Plato, Plotinus and Planescape
Plato, Plotinus and Planescape ... what do these things have in common? While I wish this post was going to be a thoughtful and thorough examination of how these two men relate to and have influenced the famed TSR game world, sadly it is not. Rather, they are all playing roles in influencing how I will be writing the books for my upcoming PBBGB (Persistent, Browser-Based GameBook -- clumsy I know, but eventually I will hit on a decent acronym), The Wizard's Tower.
Spoiler Alert!
I am writing about the general story concepts now because I have yet to even begin writing the actual story, as I am still doing research and also still hammering down the actual game code, but I thought I would post a SPOILER ALERT warning for those in the future who may look for information about the game. Because while I have my doubts anyone in the future will care, I am positive nobody at this time does, otherwise I would not publish my thoughts at all. But at least I hope what I am writing is interesting.
A peculiar thing about me is that whenever I come up with an idea for a story I almost invariably come up with the ending first and generally write backward. So I can say without hesitation what the ultimate ending of The Wizard's Tower will be: the realization that your character is dead and has been dead the whole time. But I am getting waaaayyy ahead of myself.
The Wizard's Tower will be comprised of several "books," or they could be thought of as major sections or chapters. This is largely to keep me motivated in writing them and allow me to (hopefully!) make my August deadline. It will be much, much easier to launch in August with one book and another on the way then try to push a year or two worth of writing into the next couple months (and at the same time write the code for a functioning gamebook web site to host the work).
First, let's examine how the story will relate to Planescape ... not that deep, I am afraid. It just sounded good in the title of this post. The main way that the two would be similar is in the type of "world" they present to the player.
If you already aren't familiar, the Planescape game-world is divided into many planes of reality that are all connected to a central plane of reality called the city of Sigil. This is best imagined as a wheel, with the spokes representing the connections of the diverse realities to the central hub. The Wizard's Tower will have an almost identical concept, though the imagery will be quite different.
In the Wizard's Tower, the central hub is the tower itself and it is the central connection to various realities (i.e. planes of existence). These realities are represented as sections of a large garden and each section will be its own book. Which means, while I do have an over-arching plot I am working out, this allows me to accomplish it in three books or 300. It all depends on how much time I have and my motivation for producing new books.
OK, so we have the rather superficial way that TWT is related to the Planescape universe, but I am certain you are scratching your head about the references to two philosphical heavyweights of the ancient world I referenced.
In rather feckless terms, Plato was the founder, and Plotinus the re-founder of the Platonic school of thought (which I will refer to as Neoplatonism). My real goal with TWT is to explore some of the important themes and concepts of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought as read in Plato's Dialogues and Plotinus' Enneads. I also plan to use them to compare related and unrelated schools of thought like Gnosticism, Heathenism, Buddhism and Taoism, just to rattle off the ones immediately important to me (and therefore likely to find their way in).
Here, however, is where we really get into spoiler territory. I want to talk about my overall vision for the story, so stop reading if you care. If not, go ahead.
The story begins with the protagonist (is you! ala Choose Your Own Adventure) waking up in an immense and wild forest. Visually I would model it after the immense redwood forests of my adopted home, the American Pacific Northwest. Big-ass trees, ferns and thick fog everywhere -- you half-expect to see a dinosaur come lumbering by. But I digress.
You wander for days in the forest, which is so deep and dark you aren't able to tell the difference between day and night. You are forever in fear from the constant din of threatening animal sounds. You stumble along in complete disorientation and lose all track of time. Then, after an unknowable time of wandering aimlessly, you stumble into a bright clearing and as your eyes adjust to the bright light of the sun you see that there is a large tower set smack dab in the middle of the glade.
The tower looks immense, perhaps big enough to house 10-15 people and I am imagining the glade to look about perhaps 5-10 acres in size. The glade is completely covered with an ornate and well-tended garden. Think Victorian England. The garden extends to the edge of the forest and its ordered appearance contrasts starkly with the tangled, dark mess of the forest. The whole place reeks of strange energy ... that feeling you get when you know something is not quite right.
As soon as you step into the garden you realize that the garden and tower are not what they appear. I am currently undecided about how to portray the dimensions here.
- On one side I want for the garden to be as large as a small world and the tower resides at its center. The books involve you traveling through the world-garden to reach the tower.
- On the other side, the tower and garden are as they appear on the outside, but the sections of the garden represent a plane of reality in which you travel to from a mechanism in the tower to retrieve clues to unlock the mystery of the tower. I am currently leaning in this direction.
So what does this have to do so far with my eloi-like pseudo-intellectual nonsense? The sections of the garden will represent parts of a person's life as exemplified by a concept from Plato or Plotinus. Within each, you will be forced to make decisions about some basic reality-constructs that we as members of Western civilization take for granted. Also there will be plenty of monsters and obstacles to overcome and death-defying exploits to perpetrate as well the usual villains, rogues and swooning maidens. What's the point if you leave out all the cool stuff?
