The Daedalus project

I've been playing MMORPGS for a bit more than 6 years now. at the same time i pretty much stopped playing FPS games and have been focusing on MMORPGS. The reason for that is that I find MMOs alot more relaxing and pleasant to play. it allowed me to socialize with tons of people from many different origins, live awesome group experiences and experience teamwork and competition at new levels.

While playing these MMORPGS, I ended up analyzing my own behaviors and other players, and how everybody interacts in these virtual worlds. I elaborated a bunch of theories and ideas about MMORPGS and their playerbase. and i could probably write 30 or so articles on the subjects as I already started doing with this blog but nothing could summarize my thoughts better than this psychological research that is the Daedalus project:

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_intro.html

if you click through the different parts of this site, youll be able to click on words that will lead you to detailed results and analysis about various aspects of the research

Bringing more girls in the video game world

As is it this now (altho its changing every year) not many girls play video games. some do and for the most part they are considered "geeky girls" and are often special in their own way, (theres plenty of "normal" girls too, but just not enough yet) The other thing is that they play certain types of games, typically RPG games, sometimes FPS games, and rarely RTS games. RTS games dont appeal to all guys, and it seems understandable that it doesnt appeal to many girls, youre not really a character in a game, but someone dictating the fate of units on the battlefield, kinda like chess, but more starcraft 2. then theres FPS games which are mostly violent and very competitive. theres alot of "owning everybody" and "raping everyone" in these games, which again doesnt appeal to a lot of girls.

lastly theres role playing games which are probably the more popular genre for girls, where youre character is usually involved in a story, and works with others to overcome challenges. and even within RPG's girls often fill stereotypical roles by playing healer classes that are supposed to heal and tend other players. the problem with that is that theres alot of roles that needs to be filled in a group and not every girl is made to be a good healer but thats another story. then in some games like SWG most girls played entertainer classes like dancers, musicians and image designers, because thats girly. and guys that had characters playing these proffesions had em strictly for the utility their provided or to joke around and have funny looking characters.

I also want to clarify that im pointing out the general trend here, theres definitely good RTS and FPS female players, same goes for RPGs, not all girls are healers, (tho I have yet to see a female main tank in any MMORPG)

Then games are mainly designed for guys, with male main characters, usually really badass people (think of Infamous, the force unleashed, Mafia 2, assassin's creed etc etc) girls are rarely the main character, and if they are, they are usually very very sexy, and not necessarly the best type of character for a girl to identify to (think of Lara Croft) in fact, it seems to me that female main characters are generally just to look cool, like a female kicking everybody's ass or using a big gun to destroy things, actually thats how I like to play female characters, unrealistically strong for their size, and just really badass, kinda like all male characters but better looking.

Many girls think these female game characters just look stupid the way that they are arranged to be sexy and have a perfect body and basically dont behave any different than guys as characters.

Now that leads to many questions, how do you design a game that will have credible female characters that are feminine instead of simply looking feminine. and if they are feminine, is everybody gonna cry because the game is too stereotyped. lets say a RPG game wanted to make a realistic female warrior character and for that they had to give her more muscle mass and make her look less feminine. would females and even males be interested in playing such character. ask yourself the opposite, would a male be interested in playing a male character that runs around wearing a bikini. in all games the male game characters are really badass iconic characters that the players kinda want to be, therefore that character has to be a symbol of masculinity to please the male crowd. at the same time, female characters kinda become that perfect woman, tough and rough like a man, but looks like a woman.

To appeal to more girls, there need to be games designed towards them, real games, somehow the industry needs to get a feel of what girls will like and create games accordingly, for example a game that focuses alot on story telling like Heavy Rain couldve been it, but its filled with poorly handled stereotypes and hollywood-like cliches that makes it not a very rich experience. I cant think of other possible avenues for now of games that would interest girls and actually made the brain work to solve problems quickly because...

Games are all about mathematics, the game setting is just a costume to make mathematics more appealing, but its all about numbers and geometry, thats why initially it was only nerdz and geeks playing games, and also mostly guys (the engineering and computer science world is still mostly composed of males). nowadays with games wanting to appeal to a wider audience, and the huge market share of casual games and social games, we have a HUGE portion of the gaming population that doesnt realize that they are doing maths. somehow game developpers needs to make mathematics appealing to girls for them to want to take on challenges we typically get from good games where you have to adapt quickly to a situation and make the best out of whats at your disposal and eventually reach the highest level of competitive play where you play against other human players and where your intelligence is put against the intelligence of other humans. because i think girls are just as competitive as guys, they just demonstrate it differently.

Gaming for girls

http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-games-statistics-2010-09



interesting how social games on facebook are sooooooo popular, but more interesting is that 69% of the facebook game gamers are women (and 19% consider themselves addicted). meanwhile when it comes to real games, were not sure, but it doesnt feel like more than 20% of gamers are girls.



id be tempted to guess that theres some kind of desire to game in girls, a similar desire that animates us, guys, and allow us to enjoy video games. but at the same time, most games are directed toward guys, and appeal to that crowd specifically, theres also the socialisation hypothesis, where the way we raise kids, its more socially acceptable for a guy to play video games and less for a girl.



in general girls suck at video games, but it doesnt mean they cant be good, its just that most of em dont play or dont bother to reach the same level of competitiveness of guys. I think if there was games targetted at a girl audience, but not stupid games like some of the games that already exist where you have to do really pointless girly lstuff like put makeup on your character and the only point of the game is to look pretty. but actual good games.

at the same time im not sure if both sex are looking for the same thing in a game. for example we could say that guys like to have puzzles to solves, in a game i want to use to use my logic to overcome challenges i want to be able to adapt to situations really fast and push the use every tool at my disposal to its highest efficiency. the question becomes, does that appeal to girls too? For some of them im sure it does, those represent the pretty big amount of gamer girls in this world, but their are still a minority so I'm really wondering what most girls would be looking for in a game, how would it be played, what would be the goal



heres a real world example: last summer I was playing a card game with 2 friends that are girls. I won the first few games, then one of the girl started winning too, and in the end me and her were pretty much equal while the second girl was annoyed by the fact she always lost and thought that her friend was good in games in general (I didnt get credit but thats another story :P) then her friend said that she counted the cards a little to improve her choice of cards when she played and so did I, because its really easy and its so obvious to me that I couldnt do it otherwise. Because if you always play the best card possible every time you greatly improve your chances of winning than if you do several mistakes in the game, the rest is due to luck and having good cards. so the 2nd girl was surprised that we were doing that, and said she didnt and didnt intend to.
 
I concluded that the 2nd girl in my example would probably suck at most video games unless she really focused on learning, but that would take a moment. but dont get me wrong, i dont think guys are superior than girls in video games or that girls are not capable of being good. its just that some of them either dont want to, or are not socialised in a way to encourage and develop certain skills at a early age, skills that are needed to enjoy video games. I would also like to add that the second girl in my example really liked farmville and tried to get me to play, but after a few levels i just stopped because there was no point in playing for me (earning ribbons? so I can show the world how awesome I am at growing pumpkins?)
 
 
 

fired from her job for being too sexy?

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2010/06/03/14241021.html
This woman was fired from her job because her bosses thought she was too sexy. The first thing that came to my mind is that maybe she didnt respect the dress code and wore clothes that were too revealing. but according to the article, it doesnt seem that way.

it really sounds more like her bosses couldnt resist being tempted by her and to avoid being tempted to cheat with their gf/wives they decided it was a better option to fire her.

and in my male mind that doesnt make any sense, theres no reason to logically want to get away from a person you find physically attractive. if they really were tempted by her, the simple fact that they got to hang with her at work should normally be the perfect learning environement to learn how to control yourself and stay calm in the presence of a hot person.

