Just one problem: I hadn’t played since my purchased-with-CE annual subscription ran out.

But that’s not really a problem, right? I mean I’ve been playing other F2P games and enjoying myself — Guild Wars is so fun that I nerded out and wrote two actual apps to play around with its data, and I’ve been dicking around with TERA’s action combat and having a blast with how unapologetically over-the-top it is (while simultaneously berating myself for being a horrible terrible person) so surely I could handle SWTOR’s F2P option and finally finish my Sith story, right? Right?!

Oh my friends. How very, very wrong I was.

What’s resulted is an experience in navigating the most petty, childish bullshit I have had the misfortune to deal with since I was trapped in a peer group with hundreds of other twelve year-old girls. It’s so incredibly terribad that I seriously honestly cannot tell if the powers that be really thought this was a viable F2P model or if their feelings were just so hurt that they didn’t get ten million subs in six months that they are actively trying to punish people with something that is less a game and more a punitive experience in binary masochism.

Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea what the actual free experience is like because I’m playing under what they call “preferred” status: those players who paid once, but don’t anymore. I do know that free is more punitive than preferred, and I can tell you that preferred is so ugly and hobbled that I can quite honestly say that I cannot in good conscience recommend the free experience even to people who maybe want to demo the game. It’s really and truly that bad.

Every time you complete a quest, a helpful little nag window pops up and shows you all of the shit you can’t get if you aren’t a subscriber: things like any kind of cash or random item boxes or say any kind of meaningful XP. “You are gaining experience points at a reduced rate. Purchase a Boost item from the Cartel Market or Subscribe today!” This is a lot more rage-making than I first thought it would be when I read about it, because those fucking BUY SHIT TODAY icons are goddamn EVERYWHERE. You can’t even hide the giant-ass CARTEL MARKET icon right in the middle of your fucking window when you try to edit your interface; you can only make it slightly smaller.

Absolutely nothing is available with in-game currency; you used to be able to purchase bag slots and bank tabs with cash, but no more: cartel coins or nothing (unless you subscribe, in which case you can use credits). You can’t even access the bank [cargo hold] on your ship without coins, which is a huge pain in the ass because that means you can only get to your bank from the Fleet and they took out the fucking fleet pass EVEN THE PURCHASABLE ONES FOR CE PLAYERS.

And then there’s the stupid petty bullshit: free players can’t use the hide helm or armor color match options, or any artifact-level gear (even gear they themselves have created). I can’t access the guild bank at all, so fuck if I know what’s even in there. You can’t display a title or your legacy name, but they helpfully let you know that if you want to spend a billion fucking cartel coins you totally can! Quick travel (hearthing) has a two hour cooldown. A character’s funds are capped at 350k credits, regardless of how much things actually cost from vendors or the galactic market (like say speeder piloting, which used to be exactly 350k). Free players can only mail one item at a time and can’t mail any fucking money, so it’s not like I can send cash to a new alt so they can pay for training since they can’t get decent money or experience from quests. It’s so fucking ridiculous I can’t even.

And then there’s the kicker, the thing that is right this minute driving my four white horses straight around the bend: if you are defeated in combat, you can only resurrect in place five times. Period. It used to be that your death timers got longer and longer unless you agreed to go back a million years to base, which was annoying but a standard death penalty and that’s fine. No, no more. FIVE TIMES, AND THEN YOU ARE SCREWED. I sure hope it’s per week and not forever (it’s certainly not per day) because that is a level of horseshit that goes beyond mucking the stables into serious assholery. What this means in practice is that if I am about to come up on a fight that looks even remotely challenging I have to wait for my huge-ass Heroic Moment and Legacy Attack cooldowns to be up and pray that I will not die and have to haul ass for twenty minutes and fight respawn to get back to where I was.

This alone has me so angry that SWTOR and I are never ever getting back together just so I can ensure these fuckfaces will not win by getting another dime out of me ever ever again.

What makes me so angry about this is that SWTOR is objectively an amazing RPG. It’s a phenomenal single-player experience, and the leveling stories are some of the best interactive storytelling around. It’s a beautiful game that used to be a joy to play, but they’ve fucked all that over because some catastrophic dickbag in the EA/BioWare chain of command wanted to be the harbinger of WoW in Space.

I can’t even understand why they wanted it to be an MMO in the first place when they concentrated on the leveling story and had (and still have) no endgame to speak of. The online pieces of Mass Effect 3 are arguably some of the best parts of that game (and the genre) so why didn’t they go that route and have the kinds of online group shit they’ve had since Neverwinter Nights? It makes no fucking sense, and the way they gave up on the game in six months makes me heartsick.

Usually when a game converts to F2P from a sub model it’s because their financials tell them that the sub model isn’t a feasible business decision; they tack on cosmetic shit like pets and boosters and expect to run the game in the black that way. For some reason, SWTOR didn’t decide to play it this incredibly usefully effective way; instead, they’re punishing people for not paying in the same way as a five minute time-limited demo you’d pick up from XBLA.

What’s the point? What are they hoping to accomplish? There’s no way this can attract new paying players, except to annoy them into playing what is in its current form a completely unplayable game.

And hey, if, uh, anybody Sithside on Shadowlands is 48+ and willing to help my poor Marauder kill her class boss, let me know, okay? I blew all my fucking medprobes and this dude is totally kicking my ass.

So naturally when it fell to me to mold and shape another tiny (and extremely malleable) human being into the image of my choice, introducing her to games as early as possible was one of my primary goals.

There are lots of stories about parents who are too busy or too uninvolved to be present in their children’s lives, and so count on various media sources as babysitters. Without throwing stones in glass houses (please god I just want to go to the bathroom by myself please god just once that’s all I ask HERE ENJOY SOME ELMO), I am here to tell you that doing this is not NEARLY as much fun as treating your weester like a wind-up toy and watching her just go to town.

Y’all, seriously. Playing games with her is the most fun I’ve had since drunken bouts of twelve-man Great Dalmuti in college.

