Since the age of 6 or 7 I’ve been playing video games way more than is probably healthy. It started with that ZX Spectrum that my kind-of-adopted brother owned. Those hypnotic, flashing loading screens… those oh-so-80s synth noises blasting out of that monophonic speaker…

But I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited as those 2 or 3 minutes while waiting for Dizzy to load. Sure, it was way too difficult for me at the time, but I tried my best! “Fill a potion bottle with cooked leprechauns wig, clouds silver lining, Vampire dux feather and some troll brew – cook the potion and throw it at Zaks to dissolve his reign.” — What? I was 6, damnit!

Anyway, I like to think that playing video games, rather than sitting like some kind of braindead zombie infront of a TV played a vital role in developing my better-than-average intellect. At least, that’s what I kept telling my mother…

Now, quite some years on, I’m still playing video games. Perhaps a bit less than I used to, as I have to work sometime, and I no longer bump into my dad at 7am, when he’s making breakfast, and I’m getting a belated midnight snack. But I still enjoy video games, oh yes!

While I still attend LAN parties for the occasional slobbed-out-infront-of-the-PC-for-72-hours thing, I try to limit my gameplay to more… mature levels. I play World of Warcraft (WoW) — in a big way. I lead a guild that’s about to celebrate its 4th anniversary, called Iron Edge. Those of you that know a little about MMORPGs know that after a year or two, these games tend to boil down into 1) a chat room with pretty graphics, and 2) political warfare between competing guilds. I tend to while away my time in WoW playing the political game: crippling or outright destroying other guilds, and ensuring the survival of my own guild.

They say it’s lonely at the top, and we’ve been there for a couple of years now. It’s odd, before we were #1, we were everyone’s best friends. Now, I’m fairly certain my guild hasn’t turned into an army of egoistic spastics, but if you listen to anyone that isn’t in Iron Edge, you’d most certainly hear otherwise. I guess people just look at you differently when you’re at the top. The constant barrage of people trying to take you down a peg is a little tiring, certainly, but if the only way to stop the abuse is to stop playing well and drop down the rankings… I think I’d rather keep the abuse.

I’ll be writing more about WoW, as I’ve been playing for 4 years now, and I don’t see the addiction loosening its warm, firm grip upon me any time soon.

In other news, it’s New Year’s Eve today, and I don’t yet have a party to attend. I better go find one. Otherwise video games won’t only be my first love, they’ll be my last too…

I woke up this morning to quite a fantastic phenomenon — frozen morning mist. There might be a scientific name for such a form of precipitation (and if anyone knows, please let me know), but all I know is that it’s damn pretty. I guess it occurs when the temperature dips just before sunrise, freezing any of the moisture in the air, affixing it to everything. As a result, you get a lovely, crystalline sharpness to everything. It’s not quite the same as snow-covered mornings, as they are just a small, thin layer of ice crystals: so you can see the colours beneath the frost!

Of course the best way to illustrate this would be with a photo.

Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but as luck would have it (kind of), I was woken up by some reckless beast throwing a box from Amazon right onto my crotch, as I was sleeping. An interesting way to wake up, throbbing, not certain if you’ve just had a particularly… wild dream, or if some bastard’s just thrown a big box onto your nuts. Anyway, bruising and hampered fertility aside, it was the new Sigma lens! Hooray!

Muttering expletives and quickly squeezing my ass into some pants, I went out to take a photo:
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As you can see, it’s quite a sparkly, special look! It looks even better large, as you can make out all the detail on the end of the branches, and all the little specks of colour. I’ll try to get some more photos with the new lens, for my benefit and yours. Maybe strap a polariser on and go wild with a sunset.

Anyway, I activated a neat new feature on this blog! If you double click any word on the page, you’ll get a cute little pop-up that defines the word for you. I don’t think it works with phrases, and it doesn’t work with links. It’ll probably tell you that I’m not spelling things correctly too, because the software is Americanz-English. Let me know if it doesn’t work, or if you have some kind of weird OCD-like condition where you always double click everything on the page as you read it (probably the same kind of person that highlights random blocks of text as they’re reading… you know who you are).