Then if their reason was to avoid cheating on their wives/gf, if they really couldnt control themselves, then maybe they need to look at their couple and try to fix their own little problems instead of trying to find an other person to point fingers at. but thats just me hypothesizing, i cant really tell what goes on in their mind, it just doesnt make sense from the outside

pirating music

I was browsing the web as usual when I found an interesting article about music pirating, one that shared a point of view thats not what you generally hear from artists. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Oasis-Misic-Piracy-P2P-Download,news-6476.html

Basically what the guy says is that artists shouldn't complain as much about people that pirate music since it allows them to reach a bigger audience. And what i say is that we cannot deny that it sucks for artists to have their revenues diminished because of music piracy, but right now it doesnt make much sense to pay for every single song you have. for many reasons: we consume alot of music and its easy to find for free.

We're consume alot of music, way more than they did before. before you had to go to see an orchestra for good music, later on you had to buy vinyl discs and the hardware to read it, then you listened to the radio, then you waited for your song to come up to record it on a tape, then you could copy the content of a cd on your computer and listen to it through your speakers or burn it on other discs and make your own compilations. Then there was the internet and people started to share music and they could download music, so people started to try new stuff, discover new artists, discover new genres and develop tastes. So while music became more widely accessible, it started to play a bigger part in everyone's life and we've been consuming so much more music than ever before.

It doesnt make sense to buy it all when it can be found for free to easily. The only reason to buy a song is if you want to support an upcoming artist a little bit which relies solely on your good will and we know thats not economically compatible in the world we live in. I buy some songs when they are really good and i cannot find them anywhere to be downloaded but a really great amount of songs i have on my computer wouldnt have been worthy of being bought so i wouldnt have bothered buying them if it was my only option. Another problem is that teenagers and young consumers dont have much money to invest in music, they will prioritize other stuff thats more important. Thankfully tho, music is widely available to be downloaded for free if you know how to use a computer and learn to avoid viruses and spywares.

Lastly, I think the music world is what it is now because music was easy to find for free on the internet and people shared it. That made us all bigger and bigger music consumers and music started to take a bigger place in everyone's life and now we dont want to lose what we acquired. I think that is the kind of issues the internet will be faced with alot as the mainstream world starts to grasps internet's neck. Video games already losts their free DLC, ISPs are now charging for bandwith usage. We're slowly losing what we had acquired in the free world that is the internet.

A book about not looking fat

I saw a little video on msn video which was a short introduction to a book titled "How to Never Look Fat Again" by Charla Krupp (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfC2lj_HJi4 thats not the video i saw on msn btw). While the video was loading i was thinking to myself "this is gonna be ridiculously dumb and outraging" because if you didn't already know or if you didn't guess it already, I don't really like how fashion is presenting us really skinny women as the type of body shape girls should strive for.

I don't like how were all very superficial, how there's so many girls concerned about their fat and silhouettes while most of the time they really are not overweight and in many case look absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes it's so bad it makes me wonder if girls concerned about their silhouettes have trouble with their spatial vision.

I also really hate the social pressure women have to live with because they need to look great all the time.

So with that in mind i started watching the video. I was thinking the 2 superficials women in it were dumb reinforcing the stereotypes and giving tips on how to hide that "buddha belly" or really large hips. The book really emphasize on changing the way women dress in order to hide the imperfections and i couldnt help it but be amazed by how sometimes the different clothes can really change the impression you get from looking at a women. I had no choice than to admit not every piece of clothes suits every women and sometimes you can go from bad to good simply by changing clothes. In my opinion, it comes down to the individuals to choose what they wear according to their common sense. Sometimes though, i thought the advice given were completely outrageous like "wear a V-neck to draw attention away from your belly" which is basically like saying "you're an object and if you show alot of cleavage people wont bother looking at the rest"

So the book can provide a band-aid fix to a problem, which is women being concerned by their silhouettes and give them a little self confidence boost. But theres still a deeper social problem where women are simply not comfortable with their body and want to hide their imperfection. They need to somehow be able to live with them and not worry too much. I could say "be rational" but who am I to say that you can objectively judge who's good looking and who isn't, who should be concerned about their appearance and who shouldn't. Come to think of it, it really shouldn't be that way, beauty is something that should remain entirely subjective to everyone, the problem is that right now were socialized to enjoy certain type of women, while others are left in the shadow not getting any attention.

Besides, what makes a person look great often will be how they are wearing their body, take for example a girl with a true smile versus one thats afraid to smile because shes concerned about bad teeth or braces. A true smile will always be nice if it bears the joy contained within a person. Beauty is NOT limited to physical traits, in fact its the result of someone's vitality.

ke$ha is....

hot! no thats not the only thing I wanted to write about,

I was listening to the radio today and Black Eyed Peas - Meet Me Halfway (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRNQS5UCQQIwas)  playing and while listening i thought to myself "i cant imagine anybody on this planet would like that song for the male vocals more than for the rest of the songs (off course its also because its not the chorus) but my point is that its amazing how these vocals are only there to fill in the blanks and have pretty much nothing to do with the construction of this really simple song.

I was talking about that with a friend and we went on talking about how the pop industry was looking for marketability over musical talent. He then mentionned how, when you look at how ke$ha performs, even in her video clip, "it's not the type of music she'd be known for if she had a choice". I had heard that "Tik-Tok" was not representative of her album so i decided to search on youtube to hear some of the songs shes made. After hearing a few songs i thought that it was all pretty much the same stuff where ke$ha just talks dirty in her songs because sex sells with titles such as "I made out with a rockstar" or "party at a rich dude house" and lyrics such as "I want to put my hands in your khaki pants mr. watson" and "tell me what youre gonna do to me". But i dont think im surprising anyone here. But lets go back to our main statement about how
"it's not the type of music she'd be known for if she had a choice". because during my youtube search, amongst all the different uploads of tik-tok and the various other crappy song that can be found on her album Animal, i found this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5QYwMfac8o. I'm not gonna say i find this song good, but its definitely a huge contrast from all the other things. interestingly enough, this song is not listed in her discography and its not on her Animal album. It seems to me that shes more her trueself in that song than in others and to me, she definitely sounds way less stupid and as one of the youtube user commented on that song: "she totly rocks this type of music".

but yea that one song seems to be the only one covered by all the other songs that "sell more" but also depicts a naughtier ke$ha and a general image of a "bad girl". one thats attractive to men, one that creates revenues.

also from the  wikipedia Animal album page:

Criticism for the album came from James Reed of the The Boston Globe and Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine. The former wondered when "the last time an album so flat and vacuous generated such a buzz [was]," denouncing Animal as "a shallow hodgepodge of 2009’s tried-and-true formulas," and said "you can almost hear the clock counting down her fifteen minutes of fame."[4] Keefe wrote a scathing review of the album finished by saying that "[j]ust about the only thing Kesha makes convincing on Animal is that the current crop of party girls are every bit as soulless as they let on."



