writing | Superior Realities

Star Trek: Online Thoughts:

It was recently announced that the MMORPG Star Trek: Online will soon be free to play. Being the cheap bastard I am, my ears immediately perked up when I heard this. While I no longer consider myself a Trekkie (long story), I still have enough lingering interest in the Star Trek universe to render me mildly curious about this.So, I promptly contacted one of my Facebook friends who plays, and being the awesome person she is, she immediately gave me one of her referral codes for a free trial, and I dove in as the proud captain of the USS Varian Wrynn (*nerdly snicker*).

But my interest in the game did not live long or prosper. The friend who referred me absolutely adores this game, and I feel guilty to say anything bad about it–it almost feels like I’m insulting her kid. But hiding from the truth never did anyone any good, so Teri, I’m sorry, but I have to say it:

Star Trek: Online is not a good game. At all.

There were little things that annoyed me right out of the gate. The interface is just a little too big and little too clunky, leading to a claustrophobic feeling. I rapidly began to miss World of Warcraft’s bare bones interface, especially when I discovered that a giant message pops up in the middle of your screen every time you’re near someone or something that can be interacted with. Dear god, did that get old fast. To be fair, there might be a way to turn this off–I didn’t feel like trying to find out which of the game’s many options tabs it might be under.

There is also an option (which was automatically turned on for me) that for reasons unclear puts the graphics on a setting I can only call “terribad.” The game actually looked great once my friend told me how to turn it off, but it didn’t leave a good first impression.

I’m an experienced gamer, but this game made me feel like a complete newbie. I spent a great deal of time getting lost; while quest givers and the like are tracked on the mini-map, so is everything else, and I couldn’t find any way to filter out the clutter. There were a lot of different currencies and complexities related to gear that were never clearly explained to me. I never even figured out how the leveling system works. It didn’t seem to have levels like a traditional MMO, but yet I had an XP bar. There were several times where I was automatically grouped with people, but these experiences mostly amounted to them completing my objectives for me while I wandered in circles in a vain attempt to figure out what I was supposed to do. I know the mindlessness of WoW may have spoiled me, but throw a guy a bone.

The game is split between ground missions where you command your character and NPC allies and space missions where you pilot your vessel. The ground combat is okay, I suppose. Nothing to write home about. The ship combat is actually a little interesting and involves careful positioning to maximize your firepower while trying to protect the damaged portions of your ship from further harm. But the space portions also suffered from clunky controls and seemingly needless over-complication. They also seemed to be the opposite extreme from WoW’s “LULZ FACEMASH KEYBOARD AND INSTAKILL AL ENEMEEZ LOLOLOL” questing; the fights seem to drag on forever.But my biggest complaint was the game’s load screens. Simply put, it has an absurd number of them. That may seem like a silly thing to pick on, but this number of load screens would be annoying in any game, and in an MMO, it’s just unforgivable. One of the thing’s I love about WoW is the way I can stand in Rut’theran Village and see the World Tree four zones away and know that I can hop on my drake and fly there (and far beyond) without a single second of load time. ST:O, by comparison, required a load screen just to get from one section of a space station to the other.

Hell, even Dungeon Siege III, a single player game sometimes criticized for its lack of scale, would put me through fewer load screens in a week than ST:O did in a day.

It’s flagrant false advertising to even call ST:O a massively multiplayer game. There’s nothing massive about it.

But in the interest of fairness, there is one thing about ST:O that I really loved, and that’s its customization. Every imaginable aspect (and some unimaginable aspects–the boob size option on the females kind of creeped me out) of your character, your NPC helpers, and your ship is fully customizable, from fine details of their uniforms to their height to scars and tattoos. The game even lets you pick your character’s body language, an idea so amazingly cool that I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life wishing every game had it.

Still, the fact remains that I uninstalled the game after just one day. There’s no single, critical error that ruined this game (except maybe those icky load screens), but it’s so plagued with small annoyances that there is no room for anything resembling fun.

The one good thing to come out of this is I have a much greater respect for what Blizzard accomplished with WoW. I’ve often criticized its basic gameplay, but only now do I realize how many pitfalls they evaded.

I feel bad for my friend. ST:O is her only real experience with modern video games (so far as I’m aware), and she has no idea what she’s missing out on. But on the plus side, I’ve gained a greater respect for her abilities as a gamer. If she can wade through the mind-numbing confusion of ST:O and succeed, she could probably dominate WoW.

In other news…

My contributor’s copy of MOG #33 arrived yesterday. Seeing my name in print is a very bizarre experience, but gratifying, too.

Race in Fantasy:

This is a topic that’s been nettling at for me for years now. I was never quite sure of the right venue to discuss it, but this seems as good a choice as any.

It occurred to me once that, while fantasy authors will generally go into great detail in describing everything about their characters’ appearances, they rarely if ever make any mention of the character’s race. And the reason for this is obvious: we all know they’re white.

I’m more of a fantasy fan than a science fiction fan, but one thing I always respected in sci-fi was its tradition–started by Star Trek and continued by many others–of portraying an ethnically diverse cross-section of humanity. The unspoken message is that, in the future, race doesn’t matter. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and all the others are all just thought of as human.

