dahanese.com

Today, I want to talk about humans’ fascination with making their numbers bigger. As a gamer, I think I run with a crowd who are more obsessed with this notion than the general population but the psychological root of the issue is the same for everyone: we like getting more. We want to be bigger and better. We see and seek out competition in the most inane places and that single-minded focus quite often is detrimental to achieving a much more worthwhile and valuable goal.

For today’s blog post, I’m specifically talking about Twitter and how so many accounts lose sight of creating quality content for their Followers because all they are about is getting more.

Last night I fired up XCOM: Enemy Unknown and lost myself in it for over an hour and a half (streaming - alas, I killed two of my viewers. SORRY GUYS.) After I ended, I got a friendly message from an XCOMer who had... yes, you are guessing correctly... watched the credits.

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: I'm in them as the title that I had during the time I worked on the game.

After Friday's brief stint on Kotaku, I found out that all the blog posts I made during my tenure at my old company had been taken down. I did some digging over the weekend in an attempt to find them again, but seems the Wayback Machine archived last in 2011, when I had 27 posts (if memory serves me, I had over 60 when I left.)

Sexism exists. As a society we have come come a long way, but sexism still exists and we still have a lot of work to do to change people's attitudes towards women. I believe I am a strong woman. I believe in judging people based on what they do and how they conduct themselves in the world. As such, I am writing this response because I am completely and utterly sick of people who still feel the need to disparage women because they don’t fit a certain mold (note I say people here because both women and men do this and they equally sicken me.)

Today a man named Joe Peacock wrote an article that was featured on CNN titled “Booth babes need not apply” that went on to discuss women who he described as “6s” in the real world, but garbed in a geek tee shirt or cosplay outfit, became “9s”. He said these women were "a pox on our culture" and "just gross."

Today marks my last day at 2K Games. It’s a big day and saying it’s also an emotional one would be the understatement of the year for me. 2K Games has shaped not only my professional life in a huge way, but also my personal one, making this a big milestone in pretty much every way possible. And while I may be moving on to new opportunities, today I’m spending this blog post looking back on the past six years and remembering the awesome people I met and the awesome things we accomplished.

Yesterday, we announced the Borderlands 2 collector's edition. Someone on Shacknews asked me how big the loot chest was, and since we have a prototype in the office I said I'd take a picture for him to show scale.

I also had my miniature dachshund, Pancake, in the office, and since she's kind of notorious on Shacknews, I figured I'd use her for scale.

I like using yfrog.com (although it's not the best site, I know) for all my phone-uploaded photos (archiving FTW) so I tweeted the two below pictures of Pancake to show scale and then posted them on Shacknews.

Turns out gamers really care about the scale of their collector's edition loot chests and also love tiny dogs. As of this morning, she had 1270 upvotes on Reddit - someone dug her enough to repost the picture. She was also posted on tumblr and was reblogged quite a bit.

Pancake has now won the right to come to the office with me whenever she wants. Sure, she sits on my desk and whimpers after lunch because she knows she gets a treat then. Sure, she sometimes lets out a bark during a conference if she sees a big dog out the window. But she's probably also sold hundreds of collectors editions... So I think overall, she wins at video game marketing.

So, if you know me, you probably know I really like video games, the Internet, and hanging out with people on the Internet and that I meet in the Internet whilst doing things that relate to video games (I, know, I know, it's shocking that with these hobbies I run community and social for a video game company. Shocking, I tell you.)

Anyway, a long, long time ago I was terrified of public speaking, so I joined Model UN in high school because I believe the best thing to do when you are terrified of something is to force yourself to do it. My first conference, I was timid, so the cond one I said to myself "the worst you can do is fail utterly and everyone will laugh at you. Then you will leave this place and never see them again." (motivational speaker I am not.) that tactic worked for me and I ended up winning a ton of awards and becoming president of the club - so I apply it in how I work when dealing with the public facing portions of my job, which are numerous.

While I might not like the sound of my voice, I do a lot of interviews and these days, at work, we have a robust streaming setup. So when Greg bought Dark Souls and told me it was soul crushingly difficult, I thought that I would buy it too (because I'm a masochist) and cord myself playing it for the benefit of amusing my friends.

