Deconstructing Diablo 3: The Irony of Accessible Ableism

Tags

ableism, cross posts, Diablo 3, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity

Chronic Illness Cat meme generator: “Live vicariously through Diablo III character” ~ credit not mine, unverified

So, I love dungeon crawlers. I remember years ago when I was younger, playing random indie games that I could come across, including one where the entire essence of the game is you looking for treasure. Nothing else, just straight and to the point. Of course, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it. But since then I branched out into various other games, like the Champions of Norrath series, both of the .hack// series (or rather, rpgs with very obvious dungeon-crawling characteristics), and eventually the Diablo series.

Unfortunately though, I never was able to play much of the latter – I never really had anyone to play with, at the time. Now, I simply can’t play them period. Games that rely so heavily on mouse clicks to move and cast spells destroy my hands in as little as an hour. On bad days, even less than that. Which is one of the reasons why I like Diablo 3 so much.

See, unlike the first two, Diablo 3 includes two particular functions that will make the game significantly more accessible to people with disabilities. The first, you are actually able to change the keybind for moving your character to a keyboard button instead of clicking the mouse. By doing so, you are able to make your character move to where the mouse cursor is, but you don’t have to click repeatedly or hold the button down to keep yourself at a steady pace. For familiarity and ease of access, I have my move button set as W.

The second, and which is notably unique in the games of such a genre, is elective mode. By default, you are only able to assign particular skills of specific types to particular buttons. The reason why this is a major problem is because your class’s primary damage skills are only able to be assigned to your mouse’s left click. When it’s a skill that you are spamming, having to click the button continuously can be incredibly painful, and others may not have the dexterity necessary to use individual mouse buttons in the fashion that they were designed to be utilized in. But if you enable elective mode, you are then able to map your skills to whatever keybinds you decide to set up. Most of mine are set up with the standard 1 2 3 4, with tab as my “stand still and kill shit” button.

It doesn’t come without its own problems, though. If you decide to change your keybindings, you will find that you cannot change the functions assigned to your mouse buttons. Unlike all the other keys, they are locked. I, personally, cannot fathom why, but that may be because I actually have to think about such things on a day to day basis. The other major problem, which is directly related to this, is that for some reason particular skills cannot be assigned to your mouse buttons. This can include some major defensive skills, such as Spirit Walk for witch doctors and Smoke Screen for demon hunters. When you already have to rely on a mouse simply to move (even if you’re not clicking for said movement), it can be difficult to suddenly switch from the mouse to buttons on a keyboard you designate for defensive or otherwise important skills. And it’s even harder for someone who can’t use a mouse well, but is forced to utilize the right and left click just to have access to those two skill slots. There are workarounds for these, such as using a gaming mouse with custom commands for additional buttons and using external macro software to simulate a mouse click when using a keyboard button. But the fact that we have to rely on such things just to get the full accessibility out of a game is just poor programming and execution.

So here we have this game, where its current form is more accessible than its former titles, but with serious limits. Yet even with these in mind, Blizzard hasn’t exactly been stellar with disabilities in the past. It’s great to see progress, and moving away from seriously clunky mechanics and UIs that plagued the series before. But then we look on the flip side, on things that they clearly don’t give a damn about and haven’t for a long, long time.

“Madness” this, “madness” that. It seems like as soon as you decide to get your toes wet, the sheer levels of psychobigotry start piling up from the start. Which, unfortunately, is pretty typical. I mean, come on. Three entire expansion packs for World of Warcraft alone are based on the bad guys having gone mad. Year after year after year, and that’s not even getting into elements such as particular quests or npcs, and even without approaching other games from the same company.

First major story-line quest chain, off to lay the mad king of Tristram to rest. Then it’s off to fight off the clutches of the mad cultists. Let’s not forget the mad ramblings of the cultist leader, and that mad hermit that you are forced to listen to from the spider cave. Then you go off and hunt down the mad cultists specifically, while trudging through the torture chambers of the mad king, while the mad cultists are torturing and killing the dude you’re trying to save.

Have I said ‘mad’ enough yet? Because that’s only the first act out of four.

At least with cut scenes and quest dialogue, you can just hit Esc and not have to listen to it. But you don’t have that option with the random speech bubbles that show up, conversations between you and your follower[s] or other various npcs. I hope you don’t plan on bringing the templar with you, despite him being the most effective follower available, because he will not shut up about it. The fact that you have to go through the exact same story-line with the exact same quests four times in a row per character doesn’t exactly help matters. I haven’t felt like psychobigotry was thrown this much into my face since Rift. Given the fact that I’m no longer playing Rift, one can (accurately) guess that my bullshit-tolerance bar is pretty damn low. Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to work past it all this time and continue to enjoy the game for its mechanics. And if not, well, at least I got the game for free.