Here is a thing I have learned that may be helpful for game devs: when you are two and a half, you are incredibly impatient. If a game doesn’t load quickly enough or — and this is important — have something flashy and/or interesting (in a perfect world, interesting AND flashy) on the loading screen, she is DONE. This level of patience is measured in a matter of seconds; it doesn’t matter how much fun I think she’s going to have with something, she absolutely will not wait for it. So a helpful parenting tip: if you have a slow-loading game you think your weester will enjoy, LOAD IT UP BEFORE YOU GET THE KID’S ATTENTION.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned playing games with my kid is that while she’s not at a point yet to really get involved storylines, she LOVES grindy shit. Click combat is her very favorite thing, and firing a shotgun at Collectors in ME2 (our femShep is a Vanguard, of course) makes her laugh and laugh like the tiniest loon.

The novelty of being able to control something she’s watching on screen still hasn’t worn off for her, and I don’t know if it ever will; just running around in Skyrim is enough to entertain her for hours (as long as she doesn’t accidentally make that left turn into OH MY GOD THAT IS A DRAGONville). Being part of her general delight is something magic and awesome all on its own: this is a tiny person with her own thoughts and opinions (even though most of those thoughts are ELMO ELMO ELMO ELMO), who is sharing something I love with me — and turning it into something that she loves, too.

Since I hope that she’ll keep loving this thing that I love, I owe it to her and to other girls like her to make sure that the binary world is one in which she feels safe and welcomed. I know I’m still working on that, and I probably will be my whole life — but I’m pretty sure it will all be worth it the first time she sits down to play Munchkin with me or absolutely owns me in the face on Super Mario XXI or Jedi Academy IX or argues the moral merits of various choices in BioWare’s latest Sophie’s Choice Epic RPG.

That’s what “raising a gamer” means to me: it’s not enough to have a kid who plays games. I want my kids to be able to engage with this medium and its various communities thoughtfully and interestedly, and use take the lessons they learn there to other places in their lives.

1. marketing
2. video games
3. death threats

Here are some things that apparently some nice folks at Square Enix do not have personal or professional experience with:

1. marketing
2. video games
3. death threats

To break this down for those of you playing along at home, here is the summary: the marketing geniuses for Hitman Absolution, which already had a great vibe owing to its pre-release trailer that was focused primarily on some sexy nun murdertorture and otherwise super-gratuitous ladyviolence, decided that the way to get the word out about their kind of sort of Not Living Up To Expectactions game was to release an app that lets you put hits on your Facebook friends.

Everything that is wrong with Facebook: that.

You select a friend, and then select an identifying characteristic and reason for the hit from a static dropdown list within the app that changes on binary gender. Identification options for women include such fun body-policing bullshit as, according to RPS, “small breasts” and “hairy legs,” and identification options for dudes include “receding hairline.” The reasons for murder are also super fun, like cheating on her partner or being too fat. Gender-specific body policing: definitely my idea of a good great fun time.

Everything that is wrong with the gaming industry and culture: that.

There are so many things going completely fucking wrong here that I’m having trouble unpacking them all.

Point the first: marketing fail

Look. The purpose of a marketing campaign is to spread awareness of a product or service, especially to those people who may not be aware of your product or service. It’s about drumming up new business, expanding market share, and building your brand. With a social media campaign, it’s even more specific: you are using your current customers to do the legwork of finding new customers for you. What had to have happened on the marketing team for this product is that someone in charge said that the ROI would be a) reaching existing gamers who were unaware of this title launch and b) converting new players to this franchise (almost certainly in the 18-34 white male demographic). They are actively courting people who have never heard of Hitman and never played it before — and some committee mastermind thought threatening people with assassination was the best way to introduce people to the franchise. What the fuuuuuuuuuck.

Point the second: know your audience, or: not everyone on Facebook knows what shooters are

Hey, who remembers when the Onion ran an article about children learning witchcraft from Harry Potter and some extremely gullible people took it seriously and started passing it around as truth and using it as their reason for why it should be banned from libraries and yoinked off children’s shelves? Yeah. Those same kinds of people are going to see this “You should be killed!” assassination link on their kid’s/friends/some dude’s Facebook wall and they are going to flip their fucking shit. Do we really want to revive GTA-style Jack Thompsonian GAMES KILL panic? Really? Because I don’t think we do, and I think we are all incredibly grateful that we’ve mostly moved on from this bullshit. So LET’S NOT ENCOURAGE IT, OKAY?

Point the third: omfg death threats wtf

I am a woman who expresses opinions on the internet. I get threats. It happens. I’m also a bullying survivor, and friends with several others. I know what this shit does to people. I don’t care if you think this is a great funny ha ha joke to share among your friends; that’s your business. Here’s the thing, though: there’s nothing in this app that says this is a private in-joke between you and your friends. You can send a hit to anyone on your list, whether they agree to it or not, and I don’t know about y’all but I have way more than just my (incredibly small) circle of close personal friends on my Facebook list. I have second cousins and my stand partner from seventh grade marching band and professional contacts and shit on my list, which is a pretty broad swath of population. I would not be comfortable getting a Lol Assassination from any one of those people, and it’s not at all outside of the realm of possibility that people can use this app for seriously nefarious reasons. Plus there’s the delightful truism that people have been murdered for such delightful reasons as leaving their partner while having the temerity to have small breasts. Just, you know, throwing that out there.

Do we really want something like this representing our culture to the rest of the world?

Why does this shit keep happening?

Every year, I participate in my own personal tradition: enjoying my favorite things. I read the two books that have been my favorite since I was a tiny weester (Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising), watch my favorite movies (The Princess Bride, Dark City, and Coming to America), and play my favorite games.

There are only three games on this list — which is good because I am pretty much running out of birthday week time here — and it’s A Big Deal when I get to add a new one; there is a complicated series of totally and completely subjective rules known only to my deep lizardbrain subconscious that must be fulfilled before a game is inducted into Aro’s Personal Hall of Fame.

