Having trouble salving the drama in your healer crew?  Dealing with an overly aggressive member of DPS?  Banging your head against the desk because of an obstinate tank?

Did you think you left the stressful dynamics of team leadership at the office so you could come home and relax?

Surprise!  Welcome to Raid Leadership.

Many of us may not ever stop to consider that leading a Raid (ie: an ongoing team or community, not a pick-up event) can be just as difficult as any typical team leadership assignment in the real world.  Indeed, in an online entertainment based medium there can be any number of additional challenges not usually faced in a business leadership environment.  For the most part however, the interpersonal challenges universally faced by leaders across the spectrum of team endeavors exist in equal measure for those ill-fated souls foolish enough to try leading their gaming peers in slaying dargons, handling welps, and other various and sundry digital dungeon crawls.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is an interesting incongruity to me that Geeks of all stripes have traditionally been painted as either anti-social or otherwise completely incapable of existing in any form of community. This I believe is a misrepresentation brought on by the dissonance between our behaviors and the social norms that exist around us. In my experience though, It is not anything like an accurate portrait of the average Geek. Quite the contrary I believe that our culture, while certainly out-of-phase with the mainstream, may in fact be more socially oriented than the norm – we just tend to have a different center of gravity for our social connections.

Take for instance all of the fan conventions we have created and nurtured into the giant hulking behemoths of today. Is there another cultural slice of society outside of Geekdom that is so driven to gather in this way, to this extent?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve enjoyed PA’s Automata series immensely since the day they first introduced it.  I think of it as a sort of ‘Asimov-noir’ treat.  This is story-candy unburdened from the need to spend countless pages developing flavor.  It just HAS flavor and invites you to sample a brief aperitif, just enough to whet the taste buds.

Unfortunately the Penny-Arcade archive tool doesn’t currently collate the entire series.  I’m sure it’s just a matter of a few items not being tagged appropriately but until it get’s fixed I’m posting for my own personal use (and perhaps you will derive some enjoyment from it as well) my own archive of the Automata story arcs to date.

The Case of the Red Note (The Introduction, Holkins/Krahulik)

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6

The Case of the Broken Parts (Blood and Oil, Whitta/Caldwell)

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5

My friend and fellow raid leader, Greg, posts that he is looking for alternatives to WoW and is trying to figure out what sorts of questions to ask in his exploration.  There are some obvious ones of course: Price structure, initial cost of ownership, playerbase, etc… but many of the questions will first come down to what the pre-suppositions that you bring to the table are.

Why do you play?  What are your primary motivators?  Are you a collector?  Explorer?  Socialite?  Competitor?  I think most of us who play MMOs probably engage in some of all these behaviors (and others) but there are always primary driving influences that cause us to spend more time and energy on them than others, and also those which deliver higher internal reward pay-offs than others.  It’s different for each person.

For myself, the first two questions I ask when exploring any persistent online world are these:

1. What is the environment like? ie: Is it open, explorable, immersive, realistic, fantastic?  What are it’s characteristics?
2. What kind of storyline elements are included?

The reason for these two questions go back to my primary motivators – I enjoy exploring.  I like exploring a richly developed world that doesn’t break my suspension of disbelief with awkward transitions or mechanics but lets me indulge my innate curiosity.  Likewise my storyline interests tend in the same way: I want to know what has happened in the past and what comes next and be able to explore the story at my own pace without having my immersion constantly broken by weighty mechanics concerns.

So the first question, Greg, is what are your motivators?

This presentation by Paul Adams, Google’s User Experience Research lead, is a fascinating examination of how we as human beings interact both on and offline, and how current social networking technology is and isn’t responding to our natural human patterns of use.  The setup may be a little long and turn you off (its a 216 slide presentation all told) – but the real meat of the talk starts at around slide 46 and goes until around slide 145 when he moves into Privacy Issues (interesting in light of recent conversations about RealID) and Influentials.

A few highlites:  People tend to have between 4-6 groups of friends.  Each group has 2-10 people in it, and the groups are formed around life stages and shared experiences.  The average American has just 4 strongly tied relationships and about 10 people they meet and speak with weekly.

Check out the whole thing to get an idea not only of how we interact with each other IRL and Online, but also to see how the industry is looking to respond to those interactions and leverage them for business use.