I also changed how images display on the site (just a little), but it’s still not complete. The slide show option is completely atrocious (really, don’t click it). I’m also working on a little shopping attachment to sell Seb-related apparel. Okay, that sounded a little too narcissistic, what I really meant was prints of my photos. And maybe 1 or 2 t-shirts with ‘Seb Was Here’ and an arrow pointing downwards. For the ladies.

Tomorrow I’m going to write about how I roleplayed a female in World of Warcraft for the first 2 months that I played. Yep, I even got gifts. It was an experiment on the back of my computer games degree course.

I’m pretty sure that by now, you are certain that I’m male, that I have a penis, and I most likely have hair covering the vast majority of my body. If you’re still uncertain, I definitely need to work on my roleplaying skills.

This is where I play with your conceptions and throw a curve ball, by telling you that I’ve portrayed myself, at other times and in other places, to be female. Successfully enough to have men fall for me, to receive gifts, to be brought into another girl’s circle of confidence.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never done this in real life. Being 6′5″ (196cm) with a goatee and vast amounts of body hair normally prevent all but lobotomised people from believing I’m a girl. I’m talking online — a few MUDs, and a couple of MMOs.  In the MUDs I played overtly female characters (it’s very easy, when you only have descriptive text to define who and what you are). I’ve always been gifted with words, so weaving them together to form a believable female persona wasn’t really a challenge. Normally the characters would start of androgynous and slowly develop a sexuality as I got a feel for how other girls (well, they might’ve been girls…) handled themselves.

This whole boys-playing-girls thing (which is/was very common with MUDs) can lead into some interesting and not-so-ideal situations. Take, for example, sexual interactions. I know on at least one occasion, I was seduced by another guy playing a female character. I don’t know to this day if he seduced me because he thought I was a hot girl, or because he had worked out I was a guy. The fact that he was playing a gay character probably suggests he knew I was a guy — but who knows. The other problem is when you finally have to ‘come out’, which is what happened with my WoW experiment:

I created my first WoW character back in 2005. At the time I’d just finished my degree, and a few weeks away from graduating. I’d successfully not started an MMO during my time at university (I’ll tell you some other stories about my gamer geek friends another day, and how they failed their degree…), but considering my degree title was ‘Computer Games’, I figured I should probably do some… research into the field of MMOs. Yes, I started WoW as a study to find out what made World of Warcraft dominate the market (and really, at 11.5 million subscribers, it’s MASSIVE).

With a new game, and a new level of understanding for how online communities work, I decided to up the challenge and roleplay a girl, playing a boy. It was a whole lot more delicate (and more fun), because I could outwardly be masculine, but have some deep-seated female traits that would only come out in quiet, private chats with other players. After 2 or 3 months, I had about 50% of my friends certain I was a girl, and the rest totally unsure about my gender.

The experiment came to an abrupt ending when I finally had to use my microphone (damn raiding!) and my squeeky falsetto voice wasn’t quite believable enough… I gave it my best shot though, but alas, the persona I’d worked so hard to develop came crumbling down around me.

So I’m a boy… at the moment.

Anyway! We’re off to London soon, to see a play. I’ll leave you with another nice photo that I took yesterday (and promptly submitted to National Geographic… well a man can dream, right?) It’s entitled ‘Sucks to be a Duck’…

Sadly, it’s true. While 40% of all games players are female (a rather large percentage that often shocks some people), only 15% of them play games like World of Warcraft (WoW).

I think this is probably because of the perceived element of competition in games such as WoW or Runescape (another online game). Girls tend to stay clear of the male stomping ground and focus almost entirely on ‘god sims’: games which give the player complete control over the denizens of a virtual world, such as The Sims — which is, incidentally, one of the largest selling games of all time. The female gamer market share is something most game developers can only dream of capturing. Another popular genre for those lovely female gamers are ‘dress up’ games, where there is more emphasis on a character’s appearance — there’s even a site dedicated to finding such games! The rather cutesy look of the site is probably an indication of the target audience.

