Wired Virtual Worlds
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:20:00 GMT
A Geek Actor and His Passion for Videogames
Wil Wheaton, best known for his portrayal of Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, tells us why videogames will co-exist with, but never supplant, the movies. In Game|Life.
 
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:20:00 GMT
World of Warcraft Shines Light on Terror Tactics
Virtual terrorists blowing themselves up and spreading disease inside World of Warcraft could provide counterterrorists with a window into real-world plots.
Such activities in the massively multiplayer online game bear an eerie resemblance to actual terrorism, and analyzing terror tactics in Warcraft could prove more enlightening than current computer simulations used by counterterrorists.
"People got really smart about figuring out how to cause the most damage to the largest number of people," said Robert Allen, a level-60 mage and self-admitted virtual bioterrorist who purposely spread an in-game contagion to kill other players.
Scientists have already noted World of Warcraft's usefulness in studying how diseases spread. The game's network of 10 million players -- each capable of making decisions, either logical or illogical, rational or irrational -- gives scientists a ready-made virtual world to scrutinize that's not based on computer models or artificial intelligence. The game could be an invaluable tool not only for counterterrorists and epidemiologists but also sociologists and economists.
Charles Blair, deputy director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said he thinks the game could provide a powerful new way to study how terrorist cells form and operate. His organization already uses computer models to study terrorists' tactical decision-making, but World of Warcraft's army of players adds a realistic dimension that might prove more enlightening than even the best baked-in artificial intelligence.
"The main strength is that [Warcraft] involves 'real' people making real decisions in a world with some kind of [controllable] bounds," said Blair, who said studying players' actions could prove useful to military intelligence analysts. "To put it academically, you have both dependent and independent variables."
Warcraft has a history of in-game terrorist activity. Early on, players found a curse in a high-level dungeon that would turn them into living bombs. They would then teleport to major cities and detonate themselves, killing nearby players. These suicide bombers gradually began to target areas where large number of players gathered, usually at auction houses or banks. Eventually, attacks occurred with enough frequency that some players simply avoided dangerous cities.
Virtual bioterrorist Allen and his guild, domus fulminata, used a similar teleportation technique to spread an epidemic throughout in-game cities. Using a contagious curse called Corrupted Blood that could kill most players in seconds, Allen and his guild purposely infected other players and created a semi-permanent well of disease in cities' non-player characters. Allen and his group found the chaos caused by their actions humorous.
"It's just funny to watch people run away screaming," he said.
Such actions bear telltale signs of terrorism. Allen's small group blended in with the general population and waited for a weakness in the system to attack.
Just as in real life, such tactics can be effective in Warcraft.
"The advantage goes to the asymmetric actors who can operate under the radar," said Yale University terrorism expert Stuart Gottlieb.
Like the Department of Homeland Security, World of Warcraft operator Blizzard Entertainment tries to foresee vulnerabilities and address them as they become apparent. After the company's initial attempt to end the Corrupted Blood attacks, players found ways to circumvent new security measures by using in-game pets as vectors for disease.
Yet Blizzard is uncomfortable calling Warcraft players terrorists.
"As we have always stated, World of Warcraft is first and foremost a game," said Blizzard representative Shon Damron. "It's never been designed to mirror reality or anything in the real world."
Whether the game's operators want to admit it or not, Warcraft does mirror reality to some extent. Perhaps the game's biggest weakness as a model for studying terror tactics is that death in World of Warcraft is a nuisance at most.
Because the stakes for both terrorists and civilians are lower than they are in the real world, Yale's Gottlieb said he remains skeptical that the game could shed much light on the deeply complex social, political and cultural causes of terrorism.
"This is very interesting and relevant to the times," he said, "though I wouldn't base a new counterterrorism strategy on the nuances of a videogame."
 
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT
Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax
Editor's note: Wired contributing editor David Kushner
visited Gary Gygax at the Lake Geneva Convention last June. We were
preparing a package of articles about the father of Dungeons & Dragons
and the upcoming revised edition of the game he created when we received
the sad news of his death. We are running this story now in remembrance
of Gygax and in celebration of his staggering achievements. Later this
month, we will run the additional articles about D&D as well as excerpts
from the extensive interviews used in reporting this story. We extend
our deepest condolences to Gygax's family.
You arrive at a small town by a large lake. Down a road, there is a
yellow Victorian house with an American flag. There are revelers here.
They stand on the front lawn swilling ale and eating from bountiful
plates of ham and beans. They invite you to join their assembly.
As you approach, however, something catches your attention: a
strange buzzing sound in the air. It's coming from the tiny winged
beasts that are hanging from the trees, crawling along the ground, and
crashing clumsily against you. "Cicadas," explains your host, a heavyset
man with a gray ponytail and thick glasses that magnify his eyes. "It's
a good thing they don't have mandibles." Then, quite cordially, he
invites you inside his house to play a game.
The host is Gary Gygax, and the occasion is a game convention in his
hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, this past June. Gygax, 68. is a
cocreator and popularizer of the most influential game ever made.
Dungeons & Dragons — D&D to fans — isn't a straightforward
board game like Monopoly or Clue. It's more like an operating system, an
elaborate framework on which players can build their own scenarios:
Anyone with creativity and imagination can become a game designer.
D&D players create an alter ego and guide it through a virtual world,
gradually upgrading abilities as they battle monsters and gather loot.
The game allows teenage misfits to become mythic superheroes and face
epic adventures and harrowing challenges. "It's written in every man's
heart — we want to feel like warriors," Gygax's grandson tells me
inside the family home. "That's what Gramps let people do."
Gygax was around 5 when he began taking an interest in strategy games like chess and pinochle.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Most aspects of the game can be expressed numerically, from attributes
like strength and health and intelligence to the power of a weapon and
the probability that it will successfully connect with an enemy and the
amount of damage it would inflict. But one player has to paint a picture
with words: That person assumes the role of the dungeon master and
describes for other players what they see and hear in this imaginary
world, and what effects their actions have. The game is played primarily
in your head, using graph paper maps to represent environments,
figurines to represent your character, a die to determine probability,
and a few rulebooks for reference.
Gygax forged an industry around D&D and made a small fortune in the
process. His home-brew publishing company, Tactical Studies Rules, went
from a basement enterprise to a thriving corporation with 600 employees
in less than a decade. D&D sold millions of copies and has been
translated into more than a dozen languages in at least 50 countries.
His creation is the cornerstone of geek culture, but it's also had a
profound and far-reaching impact on people who have never touched a
20-sided die.
