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United We Stand: What’s In A Name?

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

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

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

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

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United We Stand: Stand Back, We’re Learning

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

Check out that handsome book cover.

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

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United We Stand: Feels Like Purpose

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

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

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

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

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United We Stand: It’s Almost Like Being Popular

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

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

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

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

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United We Stand: Cops and Robbers

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

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

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

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

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United We Stand: Happiness Is Anyone Or Anything At All

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

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

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

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

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

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