TwinHits' Article Archives

Ask A Jedi Shuts Down, Thesis Finished!

Unfortunately, the editors of AskAJedi.com have decided to shut down the website, and so I am now a blogger without a home.

Once I graduate, I will seek further employment, and so these archives will probably remain somewhat barren until I can get something else.

In other news, I completed my senior thesis ‘Too Young to Takeover, Too Old to Ignore” on how guilds teach leadership, organization, and communication skills and can then, in turn, cause increased civic engagement offline.

If you are interested, please check it out here.

Tweet @TwinHits with any thoughts and ideas, or if you have a job for me in DC. #shamelessplug

Ask A Jedi: The Machiavellian Guild Leader

A while back, I read “The Prince” by political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. The idea was that it would have cool stuff that guild officers could apply to leadership and that I could write about. This turned out to be kind of true. In the actual act and organization of leadership, what Machiavelli has to say isn’t particularly applicable. We’re not hiring mercenaries, doling out land and fortresses to loyal princes, or deciding whether or not to raze, puppet, or annex cities (Oh, hey there, Civilization 5!). Although, it makes me wonder if in an older MMO like Ultima Online if this kind of advice would be more applicable.

I put the project aside, until I picked up a copy of “World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Rise of the Philosopher King.” You may have seen this book or maybe its companions like “The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am” or ‘Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved“. At first, these seem pretty dumb, but it was actually really awesome. It is a collection of papers and articles about philosophy that all use World of Warcraft as an example. For example, there is one about how the World of Warcraft economy represents the capitalism that Adam Smith described in “The Wealth of Nations“. Another describes the philosophical idea of determinism through the example of a player controlling a character and that character not understanding what it is that causes him to move. In particular, there was an article called “The Machiavellian Guild Leader” by Moses Wolfenstein that discussed how guild leaders in World of Warcraft use some of the political leadership principles that Machiavelli talks about.

Wolfenstein points to the infamous Onyxia Wipe Animation as an example, in which the Boulderfist guild Wipe Club is trying to down Onyxia and after a particularly close loss the raid leader Dives began to yell and scream promising to punish them all with “50 DKP minus!”. Wolfenstein claims that Dives is employing the Machiavellian principle that it is better to be feared than loved or hated. Machiavelli says that if you want to rule a country and remain the ruler, it is much better to be feared because when you are kind and generous people will appreciate it. If you are loved, the people will not appreciate your generosity because it is what they expect of you and when you need to be harsh they will hate you for it. When you are hated, you cannot rule because you will be too worried about being overthrown. “It is better to be miserly than generous for when you fail to be generous where expected you will be hated, but if you are miserly than you will be unexpected.”

“The answer is that it would be desirable to be both but, since that is impossible, it is safer to be feared than loved.” In an interview he gave to James Wagner Au of Kotaku, Dives talks about the animation, his background, and his guild leadership style. He was asked if he is worried about people leaving his guild because of his leadership style, to which he responded “They don’t leave because they know I’m right.” According to Wolfenstein, Dives understands the dynamic of leadership that Machiavelli describes, which explains his actions on Teamspeak during that fateful and famous Onyxia raid (They got him on the fifth try when they should have got him on the first, according to Dives the “performance was a disgrace”).

He was willing to be hard and yell and to make his raiders fear his outbursts and his willingness to punish, something that most raid leaders would have a hard time doing and would rather try harder to work to be loved then complain about the performance later in officer chat. He is so well known for the animation that he gets requests to come to other guilds raids and be feared in place of the raid leader. “I get too many people asking me that people want me to come to their servers and yell something at them. I did go once and give some people some attitude, which was fun. But I get huge amounts of requests.”

What’s important is that Dives is not hated, he is feared, which is exactly his job and he is very good at it. While the animation was created in jest, it shows exactly what this dynamic is supposed to look like. Dives has decided that the cost of progression is going to be his raider’s love for him, and if that’s what he and his guild wants to do than that is fine. Nowhere does it say that your guild members have to love you for your leadership, all that matters is that the guild does what it promises to do and gets its members to the loot.

