Kirby Crow's Blog, page 4

Sexy Bastards: Do female gamers demand more of their heroes? (Assassin’s Creed 3)

Quite often, when you boot up that new game in your Xbox or PlayStation or Wii, it all begins with character customization. The ones that don’t have customization have premade characters or single heroes that you play as they are, as the game designers meant them to be. In other words, there’s no “Make Him Sexy” option. Unless of course the main character is a heroine, as those tend to be created sexy by default. There’s no such button to sexualize the persona of your male hero, and if he isn’t created that way, you use your imagination or you’re just out of luck.

Or you write fanfiction, but that’s another story.

Anyway… when a guy (a straight guy, mind you) is playing a male character in-game, he doesn’t necessarily need the character to be sexy. I’m sure most men think it would be a nice bonus, but it isn’t required. As long as the game rocks and the hero slays, it’s a hit.  That isn’t always true of female gamers, and a hero who doesn’t show sentiment and/or have a love interest often fails to resonate with women.

Take Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the character who is credited with drawing female gamers en masse into the Assassin’s Creed universe. First and foremost, Ezio has very strong emotions. We see those feelings in his youthful street brawling, in the pursuit of his first love, and in his reactions to the devastating losses he incurs. Ezio’s emotions are tempered by his strength, but he’s also charming, funny, crafty, sentimental, sarcastic, and, yes, a womanizer.  He’s the James Bond of the Italian Renaissance, and we love him. Female gamers showed that love in a thousand different ways: in fanfiction, artwork, cosplay, online communities, and with cold, hard cash.

So why, when it came time for a new assassin to take the helm -or hood. Whatever-  did they offer us someone as mundane as Connor Kenway?  Connor has strong emotions, but they’re mostly negative. While his loyalty to his cause and his determination to protect his people from the Templars does him credit, because he shows few other emotions beyond those (annoyance and impatience don’t count), he’s about as fun to be around as a sack of wet cardboard.

While it feels like the gaming world is skewing toward more female-inclusive themes, I’m not sure it really is, because designers forget or ignore the fact that female gamers aren’t just different on the outside.  For a male hero to garner more universal appeal to a female audience, he has to be complex. He must display more than two emotions and he has to be a man in full, not just muscle and good looks. That means love, that means humor, that means sensuality.

Connor Kenway is a lot of things, but no one could ever accuse him of being funny or sexy. One thing he does have going for him – his saving grace in my opinion – is his endearing gentleness toward weaker creatures or those in need. It gives me hope that we’ll see Connor evolve to a more full-fleshed personality in the AC renditions to come.

 

Lengthen night and shorten day

Daylight Savings Time feels like a good day for an unveiling , so here’s my new website & blog design. What do you think? I waffled for a long time on background, color, theme, etc., but what really stymied me was getting the blog and website to mesh seamlessly without paying a web designer to tackle the code. In the end, I settled for modifying an established WordPress theme that most closely resembled my website.

Of course, I’d love to be able to pay a designer, which is just not going to happen 2 months before Christmas.  I’m sure a veteran pro could have done a better job, but my monkey-wrench css efforts will have to hold me over until 2013.  I still have a few more tweaks to make, font colors and such, but for the most part, this is it. Premiere time!

Writing continues at a steady pace, and I finished two other full-length novels. For more news, visit here. The page will be updated as soon as I have anything to tell you about publication dates, and of course I’ll mention it here, too.

Here’s hoping my shiny new overhaul will poke me to keep in touch with my readers and be more active here. I’ve finally been swallowed up by the great and benevolent Twitter Whale and am comfortable there, and Tumblr is cute as a button. Facebook just isn’t my cuppa (I lack the necessary time and dedication to make FB work for me) and as much as I love Livejournal, I think that particular equine beast is all but expired.I’ve decided to use LJ only for fandom squeeing about Michael Fassbender and Copper on BBCA.

Comment away. A story is calling me.

The King of Rshan, being an ass

 

 

Okay, maybe he’s not behaving badly. Maybe there is some *koff koff* validity to his complaint. I’m working on making him happy.

I’ve got a new novella for sale, blog tour coming up

Circuit Theory, co-written with Reya Starck.

Dante and Byron are avatars. Driven by human beings, yet still only

digital representations of their ideal selves. In reality, they live far

apart, but share most of their waking and working hours together in a

virtual world called Synth.