 

Friendship between guys and girls part 2

Here's a convo I had about friendship between guys and girls that helps complete my previous blog entry

[13:39] Mike: A homosexual male could have friend ships with girls with no problems
[13:39] #kom.Pako: yea
[13:40] Mike: except they might both be attracted to the same male
[13:40] #kom.Pako: lol
[13:40] Mike: lol
[13:40] #kom.Pako: every girl need a male friend
[13:40] #kom.Pako: theyll often say "i want a gay friend"
[13:40] #kom.Pako: but that friend doesnt need to be gay
[13:40] Mike: i agree
[13:41] Mike: it does seem that male/female friendships always do end when an attraction forms
[13:41] Mike: but your right that it doesnt have to
[13:41] #kom.Pako: yea
[13:42] #kom.Pako: but also think about it
[13:42] #kom.Pako: how many of your female friends are really NOT attractive at all
[13:42] Mike: true
[13:42] #kom.Pako: theres always something sexual to initiate the relationship
[13:42] #kom.Pako: you will never go speak to someone thats totally unnatractive to you
[13:42] Mike: well sure i would
[13:43] Mike: if she was in my class or something
[13:43] Mike: or if i worked with her
[13:43] Mike: lol
[13:43] Mike: not to get to know her on a relationship level though
[13:43] #kom.Pako: well
[13:43] #kom.Pako: lets say im in a class for project and we need to find teammates
[13:44] #kom.Pako: i wont go toward someone that i find really unnactractive
[13:44] #kom.Pako: But i might end up working with one if she's a friend of somebody else i find attractive
[13:44] #kom.Pako: or she might ask me to work with her which i wouldn't refuse even if she is unnattractive
[13:44] Mike: lol what if the unnactractive girl was top of the class?
[13:44] Mike: maybe then?
[13:44] #kom.Pako: i still wouldnt target her i think
[13:44] Mike: well you and I are different then
[13:44] Mike: do you have a GF?
[13:44] #kom.Pako: no
[13:44] Mike: that would change things too
[13:44] #kom.Pako: i guess thats another value to add to the equation
[13:45] Mike: ya
[13:45] #kom.Pako: but like there are a few less attractive girls that i talk to, but im not that close to them simply cause i dont show that much interest
[13:45] Mike: you could also add, how many girlfriends would allow a guy to have girls as their friends?
[13:45] Mike: ya very true
[13:45] #kom.Pako: yea
[13:46] #kom.Pako: well i think many girls will think that friendship between guys and girls ends up in attraction so theres many that wouldnt allow it
[13:46] Mike: yep
[13:46] Mike: but the right girl for you should allow it
[13:46] Mike: there should be no jealousy
[13:46] Mike: let me ask you this
[13:47] Mike: say your dating a girl for 6months now
[13:47] Mike: and she wants to go to lunch with a guy that she dated 3 years ago
[13:47] Mike: and she promises there is nothing to worry about
[13:47] Mike: would you let her?
[13:47] #kom.Pako: it depends on my relationship with her
[13:47] #kom.Pako: i could tho
[13:47] #kom.Pako: but
[13:48] Mike: now reverse it
[13:48] #kom.Pako: i could also be worried that the guy might have an interest
[13:48] #kom.Pako: so while i can trust my gf, i cant really trust the guy
[13:48] Mike: of course you cant trust the guy
[13:48] Mike: but if you trust your girl enough then who cares what moves the guy pulls
[13:48] #kom.Pako: what if he pulls a barrel roll
[13:48] Mike: if anything I would want to the guy to do something stupid like that, so then my GF wouldnt see him any more lol
[13:49] Mike: a barrel roll?
[13:49] Mike: hhaha
[13:49] Mike: but like i said, reverse it
[13:49] Mike: how many girls would let their boyfriend go to lunch with their ex gf
[13:49] Mike: i would say 0
[13:49] #kom.Pako: well
[13:49] #kom.Pako: it depends too
[13:50] #kom.Pako: cause you know like i said in friendship between guys and girls, its the guy that usually falls in love
[13:50] #kom.Pako: so for that lunch thing
[13:50] Mike: i see
[13:50] #kom.Pako: if the ex-gf invites the guy, the gf has a reason to not let him go cause she has an interest
[13:51] #kom.Pako: if the guy wants to see the ex, then its also weird cause he still has some interest
[13:51] #kom.Pako: But
[13:51] #kom.Pako: where it differs
[13:52] #kom.Pako: is if its just another friend girl, cause then the gf can be relaxed knowing the girl wont fall for the guy, or at the very laast, she can assume the chances are low. The determining factor here is if the guy is interested in the friend or no, if he can handle it
[13:52] Mike: ya

Friendship between guys and girls

I've had several discussions with friends lately about the possible existence of friendship between guys and girls.

Several people think it doesn't exist, that the guy always end up falling in love with the girl.

Theres an interesting theory on the subject i read a while back which is called the ladder theory (http://www.laddertheory.com/) basically what it says is that between a girl and a guy, the friendship/love is gonna slowly rise until it reaches a point where the guy falls in love with the girl and decides to tell her, which usually fails since the girl wont be in love with the guys at which point the friendly relationship becomes awkward or ends. Therefore, that theory stipulates that its not possible to have close guy/girl friendship

For my part, i strongly believe in guy/girl friendship as i have several girl friends, but i would say that its a matter of being firmly in controls of your feeling, staying natural and not getting all excited at every "hint" the girl might give you. Because thats how it goes in a guy's head, he will think the girl is interested while it might not be the case. In other words, you need to be somewhat smart to be able to handle guy/girl friendship. If the guy starts putting the girl on a pedestal or starts being too devoted to her, he's done, he will end up telling his feelings to her and the friendship ends.

Emotions while interacting with medias

I was talking with my friend today and at one point he told me that I was missing out on alot of good stuff by not watching TV to which I responded that i was replacing the good stuff with other good stuff by playing video games. Then he said while youre not particularly active while watching a good show/movie on tv, its more entertaining than playing a video game cause theres more emotions.

and i firmly disagree with that no matter how you look at it, im not denying that good tv shows or movies are not entertaining and dont give you real emotions when you get involved with the show or movie, but its definitely not more entertaining.

lets look at both type of medias

in a tv show or movies, the author is entirely in control of whats displayed to the watcher, he can then try to play with different images and sounds to create different emotions, he can also write a really complex story since hes entirely in control of it, the story will develop exactly how he wants it.

In a video game, the player is free to move around and act as he/she wishes to determine the outcome. when you script a game, you dont have a full control on what youre showing, but you can still do alot of things and add scripted events that will surprise the player. The main difference tho lies in the nature of games, youre in control, you are there, you are the character, your actions matters, its not somebody else doing it in front of you and that adds alot to the immersion which id say is at the base of all emotions lived while consuming entertainement products.

Theres different emotions and good feelings I can recall from playing different good games, ill name a few just for the hell of it

Call of duty 1: In the stalingrad mission when youre sent to the front with no gun and are forced to charge the german mg42s unarmed, the first time i played through it i couldnt believed, i was playing a FPS game and i didnt have a gun to be a hero and save the day.

Call of duty 2: at the end of the Pointe du Hoc mission where you fall back to the shore while trying to contain the germans back, the feeling i had while playing that was just great, I was reloading my 2 guns as fast as i could but there were just too many

Also in cod2, at hill400 when you wait for air support to assist you at the top of the hill, then again i had a great feeling, trying to be a hero and kill as many germans as I could.

I think these 3 moments are the most intense moments i lived playing SP games, but theres other cool thats cooler for their RP part

like in Far cry 2 at one point i had to ambush a convoy so i was really high on a mountain with my sniper rifle and tried to snipe the driver, I was so far away the AI had no way to know where I was it just felt cool

Theres also actual RPG games, like kotor1, kotor2 and Dragon age, all 3 had really great stories and the in-depth dialogue system creates a really good immersion in the game, you end up liking your character and your companions quite a bit just like you would in a good tv show.

Also, as times goes on and game technologies improves (better graphics, physics, sounds) and the budgets increases, games with good stories are becoming more common, before you had programmers quickly writing stories but mainly working on the game, now you have teams of professional writers working on stories and its only gonna get better.

But thats for actual story driven games, sure the stories are cool and can give you good emotions, but theres other way to live emotions while playing games. As youre playing games, online games i might add, youre in a real world interracting with real people and when you have people with people, anything can happen. You can find what someone says or do funny, or it can make you mad, or sad, it can be anything. you can do things that makes you feel good or not so much, youre in control after all.