Now, this afternoon at his party, Gygax slowly lumbers into his house to
a fetch a 20-sided die of his own. It is time to get his game on. Are
you ready to begin?
You are Ernest Gary Gygax, a restless boy born in Chicago in 1938.
Every summer, you head to your grandparents' home 80 miles away in Lake
Geneva. You move there in 1946, just before your eighth birthday. You
are skilled in hunting — whether taking out squirrels with a .22
or shooting wild pheasants with a 16-gauge shotgun. Your father, a suit
salesman and a violinist, makes up bedtime stories for you, fantastical
yarns about heroes with magic rings and invisibility cloaks.
It's a weekday morning in the early 1950s. You can choose to go to
school and max out your grade point average, or you can play hooky and
go explore the sepulchral system of tunnels underneath the old Oak Hill
Sanitarium, an abandoned insane asylum near the lake. What do you want
to do?
Like most kids, Gygax wanted to be the hero of his own life. "There's a
call to adventure," he says. "It's something in the inner psyche of
humanity, particularly males."
He was very bright, but tunnel-crawling held a lot more appeal than
grinding away in the classroom. "I hated school, didn't like the
discipline," he says. He dropped out in his junior year.
Gygax drifted a bit after high school. After working odd jobs during the
day and attending junior college at night, he found a steady gig as an
insurance underwriter for the Firemen's Fund. And after a lifelong love
of chess and board games, he discovered a new diversion that would
change his life: war games.
A souvenir menu for 1967's International Federation of Wargaming convention in Pennsylvania says the fest "is dedicated to the greatest and most noble country that ever existed on the face of this tired world."
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Many trace the origin of war games to a 1913
work
by H. G. Wells titled
Little Wars: A Game for Boys of Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred
and Fifty and for that More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys'
Games and Books. In this
60-page book, Wells describes how he and a friend commandeered his son's
toy soldiers and made up a game that involved situating them on an
imaginary battlefield and taking turns maneuvering them for tactical
advantage. Wells explained the many iterations he'd gone through while
perfecting the rules and laid them out in great detail so that readers
could play the game themselves.
Gygax and his friends would build detailed tabletop recreations of
famous battlefields — say, Gettysburg — and position on it
toys representing battalions of infantry, cavalry, and artillery
emplacements. Armed with rulers and protractors, they would take turns
moving their units in carefully measured increments. Skirmishes were
resolved by a roll of the dice, and one player served as referee and
judge, settling disputes over the finer points of rules and historical
accuracy. Gygax married in 1958 and had two children by 1961, but he
continued to spend much of his free time locked in epic imaginary
battles, some of which lasted for months. He played the game in his
basement with fellow members of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies
Association, but he also played by mail with other war gamers across the
country.
A group of gamers huddle in an intense session during an early meeting of the International Federation of Wargaming in the late 1960s.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Gygax was fascinated by the way the rolling of dice affected — and
enlivened — the game experience. "Random chance plays a huge part
in everybody's life," he says. He learned this first hand in his job as
an insurance underwriter, which was a game in itself. His work involved
evaluating policies and calculating how much to charge in premiums based
on salary, age, medical reports, and the potential for long-term
disabilities. He did special risk underwriting as well, such as
evaluating the payout for a Major League Baseball team that wanted to
take out a policy on one of its players. "I wasn't popular in the home
office because I wasn't chicken," he says. "I'm just a risk taker. I
have gut instincts."
Gygax took similar liberties in war games. He had little time for people
who played too by-the-book. "They'd write in and ask the publisher of
the game what to do," he says. "Whatever they were told, they did. And I
said, that's silly — just make it up."
Gygax and a few of his buddies carried that DIY spirit even further,
devising a game of their own around WWII tank combat. He was determined that his game
would avoid the "goofy bell curve"that
resulted from rolling a pair of six-sided dice (2s and 12s are rare,
while 6s, 7s, and 8s are comparatively frequent). To achieve a more
linear curve, he determined that players must pluck 1 of 20 numbered
poker chips from a hat, so that there was an equal 5 percent probability
of each outcome. Gygax later found the perfect replacement for this
clunky system: In a school supply catalog, he discovered dice shaped
like all of the Platonic solids, including the icosahedron: A 20-sided die.
Gygax's inventiveness and his organizational skills led him to put
together the first Lake Geneva Convention — GenCon for short
— at his hometown's vine-covered Horticultural Hall in 1968. (A
semiofficial gathering took place the year before at Gygax's home.)
Left-brained wannabe generals from all over the US and Canada came to do
battle. "I coughed up 50 bucks to rent the hall," he says. "Admission
was $1, and I was delighted because I made just enough to pay myself
back."
Gygax plays military miniatures at an early GenCon, the annual gaming convention for war-game enthusiasts he founded. First convened at Gygax's Lake Geneva home, GenCon is now one of the largest gaming conventions in North America.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Gygax's growing circle of gamer friends introduced him to many tweaked
and modified versions of existing games. One night, friend Jeff Perren
brought over some miniatures from the medieval title Siege of Bodenberg. Perren even had four
pages of rules, which Gygax loved and expanded into an entirely new
game: 16 pages of instructions that he dubbed Chainmail.
In other war games, each miniature represented a unit — say, 10 or
20 men — and could be destroyed with a single successful attack.
Gygax decided to make some of the miniatures in Chainmail represent a
single character, designated "hero" or "superhero," who could only be
killed by several attacks. For the hell of it, Gygax included a
supplemental set of rules that featured magical fantasy trappings:
dragons, elves, wizards, and fireballs. He was a fan of the Conan
the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to
capture that sort of swashbuckling action in a war game. (Interestingly,
he loathed the major fantasy touchstone of the time, J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings series. "It was so dull. I mean, there
was no action in it," Gygax says. "I'd like to throttle Frodo.")
Few of the history buff war gamers appreciated how Gygax's innovative
twists had personalized the play experience. They couldn't get past the
magical aspects, which they viewed as folly at best, heresy at worst.
"They wouldn't speak to me," Gygax says. But a friend who'd started a
small game company offered to publish it, and Gygax agreed. He'd left
the insurance business by then and was eking out a living as a cobbler.
Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures was released in 1971 for $3 and
soon became the publisher's biggest hit yet — selling 100 copies a
month. It wasn't making him rich, but Gygax started to wonder if
designing games could be not just a hobby, but a full-time job.