In Synth, like in most code, the laws are infinitely more simple and

infinitely more complex. Navigating the system rules of virtual lovers

is like steering through a minefield of deceit, suspicion, heartbreak,

and half-truths.

Under pressure, Dante makes a friendship that trips Byron’s warning

bells, disrupting their carefully-ordered lives and calling into

question the wisdom of trusting your heart to a man you can never touch

in the flesh.

Circuit Theory  is a futuristic, occasionally quirky bit of fiction about people choosing to use their online avatars for either emotional fulfillment or as an extension of their everyday selves. There  have been stories told on this theme before, but those narratives are usually a cautionary tale meant to warn humans of the spiritual danger of relying on technology for what they should be getting from other humans, a sort of Aesop’s fable for Web 2.0.  We were incredibly bored by the idea of shaking our fingers at technology, so instead we took a look at how digital romance could – for lovers like Dante and Byron – solve at least as many problems as it creates.


Reya and I will be over at Amara’s Place for an interview on the 30th, and there will be a drawing and prizes at the end of the day, so please drop by and chat with us.

Amara’s Place.

*cover art by LC Chase

Hop Against Homophobia Winners!

Everyone who left a comment  in the last 2 entries.   Hey, this means I give away 22 ebooks, but I figure that anyone who took the time to browse here (and I’m #218 on the list!) and comment is already dedicated to the cause of ending homophobia. That means something to me.

I do believe that WordPress sent me most of the emails of the commenters, but if for some reason it didn’t or you would like an ebook other than Book 1 of Scarlet and the White Wolf, please drop me a line at my email (see below) and I’ll get to it. I’ll begin sending them out on Friday, so you have until then. Thank you ALL for participating in such a worthy cause.

Hop Against Homophobia

 

Hi there!

I think I’m something like #225-ish on the Blog-hop list, so here goes: I decided to make 2 posts about homophobia. I had a little trouble making a segue from my previous post, so I double-dipped. Also, whoever gets this far will have to have read more than 200 blogs before getting to me, so I needed to keep it short! 

I doubt there’s a gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or transgendered person alive who hasn’t experienced homophobia in some form, or had to hide who they are to keep themselves safe from it. Homophobia isn’t a single malady: it is countless symptoms all throughout our society, at every level. I don’t see an end to homophobia in my lifetime, but I do hope to see a shift toward that inevitable end. I hope for that very, very much. 

I have a very special Scarlet and the White Wolf prize for a commenter I’ll pick at random, so please just leave a note to be entered. The Hop Against Homophobia ends May 20th, and I’ll announce the winner here.

Don’t Let Them Waste Your Time

 

“It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.”

-Rene Descartes

 

 

When I was little, my mother told me that love is strongest of all, but hate is “a whole lot louder.”

That’s why, contrary to wisdom and justice both, hate so often wins.

When you know someone hates you without reason, the natural impulse is just to hate ‘em right back. It’s hard not to answer a shout with a shout, a curse with a curse, wrong for wrong.

Kindness is not an abstract. Anyone can be kind to friends and family. Being loving towards those that we love is not difficult, and it isn’t a sacrifice. Being pleasant and making efforts on behalf of others is also not a huge chore. But being kind towards people whom we know don’t actively love us (which is a nice way of saying they hate our guts), well… that’s a hard row to hoe. Why do we even have to do that? What do we owe to the hateful homophobes in the world?

Nothing. We don’t owe them a single damn thing, not even kindness. But we don’t owe them hate, either, and they want us to believe that we do.

When you return hate, in some ways you’re giving that hateful person exactly what they want from you. You’re affirming their desire to be your desire, too. You’re interacting with that desire and allowing them to feed off it, from your source.

Because hate is often a long-lasting thing, many psychologists today don’t believe hatred to be a temporary state of emotion in human beings, but often a disposition toward hating, period.

In other words, haters gonna hate. There isn’t much you can do about that. The only action you’re left with that’s entirely your own is to take charge of the fight. Refuse to feed the negative desires of others, because every ounce of energy you put into hating them back is one less ounce you could be putting toward ending homophobia.

Don’t let them distract you and waste your time, because you, your friends, your family, and everyone reading this who believes that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer folk are entitled to the same rights, privileges, and protections under the law as everyone else, have much, much better things to do with your lives.

Here are some of those better things.