Ive lived all sort of emotions playing different games, the good feeling after winning a game of ut2k4 team deathmatch, seeing the score after 20 minute of intense play and what you had to do to get there.

In Star Wars Galaxies, when I PvPed with a bunch of friends and we worked togheter to beat groups of players from the other faction. I still remember one guy shouting to me on Teamspeak "BURST RUN PAKO BURST RUN" cause my character class could provide the group with a run speed buff.

Or when some guy came on teamspeak crying cause he'd been kicked from the guild ( http://pooregot.ytmnd.com ) it was a hard moment to live for everybody there and I still remember when it happened.

That and all the drama that can happen in all games with people disagreeing with each others, theres nothing more real than these emotions, its not always funny but it can definitely be really intense.

On the good side, theres all the good feelings you can get from being rewarded after accomplishing something difficult, being rewarded of all the hardwork and the good teamwork you had to go through. The sense of happiness you get after completing something difficult, and the even better feeling when you had to work in harmony with other players to do so.

But one of the best feeling you can live while playing games comes while youre actually playing and its what i call "the zone"

Its not a feeling unique to gaming, people generally live it while playing sports, its that feeling you get when you feel so in control of yourself and the game, where you feel like nothing can get past you, that you see everything, that everything and every action you make is right. Thats the best feeling, and the one im looking for when playing games.

Ive felt it while playing goaltender in street hockey or at school, as a player its possible but since you get physically tired after a while, its hard to maintain. Ive mostly felt that feeling playing games like ut2k4 in the middle of a close tdm match, or in guildwars in a good GvG. I havent felt it much playing games on the playstation 3, maybe a little bit when playing nhl 09/10 but it never felt as good as it did when playing Guildwars.

The zone is the best feeling after orgasm in my opinion

Gaming for kids? I think not

So the other day at a family reunion my mom said I could be a doctor if I didnt play games all the time.

That made me think because i dont have any doubt that gaming good for the brain. its just the image of gaming thats not good, cause if i was reading books all the time it would be fine, or if i a chess champion, or some other well seen hobbies. but no i play video games instead and i could argue that its a particularly good hobby as far as stimulating the brain goes.

the list of benefits is huge, games allowed me to fully integrate several concepts that allow me to play better. I then apply these concepts to real life situations and im able to analyze them quicker and find a solution faster. For example i wrote a blog entry a while back about positioning and pressure while playing games or sports. if youre not immersed in a competitive world that demands you to perform you just dont fully grasp the importance of these things.

Playing Guild Wars at a high level allowed me to learn these things, and i dont think just anyone could play at that level. yo uactually need to be good because in a balanced environment where everyone has access to the same tools. the only way to get the upper hand is to play better, have better teamwork and better strategies. and to get these advantages you actually have to make your brain work hard.

When i was about 15 year olds i used to play unreal tournament 2004, I averaged between 15-35% accuracy with hitscan weapon. How come that number suddenly jumped to 35-50% when I started to play 3 years later after taking a really long break? You dont just magically become much better at aiming if you dont practice, the only explanation i can provide is that during these years i didnt play FPS games i played other games, and in the end i had a better understanding of games, had smarter movement and was able to anticipate better.

If gaming wasnt challenging, if i wasnt good at it, i wouldnt be playing at all and there would be no interest in doing so. I have no doubt gaming played a big positive role in my development and its not wasting time.

Reckless driving

couple months ago there was a case on the news where some teenagers stole someones car at night, the owner had another car and he heard them take off so he got in his other car and chased the teens down. in the end the stolen car crashed and 1 one the 2 teenagers died

we didnt hear much afterward but today the latest development came out. the guy who chased down the kids is accused of dangerous driving that caused death

The "by the book" thing you have to do when you get your car stolen like that is to call the police and they will handle it. so in that sense the guy who chased the 2 kids made a mistake.

but seriously if youre in such situation, its kinda hard to just sit tight and wait mostly when you feel you cant act. The driver shouldnt have to pay for having his car stolen or for the kids to take the decision to increase their speed and drive beyond their capacities. The guy can be charged with reckless driving, i dont have a problem with that, but i have a problem with the fact that he could be charged for causing the death of the other teen.

Addicted to success

I always had a problem with people speaking of addiction to gaming, i didnt know exactly why, but i knew that it seemed not right. As opposed to hard drugs, gamers do not consume any kind of substance that alters the way their neurotrasmitters behave. Its just someone playing a game. Yet we still hear "scientists" say that gaming can be more addictive than hard drugs. How is it possible?

I read a really interesting article earlier this year about the inexistance of gaming addiction. it was written by a psychanalyst and he was saying that it was always another problem that was the cause of intense gaming. you could never conclude that gaming was the problem, gaming was just the result. Theres no such thing as evil games making people addicted to them.

He also stated that gamers usually have no problem stopping to game when something important comes up. for example a person that has a lot of free time will game alot and once that person gets a job and starts to work the person ahs no problem slowing down on gaming to focus on real life.

But we cannot deny that its not that easy for absolutely everyone, some people do neglect their real life as much as possible to continue to play video games. the question then becomes: why? Why do they neglect their real life, what does the virtual world brings to them.

and the answer is pretty simple, the games bypass real life barriers and creates a virtual context. a context in which the caracteristics are controlled. for example. someone thats not very athletic can play a sports game and be really good at it if that person has the mental capacities to actually be good at the game. the person is not limited by his or her body or socio/economic context to practice an activity. Whats interesting is that games are made to reward the gamer and a game like World of Warcraft surely rewards the gamer alot for accomplishing stuff in the game. This kind of success that some people can find in games that they wouldnt find as often in real life. Obviously constnatly getting rewarded for accomplishing things feels good and its that good feeling that probably gets some people to game alot and even neglect their real life, because in that case, their real life is not as fun as gaming is.

But that only concerns some hardcore gamers, because gaming is not just about escape reality. games are most and foremost a fun hobby. it stimulates the mind, gets people to try and beat different challenges and surpass themselves, online games then get people work togheter to achieve even greater goals. It's just great, its like any sports or board game, but without the physical aspect of sports and without the wait of board game since its real-time, its instant and i could go on for a long while stating the good things of gaming but that would be off topic.

Pressure and positioning

I dont know where ill get with this one, probably just a medium to huge rant about pressure and positioning, intensity and quick thinking, that kind of stuff


Cause/consequence. Lets say you have a set closed environments with different values in it. If you change a value, theres a consequence to it. and you have a new environment different from the first one after. Now lets say all these values had different attributes attached to them and depending on how they were sets, it would affect the overall results. The result in the 2nd environment would be different from the first one.

Let's say we have 4 players playing basketball in 2 teams of 2 players. We will play the players Red1(R1), Red2(R2) Blue1(B1) and Blue2(B2). All players are of equal skills, they move same speed, throw same speed and accuracy.

If R1 is facing B1 and R2 is facing B2, and R1 has the ball and tries to shoot the ball in the basket. B1 is gonna be all over it trying to block the shot. R1 cannot try and pull some moves and outrun B1, R1 cannot jump higher than B1 and he cannot try to be faster cause B1 is just as fast. As a result we have a stand still, R1 cannot beat B1.

Same scenario, lets say R1 wanted to pass the ball to his teamate R2 so he could try and do something to get out of this stand still situation. Unfortunately R2 is not any superior to B2 and cannot be open to receive a pass because B2 will intercept any attempt. Once again, were at a stand still.

Now lets say B2 has a brain disorder and is completely unable to move backward. what R2 could do is go behind B2 that way B2 becomes completely useless. Now R1 could pass the ball to R2. Now that R2 has the ball and B2 cannot do anything. R2 could try shooting the ball in the basket.

