The Observer Book of Architecture

Whilst perusing a bookstore during the summer, I came across a copy of the Observers Book of Architecture and was immediately transported back to my childhood. It wasn’t just the cloth texture of the cover, or the bindings, but the quality of the illustrations.

I wanted another copy of my childhood favourite. It wasn’t long before I found a copy online for about £2. Sadly, when it arrived it had the newer, shinier pages of the 1968 edition, rather than the 1940s run.

Observer Book of Horses & Ponies

Happily, the illustrations didn’t disappoint

Diagrams in the front cover

I had a flick through, and was surprised to come across some images that were well…not photos, but drawings. Horses that the original publishers were unable to photograph included the Manipuri, the ‘Spanish’, the ‘Mustang’, the Danish, the ‘Persian’ (??), Burmese, Brabancon, and the Batak/Deli Pony. The Manipuri, Burmese and Batak/Deli pony having to be drawn is not entirely surprising, given the time period the book was published in and the location of the breeds, but the Brabancon and Danish are from Belgium and Denmark respectively. Plus, they must have found an artist who knew what these obscure breeds looked like, if they couldn’t get photos.

The real Manipuri looks something like this. Thanks internet.

Although internet doesn’t have quite the same nostalgia prompting smell of a 1970s book.

Spoiler; it was the first half of my diagnosis appointment.

One of the problems with Mental Illness is awareness. Sometimes people refuse to believe in these often invisible disorders, as showcased by this beautifully written (and timely) post by The Blogess. ADHD and other executive function disorders easily fall squarely into this camp. Just as with depression and ‘everyone getting a bit down sometimes’, ADHD symptoms are sprinkled liberally through the brains of the general population. It’s a disorder associated with the highly visible and disruptive behaviour of hyperactive young children.

Not only that, the medication used to manage symptoms it is widely vilified and described as being ‘over-prescribed’ in the media. This isn’t just a problem for ADHD meds, but for any medication used to treat psychiatric and mood disorders. Depression, Anxiety, any Meds – there’s always an implication that you’ve somehow failed if you have to resort to meds.

And if you’re in the pre-diagnosis phase? Well, the implications can be that you’re drug seeking.

That you’re faking. That your symptoms aren’t severe enough to warrant help. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why NHS waiting lists for certain experts are so long (although I know it is simply due to the horrendous cuts that the mental health services continue to experience.) Everyone experiences and has issues dealing with day-to-day tasks and productivity – surely I’m just whiny for seeking the extra help?

It gets worse when I describe my job to people – by the standards of many I am successful, working for a great company in a junior manager role. And everyone has regrets, and things they weren’t capable of doing, rights? Right. This ambiguity of living without a diagnosis has caused more stress than I realised.

It’s a big deal in my head. I’m reading resources and groups designed for people with a diagnosis, benefit from the experience and strategies of others, yet not really able to hold my hand up and say ‘me too’. I feel like a ghost in communities – not yet legitimized, and carrying the fear that I may never be. Benefiting from, but shut out until the NHS diagnosis appointment happens, or perhaps shut out forever. It’s an odd sort of limbo land, and I’ve been in it since I first plucked up the courage to go to my GP back in February of this year. My final diagnostic appointment, I hope, is the first week of December of this year.

I am not moaning, let me be clear. The mental health services are under more pressure than ever before, with severe cases rising and beds being cut. I’m lucky that I don’t have to worry about finances (when it comes to treatment costs) and that I have a supportive enough spouse that I am able to manage and remain stable until the appointment becomes available.

The NHS Mental Health Guidelines, announced in February 2015, has the following goals

Also from April 2016, 75 per cent of patients with depression or anxiety disorders needing access to psychological therapies are to be treated within six weeks of referral, and 95 per cent in 18 weeks. By 2020 all hospitals are to have effective liaison mental health services in place across acute settings.

Alongside my potential diagnosis for ADHD, I am also waiting for access to Talking Therapy for anxiety and depression. I was seen initially by the local MH specific services within 6 weeks of referral by my GP. I’m still waiting for treatment over 8 months later. The professionals I have dealt with have been nothing but kind, non-judgemental, and competent, all doing their best with the resources they have.