You are Dave Arneson, a 21-year-old history student at the
University of Minnesota and part-time security guard. You spend most of
your salary buying sodas for your buddies, who meet to play games in
your parent's basement. You hole up in the school library, doing
exhaustive research to make your war games more accurate. It recently
occurred to you that you might get better grades if you didn't interrupt
your teachers to argue the finer points of history. You journey
from the Twin Cities to attend the second Lake Geneva Convention in
August 1969. You meet Gary Gygax there, and you can't help but be a bit
awed — after all, he's one of the biggest movers and shakers in
the whole Midwestern war-gaming scene! He tells you he's
trying to create a rule set around naval combat during the War of 1812,
and he's very impressed that you can rattle off prices of muskets and
rations and frigates during that era. He asks you to collaborate on the
game with him. Do you accept?
There was one war gamer who grokked the importance of Gygax's Chainmail
right away: Dave Arneson. The two had recently worked together on a
sailing war game called Don't Give Up the Ship. Arneson saw
Gygax as a bit of an obsessive, overly concerned with codifying and
documenting things. "Gary added this really lame section about
single-ship actions to our game, which nobody ever uses," says Arneson
with a chuckle. Gygax says Arneson "wasn't much of a risk taker, didn't
cut school, probably never got into fisticuffs. Our personalities
weren't at all alike." But their common love of gaming overcame their
differences.
When Arneson saw Chainmail, he was very intrigued by its potential for
free-form, improvisatory play. It was similar to the game scenarios that
one of his game groups in the Twin Cities had been experimenting with.
"We didn't have volumes of rules and people arguing about historical
accuracy," Arneson recalls. "In one game, we all ended up chasing a
South American dictator as he was trying to escape with his comic book
collection."
Arneson modified Chainmail for his own group's purposes. He took the
action underground, like the claustrophobic sets of the Hammer Film
Productions horror
flicks he watched. Corridors. Tunnels. Caves. "A dungeon is nice and
self-contained," he says. "Players can't go romping over the
countryside, and you can control the situation."
Arneson tested his Chainmail mod in play sessions with his group and,
based on their feedback, continued to tinker with the rules to make it
more fun. "We had to change the combat system because we added more
monsters. They were getting big and gruesome."
There was another aspect of the game he wanted to tweak: the fact that
it ended. Arneson's group was having too much fun playing these specific
roles to want to part with them after a single game. Outside of the
individual games, Arneson created an experience system for characters.
Your character would earn experience points based on their success from
game to game. After a certain number of poins, a character would "level
up."
To help move the story along, Arneson assumed a more elaborate role than
that of the referees used to resolve disputes in war games. He would be
the game master – setting the scene, guiding players along their quests.
After developing the game, dubbed Blackmoor, for about six months with his
group in Minnesota, Arneson and a couple of his buddies trekked back to
Lake Geneva in late 1971 to run a game for Gygax and his crew.
"Six-level dungeon, you start on the first floor and you go to the
others by taking staircases," Gygax says. "We ran into a troll with
magic armor, and we fought him and killed him and took it." The
Wisconsinites all loved it. Arneson had successfully distilled the
involved tactical military campaigns into a virtual world of
first-person action.
Gygax effused over the "fun house" aspect of the game, which he said
reminded him of exploring the tunnels under the insane asylum as a
child. The game session ended at midnight, and Gygax immediately saw
commercial potential in this variant of his Chainmail. "I think we can
make something special out of that," he told Arneson.
Arneson soon agreed to collaborate again. Back at home, he ran off a
copy of his notes on his dad's Xerox machine and mailed them to Gygax,
who "couldn't make heads or tails" of the "generally useless" notes. "He
sent me a couple of drafts to look over, and we talked on the phone a
lot," Arneson says. "You should see the phone bills we ran up." But
Gygax boiled down the disparate elements into a cohesive set of rules.
"He could type, and I couldn't," Arneson says.
The two had what amounted to philosophical differences. "He thinks you
can write a rule to cover any situation," Arneson says. "I don't. There
are just too many possibilities, especially when you're asking people to
use their imaginations." Gygax broke the characters down into a variety
of classes, such as magic users and clerics, and expanded the list of
weapons, from morning stars to flails. "He was always big on having
different weapons have different effects," Arneson says. "Years later,
he literally had a small book on different kinds of polearms, which I
regard as the ultimate in silliness. It's a pointy thing on the end of a
stick!"
Gygax didn't see himself as rigid and rule bound. In his mind, he was
creating a coherent framework, a comprehensible rule set…a salable
product. Once he had a near-final set of rules, he went into his study,
a small room off his kitchen. He placed an 8 1⁄2 by 11- inch sheet of
graph paper on his desk and began sketching out a dungeon. He drew
little passageways and rooms, numbering each room to correspond to 16
encounters. Designing the game was like building a haunted mansion and
setting traps with monsters and treasure.
When he was through developing his game that night, he assembled his own
team of testers. His friend Don Kaye, two of his children, 11-year-old
Ernie and 9-year-old Elise, and a kid from up the street. The first step
is to develop characters, he explained. Ernie chose to be a warrior,
Elise, an elf. Gygax then handed out index cards that listed six
attributes on each: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution,
dexterity, and charisma. Each player would roll three six-sided die to
generate a value for each character attribute. The higher the
intelligence, for example, the better spells a wizard could cast; the
higher the dexterity, the shrewder the thief. "It helped the person to
get into the role that they were playing," he says. "If they had a real
low intelligence they could play it like, ‘Duh, OK.'"
Once the players had formed their characters, Gygax assumed the role of
dungeon master. "There is a ruined castle that you have heard is filled
with strange monsters and treasures, and you want to get them," he
explained. "Your object is to slay the monsters and take their treasures
and become more powerful. Go!" The players would make choices — go
east, open a door — and Gygax would riff on what happened. When
things got slow, he would roll a die and say, "Why are you standing in
this dead-end corridor trying to look for a secret door? The Orcs have
you cornered! Now you must fight them!"
Gygax watched with delight as this new form of entertainment came into
being. He wasn't simply guiding the other players — he was a
participant as well, watching it unfold and go in directions he'd never
anticipated. "Role-playing isn't storytelling," he says, "If the dungeon
master is directing it, it's not a game."
His creation only lacked one thing now — a name. Gygax paired
random mythic words like fantasy, adventure, swords, and sorcery until
he came to one his 4-year-old daughter Cindy approved of. "Oh, Daddy,"
she said, "I like Dungeons & Dragons the best!"
Gygax took D&D to Avalon Hill,
the biggest war game publisher in the business. He described it to them
and insisted that it would be a huge hit. "I think we can sell 50,000
copies of it," he boldly predicted. Avalon had no interest in D&D. "They
couldn't understand a game with no winners and losers that just went on
and on," Arneson says.