Moving onto a more specific area — online gaming –  Nick Yee’s research (The Daedalus Project) dwarfs every other body of work on the topic, even if its objectivity is hotly contested by many other academics. There are simply too many interesting statistics available from the project so I won’t bore you with them, but poke around if you’re interested in finding out more the new and exciting breed of online gamers — gamers like me.

The only pertinent statistic, is that 35% of all WoW characters are female — and only half of those are actually played by girls in real life. Not only does this mean that only 15% out of 11.5 million players are female, it also means that 50% of all female characters are being played by boys. Now, gender-bending isn’t a new thing! Tt’s pretty common in online games, where you interact with tens or even hundreds of people each day, and playing a female can give you a certain… edge. Female characters are given gifts, they receive beneficial treatment and generally have a much easier and enjoyable gaming experience than males. Someone is much more likely to stop and help you kill some big, gribbly beasty if you’re female. (Isn’t gribbly the best word ever?)

All of these things are real life phenomena too –  this is just one example of virtual worlds imitating real life.

Sadly, in my guild, we only have about 5 girls (well, that I’m certain of), out of about 150 people. That seems a fair bit below the 15% Nick Yee suggests. On top of that, I think only 1 of those girls is an actual ‘free gamer’, and not in the guild purely because their boyfriend is there.

So, this is my attempt to drive more girls to online gaming in general, and my guild in particular. While it’s true that many people play online games like WoW for the competition, and being first, many people play just for the fun. There’s also lots of dressing up you can do, with thousands of aesthetic choices you can make to your character. I guess it’s by no coincidence that most girls prefer ‘Tolkein fantasy’  — they identify easiest with those lithe bodies and pointy ears, right? But still only 15% are female! We must increase that number! For geeky men like me all over the globe!

I think the problem is, at least for a hardcore guild like mine, is that the guys that I play with simply don’t get out. They don’t meet anyone, because games like World of Warcraft require a certain amount of time investment that makes socialising outside of the game a little difficult. I guess, considering women are much more social creatures than men, I’m not drawing a very good picture here. Let me recover with a pretty photo of my character:[SinglePic not found]

See, isn’t it PRETTY? A dragon! and swirly… magical things! Just ignore the skeletal dragon in the background.

Anyway, as I was saying, as the guys don’t get out much, they don’t get girlfriends — or at least socialise with girls. Without some kind of female contact, it’s quite hard to become socially adjusted — and you have to present yourself as a well-adjusted guild if you want to woo those few female players.

Girls just don’t appreciate it when they first thing they see upon joining the guild is ‘Argh, I’ve got itchy balls.’

So, girls, start playing an online game and adopt a geek today. Teach us the arts of grooming.

Today is a day of change, after all.

I’ve had some kind of gaming entry bouncing around my head for a few days now, but the Penis Monologues, and then the Snowy Wonderland kind of took up all of my blogging. But now the snow’s stopped, I have a little time to write about geeky things.

What is a geek?  For those that totally sure of the definition, geekiness is the act of being slightly too excited about something that a ‘normal’ person would find esoteric. Getting excited at your childhood hero playing a cameo in a modern film? Geeky. Organising your DVD collection in alphabetical order? Geeky (and a little bit concerning). Downloading old cartoon theme tunes because you think they’re ‘cool’. Geeky. Playing video games for 12 hours straight. Geeky.

The list goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, anyone that’s in some way interesting is a bit of a geek. People that are totally mediocre are dull. I think we can all agree that being normal and dull is probably a fate worse than spending all of eternity with Beelzebub and his minions. If you don’t agree, you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog anyway, because you’ll be thinking: ‘Sweet Moses! This guy’s a communist that likes talking like a cowboy, and torturing his crippled cat.’