The emotional limbo continues. It’s a limbo we don’t really talk about either, so the processes of diagnosis are somewhat mysterious because of that. No one wants to reveal they thought they needed psychiatric evaluation but were then told it was unnecessary. The diagnosis process is valuable and important, and should be better understood. It both safeguards the vulnerable person seeking help, from getting the wrong treatment, the health professionals themselves, and the budgets of the overall service.

Perhaps if the process was more visible, those needing help might be more inclined to seek it earlier.

Tomorrow is a big day for me. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life. I’ve been on medication. I’ve lost weight. I’ve done all the things you are supposed to do to overcome the sinking dread inside, the insidious voice that tells you nothing will ever be good enough. If I just tried harder. If I throw myself at this thing long enough I will overcome.

But, tomorrow.

My dad goes into hospital for a fairly routine heart operation.

And I…I am going for a clinical assessment for ADHD. I’ve tweeted a bit about this. I’m not diagnosed. I can’t pretend to know what diagnosis I will come out with. It’s entirely possible to have ADHD traits, and yet not actually have the disorder.

I know this, because I’ve spent endless hours researching…everything about the disorder, at least as it applies to adults. Even if I don’t come out with a diagnosis, the research I have done has given me further tools to help me sustain my life. I’ve already had some amazing improvements to my quality of life, and that’s a positive no matter what.

Grief

Grief is something I feel a lot of at the moment. I’m happy as I’ve ever been, but some days it feels like a small tea-light, a bright spark, suspended precariously above this deep well of frustration, of longing, of restlessness, of anger and sadness. Grief that I didn’t get these tools, this strength, when I was much younger. Grief at the wall I seem to have hit in my professional life. I’ve worked so hard and I know I am valued at work, but anger at myself for not being able to become organised. I manage people, I work on projects. I coordinate and strategize. I develop and follow-up. I want to do the right things for my team to give them the best chance at succeeding and enjoying what they do. I want to, but no amount of Outlook Reminders, Evernote Reminders, Todoist Tasks seem to mean I am able to do this thing that is ‘follow up’.

Almost, almost…..no.

I want to just DO, and I find myself doing the wrong thing for hours. I find myself cycling from task to task. I try to be mindful, in the moment, but this foreshortening of my sense of time can make things worse. And everything that comes next on the career ladder only increases the need for planning and organisation. I’m terrified that I’m at my limit.

I mean, sure, in some ways I’ve made up for lost time in the last 5 years.

I study. The words make sense. There is no problem with the concepts, but trying to visualise the chronology of Renaissance painters and historical events is like trying to make a perfect circle out of jelly. I have a lot of reading to do, and I LOVE reading. However at most I can read about….30% of a sentence before I skip to the next paragraph or page. If I remember myself, I read like a child, a finger under the word to keep my eye focused. I’m like this with reading for pleasure. I am subscribed to hundreds of beautiful blogs, but I rarely make it to the end of the first paragraph.

I get compulsively stuck on certain things. Certain Reddit subs I endlessly refresh. I re-watch the same things over and over. I watch and read formulaic stuff that allows my attention to wander. I’m in no danger of missing anything.

I feel raw all the time. I’ve always been emotional, but socially I spent many years tamping down on my feelings of anxiety and sadness. Going from thought to speech is so hard for me sometimes. I sit and listen a lot. I feel so boring and dull. And yet with my SO I am goofy and silly, the filter comes off and I can just be – whether that is silent and internal. Yet still so raw. I watch myself all the time. I stopped listening to music on my commute to work, because all it did was make me bitter and sad, dwelling on the sort of thoughts I’m letting spill out now.

I come home mentally exhausted. I’ve given up the idea of online gaming – something that used to be my entire life. I game vicariously by watching Super Bunny Hop, or watching my SO play through something with narrative. I miss gaming. I miss being able to read properly.

Wait. I wish I knew what it was like to read properly. I don’t think I’ve ever read properly. It’s why books last me a few hours at most OR never get read.

Making a change

And I’m doing all the right things. I’m losing weight, eating healthy food. I drink plenty of water and drink much less. I exercise. I do yoga. I am the least yoga person ever and I now do it daily. I move more, I walk more. I practise self-compassion and work around my propensity to lose everything. I actively work on how I think about myself. Mr Pewter is so supportive and works around my quirks. I assert my need for more structure at work. I have a thousand reminders in my phone and technical tricks like scheduled text messages to ensure I stay in touch with friends and family.

