OK, this is old news by now, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet, it is definitely worth sharing.

Here is a story about a Boston area psychologist who claims that treating people with problems stemming from "pathological computer use" is harder than treating people with online porn addictions.

Here is a perfect response from one of the talented writers at the GYG blog.  I'll quote the best part below.

My point in all this, gamers, is simple:

Own it.

Own your hobby.  Embrace what you are.  The fact is, nobody can make you feel inferior if they don’t have your permission.  In many ways, video game enthusiasts need to own what makes them unique in the same way the gay community has owned their uniqueness.  If they want to call you a nerd, screw ‘em — put it on your t-shirt.  If they want to call you anti-social geeks, screw ‘em — put it on your business cards.  Jerks and slapjags feed on your shame.  Cut off their food supply and they go someplace else to eat.

Society will change, but it’s a gradual change that takes awhile.  If you want to stop being ashamed of playing games… then stop being ashamed.  But own up to what you are and what you enjoy.  Nobody can take that away from you but you, and the sooner you embrace what you are, the happier you’ll be.

The two shirts?

I got caught up in gamershame in a big way the other day.  I was facilitating a meeting here at Microsoft to talk about gaming issues.  That morning, I was briefly stunned at my closet when I realized that most of what I had to choose from was gaming schwag T-shirts.  I thought, "oh man, I don't want to look like I only think about gaming... I don't want to look like a gamer dork... lemme just throw on this other thing."  Well, my opportunity to reconsider my poor choice came in the form of a huge stain from my lunch - right in the middle of my non-gaming shirt.  What did I have to replace it with in my office?  Gaming schwag t-shirts, of course!  I laughed, put one on, and led the meeting with quotes from those two sources above, an admission that even those in the industry can fall prey to gamershame, and a promise to OWN IT!

So, game on this week, and game proud!

How did we come up with the SideWinder logo?  Wow, sometimes I wonder that myself.  Not that I don't like it (I really do) but it was insanely hard work.  I didn't really think it would be easy, but I figured we'd have a couple of iterations and nail something down fairly fast.  It ended up taking months and it involved major contributions from an internal designer and two external firms.

Why so hard?  I didnt' really understand it until well after the decision process was over, but I think I know now.  Try answering this question:  "What does gaming mean to you?"  OK, got it?  Now the next one: "What symbol represents all the stuff that gaming means to you?"  OK, got that one?  Now for the last one:  "What does gaming mean to *us* (the Microsoft Hardware gaming team) and what symbol represents enought of what each of us thinks so that everybody can like it?"  As if answering the first two questions individually wasn't hard enough, we needed to do it as a team!  In the end, it was an awesome process.  It wasn't easy, but defining what gaming means to us shouldn't be easy.  We had great conversations about what gaming is (hardcore? casual? fun? competitive? fantasy? immersion? distraction?...) and how to embody that in a symbol.  I really grew to like my colleagues more through having those conversations because they made each of us get out there with our desires for the gaming business.  Those conversations were exactly the things we should keep on the front of our minds.

 Next post:  some of the icons that didn't make it...

Well, after reminding myself of the URL here, I'm glad to see that, while abandoned temporarily, the blog wasn't taken over by unicycle fanaticists.

Here's the deal.  When we originally conceived of this blog, it was meant to talk strictly about our products.  This seemed like a good way for us to avoid any sensitive intellectual property issues while we learned how to communicate to you in this new medium.  What we didn't realize is that by defining it as a blog just about our products, we were severely limiting the available subject matter for posts.  That's why you see a flurry of posts around our new mouse last year and then essentially nothing.

 Well, we're slightly wiser now and we've expanded the scope of the blog to be more what the tagline suggests: a discussion of all things gaming from the Microsoft PC Hardware group.  I chatted with other, wiser, more veteran Microsoft Bloggers and got the following advice:

a.      “To me a blog from “inside a team” should be revealing stuff that casual readers (and remember they may not all be hard core gamers, just passing internet “tourists”) might not come across elsewhere. It obviously needs to be stuff that is non-confidential and can be considered public knowledge but it could still be stuff that is interesting and hard for anyone to find elsewhere.”

b.      “My other advice is to look for stuff that you would have liked to have written about before, but couldn't. Can you provide a glimpse inside your group but have it be 6 months or 8 months out of date? Not as much fun to write about, but can still be fun to read.”

c.       “As a researcher, why not post about what you’ve learned from your research about your users? Generic stuff that doesn’t imply what you’re doing in the next release, or what’s changing compared to the current one, but just uncovering interesting user patterns…”

d.   "I don't get a good sense of who you are or who your team is.  Maybe some posts about your role?"

Why not follow good advice?

Stay tuned!

Hi all,

Again - way too long between posts - chalk it up to a noob blogger (me), the fact that this is just a small part of my job, and the fact that I was totally laid up with a bizarre medical problem for the past couple of weeks (any more on that is TMI..)