So, anyway, I’m a geek. I can fix most electronic devices just by touching them (I was actually nicknamed Jesus at university — not entirely for that reason, but I don’t want to tell that story just yet). I can build computers from parts. I have been known to play video games for 18 hours straight (no, not World of Warcraft — I think my WoW record was 14 hours). I’ve made fan websites as a homage to my favourite games — like Baldur’s Gate. Then don’t even get me started on musical theatre; 200 recordings, and trips to Broadway just to ’see a few of my favourites’ (like Rent and Wicked).

I even have signed first editions of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

This fantastic xkcd comic quite accurately describes about 50% of Geekdom.

That comic is proof you don’t need to be able to draw to make a successful webcomic, by the way. Anyway, looking at my list of ‘quirks’, it seems I might have left geekiness behind; I might be approaching… Dorkdom. Perhaps things haven’t quite progressed to that malignant stage yet… perhaps there is still time. If I ever become a dork, shoot me. Between the eyes.

I’m not sure, but I think that’s a Star Wars cosplayer – the worst breed. At least when I hang out with WoW cosplayers it seems they have some modesty left. There’s something deeply erotic about stripping down a female WoW cosplayer in the bedroom, actually. Peeling back those layers of magical armour, exposing the girl’s soft, pliable skin… it’s like actually performing one of the male WoW geek’s greatest fantasies. And I’ve been there.

You know, that was probably a thought I should have left bouncing around in my head, never to be aired publicly.

While I’m on the topic of ‘gaming geek’, we have gaming chic (see what I did there?): Great Geek Gaming Furniture. There’s some truly beautiful and functional furniture shown in the article; it’s well worth looking at, even if you don’t want to spend £5,000 on a chair. But there are lots of things to add to the ‘when I’m rich and famous’ list, like the Poufman.

Penultimately, while I’m not actually a Star Trek geek myself (I enjoy some of the shows as shows, but I’m not so madly besotted that I attend Trekkie conventions looking like a freak), I was shown this fantastic Star Trek Story Generator. If you’ve ever seen an episode of any of the Star Trek franchises, this flow chart will probably be quite hilarious. It’ll probably be funniest if you’ve seen a lot of the original, wobbly-set series.

And finally I leave you with this: (sorry, it has nothing to do with geekiness, but you still want to click ‘play’):

Well, according to this truly atrocious ‘human interest story’ from NBC, I do.

Since when are abbreviations that quicken communication a secret language, of a secret society? They can form the basis of a secret language — but 12 million people probably makes it a little too wide-spread to be secret.

Heck, it’d be kinda cool if I belonged to a secret society. I’d have some air of mystery then, that would probably score me many fine women. Alas, it’s quite the opposite: I belong to a geeky society with not enough women.

Oh, and he’s not the ‘tenth best player in the world’. He’s probably not even in the top ten thousand. At least when I tell you I’m perhaps one of the top 30 players in the world, I’m telling the truth!

I’m sitting here, trying to wiggle my toes. I’m sure they are down there somewhere, I just can’t feel them.

It hasn’t been above 2 degrees in 3 days now — the snow is still there. I thought snow was meant to act as an insulator, but it’s frickin’ freezing in my room. I’m wearing a wooly jumper, 2 pairs of socks, slippers and gloves.

So, to get away from the cold, it’s now time for something completely different. Sunny, balmy, land-of-the-eternal-barbecue… Australia!

 
(If you can’t see the player, you’ll have to visit my blog)

Join Bruce the Australian Surfer & Rodeo Rider on this, the fifth and final (for now!) penis monologue.

Right now I’m in the middle of raiding, waiting for some person with a broken computer to come back online. The joy of massively-multiplayer online gaming. The constant logistical nightmare of organising a guild of 150 people. Trying to keep 20 different nationalities playing together nicely and assuage the tensions caused by different religions, national holidays and ways of life.

Oh, he’s back online. Back to the grind!

Or if not killed, at least seriously injured with a baseball bat.

So there I was in Beograd — Belgrade –  capital of Serbia. Hopefully you’ve read my little introduction to Serbia; the backdrop has been painted for the retelling of one of my little escapades.