Two steps forward, One step back

Tags

ableism, disability, raiding, world of warcraft

A Forsaken warlock flying above Orgrimmar upon a Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher.

Years and a full expansion later, I finally got my Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher.

Raiding is probably the most enjoyable aspect of WoW for me. I love that feeling of accomplishment after your team finally downs a difficult boss after wipe after wipe. But often I am not able to experience the newly released raids until years later. There’s always a massive barrier in the way.

Not my disabilities themselves – over the past 10 years I’ve come to learn new methods of adaptation for many new releases. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t be able to play WoW without my laundry list of addons. Most people think the number of them that I use is outrageous, but each and every one is necessary for the game to be accessible to me.

Take for example, Deadly Boss Mods. This is one of those addons that sparks a lot of controversy in the raiding community. Many teams deem it to be a necessity to join, and yet others curse its existence entirely. But because of how fractured and splintered my cognitive and memory functions are, the constant reminders of upcoming skills, AoEs and important changes in game mechanics are one of the reasons why I am able to raid at all. Hell, not even raiding – it has helped me time and time again in dungeons, and lately even some dailies such as those in the Darkmoon Faire. If I was expected to memorize and be able to change my playstyle on the fly, for every second on every boss in every dungeon and raid, my mind would literally fall apart. And I am not the only one.

Yet, if we were to try to participate in progression raiding for the latest heroic raids, that is what would be expected of us. And if we can’t follow up, that is our fault, not their expectations.

The thing is, I am not a supercrip. I can’t headshot enemy players in Call of Duty by pushing buttons with my face. I can’t use voice recognition software to cast my cooldown macros for me, though I may be able to set that up in the future. I can’t focus on 15 adds at once, with three different strategic priorities. And because I can’t do all of this, among an infinite number of other things, it’s considered my failing because I can’t ‘overcome’ my disabilities.

It took ages, but I finally found a raid leader that does normal and heroic ICC on a weekly basis, including all of the achievements, is aware and accommodating of my disabilities, is respectable without being abusive and is understanding when I am not able to make one of the runs due to pain and fatigue. And while it has been a long and difficult road, I finally managed to complete the Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25 player) achievement, and obtained one of the mounts that I have been yearning for ever since I learned of its existence. Because to me, raid achievements and mounts are not vanity items. They are tokens of strength, that in the face of all the shit that is thrown at me, I have still been able to persevere and achieve my goals. I may be disabled, and people may be assholes about it, but I’m not going to let that stop me.

Not ever.

[Cross Post] Of Video Games and Reclamation: It Shouldn’t Have To Hurt This Much

Tags

ableism, cross posts, mental illness, MMO communities, neurodiversity

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on February 14, 2011.

This is my attempt at a post for February’s Blog Carnival of Mental Health, developed by Astrid and hosted by Differently at Ramblings of the Differently Sane. I say attempt because whether or not this post fits the subject is still up in the air. But it’s an important topic for me, so I’m trying anyway.

I didn’t used to speak up for myself. I’ve felt the impact of psychophobia pretty much all of my life, though my younger years I wasn’t aware of what it was – my loved ones and I just thought I was on the odd side. Sometimes they still think so. But that pain was still there, with every assault on my personhood simply for behaviors that are natural to me and not seeing the world as others do. For years this continued, even as I moved to new areas, and all the while I said nothing.

I think the first time I actually spoke up was toward my highschool psychology teacher when he was talking to the class about Schizophrenia. Granted, I didn’t ‘speak’ per say, largely out of fear because my classmates had a tendency to harass me and I didn’t want to give them more ammunition, but instead wrote a note and gave it to him at the end of the class. He was the first to respond positively, actually apologizing, something no one had done for me before. I think he knew the impact such perceptions could and often do have on folks like me, folks living with mental illness. He even warned me ahead of time about the movie he was going to play in the class later in the semester (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and how my classmates may respond to it, giving me the option to opt out of class for that day. I didn’t understand the significance of that until I started blogging, but it’s still one of the reasons why I started actively speaking up for myself and advocating for better treatment of people with mental illness by the people in our given societies and cultures.

Though I still struggle with doing so in real life. In real life I don’t have much power over my surroundings in case shit goes bad. Most of that power is actually in my games, where if something goes wrong or someone starts giving me shit about it, I can block them or simply stop playing. This has given me an empowerment that just isn’t there in the rest of my life, and is probably why I spend so much time online. For once, I am in control, and I can determine whether or not I put up with the shit people dish out.

