CBR News: Comic-Con International 2006

It’s that time of year again: Comic-Con is here. (Well, in San Diego.)

CBR has already kicked off its coverage with one of Jonah’s patented Photo Parade pieces and I’ll be editing and posting stories from correspondents all weekend.

Koboldnomicon art contest

Get a drawing of a favorite kobold character from Koboldnomicon cover artist Herman Lau:

With the impending release of the Koboldnomicon, we thought it would be fun to spread the koboldic cheer with a new contest. So in the spirit of kobold vanity, we are going to give you the chance to immortalize your favorite kobold with your own CUSTOM PORTRAIT, courtesy artist Herman Lau!

Just share a little tale of koboldness regarding your favorite kobold PC or NPC. We want to hear about actual tales of kobolds from actual gameplay. One lucky winner, chosen by a secret conclave of kobold dragon-worshippers, will receive an 11″ x 17″ glossy poster featuring a custom, full color illustration of their kobold. Visit Herman’s online portfolio to see samples of some of his kobolds that are featured in the book.

Details here.

Study: Failing at a game can be fun

This explains a lot about MMORPG raiding:

Recently, a team of psychologists led by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs in Helsinki, Finland, decided to study precisely what sort of emotions people experience while playing games. So they took a bunch of gamers in their 20s and had them play Super Monkey Ball 2 bowling, competing amongst each other (the top scorer won free movie tickets). While they played, the gamers were wired up to a bunch of biosensors — including skin-conductance meters, cardiac monitors and facial electromyographs. Psychologists have long found that by detecting spikes in one’s physiological activity, they can pinpoint the precise moment you find something fun or frustrating.

As the subjects played Monkey Ball, their pleasure spiked upward when they knocked down a lot of pins. On the other hand, if the ball closely missed the pins and landed in the gutter at the end of the lane, it produced frustration. This is pretty much what you’d expect.

But then something odd happened: When the players aimed really poorly and sent the ball zooming off the edge into space, their brains didn’t register frustration. They registered pleasure. “Although the event in question represents a clear failure,” the researchers wrote, “several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment.”

Sucking, it seems, can be fun.

This is a totally counterintuitive result. Gamers are utterly obsessed with success — who’s l33t, who’s the suXX0r. Indeed, much like the Inuit with their 40 different words for snow, gamers have created a sprawling lexicon of slang designed to quantify — with surgical precision — exactly how much you suck or rock. (Dude, I totally pwned that n00b llama in pvp!) In theory, totally failing at a game ought to bring nothing but the sting of defeat, right?

Sure, except in one case: When you’re playing a game so well-designed that it is delightful even when you screw up.

I know my World of Warcraft guild really liked getting spanked like a naughty little girl by Jin’do the Hexxer last week. If you’re going to get beat down, getting beat down in an interesting way is, yeah, kinda fun …

Cool iPod cases

I’m happy with my glow-in-the-dark iSkin case for my 20 GB iPod (although the case is starting to tear a tiny bit, after 18 months of use), but it’s a lot of fun to play with the case creator at iFrogz.

When I finally upgrade my iPod (I’m thinking next January, with my annual bonus), I’ll likely get an iFrogz case.

But, frankly, I just like playing with these sorts of sites. I can fool around customizing a car for ages on an auto manufacturer’s site.

If all the players of a MMORPG lived in one city …

(Figures drawn from MMOG Chart, Wikipedia and elsewhere.)

• If you put all the Asheron’s Call subscribers into one city, it would be about the population of Walla Walla, WA (30,000 or less).
• If you put all the Dark Age of Camelot subscribers into one city, it’d split into three warring sub-communities but the sum total would be larger than Bellevue, WA (125,000).
• If you put all the Ultima Online subscribers into one city, it’d be between the size of Vancouver, WA and Bellevue, WA (135,000).
• If you put all the players of City of Heroes/Villains in one city, there’d be a crazy amount of muggers, and it’d be about the size of Aurora, IL (160,000).
• If you put all the Star Wars Galaxies players into one city, they’d all be clustered in the cantina watching the “dancers” and the city would be smaller than Tacoma (170,000).
• If you put all of the EverQuest II players in one city, a lot of them would be obsessed with comparing their city to the World of Warcraft city, and its size would be comparable to Oceanside, CA (175,000).
• If you put all the EverQuest I subscribers into one city, well, people would camp parking spaces and grief each other at the grocery store, but the city would be approximately the size of Montgomery, AL (200,000).
• If you put all the Final Fantasy XI players into one city, most of the street signs would be in Japanese and the city would be slightly larger than Albuquerque (500,000).
• If you put all the Lineage II players in one city, there’d be a ton of great Korean restaurants around and the city would be larger than San Antonio (1,300,000).
• And if you put all the World of Warcraft players into one city, people would dance naked in the malls and near banks, and it would be larger than Los Angeles, but smaller than New York City, making it the second-largest city in America (6,600,000). (North American players alone would make up a city comparable to Philadelphia in size.)

Something to think about next time you’re stuck in rush hour traffic.