I’m not ashamed to say that the main reason I went to Serbia was to meet some of my World of Warcraft guild mates. Actually, as guild leader, I guess they were my peons, but carrying over that kind of relationship from online to offline can often result in horrible consequences: so I treated them like equals. It was a little weird being treated like some kind of leader in real life though, I have to admit. That slight element of deference, that instantaneous silence if I start talking over someone else.

Anyway, when I wasn’t in my hotel (a 3 star hotel in Belgrade is a bed and a sink, by the way — I think the cleanliness of the sheets dictates the star rating), or at Petar’s house, hitting on his younger cousin, my home was the dark and dingy subway beneath one of the main junctions in Belgrade. When I was being taken there for the first time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. ‘Just a little further down here, Dell.’ (Dell being a shortening of Delling, my nickname — being called by your online persona in real life is cool and kinda weird at the same time). Stepping down broken enamel steps, further and further, sunlight disappearing behind me, I emerged into… the seedy online underworld of Belgrade. Once it was probably a shopping mall of some kind, but now it was a scattering of white-painted-window derelict shops, and… internet cafes! Lots and lots of internet cafes. Basically, everyone that plays WoW in Serbia plays from this little hub.

There are cafes there for every kind of player: the posh cafe with cute Slavic wenches that walk around and bring you drinks, the middle-of-the-range ones that are clean and functional, and finally the dingy shitholes that, of course, I would end up playing from for a week. Apparently my guild mates picked that one because it was ‘cheap and cheerful’. Yeah, cheap like a bunch of ancient 486s with 14″ CRT screens, and cheerful in that they played awful happy hardcore music. Admittedly they turned the music off after a few days of me whining, which was good of them.

You can’t see much from the picture, but I couldn’t find the better one… if I track it down, I’ll post it.

Online gaming is a highly-competitive arena. You might’ve heard of the Chinese guy that got stabbed to death after he sold a ‘dragon sabre’ that belonged to someone else (the murderer). There have been lots of reported cases of real life brutality in Korea too, caused by online disputes that have sprawled into a real life brawl. While gamers in Europe are not quite as passionate as our Far Eastern brethren, some of the… ‘less developed’ Slavic friends still take gaming very, very seriously. Steal his loots, and he’ll threaten to break your legs with a baseball bat. Steal an important player from his guild, and he’ll threaten to track you down and break your neck.

This was never much of a problem, as I was all the way over in England. I just laughed and shrugged off their threats. Unfortunately, I was now in Serbia, and those over-excited, evil Serbs that were threatening me and my family were just around the corner in the next internet cafe. I’d conveniently forgotten this before I’d jumped on a plane and flown into a dangerous climate where I would have to constantly alert for impending attacks.

So, there I was, trying to lead a raid, shouting into a microphone, trying to desperately to be heard over some particuarly tragic hiphop music (did I mention you can hardly see the screens because everyone’s smoking too?), when suddenly a large, buff, muscular Slavic Schwarzenegger-lookalike is silhouetted in the doorway to our internet cafe. He’s wielding a baseball bat menancingly, a malevolent glint in his eye.

‘DELLINK? WHERE IS DELLINK? JEDI GOVNA IZ KANTE, DELLINK! ‘

At this point, I wish all of my loyal guildmates stood up and said ‘I’m Delling!’, ‘No, I’m Delling!’, but sadly I don’t think Spartacus is a very popular film there. Instead, they all stood up, very menacingly and started walking towards the spastic Serbian that was busy spouting death threats and still looking for me. They surrounded him and said: ‘You’ll have to get through us to get to Delling.’

I think he realised very quickly that online loyalties exist in real life too; these guys were going to make damn sure I was kept safe — if I got harmed, who was going to lead their guild to great glory?!

And that was just within the first 24 hours of my stay in Belgrade… it was going to be a long 10 days.

It’s February 2009 and World of Warcraft now has 11.5 million players worldwide. It has more players than any other MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) in history by a considerable margin; it’s simply blown the competition of the water. The growth of WoW is quite literally unprecedented.