But what I really want to know is for those of you who own the SideWinder mouse, what do you think?  Have you used any of the gazillion features?  Do you like them?  Do you see room for improvement?  Bring it all on - I'd love to hear any feedback. 

It may be that there are just too few regular readers for this kind of survey, but fear not...  I've just gotten the good news that I'll get some help to reskin the blog and we'll be linking it to the main Microsoft Hardware webpage.  That should do wonders for the hit count.  :)

A reader posted about problems with the driver install.  Windows was giving an error message that there wasn't enough room on the HD, which obviously wasn't true.  Here's a tip from our driver group for what to do if you're experiencing the same thing:

This "out of HD space" message is a generic error message which doesn’t help much for troubleshooting. Usually users see this message is because of a bad uninstall of previous versions of our drivers. The first thing I would try is clean up some of the old drivers installed on themachine. Here are the instructions:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

After the installer cleanup, try installing the 6.2 drivers again.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of interviews with gamers.  See my post below for more background on the idea.  Victor is the guild leader for my WoW guild, Hit it Like you Mean It on Emerald Dream.  He runs a tight ship with an emphasis on fairness and humor.  He was willing to be my first guinea pig, so a big thanks to Victor!

I'm just going to give the link here and let you all give it a listen.  Let me know what you think, shoot a question, volunteer to be my next interviewee, whatever!

Gamer Interview #1

Here's a picture of my buddy Demetre and two of his heroes from the PMS Clan.  OK, we've all seen a picture like this before... guy at a gaming expo or LAN with a couple of attractive women.  So what's different here?  Demetre is different.  He's one of the nicest, most mild-mannered, and respectful people you could meet.  He's not posing with Athena Twin and Pink Bullet because he thinks they're good looking.  He's posing with them because the PMS servers he used to play on were a little haven where he didn't have to listen to insensitive comments about female gamers.  Got that?  He was (and is) tired of listening to the same old sexist comments about women in gaming.  Hats off to you, D!

I am fortunate to play WoW with some of the nicest people I've ever met online...  the guild is Hit it like you mean it on the realm Emerald Dream.  Horde FTW.  (We're recruiting HoTers and ranged DPSers at the moment.)  Well, 6 (Morviara is taking the photo here...) of my guildies came to the LANFest to hang out, try out the new mouse, and jump up and down for schwag with the rest of the mob.  Yes, we debuted our new mouse, yes we were interviewed by GotFrag, yes I got to go on the XFX tour bus, but my waaaaay favorite moment was hauling the guild up onto the mainstage to help give away our MS products.  Woot!  Ryan Pham (Phamtastic - playing for the SanFrancisco OPTX) is also onstage with us.  He was one of the professional gamers who gave us feedback on our early mouse prototypes.  A big thanks to him and all the other gamers who helped us to make the mouse what it is!

My fellow Microsofties, Diego Baez, Charlene Wan, Gil Manalo and I attended the Newegg LANFest 2K7 last weekend.  Here's a picture of Stu Grubbs from Gotfrag's FPS Labs interviewing Gil and me.  Gil is our industrial designer and gets the credit for making the mouse as comfortable and easy to use as it is.  Big thanks to Diego and Charlene for getting us into the event and for all the work to pull it off!

 Here's a link to the video of the interview.

Sorry for the lack of new content of late.  I have been awfully busy lately on what is sometimes referred to as "my job."  I try not to let little things like that get in the way of fun stuff like this, but sometimes it happens.

Anyhow, I wanted to introduce a new feature!  I will on occasion conduct an interview (more like a conversation, really) with a gamer and post it here.  Here's my thought...  When we conduct focus groups or lab studies with more than one gamer at a time, there is inevitably some downtime when the gamers are just hanging out chatting among themselves.  I LOVE those chat sessions!  Gamers have this awesome default conversation about who they are, when they started gaming, what they're playing nowadays, and what they like/dislike about the gaming scene, etc.  Did I mention that I love these conversations?  They're like whatever folks with common interests talk about when they get together... car geeks about cars, knitters about knitting, cat lovers about cats...

So, given that I get such a kick out of them, I thought I'd try and recreate some of that here.  Expect more of that same conversation: just gamers talking about gaming.  I'm working on server space for streaming audio and I have the first gamer interview all wrapped up and ready to post just as soon as there is a place to put it - probably in the next day or so.

If you'd like to be interviewed, just say so!

Just in case you haven't absorbed all the various details about our new gaming mouse, here's a site for you to look at.  Our marketing team developed this to help explain the mouse to our internal sales partners but I twisted their arms into letting me release it to you.  OK, the truth is they just gave it to me.  I thought you might like it all the same.

Hi all,

I was recently interviewed about our new Sidewinder Mouse by Stu Grubbs at the GotFrag FPSLabs.  They were curious about the various decisions that led to the mouse specs and features.  Check out the whole article here!  I'm guessing that some of you will probably have additional questions.  Feel free to feed them through the folks at GotFrag or post them here.