While I have yet to finalize how I will treat what will be the final book, the goal of collecting the clues in alternate realities or of the journey across a garden-world, there will be an ultimate goal that connects everything. As of now, I envision that the tower is inhabited by a (male) wizard and a female character whom I have not decided how to represent yet. She will either be trapped by the wizard at the top of the tower and freeing her will be the object of your overall quest, or she will be an equal countervailing force to the wizard as you are manipulated through the garden. In either sense, your ultimate goal after X books will be to encounter the pair in the tower.
A bit cliched, perhaps, but the wizard represents the Demiurgos and the woman represents Sophia. It was this bare concept that initially choose Neoplatonism as what I wanted to explore with The Wizard's Tower. I also plan on using a lot of dichotomies (most straight from Plato but not all) to explore relationships between materialism (Demiurge) and spiritualism (Sophia). It will also make for a dramatic ending that is sure to be hella sweet.
So here is where my internal monologue gets especially spoilery for those of you listening in. You have been forewarned.
So if the eventual confrontation between the Wizard and the Lady (as I have taken to calling her, but I am leaning toward calling her Isis) is the dramatic conclusion of TWT's over-arching story, then what is the denouement? What is the purpose for all of this? Phat Lewtz?
No, my friend, no phat lewtz. I plan on inserting easter eggs from the beginning that will hopefully allow the player to see what I revealed above in the hidden text. I plan on pulling an Owl Creek Bridge and having the entire story relate to someone coming to terms with their own death.
The forest is akin to limbo, the chaos where the eternal meets the temporal: the outlands of the universe. It is to here where your (meaning protaganist) spirit travels to after your body dies. The time spent wandering in the forest is your incorporeal self coming to terms with no longer being a material being and subject to the whims of the material. Something like a scab on an old wound, "you" (and here we can pull in some Freud and Jung for kicks - I need to remember to read up on them) do not actually realize that you are dead. And so you create your dream-like pseudo-world where "you" can live on. But it is not real, and you have to move on and leave that artifact of your material existence, that which makes you "you," behind you.
So the clues that you pick up in the books ... while you think you will be picking them up to solve the riddle of the tower, they will actually be letting you know that you are really dead and that you are in a dream world your misguided spirit has created. The trick is in being as subtle as possible so that most people in the audience will have no idea, but at the end slap their head and say "I KNEW IT ALL ALONG!"
I also find an excellent mirror in various Platonic writings to give me both a direction and something of a blueprint, but also give the story real depth and meaning beyond being a mere diversion from work or school for the bored malaisiatics of this dream world we call the Interwebz.
The end will have your character realize that he or she is a ghost and ascend the tower to the next level and thus the story will be over. This will either be accomplished by "rescuing the maiden" (i.e. gaining wisdom) or by navigating the channel between reason (Demiurge) and intuition (Sophia) who are both guardians of the tower and have been testing you. Not sure which route to take yet, though I like the fairy-tale aspects of the former.
Idle Hands are the Demiurge’s Tools
It is really quite something, that. What? Oh, merely my lack of focus. What was that? Oh, I am writing a blog post ... I knew that.
Work proceeds apace on The Wizard's Tower. I have hammered down the basic attributes of a "Book" and I am, at this moment, deciding whether to begin laying out the database structure and model code for the "Pages" of a Book or pay off some code debt in the form of writing some decent error handling controls. What is a Book? Why a gamebook, of course ... pshhh.
In the past week or so I was struggling to understand how to order the game's heirarchy with regard to the world the player character progresses through. My first impulse is to order the game universe along the lines of the modern CRPG or MMORPG in the sense that I create a world for the character to exist in. However, what I am trying to accomplish is to create a story for the character to exist in. They may seem like the same thing, but there are subtle differences.
For instance, existing in the story implies that the character will likely be moving forward. No revisiting areas for the player and no random NPCs who hand out quests and expect you to come back for a reward. Actually there will be both of those ... drat, what am I trying to say? Let me get it down.
Rather than a zone, the site will have a book and rather than have areas within the zone, you will have pages in the book. Each Book represents a self-contained adventure for which there are beginning and an end points, complete with its own rule system. Well, a variant of a an extremely basic rule system. Though, to keep in the gamebook spirit, I have disavowed my previous stance of character and environment complexity for one of simplicity. Though, the basic system will still likely end up being vaguely GURPs-like which is something I have had in the back of my head all along.
A character will only be able to exist in a single Book, though there is a mechanism to transfer a character through books linked in a series. Each Book is essentially a self-contained universe with its own stock of monsters, items, traps and puzzles. As I said earlier, character complexity is out; character skill necessity is in. I am now generically referring to skills and attributes as "Powers" which covers the gamut from technical skill to raw talent. And because each power exists only within its Book, if there are no locks in a Book, there will not need to be a lock-picking skill (as an example). Of course if another Book requires lock-picking then it will have it.