Unfortunately R2 cannot throw that far and he needs to get closer to the basket. If he moves forward tho. B2 will be able to get back on him and we will be in a new stand still. because B2 has the same physical abilities as R2.

Now lets say R1 drinks a redbull and is able to jump 5 feet high, something that B1 cannot do. R2 could throw the ball toward R1 and he would throw it in the basket and score.

So how did we get out of the initial stand still? We added things to the red team and took away some from the blue team. to give an advantage to the red team. We could make it a ton more complex by adding more players, more values, take away things from the red things while giving strenghts to the blue team, we could create different rules to alter the way the game is played. but im sure all of you get the idea by now (if not you can just stop reading now)

Eventually we could create a game like chess, a sport or some other game, some kind of competition where the different values compete against one another to try and find the best. The fun part here is that the more complex you make it and the more value you add to it, the more harder it becomes to understand it and the harder it is to be able to take all the values in consideration at the same time. we will call that a mental challenge.

mental challenges are found in everyday life. in every situation you have to use your logic to make choices. Your choices will be based on calculations you make weighting the pros and cons of a situation.

For example, its 1am I should go sleep. why should i go sleep? because if i wait some more before going to sleep, ill wake up later or ill be more tired the next day if i dont wake up later. I will also be more tired than i currently am if i wait before going to bed. And then i take other values in consideration: I got plenty of time to sleep late tomorrow so it doesnt matter if i sleep later tomorrow, therefore i can afford to not go to bed right now. I also want to keep writing this post, am i awake enough to keep going or do i feel like i cannot continue without getting some sleep: im still well awake.

As you can see i just calculated the different reasons to judge if i should go sleep right now or wait a little more based on what i want and what will happen based on my decisions. Anyone can do such things to take little decisions like what i just did.

Every action or phenomena in an environment has a consequence, it changes the final result, it changes the different values and you get something new.

Im really tempted, by starting to describe the way a sport such a hockey would be played, start simply with circles and dots and add values to it until you get an actual game, but i might just be too lazy for that and people might be annoyed to read me stating the obvious. There is 1 thing i want to make clear tho, cause/consequences dont simply happen in 2v2 basketball games where red team faces an identical blue team. its in our everyday life, in every facet of it. If im dancing salsa with someone and we both move forward at the same time, we will collide. so as my partner moves foward i need to move backward to give my partner room. This is called Harmony or we could call it teamwork. Where my actions complete my partner's action perfectly as if we were 1 entity. The best way to get that is to get to know your strenght and weakness, then your teammates strenght and weaknesses, and try to maximize efficiency by communicating and knowing how people react to what you do.

Oh, but i just noticed I havent really talked about the 2 concepts presented in the title of this blog entry.

Lets say to have a piece of land thats as big as 4 units and you have 2 factions wanting to conquer it all.

If both factions have identical conquering capabilities and they start conquering the 4 units at the same time, they will both get 1 half of the available land.

Lets say 1 of the faction stayed outside of the 4 units and didnt do anything while the other faction would start conquering. Eventually that other faction would get the entire thingw/o running into any resistance.

Now lets say the faction that sat out doesnt want the other one to get all the land so they start to conquer at the same time. then we get the same scenario as the first one where each get 1 half.

Now lets say the 2nd faction was 2 twice as fast, the first one would get 1/4 and the other one would get 3/4. Now this situation vaguely resembles the basketball example.

Now lets say the first faction doesnt want the other one to conquer all the land but they still sit out as the 2nd faction conquers the whole thing. Now the first faction is not happy because the other one has all the land. but they didnt do anything to counter the progression of their enemy so they have no choice than to accept their defeat.

Resisting to the other team by making their advance harder is called applying pressure. If theres nothing made to stop the other team, the other team has NO reason to slow down or stop themselves from progressing toward their goal.

That means lets say youre playing a sport or a game. Youre gonna be putting pressure on your opponent or oppositing team to either make your team progress toward your goal OR slow their progress. If you keep the pressure up, you will do what you can to do good(if you have more skills that usually means winning) if you decide to diminish the pressure then you will be pressured more yourself by your opponent(if youre being outskilled, that usually means losing). Then all the different values come into play to differentiate the 2 opponents.

The last concept i want to talk about is intimately linked to the pressure concept. its called positioning. In team games, a team will positions their elements on the playing board in a certain way to maximize efficiency. If the game is simple and both team positioning's is perfect then we have a stand still and its skills and different values that will determine a winner. The more complex the game gets, the more complex getting perfect positioning on both side gets. this is when it starts to matter. the team with the better positioning will be able to exploit the other teams weakness more easely given that advantage.

Its pretty simple, if youre somewhere, youre not elsewhere, youre there. if you should be elsewhere and youre not there. then theres a weak link elsewhere. but youre stronger than you should be where youre at. For example back to our 2v2 from earlier:

Lets say B2 stops covering R2 and decides to sit down on the field. R2 will be open for a pass from R1 and have a freeway to the basket and the possibility to score points.

Now lets say that B2 decides to help B1 cover R1 instead of sitting down. R2 will be open. but its gonna be really hard for R1 to do anything now that he has so much pressure on him.

Lets say R1 was really talented and managed to bypass B1 and B2 and give the ball to R2 Then R2 would have an easy time scoring points.

But lets bring R1 back to the skill levels of the other players and add another value called luck. the fact that both B1 and B2 are covering him means his chances to succeed are lower than when it was only B1 but he still has a chance to manage to give the ball to R1. if he suceeds, then R1 will have an easy time to score points, but its gonna be tough for R1.

So in a world where you have to match your oponent's skills with your own skills and positioning, you have to find a way to give yourself an advantage while diminishing your opponents advantage, that is if you wish to win anything.

As you can see tho, you want to maximize the pressure on the other team, but since youre only allowed certain values to compete (you can only have lets say 5 players against another 5)then you need to find a way to position yourself well enough to try and get an edge on your opponent while also countering them in the best way you can.

And the more values you add in your environment the more complex it gets. its pretty fun to observe how it goes in a closed environment (a video game, a sport, a board game), but these are things that compose the entire world around us.

A media for rich people?

During the latest GDC, Warren Spector, founder of the studio Junction Point, brought a problem to daylight concerning video games:

New video games are too expensive making them only accessible to a select few. he thinks that the industry should lower the cost to the lowest possible cost that still allows profit. giving the example of having 20$ allowed you to go to the movies but not buy a video game or 20$ allowed you to buy a music CD but not buy a video game and ill add to that 20$ lets you buy a movie but not buy a video game.

While putting all new games on sale for 20$ sounds unrealistic, significantly lowering the prices actually makes alot of sense. Why, well theres many single player games that only last between 7 and 10 hours. some of them offer a little bit of replayability value and others have a multiplayer mode that can extend the life of a game. It costs me 10$ to go to the movies and watch a good movie, but it cost me 60$ to play a 10 hour game with, generally, a simpler story. if we go strictly by time spent playing. 30 or 40$ for a game would already make more sense. except some games can last you hundreds of more hours like Call of duty 4 for example. but games with a good multiplayer mode AND that is played by many players is not found around every corner.
Like i said, theres too many games that only last less than 10 hours and after its done. To the consumer, it just doesnt make sense to spend 60$ on such titles.

Secondly, lowering the price of video games, would actually make many more copies of the game sell, and make the whole thing alot more accessible, more games, more consoles, more gaming pcs. simply because it would be easier to rentabilize the hardware as you would be able to buy many games for it. More people would get into gaming, more people would have fun, more people would understand what gaming is etc etc. Beside, if new titles were selling or 20$, paying another 10$ for extra content would be less ridiculous than what it can be currently. (No EA, im not gonna pay 10$ to have Arwen and 2 multiplayer maps in Lord of the Rings Conquest)

Lastly, One big issue thats plaguing the video game industry are the sales of pre-owned games. people who dont want to pay 60$ to play a game right away just wait to buy it used and pay less. While the industry makes money off of the initial game, the retailers make the rest of the profit on the used games. As a result, theres much less new copies of games that are being sold, and many people dont keep all their games, they will re-sell (particularly those 10 hour games). If the price of all games was 20$, people would actually be much less tempted to resell their games and might hold on onto them more. and more people would buy brand new games and not bother waiting to get a pre-owned copy for couple bucks cheaper.