Like I said – I research. I’ve played with productivity tools since 2008. From David Allen to Pomodoro (which does kind of work) I get the concepts to being organised. People make endless lists. So do I! I make lists and lists and then I find the list 6 months later. Oops. In terms of lifetips and lifehacks I have the internet at my finger tips – there’s so much advice to follow, and a bit like some people and weight management – I’ve tried it all and being told by another person that I need to turn up on time for meetings and ‘get organised’ is a moment of compounding shame and extreme frustration. Frustration that, unlike Hades, I have to tamp down on.

I don’t need the tips.

So what is changing? Learning to rely on other people – a big part of being a line manager, and a big part of getting help when it comes to mental health issues. We expend so much energy on being strong and doing it alone – whether that’s work issues or just trying to do the basic tasks of being an adult. And that isn’t something that might just apply to someone diagnosed with ADHD (after all it applies to me!)  I managed to reach out earlier this year and am now going through the process of getting help. Which of course culminated in me getting my assessment the same day as my Dad’s heart surgery.

Stitch is my spirit animal

Worried about my Dad. Terrified I’m going to be told I’m wasting the time of the ADHD clinic I’m going to. Trepidation about dealing with medication and titration if I get a positive diagnosis. Scared of not getting the diagnosis and being stuck in a whirlwind of workshops for anxiety and depression for the rest of my life. Outwardly my life looks fine. I have a great job, friends that I see when I can, a great relationship. I’m not failing at life, by most standards, and there are commonly times when I am happy. But I live in constant fear that it will all go wrong. Again – maybe most people do! Maybe this is all in my head, but I’m tired of it all being in my head, so here it is in word vomit form.

Everything’s FINE! FINE I …wait

I don’t want that to happen, so…asking for help.

Also, just for context – my inability to focus on things, lose stuff, zone out, and various other behaviours/secondary symptoms have gone on since I was very young. Regardless of whether I do get a diagnosis, these are not new problems for me. Let’s just say that life going well finally allows me to see the true extent of my problems with less of the ‘I am shit and crap at everything’ type of mental dialogue out-of-the-way.

Strategies for being me

So what does work? What am I actually doing? I started typing this out and then realised it could be an individual post. The individual things I do really centre in 5 main strategies

• Make it easier to do the thing
• Contextuality
• Unified + Everywhere
• Kindness
• Consistency

Essentially, I’m making it up as I go along and my strategies are bespoke to me. It’s taken me 32 years to get here, and although I research a lot, I tend to do things my own way and at my own pace. Diagnosis or not, I’ve found some methods that really help and that’s a positive thing. I’ve lost so much weight and achieved so much in my personal and professional life over the last 5 years – I’m having to revisit who I am, and what my voice is. I’m not an angry, depressed, feminist gamer any more. I am a distracted happy art history student, girlfriend, daughter, friend, with a rich internal world that can be difficult to govern or communicate to others. That starts with true self-appreciation, and ends with happiness that is much more concrete. If a little….odd.

Melissa McCarthy’s flying chops.

Now I just need to get through tomorrow without comedic stories.

Future posts – expanding on the strategies above, day-to-day tips and tricks for being me, how my clinical assessment went, and probably some musings on physicality. I also need a new byline for the blog!

Mr Pewter and I have been searching for a co-op, preferably MMO, game that we both like for sometime. Star Trek Online? I didn’t like the spaceship combat. EvE Online? Spaceship combat, spaceships, and neither of us are really PvP people. We’re both very much storyline and narrative people. Well, what about Guild Wars 2? Something was just missing from that game for Mr Pewter, a long time fan of the original game. The Secret World? We both loved the story and puzzle quests, but the combat was frustrating (and the solo quests just tended to get in the way.) Rift? Too much like Warcraft, and also just missing ‘something’. However the news that TESO was going buy to play made Mr Pewter’s ears prick up, and he enthusiastically pushed a key on me. I agreed to try it out (as Borderlands was feeling a bit samey) as our next Co-op experiment.