But it still hurts. It always hurts. Frequently I find myself dropping out of dungeon groups or dropping gaming blogs I read because of psychophobia. Because many times, when I call out complete strangers on their behaviors or attitudes, they don’t care and I’m pegged as being ‘oversensitive’ (I fucking hate that word). So I do the only form of self-advocacy I can do in those situations – I leave and do what I can to preserve my mental health at that time. And because of it, my characters are sorely lacking and I’m falling further and further behind in the Cata rush. But I continue to do it because I know that if I don’t, the effects of staying and putting up with it will be far worse. Gear and levels can wait, keeping a grip on one’s reality (whatever that may be) can’t really, since everything we do is so dependent on it. Without it, everything becomes a downward spiral and the last thing I want is to be hospitalized again because people are assholes. Because yes, that’s pretty much what it amounts to, though that’s putting it in really simplified terms that probably won’t be understood to people outside of such situations.

Sometimes, like in guilds, I’ll speak up. Mostly because I feel like I can, either because I’ve grown to know the people involved and thus they may have some level of sympathy or because I know I can drop if I need to. And unfortunately, it doesn’t typically end well. The last guild I was in, things blew up when I pointed out on the side that being crazy doesn’t necessarily mean doing something outrageous and vice versa – and even if it was the case then, so what? But I was taking away people’s words, even when that wasn’t what I was trying to do. Eventually I wound up leaving because I just couldn’t handle something like that happening again, especially from people I was getting to know better. In another guild, the guild leaders had a habit of saying ‘that’s insane’ for everything they deemed outrageous and bad-things-not-to-do. Of course, there I couldn’t say anything because the one in charge was the ‘I’m not PC, if people are offended it’s their own problem not mine’ sort who had no level of empathy for anyone, let alone me.

The thing is, it shouldn’t have to hurt this much. It shouldn’t have to be a battle of which scenario is going to cause more harm, defending oneself and advocating for the deconstruction of psychophobia and better treatment of people with mental illness or keeping quiet and letting the cycle of harmful behaviors and attitudes continue. We should be able to speak up about the things that harm us and be listened to, having people actually give a shit on a regular basis instead of being told to fuck off and that we’re making things harder for others. But it does, because that’s the sort of world we live in, especially in the gaming community where you’re constantly graded on your performance and how dare you have feelings while doing so! Just stop complaining and go back to your duty, noob.

And that sort of attitude is the worst, especially when this is a community where you feel most comfortable. You’re not expected to be a person and have all of the complexities of such, you’re expected to be a white-cis-straight-male robot that’s socially programmed to conform to the attitudes and behaviors of the dominant majority around you.

The fact that this sort of thing still hurts, and the fact that it shouldn’t have to, is part of the reason why I keep fighting against it. Because it won’t go away on its own. And even if I don’t make it through to many people, I can still reach some – and that shows me that there are people that really do care and will listen. That’s what matters to me. If I can reach someone, and that person is willing to listen, grow and learn about how such attitudes harm people with mental illness, that makes it worth it. I bear this pain because I know others do as well. And we shouldn’t have to.

[Cross Post] Of Video Games and Reclamation: The Unseen Advantages of DID

Tags

cross posts, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on January 29th, 2011.

Back in the day, on another server in the different era of patch 3.3.3a, we mained a Survival hunter. Or, well, one of us did. The rest of us didn’t find a whole lot of enjoyment in hunters, though the general knowledge and occasional gameplay would seep through. But for whatever reason, hunters were what he was good at. I [1], on the other hand, did warlocks. Affliction, to be precise, and according to my guildies and partner(s), I was damned good at it. I delved into Destruction for a bit, but it just wasn’t my style. Too bursty. I do DoTs. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on that hunter, even though she was 80 and our only skinner/leatherworker; Even as Survival, which is more DoTish than the other specs, she felt too… bursty.

Of course, once 4.0.1 hit, everything changed. By then, my current partner and I had switched servers and had new characters. Including another hunter. She hadn’t made it too far, and by the time the patch came around, her skills felt clunky. Why?

Because for whatever reason (I didn’t read into it, not being a, well, hunter) they changed the energy mechanism for hunters from mana to focus. And now she felt like… a rogue. Which are melee.

I don’t do melee. I’m a caster. Any sort of melee class or spec feels wrong to me, and I have a hard time wrapping my head (ha, ha [2]) around it and their mechanics. Tried warriors once, no go. Death knights are just weird. In an interesting sort of way, but still weird. And while I do have a paladin and I’ve tanked before, running up to something and smacking it with my mace makes me twitch – I feel like I should be casting Exorcism or something. Which probably explains why my current pally is Holy.