It just makes so much sense for games to sell for significantly less money. one one hand for the consumers, on the other hand for the developpers and change the image of the industry away from "a media for rich people"

Preparing the kids for real life

I was discussing with a friend about people leeching from certain government initatives such as financial assistance to single mothers, jobless people, and others. I wont get in details with everything but eventually we ended up speaking about the education system. we concluded that there was something wrong somewhere that made it so kids dont really know what they want to do when they get out of high school and for many they just spend couple years doing generic studies or social studies while trying to decide on something. In fact, thats exactly my case. I think theres many things that come into play in this situation, geography, economy, the way parents raise their kids and the actual education system. lets take a look deeper into some of these facets and try to find an explanation.

Depending on the place you were born and the installations that are within reasonable range you will have different developpement. for example someone that was born way out in the country in a small town that has a high school and nothing after will have different career perspective in minds than the person living in a large city with several different universities and a panoply of possibilities. Why? well its difficult to see the possibilities that youre just not aware of. its also hard to want to do something very different than what has been around you all your life. so a person that lives way out in the country might be tempted to lean toward whats at his/her disposition. for example some manual job thats available in his/her area. or perhaps theyll be tempted to move not too far and go to the next bigger town that has a small college that way they can see whats there and find something or more radically they could want to move to the bigger city and and choose from a large choice. But i said more radically for a reason, cause thats a big move to leave your family and go live somewhere else in a completely new environment. to sum it up, geography modifies the choices your consider, from a narrow selection to a wider selection.

The financial status of a family also influence what their children will want or can do. a kid from a family that has a tight budget might want to start working as soon as possible to help out their family and contribute. and that may influence what they want to do as far as a job later on. they might not want to study for many years and start their career at a younger age, or they might be motivated to work really hard and have success at school and try and aim for a good income job or whatever. im thinking the kids from low income family realize the importance of work earlier since it directly affects their daily comfort and we can almost say, it strenghten their chance of survival. But wasnt it that way for most families that hard to work really hard togheter to survive in the 18th 19th and early 20th century. the kids would start to work to help their parents really only on and didnt valorize school. while perhaps one of the kid would get financed to study. that one lucky kid that was able to study sure as hell realized the sacrifices his family made to provide him/her with education.

Things changed now, a kid is not something that will be benefit the family by working and bringing more money to the table, nowadays a kid means many things to pay to raise it. and in middle class families, the parents are able to pay. they can pay for their kids to have a good food regimen, all the school furnitures they need and everything their children might need to remain happy and healthy. so the kids gladly take what they receive. but they hate going to school cause its not cool and its boring unlike playing xbox live. so they dont work hard at school and only go cause they are forced too. others perform at school cause they dont want their parents to get mad at them. others see the importance of building their future and work hard for themselves, they might even like it but wont admit it cause its not cool to like school. so for many, they are forced to go to school and are aware they will have to work when they get out of it. as they grow they start to dislike school less and realize its kinda important, and they are driven to start to think about a career, what kind of job they want to do later. so they try to figure out what they like and what they dont in career education classes and by doing bunch of ability quizzes. Yes they do start to think about jobs early on. but do they really conceive it? the idea to work in a certain domain for the vast majority of their lifes, to actually start their own lives where theirs parents are not there to pay. but the more accurate question, do they actually want to grow older and start to work.

because thats the thing, i think is problematic. while teenagers and future worker know they need to work, cause theyve been told so and they live in a world where everybody is working at one point. They've been so used to having all their needs satisfied by their parents. the same parents that want their kids to succeed and will do whats in their power to help. The best way to learn is to be forced to work at some point like it was the case for me. i didnt really need money i had what i wanted, but my parents really wanted me to start working so i did. and its then that i realized that everything around me was built through hard work. that while i had an easy time, some people didnt, and they had it that way so that i could get the best chances at succeeding. That was for me, and i dont think i worded the reflexion i made when i started to work accurately enough to explain how i opened my eyes, but its what i got so far. but not everyone realizes the importance of working and stoppign to play like i did or at the same time i did nor do i claim to be perfect in that sense either. but i do realize that life is not about having fun all the time and i want to find what i want to do for a career and i have the tools to do so.

Because yes, the education system, in my opinion, offers pretty good tools for young students to find a career they wish to pursue. high schools have counselors and career education courses. all you need is that motivation to find something. otherwise its easy to simply be dizzied by the amount of choices and possibilities and not be able to choose. at the same time its also easy to not just wanna quickly choose the first good possibility. you wanna make sure you dont do a mistake since youll be doing it all your life technically so its pretty hard to pick a domain to study in. Also people tend to go toward the funner stuff like arts, psychology, teaching, journalism, etc... (you get the idea).

So now I'm stuck with no real solutions to suggest and no unique cause to point at. I dont wanna end up saying that teenagers today are lazy and unable to do anything. they just live in a life where they dont need to do anything until a certain age where they are pushed to start working (while the possibility of not working would technically still be viable cause they wouldnt be in danger of dieing and would find food on the table everyday). I dont simply wanna say that teenagers are victims of the system where they simply cannot realize that they wont be able to have it easy all their lives. I dont want to say the education system isnt adapted either since it has all the tools necessary to make a career choice. And i dont want to say that parents dont know how to raise their kids cause they help them succeed so much. Its probably a little bit of everything, everyone has to do his/her part to solve this problem of having a bunch of young students that dont know what they want to do.

The pirate bay trial

I recently started to follow the trial of the The Pirate Bay, a site hosting numerous torrent files, many of them containing copyrighted material.

I don't want to get too much into the details of the trials, but they are basicalled being sued because they contribute to the propagation of copyrighted material. Their argument is that hosting torrent files is not illegal, its the users who share the file that are doing illegal stuff.

While reading numerous articles reporting the development of the trial, i noticed a couple of really interesting points in favor of music downloading and sharing.

The first thing is that while discs and overall music sales have gone down, the attendance to concerts have gone up drastically over the past few years. in other words, there was a huge shift of resources and people still invest money toward their music tastes, simply they do it differently than buying tons of discs or mp3s. Maybe the number of sales of derived products like band t-shirts or other artists items has gone up too. some also say that music sharing allows you to discover bunch of new things that you normally wouldnt, simply because i dont think anyone out there will pay $15 for a cd or even $1.50 for a single song, just to see how it is and experiment and discover new stuff. and im certain we could think of many other areas where the music industry gets benefit from the massive expansion of musical culture that is done by file sharing and illegal music downloading. (what were the numbers we heard last decembers? 95% of the music is still downloaded illegally in 2008?).

Because that is the other point i noticed while reading up on the pirate bay trial. people just consume much more music and culture than if they had to pay and expand their horizons more. theres no way i would pay $2500 over 4 years for music, id rather simply listen to the radio or tv and perhaps buy a couple of my favorite songs so that i can listen to them more often. the thing is theres just too much music id like to listen to and i wouldnt be interested to afford it all so i would just not bother with it. Can we say that id be listening to 80s rock or mainstream pop music instead of electornica if it wasnt for music sharing. i would be stuck in that universe of "what the mainstream culture gives me" instead of being able to walk my own way and discover different styles and artists.

