The Funeral of WoW Gold

Dalia Rawson of Ballet San Jose has many talents, but she cannot speak Hungarian. That’s why, when Rawson decided on the title “Fèm” for the piece she was choreographing for the company’s upcoming “Hidden Talents” program, she chose better than even she herself realized.

“Fem” is the name of one of 18 piano etudes by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti that helped inspire Rawson’s piece. Ultimately, she set her work to four of Ligeti’s etudes (including Fèm) as well as two capriccios by the composer.

Rawson was drawn to the word fem because its spelling suggested a feminine association. “The word means`a brightly colored metal’ in Hungarian,” Rawson says. “When I saw it, I thought it was

related to`femme’ and I thought it meant woman. I like that association; I want everyone to have that association with the word, and the idea that women are like metal, they’re strong. That’s the reason I chose it for the name of the piece.”

This dual meaning would also be a particularly fitting description of Rawson, who returned to Ballet San Jose in fall 2007 after battling Stage IV Hodgkins lymphoma. Rawson no longer dances, but Fèm brings her artistic presence back to Ballet San Jose’s stage in a new and different way by highlighting her choreographic prowess — which, as it turns out, she’s been honing, in a sense, from a surprisingly young age.

“Fem” is one of five world premiere works in Ballet San Jose’s

latest program, “Hidden Talents,” which showcases choreography by five company members who are best known to the ballet’s audiences as dancers.

The ballet presents “Hidden Talents” Feb. 26-March 1 at the
San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, 255 Almaden Blvd. The performance also includes original pieces in a variety of styles by Preston Dugger, Karen Gabay, Tiffany Glenn and Alexsandra Meijer.

Rawson’s “Fem” is a contemporary abstract ballet for nine dancers that uses classical techniques.

“When she found that I had asked the dancers to choreograph, she bounced right in and told me she, too, had aspirations to make ballets,” says Ballet San Jose artistic and executive director Dennis Nahat. “That was yet another grande jete for Dalia because now she had created a very exciting work.”

Rawson, who grew up in Saratoga, discovered her love of ballet in dance classes. Around age 5, she knew she wanted to be a ballerina — although for a short time at that age, Rawson says she aimed for dual careers: to be a ballerina and a farmer.

By the time she was 8 or 9, Rawson clearly had a passion for ballet in its every aspect: not only dancing, but also choreographing, and putting together sets and costumes for her own ballets that she would stage with ballet school classmates. Their repertoire included “The Nutcracker,” Coppelia and “Peter and the Wolf.”

“I choreographed at home, just with my friends on the weekends. We would have sleepover parties, and I would invite over all the girls from my ballet class and I would make them rehearse all night. We would perform at 4 in the morning with our neighbors — anyone we could drag in off the street — in my parents’ living room,” Rawson says. “We did tons of little ballets that I would’ve spent a year on, making my notes and drawing some diagrams.”

Once, Rawson and her fellow dancers pooled their allowances for “special effects” in their own production of Swan Lake. This performance was to be presented for their parents at the Campbell studio of the Gloria Mohr International Ballet School, where they took classes.

Although they had envisioned a scene in which the maidens transformed into swans behind a cloud of dry ice, the young dancers’ allowances wouldn’t purchase enough dry ice for the desired effect — nor could they afford to test it out in rehearsal.

“So we had a bucket on the floor, and we put the dry ice in, and then you had six girls trying to change costumes behind the bucket with a little fog,” Rawson recalls.

Following her many “sleepover” productions in elementary and middle school, Rawson continued to study dance, attending the San Francisco Ballet School and the Joffrey Ballet School. Rawson graduated from Lynbrook High School in 1991 and soon after auditioned and became a member of the San Jose Cleveland Ballet, which was then based in Cleveland, Ohio. As a California native, she found the Ohio climate took some getting used to, especially the much harsher winter.

Rawson lived in Cleveland for about nine years, visiting friends and family in the Bay Area when the ballet company would come to town for its San Jose performances.