Yet, despite this, my fiance was poking at me (on occasion) to reroll our hunter. Apparently we were the only good hunter He’s played with. [3] But I refused, because they’re clunky and use focus and melee use focus/rage/runic energy, not hunters. Hunters and other ranged classes used mana, damn it.

However, instead of never touching hunters again ever (which is about the position I was in, go obsessive-compulsiveness), the sibling in my system that used to play them (as well as rogues, though not extensively) decided HEY. I’MMA MAKE A HUNTER NOW, K? K. (whut? DAMN IT GIVE ME MY HANDS BACK.) [4]

And… he’s managing it pretty well. Cuz that’s just what he does. He does hunters. For one reason or another, he feels comfortable using hunters even when they have focus now – something I can’t get my brain around. The only time I even feel slightly at ease with using one is when the two of us are co-conscious, and that’s because he’s the one managing it all. I just sort of feel like I’m watching in the background.

Being able to play a class that I otherwise do not feel comfortable with opens up other worlds to us. There’s different experiences, different play styles, little tricks in our arsenal that contribute greatly to our power (jump shot kiting mobs? Fuck yeah, even though it hurts our hand after a while). These are things that you do not experience with any other class, simply because each one is unique in style and technique. And yeah, while it’s commonplace to think that people can just get used to new experiences after a while, that doesn’t work so well with us because of our OCD. For one reason or another, I’m more severely impacted by it than my sibling is, and my reaction to the changes to hunters is an extension of that. Except, yanno, we also have DID – and he can handle them despite my inability to.

This is something we’re all still getting used to, the fact that alters (god I hate that term) in a DID system can have vastly differing skills, strengths and weaknesses between them. And yet, this is exactly how DID operates. That core identity is fragmented, and with that fragmentation comes the separation of flexibility and those strengths and weaknesses. That way, if one of us finds ourselves in a situation that we can’t handle for whatever reason, another can. That’s the development of this coping method at work to protect us.

Granted, me not liking hunters isn’t exactly a situation I need to be ‘protected’ from. But since he operates differently than I do, the sort to be up front and aggressive in a time of need, it’s a situation where he operates best out of the lot of us [5]. When faced with a situation that threatens me for whatever reason, I stand back and try to find another way to handle it. I don’t like to tackle things head on, and that carries over in games. I stay in the background, where it’s safe (unless fire spawns under me x_X). On top of that, I prefer to be in the company of trusted loved ones where our strengths help each other (healer + warlock = world of opportunities/dead mobs). Whereas he’s a very self-sufficient person. If there’s a problem that challenges him, he challenges it back. He has to, that’s the situation behind his development in our system and how he protected us and himself at the time.

So we’ve rerolled our hunter. Let’s see where this goes.

---

1. For once, only one of us is writing this post. Fancy that. No names though.
2. I apologize to anyone who doesn’t get why this comment is so funny to me.
3. He doesn’t like hunters. At all. Especially after this one time when He had to rez one after they stood in the fire – and then, while still in the fire, proceeded to sit down. And drink. All while He was standing in the fire to heal them, because that was the only way He was within range. I will always remember that moment.
4. Yes, this is about how our internal conversations go.
5. Yes, I get that hunters are ranged – the focus thing makes them feel like melee to both of us despite this. And with the way a lot of the PUGs I’ve run with have been running up to mobs and smacking them instead of shooting at them, sometimes I wonder.

[Cross Post] Everyone Is Welcome, Unless You’re That Uppity Mentally Ill Person

Tags

ableism, cross posts, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on January 11th, 2011.

Note: This post talks extensively about the history of slurs and stereotypes regarding mental illness, which may be triggering. It also includes discussion of abuse related to them.

Certain things I have elected not to link to, such as the game and article in question. This is done on purpose, to help avoid further triggering content.

Yes, long title. My apologies.

I was going through my RSS reader the other day when I decided to burn through the gaming articles that had piled up, when I came across one of the most recent accessibility reviews available on AbleGamers, a site geared toward community, discussion and news regarding disability and gaming. I love accessibility reviews, especially for games because that lets me know which ones (especially if they’re hyped up) to avoid because I simply wouldn’t be able to put my money’s worth into it. But that love becomes a little strained when the reviews come with a side dish of othering and demonization.

See, there’s a flash game that was published earlier this month called I Am An Insane Rogue AI. The premise is that you’re now a rogue AI that’s gone evilly insane and seeks to take over the world. Where have we heard that before?

Oh yeah. Practically everywhere.