Because I like to share things during Aro-mas week, please enjoy the following rundown of My Favorite Games, presented in descending release order.

Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time (Ubisoft, 2003)

Seriously great. Seriously, seriously great.

The spiritual precursor to the massively popular Assassin’s Creed franchise (which I also love) and itself a franchise-engenderer that spawned a deliciously terrible and hugely profitable popcorn flick as well as its own game trilogy, the Sands of Time is for me a perfect interactive storytelling experience.

The gameplay was revolutionary; while the parkour-inspired freerunning has moved on to many other games, the time-rewinding mechanic (you fell? rewind and do it again) is still unique. The smoothness of this freerunning platformer is a joy to play, even though the Prince occasionally jumps at the wrong places and combat is a two-button affair that’s really just splitting up time better spent solving physics jumpypuzzles. I love it so much.

But it’s the framing device — the playthrough is a story that the Prince is telling Farah — that makes this game special to me. It’s one of my favorite tropes in the world, and time paradoxes hit all me in all of my happy thinkyplaces. I could spend hours talking about what actually happened, what’s real in what continuity, and what Farah knew when. Seriously I can talk about it FOR HOURS.

I once played straight through overnight without stopping, so as to share the story with a platform-deficient friend. I think it took about nine hours. That is some dedication right there, I tell you what.

Also, the soundtrack is spectacular.

Final Fantasy X (Square, 2001)

Also seriously, seriously great.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was not really a Final Fantasy kind of person. I grew up with a Sega Genesis, not a Super Nintendo, so I had all the sweet platformers and not the rad JRPGs; I only experienced those at a Nintendo-loving friend’s house in bits and pieces. So I knew OF them, and was familiar with the stories and the concepts, but not until the PlayStation and FF7 did I actually play them on my own, and I went back to play the earlier ones as they became available for the console I actually HAD.

To this day I can take or leave most Final Fantasy. Enh, yeah, I see what they’ve done for the JRPG genre etc etc fnarg blee blee blorp, but it was like potato chips and ice cream for me: empty calories and spending a lot of time with them made me hate myself.

Enter FFX.

It’s the same basic gameplay as your run-of-the-mill JRPG with your turn-based combat and your healer/thief/black mage/etc party system, but. Dude. Living your life without FFX’s story is doing yourself a grave and irreparable disservice. I am legit having a hard time accurately describing the sheer volume of Feels this game provokes in me; I have done actual scholarly research on the archetypes and storytelling conventions in this narrative because the capital-F Feels are so overwhelming.

There are seriously important statements made here: about the nature of faith, the afterlife, and matyrdom; how, when, where, and why to judge a person’s intrinsic worth; dealing with grief and loss; the relationship between parents and children; balancing the needs of the many and the few. When Yuna performs the ritual of last rites for the dead in front of Tidus, he says in horrified awe that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen — and yet: “People die, and Yuna dances.” POW! BOOM! RIGHT IN THE FEELS!

Also, the soundtrack is spectacular.

The Dig (LucasArts, 1995)

I’mma let you finish, but the Dig is the greatest game of all time. OF ALL TIME.

I am a product of my time, and point-and-click adventures are indelibly ingrained in my memory as Primary Gaming Experiences. LucasArts and Sierra were the champions of the genre, and there are so so so many great titles to choose from that mean different things to different people (the honorable mentions for Aro’s Personal Hall of Fame are all also point-and-clicks, for example).

The Dig is a sci-fi story about another world, and what happens there. The environments are beautiful even when you’re used to photo-realistic graphics (as long as you aren’t put off by the cartoony style; though frankly if you are you have no heart and there is no hope for you), the logic puzzles are fun and challenging (except the turtle, that goddamn turtle), and the writing is top notch.

There are two things that make this game special: the first is that it was originally a script for an episode of Amazing Stories, which was my favorite show when I was a kid, and specced out by Steven Spielberg. This was in the mid-80s, too, before he started hating himself and the world around him and did a ton of fun things (like the aforementioned Amazing Stories), so the story’s pedigree is actually pretty spectacular. However, being as how it was too expensive to film, tahdah! Adventure game.

The other particularly awesome bit is Robert Patrick’s voice acting. His deadpan, black-humored Boston Low is another fictional person I love because his life is genuinely hard and the writers were smart enough to let him sometimes show that off; for example, if you leave him idle on the screen too long he starts bitching about how much it sucks to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with no food and he should have brought a sandwich AND HE WOULD REALLY LIKE A COLD BEER, OKAY.

Look, y’all. Not made of stone.

Also, the soundtrack is spectacular.

HEY PERHAPS YOU ARE SENSING A THEME.

Or, actually, three themes. Enjoy:

What the hell?

I think some folks would like to lay blame at the feet of Guild Wars 2, because by definition any time a big new title launches people are going to check it out, even for a little while. There are also the recent WoW expansion and the upcoming RIFT expansion, but I think it’s both more complicated and more simple than just too many games and not enough players.

What I think happened is this:

Relaunching a AAA-title subscription MMO as F2P less than a year after launch is a laughably poor business decision.

When your developer and your publisher obviously have no fucking faith in their game and consider 500k active subs a failure, what the fuck is the point? Why bother giving them your money when they’re not willing to stand behind their product? That’s a terrible statement to present to your customers, and that combined with the constant news of resignations and layoffs meant it’s not really a surprise that after the announcement this summer subscribers started dropping like flies.

For the most part, after I did some raging about how sad it was that EA thought SWTOR was a failure and weren’t intending to support what they’d already built, I was mostly hopeful. People who’d left because they weren’t interested in maintaining subscriptions might come back; I could keep playing without worrying about throwing my money away on an unsupported game. I have defended SWTOR’s gameplay decisions over and over because I believe in the story, I believe in the property, and I really, really want it to succeed.

