About once a year, we hit the holiday season when we still want to make sure that we have content but we’re also very tired from getting our awards in line. These times are perfect for looking back at the past year, and if I haven’t been clear enough about this yet, it has been a year. I am not having a great time! But I have been still writing Vague Patch Notes every week, something that I have been doing since 2018 as a column I pitched to Bree with the idea of “what if I just wrote a column about, like… gaming stuff every week?”
It turns out that a week consists of a lot of stuff, and this week I’m taking a look back at a year’s worth of stuff that I wrote this week, specifically my favorites. These aren’t sorted necessarily by any metric beyond what it says; it’s just my five personal favorite columns. If you preferred other columns, hey, I’m glad! I think I wrote some good ones. These ones just stood out the most to me.
Vague Patch Notes: The MMO you play isn’t always the MMO that was designed
Sometimes, I have things that just kind of stick in my craw, and one of those consistent bits is a persistent belief that if you can play a thing without interacting with X, then X doesn’t necessarily exist. And to be clear, I understand where this comes from on a personal level. If you are playing a game purely for recreation and don’t have a job that is centered around evaluating this stuff, it’s broadly fine if you don’t look for things and thus don’t see them and don’t have to think about them.
But they’re still there. Like, I don’t go out of my way to look for people with offensive pet names in games that let you rename your pet, but my job is looking at these things in their totality, and I have to evaluate them based on their totality. It’s important to understand that even if you enjoy a given game as a thing you play with one other person, that isn’t the game in itself, and it isn’t what you have to talk about as the text.
Vague Patch Notes: MMO fans create divisions that do not exist
I wouldn’t consider these two columns as being sister columns per se – they weren’t conceived of as part of a larger thesis – but they definitely both wind up touching on things that happen to be endemic to specific communities on the regular. And when I look at both columns in juxtaposition, yeah, there is a throughline here. After all, both of these columns are ultimately about a form of reality check; you don’t get to silo off things that you don’t want to consider or create different buckets that don’t actually exist.
Honestly, part of what I like about this column in particular is the restatement of the idea that even if the players see two things as different products, that doesn’t mean the studios maintaining them do. I think that’s a valuable lesson to keep in mind, and it’s disappointing that it seems to be such a struggle to realize that a given studio might see two things selling the same basic offering as one contiguous idea.
Vague Patch Notes: MMORPG development is a guessing game
I am as guilty as anyone of having a tendency to think that I know more about the future of video games than I actually do. The difference is that I do a lot of research before I put forth my opinion, so my guesses are somewhat educated… which still means they can be wildly wrong, a fact I remind myself of on the regular, because as this article points out, this is always a guessing game. It is never a sure thing. You can have access to the best data in the world, and they can tell you a story, and you can act on all those lovely data and then find out that you were completely wrong.
A friend told me that she found this conclusion kind of depressing, but I personally think it’s just an important thing to understand. Sure, everything is a guessing game to some degree, but you can make more educated guesses and you can choose what you do when you find out that some of your guesses didn’t play out. Do you double down or do you change things once you have better information? That’s a much more important skill than being able to guess right the first time out.
Vague Patch Notes: Can you really hate an MMO you don’t play in a way that matters?
So here’s a fun fact. If you’ve heard of Betteridge’s Law, you probably like to apply it to writing: “If you ask a question in the headline, the answer is no.” Ian Betteridge was claiming this because he thought it was a poor journalistic practice for articles where the answer is vague and a publication wants to publish instead of checking sources. But ironically, Betteridge himself didn’t actually do any research before making the claim. Studies done subsequently have determined that the majority of question headlines that can be answered with “yes” or “no” are actually answered with “yes” in the body of the article.
If only he had done the research he was mad at people for not doing, right?
Having said all of that, just for my own edification, I can say that whenever I write an article with a question in the headline, the answer is “yes,” but the question is posed because it’s a worthwhile question that can then be answered in an article that runs about 1200 words or so. Case in point, the article written above. No, the article is not about throwing shade at Ian Betteridge, and he comes up zero times; I just did some research for a throwaway joke and felt like sharing because it was interesting to learn about.
Vague Patch Notes: No, crypto and blockchain are not a monetization experiment for MMOs
Last but not least, I keep kind of hoping that the amount of time I spent learning about crypto and blockchain to stop being remotely useful, but for some reason we keep having people treating “what if everything was an unlicensed security you could gamble on” as if there must be some merit to the technology. This is kind of absurd to me for many reasons, including the fact that this technology has existed for a very long time, and if it had ever had any actual useful applications, it would long since have been used for stuff that everyone would be hungry to buy and use.
For whatever reason, this one still gets brought up occasionally, despite the fact that “monetization” is literally the only thing crypto actually brings to the table, and it does it badly. I get tired of writing about this stuff, but there’s a whole assorted grab-bag of topics here that could be brought up, misconceptions that assume there must be something valuable to the tech and things it’s actually good at when the reality is that there just isn’t. But if the specter of it gets people to finally toss Smedley out with the bathwater, it’ll… well, it’ll still be bad, but I’ll take it as something of a victory.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