And that’s where the issue starts. There’s an incredibly common trend where people or beings who are portrayed as ‘evil’ are also portrayed as ‘insane’. This insanity is based on various stereotypical behaviors and thought patterns such as irrationality, random bouts of violence and a lack of or highly questionable morals. This concept is older than people realize – the term ‘insane’ is derived from ‘insanus’, a Latin term that breaks down to ‘not well/healthy/sane’. Hell, we can get a general idea of how old it is just based on the fact that it was used consistently in Captivi, a comedy written by Titus Maccius Plautus. In the play, in attempts to convince one of the main characters (Heigo) that another is not to be believed (Aristophontes), a third character (Tyndarus) tries to claim that Aristophontes chased around his own parents with a spear during one of his ‘fits’. We’re talking a stereotype associated with violence, one of the many characteristics used to portray ‘evil’ in plots when accompanied with insanity, that dates back to at least 184 B.C. [1] That’s really old.

These stereotypes are all that societies had to estimate whether one was ‘sane’ or not because it wasn’t until recent centuries that we started to develop an idea of what mental illness actually is. Psychology is a very young field. And even with the presence of psychology and a general gaining of awareness in societies, these stereotypes still thrive because that’s what people are used to. It’s been ingrained through methods like media that such traits are related to a someone or something’s lack of sanity, even if the traits have nothing in common with known mental illnesses. And of course, that feeds into the development of more plots doing the exact same thing, because we write things based on what we know. Ideas come from what is around us and what is within us, especially if those things continue to go unchallenged.

In a world where we’re starting to develop more of an understanding of what mental illness is and why these behaviors and thought patterns occur, the terms insane and crazy associated with it have become slurs. Specifically because they reinforce negative stereotypes and take away from the development of awareness regarding the very stereotypes they are reinforcing. These stereotypes, and indeed, the terms attached to them, are and have been for some time systematically used to attack, ridicule, confine and take away the integrity of people they’re being attached to. They are used to demonize people, even if they themselves are not mentally ill, because that’s how things have been for so long. It’s the entire reason why the terms have come to mean things like ‘irrational’, ‘absurd’, ‘askew’, ‘obsessed’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘extreme’, just to name a few. And I can say this with certainty, as I am one of several people who have been subjected to abuse from this perception in society, simply because I was perceived as different from others, even long before any diagnosis was established. And yes, that stereotype of violence was included – I became the first suspect of high school bomb threats when they were called in, despite the fact that I’m not a violent individual. But the people around me decided that I was simply because they viewed me as crazy and insane.

Now, for me, gaming is one of my safe spaces to get away from the onslaught of these stereotypes in every aspect of the world around me. Sometimes it doesn’t work too well, when those stereotypes make their way into my releases [2], but for the most part I’m able to get around it and absorb myself into the game outside of those factors. It’s harder to do that within a community, as those communities involve people who can actively reinforce them instead of passively like games do. It becomes even harder when it comes from a community that one, deals with disability (of which mental illness can be considered [3]); two, claims ‘everyone is welcome’ in that space [4]; and three, really should know better, or at the very least, be more open to discussion about why certain things are problems when it comes to reinforcing negative stereotypes of disability.

This is what I was expecting when I tried to point out how the review of the game (not just the game itself) was contributing to this problem. What I found was the complete opposite – instead, it was a matter of political correctness, misconstruing words and a whole ton of ‘no, the word does apply because that’s how it’s used’. What’s more, apparently safety isn’t a matter of accessibility (or should I say ‘offense’) because accessibility is about being able to physically play the game, not whether or not you feel triggered or elements of the game can worsen one’s mental state. I’m sorry, is that a hierarchy of disability I’m seeing?

So, ironically enough, not only did the review tell me about a game that I cannot play due to the fact that it triggers me (though this was never mentioned, just shown), but I also learned that the very community telling me about this game is unsafe because it in turn is triggering, and the people within don’t seem to care about this fact. Because accessibility isn’t about one’s mental state, it’s about one’s physical state. Which is hardly welcoming to all, as it erases those who are mentally disabled and pushes their needs aside. I learned a very important lesson in ableism within the disabled community – something I’ve known exists, but haven’t experienced myself until now. I also learned that nonbinary trans folk aren’t necessarily welcome, as my request to not be referred to by Miss or Mr. never got through comment screening. Hm.

An interesting thing to note, though: Border House reviewed the exact same game, and while it wasn’t an accessibility review, they still managed to address the actual issue behind the stereotype of ‘insanity + evil’ and how yes, actually, it is ableist (or disablist). So thank you to the authors at Border House for taking this opportunity where they could have gone with the cycle and instead turning it around and deconstructing it, letting people know that hey, that shit ain’t cool.