Some pages will be able to be revisited again and again, but these are the exceptions to the rule: cross-roads, taverns, WalMarts, et cetera. These are merely nodes from which adventure springs and beyond moving from point A to B or buying a ray gun, they do nothing else. I have completely abandoned my plans for designing a complex NPC dialogue system because I realized that the game itself serves that purpose already. There will be complex NPC dialogue trees, they just won't be anything special from a technical standpoint. (Phew.)
I don't know why I keep losing my focus, perhaps it is because I have had the devil of a cold the past few days. Oh well, I should get back to it, I suppose.
Shizotypal and Addicted to Urban Planning
I just thought the title sounded funny, if you must know. In reality I am procrastinating from writing control methods for the "book" module in Project WOTAN. I should be doing it, but I am having issues that, strangely, are not preventing relatively clear and lucid writing.
Also, I think I finally groked Xemerys, the web game billed as a "Hardcore Old-School Online Economic Strategy Game."
Xemerys is fairly hard-core in the sense that it holds no hands for the beginning player. More like slaps them down with a ruler like a frustrated nun. Which is why after having stuck with it now for nearly two weeks, I think I am finally understanding it.
The game is not difficult to learn - anyone familiar with strategy games and especially strategy PBBGs can get started with no trouble and it uses the familiar city-building and empire-managing tropes. But to really get into the flow of how the game works requires some tenacity and a lot of patience. I believe the game's "hard-core" label comes into play here.
Between the industries to produce 20 raw and refined goods, the (somewhat Ikariam-like) transportation system that you actually pay upkeep for while it is active, the multiple levels of Quality of Life that directly affects your ability to tax citizens, to the ability cast offensive and buffing effects on your own city and others, to ... well there are a lot and this isn't a laundry list - you get the picture.
The numerous game mechanics all work together in a sort of mad dance to generate the sort of complexity that I welcome in a web game. It is packaged with the rather unforgiving ratios and durations that stave off instant gratification. It even provides and example of the disassociated PVP that spices up web games without turning them into bullying-grounds.
When I say "disassociated PVP" I mean that players can hurt and hinder each other, but it occurs through an indirect mechanism. As an example, in Nile Online players can attack each others' monument sites but not each others' cities. The capture of a monument has a directly negative effect on the player, but it is not devastating by any means and is really more of a minor hindrance.
As a contrast, in a game like Travian players are expected to conduct PVP directly against each others' establishment and this is supported by an elaborate social heirarchy. In Travian, if you are alone and a new player, your settlement is invariably "farmed" to death. More advanced players and their alliances will conintually attack your settlement to get any resources you have accumulated and aren't protected. This makes advancing your settlement difficult at best; your only recourse is to join an alliance that is strong enough to defend you and, more importantly, is actually willing or motivated to do so.
Xemerys offers an interesting take on the former style of PVP in that it lets you spread offensive effects (hex spells) which cause percentage decreases in various aspects of a player city, be it production, pollution levels or the degree to which your citizens are happy about life, among others. "Propaganda," which is similar to spells but costs in-game money and lasts longer, provides a second means to carry out this activity.
I view these as being more indirect because, while in Xemerys you are only able to have one city and thus the actions are carried out directly on you, they ultimately only serve to reduce the rate at which you are able to be successful - not annihilate your ability to do practically anything in the game. Your city still has the wine or aphrodisiacs or what-have-you that you already produced and so there is no real incentive to habitually cast hexes on new (and therefore insignificant) players. And at the end of the day, Xemerys even provides spells and propaganda to lessen the effects of hexes cast by cantankerous fellow players.
Getting into the flow of the game can be rather difficult for many, though. So while I would recommend giving Xemerys a try, I also recommend to be ready to be patient and read the FAQ and Beginner's Guide. But mostly with the patience, which will be rewarded in the end.
LOVE First Impressions
Sadly, but not unexpectedly, I have logged in and played LOVE relatively little in the ensuing almost-week since I posted last. Partly because my life is filled with all the mundane tasks typical of the servile class, but also because honestly I found the experience a bit ... meh.
I mention that only because I would not consider this a proper review or criticism, and I would hope nobody reading it does, either. These are merely some of my impressions thus far. Overall, I doubt I will continue with LOVE past the 30 days alotted by my near-$14 (US) payment, however I can see myself coming back in the future depending on the directions taken by LOVE's one-man development team (Eskil Steenberg), because I do love what appear to be the core ideals of the game.
These core ideals, or perhaps more simply the single ideal of LOVE is to literally be a sandbox. That is the way I have taken it, at any rate. We are not talking sandbox like EVE, Darkfall or pre-CU SWG ... in LOVE it is your job to take the chaotic stuff of the ever-shifting world and mold it to your own whim.
Well, your whim and the whim of the other players around you. LOVE is very much made to be a cooperative building game. The word cooperative is a key word; players must work together to maintain order amidst the chaos of the game. A player-created city that takes a week to create can be destroyed in mere hours with barely a trace left.
It seems this is a sticking point for some - the extreme lack of permanence, the chaos, the anti-achievement mindset that must be cultivated to thrive. To those raised to achieve - to the point even their entertainment must mirror achievement-based ideals - LOVE certainly must not appeal.
Of course, even if the rest of LOVE is a wreck (it's not), this is the one aspect of the game that not only appeals to me, but that I find brilliant. Order amidst chaos does come with a very heavy price: it must be maintained with zealous diligence. The result is a long-term functioning base or city becomes more of what I would describe as a colony - an ant colony.
Some players go about their routines, molding tunnels, windows, stairs and other physical features of the base as is their whim. Other players will do the same, but range out into the wider world in search of the tokens that reward the entire colony with upgraded abilities (prettier windows, better weapons, radios, energy sources, etc).
Still other players may decide to hunt down and kill the AI competitors in the wider world. You can bet these AI competitors are also doing the same, and so far a common cause of a colony's doom has been the punishing barrage from the artillery of a nearby AI colony. The AI opponents also will also quickly infiltrate and destroy any player colony which does not have proper defenses such as walls.
Which brings us to my first real criticism against LOVE as it currently exists. I love the game with regard to its core gameplay, or at least what I currently understand that to be (and have attempted to elucidate above). However, the I have the feeling that the game is currently too chaotic.
Days sweep past in mere minutes and it is difficult to see in the dark so before you know it you get stuck in one of the numerous crannies or pits in the landscape. This makes navigating tunnels in the dark a nightmare.
I don't necessarily think the AI bots are too aggressive as much as I think they either aren't scaled properly (I suspect they aren't scaled at all) to the level of player activity in an area. Rather than providing a challenge they seem overly punishing and the entropy rate of a colony seems a bit too fast. In other words, if the world was slowed down just a bit, I would probably have a better time.
That the world of LOVE is too chaotic is, of course, not a big criticism and certainly not enough to keep me away from the game by any means. These are the sort of typical growing pains any new enterprise suffers, especially if that enterprise is as complex as an MMO. If the game survives, one would hope a consensus about such matters will provide the needed guidance for scaling and balance concerns. Or not, Steenberg could just tell everyone to go jump in a lake after all.
If EVE Online's learning curve is a steep cliff, then LOVE's learning curve is a bottomless pit.
My main criticism and the thing that will keep me away from LOVE as it exists now lies in a complex relationship between how I view its pay-to-play model and the level of professionalism that I see in the game.
1. I can't set my own name. Why am I paying a premium for a persistent game that is not really persistent? I totally get all the art-fag bullshit, believe me - I eat it up. But I can't, at least, give my in-game self a simple identity of my own choosing? Preposterous!
2. There are misspellings in the game. As evinced by practically everything you have written on your site, I already know that you suck at spelling, Eskil, and that is OK; you make up for it in other ways like being a good programmer and focusing on innovation. However, why am I paying for a game that has an egregious amount of spelling errors?
This may seem nit-picky, but notice I said, and I quoth: "why am I paying for a game that has ..." Poor spelling is highly unprofessional - feckless, even. If you can't spell, fine - but since I am paying a fee you should expect that I would expect you to hire someone who can spell.
3. The UI is horrible. My favorite thing about the UI? That passwords are not shadowed on entry. That leaves me with such a safe, secure feeling about the server I am logging into.
When I say UI, please note I do not mean the HUD. I like the HUD, it is clean and simple. It's easy to configure and use - I might almost say it's a pleasure. Me like. But really, how many times do I have to log into the game before it remembers to turn off the Tutorial text automatically? No, pressing the button to make it go away as my first action of the play session does not count ("why am I paying for a game that has ...").
The fonts are near-unreadable, and while the effects added to them are visually interesting, because the fonts are small and hard to read I no longer even bother to try and read what is flashing around on the screen like some sort of acid flashback.
4. Lastly, I have reservations about the pricing. OK, I already know the reasons given for the pricing model and I don't really disagree with them per se. But while one would hope Steenberg would be as innovative in his revenue model as he is with his virtual-environment-designing skills, that may not end up being the case. Looks like he went for the same old same-old. Maybe he was too distracted by trying to figure out how to shadow password fields on the login screen?
Aside from the reasons given above (like the spelling errors - as a literate person I'll never let that slide), I think we can take the premise that LOVE is an extremely sub-niche product as a reality. Even if Steenberg could tap every person in the civilized world who would be interested in playing LOVE, I feel certain it would still be a tiny fraction of the playerbase of the 800-lbs gorillas (i.e. WoW, Atlantica Online, etc.), let alone come within the same ballpark of the numbers of smaller games like EQ2 or LOTRO.
While my respect for humanity might increase a bit if this opinion of mine was proved false, I'm certain it is more-or-less accurate. And I also do not think that is necessarily a bad thing, just like any other work of culture, niche games are the wonderful spice that break up the monotony of the banal.
In short, the reason I do not like the current pricing scheme is that I fear it could starve off the oxygen of exposure that a niche game like this needs to succeed. (As an interesting aside, though, subbing for a month actually gets you two accounts though the caveat is that the parent account must be logged in for the child account to work.) And while there has been relatively good press coverage and word-of-mouth for such an odd-ball project, I think the subscription in turning away prospective players not quite trusting enough to lay out the fee negates those gains.
But I hope I am wrong about that, and like EVE or Darkfall, I hope LOVE becomes successful at providing a unique experience to its audience and providing its creator with some income. But LOVE is far, far more niche than either EVE or Darkfall have ever been.
L O V E
Crap, can you believe I missed the launch of LOVE? And it was a full month ago?? This has probably been the most anticipated ever to cross paths with the reddit hive-mind, and I missed it. Extreme hyperbole aside, I guess that's what happens when you lose touch with reality in asynchronous blahblahscript and php debauchery. And to think I was going to spend my 15 dollars of milk-money on a month of LOTRO.
If you aren't already aware of it, LOVE is the brainchild of Eskil Steenberg, a one-man indie-game-making madman. It features a lush, impressionistic style fully rendered in a 3d world and it has completely open-ended gameplay - literally a sandbox. Steenberg describe it as "a cooperative online first person adventure game." ...
You play as a scavanger on a small planet who together with other scvangers will build a settlement by placeing a Monolith some where in the world. This Monolith makes the ground lose so that you can shape the environment around it in to what ever you want. Build walls, catacoms, houses and shape your settlement any way you want.
To strengthen and evolve your settlement, you will need to head out in to the world to find tokens to bring back the settlement. Once placed in the settlement they give everyone in the settlement new tools to build new things and new abillities. With time you will gain tokens that will let you build powergrids to build defences and to manufacture power up pods.
OK, you know I will have to break my long-standing tradition of not updating this blog more than once every two-four months to bring you more news about my experiences in this game. Even if it isn't that great, I am positive it will be an interesting experience. Just look at what we are talking about:
OK, I need to go now and get my account set up and see how it goes.
The Wizard’s Tower
Work on Project WOTAN (a web-based gamebook framework) has been proceeding at a fairly solid pace over the past month. I have been hammering down not only the conceptual ideas, but also the actual code. It has really evolved since last year, mainly code-wise and this is entirely due to my increasing familiarity with general programming concepts as well as php itself.
Speaking of which, I have now just a few days ago embarked on my journey into the wild, wooly world of Javascript. "Fuckin shit sucks," I'm tempted to say, but I shall not. I'm merely suffering from a lack of patience and want to be a jQuery AJAX master now, not later. Give me another week and I'll have those user forms completely AJAX-ified, I swear. Really.
I suppose I am feeling the pinch a bit because I have yet again set a date for the initial release of WOTAN: August of this year. I am too lazy at the moment (actually I am tweaking on that sweet, sweet, $("id").click(function(){...}); lovin), but I believe that is actually about one year past the initial release date. I suppose I could search back through the archives but that would be precious minutes away from the jQuery crack-pipe and we simply can not have that, now can we? That also seems rather far away, but with all that is left to do three-four months is not far away at all. I should probably extend it to October ...
So, ahem, yes, August 2010 I will be releasing WOTAN in the form of the web game "The Wizard's Tower."
Like all potential future WOTAN sites, The Wizard's Tower will essentially be a web-based gamebook along the lines of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series or Joe Dever's Lone Wolf saga (a great favorite of mine as a young nerd). The main differences between a gamebook and WOTAN site lie in the technical possibilities and limitations between the two media. In spirit, I hope WOTAN plays much more like a traditional gamebook than what we might now think of as an "RPG."
And what story will The Wizard's Tower feature? I have actually been deeply considering this very question, and while I do not want to reveal too much, I am basing a great deal of it on Plato's Timaeus. And, of course, it will be set in the sort of generic dragons'n'warriors universe we have all come to know and love as it has evolved over the past couple-hundred years or so. While I'm not sure it could be considered high fantasy, as I am not sure I am capable of writing anything other than moral ambiguity, that is what I am going for.
And my plans for the story are also considering that I am running on schedule. I will be testing the site with a random dungeon generator and if I am too constrained for time I may have to launch with that in place and relegate the fleshing-out and writing of actual plot lines to post-launch site updates.
So that sums up WOTAN as of May 2010:
- php code and html markup coming along nicely and on-schedule
- UI in the form of AJAX components just barely started and I am worried this will fall behind schedule due to my inadequate skill level with javascript
- making me say things like "fuckin shit sucks" and refer to concepts like "stress head-aches"
Of course, I love it. And that reminds me, I need to find an artist whose willing to basically work for free out of an abiding love for interactive fantasy novels with neo-platonic/gnostic cosmological symbolism. Peace of cake, right?
Coming back … again and again
Well, I've taken another couple month break from the old blog. In fact, I've taken a couple-month break from life.
I wish I could say I spent the bulk of January and February in a sensory deprivation tank a-la William Hurt in Altered States, but alas I'm much more boring than that. I spent a few weeks visiting Los Angeles and that was fun. I wasted a solid month-and-a-half being way too old to couch surf but fucking doing it anyway; I wanted to get in touch with my inner hippie.
I have also been having some familial issues, and now they are in the process of sorting themselves out. Of course I will not go into all the gory details here, but lets just say I could have a pretty good treatment for a TV drama if I cared to write it. Everybody is learning, growing, sharing and whatnot.
I do have no compunction relating my gaming experiences herein, as that is the purpose for which this blog exists. Sadly, those experiences are also rather dull.
Sucker for a sale
I spent more money than was prudent during the weeks-long gang bang that was the Steam Holiday Sale. However, I got loads of sweet games for hella cheap (to use the patois of my northwestern American home), mostly comprising games I already wanted but was too stingy to buy at full price.
The winners in the "waiting-for-a-sale-and-already-knew-I'd-like-it" category are Children of the Nile, Company of Heroes and Day of Defeat. I scored on these and I am thrilled about it. Sadly I haven't been able to play Children of the Nile as much as I want and no matter how hard I try I just suck (big-time) at Company of Heroes (though I still love it), but I went on a Day of Defeat bender for a couple weeks and loved every minute. Avalanche is my favorite map so far, though I have developed a bit of a Donner fetish.
The winners of the "impulse-buy-and-didn't-care-for-it" category are Zombie Shooter 2, Evil Genius and Killing Floor. I can't say I cared for any of these, and my reasons are various. I may still enjoy playing Evil Genius someday, but I couldn't get past the tutorial which made me want to punch things -- I believe I had issues with its rather glacial pace. I just can't get into Killing Floor for no particularly good reason (which could change in the future, however) and I outright dislike Zombie Shooter 2. If I would have spent more than $2.50 on ZS2 I would have felt completely cheated. While I don't really dislike Killing Floor or Evil Genius, if I had a second chance I probably would not bother to buy either.
Fly Safe, Capsuleer
The surprise hit of the sale was a brand new $5 EVE online account. I am happy and nerdy to say I have been glued tight to the Verge Vendor region of New Eden since around Christmas, learning the many vagaries of asteroid mining. While technically not a "new" account -- I activated a trial account I originally made in 2007 -- I have been enjoying EVE nearly every day for the past two months and feel as though I have finally "found" an MMORPG I can truly enjoy.
I put "found" in quotes, of course, because I have actually played EVE Online off-again-and-on-again since 2006; I find it a bit strange I only now have actually taken to the game. In my previous attempts to grok the game I always knew there was something about it that I like and enjoy, but I suppose until I tried being a full-time miner I didn't actually know what that something actually is. So right now that something is mining and mineral trading, which I am utterly cracking-out on. Dangling preposition FTW.
And now with the recent announcement of the SimCity-like aspects of the upcoming Tyrannis update, I will probably be hooked for at least another several months, if not longer. If you want to look me up in-game I'm Dank Fortuente and the asteroid belts of the Aidart solar system is currently my main stomping grounds.
The only other MMORPG I am dabbling in at all is Dungeons and Dragons Online, which continues to be a treat now that I can play sporadically without worrying over paying a regular subscription. I don't get to play terribly often but I have been working on a Drow Exploiter Ranger which I named Emmil Cioran. His bio reads only "ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart;" perhaps "reality is a creation of our excesses" would be more a-propos to the venue, LOL.
Moving On
Well, it is nearly time for me to wrap up this post. So I will leave by saying that I am still here, still building cities and RPing like a nerdy dork, even still working on my PBBG, despite various hurdles and setbacks. I suppose I could go on for longer about my love affair with MySQL InnoDB and foreign keys, but I will bore you with that in another post. Until then blaze high -- you know I will.
Setbacks, Delays and Trying to Rise Up
Well, the inevitable has happened: I decided to push back my beta "launch" (snicker) for Project WOTAN to March, and quite possibly April or May, of next year.
I did virtually zero work on it in November as I was engaged in the cruder work of making money. Working 14-hour days out in the wilderness with bare access to electricity, let alone the Intertubes, is not conducive to making progress on an ambitious PBBG.
Even if I were able to make up the time this month, alas that is also not happening as I returned to find myself soon to be divorced, separated from my child and homeless leaving me scrambling to find a way just to stay alive. Again, not exactly an ideal situation for creating a browser game.
Rest assured, however, that unless my body washes up on a beach half-eaten I will continue to persevere in my effort and send Gungnir flying true. Of course, the inevitable mediocre anonymity the site will enjoy is not exactly a great incentive, but at least I will be able to say I finished it.
I have continued to develop my long-term idea for the project, and I am not sure if I will be able to make a MUD-for-the-web idea work; I'm not sure how well it would work even with more people (who know what they are doing) working with me. It is a dream, perhaps someday it will be a reality, but I do not believe so with this project.
Rather (long term), I am focusing on creating more of a combination of a single-player RPG and a social networking site. This was the original idea, I envisioned something maybe vaguely similar to Guild Portal. Rather than a guild organization and communication tool, though, it is a place to play and create text adventures as well as store the character(s) you use in the adventures and communicate and organize with others making and playing them.
To that effect, I am going to be setting up the main site for the project in the near future. I will need to get a VPS, and while at the lower levels they are not expensive, it is not exactly an expense I want jump right in and sign up for considering I am a very-soon-to-be homeless person. But running the game, especially how I envision it as a finished site, demand it. In fact, considering operating costs and my lack of a solid business plan, it's enough to make me hope for anonymous mediocrity.
I shouldn't underplay the business aspect of the game too much, but that is part of my extreme self-effacing nature. I actually have some really good ideas about how to make it pay for itself - none of them are original, but that also means I am picking from established practices.
The Path Ahead
Every so often I like to browse through the forums at mmorpg.com ... yes, I know it's Trollville, but some subforums are better than others and you quickly see past the sea of trollery to find the core members that are actually intelligent and fun to interact with. Plus, sometimes when I am not in the mood to play it is the only way to really get my MMO fix.
A few days ago, I came across this post: Having an "adventure" again?
Right away I was intrigued, as it hit upon one of the major problems with post-WoW MMORPGs - community. I tend to think that for all my or anyone else's musings on What is Wrong with the design of these games, a lot of it can all come back to the lack of quality community.
Are people who are part of a community that they enjoy and take part in less likely to complain about the little things that irk them in a game? Are they more likely to blow those little things up into huge things?
It seems like I wasn't the only intrigued as the thread quickly became a hot topic and a mere few days later it was featured as a mmorpg.com Community Spotlight. Now there is a Guild Portal site set up for our cause and we are in the process of choosing a game to play.
It seems like a phenomenon I have heard mentioned more than once is that back in the "old days" bugs, exploits and all manner of "game-breaking" issues were rife ... but people put up with them. Most often this accounted for by the assertion that there were far fewer choices of different games, occasionally it is said that we were more "innocent" back then.
Those two assertions may (and at least to some degree are) true. But there could also be another explanation - the general communities were just better.
Sure there were trolls and loud, foul-mouthed children playing back then. But were there as many? Was the signal-to-noise ratio quite the same now that literally millions of new MMORPG players have been introduced to the genre?
It's funny, and maybe I don't get around as much anymore, but it seems like these days you don't hear a fraction of of the complaints about maturity level (quite low) of the Counter Strike community like you might have five years ago. Now you hear the exact same complaints but about it is the World of Warcraft community.
For me personally, I would relate my experience in LOTRO. I subbed on opening day and thought the game was a lot of fun. Except for the fact that the community out of the gate was pretty awful. I was just coming off of playing nothing but WoW for about two years or so (literally, I can't believe how many quality non-WoW games I missed between 2005-2007 that I am still finding out about) and was quite sensitive to anything having to do with player2player interaction. If I could have put the global population on /ignore I would have happily done it.
When I quit LOTRO the straw that broke this camel's back was being chased around Breeland by a player named, and I shitteth thee not, "Iclubbabyseals." I couldn't take it, I unsubbed, uninstalled and didn't look back until almost a year later. And ironically went back to WoW ... there had to be some element of abuse psychology at work there.
If you know me, then you know that I am also a Tolkien nerd and so of course I couldn't stay away. So I resubscribed and made the server Landroval my home (it was/is the unofficial RP server). Lo and behold the experience was amazing. Landroval had (has) one of the best MMORPG communities I have ever experienced in an online game. That is why I am still subscribed even though I rarely play anymore. Even if I am not terribly fond of LOTRO anymore, the exceptional Landroval community keeps me coming back.
So Why do MMORPG Communities Suck?
I really hate being a WoW hater, but as the years are turning the more and more I am convinced that it has had an extremely negative impact not only on the MMORPG genre but on PC gaming in general. I know that is a stretch and it's nothing I am going to stake my life on, but it is worth considering.
To me it seems like the older games were meant to be more like a typical PnP game, where you and your friends hang out for a few hours and have fun battling some orcs, slaying a dragon and saving a princess (or prince) or two. The allure of the MMORPG over the PnP game of course is that the online video game could connect friends living on separate continents and unlike those Saturday afternoon games, MMOs are going 24/7/365.
But if you look at the technological innovations in general, you almost always find that they do not live up to all the promises they make about making life better. So for instance, now the modern worker has more work and obligations and lives a much more harried and less satisfying life than a medieval peasant. Even as productivity of a worker increases, he or she must work even more and continue to be more and more productive. Hey, at least it makes anti-depressant manufacturers big bucks.
Now I'm sure there is a lot of controversy over that example, as there are other factors at play aside from mere technological process (I'm looking at you, you Calvinist bastards), but it illustrates what I think has happened to online video games.
An MMORPG these days seems to be less about casual (not speaking in the current and popular sense of that word) fun and more about working on achieving goals and being productive as a player. And all the focus seems to be on achieving those goals as an individual player - the group only exists to get you as an individual to where you want to be; there are no communal goals. The individual is the only thing that matters; selfishness is a virtue.
Again, I hate the fashionable trend of disparaging WoW simply because it is WoW, but I can't help but feel that World of Warcraft, more than any other individual game, has inculcated this behavior in the greater mass of players.
But these behaviors are not new since WoW, you can see them everyday. Just look around you at the people going into debt for fancy houses and cars, committing every sort of privation on their lives to "make it." To live the corrupted fantasy of a life that currently passes for the American Dream. Greed is good, right? He who dies with the most toys wins.
I think that WoW tapped into these memes and put them into its core design is precisely the reason it is as popular as it is - it addresses the same lusts and character defects in general society inside the game. It has nothing to do with it being "casual" or that it is a game for "non-gamers." The sad thing to me is that it has seemingly has trained a generation of gamer to expect that in all games.
And what is the result? Turn on CNN or Fox News and you see the real-life equivalent of the WoW player. By focusing only on the needs of the individual - to the point of exalting them - the general community has become diseased, like a rotted piece of wood. So you experience phenomena like a large upswing in the troll population - those who resist the unnatural condition of hyper-individualism and try (usually subconsciously) to wreck the system almost always without realizing why (explained as being for the "lulz" or some similar example of infantilized behavior).
You have players who retreat from the community and focus solely on the "solo game." You have the smarter jackals who set up "professional" guilds to make sure they achieve all they can often at the expense of its members and the non-pro guilds whose members will quit at the drop of a hat to be in the pro guild. You have the phenomenon of entitlement - those who think that because someone is not "hard core" they should not have the chance to experience all the game (e.g. endgame raids) has to offer.
Essentially you have all the real-world bullshit we have to put up with, consciously or not, invading one of the last sacred spaces of lackadaisical dreamers of the world. And the community becomes more like the real world in the sense it is fractured, cut-throat and dysfunctional.
So you can see now why I am very interested in this new group of players from mmorpg.com who are banding together to fight both virtual fantasy evil as well as the real evils of misanthropic behavior and alienation. The thing I think we share in common is the same thing that made older MMORPGs so much fun, despite the bugs, lag and other nasty fubars and glitches. We want fulfillment from playing together as a group of people - learning from and enjoying each other. What in today's games seems to have been superseded by achieving goals set by the game developers and the all-important goal (in both PvP as well as PvE) of competing against each other. Maybe The Path Ahead can learn what it is like to have fun again and leave the "work" behind.
Back from the Trollshaws
Well, I just got back from an extended vacation out in the wilds of Northern California. There is really nothing quite like crapping in a bucket and dodging feral pigs out in the wilderness to really bring you back to down to earth.
I also once again personally proved the effectiveness of FPS games as firearm trainers, despite barely ever firing a handgun I was pleasingly accurate. With more real-life practice I could be a fair shot. Thanks, Counter Strike.
The funniest thing was the terrain - I could have sworn up and down I was in the Trollshaws of Eriador. Minus the beech trees and adding madrone, among others of course. The cattle country on the way in also reminded me precisely of the Barrow Downs - if I were going to film a theatrical scene in the Barrow Downs, it would make a really good location.
So for the past few weeks, I have been living without the Internet but with electricity thanks to Honda and their handy generators. So I spent at least some of my off-time playing through Torchlight on my trusty laptop. And I'm still playing it now that I am back. I was never a huge Diablo/Rogue fan, but something in Torchlight really caught me.
Yesterday I logged back in to LOTRO, after roughly a two-month break. I think with the fresh perspective I understand the major drawback that game has for me - quests. WoW-style quests, I mean. I can handle "kill ten rats" to a certain degree, but elaborate quest chains and travel quests friggin' kill me.
On the same topic this is ultimately why I'm not playing Fallen Earth and why I have no plans to do so in the near future. I played through the first 10 levels or so and had my fill of the exact same style of advancement I was (subconsciously) fleeing in basically every other MMORPG I have played. Dealing with quest logs full of largely unrelated quests is enough to turn me off completely to a game these days - regardless whether I can solo them or not.
So for now I am satisfying my MMORPG cravings with DDO, which does not suffer from quite the same problems as the traditional model descended from DikuMUD. I may resubscribe to LOTRO simply out of love for Tolkien and to hang with my Landroval kinship Tirn en Taur. Money is only getting tighter in the coming months, though, so we'll see - fortunately $10/month is doable.
One thing I am still not doing is buying/playing Dragon Age. Which is strange considering that I've been waiting forever for it to come out. Basically it comes down to an EA issue for me. I don't want to be nickel-and-dimed and I especially do not want to be forced into marketing channels like Games For Windows Live. So I am going to wait and see and do more research before I start laying out nearly $100 for a semi-static single-player game I may never even have the time to really play. Oh well.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Elder Game
- Fabled Lands
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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