deathwing' you'll see one or two resemblances, the jaw mainly, but i'm not so fussed, it was more a chance to draw something cool and get used to using a tablet again. That's all I want to say really! I'll post up another version when I get more done! I'll keep saving at stages and keep jpegs of my progress. As I get further I'll update this image above.
(This was the image I referred to from time to time)
Whilst around the subject of WoW, it's a good opportunity to talk about the article I read a few weeks ago regarding MUD's and different player types that play them by Richard Bartle. MUD's, which stands for 'Multi User Domain' (or Dungeon) are the foundation upon which games like World Of Warcraft sit, consisting of numerous players playing in the same environment, for example Dungeon's and Dragons. MMORPG's like WoW are an evolutionary form of this. Bartle opened the article with the question 'Are MUD's social or gamelike?' and breaking them down into four different ways of perceiving them; games, pastime, sport or entertainment.
The jist of the article was that whilst carrying out research into MUD's Bartle discovered that there were four distinct different types of player styles; Achievers, Explorers, Killers and Socialisers are the names he gave to those groups. I don't think this part Bartle's theory can be disputed, as anyone who has played MUD's or MMO's for a while could quite easily establish which of these groups they fit into, or combination of. Achievers strive to simply achieve goals set by the game and seek the most efficient way of doing so ('grinding' in some cases). Explorers favour exploring game environments and collecting, possibly then moving into exploration of game mechanics (which can lead to the discovery of glitches/bugs). Killer's find pleasure in causing distress to others and hindering progress, in the example of WoW this is often done by means of 'ganking' in which stronger players will kill weaker players for no gain. Finally Socialisers who play for the communicative elements of the game to converse with other players. This may seem as a slight generalisation to some, however from experience, I can testify that these groups do exist.
Bartle then progressed to talk about the interaction between these groups and the game world. I won't talk about all of these as it was a pretty long article and this is meant to be a summary. However in a nut shell he spoke about how an unbalance between player types can lead to players leaving the game, for example too many killers could cause the population of explorers to reduce. He suggested methods of introducing different in game facilities to ensure balance between player types, a possible solution to the just mentioned problem could be, increase the world size. He also explained how some player types act on each other and others act on the world and the differences between those. There is an understable logic to ideas like these, however there were a few points that Bartle was making which to me seemed more like assumptions that weren't really based on any evidence. An example, when discussing inter-player relationships Bartle says "Achievers tend to regard explorers as losers: people who have had to resort to tinkering with the game mechanics because they can't cut it as a player.". I'm not sure if Bartle is having a laugh here and at this stage in the article on page 600,001 my sense of humour was wavering or if he's making a serious point. I was told to cut Bartle some slack because at the time this was fairly new stuff he was suggesting so it might be sketchy in places, so I won't be pedantic about it.
Despite me being slightly picky, I thought it was an interesting article nonetheless as I had never really directly thought about these ideas and as an occasional MMO player it was fun to see where I fell into these these categories.
interesting reflections on bartle, good stuff.
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