5 Wiki Wiki

With any luck, this will be a wiki wiki post, though once I get going one can never be sure when I'll stop!


The word "wiki" is supposed to have derived from the Hawaiian "wiki wiki" meaning quick or speedy. If you think about a wiki website, the name makes a lot of sense, given that a wiki allows multiple contributors to update information quite quickly.


If you've ever looked at Wikipedia (which would have to be the best wiki in the world) on the day of a major event - say, the swearing in of the prime minister - you will generally find that this new information about both the person and the nation has already been updated.


Apart from Wikipedia, the wiki I look at most often can be found here. Yes, it is The Vault, a Fallout wiki, and it is quite possibly the second best wiki in the world (though this has yet to be proven).

I have visited The Vault many times when I've been stuck on one particular part of Fallout, or if I can't work out how to do something (like make my avatar move the way I want, for example). If you take a look at The Vault, you can see it has over 11000 pages, meaning it has thousands of contributors and a plethora of information about the history of the game, it's characters, different cities in the Fallout universe and the best ways to play.


When I was a Library student, I remember we had a dreaded group assignment (in my opinion, group assignments are a kind of cruel, and unfortunately not unusual, form of torture inflicted on students so that Lecturers have less marking to do - am I wrong?). We found that the best way for our group to work on this - a group which included students who traveled a long way to the University, was through a wiki. At that stage, I had never contributed to one before and wasn't even sure what to do, but given that they are so easy to edit and update, I found working on that particular group assignment almost painless.


Well, this post is fast becoming very non wiki wiki, so I shall leave it for now. Suffice to say, I am a pro-wikiite and can really see the benefit in using them - they're the perfect way to share information, which is what I imagine the internet was created for in the first place ...


P.S. How awesome are those Common Craft videos by Lee LeFever? Here's one you won't see in the Web 2.0 training (it's a Youtube video, so you may not be able to see it at work):

5 Warriors AND Women

Meet Violet. This is my avatar in the game Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout is quite possibly my favourite game of all time (although, remember I’m a bit of a noob, and haven’t yet played a HUGE number of games to compare). 

There are many, many reasons why I love this game - far too many to go into right now - but one of the main reasons is that you can play a female character of your own design. Of course, as in most video games, the design choices are limited - she is still generally young, she is heavily made up and has a figure I could only dream of - but at least she is dressed for her environment (as opposed to being half-naked), and if I wanted to, I could make her older (but alas not fatter).  

When I think of the (roughly twelve) Playstation games I have played so far in my noobtastic career, I can think of two where you could actually choose to have a female avatar, and two more where you could kind of play as a female, while the main emphasis still remained on the male characters (think Madison Paige in Heavy Rain). 

Now, if we think about the statistics I quoted in my first post, the fact that there are more games with male avatar choices than females makes sense - the game developers want to appeal to a male-dominated (only just!) market. 

But why, oh why, does the majority (of this minority) of female characters have to be the half-naked, anatomical equivalents of Barbie™? Is it because male gamers won’t play a game where the female characters aren’t “hot”?

If you’re up for a bit of heavy reading, you should check out this “feature” by Shaylyn Hamm (which is actually part of her thesis on the aesthetics of female video game characters). In this “feature”, Hamm talks about the wide variety of male characters (in terms of body shape, clothing and facial structure) and the limited design of female characters over a number of different games. 

As a part of her thesis, Hamm designed two new female characters for the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2, based on the male characters already in the game (the Medic and the Heavy Weapons guy). You can see her female characters here. 

I love them.

Neither of them are “pretty” or “ugly” and they are both dressed for their environment (i.e. fully clothed!). To me, they look like real women just doing their job, and I can honestly say if given the choice, I’d rather play as these women than the Barbie doll doppelgangers of most video games today. 

What do you think of Shaylyn Hamm’s designs? If you’re a guy and the option was there to have either a male or female avatar, would you ever choose to play as a girl? Let me know! :)