The Elder Scrolls Online seems to fit the bill. Admittedly, the bill is mainly me being able to FINALLY play a bow weilding character that isn’t a ranger type with a pet. I am a lightening flinging, arrow firing badass Sorcerer High Elf! My partner is playing a sneaky Nightblade Khajit. And thus Snooty Elf and Sneak Cat have been born.

The Snootiest of Elves

Anyway, we haven’t joined any guilds yet (or even so much as spoken to any other players), so we’re pretty much just playing this as ESO co-op, rather than a true MMO, on the EU megaserver.

Crafting

I’ve shocked myself though. I actually LIKE the crafting. Normally it is the one component in any MMO that I completely ignore. I used to dutifully level crafting professions in WoW when it was part of min-maxing for raids, but the feeling of pride in being an accomplished alchemist/tailor/whatever faded sometime during WOTLK. The crafting in TESO….actually makes sense to me.

• I don’t need to level up a stupid gathering skill as well. I can just pick up the materials as I find them, either as crafting notes, from deconstructing weapons and armor, or from crates/cabinets all over the world.
• Researching traits makes actual sense (even if it does take forever). All you have to do is find an item with a trait on it, and then click research. It’s time based, so to learn all the traits for all the items a woodworker can make is about 18 months. However, you don’t have to spend that time…standing at a woodworking station – it’s fire and forget. The concept is that you find the item and take it apart to see how it works.
• Learning Racial Motifs makes slightly less sense, but is still straightforward. You find a book and read it!
• For items for level 15 & under, all you need to do is acquire materials – and you can make yourself a basic set of green items with relatively little fuss.

If you want to create higher level items, you can do this by putting skill points into one of several crafting trees. These crafting trees also allow you to hire an underling who will mail you materials, make materials out in the world glow brighter for you, or increase the amount of materials you get from deconstructing items. However, there is no need to waste precious skill points during level 1-15, meaning new characters can fully kit themselves out without impacting on combat skills. (Note: for Min-Maxers you will want to make an alt crafter anyway until end game. Luckily all ‘bank’ space is shared across characters, and accessible from all crafting tables). At the moment I am not interested in leveling a crafting alt.

Seriously, Mr Pewter and I both abhor crafting in MMOs but we actively set aside time for crafting and maintenance. It may not be as fun as the combat, but despite our active aversion to crafting, we both took to it naturally in this game.

Lastly – there is no real auction house, meaning crafting feels like the community activity it was in The Burning Crusade. Trading happens via trade guilds (with many members), or via trade chat.

Combat

After my sojourn, however brief it was, in Wildstar, I didn’t want to return to the model of combat used by World of Warcraft. I’d also really enjoyed limited action sets (not having 10 million buttons is a good thing). On top of that I had really enjoyed the action-y combat of Guild Wars 2 and Neverwinter Online, and wanted something similar. TESO combines most of the things I’ve liked from those games. There are sill telegraphs for enemy abilities, but I can attack on the move (which makes for occasional hilarious moments of falling off cliffs mid-combat).

It feels response, fast paced, but without a difficulty that is too high, or SO engaging that ordinary leveling combat becomes tiring (which was an issue I had with Wildstar)

Character Skill Customization

Something I loved from Rift was the serious character customization in the form of Souls. I love the idea of being a teleporting sniper, or a rogue tank. I loved the idea of the ability wheel in The Secret World, the way you could build unique ways of playing. Of course, there’s always the trade off between ‘fun/unique’ and ‘effective’.

While TESO does have classes, really what that ‘class’ means is ‘how your character’s mage abilities manifest in the world‘. You can then pick from 3 trees within the class skills for a mixture of active abilities and passives. The active abilities can be morphed for further ‘play the way you want to play’ tweaking.

You can level and specialise any of the weapon types. It’s a dizzying amount of choice (and I must admit that I still feel a bit overwhelmed when trying to pick that next skill.) At the moment I pick/morph on the basis of ‘ooh, that sounds cool’.

Next, you can also specialise in Armor types, as each of the three (Heavy, Medium & Light) have a skill tree that unlocks passive benefits (such as increase stat recovery, crit rates, spell resistence and so on).

AND THEN (it never ends), there are also skill trees for the various in-game guilds (offering things like extra options in quests), your race, and the crafting skills.

