Voices

[Victoria Victrix]

But that's the point of posting it here for peer review.  We are here to catch these small errors and typos, which trust me, creep in to even the most professional writer's submissions.  Even the bestselling authors have editors and proof-readers. :)

And sometimes our editors and proofreaders miss things.

[Terwyn]

I've been thinking about what I should do to follow up the sledgehammer that was the previous post. Definitely, I believe it should be something that further builds the case, and helps to show the real stories behind the people who play the game. I think it's time I put together a post covering the beneficial qualities the game offered those of us with non-standard neurology.

I happen to have quite a few people watching my blog who are very active bloggers within said community, so there's great potential there if I've done it right.

[Terwyn]

I was linked on Fark.com. Unfortunately, it was labelled as "Fail." Evidently, whoever did it missed the point of the series.

[Segev]

I'm wondering by what criteria "failure" is determined with your blog. c_c;; That seems a lot of effort to go to for somebody to just be a jerk. I wonder what his reason(ing) was.

[Terwyn]

Well, here's the comments on the link over at Fark, to give you the idea.

http://tinyurl.com/a5v3asm

I am not sure where they got the idea that I am personally boycotting NCSoft - I still play Guild Wars, after all.

[Terwyn]

Voices from Paragon Part V – The Voiceless

Although I had intended to finish this series by explaining the reason why City of Heroes is important to me and thus why I am involved in the efforts to save it, the number of tales similar to my own that I have heard make it prudent for me to provide my own history with the game sooner, as opposed to later. I hope that this helps to clarify not only who I am in association with the game, but why I have taken it upon myself to function as a chronicler.

The average person speaks approximately 16000 to 20 000 words in a day, possibly more, possibly less, depending on the study you examine. I am lucky to manage even a quarter of that. To be as direct as possible, every word I speak has been translated at least twice before it even passes through my lips, since unlike the vast majority of the human race, I do not think linguistically (that is, in words). I have described how I think in several different ways, saying that I think in puzzles, that I think mathematically, especially geometrically, but it really boils down to I think in terms of almost pure visualized logic.

Thinking visually is only the first tier of translation, since it allows me to grab all the various components and spread them out, catching all the various links between them. This means that I can pretty much look at a machine and read roughly how it works with a glance, but it also means that the more complex biological machines known as people prove extremely difficult to completely account for in regards to behaviour.

The next layer of translation is descriptive, allowing me to put things into words, so that I may communicate my concepts and ideas to those around me. When it comes to actual spoken word, however, an additional layer of translation is required; otherwise it ends up frequently being lost. Either because the initial terminology chosen for the description is too complex, and thus needs to be translated in a less precise fashion, or because it is lost to the signal noise commonly known as a speech disorder. Truth be told, there is nothing actually disordered about my speech. If anything, it is far too ordered.

Having spent the majority of my life wondering why I had such difficulty interacting with members of the human species, I found an answer in the kitchen of a private club I started working at after my first (disastrous) year at college. It was there that a co-worker asked me a question that provided a missing piece from the puzzle I'd been trying to solve. She'd asked me if I was autistic, since her son was nearly non-verbal, and had a lot of behavioural traits that seemed quite in common with my own manner. Now, I'd known that I had a non-verbal learning disability since I was very young, but this was entirely new.

You see, the paperwork which identified the particulars vanished, likely in part due to the fact that it was so similar to that of my near-perfect partial genetic duplicate; it was discarded as a copy. My family has never been able to prove that, however, and despite my mother's efforts to find out what had happened and enable me to receive the assistance I needed, I ended up having to navigate the hazardous shoals of primary education up to high school almost entirely on my own. I may have had my twin brother's assistance, but unfortunately, even with his almost divine hand at gleaning the particulars of what I needed, I finished high school with very little of a self-concept. I never started regularly referring to myself as an independent being until we started studying at separate schools in the fall of 2003. It didn't matter that they were in adjacent towns, what mattered is that I finally had full authority to consciously handle my own affairs.

I failed; quite badly, in fact. Landing in academic probation, and having very little in terms of social interaction with classmates, I returned home for the Christmas break, where I was given some well-placed advice that allowed me to return to school and remove myself from academic probation. That summer, a friend of mine had picked up City of Heroes, and allowed me to fiddle with it on his account. I recognized the game as having potential, and promised myself to pick up a copy as soon as possible.

I acquired a copy in November 2005, but was unable to activate it due to the lack of a sufficiently competent computer until October 2006. My brothers decided they'd chip in for the monthly fees in exchange for having a server to themselves through my account (as it was my eldest sibling's computer we were using, I did not decline). I was promptly enthralled by the vibrant life on Pinnacle, meeting many colourful individuals, including one known as X-Funk (whom had some extremely encouraging words whenever I needed them), and found myself drawn increasingly deeper into the community, eventually finding a renewed faith in my own voice. It should be no surprise that The King's Speech is a film of tremendous personal importance.