She returned to the Bay Area full time when the Cleveland half of the company ceased operations and the organization relocated to San Jose.

Over the years, some favorites among Rawson’s numerous roles included Swanhilda in “Coppelia,” the Cowgirl in Martha Graham’s “Rodeo,” the Pianist in Flemming Flindt’s “The Lesson” and Maria and the Tsarina in Nahat’s version of “The Nutcracker.”

She was seen in performances on TV, dancing in the PBS production of “Nahat’s Blue Suede Shoes” and on “The Drew Carey Show.”

Upon the company’s move to San Jose, Rawson also began teaching at the Ballet San Jose School.

Through fellow Ballet San Jose company member Beth Ann Namey, Rawson met Gareth Hughes, a software engineer originally from Australia, who works at NVIDIA in Santa Clara.

“He started coming to dancer parties, so I asked [Namey] who her Australian friend was, and eventually we met each other alone, when we both weren’t dating other people,” Rawson says. “The stars aligned and we were engaged about three months after that.”

Rawson says that the software industry and the dance world have proven to be surprisingly similar, and complementary.

“You’re really doing what you want to do, not what you need to do, and you’re really doing whatever it takes to get it done. I think just that similarity in culture makes it easy for us to get along. He gets it if I’m here until midnight,” Rawson says of Hughes.

Rawson had just finished a demanding run of dancing the lead roles in “The Nutcracker,” when in early 2006 a seemingly routine visit to her chiropractor for a stiff neck led to a concerned referral to a specialist, a biopsy and ultimately a diagnosis of advanced Hodgkins lymphoma.

The news came as Rawson and Hughes were planning their wedding. Rawson began an aggressive treatment regimen at the Stanford Cancer Center, and so she and Hughes postponed the big event they had planned, but married in a small civil ceremony just after Valentine’s Day, in February 2006.

“We didn’t want to put off being married even though we had to put off the big party,” Rawson says. “They said I was in remission in June, and then in September we had our big ceremony, which was wonderful, at the San Jose Museum of Art,” she says.

Scarcely a week after the September wedding doctors found that the cancer had returned, and Rawson went back into treatment, undergoing a bone marrow transplant in December 2006. Because her immune system was suppressed, Rawson was hospitalized for 28 days and allowed few visitors.

Recovering at home for months after, she was nearly sequestered. “I got completely addicted to [the online video game] World of Warcraft — I still play,” Rawson says with a laugh. “I made fun of it before I got sick, but I couldn’t leave the house for months, and I played a lot of World of Warcraft.”

During her second round of treatment, Rawson also became one of the first Hodgkins patients to receive targeted cellular therapy, which takes stem cells harvested during the bone marrow transplant and uses them to attack the Hodgkins cells. “That’s how they should cure cancer, because there are no side effects, no nausea, no nothing. That’s the best treatment,” she says.

By fall of 2007, Rawson was cleared by her doctors to return to teaching ballet.

She credits the support of her family — especially her husband, mother and father — for getting her through. Rawson’s mother came to every doctor’s appointment and was at the hospital every day. “My mother and I have always been close, but she’s absolutely my best friend. My husband, too,” Rawson says.

And now, a little more than two years after the bone marrow transplant, reports from doctors are promising. “I’ve had totally clean scans for two years now,” Rawson says. “Two years — that was a big one because I don’t have to go every six months for scans anymore; I only go every year. And after five years, they admit that I’m cured.”

The cancer did mean that Rawson had to retire from dancing, and naturally, there are some aspects of the art form that she especially misses. “I miss jumping. I had a good jump. I can say that — I’m retired,” she says with a smile. “I miss performing as well, of course. I miss learning new choreography. I miss the whole life of dancer. But I’m here and I’m still involved, and there are lot of things I don’t miss. I don’t miss the pain. And I love going to the theater now to watch ballet.”