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1. If we go by the estimated year of Plautus’ death, as I can’t find an estimated year of the creation of Captivi.
2. I’m looking at you, Plants vs. Zombies, with your god damn twitching straight-jacket Jack-in-a-Box zombie.
3. Americans with Disabilities Act (amended 2008), Section 12102
4. Border House: Interview with Mark Barlet of AbleGamers.com

[Cross Post] Of Video Games and Reclamation: Let’s Get a Little Insane in the Membrane

Tags

cross posts, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on October 5th, 2010.

This week is Mental Illness Awareness Week in the United States! Started by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, its a week dedicated to help bringing awareness about the effects of mental illness and support for loved ones that live with it. I hope to be able to write something about living with mental illness each day this week, spoons permitting – fingers crossed!

So, I grind achievements. It’s relaxing for me, giving me something to concentrate on for a goal instead of just grinding experience. I’m also a massive completionist, so seeing those little green checks of completed criteria makes me really happy. I do the same thing for reputation too – to the point where I can get really, really upset if the reputation for a faction isn’t at 999/1000 (the cap) once I get exalted with them.

Sometimes this goes hand in hand. There’s a lot of achievements that require you to get exalted with various factions, such as They Love Me In That Tunnel for Timbermaw Hold. Yeah, you can only imagine how much I love these.

There’s also Feats of Strength, which are similar to achievements but are considered to be notably harder. Many cannot be accomplished anymore as they have been removed from WoW in various patches. Others are still available though, or at least until further notice, and one in particular I’m interested in is Insane in the Membrane.

This sparks my interest for a couple reasons. One, it requires exalted reputation with seven different factions, as well as honored with an eighth. Even more interesting is the fact that to gain reputation with one of these factions, you have to kill members of the Steamwheedle Cartel, four of the factions you need to be exalted with. Well, that doesn’t exactly go over well with them, so doing so reduces your reputation. There’s still talk about whether or not you need to have exalted with the Steamwheedle Cartel at the same time as their enemies, the Bloodsail Buccaneers, but the general consensus is that the only truly guaranteed way of accomplishing this feat is to have all of the required reputations at the same time. Not only that but with the way my mind operates, I need to have both of them as high as I can. Which means getting a little creative and turning in quests for the Cartel that won’t reduce your reputation with the Bloodsail, to repair strained relations after you went off and killed them all. And that’s not touching into the other factions you have to grind with – the Shen’dralar, which are only available in a dungeon and will only give reputation in exchange for librams that count as unique when you pick them up (so you can only have one on a character at a given time); the Ravenholdt, asking for the deaths of their enemies and lockboxes that can only be looted by higher level rogues; and the Darkmoon Faire, who accept decks of cards gathered from a scribe and/or rare drops from mobs, depending on which decks you plan on turning in. Managing to get all of these requirements at the same time is really fucking hard, let alone individually.

Which brings me to the second reason: society’s perception of those that are really dedicated to something they find interesting, to the point of labeling them as crazy or insane for trying to do something so ridiculous by their standards. Because clearly, only the insane have that much dedication to something so arbitrary, right? This seeps into the gaming community too, shown through the conflict between casual and hardcore gamers: casual gamers often feel that hardcore gamers are taking the games too seriously and look upon their dedication with the same disdain that the rest of society does, and hardcore gamers often feel that they’re not being taken seriously and that other gamers aren’t serious enough. And all the while the obsessive and irrational behaviors of what society deems “the insane” (oh hi there) are used to ridicule or awe at these fans, marveling at why someone would put that much time and effort into something they consider to be so pointless.

This is further reinforced by the game itself, considering the name of the feat and the title granted after achieving it is, well, “the Insane”. So Blizzard’s problematic word choice created the foundation for the ridicule of not only people within their own community and demographic, but also those with no other association but the fact that they are mentally ill.

Here’s the thing though. There’s lots of different reasons why someone may have such an intense level of dedication to a given subject or hobby. In some cases such as my own, it may be related to mental conditions or neurodiversity. In other cases, maybe they just really, really like it. Is that so wrong?

Apparently so. But you know what? I don’t care. I’m going to go ahead and take back this slur that Blizzard inconsiderately integrated into their system. I’m going to let the neurodiversity of my mind help me in accomplishing this ridiculous task, because that is something it is awesome at – sure, OCD has its debilitating moments, but in other situations it can help provide a lot of drive and ambition that I may not have otherwise. I am going to seek out these factions, get to exalted with them, and get the title to wear throughout Azeroth in proud declaration. Yes, I am insane, and I used that to be able to show it to you. And fuck you if you look down on me for it.

I can’t vouch for the availability of this feat after Cataclysm comes out. There’s still little to no word on the fate of some of the NPCs needed for quest turn ins. But hey, I’m going to give it a shot anyway – even if only so that’s less reputation to grind later when strategies need to shift. And then I’m going to grab a Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and make everyone in Dalaran around me dance. Booyah.