In 1973, Gygax formed a company called Tactical Studies Rules with
childhood buddy Kaye. They didn't ask Arneson to join. "Dave was never
considered as a partner," Gygax says."We didn't figure he was the kind
of the guy who would be too good at running a business."
Arneson agrees. "Gary was willing to go and make the pitches," he says.
"I was having fun."
TSR scraped together $2,400 for startup costs. In January 1974, it ran
off a thousand copies of the 150-page booklet titled, Dungeons &
Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargame Campaigns Playable with
Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. The rules cost $10. The
extra dice you needed to play the game were $3.50 extra. The base of
operations was Gygax's basement, and there wasn't a marketing budget.
D&D would live and die by word of mouth.
Wizard's Spell: Chain Lightning
Range: 40 yards
Duration: Instantaneous
This spell creates an electrical discharge that begins as a single
stroke of lightning, 2 1⁄2 feet wide, commencing from the fingertips of
the caster.
D&D's impact was as instantaneous as a chain lightning spell. It spread
from college to college, hobby shop to hobby shop, schoolyard to
schoolyard. Ten months after D&D's launch, TSR sold out its press run
and printed twice as many copies of the game. Soon it had sold out
again, wiping mold off the last few copies in Gygax's musty cellar to
fill orders. Players began calling Gygax's house at all hours of the
night, asking for the volume of space covered by a certain spell, or
asking him to test their game design by DMing — being a dungeon
master — for them over the phone.
Gygax's daughter, Elise Gygax, poses for a 1977 advertisement for Monster Manual, the definitive sourcebook for the creatures in D&D.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
TSR made profitable upgrades to its operating system (The Advanced D&D
Handbook soon appeared, along with the hardback Monster
Manual by Gygax that
simply gave descriptions and numerical attributes of the many different
kinds of foul creatures that players might face). Anyone could build
individual applications that ran on top of the rules, but TSR also sold
the equivalent of software. For about $5, you could buy these
prepackaged campaigns and scenarios by Arneson or Gygax
or other
emerging stars of the tabletop gaming industry.
"The modules were even more profitable than the rules were," Arneson
says, who over the course of the 1970s saw the effect that D&D had on
the gaming audience. "The whole tenor of the crowd changed," he says.
"War gamers sat around talking about the latest historical books, but
these D&D guys were from the science fiction community. And there were
women! You go from having none at a convention to having —
whoo! — 20 percent women! No groupies though, darn it…"
The creators of D&D became folk heroes…and targets. Arneson had to stop
participating in impromptu games with strangers after a fresh young punk
lured him into a losing scenario. "He spent the rest of the convention
telling everyone how his dungeon had killed me," Arneson mutters. "He's
lucky I didn't find him in a dark stairwell; we would have seen who'd
kill who."
Gary Gygax, considered the father of role-playing gaming for his pioneering work on Dungeons & Dragons, attends a gaming convention, circa 1979.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
The game also set off a moral hysteria in the culture at large. On
August 15, 1979, a D&D player named James Dallas Egbert III
vanished from
Michigan State University. Sensational stories soon hit the wires about
a boy genius who supposedly disappeared in the steam tunnels under his
university while enacting a real-life version of D&D. The game, which
had been a cult phenomenon up until this point, started getting
mainstream media attention. But not the kind that TSR wanted.
Patricia Pulling, a mother who claimed that her son shot himself in the
chest as a result of a "curse" he received in a D&D game, founded an
organization called B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons). In 1982 there was a hilariously
awful TV movie called Mazes and Monsters,
which starred a 26-year-old Tom Hanks as an obsessive gamer unable to distinguish
fantasy from reality. Jack Chick, a prolific author of religious tracts,
published a comic called Dark Dungeons, which showed D&D
players being inexorably drawn into a real-life coven.
"Somebody said they threw their copy of D&D into the fire, and it
screamed," recalls Gygax incredulously. "It's a game! The magic spells
in it are as real as the gold. Try retiring on that stuff." Calls from
die-hard gamers to TSR's office were replaced with death threats. Gygax
hired a bodyguard.
Arneson believes the hysteria surrounding the game would end immediately
if kids would just invite their parents to watch as they play. "They're
going to be so bored," he says. "They will understand that anything this
nerdy can't possibly lead to being possessed by the devil."
The publicity had a predictable effect: In 1982, the company saw its
annual D&D sales shoot up to $16 million. This game of math, maps, and
probability had acquired an aura of the dangerous and forbidden. "We
couldn't print the stuff fast enough," Gygax says.
You are Gary Gygax, and you are playing a business game called brand
extension. You go to California to try to expand D&D into other media.
You have some success, launching a Saturday morning cartoon based on the
game. Your voice
actors include cast members from Eight Is Enough and Happy
Days, as well as the legendary Frank Welker (aka Megatron from
Transformers. The cartoon is popular, and it removes some of the
stigma from the game.
But you need more money, and you have to hand over the leadership
reins to someone else back in Wisconsin. Do you choose to entrust your
company to businessmen with no knowledge of tabletop games?
When Gygax went to Hollywood to close the deal on an animated show and
explore a possible feature film based on D&D, the day-to-day operations
of TSR were overseen by his fellow board members, brothers Kevin and
Brian Blume. "They knew that I was in the midst of a divorce, so they
figured I would be happy to go out to the West Coast and get away from
my ex-wife," Gygax says. "They were $1.5 million in debt when I came
back. There were 70-some odd company cars, something like $1.5 million
in furniture."
Gygax celebrates his birthday in 1980, a few years after his company, Tactical Studies Rules, published the first version of Dungeons & Dragons.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Gygax looked for someone with management experience to fix the problem.
"I said, we're going to need somebody to get us over this period until
we can get positive cash flow again," he says. Lorraine Williams, the
mother of a writer he'd met in Hollywood, had management experience, and
he brought her on board. "Worst mistake of my life. I think she was
losing about $3 million a year. Which is pretty good, even better than
the Blumes could do." Williams soon bought out the shares of the Blumes,
and suddenly Gygax no longer had a controlling stake in TSR.
Arneson and Gygax's relationship had strained to the breaking point as
well. The two had agreed at the outset to share credit, but the pact
didn't withstand the growing pressures of success. "I approached him and
said that the royalties we're paying are too high," Gygax says. "If we
reduce them, sales will go up, and I'll make sure that we're paid for
derivative works. He didn't agree with that, so he sued the company."