Rawson and Hughes recently celebrated their third wedding anniversary. The couple bought a house in Willow Glen about a year ago. “I love everything about it,” she says of the community.

Last Halloween, Rawson enjoyed giving out candy to the neighborhood children and admits to giving extra candy to those dressed as ballerinas; those trick-or-treaters who could pirouette got extra goodies, too. “We’re not above bribery,” she jokes.

Since her return to Ballet San Jose in 2007, Rawson has worked as the ballet mistress of the Ballet San Jose School, and it’s clear that she takes great pride in watching her students progress. She works closely with school director Lise la Cour, and she teaches all levels of the school’s professional division classes. She choreographed a performance for the professional students last season. This year, she will see the first class of students that she has taught from the school’s youngest level reach high school graduation age.

“I started teaching them nine years ago, so they were like 8, and now they’re 17, 18 and graduating from high school. Just to see them become dancers is amazing. It’s so fulfilling,” she says.

Soon, she will start preparing some of her students for their parts in Ballet San Jose’s upcoming spring production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In addition to working as the school’s ballet mistress, Rawson is Ballet San Jose’s rehearsal assistant. She helps the company dancers learn choreography and aids the choreographer by taking notes during rehearsals.

It was Rawson’s work at rehearsals that helped give rise to her piece Fm, which she describes as having been inspired by the dancers themselves.

“I spend a lot of time in the studio just sort of observing the dancers, and I really was inspired in just sort of the way they interacted with each other,” Rawson says, “and how their professional life is going on and their personal life is going on, but they put it all aside for what they’re doing in the work.”

“Fem” will be the first work that Rawson has choreographed for a professional company. “It’s an absolutely incredible opportunity to work with professional-caliber dancers,” she says.

The first element of the piece she chose was actually the music, which initially shaped the choreography.

Rawson says she picked Ligeti’s études and capriccios because she has always liked the composer’s work. The music is complex and modern, and it’s also famously difficult to play.

“The music is just wild,” Rawson says. “I like to search on YouTube for people playing it. People post videos of themselves playing it to prove that they can do all these things.”

Audiences at “Hidden Talents” will have chance to see just how wild the music is, with respected pianist Michael McGraw playing Ligeti’s music, in view of the audience.

“Choreographers create what they mostly have experienced — or at least that the best way to create — and Dalia has come up with a tour de force that will set a very high standard for herself,” Nahat says. “As a first work to select the difficult music of Gyorgy Ligeti — she starts with music that propels her into a style that forces her to create the avant-garde, yet she has stayed within the classical ballet technique.”

With Rawson setting the bar — and the barre — so high for her first professional choreography, it seems Ballet San Jose audiences have a lot to look forward to, as she reveals more of her hidden talents.

Here’s a new approach to teaching financial literacy: a video game in which you play the business manager of a free-spending celebrity, trying to satisfy her wish list while keeping her out of the red.

The game is no World of Warcraft. It’s a simple, mildly-amusing Flash job of the Chimgam ilk that eats up countless working hours nationwide. And it appeals primarily to an audience of women age 18-35 (studies show that women play even more of these “casual games” than men do). The creator of the game, the nonprofit Doorways to Dreams Fund, has a video showing real testers, and they seemed to have a good time with it: “I thought it was wack and you were never going to keep me interested in it,” says one tester. “And then I started thinking about the game when I was at home and I was like, I want to play it again!”

Testers showed a 15-30% increase in confidence in their financial skills, and a 55-70% improvement in knowledge of concepts like credit limits, credit vs. debit, APR, and finance charges.

Peter Tufano, the financial management professor at Harvard who helped develop the game, is a kinder, gentler money guy. His work focuses on the best policies, regulations, products and education to help especially lower income and less-educated people cultivate healthy financial habits. (I wrote about his work on savings promoting products last fall.) Financial responsibility is a tough sell, and Tufano’s chosen tactic is engagement rather than coercion.