You can be a lightning fling, mace-wielding, teleporting, heavy armor wearing sorcerer. You can be a traditional paladin with a sword n board, or you can throw golden spears and use an ice staff. My character is really MINE. Trying to find an optimal levelling build just lead to a thousand unique builds. Snooty Elf may not be optimal, but her bow build comes out of my experiences and what I like to play – and the game is just fine with this.

(Note that we’re not participating in group dungeons or raids at this point.)

Visual Character Customization

I’m not so enamoured of this. All the races are humanoid and have roughly the same silhouette. There have been times when I mistook an orc for an elf. This is part of the realist art style of the ESO series, and probably made it easier for the game devs to model armour (when they give us a much more decent character customization option.) You can make your character old and heavyset if you want.

Did I? No, my elegant gothy snooty elf has smooth skin, because I’m in my mid-thirties and I spend enough real money on moisturizer at the moment.

Story & Questing

The fully voiced quests are not so much ‘kill ten rats’ as ‘run this errand for me and kill lots of stuff on the way’, which seems to work better for us. Mostly the co-op adjustments mean that questing together works smoothly. The plot lines are fairly predictable for the most part (at least, Auridon is), but we’re both puerile enough to amuse ourselves by predicting the outcomes in mock-pantomime voices. The over-arching main story plot is voiced by Michael Gambon, but is sufficiently joined into the zone plots. Individual NPCs are often fiesty and comedic (and there’s a good range of male and female characters of all types).

I still don’t like that there are solo quests. I think, as long as you’re on the same bit of the mage/fighter/main story lines, you should be able to enter the instance together if you’re in the same group. You can even see where your party-member IS in their version of the solo instance. Our characters are travelling through this tale together (although why a High Elf and a Khajit are travelling together, we haven’t quite worked out.) It feels clunky to do so much together and then to suddenly be split apart.

Exploration is nicely rewarded, with good chunks of exp, tons of Lorebooks (that advance your Mage Guild experience), and extra skill points for collecting skyshards. Auridon feels like a living, breathing nation, with many settlements in various levels of disarray, mini-events (like a Rift from Rift) called Daedric Anchors. Ruins, solo dungeons, lots of stuff to do.

The Future

So, there was a lot of gushing about TESO – I’m enthusiastic about playing it, but then I was enthusiastic about Wildstar (and look what happened there). There’s lots of positivity in the community (small as it is) for the next patch, 1.6, and of course the game is famously going Buy To Play (I agree, Zubon, it’s very weird that we have to have it as a phrase at all.)

In any case, I would now like to blather about something. So blather I shall. In my free time, instead of gaming, I am studying, and this studying is mainly concerned with Art History. It’s been a fantastic journey so far, but when I need a break from thinking about Sacred Art, I start thinking about the various models of ‘Video Games as Art’, or I even try and apply the principles I’m learning about to video games directly.

The current two chapters (it’s an online course) that I have just engaged with focus on two related aspects of sacred art – ‘Art as the Bible of the Poor‘ and ‘Gothic Architecture‘. The variety of approaches that historians of architecture take is truly fascinating, how they must effortlessly pass from analysing materials, floor plans and structural components, to analysing the functions and uses that those constructed spaces were intended to house, shape and ornament. The deftness with which the author of this chapter deals with such a wide (but focused) subject matter, and range of evidence, takes my breath away. It slightly makes me despair of ever being a writer of that calibre.

But then writing is a craft, an art, in and of itself, is it not?

Any, I digress. The frameworks the analysis make use of are perhaps appropriate to the analysis of games as well. I don’t really have the time to write a full on paper on this, but let me briefly touch on one framework that my OU course has taught me.

Firstly, when it comes to religious art, one can take several approaches when it comes to assessing the purpose of a piece of art (in it’s original context)

• Instruction – examples of the right way to live
• Memory – invoking a memory of a historic event, personage or myth and making it live again
• Meditative – much religious art was designed to aid on the meditation of certain concepts or realities
• provoke an empathic response (for devotional purposes)

This is a very brief, reference lacking, and probably slightly wrong summation of some of the frameworks through which the functions, purpose and forms of early religious art can be understood. However, the first thing that springs out at me is that the art in question is not passive for the viewer.

