Final Fantasy XI, a model of North American Intolerance

Hey, I don’t even play MMOGs.

I’d agree that playing alongside foreigners adds to the “adventure” feel of an MMPORPG. When I was playing DAoC, I deliberately set up a character on a French server. This helped me improve my (poor) French, as well as offering a very different experience.

I’ll agree with Kitsune’s “just don’t know any better” comments. I’ve seen a powerpoint presentation from Italy, and its goes on and on about how what they do can help people all over the world in China. So they have a slide with chinese people.

Yellow cartoon characters with the little triangle hats, buck teeth, and lines for eyes.

We told them nicely that they probably didn’t want to use those pictures
in the US. They just didn’t have the same sensitivity to these issues because it just had never come up.

When FFXI was announced, my thought was, “They had better be prepared for the onslaught of North American powergaming assholes who will try their damnedest to break the game.” I didn’t realize that there might be an attitude problem in the reverse direction, as well. :?

I don’t know if I should be pleased or unhappy that the rest of the world can be assholes like us, too. :)

It seems to me that the US is one of, if not the most, diverse and integrated places on the planet. It certainly is at the top of both categories among the countries I have visited.

olaf

Depends where you go in the US though. There are plenty of places in the midwest that are homogeneous, as well as in the south there are many places that are still in cultural apartheid.

I’ve seen many of those complaints, too, but I dismissed them as typical “power-gamer” whining instead of real racism. The only racist comments I’ve heard were the typical, overly-caustic trying-to-get-attention stuff that you see all over the internet. (Including this board, where we’d like to think the mean IQ is a little bit higher.)

This is a golden opportunity for NA gamers; we actually get a MMORPG that’s stable and has real content on release! The only valid complaint I could see about having no NA servers would be bad lag, but anyone who’s played the game will attest that there is virtually NONE. (The green “100%” that always sits in the upper-right corner of the screen, while I’m skeptical that it’s entirely accurate, is a brilliant idea on the part of the designers because it’s so calming.)

The other complaints are whining that it’s hard to find parties because of this perceived communication barrier, and that NA gamers need a “level playing field,” both of which are bullshit. I don’t speak Japanese, but I usually have an easier time reading the kana that occasionally come up on my screen than I do reading “ru m/f in rl?” and “w00t lvl5 blm lkg 4 pty n E Sarut!” I’ve yet to form a party with any Japanese players (because I play with a bunch of co-workers), but I’ve encountered many of them, and we communicate all we need with bows and gestures. As for the level playing field nonsense, that’s not only petty, it’s counter-productive. It’s awesome having these god-level characters running around. Lokust’s comments about the economy are completely true – all these people whining would be having a much tougher time in the game if they couldn’t sell drops from lvl 3 monsters for 1000 gil at auction, to higher-level Japanese players.

I would like to be able to hear a real, frank, discussion from intelligent Japanese players on how they feel about all the new NA players littering their servers, whether there’s genuine resentment on their side. I’m very skeptical that this attitude is limited to the US; the stereotype is that the Japanese society is the most xenophobic on the planet (which is, of course, itself a xenophobic stereotype).

As always, to each his own. But I think this really points out FFXI’s greatest strength, which is that it’s really just a cooperative Final Fantasy game, nothing more or less. What you describe sounds like a fully-realized Final Fantasy world, and I don’t think that fits the franchise. All the games (at least the ones I’ve played) are very story-driven; they have expansive worlds, but they’re only realized enough to support the story. In FFXI, you’re fairly limited in what you can do, but all the things you can do are presented as they would be in a single-player FF game or its minigames.

Contrast that with Star Wars Galaxies, another attempt to take a hugely popular, story-based license and turn it into a massively multiplayer game. They took the route you describe, trying to create a “virtual world” where you could do anything you could imagine. As a result, the gameplay got lost (IMO, of course). The only people I’ve spoken to who still enjoy the game are the ones who enjoy it as a world, not as a game – the game itself is tedious. I have to wonder if FFXI had been more open-ended, if you would’ve heard the same complaints of “it doesn’t feel like Final Fantasy.” And it’s not a case of being defeatist, saying that we’re going to play it safe and only try what we know works. It’s a case of knowing your audience and knowing your source material. Final Fantasy is best as a setting for games with simple mechanics and epic scale.

Actually, I don’t want a virtual world and am not usually turned on by freedom in games, as I’m usually more attracted to simple gameplay mechanics with excellent implementation. I want to do more interesting things in a MMORPG, rather than just battle like a typical RPG. I don’t think the roleplaying in roleplaying game has to be just fighting and am usually intrigued by other applications of it. Games that do something similar, namely Suikoden III and Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle) are still games, they just have all sorts of angles to them. Final Fantasy is not bound to be any one way. Certainly, FFXI is as beautiful as all the other FFs have been, but I just wish had as unique a world vision and followed it through with gameplay. And obviously the designers have never been afraid to change the games as much they see fit. You know, just because you could choose to do some be some thing else wouldn’t mean that the game would be more open-ended, either, like choosing a class in a game.