A settlement was reached, and neither party is allowed to discuss the
terms of it. However, they have been credited as "cocreators" on the
packaging of D&D ever since. The clash of the D&D titans would become
the talk of GenCons and online flame wars for decades, with the stars
occasionally throwing fuel to the fire. "His contributions were ideas,
nothing more," Gygax says. "Dave can't design his way out of a paper
bag."
Gygax in his office in Beverly Hills, California, a few years before he would leave TSR to develop offshoot role-playing games.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
"We each brought something, and we had fun," says Arneson, who now
teaches a course on rules at Full Sail, a
school of graphic arts and game design in Winter Park, Florida. "When
the money came, people's personalities changed. That's all I'm going to
say. Everything went fine when it was just a bunch of guys working out
of basements. I wish that had gone on longer."
Gygax sold his remaining stake in TSR in late 1985. "I was so sick of
the fucking company at that point, I was glad to get rid of it," Gygax
says. "It was getting more and more screwed up all the time."
The man who a decade earlier had unleashed the dragons in a basement by
a lake watched them go.
You are an American teenager in the 1970s. You love D&D. You map
dungeons. You plan encounters, attempting to anticipate all the
different ways people will react. You especially dig being a dungeon
master, guiding your friends through your campaigns. You see that the
field of role-playing games is exploding. Do you want to continue to
play as a hobby? Or do you want to become a professional game
designer?
Dungeons & Dragons had a way of turning game players into game
designers. The rule set was pure potentiality, and the greater the
creativity of each dungeon master, the more the players could extract
from it. Many young people found their calling while playing D&D.
"The ability to play an individual character in an imaginary world was
astonishing," says Greg Costikyan, who devoted
the summers of his teenage years to D&D. "It expanded the market for
adventure games." Several tabletop companies sprang up in TSR's wake,
such as Steve Jackson Games in Texas and West
End Games in Pennsylvania. Costikyan
designed acclaimed tabletop role-playing games for these TSR
competitors, including a role-playing game built around the Star Wars
license, and
he designed the bizarre Toon, a
role-playing game with the twisted physics and warped logic of Bugs
Bunny-esque cartoons.
Meanwhile, college kids monkeying around on enormous mainframe computers
found themselves drawn to the familiar systems of the game. In 1976, MIT
student Will Crowther combined his interests in fantasy role-playing and
spelunking to map out the first text-based adventure game, Colossal Cave
Adventure. By
typing in a direction, such as "north" or "south," or a command, as in
"hit" or "attack," players could battle enemies and hunt for treasure.
Before long, students and hackers in computer labs across the country
were playing and modifying the text-based game's code. "It added
automated moderation so you didn't need the human game master," says Don
Woods, a Stanford
student who created a spin-off with Crowther's blessing.
In 1978, students at the University of Essex in England pioneered a way
to emulate the multiplayer experience of D&D across the Arpanet. Richard
Bartle coded the first multiuser
dungeon. A MUD is a text-based game with D&D mechanics of experience
points and levels, and an emphasis on socialization and chatting. "MUD
was just a continuation of what I was doing in D&D," Bartle says.
Richard Garriott encountered the game at computer camp in 1977. After
organizing D&D sessions back home, he ported the role-playing experience
into PC games like Akalabeth and later the
Ultima franchise. He says that D&D's primordial game engine was a perfect match
for number-crunching home computers. "D&D allowed people to build a
numerical representation of themselves, a numerical representation of a
monster, a numerical representation of how a character and monsters
could interact," he says. "If there had never been D&D, computer games
would be more like simple arcade games, like Pac-Man and Pong."
"That cooperative experience ports over really well to digital media,
especially with the rise of the Internet," says Chris "Thundergod"
Metzen, vice president of creative development at Blizzard
Entertainment. His company's massively multiplayer role-playing game
World of Warcraft attracts 10 million subscribers, who all pay to log into a 3-D virtual
world and join other players in battling monsters, exploring for loot,
and leveling up. "Players around the world are forming friendships and
having adventures," Metzen says. "Part of the magic is that it hearkens
back to those dateless nights playing D&D."
But as the style of gaming that D&D pioneered became increasingly
popular, the original game was losing market share. TSR faced stiff
competition from other tabletop game companies like White Wolf, as well
as the growing popularity of collectible card games like Magic: The
Gathering. The company became notorious for zealously protecting its
intellectual property. TSR was soon referred to by geeks as T$R: They
sue regularly. By 1997, the company was deeply in debt, and it was
purchased by Wizards of the Coast, the company that made its fortunes
with Magic: The Gathering.
Wizards of the Coast regained some goodwill and popularity with the
release of the third edition of D&D rules in 2000. Gygax was brought in
for a brief and somewhat symbolic consultation on the new rule set, as
was Arneson. Gygax didn't approve of the decision to open-source the
game. The third edition of the rules was made available under the Open
Gaming License, which allowed anyone to modify or write games based on the
core system for free. "It pretty much gives the store away," he says.
"It ruins the uniqueness of D&D."
But the biggest threat D&D faced was not open-sourcing. It was
Everquest and World of Warcraft. As the number
of subscribers to massively multiplayer sword and sorcery games grew,
Dungeons & Dragons ads began to appear in videogame magazines, with
slogans like "If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help."
The 4th Edition of the
D&D rules will appear in June. Wizards of the Coast's latest strategy is
to meet online games like World of Warcraft halfway. The
company has launched a social networking site called Gleemax, which aims to be Facebook for tabletop gamers.
And when the 4th Edition of the rule set appears this summer, it will
launch alongside D&D Insider, a monthly subscription service that will allow people to use
the Web for many aspects of D&D, from map creation to rule books to dice
rolling.
Grown men who can no longer gather in a friend's basement every
Friday night may want to reconnect via voice chat…or they may discover
that World of Warcraft is simply more compelling. "Fourth
Edition is far more than a new set of rules," wrote Slashdot Games
editor Michael Zenke after the new products were announced. "It's WotC's
lunge toward mainstream acceptance. WotC is going to make it big or
break the tabletop industry trying."
You sit down at a table with a few other revelers on Gary Gygax's
front porch. There are books and plants and games nearby. A fan slowly
stirs the thick humid air. Gygax produces a cardboard tube and removes
a large piece of graph paper from it. It is a hand-drawn map of his own
design. There are green swirls representing trees, and tiny black
squares for buildings.
Gygax spreads the map on the table in front of you and produces an
enormous polyhedral die that's as black as onyx. He sparks up a Black &
Mild cigar. His wife isn't looking, so he cracks open a second bottle of
Guinness. Then he begins to guide you and the other players through this
game he has created. "You leave the caravan and come to a village," he
says. "You can stay here and see what's around. Who wants to go
where?"