When people talk about ‘Video Games as Art’, one of the phrases I often see is that Video Games are more ‘active and participatory’ than other forms of ‘high art’. On a shallow level (and purely individual) level, this is indeed correct. But I think that the theoretical analysis that religious art is subject to reveals that art is not truly that passive or straightforwardly consumed.

By appealing to the frameworks used by historians to analyse Art, I think there is greater scope for analysing Video Games, and ultimately more room for the craft of Game Development to be seen as Art.

I’ll probably continue meanderingly blogging about this! It makes me happy, but as I’ve just spent 6 hours studying I’m not able to brain more coherently than this, so instead I’ll leave you with this lovely overview of an exhibit that was on earlierthis year, in which Dan Hernandezcombines video game mythology with the aesthetics of religious panel paintings and murals. The header image for this blog is his ‘Untitled Wall Fragment’ – I really wish I could buy prints of his work!

I’m not hugely into the RP scene these days. My priority is keeping my general mental health happy, and sometimes that means not logging in, so the idea of making appointments to roleplay becomes a bit of a burden for me. I hate inconveniencing others, so I just don’t sign up to stuff. However, I do like RP out in the wild(star). Anyway, there are two main addons available for RPers, plus a chatfix addon that seems mildly against the rules. These are PDA, Hotspot and Killroy.

PDA

If you’ve ever used the venerable MyRoleplay in World of Warcraft, the concept of this will be instantly recognisable. This addon provides a way for players to share a character bio with others in the game, and display their ‘roleplaying readiness’ in their nameplate.

Character Info Form, plus play status flag in bottom right

Browse the character bios of other players

Character Bio Editing Page

PDA Character unitframe

PDA Options Screen

I haven’t really tested it out yet, but you can go so far as to configure the fonts you use in your bio, and the addon has options for flagging yourself ‘in character’, or ‘ready to do a scene’. There is also a screen that theoretically allows you to browse the bios of players you have met in your travels, if they also have this addon enabled. If you’re a roleplayer, this is probably an essential addon (and the only one I could find of its type) to help put you in touch with other RPers out in the Wild.

Hotspot

Based on the venerable Gryphheart Items addon in Warcraft, this is a nifty little addon that allows you to see where other roleplayers (who are using this addon) are congregating. You can list your event type, location, and who is the host, and other people with the addon will be able to see and visit. I haven’t tested this yet, but it might be worth a try.

Killroy

This addon seems to sit somewhere between ‘general fixer of the awful default chat’ and ‘a bit of a cheat’. It both makes some default function stick, makes the ‘RP mode’ ‘work’, and also allows you to read the text of the opposite faction. This means you can force the game to output your text as the ‘alien speak’ text, or as ‘RP text’.

Again, not tested by me, but the RP chat functionality sounds interesting, and the ‘chat fixes’ the author talks about are potentially helpful beyond the RP requirements.

To enter, simply post your suggested code in the comments below. I’ll pick my three favourite edits (and use them).

Competition closes Sunday 22nd June Midnight London Time

This competition is now closed!

So, this blog is called ‘Decoding Dragons’. When I was in  secondary school, I loved English Literature classes. At one point, we studied this wonderful poem called ‘Not My Best Side’ by U. A. Fanthorpe. The poem itself is three stanzas long, with each stanza being the voice of one of the characters in Paolo Uccello’s Saint George And The Dragon. Reading it back now, over 15 years later, I can remember the impression it made on me at the time. The last stanza is particularly cutting in today’s STEM/TECH/GAMING struggles for great representation and the wish to break from the immature stages of the game industry.

The seething sexuality of the painting, the conflict between renaissance order and the violence of emotion, make the Uccello piece very powerful for me. Fanthorpe’s poem re-frames the renaissance values into the modern gender tensions between the roles we want, the roles we create for ourselves, and the roles we’re expected to fulfill. Dragons are relatively rare in the ‘greater arts’, existing as supporting characters for depictions of classic scenes such as St George, or Ovid’s tale of Cadmus (and even then the dragon  is added almost as an after-thought). The dragon always plays second fiddle in these paintings, whether it be to a magnificent landscape such as the piece by Zuccarelli.