When the first passel of restrictions were posted, I was unconcerned. Cosmetic things like specific chargen options, cosmetic gear, that kind of thing — totally feasible for-pay options. Removing the fleet pass for f2p players is kind of a dick move, but it doesn’t make the game unplayable. Equally limiting access to operations and warzones: fine, as the real gem in SWTOR is the character class story, and all characters, whether sub or not, have, the FAQ says, unrestricted access to the 1-50 “journey.”

Except it’s not really unrestricted.

This week the Cartel Shop and the F2P version of SWTOR became available for public test, and the results have been less than stellar.

When I say less than stellar, what I mean is that EA is actively punishing f2p users. They assume that being unable to accept mission rewards, being stuck to a limited UI (single hotbar, IE eight slots), and gaining xp at a reduced rate is going to make people pay for game time. I mean why would you even want to play a game where you have to pay actual money to finish a mission? So obvs EA thinks this is the best way to convert free players to subs.

Except … no.

I mean, seriously, in what world would someone who was already uninterested in paying for this game be willing to subject themselves to a punitively limited gameplay experiece? I am not interested in that, and I’m already a paying sub! It’s like they thought about the most horribly annoying, terrible things they could do to make the game suck for free players and then did that. What the fuck? Compare that with GW2 (my only other f2p mmo experience), where the only things available in the cash shop that you can’t get through in-game means are convenience boosters and cosmetic-only armor (and since you can convert game gold to shop gems, even that isn’t really limited). And I know I don’t really have that much experience to compare it to, but that really feels like the way to get it done. I certainly don’t feel punished for not spending any real actual money from my real actual bank account.

Not only do the limitations for f2p players seem oddly punitive, they’re also remarkably petty. You have to pay to unlock the option to hide your helm; you have to pay to reorganize your ui; you have to pay to be able to speak in chat more than once every two minutes; you have to pay to have full and complete use of quick travel, shuttles, or the fleet pass. What the fuck?

This isn’t going to encourage people to spend money, like rare dyes or town clothes might in GW2. What it’s going to do is make players throw up their hands and say “fuck this” the first time they get the alert in Black Talon that they’ve seen their maximum boss drops for the week and uninstall the fucking game.

It sucks so bad because the part of SWTOR that is unquestionably Bioware — the class story — is so, so great and more people should play it. The current f2p model EA is employing isn’t going to do that, and it breaks my heart. I loved this game and the potential it represented; I do still love parts of it. I wish I could keep loving it still.

I feel it important to once again note here that originally I did not even really want to play this game. It’s like I got suckerpunched with awesome. POW! RIGHT IN THE FREE TIME!

So with that being said, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

Lady Alessia Navarra in unfortunate armor.

Alessia is my Ranger, level-capped and equipped with a dizzying array of weapons and pets. I have her specced for longbow and felines now, for the distance and bleed effects; she is an unstoppable killing machine and it is GLORIOUS. I spend most of my time with the jungle stalker for the AOE vigor in group events (and also he is very pretty and, uh, matches the armor SHUT UP DON’T JUDGE ME), though in WvW I switch it up to shortbow/canine because man, there is NOTHING more hilarious in this game than a cripple-fear combo. “ow my leg AIEEEEEE”

Unfortunately, hitting 80 also meant some seriously unfortunate armor. It’s not really the design I object to — it’s well made, and at least an understandable amount of flesh-flashing (as opposed to the human cultural armor, oh my god underboob pain pain ugh). I very much like the style and I especially like the attention to detail on the textures of the grommets (especially in the pants, those are fabulous). But I can’t … quite … make it look right, and I think that’s a combination of the way the dye zones are clustered and the fact that Berserker leather is tuned much darker in the color zones than other leather stuff. I can’t make ANYTHING look nice and it’s super frustrating. I AM WILLING TO ACCEPT COLOR SUGGESTIONS (that do not include abyss, midnight fire, or midnight ice, because that shit is way too rich for my blood. I have never even SEEN five gold, let alone have it lying around).

My favorite thing is that Alessia is also my chef, so when she hit level cap after an asparagus bender at the cooking station, I noticed that her personal story was still at quest level 54. That means, considering my exploration drive, probably at least 20 levels just from crafting. God, I love this game.

Savant Zykka is unimpressed with your bullshit.

So here is a thing that surprised me: asura are fucking amazing.

They’re hilarious, but not really so much in the short people lol comic relief midget way that you almost always get. It’s more that they’re hilarious because they’re not human, they don’t want to be human, and they don’t have time for your bullshit because they have shit to do and worlds to shape through the sheer power of their massive, massive brains. WHICH IS AWESOME. Also, they live in a Borg cube. I am not made of stone.

Zykka is my elementalist (as aforementioned asura or charr were my only choices for a cloth-wearing caster). She is also my littlest character, because I was just NOT getting the elementalist. I just … I can’t … y’all, I can kite like a motherfucker, but I wasn’t doing enough damage to make it worthwhile. Ten minutes on a regular trash mob is not acceptable. So, in desperation, I did what I should’ve done in the first place and asked the internets for help. Turns out that while I was TOLD that scepter/dagger was high dps and what one should be using solo, what they meant was you should be using it solo once you have a shitton of +power gear to flesh it out, not when you’re level twelve and desperate. SO. A pair of daggers and enough use of Ride the Lightning to power the entire eastern seaboard later, I AM MUCH HAPPIER.

And I’m glad for it, because seriously just look at her, she’s fucking adorable.

Brigid Sigursdottir, FUCKING FABULOUS

I don’t think it’s possible for the norn and their zones to be any more jaw-droppingly spectacular looking. Their vistas appear to be designed expressly and for gorgeous screenshots, and the way their idle animations fire and the NPCs talk about beer it’s kind of amazing that my guardian is only up in the 20s. All hey do is talk about beer, and jackalopes, and offering beer to jackalopes, and it makes me happy deep in my malted heart. Each of the background setup questions begins with “I got blackout drunk and”.