It's day three of the 2007 Lake Geneva Gaming Convention last summer, and Gary Gygax is
delighted to be getting his game on. It's almost 40 years to the day
since the first unofficial GenCon was held here in his hometown. The
official GenCon is now a big corporate franchise
and held several times a year in convention centers from Anaheim to
Australia, drawing crowds of 30,000. Gygax resurrected his hometown
alternative convention, and it has attracted just a few hundred fans.
Some of those, the hardest of the hardcore, have been invited over to
play a game scenario designed by the dungeon master himself.
He is leading players through a campaign of Lejendary Adventure, one of the dozen tabletop role-playing games
he created after leaving TSR. "Lejendary Adventure is rules light," he
says. "Life's too short to spend 60 hours a week crouching in front of a
typewriter writing rules. The more you explain, the more you have to
keep explaining. Use imagination and initiative, for heaven's sake!"
As the game progresses, Gygax veers from the scenario into a series of
entertaining digressions. When the group enters a pub, he recites lines
from Monty Python. As they learn of nearby river caves that may house
treacherous beasts, he describes a dream he had in which an African
elephant was chasing him around his backyard. At one point, he breaks
into a spontaneous rendition of the song, "Too Fat Polka (I Don't Want
Her, You Can Have Her, She's Too Fat for Me)." One or two brave members
of his party join in.
This is what Gygax thinks his legacy should be. People playing games
together in the flesh, with a real, live dungeon master guiding them.
That's what he thinks is wrong with the new direction for Dungeons &
Dragons with its new 4th Edition. "D&D is not an online game," he says.
"There is no role-playing in an online game that can match what happens
in person."
Regardless of what happens to D&D, Gygax is satisfied with what his
games have set in motion. "I think they've done a world of good for
people, socially, mentally, educationally," he adds. "I think that's why
I'm still alive now, because it's helped so many people." He's proud of
what he's accomplished and proud of the influence his games have had. He
tells me privately, "I only regret that I wasn't more outspoken in my
beliefs."
While it may surprise – or embolden – the religious groups who long
rallied against him, Gygax says he has found God. The discovery began
one day about 25 years ago, fittingly, during a game. A friend of his
was doing some role-playing with Gygax as a kind of personality test.
He had Gygax describe his journey down an imaginary road. At one
point, Gygax described coming to a clear lake, and his buddy said,
"There's a drinking vessel there. What does it look like?"
"It's a beautiful silver chalice," Gygax replied, "all engraved."
"I didn't know you were religious," his friend said.
Gygax at Geneva Lake, close to his Wisconsin home, in the mid-1970s.
Photo: Courtesy of Gail Gygax
Neither did Gygax, but he warmed to the idea that the universe has been
mapped out in advance by some celestial designer. "There's got to be a
creating hand behind everything," he says. "As Thomas Aquinas said, ‘Out
of nothing, nothing comes.'"
Over the past few years, Gygax has suffered two minor strokes, a heart
attack, and a series of falls. And, he says, it was his newfound beliefs
that sustained him. He began to pray frequently that he would regain the
movement that he lost in his arm and leg after his most recent stroke.
And it was an experience inside a game that prepared him for his
ultimate journey, too. At the completion of the round, he tells me, the
game master said, "You've come to a wall. The wall is the end. It's
death. What do you do?"
Gygax looked him in the eye and said, "I jump over it. When you come to
the end and you can't go any farther, you've got to go over the wall.
Gotta see what's there."
Contributing editor David Kushner (david@davidkushner.com)
wrote about AI researchers in 15.02.
 
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT
Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World
The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who "need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately." But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Get to the choppaaaaaaa!" tagline from Predator.
The incident, it turns out, was not an isolated one. The same scene, with minor variations, was unfolding simultaneously throughout the virtual geography of Second Life. Some cubes were adorned on every side with the infamous, soul-searing "goatse" image; others were covered with the grinning face of Bill Cosby proffering a Pudding Pop.
Soon after the attacks began, the governance team at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, identified the vandals and suspended their accounts. In the popular NorthStar hangout, players located the offending avatars and fired auto-cagers, which wrapped the attackers' heads in big metallic boxes. And at the Gorean city of Rovere — a Second Life island given over to a peculiarly hardcore genre of fantasy role-play gaming — a player named Chixxa Lusch straddled his giant eagle mount and flew up to confront the invaders avatar-to-avatar as they hovered high above his lovingly re-created medieval village, blanketing it with bouncing 10-foot high Super Mario figures.
"Give us a break you fucks," typed Chixxa Lusch, and when it became clear that they had no such intention, he added their names to the island's list of banned avatars and watched them disappear.
"Wankers," he added, descending into the mess of Super Marios they'd left behind for him to clear.
Bans and cages and account blocks could only slow the attackers, not stop them. The raiders, constantly creating new accounts, moved from one location to another throughout the night until, by way of a finale, they simultaneously crashed many of the servers that run Second Life. And by that time, there was not the slightest mystery in anyone's minds who these particular wankers were: The Patriotic Nigras had struck again.
The Patriotic Nigras consist of some 150 shadowy individuals who, in the words of their official slogan, have been "ruining your Second Life since 2006." Before that, many of them were doing their best to ruin Habbo Hotel, a Finland-based virtual world for teens inhabited by millions of squat avatars reminiscent of Fisher-Price's Little People toys. That's when the PNs adopted their signature dark-skinned avatar with outsize Afro and Armani suit.
Though real-life details are difficult to come by, it's clear that few, if any, PNs are in fact African-American. But their blackface shenanigans, they say, aren't racist in any heartfelt sense. "Yeah, the thing about the racist thing," says ^ban^, leader of the Patriotic Nigras, "is ... it's all just a joke." It's only one element, he insists, in an arsenal of PN techniques designed to push users past the brink of moral outrage toward that rare moment — at once humiliating and enlightening — when they find themselves crying over a computer game. Getting that response is what it's all about, the Nigras say.
"We do it for the lulz," ^ban^ says — for laughs. Asked how some people can find their greatest amusement in pissing off others, ^ban^ gives the question a moment's thought: "Most of us," he says finally, with a wry chuckle, "are psychotic."
In 2006, griefers let loose with a rain of phalluses to interrupt a CNET interview in Second Life.
Pwnage, zerging, phat lewts — online gaming has birthed a rich lexicon. But none, perhaps, deserves our attention as much as the notion of the griefer. Broadly speaking, a griefer is an online version of the spoilsport — someone who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play itself. Not that griefers don't like online games. It's just that what they most enjoy about those games is making other players not enjoy them. They are corpse campers, noob baiters, kill stealers, ninja looters. Their work is complete when the victims log off in a huff.
Griefing, as a term, dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters like Counter-Strike (fragging your own teammates, for instance, or repeatedly killing a player many levels below you). But even before it had a name, grieferlike behavior was familiar in prehistoric text-based virtual worlds like LambdaMOO, where joyriding invaders visited "virtual rape" and similar offenses on the local populace.
While ^ban^ and his pals stand squarely in this tradition, they also stand for something new: the rise of organized griefing, grounded in online message-board communities and thick with in-jokes, code words, taboos, and an increasingly articulate sense of purpose. No longer just an isolated pathology, griefing has developed a full-fledged culture.
This particular culture's roots can be traced to a semi-mythic place of origin: the members-only message forums of Something Awful, an online humor site dedicated to a brand of scorching irreverence and gross-out wit that, in its eight years of existence, has attracted a fanatical and almost all-male following. Strictly governed by its founder, Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, the site boasts more than 100,000 registered Goons (as members proudly call themselves) and has spawned a small diaspora of spinoff sites. Most noticeable is the anime fan community 4chan, with its notorious /b/ forum and communities of "/b/tards." Flowing from this vast ecosystem are some of the Web's most infectious memes and catchphrases ("all your base are belong to us" was popularized by Something Awful, for example; 4chan gave us lolcats) and online gaming's most exasperating wiseasses.
Not all the message boards celebrate the griefers in their midst: Kyanka finds griefing lame, as do many Goons and /b/tards. Nor do the griefers themselves all get along. Patriotic Nigras, /b/tards all, look on the somewhat better-behaved Goon community — in particular the W-Hats, a Second Life group open only to registered Something Awful members — as a bunch of uptight sellouts. The W-Hats disavow any affiliation with the "immature" and "uncreative" Nigras other than to ruefully acknowledge them as "sort of our retarded children."
If there's one thing, though, that all these factions seem to agree on, it's the philosophy summed up in a regularly invoked catchphrase: "The Internet is serious business."
Look it up in the Encyclopedia Dramatica (a wikified lexicon of all things /b/) and you'll find it defined as: "a phrase used to remind [the reader] that being mocked on the Internets is, in fact, the end of the world." In short, "the Internet is serious business" means exactly the opposite of what it says. It encodes two truths held as self-evident by Goons and /b/tards alike — that nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise.
To see the philosophy in action, skim the pages of Something Awful or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where it seems every pocket of the Web harbors objects of ridicule. Vampire goths with MySpace pages, white supremacist bloggers, self-diagnosed Asperger's sufferers coming out to share their struggles with the online world — all these and many others have been found guilty of taking themselves seriously and condemned to crude but hilarious derision.
You might think that the realm of online games would be exempt from the scorn of Goons and /b/tards. How seriously can anyone take a game, after all? And yet, if you've ever felt your cheeks flush with anger and humiliation when some 14-year-old Night Elf in virtual leather tights kicks your ass, then you know that games are the place where online seriousness and online ridiculousness converge most intensely. And it's this fact that truly sets the griefer apart from the mere spoilsport. Amid the complex alchemy of seriousness and play that makes online games so uniquely compelling, the griefer is the one player whose fun depends on finding that elusive edge where online levity starts to take on real-life weight — and the fight against serious business has finally made it seem as though griefers' fun might have something like a point.
Second Life entrepreneur Prokofy Neva (Catherine Fitzpatrick in real life) likens griefer attacks to terrorism.
Photo: Michael Schmelling
History has forgotten the name of the Something Awful Goon who first laid eyes on Second Life, but his initial reaction was undoubtedly along the lines of "Bingo."
It was mid-2004, and Goons were already an organized presence in online games, making a name for themselves as formidable players as well as flamboyantly creative griefers. The Goon Squad guilds in games like Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars: Galaxies had been active for several years. In World of Warcraft, the legendary Goons of the Mal'ganis server had figured out a way to slay the revered nonplayer character that rules their in-game faction — an achievement tantamount to killing your own team mascot.
But Second Life represented a new frontier in troublemaking potential. It was serious business run amok. Here was an entire population of players that insisted Second Life was not a game — and a developer that encouraged them to believe it, facilitating the exchange of in-game Linden dollars for real money and inviting corporations to market virtual versions of their actual products.
And better still, here was a game that had somehow become the Internet's top destination for a specimen of online weirdo the Goons had long ago adopted as their favorite target: the Furries, with their dedication to role-playing the lives — and sex lives — of cuddly anthropomorphic woodland creatures.
Thus began the Second Life Goon tradition of jaw-droppingly offensive theme lands. This has included the re-creation of the burning Twin Towers (tiny falling bodies included) and a truly icky murdered-hooker crime scene (in which a hermaphrodite Furry prostitute lay naked, violated, and disemboweled on a four-poster bed, while an assortment of coded-in options gave the visitor chances for further violation). But the first and perhaps most expertly engineered of these provocations was Tacowood — a parody of the Furry region known as Luskwood. In Tacowood, rainbow-dappled woodlands have been overrun by the bulldozers and chain saws of a genocidal "defurrestation" campaign and populated with the corpses of formerly adorable cartoon animal folk now variously beheaded, mutilated, and nailed to crosses.
As the media hype around Second Life grew, the Goons began to aim at bigger targets. When a virtual campaign headquarters for presidential candidate John Edwards was erected, a parody site and scatological vandalism followed. When SL real estate magnate Anshe Chung announced she had accumulated more than $1 million in virtual assets and got her avatar's picture splashed across the cover of BusinessWeek, the stage was set for a Second Life goondom's spotlight moment: the interruption of a CNET interview with Chung by a procession of floating phalluses that danced out of thin air and across the stage.
People laughed at those attacks, but for Prokofy Neva, another well-known Second Life real estate entrepreneur, no amount of humor or creativity can excuse what she sees as "terrorism." Prokofy (Catherine Fitzpatrick in real life, a Manhattan resident, mother of two, and Russian translator and human-rights worker by trade) earns a modest but bankable income renting out her Second Life properties, and griefing attacks aimed at her, she says, have rattled some tenants enough to make them cancel their leases. Which is why her response to those who defend her griefers as anything but glorified criminals is blunt: "Fuck, this is a denial-of-service attack ... it's anti-civilization ... it's wrong ... it costs me hundreds of US dollars."
Of course, this attitude delights the terrorists in question, and they've made Prokofy a favorite target. The 51-year-old Fitzpatrick's avatar is male, but Goons got ahold of a photo of her, and great sport has been made of it ever since. One build featured a giant Easter Island head of Fitzpatrick spitting out screenshots of her blog. Another time, Prokofy teleported into one of her rental areas and had the "very creepy" experience of seeing her own face looking straight down from a giant airborne image overhead.
Still, even the fiercest of Prokofy's antagonists recognize her central point: Once real money is at stake, "serious business" starts to look a lot like, well, serious business, and messing with it starts to take on buzz-killing legal implications. Pressed as to the legality of their griefing, PNs are quick to cite the distinction made in Second Life's own terms of service between real money and the "fictional currency" that circulates in-game. As ^ban^ puts it, "This is our razor-thin disclaimer which protects us in real-life" from what /b/tards refer to as "a ride in the FBI party van."
Real money isn't always enough to give a griefer pause, however. Sometimes, in fact, it's just a handy way of measuring exactly how serious the griefers' game can get.
Consider the case of the Avatar class Titan, flown by the Band of Brothers Guild in the massively multiplayer deep-space EVE Online. The vessel was far bigger and far deadlier than any other in the game. Kilometers in length and well over a million metric tons unloaded, it had never once been destroyed in combat. Only a handful of player alliances had ever acquired a Titan, and this one, in particular, had cost the players who bankrolled it in-game resources worth more than $10,000.
So, naturally, Commander Sesfan Qu'lah, chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation and leader of the greater GoonSwarm Alliance — better known outside EVE as Isaiah Houston, senior and medieval-history major at Penn State University — led a Something Awful invasion force to attack and destroy it.
"EVE was designed to be a cold, hard, unforgiving world," explains EVE producer Sígurlina Ingvarsdóttir. It's this attitude that has made EVE uniquely congenial for Goons.
"The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying" says Houston. "The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don't come back."
And the only way to make someone that miserable is to destroy whatever virtual thing they've sunk the most real time, real money, and, above all, real emotion into. Find the player who's flying the biggest, baddest spaceship and paid for it with the proceeds of hundreds of hours mining asteroids, then blow that spaceship up. "That's his life investment right there," Houston says.
The Goons, on the other hand, fly cheap little frigates into battle, get blown up, go grab another ship, and jump back into the fight. Their motto: "We choke the guns of our enemies with our corpses." Some other players consider the tactic a less-than-sporting end run around a fair fight, still others call it an outright technical exploit, designed to lag the server so the enemy can't move in reinforcements.
Either way, it works, and the success just adds force to GoonFleet's true secret weapon: morale. "EVE is the only game I can think of in which morale is an actual quantifiable source of success," Houston says. "It's impossible to make another person stop playing or quit the game unless their spirit is, you know, crushed." And what makes the Goons' spirit ultimately uncrushable is knowing, in the end, that they're actually playing a different game altogether. As one GoonFleet member's online profile declared, "You may be playing EVE Online, but be warned: We are playing Something Awful."
The Internet is serious business, all right. And of all the ironies inherent in that axiom, perhaps the richest is the fate of the arch-Goon himself, Rich Kyanka. He started Something Awful for laughs in 1999, when he began regularly spotlighting an "Awful Link of the Day." He depends on revenue from SA to sustain not just himself but his pregnant wife, their 2-year-old daughter, two dogs, a cat, and the mortgage on a five-bedroom suburban mini-manor in Missouri. His foothold in the upper middle class rests entirely on the enduring comic appeal of goofy Internet crap.
Sitting in his comfortable basement office at the heart of the Something Awful empire, surrounded by more monitors than the job could possibly require and a growing collection of arch pop-surrealist paintings, Kyanka recounts some of the more memorable moments. Among them: numerous cease-and-desist letters from targets of SA's ridicule, threats of impending bodily harm from a growing community of rage-aholics permabanned from the SA forums, and actual bodily harm from B-movie director Uwe Boll. A onetime amateur boxer, Boll publicly challenged his online critics to a day of one-on-one real-world fights and then pummeled all who showed up, Kyanka among them. (See "Raging Boll," issue 14.12.)
Given that track record, you might think that a family man and sole breadwinner like Kyanka would be looking into another line of work by now. But he's still at it, proudly. "My whole mindset is, there are terrible things on the Internet: Can I write about them and transform them into something humorous?"
But ultimately, Kyanka's persistence is a testament to just how seriously he refuses to take the Internet seriously. Consider: When comments on the Web site of popular tech blogger Kathy Sierra escalated from anonymous vitriol to anonymous death threats last March, it sparked a story that inspired weeks of soul-searching and calls for uniform standards of behavior among bloggers and their communities. In response, Kyanka wrote a Something Awful column, which began with the question: "Can somebody please explain to me how is this news?"
Kyanka went on to review the long and bloodless history of death threats among Internet commenters, then revealed his own impressive credentials as a target: "I've been getting death threats for years now. I'm the king of online dying," he wrote. "Furries hate me, Juggalos hate me, script kiddies hate me, people banned from our forums hate me, people not banned from our forums hate me, people who hate people banned from our forums hate me ... everybody hates me."
So far, so flip. But almost as an afterthought, Kyanka appended the text of a death threat sent from a banned ex-Goon, aimed not at him but at his infant daughter: "Collateral damage. Remember those words when I kick in your door, duct tape Lauren Seoul's mouth, fuck her in the ass, and toss her over a bridge."
Next to that text, Kyanka posted a photo of himself holding the smiling little girl. His evident confidence in his own safety, and that of the child in his arms, was strangely moving — in an unnerving sort of way.
Moving, and maybe even illuminating. In the end, no matter what they say, life on the Internet really is a serious business. It matters. But the tricky thing is that it matters above all because it mostly doesn't — because it conjures bits of serious human connection from an oceanic flow of words, pictures, videoclips, and other weightless shadows of what's real. The challenge is sorting out the consequential from the not-so-much. And, if Rich Kyanka's steely equanimity is any example, the antics of the Goons and /b/tards might actually sharpen our ability to make that distinction. To those who think the griefers' handiwork is simply inexcusable: Well, being inexcusable is, after all, the griefers' job. Ours is to figure out that caring too much only gives them more of the one thing they crave: the lulz.
Contributing editor Julian Dibbell (julian@dibbell.com) wrote about open source software in Brazil in issue 12.11.
 
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:00:00 GMT
Second Life Bans Traditional Banking
Linden Lab's shutdown of in-game institutions offering interest and investment opportunities follows the collapse of "virtual investment bank" Ginko Financial.
Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT
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