While Uccello has placed St George’s dragon centre stage, the two-legged dragon exists to create the structure and rhythm between the divinely sponsored St George, and the noble woman who has literally ‘leashed’ the dragon.

At the time, I was a lonely teenager, who felt ugly and like an outsider. I probably identified more with the Dragon, than with the girl, but the ‘appearance’ related comments in the poem struck me hard at the time. I remember that english lesson, I remember loving the analysis I was doing, and the way it made me look at the painting differently. I remember the way that both together made me look at the world differently. I’m not going to talk about my own relationship with my sexuality, but I had already characterised my depression as a ‘black dragon’ at that point, it’s only a short step to start seeing dangerous dragons as allegories for the turmoil that emotions and sexuality can provoke. And from being able to anthropomorphise and picture concepts and ideas through analogies, it becomes easier to understand and reconcile them.

And this is why dragons need decoding.

Saint George And The Dragon by Paolo Uccello (1470) (c) The National Gallery, London; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Not My Best Side by U. A. Fanthorpe

I

Not my best side, I’m afraid.
The artist didn’t give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn’t comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don’t mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It’s nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon–
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.
I’m qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don’t
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don’t you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.

While I’ve really enjoyed the texture of Dominion Lore, up until level 20 so far I have struggled to really connect to the characters I interact with. I think Dominion is the more interesting of the two factions, but I also struggled with really feeling any real sadness as I was playing too. A bit of me thinks that I am desensitized to suffering in MMOs, which is entirely possible.

On the exile side, things sound like they are a bit different, with the Elderroot plotline being held up as an example of a lower level quest line that pulls you in emotionally. SuicidalZebra’s example of the Warcraft questing in Darrowshire is a great example of what he was talking about as far as MMOs in general (and WoW in particular). And so far I have to agree, Dominion (taking the Crimson Isle -> Deradune route) hasn’t pulled me in on that level.

Now, this post isn’t about proving SuicidalZebra right or wrong, after all the feelings that the game has (or hasn’t) provoked are entirely his own.

So, for me the question comes back to ‘What is lore?’ and ‘What makes it good?’

On twitter I did a very short summary of ‘Story, Texture, History, Culture, History’. This translates into ‘a ball of made up stuff that gives the created world depth + narrative’. I’m being a little facetious with that wording. What you’re looking for with MMOs are a variety of strong stories, some of which I agree should have a strong element of pathos. The dialogue for any given NPC should also tell you something, not just about the NPC, but about the culture they were raised in, and the tensions that exist for them socially now. The art design should also communicate more than just ‘here is a dominion house’. It should say ‘here is a house that comes from a technologically advanced civilisation, with a taste for red & gold, displays of opulence, power’. The way an NPC talks should betray societal values – something Chuaspeak does especially well.

So, what Wildstar does well for me is showing me how the sub-factions of the Dominion interact with each other. The treatment of the lower classes, the machinations of the church, the mechari, the luminai, the cassian nobility.  Wildstar shows me the fruits of their culture, with it’s deadly politics and it’s fine art, museums, and the way it interacts with Protostar, the ‘coporate’ part of the game. Additionally, listening to the Datacubes gives me insight, piece by tiny piece, into the factions that made up the Eldar. The game also, in Deradune, plays out how the Chua and Drakken interact with the empire – but there are no heroes to cheer for yet. The characters you interact with are largely unlikeable, which creates an issue when you’re trying to build up pathos through a story line.

Mondo Zax, Agent Lex, the various Huntresses, the Bloodshaman, and even Artemis Zin are supreme examples of what the Dominion wants them to be. Governor Aluviel, met in Hycrest, is a bit of a jerkface. The sadness, if there is any, has to be prompted by the ordinary people you help out, and the game certainly doesn’t paint the Draken as ordinary people. Only the humans, with their farms, get preyed upon by the menacing exiles, murderous criminals, and er, um, mankey denizens of the plant. Only they are under threat and therefore need protection.

So, to put it bluntly, the detail in the lore is fabulous. ClassicQuestDialog, an addon, helps. But I have yet to come across a dominion quest that tugs at my heart strings. It is likely that I just haven’t gotten there yet, and this is the price to pay for going down the ‘heartless’ dominion route as opposed to the fuzzy exile route.

The next question is – does an MMO need quests with pathos at a lower level?