I buy music, but i have a normal budget for it, the equivalent of couple cds a year for some of my favorite artists and favorite genre. If i had a ridiculous amount of money to spend, id save it toward the purchase of a vehicule or perhaps a new computer or any other expensive thing, but music wouldnt be a priority at all and it will never be as important as other material objects. its just too easy to cut on it for any individual.

nhl 09 season

in nhl 09 you can save highlights videos and upload them to the ea sports media hub where others people can view rate and comment on your highlights.

Also, most people that do a season or a dynasty in nhl 09 keep it personal and play by themselves most of the games, and when theres people over to play, they just play exhibition games.

well i decided to create a season to play only when i have friends over. and we had a rough start we had to learn to play our positions well and be careful about our mistakes and fall back defenseively, things you dont really care when you play by yourself. in the begening we kept losing games by large margins such as 8-2, 7-4, 5-0 but while we were getting owned by npcs, we started to play better as a team, our team the Tampa Bay Lightning also went through some changes (we traded almost every players to fit our tastes) and things started to get in place. but close to the half season we were 13th on the eastern conference (out of 16 teams) and we needed to be in the top 8 to make the playoffs. we had a 16-23-4 record so we battled harder and started to win games, 3-1, 4-2, 2-0. as time went on we became really good mostly defensively and spent entire games in teh offensive zones so the scores became 7-4, 6-0, 8-3, 7-2.

approaching the last turn of the season we were saw that we needed to win many games to qualify for the playoffs. so we got to work, we eventualyl managed to climb to the 9th position, then the 7th. then we saw we were only a few points behind the washington capitals (leader of our division which would give us the 2nd or 3rd position (theres 3 divisions)) we had a fantastic month of march wit ha 11-1 record. the nthe month of april arrived with its last 3 games. we played the capitals for the first game and won, which put us one point behind with 94. then we lost the 2nd game to the devils. while they lost too. then the last game we won and got up to 96 points. they needed to lose in regulation or OT for us to take the lead and they lost in OT. so we won the divison title because we had more goal scored in the season.

in other words we went from 13th to 2nd in the conference by improving our teamwork and playing hockey the way its meant to be played. were all very proud of our season and the 70 or so games we played and heres some highlights from it that i uploaded to the media hub. pay attention to the one named Quiche which is the guy in the red shirt here

http://www.easportsworld.com/en_US/profile/9290908

2009 NHL all-star game

there was something special about the 2009 all-star game from the beggening. Montreal asked to host the yearly event in 2009 as a part of the teams 100th anniversaries celebrations.

Like for the past couple years, the nhl allowed the public to vote for the starting lineup of both the eastern and western team. the same stupid system used to elect Rick Astley - never gonna give you up as the best act ever and by that i mean the ability to vote over and over and over as much as you wish. Even if Rory Flitzpatrick was elected on the starting lineup last year (he refused the invitation), its like the nhl didnt learn from its mistake and kept the same system.

Now if we exclude people using programs to vote and over and over. the best way to elect someone is to actually have more fans voting and im certain the Montreal Canadiens have the most fans out of any NHL team. not only do they have more fans, they also have very devoted fans that love their home team. So when the vote started, it was normal that the montreal players would get a lot of votes. i was not surprised when i heard that the starting lineup was gonna be 6 montreal canadiens players 1 week after the voting started. But i still had a problem with that, while i and the other fans like montreal players, this is the all-star games, where the best players in the league meet to play a game, not this is where your favorite players play togheter game. unfortunately you cannot control the mass of voters, a mass constituted mainly of canadiens fans. the nhl then saw this ridiculous starting lineup and decided to check and see if there was cheating in the vote, if people used a program or script to vote and over. then they removed several thousand votes for habs players. but the canadiens players still had a big lead so i guess there really was alot of fans voting.

Next week pittsburgh fans woke up i dunno what woke them up (last years, the san jose sharks had voting booths in front of the arena for people to vote for sharks players) and suddenly 6 pittsburgh players were either in the lead for votes or were really close. Sergei Gonchar (injured since the beggening of the season, Ryan Whitney (missed the start of the season cause of an injury) Crosby, Malkin 2 really good players that should be on the all-star team and lastly their goalie whos not having a really great season Marc-Andre Fleury. I dont know how those players got so many votes but visibly the penguins fans are not smarter than montreal fans. so the battle raged between the 2 teams in the voting. in the end. the 11 players involved had significantly more votes than any other players in the eastern conference (kovalev had 1,2 million and was the 3rd forward) Ovechkin was 5th behind with around 400k votes.

As a result the starting lineup was made of montreal and pittsburgh players for the eastern conference. and while the western team voting wasnt as crazy, the blackhawks and the ducks pretty much won the voting. Basically only teams with a lot of fans were elected instead of actual star players.

but enough talk about the voting. some players decided to not attend like nicklas lidstrom and pavel datsyuk and the nhl suspended them. i guess thats a good thing because 2 really good players were missing during the all-star weekend and if the players dont participate theres no point in having a contest with the best players in the league. speaking of no point, Stephane Robidas, the Dallas Stars defensemen was invited to replace Lidstrom with his whopping 17 points and his nose that was broken 4 times in the past. That is retarded, not only does he not hav many points, hes not the greatest defensemen and theres a ton of better defensemen out there that couldve gotten invited like Dion Phaneuf. at first i thought, well maybe its because the nhl wanted to have a representent for every team, but then i saw that Mike Modano got invited too so the only explanation i could find is that Robidas played for the canadiens before and the nhl thought the fans would like to see him again. Well i'm a fan and i wouldve much prefered to see Dion Phaneuf, Ed Jovanovski, Brian Rafalski, Chris Pronger, Rob Blake or Lubomir Vishnovsky instead to only name a few.

But yea, thats stuff thats out of our control and the whole weekend was still really nice. the skilsl competition was gonna be really boring until ovechkin and malkin pulled their play and ovechkin went on a breakaway with 2 sticks funny glasses and hat and fired from his wrong side. he really saved that event and things got more fun. As far as the game goes, i didnt watch it entirely but im happy for kovalev who said he was gonna be the MVP and he got it with 2 goals and 1 goal in shootout. I also liked the show tim thomas put on everytime he made a save. hes part of the success of this type of event and i hope other players take example and start doing more spectacular moves for the future all-star games.

Lord of the rings Conquest preview

(This is 2 forum posts i made that im pasting here)
I heard about the game, read about it and was pretty excited, then i saw that the demo became available for ps3 users. but i hadnt managed to get on the internet with my ps3, so i went ahead and bought a 100 ft long cat5 wire and downloaded the demo of LOTR:conquest

Then i played through the tutorial the ndid some online games and Wow, i had a blast.

But let me tell you guys about the game and what it is, its vastly similar to Battlefield but with a LOTR sauce.

You choose one of the 4 class warrior, ranger, scout or mage. Each class has its own unique feel and range of abilities.

Warrior fight with a 2hand sword, they have 3 kind of move light medium and heavy. then a modifier they can add to their wepaon by holding a key and performing one of the 3 attacks, then theres combos. they also have active blocking and lastly the yhave a throwing axe they can use to finnish off someone running away from them or whatever. the axe cannot be throw that often. Warrior have an energy bar, they get energy when they hit enemies so that they can use that modifier that makes their sword fiery their special aiblities also recquire energy. They have one that goes through blocking (its a heavy hit tho so long precast/aftercast)

Rangers fire arrows, when they hit with arrow they get energy that charges one of the 3 abilities, Multi arrow (3 arrows at once) and/or the 2 preparations poison (snare) or fire (KD). basically you fire hit one of your preparation and you bow becomes green or orange, then you fire an arrow and it does the desired effect. ranger dont have much defense except an ability to kick enemy from melee range which moves them away and gives you some breathing room.