The guardian, much like the elementalist, depends a lot on weapon choice to not be stupid and boring and dumb. For example, your weapon skills page will tell you that you can use a mace and a shield. DO NOT DO THIS, THIS IS A HORRIBLE TERRIBLE LIE. It is the most boring thing you will ever, ever do. Instead, as my friend the mechanics nerd recommends, go for a sword and torch. You will BURN LIKE FIERY JUSTICE and become AN UNSTOPPOABLE BLUE FLAME OF ENDLESS DEATH. It’s fucking amazing and I love it.

Pereskia is sweet and charming and smiley right up until she stabs you in the face.

I have many feels about the sylvari, not the least of which is that they, along with the charr, have the only really good masculine models in the game. And in fact this, my prickly pear-inspired thief, was going to be male right up until the second I saw this leafy ponytail style. After that I was doomed and basically just entirely done for. I mean come on. It is a long frilly flippy ponytail MADE OF LEAVES. What do you people want from me?

There are a lot of lore things about the sylvari that I don’t understand (most of which you can find in the comments of my last GW2 post such as for example PLANTS DO NOT LACTACTE), but I can set all of that aside just for how beautiful they all are. I mean … I just … look at this character. She is a cactus with needles on her face. Needles. On her face. She can stab you to death with her daggers OR HER FACE.

Also, she glows in the dark. Seriously.

I’m still not really comfortable with my knowledge of Tyria as a world — I may actually have to pick up tie-in novels, which I swore off years ago THANKS FOR NOTHING CHRISTIE GOLDEN — but the personal stories are interesting enough, especially with the character generation questions, that even without being able to get into the world as a whole I’m invested enough in my characters to keep going. It’ll be interesting to see if and how that changes when I start getting to story ends.

For example, Mr. Aro is a hobbyist chef, and because of this I recognize that whomever was responsible for building the Chef skills actually knows what they are talking about re: food. Every pie needs some lemon juice and starch, for example, which is a standard pastry trick; the herbs used in various entrees are correct and applicable to their real world flavors. I’ve found myself playing with the experimentation/refinement pane and going man, a loaf of tarragon bread actually sounds super delicious right now.

I’ve also tinkered around with Jewelry, which is a lot more straightforward than Chef bits but just as interesting: you have to have a stone to put in a setting to put in a piece (a band, a hook, or a chain) before you can craft a ring, an earring, or an amulet. Usually minutiae like this drives me around the bend, but for some reason in GW2 it delights me instead. I think it’s because somehow the ANet devs have managed to strike upon timesink tedium that doesn’t feel like needless grinding; instead for me it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where I maybe can’t see all the pieces but it all still makes SENSE.

There’s a lot to be said for shit that just plain makes sense, y’all, I can’t lie. This is a game that counts a real-world economist on its staff and maintains its own virtual currency valuation histology, which absolutely blows my mind into tiny little diamond sparkles of delight.

All of this attention to realistic detail has really struck a nerve with me, and I’ve spent a great deal of my non-gameplaying free time taking all this wonderful and very specific data and putting my own real skills on top of them; in the really real world I’m a web developer and front-end designer, and I have not yet met a data point in GW2 that I haven’t wanted to build an app out of.

Good With Beer is a Chef helper that searches on both ingredient (oh my god what are the two recipes it says I’m missing that I can make with yams) and recipe (so this takes a bowl of spicy chili, wtf is that). Unfortunately the chef data keeps changing, assumedly for economy-balancing reasons, so some of the quantity data is out of date — looking at you here, dyes — but I’m constantly going through and updating the relevant bits.

The Dyealogue is a searchable and filterable catalogue of dyes, with color swatches at a glance and, where applicable, the separate cloth/leather/metal colors noted.

What I wanted to emphasize here was speed and ease of use; the GW2 wiki is pretty rad and Guildhead is super exhaustive, but having all of this data in a quickly-loaded and returned search isn’t something the big databases can really offer.

Also, they were super fun to write, and you bet they’re going on my professional portfolio. :D

I was pretty skeptical about this game for several reasons, not the least of which was that I’d spent some time in Guild Wars 1 a million years ago when the earth’s crust was still hot and was bored stupid by it. It’s not really my kind of thing, playing a game where the story doesn’t mean anything to me because I’m so far behind the times. I’m into things like SWTOR and WoW, which have established worlds that I’ve already loved for years and I can eke out my own space within them.

There’s also the problem of the cash shop, which bothers me a lot (and is concerning me about SWTOR’s future). I understand the capitalist theory behind F2P: you can get more cash out of a volume of cheap impulse purchases than you can out of a single steady subscription fee. This is industry-proven, even, considering Blizzard made a couple million dollars off the much-derided sparklepony in a matter of hours. However, understanding the economic theory doesn’t mean I like it. I don’t like it at all, as a matter of fact, because I recognize my own personal limitations. When I get involved with a F2P microtransacted game, I will without fail at one point suddenly surface from a hazy dream of a spending frenzy where I’m playing hangman dressed as a pirate or singing karaoke versions of shitty indie death metal. Seriously my Rock Band track list is motherfucking absurd. So many hundreds of dollars, you guys. It’s not normal.

However, a lot of my friends were planning on spending a lot of their free time in GW2 and the promo shots all looked really pretty, so I figured I’d dick around in it some and set up painstaking screenscapes for fabulous image galleries when the mood strikes me, because hey, no sub fee! I don’t expect to do any actual playing, so the cash shop will not hurt me. I’ll be fine! Fine! Just fine.

I preordered the digital edition, because frankly any time I can spend in my house not interacting with physical people in physical stores is a very good time, which means I got to download and start playing on Friday at 11:30pm. I figured I’d hop in, play around in chargen, reserve some names, and that’d be the end of it for awhile until the mood struck me.

Fast-forward to 2AM Monday morning and I have no idea who I am or what is going on anymore.

I started out with a Norn Guardian because one of the most compelling gameplay mechanics is that your skills change based on what kind of weapon you have equipped, and the Guardian seemed the most diverse there (staves give you very powerful healing spells; two-handed hammers are giant smashy defensive things, etc). Unfortunately, she hit about level five and suddenly guild stuff crashed and she couldn’t represent the guild anymore; since this is pretty important for guild-building, I decided to play around in chargen some more and see what stuck.