Machiavelli is probably most famous for his statements that “the ends justify the means” and that is what Dives is getting at. Sometimes as a guild leader, you have to do hard things for the continued fulfillment of the purpose of the guild. A guild, no matter how big or small, is successful if it is providing to its members whatever it is that is outlined in the purpose of the guild. As long as raiders are raiding, or warzones are being won, or crafters are crafting, or whatever the purpose of your guild is than it is successful. Dives found that the best way to continue to fulfill his promise to his guild, one of raiding, was to be this harsh to the point of being feared.

And that is okay if you are willing to sacrifice yourself that way. In fact, it’s probably a more effective way to lead a guild than to try to love and coddle your way through all the problems that you will face. But, it will cost a part of yourself, and you will probably have less fun doing it, particularly if that is not the kind of person that you are. You will face burnout sooner, be more likely to disappear or give up, and the guild will seem more like a job than not. Choose carefully, but remember that you cannot be both feared or loved, and above all do not be hated.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet @TwinHits with your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask A Jedi: Drop Everything and Start It All Over, Remember More Than You’d Like to Forget

Don’t quit. That’s the thesis of this post. If you are a guild officer, don’t do it, don’t give up. Don’t quit your guild, don’t ask to step down, and absolutely do not just disappear. Burnout has always been a danger for leaders everywhere, not just in gaming guilds but in every volunteer leadership position. I know that you might feel tired of the responsibilities, but honestly: just keep playing, just keep logging on. You’ll thank me later.

I am an optimist, I believe in the best in everything. Every problem has a bright side, and no matter how bad things might get one should always remember all the good things that one takes for granted. I will always remember the smiling faces around me as we downed our first boss, cleared our first operation, or got our first piece of Rakata. I remember the energy that I felt at every new member and every small achievement. I remind myself of all the time and energy that we put into building a great guild and no matter how tired I might get, I’ll always rather have this than nothing at all. I just keep playing, and I just keep logging in.

I play Star Wars: The Old Republic not because I get to jump around with a lightsaber and pretend to be a Jedi (admittedly, that is a big part of it), but because of all the people that this game has brought me to meet. Guilds start out with just four people and grow into ten times that. That’s not including a friends list, or simply names that one recognizes in the warzone. Keep logging in because of the people that you have built relationships with.

This is because this is not a game. Sure, the actual gameplay is a game, but the very moment that you start talking to another player is the moment that it is no longer a game. Instead, it’s an interaction between two people doing something they enjoy. Because your characters are the medium of this communication, they become real and everything associated with that character becomes real. This is even more acute as a guild officer, for that is the most real of all. Having a position of authority and responsibility becomes so real that it invades your everyday life because it requires time and energy outside of the game and simply logging out of the game does not make the responsibilities stop. That’s why people burnout, because there is too much to do and it has become far more than they signed up for.

If you drop everything and start it all over, you’ll remember more than you’d like to forget. I’ve abandoned officership before, and there is nothing at all like the feeling of emptiness once you have done it and realize that there is no way that you can get back. To realize that you abandoned friends and comrades simply because you were tired strikes one so low it’s hard to get back up and try to do something like it again, in any game. You’ll wish to go back, see to their smiling faces again, to be able to help them and yourself enjoy the game more at the cost of a little bit more of your time and energy.

Just keep playing, you got friends to make.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask a Jedi: What’s in a Name?

My name is technically not TwinHits. For unless one has very strange parents, one would expect a more normal name for a person. However this is the internet, and here on the internet we name ourselves.

Not so much in the tribal sense of the word, there is no ceremony where the elders gather around the youth about to venture onto the web for the first time, lay their hands on his shoulders and declare him ‘Starman2000′. Instead, naming is a very personal act. It’s what comes to mind when you stare at the required and empty name field when you are rolling a new character, sign up on a new website, or even name your computer so it’s recognizable to you on your home network.

