Tag Archives: Silly

Blaugust and What is Content Anyway?

We are into the third week of Blaugust now. This is the 16th day of the month and my 16th post, so we’re past the half way point and into the back half of the event. Is everybody hanging on okay?

Blaugust time is coming to town…

It is still not too late to get involved. I mean, we’d like to have you. All the information is here:

I’ll probably decide by week five that it is finally too late to join in. But you’re good until then.

Looking at the Blaugust calendar, this week is… um… creative appreciation week?

The Blaugust Calendar

Are we to be creative in our appreciation or appreciate creativity? We might need to workshop that one a bit before next year.

But I know what it means, because this used to be developer appreciation week in older iterations of the event, back when it was a little more focused on video games. But we’ve grown beyond that so the week is now a time to focus on the creative people… authors, musicians, developers, artists… whom we enjoy.

What do creatives create? Content.

And what is content? Hell if I know.

Seriously, I know it when I see it, but I am not sure I could write a definition of content that would survive any serious testing. And I am just going to dive into content and video games for the purpose of this post, because it only gets more complex if I try to devise some universal definition for content.

Plus, we’ve had this discussion before, and I am always a sucker for the oldies.

I can tell you positively that when EverQuest or WoW drop an expansion, that is content. If you you stream or make a video about your first day playing in the new expansion, that is content. If somebody makes a reaction video to your video, that is probably content too, even though I find them mostly tiresome. And if I write a blog post about a reaction video, probably complaining that nobody ever does reaction videos about my posts, that too is content.

And so is the expansion guide on the commercial fan site and the stories on the gaming news site and summary item somebody does to tie together all the content surrounding the expansion. It is a content ecosystem.

But what about a more sandbox style game, like EVE Online? I was just bitching about them yesterday, and a lot of that had to do with content… but what sort of content?

I mean sure, they do create content. There was the Doctor Who event earlier this year which people enjoyed. And there is a content ecosystem around the game well beyond what its player population might suggest.

The question comes up around mechanics, or changes to the rules, or ships. You can certainly create content around those things, but are they content in and of themselves?

Furthermore, if CCP releases a new ship and we all buy one and fit it out and have a big fight, who really created that content. The fight would be content, after all. But CCP had little influence on when or where it happened or who might participate in the fight.

So in New Eden we sometimes get into a row about people who claim to be content creators because they make things happen in the game… or think they do. And what of the other fleet commander, are they a co-creator? How do we apportion levels creation-ness or whatever? How about the members of the fleet, all of those who participated in the battle? If you just flew a ship of the line and shot targets, maybe you didn’t create content. But what if you were in logi, or were the logi anchor, or maybe one of the fleet boosters? You helped enable or sustain content.

The philosophy once espoused by Goonswarm was that every ship mattered.

Every Ship Counts – World War Bee version

How much credit does the person who shot that cyno jammer get as a content creator? Sure, somebody in the command channel got to shout “free fire on titans” which led to an exchange that set Guinness Book world records.

Exchange of fire as the battle began

But who “created” that content? CCP? The titan fleet commander? The line members who broke tether and opened fire knowing it would likely be a bloodbath? That PAPI titan pilots that formed up on grid with us not knowing how things would play out? That person who shot the cyno jammer? Me in my boosting ship?

My Damnation in the middle of the fight helping create that content

And that is an extreme example as hundreds of small battles pop up every day.

These are, of course, silly questions, pushing into absurdity to prove a point that there is no hard line, no velvet rope that separates the content providers from the unwashed consuming masses.

There is, of course, a line between good content and bad, but that is another subject altogether.

These people, who are participating in Blaugust however, they all produce nothing but the finest content. You should take some time out of your day to visit their sites.

Another day in Blaugust.

Where is the Scenario Mod for This?

Due to the absolutely staggering lack of leadership currently at the federal level, regional groupings have begun to form in an effort to coordinate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The internet being what it is, people are tracking and mapping these groupings.

Regional Groupings

There are even people working on flag variations for things like the Western States Pact. (Though, now that there are five states in it, the flag needs a re-think.)

And, because I am what I am, my thoughts immediately go towards a mod or scenario or whatever to reflect this, if not break up, then regional grouping of these re-United States. Civilization or Crusader Kings or Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, in one or all of these somebody has to be brewing up a scenario. Who has one?

Gallente Federation Endorses Fart Lighting

It pretty much said that the Gallente celebrate fart lighting in the launcher today.