[Cross Post] Of Video Games and Reclamation: Felwood Forest

Tags

cross posts, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on September 28th, 2010.

A screenshot of Bloodvenom River, Felwood in the multi-player roleplaying game World of Warcraft. The trees are grey with decay, with a hint of glowing green veins from the corruption of the Fel. The water of the river is murky and foul. Oversized mushrooms dot the ground.

Over the last day or so I’ve found myself in the forests of Felwood again. Despite the vast dislike for the zone among players, this place has always been dear to me. I typically find myself here long before I need to as a Warlock (and like it or not ‘locks, if you want one of your most powerful summons, you have to come here). And no, it’s not just because I like grinding reputation for the Timbermaw.

People don’t usually understand when I say I’m fond of the area, though. It’s almost entirely vertical, meaning a lot of running back and forth over the exact same tracks you made before in order to turn in quests in exactly two posts regardless of your faction – one of which being neutral. It’s even worse if you’re Alliance, considering the posts are on complete opposite sides of the map (but hey, at least they’re kind enough to give you flight points). It doesn’t help that frequently, quest chains have a tendency to send you running back to the area you just came from to do something completely different, only to come back and find out “hey, now you have to go kill the mastermind/this one rare mob/etc”. You can’t step off the road without risk of getting mauled in the face, considering there’s monsters peppered everywhere, some of which stealth. The atmosphere is rife with decay and corruption, hardly what’s generally considered “beautiful” environment by gamer standards. Even the monsters are rotting away, their flesh and bone exposed as they, well, maul you in the face. And unless you plan on grinding reputation with a faction that starts out as hostile to you or you use flight paths, there is only one exit – again, on the complete opposite side of the map for Alliance. And one of the exits that opens up after you grind all of that reputation? Is a dead end.

So people think I’m silly. But you want to know why I love the area so much?

Because it matches my mind. It is like a piece of my world, the world that no one else can see, in an external form that I can wander into and out of whenever I wish.

This is actually something I do frequently. I do it with horror/survival games too, including a deep love for the series Silent Hill.

Growing up, I found myself lost in a world of decay. You couldn’t see it, but it was reality. It was my Reality. Buildings would be falling apart, broken pipes sticking out of them dripping foul water, metal would be broken and rusted over, surfaces muddled with dirt and grime that never went away. And wandering around this world would be the most bizarre of creatures, be they giant spiders with bodies made of eyeballs, mosquitoes the size of elementary school children, and tentacles of ink reaching out to you from the school walls.

I lived in this world, and still do on occasion. Years have past but once in a while I find myself back there, in a world no one else knows exist. But I don’t find myself scared like one would think, given the description I just gave you – instead, this place feels safe to me. It feels like home. There are no threats from the outside world, no people to taunt or hurt me, no judgment or oppression. Even the creatures mind their own business, as long as you let them. We coincide and I can just fade into the fog around me.

Of course, this Reality isn’t one I can control. I can’t go into it whenever I feel threatened, and I can’t leave it of my own free will. It’s entirely dependent on the living hell of the world around me, the stress becoming too much for me to handle. But when I am there, I am safe. I am hidden. The outside world is gone.

So when I’m not going through a psychotic episode, I don’t have access to this Reality of mine. But what I do have access to are these little snap shots I find throughout the world, movies and games that resonate with me and my perceptions and allow me to dip into this safe space without having to put myself – or others, should they try to interfere with it – at risk. I can disappear from the world, just for a little bit, and then when I’m done I can put it down and go back to this thing people call life.

So really? I don’t care if people don’t like questing in Felwood. It means I get the place to myself, sweet peace and lack of interruption from the outside world. And I don’t care if people find the environment to be gross or ugly.

I think it’s beautiful. And it’s mine.

[Cross Post] I Am Not: A Valuable Player

Tags

ableism, cross posts, disability, MMO communities

This post was originally posted on Some Assembly Required, on July 9th, 2010.

Through all of my previous years as a gamer, I initially avoided mass multiplayer online (MMO) games. Considering that I used games to get away from people, playing with them seemed counterproductive. But over the past couple of years I’ve started expanding myself into the digital culture of MMOs, playing with people and getting to know them.

And now I’m starting to see why I avoided it in the first place.