These names define the cyber-citizen because it is the name that divides the online person and the offline person. With a name comes a personality, completely separate from your real offline identity. These personalities can take on a life of their own making actions of that name entirely different from the actions of your real name, completely unconnected to each other. Separate identities lets one become separate people, different personas for different situations.

This is important because wherever one goes, one builds up a persona, like a reputation, that precedes them into the room. Everyone views them through the lenses of that persona. Moving away, changing schools, or changing jobs allow you to start all over and build up a new persona. However, in the infinite wisdom of my mother, you’ll always end up back where you started. The internet offers a release from this cycle, each name is a new start. With each name you can build up a new persona.

This is anonymity, the very basis of all internet communication. We have the option to reveal who we really are, or continue under a name and persona that we have created. As the internet generation grows up, some will find that their screennames will be just as important than their real names. At which point, it may be wise to draw a line connecting the two names. Someday, I may want everything I have done to not just be TwinHits’, but John’s as well.

However, this is a delicate dynamic. As important as anonymity is, it is constantly under assault. Almost two years ago, Blizzard tried to get rid of it completely with their “ReadlID” and we watched as the entirety of their official forums rose up against it. What they didn’t realize is that our anonymity is our first and last protection, we are aware that the internet has the capacity to be dangerous and the best thing that we can do to protect ourselves to is the create an entirely new identity.

So, I offer a warning to websites around the web. Don’t take away from your users  the rights to their name, let them be who they want to be and present the side of themselves that they want to present.

My name is technically not TwinHits, but why’s that matter? It’s still me anyway.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask A Jedi: Stand Back, We’re Learning

Dear Parents, don’t worry. Your kids are going to be alright even if they are spending a ton of time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s not antisocial, it’s not useless, and it’s not a waste of time. It’s learning, and according to James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, they are doing a better job than our schools are. “They operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.” (Gee, 205)

Check out that handsome book cover.

And he is absolutely right. In this book, he highlights thirty-six learning principles identified by learning and literacy studies and talks about how they are used in modern game design. An excellent example that he uses is the pattern teaching strategy that first person shooters use. They teach you have to move, how to shoot, and how to not die then they throw enemies at you. When fighting, you develop strategies and learn tactics that are effective against your enemies. Then, as the game progresses to more difficult enemies, the game forces you to use everything you have learned in new and different ways. Then, as the final boss nears, the game tears these strategies’ away from you and makes you look for solutions outside of the box, drawing on all the experiences you have had throughout the game.

This is the Probe, Hypothesize, Reprobe, Rethink Cycle. You must first probe  the game, or figure out what’s going on and what you can do. From there, you form a hypothesis about what something might do or how you might be able to take advantage of it. You then reprobe the world using that hypothesis and see what kind of results you get. Using feedback from this experiment, you rethink what you know using what you learned from this cycle.

Consider the Soa the Infernal One fight in the Eternity Vault. First, you probe the boss with the strategy that you have researched (discovered using this same method), then form a hypothesis about how to do it better and best apply it to your group. What is more important to kill, balls, mind traps, or Soa while he is stunned? Should we be spread out or stacked? Revive the healer, or revive a crucial DPS? Then try the fight again and reprobe the boss with your new hypothesis. If it doesn’t work, rethink and go back to your hypothesis. That’s how raiding works, drawing on the very principles of learning that Gee describes.

What this means is a lot. Most importantly of all though, is that it means that good video games likeStar Wars: The Old Republic have the potential to teach us valuable processes and patterns that can be applied to anything that we happen to experience. This is exactly the goal of traditional schooling. They aren’t teaching you the quadratic equation because you’re going to need to use it every day, but because of the patterns and strategies of logic and reasoning that you learn while learning how to use the quadratic equation. Games can do the same thing, and even better because it’s something we actually care about. It means that those who have spent a lot of time playing good video games, particularly at a young age, can learn better while doing something that they love.