-Kitsune

I just wanted to toss in my take on the whole international servers bit. Back on PSO on the DC, early on my group and I became thoroughly sick of the American gamers online, especially due to all the cheating, weapon-stealing, and BSOD crap. So we moved en masse to the Japanese servers, and everyone was exceptionally nice, happy to see us, and often tried out their English on us. We played for many weeks there, both with Japanese players and among ourselves, and never ran into any problems.

Flash forward several months to the launch of PSOv2. Our gang reforms, we go back to the old Japanese server stomping grounds, and nobody wants to deal with us at all. Eventually we find out it’s because, after we all stopped playing regularly, the Japanese servers were essentially invaded by US gamers who were solely out to fuck with people’s games. People lost lvl 100 characters, rare items were stolen, games were ruined, etc., partially because the Japanese players simply didn’t know any better when it came to the assholes. So, to a large degree, these jerk-offs ruin the game for people who aren’t even around when they pull their shit. PSOv2 was substantially less enjoyable without new people to play with.

On a sidenote, my favorite PSO moment of all-time happened in a Japanese lobby. One of our group liked to make animations using the symbol chat that were, shall we say, in questionable taste. His favorite was a fairly graphic depiction of someone being assaulted anally while yelling “No!” “Stop!” in various frames of animation. It was funny at the time.

So we’re in a lobby on a Japanese server chatting a bit, the place is full of maybe 30 players, all Japanese except for the three of us. Our resident animator fires off his “No!” “Stop!” bit, and all chat instantly ceases. There’s an awkward moment of nothing, and suddenly everyone else in the lobby disappears in about a 10 second span. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at an online game moment.

Moral: Funny is in the eye of the beholder, and we’re all assholes sometimes. :wink:

~MJK

Um, no, we’re not. I don’t see much distinction between ruining a game for people by stealing items & such, or ruining a game by offending people. Sure, you can say there’s a difference in scale, no permanent harm done and all that, but I don’t think so; I think the only difference is that the second time, you and your friends were in on the “joke” (for lack of a better word). The end result is the same, it’s being immature and selfish and taking the fun away from other people. I bet that the people who were hacking into the game thought they were being really funny, too – after all, it’s just a game, right?

Y’all are welcome to call me a sanctimonious tight-ass all you want, but I think it’s a real problem. There’s an epidemic of immature dorks in massively multiplayer games, and it does as much to ruin the play experience as cheating or hacking or “griefing.” There was some moron on FFXI the other night who thought he was the funniest thing; he’d called himself “Taekinapoo” and was running around cussing about chocobos for the whole area to hear. He didn’t get my character killed, he didn’t cause me to level down, he didn’t cause me to lose items, but the end result was the same – he caused me to stop enjoying the game. This kind of thing was bad enough before, when I thought it was all just 12-year-olds being 12-year-olds, but now I know that the average age for gamers is in the mid-to-late 20’s, so there was a good chance this guy was an adult and part of the workforce. That’s just depressing.

It all goes back to the “people are broken” comment. Why open these games up as massively-multiplayer experiences in the first place, if all people are going to add are annoyances?

I don’t generally think of myself as racist. However, I am loquaciousist and prolificist, so I decline to read half the above posts.

Hey, I didn’t choose to be long-winded. It’s just the way God made me. I’m here, I’m prone to use an excessive amount of dialogue to express a simple or common viewpoint that could be as effectively communicated using much less verbiage, deal with it.

When comparing one group’s xenophobia to another’s, what’s the basis for comparison? Who has an unbiased sample set? What evidence is there that is relatively complete and unbiased? It’s impossible to debate intelligently without agreeing on this sort of data first – and once we have that data, the data will speak for itself. We don’t have that kind of data, so at this point we’re bullshitting to speak in terms of one place being “more xenophobic” than another.

In my experience everyone thinks their own kind is best. I’ve been with a Chinese girl for six years now, and I notice that she and her family typically have Chinese friends, go to Chinese places, etc. And my family has white friends, go to American places, etc. Both sides pretty much stick to what they’re familiar with, to what is like themselves.

I was fortunate that when I went to college I went to a University with a huge foreign population (UT Austin) from every corner of the world. That was more educational than many of the classes.

Most people don’t have that kind of education. Without it, they go on thinking that whatever they’ve always known is best.

The South is pretty integrated, still – whether you’re poor white or poor black it doesn’t matter, it’s the same Man keepin’ ya down. :)

I don’t think there’s a single non-white person in all of rural PA.

I remember Salt Lake City being quite an international city when I was there. Then when we drove through a small town not 20 minutes outside of SLC, my Chinese girlfriend and her friend were openly gaped at by the children in the town, who had never before seen someone who wasn’t white. The town appeared to have a rather shallow gene pool…