After some fiddling to find defaults that did not make me want to kill myself, I ended up with a human ranger because HOLY SHIT DRAGON PET really you guys really DRAGON PET.

Now look, I hate pet classes, because I suck at the micromanagement involved. I even used to have trouble making sure my shadowfiend wasn’t incredibly stupid at, say, breaking CC on Moroes’s adds in Karazhan. So I figured I’d dick around a little, get to the city, play with some dye, and wait for my guardian’s guild invite to repop.

Two days later I’m level 21 and I have no idea what happened.

Alessia Navarra, fucking amazing.

I have so many feels about what’s good in chargen. The sheer volume of skin tones and body types, the ability to dye your armor wherever you want, the miniscule variations provided in specifying the exact height of the bridge of your character’s nose over and above the dozen or so different basic face shape options. I love this part of it so much.

It should be noted that I did expect to love playing paper dolls; that’s kind of one of the things I’m adamant about in my games, and something that always made me sad about Warcraft. I went straight from SWG and its infinite sliders and Image Designer skill trees into “here, you get half a dozen different faces to choose from, ready go” and I’ve never quite gotten entirely over it.

The one problem I have with this particular character generator is that I went with the headband hair because it’s fucking adorable, and did not realize until I got emotionally invested in playing her that I could not actually ever change the headband color ever again. So I’ve got all these amazing red and purple dyes that I CANNOT USE because ORANGE HEADBAND. The moss trench is really badass, at least.

I didn’t try to level quickly on purpose, and in fact did not try to level at all. I discovered, much to my surprise, that this is an entire game predicated on exploring beautiful, jaw-dropping vistas to find more fake people to do favors for in order to make them love you.

You guys.

You may or may not recall my discussion previously on how one of my primary MMO Win Conditions is making fake people love me. And here is an entire game, AN ENTIRE GAME, where instead of linear questing you DO FAVORS FOR PEOPLE TO MAKE THEM LOVE YOU. Literally, there is a little heart you fill up and then they send you presents because THEY LOVE YOU. The Queensdale Monastery Brewery, the pretty vista header for this post, humbly requests that you help them out by taste-testing their new beers.

….
…….
….

WHY DON’T MIND IF I DO.

I kept getting sidetracked on my personal story quest because I’d find just one more Point of Interest over the horizon or just one more underwater camp of adorable tiny many-toothed whalesharkian quaggan needed me to fetch them some crab meat.

And then I decided to kill a little time crafting, just to see what it was like. I picked up cooking, because that’s how you make dyes, and also I’d found a lettuce farm that I totally gutted the shit out of, so I figured it was worth trying. Now, the Master Chef NPC trainer lady tried to warn me: being a chef in Tyria is not for the faint of heart! It is SERIOUSLY HARD CORE! BEWAAAARE! And I was all man fuck you, Master Chef NPC trainer lady, I do what I want.

Oh how wrong I was. Listen to the Master Chef NPC trainer lady, you guys. Do not make my mistake.

I lost like four fucking hours after the gup went to bed last night just playing around with cooking experimentation and discovery just trying to figure out if I could, I dunno, make a BLT. It was two in the morning last night and I was still going WHAT IF I ADD BAY LEAVES????? and I was a twitching, cackling monster. I had to spend ten bucks to buy two more bank tabs because I MIGHT NEED THAT COOKIE DOUGH LATER and HOLY SHIT I HAVE NUTMEG COMING ENTIRELY OUT OF MY ASS and BUT WHAT DO YOU MEAN BANANA CREAM PIE IS CHEF 225 I WANT TO EAT IT NOW.

So Crafting in GW2: fucking awesome. Exploration, vistas, and platformer puzzles where your character jumps entirely when and where you expect them to (I am making a pointed frownyface at you, SWTOR): fucking awesome. Making fake people fake love me: fucking awesome. Having a character with dark skin that looks realistic and not like they dropped a black layer over the default texture: fucking awesome.

However, there are also some … problems … that I’m having. If you aren’t interested in hearing any criticism about GW2, I totally understand that you want to fanninate yourself and hear only good things. That’s cool. Stop reading now, and enjoy your fourteen hundred words of shit that I think is fucking awesome, and enjoy the rest of your time in Tyria.

…Are they gone?

Okay look. There’s a lot of good here, and a lot of things to like, but also some surface shit that is driving me absolutely up a wall. For example, the reason why I started to roll a human ranger and discovered that there was a dragon pet at all is because I had a ladytype name in mind, I wanted to enjoy the human zone, and, I discovered as I was beginning the whole human female thing, playing a caster was completely out of the question.

Why?

Well, let’s take a look at why.

Y’all. Seriously. What the fucking shit is this? The necromancer’s perky little gothic lolita cheerleader is the LEAST offensive of these, but whether or not you like floofy frilly skirts or whatever is not the point: the point is that loot dimorphism, especially this pronounced, is fucking gross and wrong.

If you want your character to wear a loincloth and garters, whatever. More power to you! You make that choice and you own it and you enjoy yourself as only you know how.

HOWEVER.

When the same item ID is an awesome badass robe on a dude and turns into nipple caps and butt floss on not a dude, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

I am not advocating the removal of Sexy Gear, yet whenever I bitch about this kind of thing people throw their hands in the air and flip their fucking shit about OH MY GOD ARO SAYS NO ONE CAN EVER LOOK SEXY EVER. No, see, the thing is about CHOICE. If you CHOOSE to get sexy gear and put it on, THAT IS FINE. I would not ever want to deny people that choice! My WoW figureprint is wearing the Robes of the Guardian Saint, for fuck’s sake. But when you remove that choice, when you say that female characters HAVE TO wear nipple caps and butt floss, we have a problem. When you prevent male characters from wearing nipple caps and butt floss, we have a problem. The solution is SEXY GEAR FOR EVERYONE.