The moral of the story is this: Worry less about how much time one is spending playing video games, and worry more about how they are playing their games. In a game like this one, be worried if they are never trying new things, never forming new hypothesizes, and never rethinking old ones. This is a social game: be worried if they are always playing alone and never in groups, never striving for better gear and better play, never willing to help out others, and never kind to those that have helped them in turn. If you never doing these things, then you are wasting your time because you aren’t learning and you aren’t building a better self. That’s against the rules.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask A Jedi: Feels Like Purpose

Quick Note: 5/5 Karagga’s Palace downed! Special shout out to the creator and moderators of www.dreshdaecnatina.com.

I think that one of the most common complaints about MMO’s is that at a certain point they just feel like you are playing a job. One of my roommates, Walters, said this a lot towards the end of his raid leading career in World of Warcraft. I don’t blame him at all, this feeling is common among guild leaders, officers, and raid leaders. We like to refer to it as ‘burnout’, but I think that it is more than that. I think that the fact that our games can take on this flavor is a great statement both about Star Wars: The Old Republic and about the effects they can have on us and our society.

What about MMO’s feels like a job? Management, responsibility, having to tell people they can’t do whatever they want because their gear isn’t up to par, etc. The list goes on. Getting sixteen people online at the same time at the same place with a shared purpose isn’t easy, and it takes quite a bit of skill to do well. All the /tells, officer chat, forum moderation, and drama means less time spent runningKoan Under Siege for that Columi headpiece (I’m not bitter) or PvPing to get that Battlemaster title isn’t necessarily fun. In fact, I would probably not get much resistance if I said that’s not nearly as fun asHuttball.

But it’s important. Having this as an element of a game means that the game is much more than a game. When you play Star Wars: The Old Republic, you aren’t just wasting time away playing a lengthy RPG, you are playing with other people. Improving your character means you are better able to help others and achieve more; you are better able to have fun for both yourself and for those around you. Fifty hours spent in this game doesn’t mean you’ve just completed a story, a pleasure within itself, but it also means that you’ve built something that affects others too.

But, this costs us some, mostly for those heroes among us who spend their time in Dalaran, in Bree, in Coronet, and on the Fleet typing as fast as they can to schedule and organize instead of playing the game, just for the increased pleasure of others.

Even more important is that this kind of game can make a legitimate difference in society. Players of MMORPG’s are offered more opportunities for leadership and management. It’s very hard to teach these things, it takes experience to get a leadership position. But in order to get experience, you need a leadership position. Guilds can change this dynamic and break this dichotomy  by offering leadership opportunities to anyone, and most importantly, young people.

I am among those, one of those who had the greatest pleasure to be a guild officer at a young age. Every day I draw on this experience and I will continue to do so ’til the day I die. Until then, I will owe so many people for this experience, and I still know there is so much left to learn.

Feels like a job? No, feels like purpose.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask A Jedi: It’s Almost Like Being Popular

Off-Topic: Four out of five Hard Mode Eternity Vault down! It felt amazing, raiding in this game is so much fun.

When I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, I put a constraint on myself. I decided that I was going to accept every group invite offered to me because I wanted to meet random people. For me, the people that have affected me the most are those that you meet in a group, a guild, or in a brief moment of doing the same quest and not wanting to trip all over each other. How did it work out? Well, I have a startlingly long friends list and it’s not stopping. My goal is to be friends with most of the level 50′s on server, a goal that doesn’t seem that far off because the 50 community still isn’t that big.

Cultivate a friends list and there’s a lot of good reasons for doing this I think the most practical is that there’s no LFG system in the game right now so we have to build our own. General fleet chat isn’t that great, so the best way to go about finding flashpoint groups and premade PvP groups is to friend everyone who you group with who you think is good and always offer yourself up for future runs. Don’t be afraid to send them /tells asking if they want to  go to Hard mode False Emperor with you or go claim the west Alderaan Warzone turret as your own.