“We can design the best curriculum in the world, but if nobody is willing to spend time on it, it won’t work,” says Tufano. “Our goal in all of these things is to find something people will voluntarily do.”

This is the first of a sequence of video games Doorways to Dreams is developing to teach various financial skills. They’re hoping employers and colleges will like the game enough to distribute it. And the concept is catching on elsewhere, too. MTV has a similar initiative called InDebtEd–they just closed a contest that asked students to develop their own game to teach financial literacy.

Every now and then when I feel that I’ve managed to ’settle down’ a bit in my life, something comes along and disrupts it in such a way that I end up being unable to return to my previous incarnation. Atlantica Online was such a disruption. Don’t get me wrong, AO is a fantastic MMO, but it was certainly a different kind of MMO from the sort that I was used to. The real problem is that now, having become somewhat used to its interesting ways, I find myself craving more MMOs like this; unique in creation and unique in delivery. We’ll call Atlantica Online a good disruption - and I’m here to tell you why.

First of all, for those of you who are safely ensconced within your World of Warcraft, Vana’diel or Norrath, you might be wondering what Atlantica Online is. While you can read about developer commentary here, here, here and here, I’d like to talk about it in my own words. Developed by the Korean Company, NDOORS Corporation, Atlantica Online is a free to play MMORPG that’s set on an alternate Earth. The MMO incorporates a lot of elements of steampunk (a blend of fantasy and steam era technology) and fantasy while blending together characters from all sorts of collective myths (Pirates, Spartans and… Napoleon? Oh my.).

Character creation and development in Atlantica Online is deceptively simple. The basic idea is that players choose a ‘main’ weapon (of seven weapon choices), and then, along the course of their AO lives, they pick up 8 other mercenaries (of 20 unique mercenary classes) to complete their traveling brigade. This 9-man (or woman) unit is then used to engage in PVP battles (typically 1v1) or go dungeon crawling. PvE encounters can have up to 9 monsters per unit, but sometimes other enemy groups can join and transform the thing into a ridiculous 27v9 situation. To combat this, players can also band together to end up making some really huge 27v27 battles, but typically combat is 9v9.

In terms of combat, Atlantica Online is very proud of its unique turn-based combat system, and it goes like this: one side has up to 30 seconds to complete its turn by left clicking an enemy unit to attack with their currently selected mercenary/main, or pressing specific hotkeys to launch / prepare volleys of delicious magic. While this appears to be very simple at surface level - if a little bit boring (except the Unicorn slaughtering!) - further explanation is warranted to really open your eyes. I’ll explain later.

Atlantica Online also boasts a very community based structure, in that a significant portion of advancement relies upon communication and interaction with the player base of AO. The way in which they approach the “massively” portion of MMO is really interesting in this regard, because actual fighting is usually done with three other individuals. Where other MMOs almost always tie in combat (one of the most important aspects of any game) with lots of other players, AO has chosen to connect players together through the economy, guilds and crafting. Allow me to elaborate.

The Atlantica Online economy is completely player driven. While there are NPCs who sell specific crafting items, most items are found by farming monsters and opening little treasure boxes. As well, a significant amount of equipment is crafted by other players, and these crafters dictate how their portion of the economy works. There are a few NPCs who sell items for set prices, but there are no NPCs who purchase things for anything above 10 gold. Basically, if you want to make any money, or have any gear for your mercenaries, you’re going to have to participate in AO’s fluctuating economy. This leads me to the next part of the economy, and one that I found really interesting: crafting in AO.

Crafting in Atlantica Online, as I’ve noted before, is what completely drives the economy. Players must ‘queue up’ a specific craft to complete, and then they have to go out and kill a set amount of monsters to complete the workload necessary to finish the craft. Don’t ask me why slaughtering phantoms is necessary towards creating my bullets, but it’s definitely a different direction from most other MMOs that require you to step away from combat for the entirety of your crafting session. Do note, however, that AO does offer the ability to ‘auto-craft’ at later levels, which basically allows you

to toddle off while your character slowl y fulfills the ‘workload’ required to craft the item. What is really neat about crafting, however, is not the fact that the AO team has thrown these two systems together in a vaguely cohesive manner, but it is how crafting advancement in Atlantica Online takes place.

The thing about AO is that there are very few NPC crafters (one) that ‘teach’ you how to make your stuff. I attempted to look up the residence of the only NPC gun crafter in the world of AO, and discovered that he lived a solid hour (that’s a real life hour, mind you) away from my current location. Boggled by this, I wrote out a carefully constructed inquiry (I whined) to my in-game guild, only to have a little message pop on my screen: “____ is about to teach a skill. Do you want it?” As it turns out, crafters in Atlantica Online operate in a symbiotic manner. Essentially, each level of crafting requires a specific amount of “crafting experience” to be fulfilled before you can advance to the next level. In order to advance to the next level, however, you do not simply level up every time you hit the pre-requisite experience; you can only advance to the next level if you pay a fee to trainer who lives halfway across the world from you, or if you are ‘taught’ a level up from any higher level artisan. For the upper level crafters, the benefit from teaching their newbie brethren comes in the form of additional crafting experience for them, thereby helping them push towards higher crafting levels of their own (which would be granted to them by even higher level artisans). In this way, high level crafters are constantly trying to help lower level crafters, and lower level crafters are advancing by helping anybody who’s lower than themselves. This aspect adds a unique dimension to the crafting community of Atlantica Online and it creates a sense of participation to crafters of all levels.

Guilds in Atlantica Online are, like any other MMO, plentiful. The unique thing about Atlantica Online is that when guilds have enough members and support, they can submit bids to take over towns. The bidding in this case utilizes guild points, and these points are accumulated by entering guild dungeons and decimating monsters, or crafting guild items, or even by maintaining a high attendance. Once a guild takes over a town, they gain many economic benefits, as well access to unique dungeons and other bonuses. Towns taken by guilds can band together to form a nation, and can subsequently go to war on other nations. During war is the only time when 3v3 PvP can take place, but war also has its own negative aspects, as players who lose in combat have a chance to drop a piece of their equipment. When we’re talking about gear that costs incredible amounts of money, it becomes a difficult choice to go to war and risk losing an item that you spent weeks trying to get.

In many ways, Atlantica Online may seem like a very traditional Korean MMO with turn-based fighting, but there are some very well developed ideas at play here that hint at a deeper game. The combat system in Atlantica Online, while it seems simple in its turn-based antiquity, introduces great synergies that utilize your entire mercenary force. As well, skill development per mercenary is limited, so no two teams are ever the same in execution or strategy, even if they utilize the exact same mercenaries. I really enjoy games that make me think - even when I’m not playing the game - and Atlantica Online is one of those games. Even when I wasn’t at the computer toddling around with my team, I would often space out, imagining the various ways in which I could develop killer strategies and coherent matrices. Some gamers may prefer an easier approach to their game, but I would certainly have it no other way.

Another way Atlantica Online is unique in its approach is that it rewards philanthropy and good will, but does not make them mandatory aspects of the game. There are several little ‘title’ awards that give neat bonuses for players who give 25 gifts to new players, or give cash donations to other crafters. Guilds gain bonuses for taking good care of their villages, high level crafters gain bonuses for helping low level crafters, and the NDOORS Company is planning to implement rewards for players who volunteer their time to mentor newer players. All of this speaks towards a game that’s focused upon community involvement rather than self-involvement.

The only real complaints I have for this game are its generally clunky user interface and controls. Despite the game involving a fair amount of interaction, the chat boxes and interface generally make it very difficult to communicate with other people. To date, I don’t think I’ve managed to discover a method of quickly and easily sending whispers / messages to other players. In combat, there are many situations where I’ll want to target a specific monster, only to have the game think that I was really attacking something else. At the same time, I’m unsure if this is a glitch that is unique to my own computer, but every now and then the camera will zoom ridiculously close to the monster I’m attacking, and render me unable to continue my combos. There needs to be a simplified monster box on the screen that allows me to quickly and easily click my targets, instead of having to manipulate the camera like a madman. As well, call me picky, but my shoulders don’t move when I run . It creeps me out.
 
The final problem that I have found with Atlantica Online - and for me, it’s not really a problem - is the lack of human participation that is required for combat. For myself, I think it’s fantastic that there is an incredibly low headcount requirement for any monster mashing, but other individuals may find that low player participation means a sterile world. I ingrained myself within every social aspect of this game as soon as I began, so I did not feel like I was completely alone. Your social mileage may vary, I suppose.

Yes, AO generates its revenue via micro transactions, and a significant portion of the game is based around questing for experience, but I can honestly say that Atlantica Online is one of the first MMOs I’ve played that hasn’t tried to ‘remix’ the World of Warcraft style. When a market is so completely eclipsed by a single juggernaut, it becomes difficult to think outside of the genre box; we ultimately end up believing that the behemoth is the genre. In this case, Atlantica Online goes out of its way to definitively prove that they can create a unique game that falls within the “MMO” category while still providing a highly entertaining and a richly complex game. AO shines as a game that was developed out of a passion for the craft, as opposed to a quick method of tapping the gaming industry. I really hope that others will take this as an example to be just as innovative and daring when they create their own MMOs.

This is what a Stanford professor believes

World of Warcraft is now the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) on the planet, played by more than 11 million people worldwide. Under these conditions, it would stand to reason that this single application could potentially have a tremendous impact on the lives of many individuals, and that’s why it should also be used to do good, Stanford professor Byron Reeves believes.
Over the years, the scientist has suggested the creation of an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) that would incorporate smart meter technologies, in a bid to make the user more aware of various issues facing the environment today, and to create the feeling that individuals have to get involved, even if simply from behind their computer screen.

As far as combat in World of Warcraft (WoW) goes, no one is currently able to win unless their whole team wins, which is actually the basis for the large level of cooperation seen in this game. But Reeves argues that smart meters, designed to monitor a computer user’s electricity consumption, could be assigned to each member of a guild. When one of them behaves in a manner that consumes too much electricity, the score for the whole team could drop.

However, the main idea is not to make gamers lose points, but to cause them to behave in such a manner that they work for the good of the team. Psychologically speaking, this is the only way to convince persons to follow suit and care about a specific issue – you have to make the entire outcome of the title depend on all members’ behavior. Although it could seem like a long-shot, this idea might actually prove to be effective.

“Of course, you could change your energy usage because you had read all the science about climate change and you knew something about energy usage in the house, and you were interested in saving six cents here, a dollar there, two dollars there on your energy bill. But we don’t think that that will be enough motivation at scale for lots of people to get into this. So, if you can align that goal with ‘let’s have some fun, let’s go on a quest, let’s have a team activity, let’s see who can do this better than others, let’s help each other’ – all the different features of games that are important. And if we can get that going at the same time as the community value, we might have something special,” Reeves maintains.

Blizzard has posted the first details about a massive new raid, dubbed Ulduar, which will hit World of Warcraft sometime in the spring when Patch 3.1 goes live. Under the “in development” section of the European site for the game, the company has described what it calls the game’s “most ambitious raid to date,” with a total of 14 bosses and two sections to the raid itself.

Blizzard goes on to explain that the first section will pit a group of players against a massive iron army that guards the gate to Ulduar’s inner sanctum. Thankfully, you’ll be able to step into the battle on even footing as a small fleet of siege vehicles will be on hand to aid you in the assault. Additionally, for those concerned that end-game content in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was too easy, the company said that Ulduar utilizes WoW’s “Hard Mode” more than any other dungeon.

Blizzard has yet to reveal when Patch 3.1, which includes Ulduar and a host of class changes, is set to be released but promises that it should hit the Public Test Realms “very soon.” Further details are available here.