Some people can be really cool and awesome, playing the games for the experience and interacting with people just to get to know them and make connections. I like these people, these people make me happy. But the further you get into a particular game, the more elitists you find, pushing their ideals of how people should perform and criticizing or even attacking other players for not conforming to their standards. This can be especially problematic in roleplaying games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), where you can create a large variety of alternate characters (generally known as alts). The higher level your character is, the closer it reaches to “end game”, where your character level is maxed and you start working toward more powerful gear, achievements and other accomplishments. There’s a high focus on dungeons (especially those of heroic difficulty), large-group raids, and player vs. player (PvP), be it in large or small groups (Battlegrounds and Arena, respectfully). If you make it to the max level and wish to participate in any of these end game activities, you are expected to perform.

What’s the problem with this? It assumes and makes judgment of people based on a preconceived idea of what they are capable of. It ignores the scope of a particular gamer’s abilities, their strengths and their limits.

The sheer number of addons available for WoW help, but these aren’t available for all games. And in some cases, they’re not condoned by the company that makes the game or the server you play on, and it can even be considered against their terms of service to use them – regardless of your reason. I ran into that problem with a server I played on for Ragnarok Online, where their rules stated that players couldn’t use third party software if it could or was being used to gain an unfair advantage. At the time I was using a program called Hotkey Master, which enabled me to paste commands into the chat panel and hit enter with a single push of a button, instead of having to type it out myself and lessen my overall game time because of the impact on my hands. While this could be seen as an unfair advantage, this very feature was available within the game – but it required you to press two keys on opposing sides of the keyboard simultaneously, which my hands couldn’t reach without strain or if I had my braces on. Especially since one hand had to be on the mouse at all times to move your character or target skills or enemies.

The response I got from the moderators was favorable, but the players not so much. Their attitudes demonstrated and reinforced the frame of thought that if you are not capable of playing the game the same way that they are, you are less valuable as a player. You do not count. Or worse – you’re asking for special favors, asking to get around breaking the rules, or to cheat. Just because you cannot play in the same fashion that they can, or you can’t keep up with them without assistance.

I’ve since moved on from this game but the attitudes are still prevalent in others. According to them, if you use the keyboard to play instead of the mouse, you’re not a real gamer (since clearly the keyboard is inferior to the flexibility of the mouse’s features in-game). Or you don’t know how to play your class or character right. Or if you don’t or can’t use certain features or addons that many consider to be essential to playing their class, you’re not playing your class right. If you’re not maxing out your damage-per-second (DPS) on a dungeon or raid boss, regardless of reason, you’re not playing your class right. You’re a less valuable player. If you cannot top the meters, be they for damage, healing or enemy player kills, you are a less valuable player.

I wish it was just strangers that do this. But I’ve gotten it from my own guild mates too. If I cannot remember or focus on the functionality of my class at a given moment, I am an amateur. But sometimes my attention cannot stay on one part of my screen, to watch my skills and focus on my role in the party. Sometimes I hyperfocus and forget to pay attention to the enemies that are appearing or being summoned, when I’m supposed to be switching my attention to them. Sometimes my hands start to tense and lock up and I’m not able to hit my hotkeys as fast as I usually do or respond as quickly to immediate situations. Sometimes my blood sugar crashes and I have to leave the party early. Sometimes I can’t log into Ventrilo or another voice communication program because I’m dealing with high levels of anxiety or sensory overload. Sometimes I hit a fatigue spike or pain crops up and I have to take a break.

All of these limits, in the eyes of elitists, can make me a less valuable player. And frequently do. All because I function differently than they do, and thus have to adjust how I play to accommodate.

And because of this, it affects how comfortable I am playing with other people in these games. It affects what features of the games I use, where I go both within and outside of them, how I communicate with other players. It makes the very activity that I use to retreat and distract myself from the harshness of reality and society around me just as harmful as the social interaction I’m trying to withdraw from, should the situation arise while I’m around.

There are still some really great people in these games, and I love meeting and getting to know them. I love playing with them. They make playing the games worth while despite the hardships that they in turn produce. But even in digital communities like this, I’m still a recluse in the end.

All because I’m disabled, and thus a less valuable player.

Of new beginnings and branching roads

hi there! it’s Static Nonsense again, from Some Assembly Required.

contrary for most, video games are not games for me. they are an obsession. i have been playing these games since i was a toddler, when my father taught me how to start them up in DOS for when he was overseas. since my first adventures with Mickey Mouse juggling shapes, i branched into flash and console games, and eventually into the PC and MMOs that i play now. since the beginning, they have been an escape for me. an escape from the burdens of my body, to the cruelty of humanity. those years were young, idealist and naive.

since then, i have realized that the calculations and strategies are not isolated from this world of ours. the bigotry that are things like sexism and racism are not something that can be forgotten in light of these digital worlds. they too are subject to the same flawed privilege and twisting of perception.

this will not do. and i will no longer be pacified.

it’s time we fought back.