1. Start with the tank and the healer, if you can get these then you are already most of the way there. If you happen to already be one of these people, then you are a blessed person. Friend all the good ones that you find and don’t hesitate to ask them to do things with you, for the worst thing they could say is no. Think about how you would feel if someone were to /tell you asking to do a hard mode, you’d probably be all about it. Why wouldn’t they?
2. The DPS, everyone loves a good DPS, so make friends with lots of them. Once you got your tank and healer ask your favorite damage dealers if they want to come. If you already have a tank and a healer you’ll have a lot easier time filling the rest of the slots. If you want to get all fancy, think about how the personalities and play styles of these players will mesh together. Doing this well will lead you to a better group experience, more success, and the chance of even better and greater adventures down the road.
3. Don’t do anything stupid. Act graciously, play well, and don’t look for weakness in others. If you are rolling against someone else on something important, consider whether or not you actually want it. Always remember: Need for need, greed for companions, pass for everything else. If you play like you expect others to play, you’ll find it a lot easier to find groups, both those formed by you and those that others invite you to.
4. Make friends! If you are playing with someone new, like a friend of someone else’s, and you enjoyed playing with them then add them to your list for future groups. Soon enough you’ll find that a group is only a few /tells away.

This is how you progress in a community, you make friends. This is how you start building a better server, by bringing others together to have more fun. This game wasn’t meant to be played solo, so go out there and make it a party.

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet @TwinHits with your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask A Jedi: Cops and Robbers

I absolutely love hard mode Flashpoints. To anyone on the Dreshdae Cantina server, look me up and let’s run some. My freakin’ legs won’t drop in Directive 7.

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of sitting in a parenting Sunday school class with my parents. I’m still not sure how I got there, I certainly didn’t fit in, it was early in the morning and I’m not a morning personso I kind of just came to consciousness in the room. However, one thing that stuck out to me was I heard a mother ask was, “Should I be concerned if my child takes the ‘bad side’ in a violent game?”

I thought this was an incredibly interesting question and a new turn in the discussion about whether or not violent games are bad for younger children. While we gamers have our own opinions on the subject, for most of us might say that we are better off from our violent games, what about our alignment choices? What does it mean when we pick the ‘evil’ choice in a conversation, or choose to play our characters as violent, immoral people?

Most violent video games (there are several notable exceptions) present their violent content as justified, meaning that it is acceptable or even right for you to kill this person. In a war game, it is justified because they are the enemy, while in other games, it may be justified as self-defense. In the case of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I would argue that is it justified both ways and quite a bit others depending on the story and the missions you are doing.

What’s interesting is the game oftentimes offers you chance to kill when it is not justified. Take, for example, The Esseles flashpoint’s noteworthy choice to vent the engineers, or the early Bounty Hunter decision to kill the father in front of the son. Yes, we could go on forever about what it means to be justified in violence, but the point of this discussion is what does it mean when we make these choices.

I always default to a light character, because that more closely reflects who I want to be. That, however, is not the only reason why one would make a particular choice. I think that there are four possible motivations behind a choice.

1 – For Awesome: A choice is made for the awesomeness of the effect, for example you choose to shoot a barrel of explosives because it will be both pretty and effective instead of reasoning with the gentlemen standing near it.

2 – For Gameplay: A choice is made because it gives you some kind of game play related benefit. For example, by making a light side choice you are one step closer to getting the Light V vehicle mount.

3 – For Morality: A choice is made because you believe it is the right choice to make. For example, you choose not to activate Vette’s shock collar because you do not believe in harming captured innocents.

4 – For Character: A choice is made because you have decided that it is in your character’s personality to make that choice. Your smuggler only cares about credits, and so she will make all sorts of immoral choices in order to get more cash.

