Nostalgia is great. There is nothing like the rose-colored glasses of memory to make you feel glad. And, if you’re trying to show off your MMORPG cred, to show off how much you, personally, rock. Any time an instance, event, or even crafting gets changed in an online game, you have people that crawl out from the woodwork to explain that while sure, you can do it now, THEY did it when it was really tough, not this carebear version you have. Nope, uphill both ways, carrying their guild master on their back, blindfolded, wearing their newbie tunic and with only a rusty sword. And they liked it. It’s fun to mock those people, but let’s not talk about them anymore. What I do want to talk about is what was done in EQ1 often enough that I think WoW may want to look into: Revamping Zones.
Category: General
General
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.Don’t tell me to smell the roses
Probably one of the most used and abused phrases of 2007, that one.
At its best it’s honest advice, and the words chosen by the voice of experience. At its worst, a political statement and dishonest noise. There’s a little world behind this seemingly harmless phrase, and quite a colorful one too. Is this just the latest weapon of choice in the old and tiresome ‘Casual vs. Hardcore’ debate(*)? Or is there something more behind it and its shining rise to forum stardom?
You will read on. You know you want to.
(*) To call the ‘Casual vs. Hardcore’ debacle a ‘debate’ is like saying the guys in charge of the fryer at Micky Dee’s are ‘Chefs’, but you know where I’m coming from.
Go Stags!
Tim Harford’s comments on a bank run in the UK reminds me that we have an extensive body of research that we can apply to gaming. Appropriately, this is game theory. You have probably noticed that most game developers keep trying to rediscover the wheel when dozens of companies have already made all the relevant mistakes. When Jessica Mulligan stopped writing Biting the Hand, she commented along those lines: no one was making new mistakes, just the same ones over and over again.
Mr. Harford’s example is about group versus solo play. Yes, at British banks. Everyone would prefer to be in a good group, but a bad group is worse than solo play. Yes, there is a large body of academic work that revolves around that one sentence.
MMOs are a more tenuous game than the standard stag hunt. Game theory is usually stated in terms of two players; MMO groups have five or more in a group, and let’s not get to raids. In MMO groups, one weak player may not spoil the hunt but a couple will, and one severe idiot will leave you further from the level cap than where you started. Is it any wonder that so many of us are hunting rabbits?
Do we need an extended treatment of this concept? We could delve into economic theory of the firm and how it applies to guilds.
: Zubon
Only on-topic by name, my undergrad had good news earlier this month and better news this week. That is about $200,000 of good news per student. Kupo!
Petrov Day
I forgot to mention that today is Petrov Day. This is when we honor Stanislav Petrov for preventing nuclear war by recognizing that computer errors are more likely than underwhelming missile strikes. His tale is recounted across the internet; I saw it in a variety of places. He is one of the few people who can compete with Norman Borlaug for the claim of having saved a billion lives.
If your MMO in development has a chance of causing a nuclear holocaust, please do more beta testing.
: Zubon
Dating for Gamers Part 4: Chat Systems
Men are from Earth, women are from Earth: deal with it. If no one understands you or you have trouble talking to girls, the problem is probably you rather than them. You must learn to communicate with the rest of the species.
Harsh? This is a primary point: men and women tend to communicate in different ways. Come explore the implications of this and other issues with IRL’s lousy chat system in our continuing series of articles on dating for the introverted heterosexual male.
Cultural Advancement
See that Great Person? Do you know who that is? That’s right. If you are falling behind in culture, call a librarian.
: Zubon
Samorost
I may be deeply screwed up. I often do not enjoy point-and-click puzzle games (oh, I have to click the fish before I flip the switch that turns the cheese into a cat-deflector, of course!), but this one was far more intuitive and logical to me than most.
: Zubon
Hat tip: Play This Thing! (as mentioned yesterday. Check it out for more games)
Play This Thing
Have you heard of Play This Thing!? (Yes, there is a ! in the title) It comes to us courtesy of Greg Costikyan, your friend and mine, who says, “It’ll feature a game a day–free games, interactive fiction, mods, and weird stuff like alternative reality and ‘big urban’ games, as well, of course, as independent games.” Check it out.
As Nicodemus mentioned long ago, you can also find a lot of free flash games at Kongregate. It also has built in badges and things so you can feel like you are leveling and getting pretty shinies as you enjoy timewasters.
: Zubon
Gardening Sim
I have mentioned Virtual Villagers a few times lately. The creators also make Plant Tycoon,® “a gardening sim game where you nurture plants and experiment with increasingly rare and valuable species. The object is to breed and cross breed plants until you find the 6 Magic Plants and solve the genetic puzzle.” They also have a virtual fish-breeding game along the same lines.
Of course, these are offline games. If you are looking for online massively multiplayer breeding, you might try Virtual Horse Ranch. (It says right at the top that this is a “strategic” MMO horse sim game.) Google led me to a surprisingly large number of online virtual horse breeding games.
And people say there is no innovation going on.
: Zubon
Seriously, wouldn’t robust animal/plant/whatever breeding be a neat addition to your game’s trade skills? Don’t just give us a “breeding” skill that increments up: throw in some real Mendelian genetics. A Tale in the Desert has some things along these lines.
Koster’s Metaplace launches today.
Metaplace launches today. The overview over at Crunchbase says:
“Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.
Most virtual worlds are walled gardens making it hard to get data in and out of the worlds. Metaplace-created virtual worlds can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.”
I have mixed feelings on this, so I am going to wait to comment until I can get a good look and see what is really here.
There is a lot of potential, considering that Koster is at the lead and calling the shots. I am also a firm believer that the precursor to the “metaverse” (or cyberspace depending on your preference) are MMORPGs. I’ve also said that MMORPGs lack a lot of things and so do virtual worlds (like second life). Will Metaplace be a step in the right direction for a change, or will it miss the boat and eventually fall to the side and struggle for years like badly designed MMORPGs and poorly implemented virtual worlds?
I’m hoping that Koster did it right and it takes off. There is a lot of attention on web 2.0 approaches, as well as pseudo-MMOs like club penguin, laguna beach, etc. Expect to see a lot more of these as the “flavor of the day” with the venture crowd becomes social + virtual world. I predict this is a fad, and the people that look to the long term will be thinking way beyond these shallow experiences.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. More later.
Robert / Nicodemus