As a result of the increased confidence in my own voice, I was able to go from a 2.72 GPA in my first run at college to a 3.42 in my second, which was a Business Administration Co-op program with a focus in Marketing. I had placements across multiple industries, from marketing services, to non-government humanitarian organizations, and the high-tech world of Waterloo, Ontario. Not only that, I found an anchor in the game that helped me codify many ideas into potential story seeds which I am still continuing to grow.

City of Heroes is far more than just a game for me, as it has frequently been my *only* social outlet. I have never been a greatly social individual, preferring the reliability and order of books to the inherent chaos of human civilization, but I had a friend point out to me a decade or so ago that for me to eschew chaos would be to deny the greater portion of my own being. She was right. In as much as my twin brother has been an interpreter for me when it comes to interacting with the world, she's been my guide and my teacher. I would not have gone to the risk of introducing myself to the Pinnacle community without her well-time advice.

Considering that in the time since I joined City of Heroes, I've been able to find my own words with deeper certainty and vastly greater strength and passion, to the point where I am nearly ready to seek the publication of my first book, I have to say that there are no other words that I can put forth than to merely say "Thank you" to the community of Paragon City and the developers at Paragon Studios.

Thus, the reason why this particular series is titled Voices from Paragon, as it is through my interactions in Paragon City and the community around it that I found confidence in my own voice. Were I to present this information verbally, I would be extremely hesitant and practically incomprehensible. And yet, I would still find some way of succeeding in doing so.

The fact that much of the social interaction I experienced within City of Heroes occurred through a textual medium made the process of such interactions much less of a challenge. Although there were plenty of errors and miscommunications resulting in some exceedingly interesting, and yet at the same time friendly, argumentative encounters, as a result of playing City of Heroes, I have learned how to correct the errors that had developed in my methodology of dealing with living beings.

After all, when one's process regarding constant dealings with complex situations fails to consistently distinguish between objects and people, one has a significant issue. I am very frequently surprised by those who think I am eloquent, as if I were to write down my thoughts before they are thoroughly translated, the result is something like below:

Human behaviour has always been, in the perspectives of myself and several others who share a similar methodology of mind and thought, an intriguing puzzle of incredible complexity to which there has never been a truly satisfactory answer, and as such, there has been a continual push to revise and modify the means and measures by which those of us have deemed it necessary to adopt for the purposes of seeking to determine such an answer. However, it is impossible to dismantle the higher order habits and behaviours of human beings without losing the significance drawn from the individually unique circumstances within which these behaviours occur. Humans do not act within a vacuum, as every action and thought that a human being can have necessarily influences succeeding thoughts and actions, just as the initial actions can and are influenced by the actions, thoughts, and circumstances that immediately preceded them. The purpose of this documentation is to trace the most basic elements of human behaviours and emotions and evaluate the various complex combinations they can emulate, with the express purpose of determining if it is possible to identify those individuals who are prone to patterns deemed hazardous to one's self and close interactions, as well as those who are prone to patterns that prove hazardous to those with minimal interactions with the selected individual. 

The above text seems to have a Flesch-Kincaid reading ease level of 2.6, which means that it, like my general thoughts, are extraordinarily complicated, quite possibly needlessly so. It is quite possible to sum up the meaning of the above text with a single sentence, after all. In short, it says nothing more than stating that I do not quite get the way people act, as they never seem to match any predictive modelling to a suitable degree.

As far as I know, I am not autistic, although the designation certainly fits my experience. I am not the only person with non-standard neurology whom City of Heroes has helped, as the player known to me as Plangkye demonstrates:

There are a few interlocking reasons here. First, I've been playing games since childhood, and the games I favor are the ones that let you explore and - when video games started having that option - make your own character, and customize your experience, and are not focused on competing with other players. First-person shooters and arcade-style fighting games leave me cold. I devoured the Pokemon series, with its ample flexibility in party combinations and play style options, in my early teens. When I discovered BioWare, I latched right onto Knights of the Old Republic, especially the second one with its even greater depth of dialogue trees, individual character stories, and character build customization options, and held on well into other BioWare titles (I'm halfway through the first Dragon Age and loved the first and second Mass Effect games; still need to get my hands on Jade Empire). However, aside from City of Heroes, my great love in video games is, and remains, the Elder Scrolls, in particular Morrowind: while it looked interesting to me even on its own, once I discovered that it came with its own Construction Set and there was a whole community of people online who dedicated even more of their spare time to allowing the player to be exactly the character they wanted to be than they did to actually playing the game, I did nothing else for years. I'm still a part of that community, though I've become a little scarcer over the past couple of years, for one reason and one reason only: City of Heroes is better. Morrowind (and Skyrim, and I suppose even Oblivion) are all fantastic worlds to explore, in which you play exactly what you want to play - an aside; I played WoW for about twenty minutes before I got tired of being Orc Shaman #3,428, I mean, sure, I got to pick my own hair color and style and skin tone but any game that changes your avatar's outward appearance based on what equipment you're wearing only goes so far in terms of visual distinction if you can't add new equipment yourself - but The Elder Scrolls series comprises single-player games, which means that there is no in game, real-time role-play as the character you've dreamed up. The next best thing is tabletop RPGs; I've played a lot of D&D, Star Wars D20, and even tabletop Dragonball (which was far more amazing than I could have ever expected), but tabletop also lacks - there is a limited pool of players, sessions have to be set up and agreed upon ahead of time, meeting in person is inconvenient, rolling dice slows things down, etc., and there are also no visuals. To imagine is one thing, but to be shown is another thing entirely. This is the crux of what makes City of Heroes my most beloved video game title: My character, that I play with hundreds of other people, in real time, feels like my creation as I watch him fight evil using the powers that I have chosen for him.

The second reason, that I believe depends heavily on the first - I have Asperger's syndrome and it gives me severe social anxiety, and if not for this game, I would not have friends. It's much, much easier for me to understand the minds and motives of fictional characters than real people, so I gain relief from this anxiety when there's a safe curtain of fiction between me and whoever's on the other end, that I can pass through at my own pace. This works. Case in point: I just got back from a vacation in Mexico, on the Mayan Riviera, arranged by the co-leader of my SG. This kind of real friendship is not something that comes easily to me, and it only happened because of our RP together and later, our joint efforts to keep our SG running. The only other place that I can encounter this safety curtain is at conventions, and even then, it's neither as effective (conventions end, and people go home to unreachable places) nor anywhere near as affordable, not to mention a much greater expenditure of time and energy, which I can't sustain for long.

Lastly, Ms. Lackey has already said exactly what I feel, though I don't write professionally:

As a writer, I am deeply invested in my characters and their stories.  Some of them have made it on to professional prose, but writing is very hard work, and nothing like as immersive as the experience of playing their stories and reactions.  NCSoft is going to do something no one else ever has: completely destroy almost a hundred of my characters and stories.  Legally, that is not a criminal action.  But by all that is holy, it should be.