And that’s just up to some time in 2008. WoW has taken huge bites out of other gaming segments; when you are the third biggest selling PC game of all time (behind Sims 1 and 2 — damn those female gamers!), other genres tend to take a hit. Blizzard didn’t just conjure 11.5 million people out of thin air! People dumped their FPSes and RTSes and came to see what all the fuss was about. I remember when I started playing, the majority of people that I met were CS kiddies, or StarCraft/Warcraft 3 players. You can see from the graph that there just weren’t that many subscribers from other games to play WoW — Blizzard had done what every other games developer can only dream of: they cracked the MMO subscription market wide-open.

Blizzard made fantastic use of their experience from StarCraft and Warcraft, and made a game that’s easy to learn and enjoyable to play. A lot of the ‘old school treadmills’ and ‘grinds’ that players had grown to be accustomed to (and often loathe) in other MMOs all but disappeared in WoW. If you’re one of the million-or-so gamers that came from EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot or Final Fantasy XI, the first thing that strikes you about WoW is just how easy it is. Never has it been so easy to be ’successful’ in an online game.

You might’ve heard the phrase ‘welfare epics’, or ‘casual friendly’. Both of these terms have been coined to describe Blizzard’s ideology of massively-multiplayer online gaming: It should not necessarily be about how much you play, it’s about taking part. WoW is about making everyone feel special. And boy it works!

In other games, before WoW, you could only dream of one day being in anyway equal to the best players. MMORPGs really weren’t for casual gamers, they were for gamers that thought they had a chance of being #1. They had the time, the dedication and a certain lack of RL obligations — that’s what it took to be competitive pre-WoW.

Then along came the casual-friendly welfare-epic gloriously lore-rich realm of Azeroth. A world where you could attain the max level is about 15 days, and be adequately well-geared within 20. Such an easy game had never been heard of! All those newbies were subscribing after their free month. An awful lot of people never play past the first month of MMOs — WoW’s player retention is truly awesome compared to other MMOs; people pick up the game, and never put it down. Finally we had a game where the reward is directly related to the effort, and not some sick-and-twisted system where the higher levels require exponential time investments and dedication.

And that’s the key to WoW: a linear curve of progression. There is very little justifying reason to play those extra 25 hours a week to get that small one-up on the opposition. (There’s a very good business reason for this too, as Blizzard make more money if you play less!)

Anyway, you can probably see where this is going. I’m not one of those casuals; I’m the total opposite. I’m a guild leader. I’m in that tiny percentile of players that goes a little bit further than the rest. Not only do I play those extra 25 hours a week, I also manage a guild at the same time.

The purpose of this blog is to educate and inform people about massively multiplayer games in general, and leading a successful WoW guild in particular. If you’re a struggling guild leader, or you’re thinking about starting your own guild, hopefully you’ll be able to find some tips here. Perhaps you’re just a raider, with no involvement with the leadership of your guild, you might find some interesting things about inter-guild politics, or how to be a better raider.

There’s actually very little out there on the Internet about actually leading a successful WoW guild. That’s probably because we’re overshadowed by our hyper-competitive PVP brethren, like Serennia and Ming. Hopefully this blog will give you an insight into the other, more social side of online gaming: guilds and PVE.

Well, a large portion of my life at least. Not quite all, but… an uncomfortably high percentage of it.

Anyway, I’ve started a serious series of posts, about being the guild leader of a successful World of Warcraft guild.

This is obviously a series of posts aimed at gamers in general, and WoW players in specific. You might find it interesting if you’re an outsider looking in — a girlfriend of a WoW addict perhaps, or maybe someone that’s interested in picking up another game to play! It will focus on tips and tricks for up and coming guilds, the politics of WoW guilds (and online communities), and it will hopefully provide an insight into the inner workings of a successful guild leader.

It has its own category, which you can find on the right, and its own RSS feed — take a look, if it tickles your fancy!