Are any of these bad? Well, no. I guess if one were making a choice For Morality and it was a particularly dark choice, then that would be questionable, particularly if made by a small child. All the rest of these I would say aren’t a problem, even for smaller children. I can imagine that they may show an exceptional sense of identity if they are able to separate themselves from their created characters at an early age.

We all know that decisions made in games aren’t real and the ability to make these decisions are part of what makes a good game. While Grand Theft Auto allows you to make a number of questionable choices and Bulletstorm could, according to Fox News and Dr. Carole Lieberman, make you a rapist, both are things that some people would find offensive. However, that is part of making a good game universe: you can’t limit your players. Your players may choose to do whatever they want, and sometimes they may choose to shock Vette rather than pat her on the head.

Recently, the Daily Mail posted this article discussing how TOR players can choose to treat female slaves, specifically Vette, in demeaning and violent manners. While this article does just show a lack of understanding of how video game universes work, it is awfully difficult for those who aren’t familiar with choice based system to grasp that the choices don’t matter.

Particularly, if you are the parent of a small child who sees their child choose to needlessly kill Mandalorian engineers. I don’t know about you, but part of me judges a person when I see them make the dark dialogue choice, but the other part is curious to see what happens anyway.

Do you think that taking the bad side matters? Parents, would you be concerned if your child consistently choose the bad side in any medium?

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.

Ask a JedI: Happiness Is Anyone Or Anything At All

Happy New Years! I’ve decided my new year’s resolution is to become friends with all the other level 50′s on server.

Yeah, I know that’s ambitious and kind of ridiculous, but right now it’s not that hard because there’s only like fifty of us (even so, I’d say I’m only friends with about fifteen). But for me the point is the effort and the progress that I will make along the way, the people that I will meet, the experiences that I will have, and the joys that we will be able to create for each other.

This is really what brings us back to the point of online gaming: the people that we meet here are what make the game real and important. I think particularly at the beginning of a game’s life, a.k.a. the last few weeks for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is especially clear. Less people, less content, a less clear understanding of the game all make it more important that we meet others and build community.

Several nights ago I had my first TOR raiding experience. We went into Eternity Vault and Kragga’s Palace and cleared them both on normal. While half of this example is just to brag, the other half is to serve as an illustration about how important to is to build relationships with other people on one’s server. As much as I would like for this to be an accomplishment of my guild, it wasn’t.

It started as a random whisper from a friend asking if I wanted to go bang my head against the first boss of Eternity Vault. We ended up downing him on the second try and then we just kept going. While we laughed about it and joked that a PUG could do Eternity Vault, this really wasn’t a pug, it was just like a guild run. There was no one in the group that hadn’t played with each other before, yet only about half were guild mates. We had built ourselves our own little community, accomplished something awesome, and we’re going to do it again next week.

I went home for Christmas, and while I was raiding on our dining room table my mother asked me why it’s fun to just keep wiping on a boss over and over again without very much chance of actually getting something out of it in the end. The answer came somewhat easily to me: the process is the fun part. The wiping, the learning, and the failing is all part of the enjoyment because you are doing it with people who you enjoy. I’m perfectly happy to sit here and fail and pay all kinds of repair bills because for me, that’s the part of the game that is fun. Through all that failure, when you finally succeed is the greatest feeling of them all. Happiness is anything at all that’s loved by you.

My point is this: Please do not take this game lightly for the sake of the relationships that you form within it. The gameplay itself is fun and awesome and all that stuff, but it’s the playing with others that makes the game. Don’t play by yourself, go out there and make friends. It’s easy, it all starts with just a /wave. Soon enough you’ll be charging into Eternity Vault with naught but your friends at your back. This is what online gaming is about, and what sets it apart from everything else. What group experiences that you think are important have you had?

TwinHits is an officer for the guild Unity on the server Dreshdae Cantina. Leave comments or tweet@TwinHitswith your thoughts, ideas, and stories about guilds, communities, and leadership inStar Wars: The Old Republic.