Scout are like assassins, they have a cloak that makes them as invis as the ut2k3/2k4 invis adren combo did. and when they manage to sneak up behind someone they can 1 hit kill them(dont worry its gay but its not That easy to pull off) then they ahve 3 attacks like the warriors, but they arent as effective for aoe and then they have a satchel bag they can throw. as for the other class they need to fight to get their energy for the stealthing, satchel and whatever else they got (i havent played that class much)

lastly Mage, Mage fire lightning at enemies, they can charge it to more dmg or simply fire single bolts. thats what gives the mtheir energy to use their aoe heal (Similar to the aoc big heals from priests) their energy is also useful for their fireball attack which fires a fireball that explode and does aoe dmg or their Repulse like thing thats a aoe KD (awesome againsts scouts) they also get a blocking shield when they hold the active blcoking key, basically they are in a bubble that protects everyone in it from all ranged dmg, the bad thing about that is that you cannot run, only walk, and youre not invulnerable to KD.

Thats it for the classes, now what you do with them is exactly like weve seen in battlefield, theres capture points on the map and you stand near them to capture them, and it gives your team point, once you get max point you win, the simple but so effective recipe for good times. i also saw that there was other things in maps but i havent really got a chance to experience with them, but it seems like you can control trolls and or the tree guys or ride mounts and fight from them. i was playing a orc mage once and was assiting a troll on my team from a distance and i saw a good guy warrior climb the bakc of the troll and starting hitting it hard but i managed to kill him fast enough

The game is just awesome, its the kind of feel Aoc shouldve given me but failed miserably. theres alot of action, alot of teamwork, its accessible but has the ability to be more complex. and its seems decently balanced as far as classes go cause each one has a little something to give to their team.

I also like how it fixes problems with for example, battlefield games. for example you cant fire from a really far range wit hyour arrows or your lightning bolts. so the gay sniper hiding in a mountain and thats impossible to find from bf vietnam doesnt exist. then theres not that many headshots, except the scout thing. but like i said the scout will have trouble to do it to any moderately aware person. theres also teh trolls and trees that hit pretty hard but mage arent meant to tank giant trees. on theo ther hand warrior can stand closer and survive if they are not alone. all it takes really is a bit of focus fire. lastly what i noticed is that since its all close ot medium range combat, sure you need t oaim and target your stuff, but not That much and it doesnt take much practice to be able to be accurate with a ranger or a mage.

I dont know how the gameplay will translate on a mouse and keyboard but its definitely great for consoles (its also playable in 4way splitscreen i believe, if not only 2). i hope they release a demo for pc so i can test it. but so far im certain to buy it for ps3

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i just spent some time reading on the lotrc forums to hear the feedback other players gave to the game.

there was alot of negative stuff that people found about the game and so i decided to refutate some of it here because i thought the game was awesome

first people are saying the mp maps are too small and too cramped. well you can only play it 8v8 so it makes alot of sense that you dont have HUUUUUUUUUGE maps. the maps are 8v8 size and they have certain areas you can walk on and certain paths you can take instead of being a really open world. thats good cause it creates choke points and area you want to control to win. it creates large struggles to control a zone instead of having bunch of people chase each other in circles to cap points.

theres also complaints about the classes imbalance, well i heard people complaining about each class so i guess they all have their things and are balanced in that way. but more seriously, i liked how everyclass had their thing and had to work with other classes to win games while not being helpless in certain situations. For example the warrior class isnt that good against a bunch of ranged classes, so sometimes youll see a mage with his bubble walk with a warrior until he gets a better position to start attacking enemies. but thats a rather sucky tactic if you ask me cause you dont have that kind of time and warriors have better options like their throwing axe they can throw an axe at the enemy and if it hits, the enemy is knocked down, not only is that good defensively to help a teammate but its pretty darn good to get in striking position with the enemy. and then wit htheir energy move, warriors have that Falcon kick type thing which is just like Falcon kick, while it doesnt charge you forward that far, its can be enough.

Rangers with their snare and KD are good at keeping their enemies at a distance, but when they are within melee range its hard to fight, thankfully they have their kick to KD enemies away.

Mages, people are complaining about magic in the game and all. but the game is not really a lotr simulation, its a fun mp game. and mage fits really well in there. their lightning bolts needs to be charged to be really strong, their fireball have to be aimed in an arch so its hard to aim (but it creates an aoe fire circle for a few seconds that can shut down a path a little) their melee attack is good because its done with a pole and the pole has a wide hit radius similar to guardians in AoC. but the pole does very little damage. the shockwave isnt too OP either to get rid of meleers because theres a like a 1/2 second precast on it so you have to use like a protective prayer in GW and not just a Panic button.

Scout can cloak but you can always see their silouhette, i find em kinda weak compared to the others but since they can one shot well whoever wants to play em may go ahead, it just doesnt seem particularly useful to me. oh and they have their satchel bomb as some kind of ranged attack as well as left or right roll to evade stuff.

oh and i forgot warriors active blocking is kinda hard to use online but it might just be me who is bad. ive used it effectively offline tho to tank big mobs. once you go in active blocking mode you can move the directions to dodge forward backward left or right. so all defensive moves are combined unlike AoC.

people are also complaining about how you get knocked off mounts too easely. it takes only 1 hit or 1 arrow to be knocked off your mount. i find that great because it doenst give a ridiculously big advantage to the people on mounts. besides when youre on a mount you can kd with your sword almost anyone that comes inyour range. its really effective to disperse a big mob just like what they intended to do with mounted combat in aoc but we all know that mounted combat in aoc sucked ass.it sucks tho that theres no mounted archery, it woudlve been cool but it doesnt really matter because aiming while riding a horse is almost impossible.

Hero playable characters can be obtained in mp games to give your team some kind of boosts. top scorer on the team gets asked if he wants to control a hero and he then has the control of a hero character that has alot more health than normal and hits really hard and based on the nature of how you get that character, its being played by the toughest guy on the other team. i found that a little op but pretty cool nonetheless. the heros are still killable.

i found troll and ents you can control pretty gay too because they 1 hit kill pretty much everything they manage to hit (Except warriors, they take 2 hit) they are not all that easy to control but they still take quite a bit of effort from the other team to take them down. the biggest problem i have with them is that they have a heal over time abilit yto heal themselves while the ystand still and use that. sure its a slow heal, but i dont think they should get it. Another thing worth noting is that the ents get on fire if you use the fireball or the fire arrows against them so they die faster than the trolls. but oyu know, trolls and ents arent all that OP if you have good scouts cause they can 1 hit kill them if they managed to sneak up and climb behind them and chop their head or whatever. (looks pretty cool too)

another thing that was kinda stupid but is really minor is that you die if you go in water. as if you fell off a ledge. and theres a river on a map with a small bridge. like i said tho when speaking about map size thats fine that you cant go in water but id opt for the invisble wall instead of you die when you touch water. thats a minor thing tho and i have yet to get knocked down or anything in water.

i dont think i saw any other reasonable complaint about the gameplay while reading through the feedback thread. then some people are sayign the graphics sucks and all, and for that game i really could care less mostly because id rather have those huge battles with 150ish npc on the map in sp mode instead of a really lagged battle. also not opting for for the best graphics psosible allows for split screen coop play, and if you have a look at the graphics really it looks mighty fine.

The only thing im hoping is that theres more skins per class in the retail game. i know it wil lchange depending on the maps. but id like to be able to have a choice of appearance for my class. as it is right now your class gets assigned a skin depending on the map so tehres like 3 good ranger skin, but you can only be the hobbit ones when youre on the Shire map. but then again this is only visual and doesnt impair gameplay.

to conclude, im really excited about the game because of that feeling it gives me when i play it. a feeling that ive been looking for for a loooong time.