I do not believe there is anything else I can say.

~~~

I am sure there is actually more I can say, I'm just not sure how I should go about actually *doing* it.

[Terwyn]

Part V is now live.

http://missingworlds.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/voices-from-paragon-part-v-the-voiceless/

[Flashtoo]

Is there a way to share these blog posts on Facebook?

[Terwyn]

It should have automatically, at least on my own. Give me a second.

[Terwyn]

While I am still debating what to do for part VI, I will definitely be happy to announce that the title of part VII is "Enter the Mouse."

[Rotten Luck]

Speaking about the Mouse have you sent them a link to the blog!  One thing to read letters it's another reading the same thing from those who don't seem to be trying to tug at the Mouse heart strings.

[Terwyn]

I decided to do something slightly different this time around. I'll be putting the links in later. Please feel free to point out any factual deficiencies or possible areas of improvement.

Voices from Paragon, Part VII – Resilience

Three weeks ago, at 3 AM EST on December 1st, the servers for City of Heroes went offline for what may be the final time. Despite seemingly running out of time to save the game, the community did not waver, and in fact intensified their efforts, being called the year's best online community by Ten Ton Hammer, one of the top MMO community news sites. Contrary to expectations, the loss of our digital homeland has not diminished the efforts to do something to save the game, and has in fact resulted in some extremely unlikely ideas.

Enter Team Wildcard, who, drawing from the single long shot idea of contacting Disney about the game, prepared a solid pitch and sent it to the executives best suited to make decisions on the matter. While obviously they didn't pitch the game itself, its IP, or its studio, all they did was point out why buying and rebuilding Paragon might be a solidly profitable venture, and provide the necessary contact information for those who *do* have the rights to sell.

Wildcard has stated that they have a list of companies with whom they will be targeting the pitch if Disney and other ventures do not work out. While I do not know for sure the contents of this list, I am quite confident that no one would be surprised by any of the companies that are contacted in this effort.

In addition to this Wildcard effort, the story broke on the front page of the financial section of the Korean Times, as a Korean journalist contacted our dear Mercedes wanting to know more about the game and its impending shut down.  The most notable thing in the article is NCSoft's response, in which a spokesperson states that terminating City of Heroes was a "strategic decision," and more importantly, that "nothing had been decided on selling the game or other action afterwards."

Nothing had been decided on selling the game or other action afterwards.

Extremely curious, especially because in the infamous October 2nd release, NCSoft stated that "We've exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful."

And yet, now they say that nothing had been decided on selling the game or other action afterwards. I think the events of the past several years in the financial industry reveal just what tends to be the result when companies do such things, and I think the evidence speaks for itself. The day the article hit the newsstands, NCSoft's stock hit a new 52-week low, and shortly afterwards, announced a reorganization in which it would sell its entire share of NC Interactive, the subsidiary operating in the west that actually owns City of Heroes.

Now, some might decry the effort of the City of Heroes community as being a pointless endeavour, a first world problem focused on something that is, after all, just a game, but I will be the first to say that it is much bigger than the closure of a game and the studio that created it. This is a problem which is endemic to the world, a problem which is the cause of a great deal of strife.

I am speaking, of course, of lapses in ethics and empathy. It is all too easy to make decisions that influence the lives of people you have never met thousands of miles away, because you will not see how your decisions impact their lives. They are not people to you; they are academic points of consumer data. I have shared many stories about the importance and impact City of Heroes has had on many lives, but I have been holding one in particular in reserve, because of the obvious emotional impact it carries.

My friend Ironwolf has already posted this as a comment on the first entry of Voices, but I feel I ought to give it a proper place within the narrative I am working to construct. He writes,

This is for my granddaughter who I call Bean.

She is 10 now and has never had a single year that was without drama from a male figure in her life - except me - I am her Papa. She was 1 and her father "dropped" her breaking her right wrist. He left her and mom and moved from Michigan to Texas. She has never received so much as a birthday card from him.

Then my daughter married a guy who seemed a good guy and appeared to love my granddaughter as his own and I hoped against hope as parents do that they would live happy and forever. I was wrong. It turned out he had a drug problem brought about by working in a factory that caused his back and knees to ache. Within a year I was buying my daughter groceries as any money I gave them ended up buying drugs. Several years passed until my daughter saw the damage being done and left him.

My daughter found a new guy who was wealthy and hardworking and unknown to us was also an ex-con who was basically insane. He tried every way possible to control my daughter and separate her from her family and isolate her - not all at once but step by step like Worm tongue. During this time he also on a regular basis was mentally abusing my granddaughter. Being called stupid, a loser and every other hateful thing under the sun - took an outgoing 10 year old girl who got straight A's in school to sad loner who was failing 4th grade.

One day while at our house she watched me play City of Heroes, now I have been playing since the game began but she never really understood we were HEROES. She saw me battling a monster and my defeating him. For the first time she said, "Can I play?" I said of course and we spent the next 3 hours building a character and playing the game. I watched and coached her a bit and she played. I listened to her laugh - a real from the belly laugh and I realized to my horror it had been YEARS since I had heard her laugh like this and I nearly cried and had to leave the room for a moment.

I won't talk about the way we got the family out from under this monster. I will talk about my 10 year old hero standing beside her Papa fighting back against this live-in monster as she walked out of hell. She yelled at him and told him he was hateful and a horrible dad and that they would never go back to him. I was never more proud in my life of anyone and her spirit was bent but not broken.

My granddaughter then helped us get back her 2 year old sister who had been kidnapped by the father's family. She helped open the door and unbuckle the seat belts, when we had accidentally saw her sister at a McDonald's sitting in the car eating with one of the grandparent kidnappers. I ran interference and she helped her mom get the rest of the family back. Ten years old is young to have walked in the fires of hell and yet this game helped her learn she can fight back and defeat the monsters.

It also showed me the laughter that was missing from her soul and now I will spend every day working to keep the laughter loud and long and I thank this game for as long as it lasts for the bond we shared that was already strong now becoming a thing of legend. She now has a tale to tell her sister as she gets older in how she helped save her from the kidnappers.

The mantra we have continually repeated over the course of the effort to save City of Heroes is quite simple. We are Heroes. This is what we do. I have to admit, every lesson and ideal that comic books teach children, about good and evil, about making a stand for what is right, about acting out of love and mercy instead of malice and selfishness, and most importantly, just seeking to help.

It certainly not just a game to any of us, it is a realm of story and of great lessons, which many of us have used to teach our children. To paraphrase the old English author GK Chesterton, stories do not teach children that dragons exist. They already know that. Stories teach children that dragons can be slain. And the stories told in the City of Heroes do more than just that. They teach children to look for the helpers, and they teach children that they, too, can help.