AFR #272 – Irresolute

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May your new year be filled with wonderful things!

AFR #271 – Veiled threats

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To all of you who celebrate I wish a Merry Christmas, and may Santa Claus not get picked off by an over-eager archer when he lands on your roof!

AFR #270 – Points of view

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It’s a useful exercise to take the things people say about one gender and try flipping them to the other.  I’m sorry to say that all of the arguments the ladies are making fun of above are things I’ve seen people actually say in response to the controversy over the paucity of female characters in Warlords of Draenor.  I wonder what they would say to the gender-reversed versions of their own arguments.

It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen the completed expansion so we don’t yet know what kind of representation female characters will actually have.  Blizzard has a decent track record of making interesting female characters, both minor characters and major plot drivers.  We can live in hope that despite the wibbly-wobbly blast-from-the-hypermasculine-past nature of the expansion there will be room for more good female character development.  The thing is: we shouldn’t have to live in hope.  In this day and age when the representation of women in gaming is such a public cause, it was startlingly tone-deaf of Blizzard not to pay more attention to the issue in how they rolled out the new expansion at Blizzcon.  Calling the new expansion a “boys’ trip” may just be Metzen being Metzen, but it also betrays a real failure to think about how Blizzard’s presentation of itself and its games comes across to half the player base.  (Sadly, not a first for Metzen.)

AFR #269 – Resurrection

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I don’t know if this is a new thing or if I just haven’t been around to witness it before, but the thing I’ve been seeing a lot of lately is huge crowds of people in the chat channels complaining about how the server is dead and no one is ever on.  Indeed, it seems that the surest way to encourage more activity on your server is to declare that no one is on your server any more.