But sadly, fantasy isn’t like that. Sometimes it may pay lip service to the idea with it’s multiple non-human races, but that’s sort of undermined by the way they smack of Caucasian. When was the last time you encountered a black Elf? An Asian Dwarf?

Ironically, Warcraft–which even a fanboy like me will admit has a very basic and unsophisticated story most of the time–does a better job of this than most. If there’s one message the franchise has repeatedly hammered into the player, it’s that racism is bad (mmkay?), and the great diversity of their races allows them to do so with a reasonable degree of authenticity. Also, that they let you play as a variety of racial options as a human (and some other races) is nice, if hardly unusual in the video game world.

That’s not to say that fantasy never includes anything but white people, but their history with other races is spotty at best. In my experience, the most common non-white races to see in fantasy are Arabic and South Asian (probably because these would be the only ones likely to have been well-known to the medieval European societies fantasy tends to base itself on). But these are often portrayed as villains, or at least suspicious foreigners–a problem that all non-white races suffer in fantasy, honestly.

Blacks and Asians really get the short end of the stick in fantasy. I’ve been reading fantasy novels compulsively for the last ten years, and out of all that experience, I can only think of two high fantasy series in which black people were portrayed prominently, and both were pretty outside the norm of high fantasy. The first is Ian Irvine’s Three Worlds Cycle, which has featured many prominent and likable black characters, such as Tallia Bel Soon, who is described as having “skin the colour of chocolate” and is renowned for both her beauty and her skills as a fighter and sorceress. The other is Glen Cook’s Black Company books, which featured, among others, the black wizard One-Eye. He wasn’t portrayed in a very positive light, but neither was anyone else, so it’s safe to say that wasn’t a comment on his skin tone.

For Asians, the only examples I can think of off the top of my head are the samurai guy in Mickey Zucker Reichert’s Bifrost Guardians series, and the Nyeung Bao, also of the Black Company novels.

Hispanics suffer perhaps the worst of all. I can’t really think of any I’ve seen in fantasy.

(As an aside, I’ve always been confused when fantasy authors describe a character as “dark,” as there are a lot of ways to interpret that. To be fair, some of them could mean “black” or “South Asian” or “Hispanic,” but based on the rest of the genre, I tend to assume this means “dark hair with a tan.”)

One reason for the whiteness of fantasy is immediately obvious: the genre is mostly based on western European mythology, so it feels natural to have it mostly populated by western European-inspired people.

But is that the only reason? Is there some hidden and shameful streak of racism running through us fantasy authors? It has certainly become common to deviate from the traditions of the genre’s mythological roots in other ways, so why does this racial inequity continue to stand?

And perhaps the most important question of all is, is this okay? Is the fact that fantasy worlds are as white as Dempsters a harmless idiosyncrasy of the genre, or a grave injustice that sends the wrong message to non-white readers/viewers/players? Or is it somewhere in the middle?

And if it is a problem, what do we do about it? People have become so used to the Caucasian dominance in fantasy that a major break from that now might seem pretentious or preachy.

This is a major concern in my own writing, and a large part of the reason I haven’t broken free of the ethnic mold much. (This is also why I haven’t written any gay or lesbian characters yet, but that’s another topic.) In two of my novels (and, by extension, their subsequent sequels), I’ve tried to create distinct human ethnicities, but in one, the difference between the two was based on magic, and they were both completely white, and in the other, they were all, again, mostly various shades of white. The only major exception was a sort of quasi-Asian race with blue hair and pale skin.

I’m not proud of this, but again, any other races just end up standing out so much in a fantasy story that it just ends up feeling awkward and potentially preachy, and that’s no good. So what am I, as an author, to do?

If this same struggle is going on in all the other fantasy writers out there, then I can see why the Caucasian obsession persists.

If you were looking for me to make a point in this post, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. The fact is that I really don’t know how to feel about this issue or what can be done about it, or even if anything should be done about it.

I believe strongly in ethnic diversity, and I also believe that it should be depicted in the media, but it can’t be right to shoehorn a bunch of black people into a story just to make a point, can it?

I love fantasy, and I don’t want to view it as a cesspool of racism, but there are times that seems like the only logical conclusion.

If my thoughts seem to be all over the place, that’s because they are. I find this a very complex issue, and despite all my thought over it, I have come to no solid conclusions.

Please share your comments on this. I’m very eager to see what people think. Is the lack of racial diversity in fantasy a travesty, or a non-issue? If it is a problem, what should be done about it? If you know of any high fantasy works not mentioned here (in any medium) that have broken the racial mold, please mention them.

I know this has already been a terribly long post, but some other notes before I let you go…

Publishing News:

Sometime this week (I haven’t been able to find an exact date), Beckett Media’s Massive Online Gamer magazine will be releasing its issue #33, which includes an article on WoW patch 4.2 by yours truly. I encourage you all to pick it up and marvel at my wondrous insight into the effects this patch has had on the game. (:P)

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: writing

Star Trek: Online Thoughts

Race in Fantasy (+ Publishing News)