Have Photoshop, Will Travel

Squirrel the Bacon Pirate

One of the things I often do on forums is illustrate discussions with pictures of squirrels.  Players have been requesting reposts so here are a few of the Photoshop composites.

One of our standard forum poll answers is "Bacon."  This started out with a search for "Bacon Pirate."  Found a workable image, changed the background to black, resized and cropped and rotated.  Worked it together with an image of a squirrel standing up.  The flagpole is crude; didn't spend a lot of time on refinement.  But it works.

This next composite doesn't have any squirrels; it's a standby that returns to use in a lot of situations.  The basic idea here was to adapt the masks of comedy and tragedy into a jolly Roger.

The Drama Pirate

Forums in any online game attract people who are at least as interested in playing other people as in playing the game itself.  Rather than let that accumulate to toxic levels it's sometimes useful to hoist the appropriate identifying graphics.

Remember which door we opened.

Another non-squirrel graphic comes into use when players quarrel over gaming styles.

Play within the rules, of course.  And if you play within an alliance the team may set certain requirements for continued membership.  Beyond those boundaries anything goes.  A lot of people sign up for this sort of game to indulge their inner troublemaker.

Moderators who troll?  Say it ain't so.

What's worse than a troll picking its nose?

One of these trolls was easy; the other took a bit of work.  If there's anything more charmingly grotesque than an illustration of a troll picking its nose, that would have to be an animated GIF of a troll eating its boogers.  This required moving the index finger and creating a tongue as well as making the phlegm appear to fall as it drips.  Ended up using the tongue from a kitten and then putting it through several distortions.

The Kixeye Death Star

Kixeye is a pretty cool company; they actually offered me moderator ops on the same day I Photoshopped their company logo onto the Death Star.  Which of course meant that shortly afterward there had to be a Darth Squirrel.

Join the dark side?  Who, me?

Will rifle through the image files and pull out more of these another day.

Empirical Evidence of Something Gamers Have Known All Along

As the old joke goes: violent content doesn't make gamers aggressve; lag does.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921743

The research sought to establish whether it was violence in games which made players feel more aggressive, or a combination of other factors.
Six separate studies were carried out.
One of them involved modifying Half-Life 2 - a critically-acclaimed, but graphic, shooting title.
The researchers created a modified version in which rather than violently removing enemies, the player would instead "tag" foes who would then evaporate.
This version was tested alongside the normal, violent version.
However, only some of the gamers were given a tutorial before playing the game so they could familiarise themselves with the controls and game mechanics.
The researchers found that it was the players who had not had the tutorial who felt less competent and more aggressive, rather than people who had played the more violent version of the game.