BONUS TIME:

The Frigging Queen of Kryta

This is a very unfortunate and not very flattering angle for THE QUEEN. It would be really super great if I did not have to deal with sideboob every time I moved up a step on the personal story (and since Alessia is a noble, THIS HAPPENS A LOT). You guys, that is some seriously impressive disregard for physics and over-reliance on boob tape. Royal fashion: a killer.

The other challenge I have with superficial shit is a really small thing, but nonetheless means kind of a lot, and BEWARE SPOILERS FOR HUMAN PERSONAL STORY AT LEVEL 18.

Remember Alessia, my character up above? Well, I met her sister, and she looks like this:

Whoops, your default is showing.

SIGH.

They expect so many people to play blond white folks that they don’t even bother having a customized skin for Deborah (which is something Bioware implemented with awesomeness in Dragon Age 2).

ETA, because this is important: your character’s sister’s race is determined by the option you choose when the story-giver asks you where you and your sister were born. There was a whole list of choices that meant very little to me, and I could find no way to figure out what any of them meant; apparently if I’d made a different choice Deborah would have been dark-skinned. I wish I’d known that earlier!

That’s just such a sad commentary on the status quo default in the gaming community: developers expect you to be white, male, and enjoy looking at naked butts.

I mean being all of those things is totally okay and all, and it is awesome if you are those things! I am not even a dude and I enjoy naked butts from time to time too. But I’m sad that I can’t play a human, norn, or sylvari caster (I have an asura elementalist instead; she gets a robe because short squat humanoids aren’t allowed to be sexy) without wanting to stab myself in the eye, and I’m sad that for all the awesome diversity of NPCs something as important as a PC’s family still defaults to white.

There are so many good things, but there are quite an awful lot of status quo bad ones, too. I expect better.

But hey, I’ve got a bank full of chocolate-covered bananas and cheese pizza and a ton of brewer monks who love me. Party at Divinity’s Reach!

The funny thing is that Mr. Aro does not have this problem.

Please don’t misunderstand; Mr. Aro is a terrific dad, and identifies just as strongly with “dad” as I do with “mom,” but never once has he been subject to the implication that his entire life should revolve around his kid to the exclusion of all else. When Mr. Aro joins a social scene, he can talk about both game-related hobbies and family-related goings-on and no one will bat an eye. However, if I’m the one in that conversation, things are a little different.

Here’s how it goes when I try to talk about gaming while parenting with people who are not also gaming while parenting: first, people go reaaaaaally quiet. Then someone will laugh, like they do when someone tells an uncomfortable joke. Finally, the subject is changed. Every time, with only extremely rare exceptions. Every time.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this, and the one that comes to mind first is that when people (who probably don’t know any gaming moms) think the phrase “gamer mom,” the mental picture they come up with is a CNN headline: KID STARVES TO DEATH WHILE MOM GAMES. These horror stories do exist, even though they’re rare, and are so horrible that they tend to stick indelibly in our collective memory; a woman who raids for fifteen hours straight while her toddler tries to stave off a slow starvation death by eating cat food should be a Clive Barker plot, not a real news story. That creeping horror also makes them seem more prevalent and definitive than they really are — even though this level of extreme neglect is a handful of cases world-wide, the scope of them individually (who lets tiny children die I mean oh my god really) creates this specter of horrible things that video games do to you and make you do.

So first I have to contend with that, the general distrust of video games and people who play them. This isn’t really news; we all, every one of us who has ever identified as a gamer, have had to put up with this at some point or another in our lives.

But then I get a special extra helping, the flavor that is only ever offered to we moms of the gaming world: but moms can’t DO that.

This is the part that Mr. Aro doesn’t get, doesn’t have to deal with: it is, in this society, the mother’s job to take care of children. Period. That is the expected norm, that is what you are supposed to adhere to in this culture. If you, as a mom, have your own hobby on which you spend your free time, that is time not spent mothering your child, you selfish neglectful bitch. It doesn’t matter that Mr. Aro and I worked out schedules for raids, and only ever scheduled uninterrupted game time for when the kidlet was asleep; it doesn’t matter that he never liked hardcore raiding and will roshambo me to see who gets to read her to sleep at night. No, that doesn’t matter because it’s the mother’s place to parent, and the father’s to just go off and do whatever the fuckall he wants (nope, still not going to stop talking about how the patriarchy sucks for dudes too).

This is why knowledge (and rejection) of gender roles is so personally important to me. I love my kid, and I love being her mom — but I’m also still pretty fond of being me, and knowing how to balance those things takes a lot of time and work and effort. I know that the wider world out there thinks I’m supposed to put my childish things aside in favor of my daughter’s, but I would much rather learn how to manage my time effectively and share the things I love with her rather than give them up all together, and regardless of what the undercurrents of GRR WOMENS ARE FOR BABIES culture would have folks think, I do believe it’s possible to be a good mom WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY also being a good gamer.

We’ve moved on some from the days of “GTA made Little Timmy shoot all those people,” but not as far as we think; we’ve moved on some from the days of June Cleaver’s housekeeping skills, but not as far as we think. When those two roads meet, for me it’s not so much getting chocolate in my peanut butter as it is HOLY SHIT DID YOU GET THE NUMBER ON THAT TRUCK.

Meanwhile, I’ll be over here teaching my kid to shoot geth one M-300 Claymore at a time.

When the panel submission was denied, I figured I would just spend some time talking here about what I intended to discuss at PAX. I have some public appearance issues anyway and actually getting to PAX would have been really challenging (I really super like my kid and I couldn’t have taken her with me, for example), so it was better this way, right? Right?

Well, yesterday (more specifically, last night) that all kind of changed.

This is because last night I learned that while “Women in a Virtual World” was denied, on the PAX schedule posted yesterday was “Wife Aggro, Career Obligations, and Time Constraints: How to Play While Meeting Life’s Demands.”