The Trevor Project

http://www.thetrevorproject.org/

It Gets Better

http://www.itgetsbetter.org/

GLAAD

“http://www.glaad.org/

Lambda Legal

http://lambdalegal.org/

The Matthew Shepard Foundation

http://www.matthewshepard.org/

The Point Foundation

http://www.pointfoundation.org/

International Day Against Homophobia

http://www.homophobiaday.org/

 

 

It’s Earth Day. Let’s Make Some!

If you’ve got a flash drive, you can make a world

I’ve recommended this before to friends who wanted to know where/how to get started in 3D Creation (known just as Building to those of us addicted to it), but in case I haven’t mentioned it here, SOAS (Sim on a Stick) is about the niftiest thing ever. Basically you plug in your USB flash drive, install a few programs onto the drive (all zipped together conveniently and ready for download on the SOAS website) and boom, your own private virtual world is ready for your commands, with endless modifications and customizations available. The only limits are your imagination and how much time you’re willing to dedicate to hone your Building skills.

The reason that SOAS is the coolest nerd thing since pop rocks is because you can take it with you. The compactness itself, the very idea of slinging an entire virtual world into your pocket, is what appeals. I know there are comparisons – for instance, just about any Xbox game will fit into your purse – but unlike other online MMO’s that must have an internet connection or a dedicated gaming console, you can take Sim on a Stick anywhere with you, plug it into any relatively recent computer USB drive, and it should run. By recent, I mean within the last 4 or 5 years. My workhorse desktop is that old (I’ve made a few mods, mainly video card and RAM), and SOAS runs just fine.

This is the brand new world inside my flash drive using the latest build of SOAS. It doesn’t have any homes or structures yet, just a name (I’ve called it The Riverlands. Hello, Game of Thrones). It has mountains and water, and an avatar that I’ve dedicated zero time to customizing. I did quite a lot of work on my last world (Horus), but it was a little buggy (user error, not program) and I managed to mess it up. I wanted to start again with a clean slate.

In case you’re thinking this all looks too complicated for your tech level, it’s not. Building in 3D can certainly get complicated, but compiling the world itself has been streamlined to idiot-proof levels, which is quite handy for us idiots. If you can unzip a folder, you can do this.

I should mention that the latest build of SOAS has the option of not having a viewer compiled with the zip folder. In order to enter a virtual world, you not only have to have the world available, you need a viewer capable of interfacing with it. If you follow the help link into the SOAS website, you can download the Custom SOAS Imprudence viewer that will not only teleport you into your own world (localhost), but many other virtual MMO’s.

Happy Nerding!

PS: Okay, I missed Earth Day. Because I spent it planting tomatoes, I think I should get a pass to make my Earth Day post today instead. Yes, I do.

Author-Type Swag (DIY)

Previously posted to my LJ, but I’m trying to get back into the swing of posting at my blog here after the Big Health Scare, so here ya go.

So, we all know what a QR Code generator is. If you have a business card or any print publicity materials, you should have your QR code somewhere on it, and it would be totally awesome if I could convince publishers to start adding them to my print books from now on. While they’re really cool and recognizable just the way they are, it’s even MORE COOL if you have a custom QRC.

Hackaday tells you how to put one together using Photoshop and the QR generator, but the how-to is really long and – IMHO- unnecessary. I just got my code, read through the Hackaday guide to quickly find out where the “don’t touch” boundaries are on the image, and then just pasted a few images inside the “okay” zone.

Here’s the result.

If you have a smartphone with a QR reader app like RedLaser, just put it up to the screen there and let it read the code. Yep. The little crow takes you right to my website.

Now isn’t that neat?

PS: re Big Health Scare has been given the negative by specialists (the problematic and in-a-weird-place lump in my throat has been diagnosed as a benign cyst), so I can stop going to doctors for the time being and head back to writing. Thanks for being patient with  me.

Dead Space

 

No, not the game. I'm talking about temporary spaces inside the virtual landscapes of MMORPG's, spaces that are only open for certain periods of time – such as special events – but closed off to the rest of the game 'verse when the event is over. After the event is over, I like to imagine that those spaces enter a kind of paradox where they patiently await the return of the players, biding time until the space is reenergized by the act of observation, a sort of Schrödinger's Cat of RPG. The NPC's are still running through their animation files, particles still emit, the wav files still play, but there are no players to hear them.

If a wav file plays in the mesh forest and there is no level 65 tank to hear it, does it still make a sound? (continued)

Read the rest at Livejournal.com

 

Comment here, there, anywhere.