Last night I did one better: using http://twitch.tv/dahanese I streamed myself playing the first hour of the game. Between people on Twitter and Shacknews I think I got something like 200 views (I use ustrwam.tv currently for work so I havent poked around with the twitch metrics - I would love to know how many poor souls were concurrently suffering as I played horrifically poorly.) and while streaming myself doing something personal in my home was slightly terrifying to me (not to mention I was purposefully putting myself in a situation where I would look dumb for the amusement of others) I had a ton of fun with the entire ordeal. From setting up the system (thanks Loiosh!) and learning that MacBook Airs are fucking amazing and can run a high quality stream of two cameras over wireless to having my chat room heckle me and steer me at times towards death and success, everything was awesome.

I understand now why Greg likes streaming his live D&D sessions. While he Likes being in the spotlight far more than I do, I'm not without ego, and so even if this is a situation where I am the fool rather than the rockstar, having a crowd to cheer and laugh and enjoy is really welcoming.

I knew when I bought Dark Souls that it wasn't my kind of game. I like beating on things, but I am terrible at learning to be defensive and subtle when slashing away at enemies in video games. That's one reason I love Borderlands, for example: group play and as Brick I could run in and bash people in the face with my fists while my fiancé (playing the sniper) laughed at me through his rifle scope. I also rally don't ke things that are punishingly difficult - I challenge myself enough in life - I like the option to drop a game to easy and cruise through it after a difficult day. Dark Souls has none of this, but because of that, it makes for an awesome game to watch me play, and it also is an awesome game for my to have a group with me while I play so perhaps I can make it to the end.

Okay, maybe making it to the end is overzealous, but I'm looking forward to being back home next Monday so that I can figure out how to make the image quality better and stream again. And not only that, I'm a lady thinking s out buying direct feed inputs to stream games from my desktop or direct from my consoles. I mean, if people will watch me and through the amazing connectedness of a live stream hang out with me, think of how many video games I minght playnthat I've previously set aside. Who knows, may e someday I'll play one I'm actually good at (although I'm sure the ones I am terrible at are far more fun.)

So I'm taking requests on what you guys want to see me play in the future and inviting you to watch me through the next week or so with Dark Souls. I think live streaming is awesome and have thought so since we started doing it at work over a year ago, but I never realized how much I'd enjoy it for my own personal use.

Thanks, Internet! You win again.

Recently, people have been talking a lot about social media and, frankly, the term has quite the bad reputation. As someone who makes a living off things that include social media, I often jump into these debates and someone on the internet asked me to write up my thoughts on the topic. I have many thoughts, so I'm keeping this one general: I could go off on emerging media, experiential and interactive marketing, or even experimental marketing - likewise, I could rant for hours about the value of community and how it's morphed and grown immensely in importance over the past few years. But today, I'm keeping it simple, and I'm talking about "social media" as a generality. Consider this my starting rant (although I hope I'm not too ranty, or worse, preachy). If you like it, let me know if you want to hear more (and what you want to hear more of).

Enjoy.

If you have not read my entry "What the hell is Jejuning?" please go here: http://dahanese.com/?item=767. It explains my past year or so with Jejune (which is an ARG that has been going on in San Francisco for the past three years.) Today, I participated in the final chapter - and now, I'm going to tell you about it.

frequently, i talk about the internet, forums, twitter/facebook or other social networking with both incredulity and disgust. it's not really disgust - it's really fascination and admiration and a little bit of embarrassment - but i find myself saying stuff like "and i find that hilarious and awesome and it also makes me want to punch myself in the face a little bit." for example: i have a lot of work relationships that are maintained and thrive via twitter. now, i love twitter. not only is it awesome for 2K Games, but it's also awesome for me - for example, my best friend felicia just moved to australia. if i ever want to talk to her, texting is out of the question, but twitter is just as (if not more) effective. and there are also nifty bonuses like meeting people from the microsoft team that unless they tweeted, i really would have never known. example on this: last night i was playing fable III on my 360 and i was invited to play a racing game (NFS) with e from MS. never met the guy, only ever tweet with him, but spent over an hour kicking the shit out of some MS guys (and other folks who i didn't recognize) in a smash-em-up game.