Now, I know I have a little bit of bias because my panel about the same fucking thing without the terrible title was denied, but y’all, seriously: Wife Aggro

Wife Aggro

Wife Aggro

Surely you will have a heart attack and die of unsurprise when I tell you that this particular panel was proposed and will be moderated by a man.

So let’s talk a little bit about my BURNING SEARING WHITE-HOT RAEG!!1 here, shall we?

It’s needlessly exclusionist.

When you title your panel “Wife Aggro,” what you are saying is that this is a place for dudes and that women (unless they’re committed monogamous lesbians from one of a handful of US states or Canada, I guess?) are not invited, because you’re going to be talking about Bitches, Amirite?. You might as well put up a sign that proclaims you the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club and that girls have cooties and also you have the emotional maturity of eight year-olds, because really, you guys? REALLY?

It’s misogynist as hell.

WIVES ARE TOTAL FUNKILLERS, YOU GUYS. WOMEN HATE FUN AND ESPECIALLY HATE WHEN YOU HAVE FUN AND WILL GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO RUIN IT. BITCHES, AMIRITE.

How is this attitude still so prevalent. How. HOW. “Wife Aggro” is basically code for “I don’t know how to treat my partner as a human being with her own individual thoughts and feelings, and her desire, no matter how banal, is less important than mine.” You know who else acts like this, like what they want is most important and they don’t give a shit what you want or need, or how to generally behave like a cooperative human being? My kid. BECAUSE SHE’S TWO. AND SHE ONLY DOES IT WHEN SHE’S GRUMPY.

Do you really want your behavior to be unfavorably compared to a toddler’s? Do you?

It’s straight-up fucking wrong.

Dear dudebros: I was the hardcore raider in my family. Not Mr. Aro. Me. So you can take your “wife aggro” and you can go fuck yourselves. I know y’all are so scared about getting the cooties into your clubhouse and you’re scared that vaginas are communicable diseases or some shit, but there are a lot of gamers who identify as women, and there are a lot of women gamers who have successful romantic and emotional partnerships. Continuing to refer to “wife aggro” completely erases women like me (and there are many women like me; I am friends with several!) who are the predominant gamers in our relationships.

I know PA is run by garbage nightmares and the whole thing is full of hatey dudebros and fnarg blee blee blorp, but I keep hoping that someone somewhere will have an epiphany and realize that there is A PROBLEM, and they NEED TO FIX IT. Unfortunately, instead of that, what I get is the Wife Aggro panel guy searching twitter for people talking about this and giving folks a pile of condescending bullshit about how it’s really super inclusive, honest and people are just being totally unfair!

@Arolaide Despite the main name, “How to play while meeting life’s demands” is about how all of us (men & women) can balance life/work/play

8 August, 2012 8:53 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@djfanco

Don

So, if one were to, say, give the benefit of the doubt and assume in good faith that yes, this is about how all people can balance their virtual world and physical world commitments, why in gods name would you give it a dismissive and exclusionary title? This person specifically chose that title, specifically chose to be associated with that phrase, specifically chose to make that the manner in which other people would find and be exposed to his ideas. Not cool. No dice, dude.

@zaralynda @Arolaide Not every person is with someone who shares their interests. Please share how you & your sig. others balance play.

8 August, 2012 9:49 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@djfanco

Don

Here’s the thing: gaming is not some special snowflake hobby that requires unique management skills to integrate into your life. Before the gup was born, I was not only a hardcore raider, but also heavily involved in community theatre, which is a huge time commitment; I’ve also played sports, managed eleventy hojillion virtual communities, been a member of a beer-tasting group, played on trivia teams, and attended a weekly knitalong. All of these things require time management skills and communication with a partner who doesn’t necessarily share those interests. I even occasionally make up my own mind about what TV shows to watch without him! Can you believe my nerve?

As an aside, dude is asking women to educate him. Not cool. No dice, dude.

@Arolaide I’m curious. How do you feel about articles that try to help men get a wife/girlfriend to share their love of games?

8 August, 2012 9:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@djfanco

Don

I asked him if he had any specific articles in mind, because while most of the literature of this stripe tends to be gross, dismissive, mansplainy bullshit that throws around gender roles like it’s fucking rugby or some shit I’m sure it’s totally possible for there to be something written that explores how to share things you like with new people without being total garbage douchebags about it. I just … well, I’ve never read it, because the kinds of people who would write something like that also know that it’s really very simple: JUST INVITE SOMEONE TO SHARE A THING YOU LIKE, AND IF THEY DON’T LIKE IT LET IT GO AND MOVE ON. Unfortunately, he had no specific examples, and still wants a woman to tell him how shit is wrong. Not cool. No dice, dude.

@cynixy Not entirely true, but I do welcome all feedback. I’m more disappointed people cast harsh judgment w/out hearing our panel.

8 August, 2012 10:07 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@djfanco

Don

This is like Blackface Up With Whitey Author Lady who says that judging a book by its cover is just like racism for reals. Dude. Your panel has a sexist title. People are going to think you are a sexist jerkbag. WORDS, THEY MEAN THINGS. I am totally sorry that you has a sad because people are calling you out on it. Oh no wait, I’m not sorry at all. Because bringing up your feelings about how unfair it is that you’re being judged for marginalizing women? Not cool. No dice, dude.

BONUS ROUND:

As founder of Busy Gamer News, I’m offended! Wife aggro?! Presupposes gamers = men who dodge family to play. @looocas @cynixy @Official_PAX

8 August, 2012 9:40 pm via TwittelatorReplyRetweetFavorite

@Gamewatcher

Dave Kramer

Dear dudes: yeah, the patriarchy’s not so good to you either. It’s really not cool, huh?

An important footnote: I suppose you could use “wife aggro” as a descriptor for my family, but it would be specifically used to describe JESUS FUCK ARE YOU USING YOUR GODDAMN COOLDOWNS BECAUSE GOD DAMN IT STOP PULLING EVERYTHING IN THE FUCKING ROOM AT ONCE WHAT THE GODDAMN HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU