Jan 13 2009
Writing for Wikipedia - To Do or Not to Do?
One of my favorite starting points for general research used to be Wikipedia, but by now, many of you in the gaming industry may have heard all the hooplah about the entire Threshold RPG vs. Wikipedia incident. (That’s a bit of a misnomer. I should say the incident is really between Threshold RPG and a few pompous, arrogant, and, ultimately, ignorant editors and administrators who definitely like to get together to gang-bang vulnerable articles. You can read more about it here .
Now, I love to write, as anyone reading this blog would know, and the idea of writing something that would be really useful to someone else is a bit seductive. That’s probably why I started this blog. Imagine how seductive it must be to write for Wikipedia then. There’s only one big problem, and it’s a doozy. Anything you write can be changed or outright deleted by someone who very possibly has not not even finished high school yet. Most of the people running around submitting articles for deletion (and arguing until they get deleted) obviously have not done a day of research in their life. They have very little knowledge about how to write and how to cite, and their defense is the wikipedia policies and guidelines that have obviously been written for a more intelligent and educated crew. They, however, love the power of being able to bludgeon people with their misinterpretations and ridiculous logic that would never fly in any kind of an academic setting.
Almost all writers have experienced writer’s block in some form or fashion, and we’re all very used to the frustration that accompanies this phenomenon. For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced this, writer’s block is defined as a mental condition that results in a temporary loss of the ability to continue a piece of writing or begin a piece of writing due to a lack of creativity, ideas, or will. Sometimes writer’s block is a temporary thing that can be resolved by simply waiting for a bit of inspiration. Other times, it’s much, much more serious and can hamper the development of a creative process.
For most games and especially text games, writing should be done in the active voice to give players a true sense of events within the game’s history and current happenings. Many writers fall into the habit of writing in the passive voice which can often create convoluted and confusing sentences. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence is the one creating the action. In passive voice, the subject of the sentence is receiving the action. With just a bit of rewording, a sentence using passive voice can turn into a sentence using active voice.
Maxis definitely made it quite easy to create beautiful and interesting items in Spore. Obviously, it was in their best interest to make it easy since so many of the creatures and buildings end up on other people’s games. It would be horrid to end up with some pretty blah and bland looking items done by a lazy player. They obviously spent a ton of time programming their creation interface to be used even by the most inept gamers or people new to the game like me. I was completely impressed by how easy it was to make something decent.
Okay, I recently got Spore, and so I’ve been playing that for 2 days. Honestly, my husband took me to Wal-Mart at 12:15 am Sunday to get it as soon as we could since I have such limited playing time. (It’s nice to have someone who understands my gaming obsessions.) I didn’t actually even know it was coming out because they don’t seem to be advertising much.
My husband is a huge college football fan, and we actually used to live in his favorite team’s hometown. I think that if we hadn’t moved away, I’d probably never come to love his team. It was just way too in-your-face anywhere we went, and honestly, I didn’t understand the game. If I’d stayed where I was, I probably never would have wanted to learn the game. Part of the problem with football, at least for me, was that there was simply so much dead-time, and none of the positions seemed to make sense. It really looked like the ball got snapped, and everyone ran around until someone got knocked down. To me, it was just a chaotic mess of men, a ball, and some grass. How did it all change?
My first reaction to the table was probably pretty normal: W-T-F. WTF!!! Who would pay $10,000 used for throwing some dice and moving a few figures around? Someone crazy, that’s who! Then I took a look at the actual table - dubbed the Sultan- which is brought to us by 
EPC - Evil Pussy Cat - is what I’ve dubbed a specific type of women gamer. (Sometimes you run into men pretending to be women who also deserve the title of EPC.) Every guild and every game has this type of player, and I feel for any guild who has more than one. EPC is a tribute to someone I watched in morbid fascination as I was playing City of Heroes/City of Villains. I never had a direct run-in with her, but I’d watch her have drama after drama on the guild alliance channel. She’d gathered a group of “white knights” who simply hung on her every word, and she enjoyed that attention greatly. In fact, if she was online and other people weren’t talking to her or about her, it wouldn’t be long before she had some sort of fit. One time, there was an animated games mechanics discussion going on guild chat. Several people were involved, and EPC threw in a few random sentences about her day or her life here or there. No one really picked up on it, and it wasn’t before long before EPC got “offended” by a statement a random guildie had made and spazzed all over everyone. A few of her “white knights” also jumped on the guy, and of course, chaos ensued. This happened on the forums a few times as well. Honestly, I’d love to be more specific about the issue, but I can’t for the life of me remember the issue over which she was totally losing it.
When designing a virtual world in which roleplaying is a focus, I run into all sorts of interesting questions and conundrums. In a low tech world much like the one in our own history, I believe that children looked for entertainment much like they do now, and many children probably loved animals much like the children of today. In today’s world, we have tons and tons of stuffed animals, many of them extremely life-like, all of them made with faux fur or synthetic fibers. What if that wasn’t readily available? So, while I was Michaels shopping for sales to support my other hobbies, I ran into the answer and a new addiction - amigurumi. Amigurumi is the Japanese art of creating animals by knitting or crocheting the parts, stuffing them, and sewing them together. I’d actually had exposure to this already from my relatives in Thailand, but I hadn’t realized they actually had a name.