Oh yeah, blue flames man!

Or maybe this is just a sign of my misspent youth, which occurred before we all had the internet to distract us. Or encourage us. I think farts get lit either way actually.

Still, “Blue Flames” brings a number of things to mind aside from flatulence ignition, including a rocket car a Chevy engine, something half remembered about the temperature of flames, and Quafe ship SKINs.

When I think of the Gallente Federation itself, I tend to think of the color green.

Green, Steel, Rust, and the type of tacky Gold you see on Acura or Lexus emblems

But (heh, butt) if you want the Sapphire Sungazer SKINs despite this unfortunate association in the launcher, they are available now from the New Eden Store. I’ll have to check them out, but somehow I doubt they’ll be better than the Quafe SKINs.

Not Quite Calculating Gaming Return on Investment

There is a site and a chart going around that shows some games quantified in terms of return on investment. The original source is the Video Game ROI site, hosted by Ebay of all things.

Of course, this is a list, and we love lists! So I went to see the top ten value rated games, which are:

The Top Ten

To me that was an interesting list, if a bit odd. How did they come up with this?

Well, they are pretty up front with how they did. How they calculated the value rating is there on the front page.

ROICalculation

Not bad so far. Hours per dollars spent multiplied by the rating percentage.

So the original Animal Crossing currently costs $6… this is Ebay, I guess they know the used price, so we’ll give them that… and the hours to beat is rated at 69.5 hours, while the average rating for the game is 88%.

So 69.5 divided by $6 gives us 11.58, which multiplied by .88 ends up with a rating of 10.19, which is the best rating of the lot.

Now, you might ask if a game from 2001 qualitatively delivers an experience you would want to spend nearly 70 hours on here in 2014. Fair point, and something not addressed as far as I can tell. And the cost of the game certainly seems to favor used games, but this is Ebay and they want to sell you some used games, so go figure.

I was a little more interested in how they came up with the hours to beat a game.

As it turns out, there is a site called How Long To Beat that is just brimming with this sort of data. I was curious as to how accurate it might be, but didn’t know how I could assess that. I would have to actually beat a game to get that number, right?

Oh, wait, I did just beat a game! I finished Pokemon Y, and all I really did was the main storyline as noted in my post. So I went and looked that up on the site and, naturally, found Pokemon X and Y listed with lots of data. But the essential bit, hours to beat for the main story was there.

PokemonXH2B

So they peg the main story at 33 hours of play time. And I finished the main story in…

Pokemon Y finish time

… 31.5 hours. Pretty close. Close enough that I am probably willing to accept the H2B numbers. Meanwhile, the average rating is as close at MetaCritic, so I am good with that.

So it seems like we have some pretty solid numbers, even if they seem very biased towards older games, which are less expensive. There is Civilization in second place, from 1991. I am not sure, even if you could buy a copy for the $1 they show, that it would run on a modern operating system. The ROI on unplayable games should be pretty low.

Of course, I am interested in MMOs, so I went digging to see what they had listed on that front. Way down at 109th place I found World of Warcraft. Current price, $20, hours to beat, 11.2, and overall review rating of 93%, giving it a value rating of 0.52.

WoWROI

Now, I expected the value rating to be low because I figured that they would account for the subscription model in some way. But no, they figure you’ll be done with that free 30 days yet, since it only takes 11.2 hours to beat.

That seems sort of fast, 11.2 hours. I mean, I am running through the 1-60 on the whole Loremaster achievement thing, so it seems like that number should be higher for somebody new who doesn’t have heirloom gear or what not.

So I started going further down the list and ran into Minecraft at 127th place. The cost is $27 and the rating is 89%, but the hours to beat was 11.2, the same as World of Warcraft.

MinecraftROI

Now, if 11.2 hours seems very low for WoW, which sort of has a 1 to 60 main game, for Minecraft it seems very much off.

Reading through the site more carefully, I found that if a game is open ended or doesn’t have a well defined main game… which is to say the How Long To Beat site doesn’t show one… they went with the number 11.2 because that was the average of all the games measured.

Color me unimpressed.

Still, I suppose it is an interesting data point for discussing older games. And, of course, it markets older games for Ebay. But you’re not going to convince me that Pokemon Red and Blue, which ran on the GameBoy in 1996, provides a better return on investment than Pokemon X and Y for any qualitative measures.

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The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi