Blizzard's Commitment to Better Female Representation

One of the biggest developers in the business, Blizzard, stated its intent to better represent women in its games. Their effort to create more realistic characters starts with Overwatch, a competitive FPS planned for release in 2015. Though images from the website still show them in revealing clothing, employee Chris Metzen said that they have been "trying not to oversexualize the female characters."

This comes after a speech from Blizzard CEO Michael Morhaime, where he condemned the recent attacks on women in gaming known as Gamergate. "Let's take a stand to reject hate and harassment," he said at BlizzCon.

Blizzard Entertainment publishes the games World of Warcraft and the StarCraft franchise and has a revenue of $4.85 billion.

Building the perfect Destiny playlist

Need a little background music for your video game binge? Here's a playlist of songs about post-apocalyptic wastelands, gun-fighting, light, witches, bounties, and fire. There's also the theme from Pacific Rim, guaranteed to pump you up, and the Mjolnir Mix of the Halo theme as an homage to Bungie's earlier games. The run-time is a little over two hours. If you play longer than that in one sitting (I know I usually do), then use the playlist to start a radio station, or sprinkle your favorites from the list into one of your own playlists.

Good hunting! Now go grind out that strike playlist. 

Hear Me Out: Destiny Needs Minivans

Pimp My Ride: Destiny Edition

It's a brisk but sunny day, and me and my friends are cruising around the outskirts of the city looking for trouble. We roll up on a group of vandals, slide open the side door, and send out a spray of bullets. Once they're all dead, we pick up our loot and hop back in the car, reclaiming the wastelands that once belonged to our ancestors.

IGN's article about looking into the Halo series for hints about Destiny's future brought up vehicles. Single-rider vehicles, group vehicles, vehicles with machine guns, vehicles with laser beams... Halo had a multitude of vehicles available to roam around with, while in Destiny you can only own and ride the sparrow at will. But wouldn't it be cool if there were group vehicles available to patrol with your friends?

As impractical as it might be to design, I would love to refurbish an old Prius I found wasting away in Old Russia. I guess we'll just have to save that for the Destiny fanfiction.

Gamer Community's Ownership of a Medium Causes Sexism in Video Game Culture

The most recent batch of sexism toward women in video game culture has become popular enough to be discussed by Forbes and The New Yorker, as well as five articles on Time in two days. But why do some gamers hate women enough to send violent and detailed rape and death threats, harass their families, and drive the women from their homes? I asked Doctor Rosa Mikeal Martey, an associate professor at Colorado State University in the Department of Journalism and Media Communication who researches identity and gender in online social interactions.

Martey explains that "gamer" is a label reclaimed by a community that was once stereotyped as having a low social status and no relationships with women. Like all communities, they also defend their boundaries, so if a woman threatens the gamer community by trying to enter or change it, the community retaliates. In the case of gamers, the threat is handled like a boss fight in a raid, where people team up and strategize how to take her down. 

"The fact that there's a human being who might actually have personal consequences as a result just wasn't part of the thinking in any way, because she became the object, literally the object of their attack," Martey describes. "It was a name and a set of linkages that they were trying to sever in their mind, not a person." 

Martey suggests that the open dialogue between developers and players has created a more solid sense of ownership over the medium than fans of other media have, likely because developers listen to player feedback and make adjustments, especially for online games. In the case of BioWare, enough people voiced their dislike for the ending of Mass Effect 3 that the developer released downloadable content with a new ending. 

But as more people play games, the label of gamer means nothing more than one who plays video games. Now the industry has to cope with and respond to criticism from varying perspectives, as any new form of media has while it adjusted to becoming mainstream. Early adopters of the medium likely struggle to hole onto the old boundaries of their community once they find they are no longer the sole demographic of their medium. Perhaps this is why some gamers are reacting so violently to feminist cultural critique. 

Kotaku Promises Critical Video Game Coverage Post-Release

Video game journalism is about to read a lot less like corporate advertising. Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo announced today that the gaming news site will shift their focus to reporting on games and gamers long after a video game has been released. This is in contrast to the current and long-held standard in video game journalism of previewing and reviewing games before they come out, then ignoring them once they are released.

Totilo says this change will help their articles seem less like press releases as they begin to write more people-centric stories that cover games once they are actually being played. His reasoning is that addressing the community of players surrounding a game is more important and more interesting than simply covering games before they are released. This is an effort to get out of "a cycle of coverage dictated by public relations firms."

Authenticity is a big theme at Kotaku, where Totilo wrote similarly about the downsides of previewing games in February of 2013, saying that they are "reporters and critics ... trying to find the truth," and that the truth is rarely found in the small preview of a game. An article in 2012 also criticized the cozy relationship between journalists and the developers of the games they write about.

As Kotaku prepares to make video game journalism more journalistic and interactive, they have set up an email address for people to send their story tips and ideas, and made it clear that contribution opportunities are available.

You can find the full article on Kotaku here.

Destiny: Cryptarch changes coming this week

Bungie will patch the Cryptarch in Destiny on Tuesday so that engrams will only decode at their level or higher. For example, blue/rare engrams will only decode to blue or purple/legendary, and purple engrams will never decode to blue. Rare engrams will also have a higher chance of decoding to legendary. However, Bungie warns in their dev notes that any legendary engrams you find now but wait to decode until after the update will automatically decode into rare, so get them decoded now and look for your legendaries later. 

Daily and weekly challenges will also include more chances for rare and legendary rewards, and ascendant materials now have legendary status. 

Destiny: The Treasure Cave is no more

By Jenna Brown

This article was originally posted on 2014-09-25 13:05 MDT. It was updated on 2022-05-28 for clarity and to provide additional details.

Bungie has rendered the famed “treasure cave” at Skywatch on Earth effectively useless with Hot Fix 5, an update file released to consoles this morning. The patch notes indicate that the spawn time of every cave on Earth was increased to 40 seconds. For comparison, treasure cave monsters previously spawned every six seconds, the shortest on Earth. Three of the other four caves respawned every 10 seconds. The cave with the longest respawn cycle was in the Barrens at 20 seconds.

According to their Dev Notes, farming for loot does not align with Bungie’s tenuous "dream for how Destiny is played." One of the most compelling aspects of video games is when users find new ways to play a game and make it their own. Gaming becomes infinitely more fascinating when a game evolves into something other than its hardware and mechanics, providing a backdrop for a community to grow and greater entertainment value outside the campaigns and arenas.

For as much as Bungie claims that Destiny is a social experience, they certainly make it difficult to socialize. There's no proximity chat to help gamers group up and fight together while casually patrolling the open areas, and the "social" Tower area provides no method to communicate either, besides gestures and dancing. Loot farming was a great way to find a group of people to interact with while picking off the runners and hoping for Legendary drops.

Other popular farming method “waking the Hive” was nerfed with the Sept. 22 Update 1.0.1.4, but clarified with the rest of today’s Hot Fix notes: the engram drop rate is now temporarily reduced after a hard wipe, meaning you will have to wait longer between rounds of waking the Hive if you want any of your kills to drop loot.

Perhaps I'm being too emotional, but this update has certainly made Destiny less appealing to me. In my irrational fervor, I almost feel like organizing a protest, like a sit-in at the cave, or picking a day where no one plays Destiny as a kind of walk-out.

What do you think about the updates? Still in love with Destiny? Were you ever in love with Destiny to begin with? Let me know!