The following are articles I wrote for "The Rantings of Lum the Mad", a site covering massively multiplayer online games, in reverse chronological order.

THE VIRTUES OF MOVING ON 2001-10-20 02:37:00 [Filed by delusion]

The Ultima series is largely acknowledged for coming into its own when it embraced a gameplay asthetic which had a moral dimension in Ultima IV. Now it's time for Ultima. Online. The problem? It's not 1997, it's 2001. Calandryll has been busy talking up the concept of adding virtue to the formula which constitutes Ultima Online. It's an ambitious goal. It's going to be a coding and exploit-ironing hell. But does it really matter? I won't pretend to be objective about Ultima Online in general. When I quit the game, I feel I had a chance to suitably say my piece already. Had there been someone at OSI very early on using Calandryll's approach to fight Raph's albatross [*], I very well might still be playing the game. It obviously mattered to me. But who is all this new virtue-related content aimed at? Ultima Online today is not, by and large, a world inhabited by Ultima fans. A case in point is UDIC (Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter - a loose organization of fans of the single-player Ultimas). UDIC was for the most part very excited about Ultima Online. They'd played the Ultima series over many years, and Ultima Online seemed to be a way to mix some of the best of Ultima into a brand new online experience. It's very telling that the majority of them either quit Ultima Online by the middle of 1998 or never actually joined in part because of the feedback of other UDIC members who wanted something more than the PvP-centric world which was, then, part and parcel of everyone's Ultima Online experience - whether they wanted it to be or not. The nature of PvP may have been the final nail in the coffin for some of these players, but the fact that Ultima Online just didn't seem very Ultima-like was something that would be a lot more difficult to fix, and nobody seemed to be interested in addressing that in Ultima Online's peak growth period. These hardcore Ultima fans are the sort you woo with a virtue system. Most of them either played or considered playing Ultima Online and found it lacking. Hell, UDIC barely exists anymore, thanks to a triple play of Ultima 8, Ultima Online and Ultima 9 which were an abandonment of the series' moral dimensions so pivotal to the U4-7 experience. Thrice bitten, uh ... shy four times? You're not going to change Ultima Online and get another chance with that audience. It made up its mind a long time ago, and it's not looking back. So then, who is left to appeal to with this content? The existing Ultima Online playerbase? To what end? To prevent them from wanting to jump to a new game? A virtue system isn't going to speak to that. I don't have the numbers here in front of me, but it's safe to say Ultima Online is in maintenance mode in the United States and in many of the largest markets in Europe and Asia. Wouldn't development time be better spent on the dozens of promises OSI has reneged upon over the years, rather than make content which would have been dead-on for public launch, but is largely irrelevant now? Ultima Online's remaining players aren't interested in virtue for Ultima's sake, and that's exactly what this risks being seen as. That the developers have suddenly pulled this most Ultima of concepts out of their hat and decided to make a go of it is in itself admirable... ...but for it to be relevant, I hope they're also working on a time machine. Set it for March 1997 and make a six month plan out of it. See you then. [*]This is a reference to Raph Koster writing in reference to Ultima lore: "Trying to satisfy the thematic desires of the player base was one of the greatest challenges we faced--it was hard enough trying to make player policing work without also having to make it be "Ultima." It's both the biggest boon and the biggest albatross around your neck." Discuss: The virtues of restraint.

 

GAMES FOR PEOPLE, GAMES FOR PROFIT or THE ROAD TO CLEVELAND IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS or THE DEBIRU IS IN THE DETAILS Part I 2001-09-02 03:23:00 [Filed by delusion]

The machinery of gaming has run amok. Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month's PC Data list list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets so high and royalties so low that there can be no reward for creators. Instead of ascribing credit to those who deserve it, it seeks to associate success with the corporate machine. These are strong words for an industry more recently famous for its lows than highs in regard to having any backbone. There's more words where that came from, a lot more. Welcome to the Scratchware Manifesto, a strong statement of values from inside the industry, and at the margins. It is time for revolution. Walk into your local bookstore; you'll find tens of thousands of titles. Walk into your local record store; you'll find thousands of albums. Walk into your local software store; you'll find perhaps 40 games. Yet thousands of games are released each year. The point deserves to be qualified, however. Your local bookstore and your local record store carry first run titles, second editions and every other sort of reprint, and have no qualms about stocking old titles that people still buy. The better record stores tend to carry more than a given artist's latest album. That's rarely the case in the computer industry. The only games that generally get a reprint--usually in a more modestly packaged value line--are blockbusters that are at most several years old. Other than that, the shelves of new games and best sellers at most two years old have very little competition for their shelf space at most retailers. It is perhaps fitting that the manifesto is hosted on a site dedicated to preserving videogaming's history, and sad that said site and others like it continually have to fight with the current copyright holders to preserve said history. Part of that fight arises from the fact that classic emulation sites became current-console emulation sites and crossed the line from preservation and emulation to warez, and that the copyright owners responded with a shotgun attack on emulation of all shades, but that's a subject that deserves its own rant. The only games that fill those 40 slots are those on which publishers have lavished millions in placement and promotion and advertising and marketing dollars. The only games that make it to the shelves are those on which publishers have advanced millions in development funding, because they know that only a handful will succeed, will ever recoup the millions or tens of millions they spend in developing and launching them, because to succeed, a game must pass through the eye of the needle, become one of the handful that make it to the shelves or to the cover of PC Games. Which is to say it's the victim of a aggressive maturing publishing industry. An aggressive publishing industry homogenizes, reduces the opportunity for anyone taking creative risks to take them in a public forum, and co-opts distribution chains. The process of paying retailers for shelf space and special product placement is analogous to the process of payola in the music industry. The individual DJ in any successful radio station has no say in what gets played. The playlists come from the corporate office. This is a key factor in the homogenization of musical tastes across a large nation that would otherwise--and in fact, used to--have distinct regional tastes even within existing genres. The metaphor isn't entirely useful because software retailers, unlike radio DJs, never had pretentions of creativity to deal with. This is good for the big game publishers, as it makes co-opting the distribution chains a lot easier. The magazine industry doesn't fare much better on the merits of creative investigation of the industry it allegedly covers. The example the authors give is wonderful illustration of the same point. Every game in the previews section is the Most Important Game Ever. Why? Because the developers in the interview say so. Every one of them will Revolutionize the Industry. Why? Because the eye-catching blurb from one of the developers displayed prominently at the head of the article says so. To go one step deeper into this perverse unholy alliance, the only reasons developers allow this sort of exposure to their embryonic projects is another PC game magazine truism: the preview section is in-house advertising. Nothing critical of any import is ever said about a title in development. Take any game that was nearly universally reviled--I don't want to lead the audience, so I won't provide an example--and check it out in the prerelease previews. It was probably heralded as Important, Industry-Changing, Stunningly Innovative, and by god, it probably even did your goddamn dishes. Of course, that'd be a good thing, as I hate washing dishes. An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labor, that no single creative vision can survive. Certainly, none can survive the clueless demands of marketing weasels and clueless executives drawn from packaged-goods industries and inexperienced external producers who think demanding unnecessary and counter-productive changes will prove their merit to their bosses. We say: Basta! Enough! It doesn't have to be like that. Budgets went up for many, many reasons. FMV (Full Motion Video) is a wonderful example. Remember when FMV was being added to nearly every game in development? Most of it was wasted eye candy. It started out looking woefully artificial and candy-like, and eventually became slick and produced-looking. The acting--first voice acting, then motion capture and voice acting--was generally atrocious, and that may be too kind a description. It had a tendency to bloat game production budgets, and lended very little, if anything, to the game itself. More often than not, FMV screenshots were on the packaging covers; eye candy that told consumers next to nothing about the game itself in the place many of them were likely to look for information. The UO and UO:T2A boxes featured shots from the FMV that most players probably watched once, maybe twice if they were really impressed. Diablo II--an awfully recent entry to have as much tedious FMV as it had--was advertised on television in ad spots that consisted wholly of FMV sequences; there wasn't so much as a single glimpse of actual gameplay. The oft-quoted wisdom that the gaming industry rivals the movie industry is much like the old truism about how humans only use 10% of their brain. Both are patently untrue. Science has no basis to assume that anything less than all of the normal human brain serves a useful function, and any neurologist will happily agree. They might be more hesitant if they met your typical game publishing executive. As far as videogaming goes, the "gaming is bigger than movies" is true if you only compare domestic theater grosses to all videogame grosses. Once you add the international market and the astoundingly profitable rental and home VHS and DVD sales to that number, videogaming takes on a more accurately modest stature. Clearly, there is potential for the industry to blow itself up to cinematic proportions, and a staple technique of that concept is to throw money into lavishly extravagant budgets. Enter a floor of cubicled Photoshop jockeys, a marketing department on amphetamines with no compunctions on selling the Brooklyn Bridge, copious amounts of FMV (middle 90s) or fully 3D worlds with lighting effects that would make your typical California power company executive salivate like a hungry puppy. Good Pavlov, sit. If the miserably bad acted motion capture or FMV sequences aren't good enough, make miserably bad acted motion capture or FMV sequences featuring highly paid Hollywood talent. You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon--last year's #1 best-selling game--almost entirely on his own. This may be overstating the point. The top five selling videogames of 2000 were Pokémon titles. If you wish to pare down this manifesto to computer games specifically, it's still helpful to bear in mind many derivative games that did pretty well: Deer Hunter and its innumerable sequels, Quake II and Quake III and every non-id Quakealike, several entire series--Might and Magic, the Mortal Kombat and its ilk--Final Fantasy X (over two million units shipped in Japan, and not even a US release yet), any game with Mario in it made in the last five years, the sequels to all the above games listed as innovative, and almost every hit adventure and blockbuster sports game ever made. It's more useful to take the above and learn from it that unique and innovative games aren't doomed to failure rather than suggesting that derivative games are risky because sadly, they're not. Catering to the lowest common denominator never made anyone poor, and videogames aren't any different. What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior. You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game lost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developed for nothing, by a dev team working as a labor of love, in their spare time. TreadMarks, this year's IGF finalist, was developed by a team working for scratch and paying their groceries with the meager earnings of a little downloadable game they'd put up on their site. What do you need to fund a game? Food stamps and enough scratch to pay the electricity bill. Note: Food stamps don't buy Ferraris, nor a posh rental to show up at E3 in. What used to be a fairly insular, somewhat nerdy industry has attracted people who want to be known when the open the door of a Las Vegas hotel. Programmer as Rock Star. ROMS to richesse, as it were. The narrow retail channel forces millions in promotional expense? Then kill it. There is no shelf space on the Internet. That may have been true, in a sense, several years ago, but it's not true now. The payola scheme may not be as well developed on the internet, but make no mistake, it exists. Having said that, it is true that it's easier to get around, as there are many independent game sites that don't carry advertising, or have a strong enough watchdog of editorial policy to keep the advertising from affecting the site's content. To quote a friend, as well as an annoying 70's TV ad campaign, "you're soaking in it". There are, however, many perils: search engines that offer higher placement for a fee, web sites of magazines with no interest in covering games by organizations which--by definition--don't have a hefty advertising budget, and web sites naïve enough to agree to outrageous terms for a sneak preview of a beta or development materials for an up-and-coming game. You need hundreds of thousands in sales to recoup your costs? Yes, under the dysfunctional business model that rules today. But if you develop games the right way, the fearless way, the independent way, your costs are drastically smaller. A few thousand unit sales will pay the bills. Death to Software, Etc.! Almost every PC in America is connected to a pipe that can carry bits. Why are we copying bits to a plastic-and-metal platter, sticking it in box full of air, and shipping it cross-country, when it is far easier, cheaper, and environmentally sensible to ship those bits down that pipe? There was a day that box was jammed packed full of pertinent gaming materials. Some games were actually shipped with manuals that were useful to read even if you could figure out the basics of the game without it. For other games, the manual was essential. Copycat games, however, don't require a manual. "Think Quake, but with hot dogs, fence posts, and nylon bristled hair combs", and a keyboard command chart. Of all the standards of software distribution for console games PC game publishers have tried, they still haven't picked up on the best one: the use of the DVD-style case for software releases that don't require a thick manual. I should be careful for what I wish, however, as an industry-wide move to compact casing might encourage even more publishers to neglect including a manual, or to include the manual in HTML or PDF format on the CD, which is the worst of both worlds. The better solution would be to make games that have manuals when appropriate. Death to EA and Vivendi! Your groveling to the retailers, your lack of understanding of what constitutes a game, your complete failure of aesthetic sense, your timidity in funding, your attempts to grow by choking off competitors, your inability to make developers and marketers understand each other, has led us to this pass. You are dinosaurs, your brobdignabian sloth nothing but a drag on what ought to be a field of staggering originality. Death to Sony, Sega, and Nintendo! Your insistence on controlling every step of development, of ensuring that no product strays too far from your own blinkered twitch-game aesthetic, your absurdly high platform royalties, your gouging prices for development stations and SDKs, your boxes with the controllers wholly unsuited to a game of any depth make you irrelevant to anyone who wants to develop games of enduring merit. Death to the gaming industry! Long live games. We find our heroes not among rock stars, or game developers whose real desire is to direct movies, or designers who bare their breasts in the pages of Playboy. We find them among the men and women who created this industry, whose imaginative vision once sparked its rise, who developed games the way we mean to: Chris Crawford, once vaunted as the world's greatest game designer, now cast aside by a marketing machine that can't figure out how to sell anything that doesn't fit into its tedious categories. Revisionism? Chris Crawford, once highly interested in the process and concepts of game design, burned out on making games for the same 200,000 people and moved away, consciously, from the industry, and toward work in interactive fiction. Leaving is distinct from being "cast aside". Dani Bunten, who understood the importance of socialization in gaming far better than the Verants and Origins of the world, with their customer-hostile policies, spurned by a bigoted industry because she was a transsexual. She was also spurned from the industry because she was unwilling to modify her vision to include the rather brain-dead marketing driven demands of gaming publishers. Transferring all the blame on her sexual issues does an injustice to a greater appreciation of the rank stupidity of marketing staff. Richard Garriott, the virtual inventor of the computer RPG, cast aside like a used condom by a machine that thinks it's sucked what useful value it can find in him. To say that someone is the "virtual" anything is to say that they are not that thing. Proper credit goes to Will Crowther (~1968) or Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (1980), depending on what you consider a computer RPG. It may be more important to remember Richard as the inventor of the computer RPG which includes a moral element, which was a breakthrough in the genre. More to the point, Richard has also not been "cast aside" by the industry, and remains an important figure within it. Julian Gollop, languishing in obscurity, the fruits of his own labor denied him by an industry that values trademarks more highly than talent. While I can't speak to his reaping of fruit, it seems disingenuous to characterize the creator of the X-COM series as obscure. If the point of this inclusion is to make issue of the fact that MicroProse is continuing the series without him, it's useful to note that selling the rights to the titles was a decision made because he had no desire to re-create the same game over and over. That is, presumably, a good thing. Will Wright, who somehow still manages to force his vision through despite all the obstacles the machine puts in his path. As they did, so shall we do. We will develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles. We will work in the white-hot ferment of our own imaginations, striving to produce games of enduring merit, games so fine that generations to come will point to them and say, this, this was important in the creation of the great artistic form we know as games. We will strive for innovation over imitation, originality over the tried and true. We will explore the enormous plasticity of what is "the game," the fantastic flexibility of code, seeking new game styles and new approaches to the form. We will create games we know gamers will want to play, because we ARE gamers, not MBAs or assholes from Hollywood or marketing dweebs whose last gig was selling Tide. It's a point worth stressing: there are indeed a lot of marketing leads and gurus who have no previous--and little current--connection to the product they peddle. It's not unique to the gaming industry by any means, but in any industry that has an artistic basis, it seems inappropriate for publishers to lack that sort of connection. One of the results is a sense that marketing to base instincts is acceptable. If you have a poorly executed game, no amount of skin-hugging bodices on the front of the box can change what's in the box. We will work in small, committed teams, sharing a unified vision, striving to perfect that vision without fear, favor, or interference. We will find our market not by bribing retailers to stock our product, but on the public Internet, reaching our audience through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes, by nurturing a community of people passionate about and committed to games. It would be helpful to elaborate on what constitutes guerrilla marketing lest the uninitiated assume it begins and ends with making a company web page on which to sell your product. Guerrilla marketing is to advertising what guerrilla warfare is to traditional warfare: squad based if you will, unconventional, fighting dirty--in this case, against the numbing buzz of incessant production house advertising. Turn the existing advertising back on itself. Co-opt public space. Insert yourself into otherwise tightly controlled dialogs. We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music. We reject the machine. We reject the retail channel. We reject big budgets and big teams. We reject $50 boxes of air. We reject end-caps and payments for shelf-space. We reject executives and producers who don't understand what they sell. We reject timidity. We reject the notion that "we know what works," and commit ourselves to finding NEW things that work. We will turn this industry on its head. Tremble, Redwood City! The forces of revolution are on the march. Designer X First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. Gandhi WE are gamers, game makers, writers and readers of computerized media. We think some things are deeply fucked in the game industry -- no surprise, given how much is fucked in every other industry. We've figured it out: shareholders, corporations, managers don't care how good a game is to make or play. They're just looking for their return on investment to be higher than humanly possible. We want to play good games, and we want making games to be an art, not an electronic sweatshop. This problem, also not unique to the gaming industry, is as old as Das Kapital and as new as The Matrix. It's ugly, It's pervasive, And it can and will be changed. Designer J1 Marketing should be geared towards selling the game that the developers have created and not used as an extension of management. They work for you, the developer, not you for them. If they want a game with a feature list, then they should program it. If they can't sell the game that you've created then fire them and find someone who can. Designer J2 Therein lies the classic conflict between entertainment industry creators and their distribution chains. The programmers are making art. The management is pushing product. The compromise is often seen to be a sort of "design by committee" ethic. This is wrong-headed; committee-based design isn't a compromise between art and product, it's a complete rejection of the art of design. Art by royal commission rarely succeeds unless the king is willing to allow the artist freedom to work. Stay out of the driver's seat unless you know the destination. We reject crunch time. It is anathema to the principles of quality for which we strive. Nobody EVER does their best work at the end of a 12-hour day. And if you're not doing good work, then what the hell are you doing? Go home. Sleep. Play with your kids. Mow the lawn. Watch some television. Then, when you have some creative energy to give, come work. We will declare a game done when it IS done, not when marketing says it has to be done. If it's not done, it will suck. If it sucks, then no one will want to buy it (or even download it for free) and no one will pay attention when we release the next one. A corollary: no one should pay for being a beta tester. Listen up, everyone -- yes, even you, id software: we will do our level best to make sure the damn thing is done. If it ain't done, it's a beta. And those are free. If we discover something is wrong, we'll fix it. This of course also requires the userbase to think of a beta test as a beta test rather than a preview of the game. Previews, demos, of commercial games serve a useful purpose. It's useful to get the buzz out, to get the users interested. It does, however, carry the requirement that the developer differentiate between a beta test and a preview or demo. If your game ships with bugs reported during the beta test, then you didn't have a beta test, you had an advertisement. Be clear about what you're offering. Another corollary: our games are our responsibility. (You listening, Jason Hall, King of teh monstars?) If it's broke, we fix it. We don't blame it on other people, even computer and video card makers who don't adhere to standards. If we can't fix it, we let people know that we can't, why we can't... and we give them their money back if they ask.What we're about is credibility, in a fundamental way. We're saying that games should be created by people who play them and love them. That comes with a responsibility to create games we would want to play -- and we sure as hell don't want to play buggy, unfinished games that make our systems crash. Designer K The original Incredible Machine was developed for $35,000, and went on to sell over 800,000 units. Dynamix The Quotable R Someone is raking in so much dough that even Zaphod Beeblebrox, or John Romero, would blush. As for the state of game development...I need to use an even more disturbing metaphor: The Donner Party tragedy...their journey was also doomed to fail, and in the worst imaginable ways, due to inexperience, overconfidence, bad judgment, wasted resources, in-fighting, taking short cuts and heeding what turned out to be just plain bad advice...I have come to the conclusion that if game development is going to be so blindly ignorant that it only succeeds in causing itself to relive some bizarre version of the Donner party story again and again...then it deserves whatever grim fate awaits... There is a denial of failure pervasive in this business, from top to bottom, that defies common sense. Taking risks and failing is an important part of the creative process. Denying one's self of this experience is to enter the realm of the mediocre. I see a utopia for game designers, artists, writers and musicians. I see a perfect balance of freedom, lifestyle and creativity as the norm, not the goal or the exception. However, this utopia cannot arise within a system which is based upon concepts of management, marketing and product development which are uncreative, out-dated, wasteful and ineffective. Do you want an arcade-based, shoot-'em-up, puppet-show, Saturday-morning-cartoon aesthetic criteria to dominate the industry? Do you want more crappy games made with assembly-line techniques by yuppie puppies in luxury sweatshops? Remember: John Romero wants to make you his bitch. As a matter of fact, so do about a dozen other game developers I know... Designer R Creator's Bill of Rights The full version of the Creator's Bill of Rights that Scott McCloud created in 1987 can be read by clicking here. It is very applicable to the computer game industry. The Rights are: 1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create. 2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own. 3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property. 4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed. 5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers. 6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions. 7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time. 8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work. 9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work. 10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition. 11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property. 12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property. This system is incompatible with a traditional corporate model. The current model for artistic content distribution always favors the middlemen. Something not really dealt with in this document is the concept of cooperative distribution--a sort of collective bargaining institution that is formed by artists working for themselves collectively rather than an institution based on wringing from content creators a product and then selling the product with rapacious markup, paying paltry slave-wage royalties (or worse yet, an hourly/yearly slave wage in lieu of royalties), and unabashedly lying to the customer about the virtues of the product. Having made a practice of unsubstantiated hype and outrageous lies, these same middlemen should probably pause to wonder why it is the customer has to be marketed to more aggressively as time goes by. The Scratchware Manifesto Phase Two: Know Your Enemy Power And Money In The Game Industry What is wrong with the game industry? Why do games come out buggy, why do good game companies go under, why are the games we play today just like the games we played 5 years ago, with better graphics? To understand why this is so, and to understand what we can do to change it will require an understanding of how power and money flow in the game industry. The game industry is first and foremost an industry like many others in the world. They call it the new economy, as if it is in some way fundamentally different than what has gone before. Is it? Hell, no. When you get right down to it, the industry as a whole is populated by economic players (corporations) headed by people who are doing all they can to make money for themselves and another group of people (the stockholders), while getting as much money as they can from the customers, and paying as little money as possible to the people making the games. The corollary to this should be obvious: the only message you can send to corporations about their products is a message you send with money or its lack. You complain all you want on messageboards about how the game you're looking forward to has been seriously scaled back for some artificial deadline necessitated by a fourth quarter release, but buy it anyway? Allow me to translate the message you're sending to that corporation: "Keep up the good work, guys!" Stockholders don't listen for any message other than the message you send by buying their products, or not buying their products. If there's no correlation to public user feedback on web sites and sales, industry analysts--and therefore the corporations in that industry--will ignore user feedback. The Vampires Of Wall Street If the economic and political world were a first-person shooter, it would be infested by the undead. That’s right, the world is controlled by a bunch of vampires. Ever wonder why Exxon, Microsoft, Monsanto and all their buddies run so many commercials on how great they are? That’s because they have to hide the truth to us. Vampires control the world, in the form of corporations. What are the characteristics of vampires? Well, they’re immortal. Strangely enough, a corporation can live forever, too. Morgan Bank, Ford Motors, and General Electric - they can go on and on and on. Another characteristic of vampires? They live by sucking blood. You know the feeling you get when you boot up a new game and it crashes five times in the first 15 minutes? That’s your blood being sucked. The corporation exists for one reason only (and don’t let them tell you otherwise) - to make as much money as it possibly can. It’s like we’re cattle, kept alive for the greedy bloodsuckers to get as much profit as they can out of us. (They treat the Earth the same way, too - ever seen a clear-cut forest? Corporate vampires in action!) Vampires are notoriously hard to kill, and so are corporations. Exxon spilled oil all over Alaska - but it’s still going. Union Carbide killed thousands in Bhopal, India, but it’s still trucking. You can try and sue a corporation, but they have millions of dollars and thousands of lawyers to make sure their evil undead masters remain in control. Bridgestone/Firestone made a bunch of shitty tires, which killed a whole bunch of people in their SUVs. They might get in some trouble, but you can be sure that the corporation will go on. (An interesting fact: many of the faulty tires were made in the Decatur Illinois plant, where the regular workers were on strike. The tires were made by ‘replacement workers’, also known as scabs. Vampires and scabs? Some coincidence.) Vampires also have nests; usually the basement of some dusty castle. The vampires who run America have a nest, too, but theirs is called Wall Street. Vampires have a dark charisma; corporations spend billions on advertising. If this sounds flagrantly un-American to you, you're probably one of the millions of people who think that corporatism is the 'American' system. Democracy is the American system, and an economic model that puts an extraordinary amount of power--not just economic, but political--in the hands of the elite few is inherently undemocratic. The knee-jerk reaction to this sentiment is to assume that the person expressing it is some sort of radical communist. In fact, the icon I made for this story is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this reaction. This assumption would, however, be inaccurate. It belies a presumption that the only choices for an economic-political system are either extreme radical social totalitarianism (Soviet style communism) or a no-holds-barred extreme radical corporate free market anarchy (American style corporate state). There are many other choices between these two extremes, and one of the best--and most American--is actual democracy. Benjamin Franklin The Vampire Slayer The founding fathers of the US were an interesting bunch; some of them were into some strange things. Many were members of secret societies, with hidden knowledge and rituals. You think the eye in the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill doesn’t have some hidden meaning? Right. These people knew of the evil arcane power of the vampire-corporation; the British controlled the colonies with a few huge and powerful corporations. After the Revolution, they let corporations exist, but they reserved the right to plunge a stake into their hearts at any time. For the first 100 years of the US, corporations were highly limited. But they were plotting and planning their release. They got their big break during the Civil War. At the same time that black folks were getting freed from slavery, the vampires of Wall Street were slipping their bonds, setting up a slave system for all of us. In 1872, they convinced the Supreme Court that corporations had all the rights of a person. And that’s what we have today; America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of GlobalCapitalists’R’Us. This may be seen as overstating the point, but it isn't. In fact, the point can't be stressed enough. It's the fundamental lie which keeps even the most socially irresponsible of corporations extant: the Corporation as Person. It's a legal fiction, and a damning one to entrepeneurialism, let alone democracy. We Are All Renfield They’re crafty, these undead princes. Most people rely on them for a paycheck. They have created this hierarchy of slaves; from the zombies at the bottom to the cherished and pampered few at the top. They love dangling carrots, almost impossibly high. There are a lot of carrots in the computer industry right now - you too could be a dot-com millionaire! At the same time, the shortage of skilled computer workers has them trying to ship in people from abroad with the H1-B visa proposals. Now, there’s nothing wrong with an Indian, Thai, Finn, or German wanting good work; remember, they’re vampire-food too, but these visas tie these workers to the companies that hire them, which results in more company control. And the wage rates for all computer workers go down. Which is, of course, exactly the point. The H1-B visa proposals serve many purposes for the corporations shilling for them. It gives them lower-paid workers which they can control under the fear of deportation. The sponsoring corporation doesn't have to worry about H1-B visa employees doing anything corporately worrisome like joining a union, filing any sort of grievance, or voting with their feet to find another employer. It's preferable to these corporations to actually hiring Americans at the industry standard wage rates, it's preferable to keeping on older employees who may swiftly be approaching a pay raise, becoming fully vested, or nearing eligibility for an expensive retirement package. While they’re crafty, they’re also stupid. You’d think immortals would have a longer outlook, but the rules of their nest - sorry, Wall Street - have caused them to focus more and more on quarterly returns. Ever wonder why some buggy game got rushed out for a Christmas release? Fourth-quarter profits, friend! Silicon Sweatshops So the computer game industry is getting caught up more and more in a blood-sucking scam. Venture (vampire?) capitalists make sure everyone knows what side the bread is buttered on. The large amount of blood - sorry, capital - that is required to make a game nowadays mean more and more of the small development shops are being forced out or forced into ‘partnerships’ with big corporations. At the same time, working conditions in the industry are getting worse. Crunch time (crunch, like the sound Renfield makes biting into the carapace of a tasty bug?) seems to be more and more common, and to go on longer and longer. Descriptions of crunch seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of work practices you find south of the border. Here’s one from Ion Storm Dallas, as reported in Salon (link: How do game developers hack it?). It's rife with 'I love my vampire masters' baloney. All-nighters, 18-hour days, sleeping at the office -- John Romero's posse keeps up a "death schedule" to get Daikatana out of beta. Since Daikatana's inception, elite and obsessive gamers have road-tripped from around the world to work with their hero, Romero. They've quit school, left relationships and literally built beds under their desks to live and breathe nearly every breath in the house Romero built. Their commitment to a self-described "death schedule" -- the final, endless rush to perfect their game -- isn't just some start-up novelty, it's a way of life. The commitment of a Mexican maquiladora worker to their imposed 'death schedule' isn't a choice -- it's a hard economic decision in a poor country. One of the differences is that many employees in these programming jobs are starry-eyed, thoroughly enjoy their craft, and/or are willing to make severe personal sacrifice to be involved in a profession they've been enamored with ever since they played The Bard's Tale on a Commodore 64. This makes them even easier to manipulate than mere economic self-interest alone can. All the 'cool' companies do it, and the 'cooler' they are, the more they do it. The first 14 hours are always the easiest. "Aaaaarrggggggggh!" Shawn Green screams as he thrashes his computer keyboard against the ground. It's midnight in the coders cove of Ion Storm and the cubes are as dark as the city below outside. Green, a stocky, long-haired programmer in a paunchy black T-shirt, hunches like an ape at the beginning of "2001" and whacks keys across the floor like loose teeth. A skinny programmer stretches his neck out of a nearby cube to observe the tantrum, then nonchalantly returns to his work. Green brushes the hair from his face as a smile creeps across it. "Nothing like a little stress relief," he says, tossing the battered keyboard down the hall. Nothing like a little violent behavior induced by an insane schedule. This is Texas -- will the next step be to grab a handgun and whack loose teeth across the floor after trying to eat a bullet? Not that this anger transference is new. The darling of many avowedly liberal digerati, Apple, was masterful at anger transference as a tool to squeeze merciless amounts of office hours out of people by making the competition, rather than the management forcing these schedules on them, the enemy. Bash the keyboard and take one for the team. Management's right behind you. Great job, maybe they'll get some more Jolt Cola in the fridge for you so you can make your next all-nighter even longer. Green, the 28-year-old lead coder on Daikatana and a veteran of id Software, is 14 hours into one more 18-hour day. In a few minutes, he'll take his first and only break, heading off to an abandoned abortion clinic to practice with his doom-metal band, Last Chapter... The great thing is, if people in the industry were paid hourly, crunch time would be a clear violation of even the miserable US labor laws. Mmmmm… I love working 18 hours with one break. Sign me up, oh dark lords of capitalism! Everyone teeters on the brink of self-destruction during crunch mode, the ruthless death schedule that comes during these final months of production. That's got to be healthy! The sheer relentlessness of crunch mode, Romero insists, is the only way to make sure everything gets covered. The sheer relentlessness of global competition, sweatshop managers insist, is the only way to survive. Back to work, lazy sheep! To hack it, survivors like Green have transformed crunch into their high-tech frat's equivalent of hazing -- the upperclassmen being the machines, and the pledges, the humans who serve them… Brian Eiserloh, a bushy, 29-year-old coder who goes by the nickname Squirrel, set the office record for spending 85 out of 90 days without going home. "You can get an amazing amount of work done," he enthuses via e-mail. "I thrive under [short bursts] of pressure." The thing is, Daikatana turned out to be a long burst. They get longer and longer. And soon enough, they become the expectation. This is called 'reduced expectations', baas and moos, and it's one of the favorite tools of the vampire. And this one has to be the crowning glory. We're so much better in the US than in other parts of the world. There, you have other people forcing you to work in unlit, unventilated workplaces for 18 hours day in and day out. Here, we get people to convince themselves to do it voluntarily. Aren't we so superior? Many of these same companies have turned a blind eye to excessive in-office abuse of amphetamines and other stimulants. That on top of ridiculous working hours produces a sleep deprived staff filled with junkies, broken marriages, socially inept outcasts, and generally thoroughly used people. The idea is that these are the people most likely to produce good work. Even if this were true, it would be morally indefensible. Excessive adulation of free-market capitalism has all sorts of solutions that are morally indefensible. Many of these workers are prone to back and tendon disorders that were the primary concern of those pushing for enactment of ergonomic regulations. Predictably, these regulations were fought by the management of the businesses whose workers needed this protection the most. The fact that our current and previous presidents had no use for anything that impedes the interests of business ensured that the legislation would be passed so late by one that the other could repeal it. Neither would recognize an ethical issue if it landed in their coffee cup. Now Ion Storm's 31 game developers don't just work in the shade, they work in the black. To get into their cubes, they part felt… It was a fairly awesome and ironic sight as I wandered through the glass-domed gamers' haven last October. All I saw were rows of caves. And of these caves, Weasl's was the darkest. "I call myself a mushroom," Weasl told me as I crouched inside, "because I'm always working in the dark." With a couple extra layers of felt draping his cube, there's not even the slightest trace of light, let alone fresh air. But Weas… doesn't seem to mind. "Darkness is really helpful when you're trying to shut out outside influences," he explains, tweaking an animated pool of lava on his screen. "After you spend enough time in here, your personality adapts." After you beat a child repeatedly, it's personality adapts, too. In an ethical company, this behavior would be seen as wholly physically and mentally unhealthy, unsanitary, and dangerous to him and very possibly, his coworkers. Under a reasonable system of ergonomic standards, this would be one step removed from the horror stories that emerge from the meat packing industry. In this industry, however, it's seen as some sort of twisted gnomic badge of honor. Weasl needs a job, but does he need a job where he is encouraged to dehumanize himself in the process? Luke "Weasl" Whiteside is the newest level designer to join the Daikatana team and, in a way, the most enigmatic. Since he came to the company just a few months before my visit, Weasl managed to miss out on Ion Storm's tempestuous back story. He's still so awed to be working here that sometimes he doesn't leave. Underneath his desk there's a pillow. On some nights, he hunkers down below his computer, munches some M&M's and goes to sleep. For Romero, who dreamed of populating a company with gamers as intense as himself, Weasl is as hardcore as it gets. Sounds like poor Weasl is suffering from a case of vampiric possession. Concentration camp victims identified with their oppressors, too. Not to say that the much (and probably accurately) maligned Ion Storm is the only company where this happens -- no, not at all. It's all over. Doesn't that make you feel better about the games you buy? It’s a good thing that CDs don't carry bloodstains well. Slash And Burn Development So the companies are getting more work out of people under worse conditions, and making them like it. At the same time, they are increasing their control over the fruits of worker’s labor. When you say it like this, it sounds great: ‘Intellectual Property Rights’. Who could complain about people having control over their own work? Well, brothers and sisters, it’s not the worker who has the control, it’s the undead. Work for hire contracts leave computer creative workers with no rights whatsoever. Further, there are many games that get lost in the mad scramble for guaranteed profits. The industry is littered with the corpses of games that had funding pulled at some point. And who owns that work? The corporations. So thousands on thousands of hours of work have disappeared into the secret vaults of the demon princes. The wrecking swath of the marketing juggernaut has no appreciation for anything but the most heavily hyped products of the week. Not only are the single-player products of yesteryear at risk--including those products which have no commercial value anymore--the online products are in equal jeopardy. As has been demonstrated several times in the last few years, companies with total control of their former employees intellectual property would rather consign that property to the junk bin than give it away or even sell it for a nominal fee for the customers, the fans, to continue to enjoy. An Unholy Alliance How does something this wasteful and evil manage to keep going? One way is through good-old-fashioned anti-competitive marketing strategies. Why is it that every game in the world has to retail for $55.00 when it comes out? Well, the vampire lords of the gaming industry have made a pact with the vampire lords of the distribution giants to make it so. And the lackeys of the computer gaming press, both online and in print, keep up the scam. The computer hardware masters don’t mind either, as these games are pushing bigger and better hardware sales. And the Demon King of the computer world, Microsoft, does it’s part too. Again, another form of digital payola. When the retailer doesn't have any interest in the product, don't expect much attention to detail, or shelf space for those games without a multi-million dollar marketing budget. They'll sell you software, but they'd be just as happy to sell you a television or a toaster. It's all generic product to them. Moo! Baa! And let’s not forget the ‘keep the cattle in line’ strategies. The dark masters of our industry are well aware that they are outnumbered, both in the workplace and in the gamer community. They have used the time-honored methods of divide and conquer, baffle them with bull, and keep them in the dark and feed them shit. The most common way people have fought for their rights as workers is to organize themselves, often into unions. Well, unions have been on the butt end of a bad-PR campaign that has gone on since the 1930s. Certainly these warriors of the new economy wouldn’t want to take part in something as stinky as a union. We’re Game Professionals, not autoworkers! Another problem with the image of unions is that several of the more powerful unions have adopted a method of operation which can best be described as corporate. This is a shame, because as mentioned before, the only message the stockholders and upper management understand are messages which involve money. A union of workers acting collectively can send a very decisive message. That is, they can if our supposedly elected representatives don't interfere on behalf of powerful business lobbies, as they've been consistently wont to do since the 70s, regardless of administration. The Sun Is Rising Our vampire overlords don’t do too well when the sunlight of truth is shined upon them by well-educated workers and gamers. You can see signs of the rising sun all over. Microsoft’s operating system monopoly was one of the forces that has helped the LINUX movement to grow. LINUX is deadly to vampires, because it works directly against one of their main sources of control - copyright of software. Without that, the cattle can slip out of the pasture, grow horns, and do all sorts of dangerous things. The whole open-source movement draws many people who are tired of the way the corporations do things. Another great anti-vampire example is Napster, and the other MP3 swapping schemes. People are really tired of vampire radio, vampire music companies, and vampire CD stores. The Indymedia movement is another example of resistance to the reign of the undead, particularly in their control of the media (baffle them with bull, keep them in the dark). Alternative forms of organization abound on the Internet, from everything to internet collectives (www.tao.ca) to Quake clans. Some of these are aware of their dark bondage, some are not. Putting A Stake Into The Heart Of The Game Industry Our vampire masters know their rule is precarious. Resistance is growing, from the Seattle uprising against the WTO to this manifesto. The corporate hold over our ‘democratic’ politics is slipping. There is a simple, three point plan that can take these guys out. First, we need to pull the blinders off our eyes. Wake up. Games don’t have to be shitty and buggy, working on games doesn’t have to be some equivalent of slavery. We need to get mad and get active. Second, we need to educate ourselves on the real story in our industry. Look for alternative sources of media. If you get the feeling that someone is trying to bullshit you when you read some news story, you’re probably right. Find out the truth. Third, we need to organize. This is what makes them tremble - that the cattle and the sheep are getting together. We need to take direct actions to change things. We need to organize ourselves into a new industry, find new channels, and use our economic power as buyers and our labor strength as workers. We need to get out from under the thumb of the corporations, either by tearing them down or by making them obsolete. This strategy requires consumers to make informed choices rather than market-driven choices: Feel free not to be the first one of your friends not to buy a particular game because it's been at the receiving end of a deafening campaign of hype two years before hitting a shelf. If you're interested in a game, but unsure of whether or not it lives up to the hype, download a demo, and if there is no demo, demand one on future products, and take it upon yourself to play the game through other means. This too comes with an obligation - try before you buy, but buy it if it proves worthwhile. Don't, under any circumstances, pre-order. Pre-ordering upcoming titles advertises to a bloodthirsty industry that you have absolutely no intention of exercising any sort of quality discrimination. Pre-ordering is you shouting to these companies "I don't care what you put in this box, I want it!". That does damage to any hope of quality control in an industry which desperately requires it. New Model Utopia Picture if you will, a time when we don’t have to rely on our vampire overlords for our gaming or our game-making. Game development teams are small groups that share all the proceeds from their work and have control over it and ownership of it. Games are not bought in the mega-stores, but off the Internet or from your local independent game-download outlet. Games do not all cost 50 bucks - some cost 30, others 10, some are free for the first chapter and then 50 cents per chapter download. We have games about everything, from worker’s revolution and women’s rights to raves and pagan rituals to shooters and citybuilders. Faced with real competition, the current big players can no longer get away with releasing buggy product that’s just a rehash of last year’s hit title. We can do it, if we get mad enough, educated enough, and organized enough. What do you want to overthrow today? Designer J1 Continue to Part II of this article... Discuss: You have nothing to lose except your change.

 

GAMES FOR PEOPLE, PART II 2001-09-02 02:09:00 [Filed by delusion]

Due to the length of this update, I'm forced to split it into sections. Here's the rest. The Scratchware Manifesto Phase Three: What is Scratchware? The Scratchware FAQ Everything you always wanted to know about scratchware games but were afraid to ask. What is scratchware? The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices. A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and read. Scratchware games are brief (possibly fifteen minutes to an hour or so), extremely replayable, satisfying, challenging, and entertaining. Requiring brevity is one of the shortcomings of this concept. There are others; it's probably better to open doors rather than close them. It might be more useful to suggest quality games don't by definition have to be multi-hour epics rather than suggest that they cannot be. Why the term scratchware? Scratch; chump change; nickles and dimes. Ware; warez; software. And we come to the term itself which is problematic. It implies low value, and sounds like yet another term invented by independent software designers who want to release freeware or shareware and call it something cute. Cardware, giftware, junkware - these sorts of silly license terms serve mainly to cause users to ignore license agreements. Let's settle on unambiguous functional terms: commercial software, shareware, freeware, open source, public domain. The call to action described in the Scratchware Manifesto has more to do with the process of game making than the process of game licensing anyway. Why do we need scratchware? We need scratchware because game programs cost too much for most people. Games are running $35 for last year's model and upwards of $55 retail for the latest title. Most aren't worth that much money. Consider the one-time-through linearity, lack of replayability and derivative gameplay that many games suffer from, then reconsider the price that the publishers of these games are demanding again and again and again... Cheapass Games is a board game company that manufactures and sells award winning board and card games for $3 to $7, and very successfully. It might be said that scratchware is to commercial computer games what Cheapass Games is to commercial board games. Like Cheapass Games, the philosophy of scratchware embraces the idea of value; of worth. This philosophy provides for a new frontier of thoughtful ideas, reasonable design goals and careful and dedicated craftsmanship. * * * We also need scratchware because development teams are too large. Imagine writing a song or a poem with ten other people. Imagine weaving a tapestry or painting on canvas or writing a novel with twenty people. Now imagine making big budget computer entertainment. The design team for an Unreal based 3D shooter game, for example, would be comprised of fifty to one hundred people. On the other hand, imagine making a computer game with one or two other multiskilled people. They might even be your friends or family members. Imagine doing this without the restraints imposed by deadlines or bureaucracy. Imagine actually being in control of content, gameplay, art and design rather than subordinating it to someone else. Imagine a game that can actually be made and make it. Imagine scratchware. Take note of another one of the pitfalls here: getting locked into a specific idea for developing software. The implication here is that anyone can make good computer games. I'm almost worried that the wrong people will take this manifesto the wrong way and immediately bite off far more than they can choose. We've have plenty of evidence of that in the MMOG genre; teams of people who assume the hard part about making a good game is coming up with good ideas for a game. This is wrong headed in the sense that coding experience is not optional when you set out to make an ambitious game... ...so start smaller. If someone and two friends want to make a game despite a lack of experience, it's crucial that you tackle a project that won't overwhelm you. Scour the net for many examples of the shells of projects that small groups of people started and never finished because the task wasn't suited to a few people without any experience. Face it, if committee-style game making with actual programmers and artists is bad, committee-style game making with an HTML hero and a Photoshop jockey is idiocy. So for your first projects, don't start out with the idea of dethroning EverQuest, out Quaking Quake III, or making the next Civilization-meets-Sim City game. Hone your skills in incrementally more ambitious public domain, freeware and shareware offerings: not only is there no shame in starting with a project you can actually hope to finish by yourself or with minimal help in something approaching a reasonable time frame, it's almost always better if you do. * * * We need scratchware because there is more than one way to develop good computer games. Corporate computer game making is in a panic right now. Game publishers seem clueless and in denial. They aren't willing to admit that they may be insufficient judges of developer maturity, management ability, audience intelligence or design originality. Meanwhile scratchware game designers, by their honest indifference to the computer game industry at large, can ignore all of this nonsense and simply create great games... Does the term scratchware refer to other applications besides games? Absolutely, although scratchware applications and tools probably already exist. How are scratchware games made? One to three people design, build, test and release them. They are made using normal software and hardware tools for the average computer system. They are made at night, on weekends, during vacations or whenever one can. Tasks are delegated or shared. Anyone involved should have at least two of the following skills: writing, programming, art, game design, sound design and/or music production. A scratchware game relies primarily on 2D art, which defines both its look and design. Most of you realize the distinct advantages of this. 3D games are complex and costly. [3D is discouraged unless one can program an engine one's self and are, or are working with, an artist competent in 3D tools, model making and textures.] 2D game art is faster to create and implement, and certainly possesses unplumbed aesthetic potential. Again, don't box yourselves in like this. There's more to this concept than limiting development teams to three amateur programmers or developers. They key is to get out of the existing situation where creators are treated like widget makers. There's a lot of room here for the concept of cooperative game design; a game company concept where there's plenty of room for profit shared equitably rather than the lion's share of it heading to the CEO of a publishing company in the form of a sweet tax-sheltered investment option or a multi-million dollar bonus check that is completely out of proportion to his negligible contribution. Squad-based cooperative game development where the people who actually do the work share the spoils of the work. It's criminal that this is a radical concept in American business. Who makes scratchware games? Nobody intentionally makes scratchware yet; the concept is fairly new. Some of the better low priced shareware games might fall under this category. Some low priced shelfware games might qualify. If the game has original content, offers great gameplay and replayability, has a professional look, is bug free, costs $25 or less for the complete program, and was made by three people, it is scratchware. The point here has been missed. Judge the concept by who profits, where those profits came from, and the quality of the software. Don't get caught up in the trap of limiting design teams to an arbitrary number. There's plenty of room in this re-evolution for groups larger than three; just keep the jackals off their backs. How much do scratchware games cost to design and make? Each person involved puts their talent and tools into a pool. The question is then asked: Which one of our game ideas can we create using only the skills, assets and tools we already have? In essence, it costs little or nothing to make a scratchware game. If a special tool or asset library is required, freeware programs and sources are recommended over shelfware, beyond what one can personally afford.If scratchware costs anything to make it probably costs about as much as your average hobby, like golf, photography or mountain biking. What game genres are appropriate for scratchware? Any, either in terms of broad category (adventure, strategy, puzzle, etc.) or specific setting (science fiction, historical, fantasy, etc.). Any genre or category, really. How much do scratchware games cost to purchase? $10 to $25. Downloadable or on CD ROM. What do I get for my money? A good game, with professional quality art, programming, writing, design, sound and music, at a reasonable and worthwhile price. Who distributes scratchware? Nobody. Currently no distribution models or systems exist outside of the shareware model. When shareware is readmeware and not responsible enough to remind the customer of its price up front, it might as well be freeware. A slightly more aggressive approach is needed. The author makes an extremely important point. I stressed this earlier, and it bears repeating: silly "fun" licensing concepts serve no-one. If you're going to make software for money, charge for it. If you're going to make software for free, do not. Asking the user to do "cute" things like sending you a post card, used CDs, or donating $5 to your--or their--favorite charity sounds pretty harmless, but what it in fact does is tarnishes the concept of paying for software you've actually tried (shareware, or commercial software with a demo or preview). Don't confuse the issue: Shareware, freeware, public domain, open source, and commercial software are nearly universally understood terms. You owe it to yourselves and your users to inform your users as to which of these your software is. Scratchware needs very creative distribution methods. Solutions to this problem will vary but innovations in how we communicate and do commerce on the internet seem to offer the best possibilities at this time. Creating a distribution system for indie games and scratchware should be very attractive to the more business minded entrepreneurs among us. Such a thing could be very profitable. With the right kinds of creative online placement, spotlights and reviews at game oriented web sites, and a fair bit of guerilla marketing, these hurdles could be overcome...at least until scratchware distribution networks, which are inevitable, come to be. Designer R R E V O L U T I O N You say you want a revolution Well, you know we all want to change the world You tell me that it's evolution Well, you know we all want to change the world But when you talk about destruction Don't you know that you can count me out...in Don't you know it's gonna be all right? You say you got a real solution Well, you know we'd all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know we're doing what we can But when you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is brother you have to wait Don't you know it's gonna be all right? You say you'll change the constitution Well, you know we all want to change your head You tell me it's the institution Well, you know you better free you mind instead But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow Don't you know it's gonna be all right? John Lennon, Paul McCartney August 30, 1968 Lest my critique of several specific parts of this document seem too critical, I'd like to state that the Scratchware Manifesto is a wonderful piece of work. As such, I'd hate to see people dismiss it because the third part tries to define the concept too narrowly. To once again hop on the horse and beat it, it takes more than merely keeping development staff down to a single level and number. An excellent case in point is Atari's 1976 arcade classic Breakout. Breakout was designed by Atari employees Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of later Apple fame. Nolan Bushnell, founder and CEO of Atari, described the concept of the game to Jobs. Jobs accepted the work as a design task for himself and Wozniak to complete. Jobs, an idea man then and now, wasn't the one who was going to be doing the actual design--that was Wozniak's calling. For their work, Jobs agreed to an even share of the profits. Jobs accepted $5,000 from Bushnell and informed Wozniak that he had been given $700, by which he only gave Wozniak $350. The truth came out later. The parable serves a purpose: it illustrates that coercive management practices don't magically pop into place once an organization becomes large, they can exist in groups of two. This makes the case for focusing on an honest, collaborative development strategy rather than putting on the blinders and paying attention only to thenumber of people involved. The goals of the Scratchware Manifesto are ambitious. They amount to no less than changing how games are made and creators making more than slave wages from the process. In order to achieve these goals, it is imperative that the gamer--the potential customer--is aware of the movement. The customer has to participate in this process. · Accepting poorly executed work because the game has potential to be worthwhile in a few patches is ludicrous. It harms both the programmer and the customer, and serves to increase marketing budgets for future products. · Pre-ordering products whose quality is unknown is insanity. It's a result of hype machines that are woefully out of step with actual product development, and falling for it makes quality take a back seat to marketing. · Consciously choose where you buy your software. Support stores which focus on software and are able to consistently offer useful advice. · Word of mouth is extremely important for quality games that otherwise might fall off the radar. If you discover an overlooked gem, tell others about it. Write to the people who shouldn't have overlooked it in the first place--gaming magazines, websites, and media reviewers--and tell them about it, too. · Engage in guerrilla development and marketing. Avoid webpage committee game design where all sorts of people talk about making a game that none of them have the skills to make. Rather, focus on making software ambitious enough to be a challenge to you without overwhelming your resources. In all of this, remember that in the existing distribution structure, the most successful producers have entire marketing staffs whose primary job is to deceive the customer into thinking their next project is the most important, best designed, and most entertaining title ever to exist. Judge the merits for yourself, you're not sheep. Are you? Discuss: You have nothing to lose except your change.

 

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE ... COMMERCIALIZED. 2001-06-01 01:42:00 [Filed by delusion]

Fresh on the heels of Oni, Rockstar games has announced an upcoming project: State of Emergency. To cut to the chase, it's a game about rioting against the "American Trade Organization", which is to say it's the videogame version of the WTO protests that have occurred over the last year or so. I suspect that anyone who feels great sympathy for the anti-WTO movement aren't eager to have their points of view trivialized. I know I don't. I also suspect anyone who feels strongly in favor of the latest round of what is laughably called "free trade" probably isn't eager to have the more extreme acts of the radical minority of the protesters glorified. Who does that leave as actual customers of this game? People who don't give a shit about politics or who don't have enough sense to form an opinion about, well ... anything. Given such a vast target audience, I predict Rockstar Interactive will have one hell of a success on their hands. Maybe the sequel will based be the inevitable results of the actions of the WTO, titled "Third World Sweatshop". Discuss: Comm€nts?

 

COUNSELOR MOJO BLUES, PART LXVII 2001-05-11 14:14:00 [Filed by delusion]

This while playing tourist in the official (now ex-)Counselor channel: {Jane_Doe} I'm not ready to give up helping those in need just yet, so I'll probably join one of the guilds being formed. {Counselor_3858} That is inspirational of you Jane :) {Counselor_3858} They can pull of our robes, but they can't pull out our hearts, right? :) (The names have been changed for privacy.) Allow me to translate: "I'm not smart enough to realize when I've been discarded after years of being used. They can fuck us once, but they can't stop us from begging to be fucked again!" You've heard of vigilante justice? Get ready for vigilante counseling. Folks, Electronic Arts/ea.com/Origin et al isn't a non-profit community service organization. It's a business whose primary function is to make money for stockholders. Your in-game protests, your web-based petitions, and your e-mails to Origin staffers will make no difference. There are only two messages that Electronic Arts will listen to: more money and less money. How many of you now-ex-counselors are going to keep paying Electronic Arts for the privilege of playing UO? How many of you are going to quit? How many of you are going to urge your friends to follow your lead? Again, those are the only two ways to get Electronic Arts' attention. I suspect that the reaction will be a collective shrug, however. There is simply no way to have been a counselor past 1998 without realizing that Electronic Arts is a soulless company with no conscience and that its primary online game has no future. And for you would-be apologists, please note that not having a conscience and not having a future are two completely separate issues that are only peripherally related. Originally, the Counselor program was designed to help players with questions about the game. There's nothing that's questionable or immoral about that; call it the path paved with good intentions. What it became, however, was an unfunded tech support and community administration staff. It was allowed to become this because Origin realized that if it could push off tech support and administration to a volunteer staff, it would achieve a greater profit margin than if it actually paid an in-house technical support staff. Nobody can deny that the Counselor program became tech support and do it with a straight face, and as to whether it was part of the community administration, who was on the first line of response when players complained about players with offensive names or conducting themselves offensively? A lot of people - most, I would hope - joined the Counselor program because of an honest desire to help others. Some joined because it was the next logical step in their "advancement" of the game, and wanted to position themselves in the halls of power. The latter are inevitable in any such situation. They're predictable, and they don't concern me much; I recognize sleazy politics when I see it. What intrigues me is the former. Why did people with a desire to help others stick with this program? Some of them didn't recognize the fundamental disconnect of a for-profit company using a free tech support staff. Of course, some people don't see the problem with sweatshop labor, either. Tech support isn't charity work. Helping players in an online game isn't working at a soup kitchen or delivering meals to the infirm. If some of the participants in the Counselor program were innocent of the implications of giving away their labor for free, I can't really fault them for that, although I hope they'd see things a little more clearly in retrospect. Some of the rest became jaded; certainly, some of them stuck around just to see how absurd the situation could get, they wanted front-row seats to the punchline, as it were. I can relate to that. So what happens to the player, now? Is Electronic Arts likely to hire sufficient tech support and administration staff to deal with the paying customers on its US servers? Given ea.com's actions of the last year, absolutely not. Having had the equivalent of a support subsidy for the last three and a half years, they now have to actually pay for labor. They're going to find out that their margins are cut back. Don't get me wrong, UO - even the US portion of UO - is a profitable venture. Will it be profitable enough for the suits, bean counters, and stockholders? Yes, if they continue along their current path, ie that of introducing UO into fresh markets. The US UO market has been written off. The sequel has been yanked, support for the US servers has been deemed more expensive than it's worth if they have to pay real labor costs, and the volunteer firing is going to motivate a chunk of the US playerbase to quit (those of you "waiting" and continuing to pay EA for your UO account on the basis that it will become more valuable on ebay are about to see the market drop considerably as more veteran accounts hit the auction block). The future of UO lies in taking it to new markets, and continuing to service it in markets with decent computer saturation and where slave labor is still considered a valuable endeavor: much of Asia, for example. In the US servers, however, those players wishing for the return of the "good" old days of no accountability and grief play are about to get their day in the sun. It certainly would be ironic if their numbers offset those of people leaving the game because of the abandonment of the Counselor system. Particularly when Counselors start re-appearing on the US servers. Hint: They'll be playing from Asia. Discuss: Comments?

 

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU MAN AND WIFE. YOU MAY NOW ... UH, HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE 'R0XX0R', ANYWAY? 2001-05-06 22:26:00 [Filed by delusion]

The Mercs are an MRPG guild perhaps best known for PvP in DSO and UO, PKing in the same, and continuing to discuss who owned who in events that took place years ago by people who don't even play the games anymore. They also have the dubious distinction of having about ten times more people "quit" TM than were ever in it. Don't ask. Surely this isn't the sort of guild that exactly championed or supported the idea of role-playing. Much less online weddings. Still less out-of-game role-play. In any event, congratulations to Lord Glenn (Balor, co-founder of The Mercs) and Lady Monica (Lady China, best known for her rabid attacks against non-TM who post on the TM messageboard - despite not being a member herself). Which begs the question: Why is role-playing in a role-playing game bad, but having a wedding where the participants role-play that they are members of a particularly low-budget performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream good? You want a medieval wedding? Where's the 12 year old bride, the smell of offal in the streets, the clergy using scripture as a weapon and the disease? No, in-game and out, everyone wants the sanitized, happy, incarnation of a "medieval" setting, complete with impeccably clean clothing. I bet they ate with utensils, too. Fortunately for all parties involved, consistency isn't much valued anyway. I didn't see any pictures of the party crashers who came in wearing underwear and speaking in slang threatening to kill everyone there with their "main". Discuss: Comments? Questions? Toasts? [dead link]

 

WE STIL FEER CHANJ. 2001-04-03 13:08:00 [Filed by delusion]

Are you tired of watching the slow, agonizing death throes of proper English as it succumbs to injuries suffered at the train wreck of real-time media, laziness, and idiocy? Do you flinch when you see so-called "d3wd-speak" even in jest? When people use "ppl" for "people" and "u" for "you", does it get on your nerves? If you're like me and answered yes to those questions, relax. Apparently, we're wrong. Retired British TV, print and radio writer Richard Wade wants us to ignore spelling rules and just type whatever sounds right. LETS CHANJ the way we SPEL... on paper, on our mobiles, on our screens... Freespel for comprehension, clarity and cumfert Don't worry if you cant be konsistent Praktis on your mobile fone 'I luv u...c u 2 moro...I o u $5...' Invent new words to replace tricky ones: 'she brings, he brought' why not 'she brings, he brung'? Start NOW...tell you frends, use freespeling...GO FOR IT That's right, literacy, apparently, is for snobs who actually know what a semicolon is and how to use it. I'm a member of an online community where 'freespeling' is pretty widely practiced, and I'm here to tell you, Mr. Wade, it's pretty goddamn ugly. Discuss: Comentz?

 

FINALLY, AN MRPG THAT DOESN'T MAKE BABY JESUS CRY! 2001-02-08 00:21:00 [Filed by delusion]

Baby Jesus hits you for 43 points of soul damage. You have been saved. Is Jesus ready for an MMOG built to praise Him? Technically, ProjectX, isn't an MMOG quite yet. Unlike some people, they're familiar with the limitations of starting a niche product and seem to be keeping their goals realistic. Rather than build a game with magic server code and 19 species of sponges, they're starting smaller - a game designed around the Gemstone III mud engine and client, which has the actual benefit of already existing... More to the point, it's a project lead by an employee of Simultronics, who made Gemstone III in the first place. Personally, I'd like to see them get somewhere with this. Yes, I'm still an atheist. I don't consider that a contradiction. Of course, by the same token, I also wouldn't be playing it, but I think it might have more to offer the industry than is first apparent. Presumably, a Christian-specific role-playing environment would exhibit many of the same traits as existing MMOGs. In fact, human nature guarantees it, and that's why it interests me. If this game sees the light of day, it's going to have administration requirements that have been seen in previous MUDlike games, but simply hasn't existed in the newer generation of MMRPGs. Having a moral aspect to your games isn't new, as anyone who played Ultima IV through VII can tell you. But that aspect of Ultima Online was abandoned during development; the irony isn't lost on a lot of people. Content control is a big issue when you're not only trying to tell a specific story (at which some games have been better at than others) but also trying to make sure your players aren't telling the wrong story. At least in a game like this, the developer has a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't constitute the "right" story. There are content issues inherent in an environment like this that need to be solved differently. The false dichotomy of Ultima Online's "PKs vs RPs" pales in comparison to the problems of actually enforcing not only a role-play environment, but one with specific values and beliefs. What do you do with players who prefer a PvP style of game - let them be Romans, witches, heretics, Muslims, demons, unbelievers, or do you have Christ's followers camping the newbie spawn points for fresh souls? These pre-existing solutions are not as practical in an faith-specific religiously-themed environment. Is there a way to create a game for a niche market and be something bigger than a MUD? Is there an interest in online gaming with a moral dimension (whether it's one I agree with is more a question for me as a customer than as someone writing about this genre), and more importantly, how reasonable a concept is this? Is there a way to woo an audience that has a vocal minority assuring it that the very concept of a role-playing game isn't appropriate for the very target audience it's intended for? Does Jesus cast spells? Discuss: ...before you do this. [dead link]

 

EQ FAN FAIRE MUSINGS or ANIMALIAK MAITE DITUT, HORREGATIK EZ DITUT JATEN 2001-02-05 04:28:00 [Filed by delusion]

A thousand Everquest players descend upon a Baltimore hotel, but the city's biggest news of the weekend is that a something smelled bad on an airplane that wasn't scheduled to land here in the first place. Verant, unlike British Airways, came out smelling like roses for the most part. I headed up to the EQ Fan Faire on Friday at about 6:00 pm. As registration began at 1:00 pm, I was afraid that I may had missed some of the event. Arcadian Del Sol assured me that I hadn't missed much; most of the players were having a good time socializing, but for those of us who really don't have a foot in the EQ community, there wasn't much to see. The reception began at 8:00 pm, and Cindy Archuleta, Everquest's Community Relations Manager, made introductions for all the staff members of Verant Interactive. Verant's staff were, to a person, very accomodating and eager to talk to the players. One thing critical to note here is that the hors d'oeuvres served during the reception were excellent - it would be a crime to come to Baltimore and not have crab balls. Excellent choice on behalf of Verant or the Airport Marriott. Hopefully, most of the players from out of town actually had a chance to see some of Baltimore on Sunday. One of the common complaints about the EQ Fan Faire I've heard from players is that Friday wasn't used to the extent it could have been. Given that that's the biggest grievance I've heard to any real degree is a testament to the overall success of the event. Still, it's something to keep in mind when planning these gatherings. If the players' reaction to representatives from the Website Formerly Known as ... can be described in one word, that word would be "huh?". If any of us is known for covering Everquest, it's certainly Lum, and not Arcadian Del Sol and I. Furthermore, as came up a few times, the players who are looking for news about current events in the game, they often find sites more focused in on the day to day happenings of the games themselves. There was a tag ritual which involved peering at the wearer's name tag to see if you knew them, but aside from the disappointment that more than one player had at realizing that Arcadian's tag didn't say AllaKhazam, there wasn't much of a response. "Uh... Delusion... ok..." I probably looked out of place without a robe. Saturday was the day of the Faire Proper(e). After a quick run-down of what was going on and when, something called Real Life Quest began. I could make a hundred jokes about the name, but I'll just make one and leave the rest to you: Real Life Quest involved obtaining candy from the babies of hotel patrons, running around the halls with nothing but towels on and occasionally taking those towels off to snap one another in a sporty "I'm not attracted to you, I'm just wacky and fun-loving" kind of way, and denial-of-service attacking the front desk phones. Honestly, it involved none of that (to my knowledge), and although I'm not exactly sure what it was (remember, I'm a bit of a stranger in these parts), the players seemed to enjoy it. It gave the Verant staff a chance to talk to the press as well - the usual suspects as well as print media and radio. The vendors and some of the more prominent EQ sites were introduced as the Faire opened. There were a few vendors there, including Everlore, RPGwear, and Verant's official EQ product vendor, dubbed "Phat Lewt". It seemed to me that there would have been a lot of interest in more vendors. I'm not sure if the number of vendors was limited by size of the venue or expense or some other concern, but for future events, I'd really encourage Verant to do as much as possible to get more turnout. From the vendors' point of view, they seemed to be doing a brisk enough business to warrant having more sellers the next time out. Verant's official product table had quite a number of eight inch figures which seemed to be one of the more popular offerings. Why Firona Vie was absent from the figure collection is beyond me. The model who plays Firona for Verant's events was in tow, so it would have seemed to me to be a bit of a no-brainer. Then again, I'm sure she had to sign enough posters as it was - adding a figure likeness to this may very well have caused the line to back up into the parking lot. The abundance of t-shirts with the "got SoW?" line emblazoned upon them reminded me that I was a Stranger in a Strange Land. I was going to bring a Basque dictionary to use as a prop for when the jargon flew too fast, but I didn't get around to getting one. One of the Stratics staffers explained the SoW reference, and I'm assured that it's considered incredibly funny in some circles. I'm taking his word for it. My confusion aside, the shirts were a hit, as was one for a perscription for "clarity". Again, right over my head. Speaking of clarity, Wives Against EverQuest, an organization I suspect has a basis in humor more than reality to begin with, made news by not showing up. Truly an envious position to be in. One vendor that probably could have stayed home was White Wolf. Of all the vendors introduced during the faire, White Wolf was the only to receive no applause or cheers. To clarify, I don't mean "not much", I mean "none". Whether this is a reflection of the lack of interest of the EQ community in White Wolf's product or a broader indication about the EQ community's interest in pen and paper RPGs isn't exactly clear, but I'm assuming the former. They couldn't give their product away. In fact, they tried. They had a stack of free Introductory Kits for their game Vampire: The Masquerade which they were giving out - a sampler to the game, of sorts. There were a lot of these left lying around in a distribution which can only be described as pathological. Most occupied the center of a zone of uninhabited area with an average radius of five feet. These things, perhaps appropriately, shunned life - or vice versa. On the bright side, no impressionable young players were tricked into Vampire LARPing. After the teams finished up the Real Life Quest, the event Balkanized into many different discussion panels. Not being a native speaker, the specifics were lost on me, but the overall thrust was not: these are developers and gamers with a lot to say to one another and they're eager to say it. With limited exposure to the game, to me the most interesting part of the Faire during the discussion panels was the quest panel that was being held in the ballroomm, but it wasn't a discussion panel about how quests are run. It was an actual quest. I stepped in during the quest, but it was run again on another server, so by the time it started over, some of the players were able to fill us in on the basics that we weren't familiar with. It seemed to be a low-level quest designed for just a few participants. I take it Misty Thicket is a halfling-friendly area, because the quest involved Fuzzy the Bear being saved from disease, and in each case, the participants were halflings. I was distracted for a bit until I realized I wasn't watching a trailer for the Lord of the Rings movie. The bear was played by one of the Verant staff and his screen was being projected onto the main viewing screen. The decision to hold this part of the Faire in the main lobby was a good one: it was packed. The players were enjoying watching. During the first run of the quest, the players were cheering on the halfling who was rescuing the bear - stay with me here, I'm not getting into specifics on accident. Near the end of the journey to the destination where the bear was to be taken to, the halfling turned to the bear and gave it some food. This wasn't necessary to the completion of the quest, and the audience cheered on the halfling some more. It was a transforming moment; no more than fifteen minutes before, this same audience was shouting to the person controlling the bear "Kill him! Kill him!" when the halfling first appeared. I'm not exactly sure how to read that, and I'll avoid trying to ferret out a general humanist truism out of it. It was, however, a very encouraging thing to see, and goes a long way toward demonstrating the emotional connection that drives people to play these sorts of games with more personal involvement than what you usually see in single-player games. The discussion panels concluded, and the participants gathered together for another game, this time, a trivia contest. Between the Real Life Quest and the trivia contest, the players had once participated in events divided according to the server on which they play and once by the character class they play. This seemed to be a good way to mix the players and get them involved in events with people they otherwise may not have had the opportunity to meet. It struck me as a good move. It also reminds me of something that was missing from this event that I've seen or heard about at Ultima Online events: the schism between the "PKs and RPs". I can almost visualize a bunch of UO players working together based on server preference rather than extremist PK/RP partisan playstyle preference, and it's not pretty. A few of the participants were in costume, so I was surprised that there was no official costume contest. Notable participants would have been Karana Abdul Jabar and his Basketball of Slaying, Pelvis Man - the only person whom I have ever seen use a pelvis as a fashion accessory, Laefaethasha Third-Elven who pulled off the look a lot better approximately two seconds before this shot when she wasn't in the middle of blinking, Chain Male with not-quite-matching wristwatch and cell phone, and his friend who doesn't want to be Elfstar any more. She wants to be Debbie. There was a fair bit of idle time between the trivia contest and dinner, so at about 6:30, the masses began to camp the food spawn. Forgive me for such an obvious joke. It was extremely packed during the wait, which for whatever reason was a little longer than anticipated. They were serving drinks once the lines were moved forward, at least - I can't begin to tell you what perfect timing that was. There was an extremely small minority complaining (after the fact, on the boards) about the prevelance of alcohol at the event. Frankly, this baffles me. It's a hotel. It's a convention. It's social. It's a weekend. The overwhelming majority of attendees were old enough to drink. It's not 1923. To address said grumblings delicately: screw 'em. There was still a bit more waiting to do, and in close quarters. On to dinner. The staving peasants rush in! By Saturday evening, we had lost track of the Stratics folks we had spent much of Friday evening with. You can see us toward the left side using Arcadian's hat to try to lure them into our trap. Sadly, they didn't fall for it. Dinner included carrots, rice, stuffed chicken breast, and a red disc. I was expecting pickled beet, but it decided to be spiced apple. The spiced apple was good, but it's surprising as hell when you're expecting something vinegary and tart and end up getting something cinnamony and sweet. The rice was putatively saffron rice, but in the absence of any saffron flavor, it could best be described as "yellow rice". If it were snow, I would have avoided eating it. The pastry mushroom-stuffed chicken breast was delicious, and I don't say that lightly - if any web site will take you to task for abusing breasts to your advantage, it's this one. Sorry, Grath. The after-dinner entertainment was informal. There was plenty of schmoozing (not that we hadn't availed ourselves of a lot of that beforehand), both the hotel bar/restaurants were packed, and a lot of groups were forming up for various scheduled and impromptu player/guild/server/etc. gatherings. It was also characterized by someone - an event participant, not a hotel staffer - playing the same three songs on the piano as he played Friday night. Amidst all the EverQuest paraphernalia, I had what could be described as a very Ultima Online moment as I resisted the urge to scream at him "STOP PLAYING THAT DAMN THING" - a refrain familiar to anyone who played UO and ever had the displeasure of encountering someone in town with a real lute fetish. I came away from the EQ Fan Faire a much wiser member of the gaming community. This wisdom can be summed up pretty neatly: 800 speed film really isn't sufficient for taking indoor non-flash photography, no matter what the box may say.         Discuss: Comments? (Ez, ez dut nahi arrainik!) [dead link]

 

MARCIE, GET OUT OF HERE. YOU'RE DEAD! YOU DON'T EXIST ANY MORE. 2001-02-01 20:55:00 [Filed by delusion]

In news that may be a surprise to readers of this site, this site ceased to exist in January. This from AllaKhazam's Magical Realm: The huge drop in value of many dot com stocks has taken a lot of money out of the web, and the amount being spent on advertising is only a fraction of what it was even six months ago. It seems like every day you read about another dot com company going bankrupt. Many good game sites, like Lum the Mad, Gameglow and others have just folded up shop. Any updates you see after this are purely imaginary. <Mako> It's on the web. It has to be true!

 

PLEASE HELP... PLEASE, SAVE THE CHILDREN. 2001-01-29 01:56:00 [Filed by delusion]

Help! I'm a prisoner of The Corporation, Alexandria bureau. This is near the end of Day Two. Their demands are simple: they're holding me prisoner until I agree to seek employment with Glitchless. Fight the power!

 

NEXT, ON A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE OF BLOSSOM 2001-01-25 15:55:00 [Filed by delusion]

This isn't "news" by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought enough of our readers might have on opinion on Gamespot's Question of the Week, which this week is "What game convention would you like to see changed in 2001?". Better yet, they might actually want to discuss the issue... ...but if not, you can vote against breasts. Take that as you will. Discuss: Comments? [dead link]

 

SIMULATING THE UNTHINKABLE 2000-12-11 16:45:00 [Filed by delusion]

At first they insisted that reinforcements be called in. The three guards who were waiting on stand-by call at home came in and the night shift of guards voluntarily remained on duty to bolster the morning shift. The guards met and decided to treat force with force. They got a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. The guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked, took the beds out, forced the ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion into solitary confinement, and generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners. This isn't what most of you think it is. If you think it's the account of a US prison rebellion, you're wrong. If you think the prisoners are Jews, and that this took place in the Hitler's Germany, you're wrong. If you think this is a tale about defiance in a despotic third-world regieme, you're still wrong. It's August, 1971 in Palo Alto, California, and this is just part of the story of something that happened not in a "real" prison, but rather in a university. Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment. There are some interesting parallels to issues we deal with today - as a community of gamers, and in a broader social context. How does Wolfenstein 3D become more complicated when you, the player, can assume the role of the state-sanctioned thug in an online update? Does the cartoony graphic approach help to keep things abstract and impersonal, or do they enable the player to more easily identify with his or her or her character? What happens when the worlds of talky social gamers and role-players interact with the more "dedicated" fringe subset of wargamers who enjoy the fetishism of the trappings of fascist authoritarians on the scene of a WW2-era game that can't decide if it's a strategy game or a role-playing game? Is there a reason "role-playing evil" tends toward the extremes of either absurdity or viscera-porn? Do these extremes make it easier to maintain a distance from the moral difficulties involved with addressing the real evil that real people do? Is a game the best context in which to consider these sorts of questions? All the questions don't have easy answers, but as the world learned in 1971, sometimes pretend atrocity gets out of hand. Sometimes it's a horrible - if brief - glimpse of the real thing. Proceed carefully. Discuss: Comments? Such fun. [dead link]

 

"TAKING A BULLET FOR MRPG COMEDY" or "DAWN HOC 3" November-December 2000 [Filed by delusion]

You know, after Lum's piece (which was filed as I was parsing this log), I should probably show some moderation and give the Glitchless people a break. Welcome to Dawn HoC 3, the first Dawn HoC to be hosted in #lummies. <Ironfist> Hey jeff can we have balloons? <GL-Jeff> We are incorporating balloons for long distance travelling that will run on hot air and players with metalworking and tailoring can create blimpbs <GL-Jerry> You can kidnap and assrape people in our game too <GL-Jeff> assrape will be a skill you can only achieve by completing some difficult quests <calenth> can i rape chocolate golems? <GL-Jeff> you can't make chocolate golems, but you can cover a golem with dirt bricks and call him chocolate <GL-Jerry> you can cut off bodyparts and wear them as armor <calenth> what about if i make assless golems specially in advance? <GL-Jerry> I made a suit of tits in 3DS Max! <GL-Jeff> golems have no internal digestive systems right now, but that will be added in our expansion <Staberinde> Oh oh oh, can I set traps in my golems ass so if someone assrapes it flying monkeys come out of it and kill them with the exploding bananas? <GL-Jeff> Good question Staberine. We have that system 75% complete <GL-Jeff> You will have to wait for the beta to see <Staberinde> So the flying monkeys launch, they just don't throw bananas? <GL-Jeff> if you tame a monkey you can train it tricks. <GL-Jeff> eventually it can learn advanced skills like flight and engineering <GL-Jeff> right now we have a comprehensive list of thirty skills that monkeys' can learn, each unique to the monkey class <GL-Jeff> can they use catapults? right now, those devices are for humaniod players only <Gothic_Moth> Can I be the King of the Gothic Moths? <GL-Jeff> Anyone can be king - our game allows for all forms of player created and enforced politics <Ironfist> how large can the fetuses get? can we enchant them to make them huge? <GL-Jeff> ironfist - well a dragon fetus is quite large <GL-Pete_B> *whispers* promise them a free beta, I have a clever idea! <Gothic_Moth> Does a dragon fetus fit in a Trebuchet? <GL-Jeff> gothic - depends on how early in development the dragon fetus is <GL-Jeff> they all start out as a single cell, you know :) <Ironfist> can we build houses out of fetuses and tits? <GL-Jerry> You can make a people grinding machine with the advanced tinkering skill and trick people into walking into it <J__> Will you get to have anal sex with dragon fetuses? <J__> Will there be abortions in Dawn? <J__> Will you be able to dupe fetuses? <GL-Jeff> J - abortions will only be the result of losing your connection during conception <Gothic_Moth> Do Trolls come with mighty ass scratch action poses? <GL-Jeff> goth - trolls can be taught any number of skills <GL-Jerry> Gothic: YES! Trolls can even fist themselves <Gothic_Moth> If my wife is giving birth to a kewl d00d can we put the little bastard up for adoption? <GL-Jeff> adoption is something we will not directly support <GL-Jeff> however <GL-Jeff> players can put together this sytem and will enforce it themselves <GL-Jeff> ../next <MadmanSBR> will blow jobs be supported in Dawn? <GL-Jeff> blow jobs and other sex acts won't be programmed, but you can always emote them. <GL-Jeff> ../next <Asimov> Next Question: <Brad> So when I have my second gay marriage, will there be a spell to impregnate my partner? <GL-Jeff> Brad - well I don't see a problem with that. In fact, we plan to allow for same sex polygamy and the Gods will actually grant them magical pregnancies <GL-Jeff> ../next <DanSTC> Jerry, will there be a technological skill for creating new kinds of baby fetus launchers, such as cannons, bottle rockets, and tactical missiles? <GL-Jeff> Dan - actually, if you can obtain sulfur and other primary ingredients, you can use the invention skill to create giant cannons like in FF7 <GL-Jeff> those can be used to launch fetuses machine gun style <GL-Jeff> ../next <MadmanSBR> will I be able to dig up? <GL-Jeff> madman - yes. digging is vertical <GL-Jerry> .../next <Gothic_Moth> question: If a tree falls in the woods in Dawn, does a baby fetus hear it? <GL-Jerry> Only if the tree has an EAX soundcard(I just learned that word today) <Daddy> i wonder if dawn is lessening the number of cretins on the horizons boards. <GL-Jeff> Actually we plan to incorporate all of Horizons within Dawn <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> will everyone's penis size be the same? or will different races have different penis sizes? <GL-Jerry> I just modeled blue potions so use your imaginations on the penis upgrades <MadmanSBR> will the women's tits be big? <GL-Jerry> the womens tits will be 60 polys(I just learned that word) <GL-Jerry> ../next <Gothic_Moth> Only 60?!? <Gothic_Moth> I want 40,000 poly boobage! <GL-Jerry> 40000000 poly tits will be in the expantion <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> will Dawn pay me for playing their game? <GL-Jerry> Only if you agree to 'fluff' GMs <GL-Jerry> ../next <Gothic_Moth> Oh, will Dawn offer Full Screen Anti-Aliasing or Transform lighting? <GL-Jerry> Gothic: oh yeah, those things are good right? <GL-Jerry> ../next <Gothic_Moth> Will Dawn be running on an OC3 or an Okragon 303baud modem? <GL-Jerry> 7654Ghx <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> will Dawn have more than 10 kinds of sponges? and will you have a lufa as well? <GL-Jerry> Anus sponges are in <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> Do you have crabs? <GL-Jerry> to get crabs you have to touch lady parts right? <GL-Jerry> ../next <DanSTC> MadmanSBR> No, but you can catch them from aZZraping corpses without protection. <GL-Jerry> STDs are in for corpses <GL-Jerry> ../next <Gothic_Moth> Question: Will Dawn offer grapes in both the unpeeled and peeled varieties? <Daddy> do you play games to bake bread, or to launch fetuses from catapults? <GL-Jerry> I play games to bake fetuses <GL-Jerry> ../next <Gothic_Moth> Will we get phat l3wt if we sell our sons to the gods? <GL-Jerry> human sacrific is in <GL-Jerry> ../next <DanSTC> Is there a tailoring and cooking skill for edible underwear? <GL-Jerry> You need sex skill to make sex toys <GL-Jerry> ../next <Daddy> gl-jeff: first off, i just want to say what great game devs and programmers you are, and will you please spank my ass and call me momma. Secondly, what's the youngest age you can reproduce at in dawn, and if you're pregnant, and get high, is the baby retarded? <GL-Jerry> You can get pregnant at 5. Boozing while pregnant gives the baby better strength(like my brother)! <GL-Jerry> ../next <Lum_> Can you be a Cardassian? <GL-Jerry> You can emote being Cardassian but only if practicing anal sex <GL-Jerry> ../next <Staberinde> If I spank my monkey and call it willy, will Dawn reflect this? <GL-Jerry> cock names are in <GL-Jerry> ../next <DanSTC> Will there be woman-raping tentacle penis monsters in the game, and if so, can I watch them go to town urry cat amazon half-nude chicks? <GL-Jerry> Camping devil cock spawns is needed to craft dildos <GL-Jerry> ../next <Senate> If I roleplay a lesbian nazi hooker will that affect my character's reputation, even if I give sexual o every person I see walk past me on the street? <GL-Jerry> Nazi and lesbian factions are incompatable <GL-Jerry> ../next <DanSTC> We will reward the women who have the most sex in the game. <GL-Jerry> Dan: Bukkake is in <GL-Jerry> ../next <DanSTC> Is there a "Pimp slap" emote? <GL-Jerry> Pimp slap is emotable but there are better ways to control your prostitutes <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> will I be able to live if I have my head chopped off? <GL-Jerry> Headless Horseman is a playable race <GL-Jerry> ../next <Senate> If I find an exploit where I can rape women through walls for good XP, will you nerf the rape skill, and/or ban players that also use this technique? <GL-Jerry> wall punching cocks are in <GL-Jerry> ../next <Darwin`s_Hand> What the FUCK is going on in here? <DanSTC|Charity> We're interviewing GL-Jerry, the maker of Dawn. :) <GL-Jerry> you are free to emote interviewing me <GL-Jerry> ../next <MadmanSBR> what about pac man emulators? <GL-Jeff> Dawn will have Pong in it. <calenth> of COURSE they're going to implement penlties for being female. <calenth> i don't even need to see their docs to know they ahve that. <GL-Jeff> well I've never actually touched one, but I imagine that breasts are like counterbalances that prevent you from running properly. <GL-Jeff> okay tonight's topic is: playing females in Dawn. <GL-Jeff> First the "gods" will find all the loser guys who pretend to be women, and "deal" with them <Lietgardis> SEXY CHAINMALE PLZ, JEFFIE-POO <GL-Jeff> All women will be r33t and look like Lietgardis. <GL-Jeff> only in chainmail < Darwin`s_Hand> Jeff: Will there be birth animations in Dawn? < Darwin`s_Hand> and how realistic will they be? <GL-Jeff> Darwin`s_Hand - no but there is nothing to prevent you from emoting /me has birth with so and so <GL-Jeff> Our game engine is 74.3% complete so our current shots are rendered <GL-Jeff> but they are fair representations of what we plan for Dawn <Savant> Jeff, will there be combat in Dawn, or will we need to do /me fights a_monster_00. <GL-Jeff> There will be fights because players will be *DEFENDING REAL PLAYER GOVERNMENTS AND LAWS* <GL-Jeff> Also, we have a large gold sink in Dawn that players will enjoy <GL-Jeff> no, but it has both hot and cold water taps <aureus> does it have one of those spray nozzles? <GL-Jeff> yes - to clean dishes before putting them in the gold dishwasher <Lietgardis> GL-Jeff: If you get in a player-made hot tub with a masculine man, is it possible to become pregnant? <GL-Jeff> Lietgardis - only if he gains access to your labia <GL-Jeff> we have made copulation very detailed and realistic to real world conjunction * GL-Jeff we think. we're not really sure <Savant> Jeff: Will we have a Pinch Boob emote? <GL-Jeff> no, but we will use the UO animations method where you use command words like .bow and .salute <GL-Jeff> currently, we're finishing work on .grabankles <Lietgardis> Will you have studded leather gorgets? <GL-Jeff> We will have metal studs that players can punch onto any object in the game, including other players <Savant> Jeff: Will women who end their "cycles" have Hot Flashes, and how will they effect them in-game? <GL-Jeff> Savant - There will be no cycles for anyone to ride in our game. it is medieval based <da_slog> Will you be able to make fetuses move like puppets? <GL-Jeff> check the FAQ - we've addressed every single permutation of any variation of the word fetus ad nauseum <Lietgardis> Can I conduct medical research on them? <GL-Jeff> yes, and if you study medicine, you can perform surgery on players. if you are good enough, you can find unwilling subjects <Lietgardis> Will I be banned if I name myself Mengele? <GL-Jeff> We would prefer to keep Mexican politics out of our game as it will destroy the careful RPG element that will dominate our free form game <Izang> Jeff: Will we be able to cook the afterbirth or use it as an improvised weapon? <GL-Jeff> Izang - we are no longer addressing fetus related questions. <GL-Jeff> check the FAQ <Delusion> Can I make fetus jerky? <GL-Jeff> YES YES <Soulflame> How can anyone take this seriously? <GL-Jeff> Soulflame> Read the FAQ <Izang> Jeff: When can we expect an SGI IRIX port? <GL-Jeff> You can expect it as soon as powerplay is completed, Izang. <Savant> What about Dreamcast? <GL-Jeff> Savant> No. Not until 3d studio max is available. But you can still be a member of our brilliant roleplaying community! <Soulflame> Dawn will be released on PS2, PSX, Gamecube, N64, Dreamcast, Mac, AIX 4.3.3, Mac, Amiga, Coleco, and TI99? <GL-Jeff> Our current client is experiencing some problems on the Apple 2e <GL-Jeff> But it should begin running smoothly as soon as we figure out how to boot our floppy disks. <Avie> what about the PET - will you support that? <GL-Jeff> Avie> Yes. We will also support "Catz" and "Dogz" and "Oddballz" <GL-Jeff> now, /next <Delusion> <Soulflame> How can anyone take this seriously? <Delusion> Utter blind faith and naivete. <GL-Jeff> Del> each game box will ship with a bottle of Jack Daniels to help you get into the game. <Delusion> Will Dawn support MIDI? <GL-Jeff> Our net code client is actually based on MIDI. <GL-Jeff> Meaning that it's every bit as grating and annoying. <ArcadianDelSol> Jeff- will there be hats in Dawn? <GL-Jeff> Yes, we will have all kinds of hats. Even little aluminum ones to block out the martian mind control rays that our fanbase seems to be so fond of. <Izang> Jeff: Can I ride a horse wearing nothing but a mage hat? <GL-Jeff> Izang> No, but the house can wear nothing but you. <GL-Jeff> er, horse. <GL-Jeff> Darn this keyboard! I AM SO SICK OF DEALING WITH YOU PEOPLE! THIS KEYBOARD HATES ME! <GL-Jeff> Next question! <Izang> Jeff: Will there be native FUFME support? <GL-Jeff> Izang> No, but we do plan on stripping naked and dousing our bodies with coca cola while we roll in the T-shirt money you sent. <GL-Jeff> Next question! <StackedMidgets> Jeff: Will you be able to sacrifice aborted fetuses to satan? <GL-Jeff> Aborted fetuses are already dead. Next question. <GL-Jeff> oH nUOOOO!@!@ IT SI TEH FLYING ELVESSAA!! 1 TTHEY R BACK AAAGAINASASS!@!#! <GL-Jeff> whOOpss!!@ riTAlIN TiEM#!@! <GL-Jeff> Okay, better now. <GL-Jeff> Next question. <Delusion> Will there be harmonicas in Dawn? <GL-Jeff> Del> We do not have harmonicas, but we do have plenty of cat gut. We presume you could /emote on that cat gut as if it were a musical instrument. <GL-Jeff> anyway, /next <Delusion> WILL I CRAMP UP IF I DO A LOT OF MELEE FIGHTING WITHOUT HAVING DONE STRETCHING EXERCIZES FIRST? <GL-Jeff> Del> Yes, and make sure you wait an hour before fighting after you eat or you will get a sideache and lose automatically. Next question. <ArcadianDelSol> sideache? <ArcadianDelSol> is that yiddish? <ArcadianDelSol> oy I gots a sideache! <GL-Jeff> SIDEACHE!@!@ SHUTS UPZORS!@@! I HATE JOO PPLS@!@!! AARRGHGH!@!@ <GL-Jeff> EVERYONE SHUTS UP!@!@@#!! <GL-Jeff> OO! A pony on tv! <GL-Jeff> Okay, I'm alllll better now. <GL-Jeff> next question! <Izang> Jeff: Would you consider trading 3D Max 3.5 material libraries with me? You have some great ones in the screenshots. <GL-Jeff> next question <Izang> Jeff: Will Cybiko be supported? <GL-Jeff> We are currently working on a version of our client that will run on palm pilot. <GL-Jeff> We have a version up and running on my best friends tamagotchi, but he wont let me play with it. <GL-Jeff> NEXT QUESTION! GOD I HATE EVERYONE! <GL-Jeff> My life is a black pit and I am it's orifice. <GL-Jeff> DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS OF THE DARK LORD! YOU KNOW NOT OF THE FORCES YOU INVOKE, FLESH ONE! <GL-Jeff> Anyway, back to our fun and exciting game. <GL-Jeff> Next question! <Delusion> Will Dawn players be able to spell "ASSHOLE" out in trout? <GL-Jeff> Only if the trout aren't flopping around. <GL-Jeff> Next question! <Staberinde> How does Dawn's grease cutting power compare to other, more established games such as UO and EQ? <GL-Jeff> Staber> Dawn's grease-cutting action power is far superior to other brand X detergants. <GL-Jeff> Next question! <Staberinde> If Dawn were a car would it be a Yugo or a Hyundai? <GL-Jeff> Staber> It would be a porsche with a giant cardboard spoiler. * ArcadianDelSol once played the role of Fellatio with a "Shakespeare in the park" troupe <ArcadianDelSol> we never had a show tho. I only remember the rehearsals. <GL-Jeff> We here at glitchless encourage roleplay. Which is why we'll reward all roleplaying with immediate killings, lootings, and bannings. <Izang> Jeff: Will you be playing a god in game? <GL-Jeff> Izang> My ego demands I must play as THE god. YOU WILL ALL BOW BEFORE ME! <GL-Jeff> Next question. <ArcadianDelSol> Jeff - is it true that you play King Jeffy on your web game and that you are killling newbies with 1 million point hits? <GL-Jeff> Arcadian> I w1LL oWNZ j00 4 s4Y1ng tht4!!@!111 <Izang> Jeff: Jeff how many sexual character animations will be in the game? <GL-Jeff> Izang> Read the section in the FAQ on the Kama-sutra. <Mr_Poppinfresh> Jeff: I just want to say, I really love your work and keep up the good work! Now, will you be able to fire roleplayed fetuses out of your straight tunnel into the center of the player-run baking district, thus ruining the economy by splattering dead baby all over the gold reserves? <GL-Jeff> Mr poppinfresh> that question should be taken out and shot. NEXT! *** Quits: GL-Jeff (Connection reset by peer ) *** Joins: GL-Jeff (Daniel_St.@f64ccaa7.san.14056255.com.hmsk) <Delusion> GL-Jeff? <GL-Jeff> Sorry about that. My business partner who was underneith my desk, doing, ah, server maintinence tripped over the cord. <Izang> Jeff: Will you be releasing the source code to Dawn before or after the Sparc 2 port? <GL-Jeff> Izang> No, not until we can get the source code for our warez version of Adobe photoshop. <Lum_> WHAT A COINCIDENCE <Lum_> I'M WORKING ON A DAWN STORY <GL-Jeff> AAAGH! LUM! IS IT THE DEVIL SPAWN HIMSELF! HERETIC! BURN! * GL-Jeff puts fingers in the shape of a crucifix. <GL-Jeff> Okay, how's this: "YOU ARE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK! NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 20!" <GL-Jeff> That concludes the Third Dawn HoC. Discuss: Lest it get too free-wheeling, read this before you comment. [dead link]

 

"FOUNDATION'S CRACK" or "HOW HIGH IS YOUR CEILING?" November-December 2000 [Filed by delusion]

All is not well in the land of Dereth. In fact, some things are horribly, horribly wrong, and are doomed to relegate Asheron's Call to a "legacy" game if not addressed soon - if it's not too late already. I feel obligated to post disclaimers here: I love Turbine. I love Asheron's Call. I respect the way Turbine's addressed some sticky issues, and I have a lot of respect for the creativity of the dev team: there's some inventiveness, some quirkiness, and some real passion for the game. I just want to be able to, you know, do something, but I can't. I'm not a career MRPG gamer. I'm what some would derisively call a "casual gamer". Early in the game, I eagerly powerlevelled to the extent that a non-draining non-lifemage could, and got into the 30-something levels when that was still considered "almost, but not quite, high level". Now as my "main" character walks past a group, the "level 38" tag isn't anything to look twice at. In fact, it's rather mundane. And that's a key word: "mundane". It's taken as an article of faith that any character in the 20-levels (and higher, these days) is played by someone whose "main" character is in the 60s or 70s. Go into #asherons-call and strike up a conversation. Go ahead and try to discuss anything other than the month's latest super-high level content. Talk about content ideas that would benefit all players regardless of level. Talk about the benefits of the game-within-a-game concept, giving players ways to "compete" that don't involve 12-hour powerlevelling sessions, the addition of items that aren't designed to make stuff die faster, and there's a fundamental disconnect in the chat. It's like walking into an elementary school in Georgia and screaming obscenities in Basque while gesticulating violently. They raise an eyebrow, back away, and continue their discussion about the best template to beat the game, and how to get it to 40th level through twinking, when it finally becomes playable. Turbine, here's a news flash: most of your players haven't made it to the point where they can fight diamond golems. The players you're spending all of the time designing content for are a small minority, and nobody else can touch it. Furthermore, most of your players don't play Darktide, and while those who do tend to log in more hours than those who don't, they represent a small slice of your userbase. I'm not suggesting that they don't have needs and desires to be filled - not by a long shot - but balance changes that address the immediate concerns of 3% of your playerbase but guide 90% of the development work are inherently lopsided. I'm not suggesting Turbine stop raising the ceiling, either. That's not bad, in itself. When the only way to experience the content of the month is to have the template of the week, that is bad. Note I didn't say "beat", because I'm all for monsters that you have to group to kill. But the casual player is left out in the cold entirely, with the option to maybe do BDC for the 705th time. The new content for the last several updates might as well not even exist for most players. Casual players aren't the ones who cry "foul" on the CoD Dev board within minutes after finding out that, yes, new 200th level monsters are hard, and can't be killed solo. Casual players aren't the ones who give the fan sites pictures of the latest dungeons by 5:00pm the day that they're enabled. Casual players just get to read about all this stuff and hope that, since they don't log in 20-40 hours of game time per week, they might be able to kill a diamond golem with three of their casual player friends by December 2001. The vocal minority, the powergamers, the people who log 40 hours of game time per week, the people 20 hours of active IRC time per week, they're the only ones benefitting from the patches every month, and something as "mundane" as a diamond golem is derisively called a "legacy monster" in their ranks. Catering solely to the highest level gamers has a price - you lose the people in the cheap seats. AC isn't going to sell 50,000 new copies in 2001 because they added monsters that some 80th level player actually needs to bring a friend along to defeat. Again, I'm not suggesting that the template-tweaking powergamer community is playing "wrong" or that they don't deserve notice, but - and this is critical - there are other people playing this game, too, and a continual supply of new gamers is rather crucial. Casual gamers are patient. They're forgiving and they want you to address their concerns, too, but they won't wait forever. Zure ama emagaldua da, alu hori! Zoaz popatik hartzera! * rude, vaguely sexual fist-pumping motions * Discuss: Comments? (Or flames, whatever.) [dead link]

 

SHE'S IN OUR WORLD NOW November-December 2000 [Filed by delusion]

You know, I'm sure there's some cutting social commentary that would be appropriate here, but ... I'm nearly speechless. Someone who doesn't even follow MRPGs showed me this. I can't figure out if this is hilarious, sad, bizarre, or just plain disturbing. Discuss: But I'm sure you can. (Comments) [dead link] [Note: This was an image of Firona Vie on amihotornot.com, long since expired.]

 

File under "NOT QUITE GRASPING THE CONCEPT". November 2000 [Filed by delusion]

Turbine has a convenient player/dev Q&A page, so they can avoid answering the same questions over and over. This one particularly amused me: Question Title: Where are the Dragons? Question: I understand why you have not picked up some of the traditional "D&D" type monsters. The game is fresh in this regard and I applaud you for your innovation... Any chance of Dragons entering the world anytime soon? Name: Jason Booth Answer: none what so ever. I have a suggestion. If you want cliché "traditional fantasy", there are plenty of other games which cater to that brand of generica. Fight dragons with your drow elven princess warrior priestesses there. Discuss: Sorry, "FIRST POST" has already been made. Continue on with your day. [dead link]

 

"FOLLOWING THE VAPOR TRAIL" or "HOW TO MAKE AN MRPG IN THREE DAYS." Thursday, October 26, 2000 - 11:05 PM [Filed by delusion]

Step one: Graphics. Lots and lots of 3D Studio Max graphics. Movies are extra credit. Step two: Promise them the world. Step three: Lure legitimate sites into believing you. Once this is done, move on to the point of this whole exercize, merchandising. Why bother creating a game at all when you can sell t-shirts and mouse pads? Sure does beat paying someone to do the hard part - you know, actually coding your game, creating artwork, pitching to a distributor, and ... ...oh wait, please tell me you weren't taking this seriously... Discuss: Comments? (36 species of sponges can't be wrong) [dead link]

 

EVERQUEST, PORNOGRAPHY, OBSCENITY, AND CHILDREN - A CLARIFICATION Friday, October 6, 2000 - 11:47 AM [Filed by delusion]

To call the Mystere stories "child pornography" isn't just inaccurate, it's potentially dangerous, whether you agree with Mystere, Verant, or somewhere in between. But don't take my word for it, because I'm not a judge or a lawyer... Justice Byron White is, however. Writing for the court's opinion in New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747 (1982), he noted: There are, of course, limits on the category of child pornography which, like obscenity, is unprotected by the First Amendment. As with all legislation in this sensitive area, the conduct to be prohibited must be adequately defined by the applicable state law, as written or authoritatively construed. Here the nature of the harm to be combated requires that the state offense be limited to works that visually depict sexual conduct by children below a specified age. The category of "sexual conduct" proscribed must also be suitably limited and described. The test for child pornography is separate from the obscenity standard enunciated in Miller, but may be compared to it for the purpose of clarity. The Miller formulation is adjusted in the following respects: a trier of fact need not find that the material appeals to the prurient interest of the average person; it is not required that sexual conduct portrayed be done so in a patently offensive manner; and the material at issue need not be considered as a whole. We note that the distribution of descriptions or other depictions of sexual conduct, not otherwise obscene, which do not involve live performance or photographic or other visual reproduction of live performances, retains First Amendment protection. So to summarize, the story about the "elf of 14 seasons" - regardless of of whether you think this means "14th level", or "14 years", or "14 quarter years", regardless of who wrote it or if it's the real reason Verant banned this account - is not child pornography. It may be obscenity, but that involves getting knee deep into a "community standards" debate, and I don't think there's any precedence yet for "virtual community standards", though I'm sure there soon will be. The rape story is, sadly, a common theme of fanfic. Part of the appeal of fanfic is putting characters in situations that they wouldn't otherwise get into, and rape is one of the most extreme forms of these "taboo" situations. It's probably encouraging that this is the case, because it confirms that this sort of behavior is beyond the pale. The discouraging thing about this archetype of story is its seemingly wide appeal to such a significant portion of the videogaming demographic. Calling this "child pornography", though, brings to mind echoes of the Red Scare. It reminds me of the last several decades of presidential administrations who supported the export ban on cryptography software under the "justification" that this was to protect us against vague, undefined threats of "terrorism" and "child pornography". It's a canard, and a dangerous one at that. This sort of knee-jerk reaction is not only damaging to dialog about discussion of "virtual community standards" and an affront to reasoned dialog, but it is, quite frankly, an invitation to a witch hunt. This medium is young, precedents are being set, and will continue to be set in the upcoming decades. Step back and carefully consider if you're trading in your First Amendment rights for moral expedience. Popular speech doesn't need First Amendment protection to continue to exist. Unpopular speech does. Discuss: Thoughtful comments? No knee-jerking, please. [dead link]

 

HOW TO SCREW YOURSELF, FOR BEGINNERS AND EXPERTS Tuesday, September 26, 2000 - 10:52 PM [Filed by delusion]

Beginners: To screw yourself, believe everything you read. After all, if someone promises you can... "Beta-test new monsters , dungeons , and more before the update. Attend special DEV chats to discuss new ideas. Receive valuable discounts at the Game Shop, and more." ...for nothing, and all you have to do is hand "Turbine" your Microsoft Zone ID and password, that's a pretty clear-cut way to screw yourself. Advanced: Run such a site. Then not only can Turbine have grounds to pursue legal action, but so can Microsoft and the FBI. Computer crime's real, kids, and restitution's a bitch. Way to go, you've screwed yourself real good. Note: The above site works in Internet Explorer but not Netscape. Somehow I think browser compatibility is going to be the least of their concerns. Discuss: Comments? [dead link]

 

The Art of the Sub-Game or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dice Friday, September 15, 2000 - 6:57 PM [Filed by delusion]

It's 1985. The game is Questron. The machine is a Commodore 64. It's an FRPG, it's pretty entertaining, and it introduced me to the concept which I believe will be the key to making a long-term successful MRPG: the sub-game. In fact, it may be what saves the genre. Am I overstressing the point? It's certainly possible, but I doubt it. Right now, you have a total of three mass-market MRPGs. All three are fantasy-based. The first sci-fi MRPG to market will do well by default. It will share a marketing strategy in common with the early days of UO: lack of serious competition. There are only so many of these "free rides" left, though. In the absence of this, the key to long-term viability is to give the players something to do. Obviously, in an MRPG, there's usually going to be a LOT to do. Monster fighting, PvP, socializing, powergaming, exploring, and testing the magic or feudal systems such a game might employ. But that's not necessarily enough. Now, though it was my first exposure to a sub-game in an FRPG, I suspect that Questron was probably not the first FRPG with this feature. Whatever the case, it certainly wasn't the last. The concept of the sub-game has been a part of the FRPG genre pretty consistently since. When a good game has a fun sub-game, such as Questron, that's a win-win situation. Recently, there have been very bad games with fun sub-games (Might and Magic 7's Arcomage), and very good games with pointless, un-fun sub-games (Baldur's Gate's simple gambling games). Ultima Online continued this tradition with checkers, chess, backgammon, and dice. As is befitting UO's very "loose" interface, it was literally a board and pieces in the case of the first three. You could position the pieces however you wanted, the board was just an object, it wasn't enforcing rules to a set game - that was up to players. It worked if you had two people that actually wanted to play, but it wasn't conducive to activity such as competitive tournament play. The success of multi-player social gaming environments is an established fact. There are many sites offering a variety of board, card, and parlor games, including MSN Gaming Zone, Yahoo! Games, and flipside.com (formerly won.net). There are, of course, more specialized companies running online gambling concerns out of servers in Caribbean tax shelter nations such as Anguilla and Trinidad. I'd provide specific linked examples, but I'm loathe to do so without knowing which ones are reputable and which ones have little or no history. Caveat Emptor. You can probably see where I'm going with this; it's obvious. What I'm suggesting, however, is not only is the merging of an MRPG environment with good entertaining sub-games a good thing, but done right, it can be what differentiates one product from another in the fragmented genre of MRPG titles in the near future. They key to success in the MRPG market of three years from now is bringing in a new segment of the gaming market. Companies making new fantasy MRPGs for the current fantasy MRPG audience are going to find out really quickly that it's a zero-sum game. You either woo players away from existing titles, or you can't get in the black. The first sci-fi MRPG to market is going to attract an audience that is, in part, not already playing fantasy MRPGs. The first MRPG to be specifically targeted at children (and I don't envy the amount of responsible administration needed to keep an anonymous audience child-friendly) will bring in new players. The first sports-based MRPG (don't think for a second it's not in development - there's already a netplay console football game - imagine when it won't require members of the same team to be on the same machine) will bring in a lot of new players. And there's that group out there, the social parlor/card game players. They're you and your friends, but they're not just those of us who are comfortable in MRPGs, FPS, and RTS games. They're your mother, your aunts, your grandfather, and your neighbors who are using the first computer they've ever owned. Will it get to the point where all MRPGs worth a fraction of marketshare will have a fairly involved set of sub-games? I suspect so, and I hope so. A modular design is important. You don't want to be having your main development team faced with the decision of including either a fix for the latest dual-wield sword bug or fixing the Dragon Chess (issue #100 anyone?) subsystem. The integration between MRPG and sub-game is going to be subtle, but it will need to exist. MRPGs are competitive environments, and while it's certainly commonplace for lots of people not to be caught up in the powerlevelling and dual-centric PVP scene, almost everyone has that competitive urge, whether it manifests itself in being the first to kill the Seventh Lord of Chaos or if it involves beating an old friend at poker. They're playing these games anyway, so serve the games to your customers in your world, on shared terms. The modular design allows you to have a team dedicated to a specific sub-game, be it checkers, a chess or poker variant, or something new that you invent from scratch to give your wider MRPG a distinct flavor. In fact, maybe the chosen diversions in your game world vary from place to place, just as it does in our world. But in any case, the modular system lets you add new content, just like the online social game sites do now. If MSG Gaming Zone adds a new Poker variant, you don't have to download a new web browser, or even a new Zone client, though you will be downloading some new client data. And much like the existing web-integrated gaming environments, they can fix a bug or add a feature to, say, checkers without affecting blackjack. There's an issue of server load, of course, but the demands of these (mostly turn-based) parlor, card, and casino games are usually much more modest than the demands imposed by a typical MRPG keeping track of real-time player location and dynamic movement in an environment with multiple allies, enemies, and contact and distance weapons with a chat layer over top. A character sitting at a poker variant table for 20 minutes sure is simple to track - he or she is sitting. Even though more ambitious games that involve virtual space (such as a team contact sport or pool) involve more active location tracking, the parameters of possible action are going to be smaller: It's probably safe to assume that allowing Fred the Angry Alchemist to bust a wicked Kung Fu Death Spiral Kick on Bob the Sneezing Warrior probably isn't necessary when the two of them are engaged in a polo match on their six-legged horses. Though modular, ideally a game should have an effect. If you're playing hearts or chess, you should have a rating based on your success or lack thereof. If you're a pro at the local dice or card game, maybe you have dice or cards that look a little bit better than those in play by those new to the sub-game. A champion in a tournament might have an entry automatically added into a biography page and be eligible for a slot in the monthly high-stakes game. What better money sink than gambling? For sci-fi MRPGs that take place in a near-future or historical fiction MRPGs, the games may be familiar for the most part. In a fantasy MRPG, combining some of the familiar (such as chess, parcheesi, and hearts) with games that are specific to your world, though they may be based in part on popular games (such as Might and Magic 7's Arcomage was based loosely on a simplified version of Magic the Gathering) as the centerpieces. This will add significantly to an MRPG game. It will add players who might not normally be interested in games of this genre, and it will keep your players in your game for a longer term. It also adds variety to your game, and that's good for the long-term health of any game, MRPG or otherwise. Now I only wish I could play Arcomage with real people and without that nasty Might and Magic 7 installed. Discuss: Comments? Cribbage? Chess? Chinese checkers? [dead link]

 

This Smacks of Effort Tuesday, September 12, 2000 - 9:27 PM [Filed by delusion]

Asheron's Call has a major upgrade in today. So major, in fact, that if Turbine were Verant or Origin, they'd put it in a new box, call it an expansion, and charge you $25 a pop for it. GameCenter's article about it is worth looking at - be sure to check out the pictures. A comparison is in order. To make things blindingly obvious, negatives are in red, positives in blue. UO at release UO now AC at release AC now Date/Time September 1997 36 months November 1999 10 months Dungeons 7 (8 with Wind) 20 (22 with Wind) ~190 220 Production Servers 3 22 6 7 Raistlins 70 894 6 7 GM Darwins 1 0 0 0 Neis 0 0 1 1 Ex-Lead Developers 1 3 1 1 Annual Dev Team Turnover marginal Menudo marginal marginal Average Time Between Plot Advancement 6 months what plot? 30 days 30 days Players Having Participated in a Plot-related Event 158 847 1100 80573 Man-Hours Devoted to Fearing Upcoming Patch 1,920,000 24,000,000 0 0 Discuss: Comments? I'm sure of it.

 

"So you're Going to Prison" Wednesday, August 16, 2000 - 6:42 PM [Filed by delusion]

I believe I made my point. Someone noticed. Political satire with edge. Discuss: Comments? Please send me a carrot cake with a nail file in it. [dead link] [Note: This update was written as a followup to the previous. By reading the articles without the thread, and without being familiar with the other associated threads, the additional information that is revealed in them is that the person who put his vote on ebay as a form of political protest was me. While I did get a rather alarming amount of attention from the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, and the Maryland Attorney General, the event passed without a dramatic outcome, fortunately. This is mostly due to the office of the Maryland Attorney General, who took this incident for exactly what it was: political protest in the form of a farce, rather than a real attempt to actually exchange money for a vote.]

 

50th level voter for sale, no reserve. Tuesday, August 15, 2000 - 2:39 PM [Filed by delusion]

eBay item 410721373 (Ends Aug-25-00 14:23:20 PDT) - Vote of One US Citizen - NO RESERVE! Democracy has been for sale for all of the 20th century. Be sure to make your dollars count. (Fairness in Journalism: I posted this on my own domain, too.) Discuss: Comments? (Free for now) [dead link]

 

Use only as directed Tuesday, August 15, 2000 - 1:05 PM [Filed by delusion]

Jesse's been busy doing some controlled experiments lately. Data's a good thing to have. In fact, when I read these posts, I was reminded of Stratics when their UO section was the only place worth going to for UO data and data analysis. Sadly, there really isn't an AC equivalent of this. There are currently four experiments up: unarmed vs dagger axe vs sword bow vs spear vs mace vs staff war magic COD hint: extend the length of time your server keeps messages. I've tallied up the total damage for you, otherwise, it's the message as posted. [page after page of hit data deleted] Discuss: Comments? Stay on target. [dead link]

 

May I, kick a little something for the G's Wednesday, August 2, 2000 - 5:29 AM [Filed by delusion]

While vigilantly manning the LumCorp IRC perimeter, someone mentioned some new content added to what was, without a doubt, the most influential and beloved UO screenshot satire site. It was, in a roundabout way, the inspiration for my own. The Adventures of B0N3D00D and pLaTeDeWd ride again, for a final journey into the sunset. You can read what happened or jump right to the new strips. Discuss: Comments? Corp Por! [dead link]

 

"The Wooden Horse" or "Why Password Security is Hard" Tuesday, August 1, 2000 - 12:10 PM [Filed by delusion]

Or perhaps "Buy Victory". If a few illiterate and combative high schoolers came to you in an IRC channel and told you they'd gladly level your Thistledown character from 30th level to 40th, and that they'd charge you a mere $450 for this service, what would your reaction be? Note: There will be a test. The eminently "proffessional" [sic] gentlemen at AC EXP are here to help. If you'll just be so kind as to e-mail them your MS Zone login ID and password, they'll be happy to level your character for a decidedly exorbitant fee. There's only one problem here. If you do, you're responsible for anything they do. For the moment, I'll ignore the fact that transmitting your userID and password via e-mail is idiocy. Assuming you trust these clowns in the first place, your account is available for several people to play on your behalf. Why? So you can be a higher level than you are now? Is the game really that hard? Are you that hard-up for ways to usefully spend your money that giving it to a bunch of cocky brats too lazy to get real employment is an acceptable option? Who am I to judge? Hell, I just play games to have fun, what do I know? Maybe I should dedicate hundreds of dollars or 50 hour gaming weeks to "winning". Or, perhaps, I won't. You know, if there's really a market for this sort of fun-by-proxy, I expect some enterprising person to set up a videogaming sweatshop in Pusan, South Korea, and pay some kids slave labor for a day's levelling. You can become the Kathy Lee Gifford of online gaming. "That sure is a pretty horse. It'll make a fine addition to our city." Discuss: Comments? (Note: Don't leave your userid and password here, I don't want them.) [dead link]

 

Here's the asterisk. Sunday, June 25, 2000 - 10:41 PM [Filed by delusion]

Just thought I'd cap "The UO Weekend from Hell" by letting you know that Asheron's Call is still running. Normally. Hence, no news - though if it were UO and it were working, maybe that would be news. No scandals, torrid tales of thousands of customers simultaneously being yanked around by the shorts, and since it doesn't have a bunch of power-addled GMs running around enforcing play style like EQ, there's no individual tales of woe of note lately, either. Anyway, back to UO. For me, the question wasn't why I quit UO. The question was why did I stick with it for so long? During the entire time I played, from release in late '97 to late '99, I was waiting. And that's the key. It's why a lot of you are still playing, too. Let me describe my situation in particular. In my case, I began by waiting to develop my character, which was entirely my affair. This was followed by waiting for OSI to code in half of the features they had planned in the game. After all, they couldn't possibly call it a finished Ultima product until there was a virtue system, right? What we were given instead of a complex inter-related system of virtue scales was a good/evil teeter-totter. So with that "wait" over, though I wasn't much happy with the result, the next thing to wait for was the plot. Realizing that this was pretty slow in coming, several of us decided to make our own plots, with real Britannian characters with real Britannian backgrounds. We forged along, and one of us apparently had some GM connections. Then we waited for some support we were implied might be possible for our events. We didn't just wait, though, as we valued our independence. Then, after finishing the first cycle of our events, several of us were invited to apply for the Seer program. Some of us had no idea we'd been put in for it, including myself. So then we waited with anticipation of what could come of our humble beginnings. Eventually, the e-mail I was waiting for arrived, and several of my friends and I were officially accepted. So then we wait some more. We get introduced to the system. The system involves a lot of ... you guessed it ... waiting. Submit an RPC proposal, wait for it to go through the official channels. Submit a quest event, wait for the pitifully understaffed IGM department to respond. Eventually, you get sick of waiting impatiently. Waiting patiently sure is easier. The next thing I know, a year's gone by and it occurs to me that our independent role-play group accomplished more in three months than we had as Seers in nine months... a lot more. The IGM staff fluctuates but never gets substantially bigger. The "solution" to this - in other words, the solution to letting us actually do what we were invited to do in the first place - is to give us tools to do things without having to beg an IGM for attention. So then we wait for powers. And wait and wait and wait. It's audacious, we spent much of our time waiting for the program to become a priority for OSI. Clearly, it never quite got to that point. Everything's always coming "Real Soon now" (tm). Eventually, you stop "waiting", as such, because that gets really old. After a while, I'm just in it because I've bought the ticket, and by god no matter how bad the movie is, I'm going to see how it ends. The longer I watched it dispassionately, the more I started agreeing with Lum's proposal that maybe the entire system needs to be dismantled. It gets to the point where you're waiting for something to wait for. The last straw that made me quit was a small enough incident, but representative of that which was causing me dissatisfaction. And that's just one person's experience. I've heard countless others who were waiting for good/evil, waiting for necromancy, waiting for advanced alchemy, waiting for T2A housing, waiting for factions, waiting for UO:R housing. If you're still having fun in the game you're playing, more power to you. But if you're "waiting" for something, I whole-heartedly encourage you to re-examine your relationship with the MRPG of your choice, whatever it is. After all, it's a game - should you have to wait to have fun? Comments? [dead link]

 

"MY LIFE AS AN ADULT" or "KAWAII?" or "I'M NO DALE CARNEGIE" Friday, June 16, 2000 - 5:01 PM [Filed by delusion]

21 - Girlie - California - Thistledown - 9 (woot!) :) - NT - Snark [really freakin' giddy!] 6/15/00 at 12:23 pm mmmmbuhbyyyyeeee... - NT - Lillith Blanche: Steamy... 6/16/00 at 4:31 pm *bumpfuzzles Lillith before she goes* Bubye! - NT - Jabberwocky calmed 6/16/00 at 4:36 pm nighters Lynn *huggle* - NT - MeBop 6/16/00 at 4:33 pm *swings the door open dramatically* - Olivya 6/05/00 at 04:42 am Is this AC Discussions or some form of Adult Chat Room? - NT - Trevor 6/16/00 at 5:51 pm *puts arm around Snark, grins cheesily* ^_^ - NT - Stormwaltz [*Blocked*] 6/16/00 at 5:59 pm * timber trys to fly up to his table * - Timber pixie" ( Ches ) Heartkin 4/19/00 at 6:29 pm WinterSky purrrls, "Ok, Random, here's how much this newbie knows. I can probably RP you right into the very bowels of the earth with out blinking, plus I also run my own muck, know just about every command out there and learning more everyday. I wiz in more places than you can dream of." WinterSky purrrls, "Chances are Random, you don't have the nerve to try and RP with someone who has been role playing for well over twenty years. I know all the in and outs and loop holes." <Sarah> Poll: ASL????? <nei|bitterchat> i will never fuzzle ever. Note for those of you who've come here specifically to read this article: check the byline before bashing "Lum" on the web boards. I am an adult. Whether or not this is all it's cracked up to be is an open question, but without a doubt, there are certain advantages. I could list you a hundred, but I'll just list four that immediately come to mind (and they're not even the top four): * I have a "house", not a "room" * Driving is fun, especially when the car is yours. So is sex, especially when it's not in a car. * If, for whatever reason, I want to screw up my sleep schedule, my mother isn't going to be upset (though she certainly wishes I'd call more - I really should, you know). * I can order adult beverages in public restaurants. Sometimes they actually card me, though I'm sure it's usually just flattery so I'll leave a bigger tip. Now, the point of this isn't to display "superiority" to my juniors in any way. After all, they're all going to be adults sometime, too, and the four points I've mentioned will apply to them just as much as they do to me, so bragging about chronology would absurd in the extreme. The point is that this is how it is, and that there are perks. Cute is good ... to a point. I have three cats that are very cute. I find the very concept of Hello Kitty amusing (thanks Ely, you bastard), though probably because Japanese pop culture is so blatantly weird by American standards rather than for the innate cuteness of it. I have fond memories of Kimba the White Lion, which immediately followed Underdog on TV when I was four. I am not four. I love playing with and talking to children. I don't talk down to them: I speak English, not baby talk. When my sister was little, it used to bug me to no end when one of my cousins would talk down to her. I've been told that I've missed my true calling by not becoming a teacher. I am not a sex-crazed cute-fetishist leg-humping four-year-old poodle. I have never been one, and I don't like associating with them. They are, however, legion in our community. When did this happen and why? I'm not sure I want to know, though I am certain it predates the MRPG community by a longshot. I don't care what other adults (or, for that matter, teens) do privately for amusement. It's none of my business, and it doesn't affect me. When public forums degenerate from being places to discuss the game to being places to "virtually snuggle", all intelligent discussion moves to other venues, and that does, to a certain degree. When significant numbers of the applicable dev teams decide not to leave when the intelligent discussion does, preferring to virtually flirt with virtual faries, use cutseyverbs on their most vapid fans, and otherwise engage in conversation in threads where 90% of the posts are "NT" rather than discuss real game issue on the channels where adults are still allowed to act like adults, that affects the whole community. I played Ultima Online. I play Asheron's Call. I have never logged into FurryMUCK, FurryMUD, or Furcadia. Why? Because FurryMUCK, cutseyplay, and TinySex don't interest me, and I figured not playing games with others who do like that sort of thing was probably the best way to avoid it. That's a "You don't like this, don't go where this is done" sort of thinking. Return the favor. I too will never fuzzle ever. Please comment in our "baby talk-free" forum. [dead link]

 

MENTORS, THE STANDARDS MAKERS Wednesday, June 14, 2000 - 9:26 AM [Filed by delusion]

If you think the primary difference between traditional pen and paper RPGs and MRPGs has anything to do with computers, think again. The primary difference, of course, is the players - and not just the amount of them. Those of you who learned RPGs from the words of Gary Gygax (or his contemporaries), think back. Remember the first campaign you played with players who actually knew the game? If you were lucky, this happened the first time you played, otherwise you may have just futzed through the rules before playing in a "normal" campaign. You were playing with real people. They knew who you were, and at least some of them knew where you lived. They gave you a brief overveiw of the rules, probably as they talked you through creating a character. They explained to you why you couldn't start with a level 10 character in their fledgling campaign. They talked you through the concept of having to make decisions about your character's stats. They made it clear that fudging dice rolls wasn't cool with them. They showed you, by example, what role-playing was. You couldn't play a chaotic evil half-drow-elf multi-class assassin/paladin/magic-user/cleric with 18/00 strength, 19 intelligence, and 18 dexterity in their campagin... The Dungeon Master had his own world for you to adventure in, and "drow elves" didn't exist in it. He was flexible alignment with but not completely dismissive of the issue as he'd have to be for that particular combination. He didn't give experience points out like candy, which would be required to actually attain any level with such an absurd array of concurrent classes. He followed the most "player-friendly" method of character stat dice rolling in the manuals, but even so, you weren't going to get stats like those. Besides, he didn't allow anything over 18 in any skill for any reason, with the exception of Strength, which he maxxed at 18/50. Perhaps just as importantly, you were playing with other people who had characters of their own. Your "super character" wouldn't have fit in with any of the goals of the characters in your party, and your character would have either been at odds with theirs all the time, or you would have had to play it in a ridiculously out-of-character fashion. You decided to play the dwarven cleric instead. Not because the DM was a hard-ass, or because your fellow players were whiners. You played it because you were being taught how to play this game in a way that was compatible with the group. You had a mentor. Your mentor explained why certain actions weren't allowed, helped you through the more unusual rules, and helped you figure out how the group played. Maybe they expected you (and everyone else) to bring $5 to cover pizza halfway through the game session. They might have had house rules that weren't covered in the manuals. They let you get a feel for how the DM wanted you to declare your character's actions, and what you could expect from him in return. In MRPGs, it's possible to purchase a game, have no idea about any of its in-game or out-of-game social structures, have no concept of the standards that are expected of you, and play. You don't automatically have someone looking over your shoulder for the first couple weeks to explain to you why a certain character creation choice might unnecessarily weaken your character later on. You don't have a group of your peers whom you must deal with after the session by default. You don't really have any accountability at all beyond not getting caught doing something that is blatantly in violation of the game's license or usage agreement. What's worse, finding the wrong mentor in an MRPG can be worse for you and the game than not having one at all. What if the "community standards" of your group of peers thinks it's perfectly acceptable to do anything as long as you don't get caught? What if you end up playing with people who actively thrive on causing grief to other players? What if your "community" binds together simply on the basis that you all hate "role-playing" despite none of you ever having actually tried it? There are new groups that will be joining us in the greater MRPG community. MRPGs that are based on science fiction will bring in new crowds. MRPGs based on successful film franchises are on their way, and have installed fan bases. MRPGs for the console markets are in development. MRPGs designed for the strategy and action gamer are inevitable. Looking at these new groups in dismay and retreating to our "safe" cliques full of people who always agree with us is the best way we can ensure that none of our "community values" will ever rub off on them. And they will out-number us, no matter who you think of as "us". Looking at them as new gamers in need of mentors is one of the best ways to raise the bar of MRPG community behavior. Giving in to the lowest common denominator is our other alternative, and that's none too appealing. Comment! [dead link

 

BRIEFLY SWITCHING TO THE STRATEGIC MAP Tuesday, June 13, 2000 - 11:44 PM [Filed by delusion]

Every time The Brand Formerly Known As OSI pushes back a publish, an update, or delays a feature, the inevitable war between factions breaks out. Given events as of late, it's the closest thing to in-game factions you're likely to see, so indulge me as I develop this a little. Two of the factions in question are the "Negative Cynical Bastards" (in the interests of journalistic integrity, be aware that I'm a card-carrying member) and the "Revisionist Optimists". The Realms of Lum the Mad are but a single venue for this battle: it sputters among the staff rather uneventfully, but among our readership (and that most other sites that cover UO) , it roars like a twenty-thousand acre forest fire headed straight for the expensive wooded neighborhood in a sleepy California valley. The Optimists berate the Cynics for bashing OSI/EA breathlessly at the drop of a hat and grate their teeth whenever the slightest news is pounced upon as the breaking of the Seventh Seal, and the Cynics beat their heads in the wall wondering how many "second chances" OSI/EA gets and watch, jaw agape, OSI/EA get the cushiest soft-ball questions imaginable at UOHOC. The Optimists listen with an understanding ear when OSI explains how simply throwing 10 more programmers at UO won't help it any, while the Cynics remind OSI that maybe just keeping the same 10 programmers for more than six months might be helpful. The Cynics have a certain amount of sympathy for the gamer who quits his or her popular website out of frustration from having to deal with a Byzantine support system, whereas the Optimists point out that this is a fluke at worst and that the support system, on the whole, is quite good and improving. This is the tactical angle; it's where these two factions do their daily battle. There's a third important faction, though, that plays entirely on the strategic map: the Stockholders. They've got their own guild, and they've got a brand new member. In fact, their new member is the only one specializing in the computer gaming field. Their newest member has one hell of a manifesto. This faction has detractors, too, and they're getting more and more vocal (read the section entitled "Our Survey Says"). I'm hearing more and more stories from the (current and ex-) Employee faction, and they make the Cynics look like Mary Poppins. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't treating employees as something other than an immediately replaceable commodity probably be in the best interests of the faction with the most to lose? Well, wouldn't it? Comments. [dead link]

 

LET'S PLAY "BLUE'S CLUES". Tuesday, February 29, 2000 - 7:00 PM [Filed by delusion]

COD's AC magic messageboards have rules against posting spell formulae. In that spirit, I'm going to beat around the bush and not come right out and give you this latest news item; I'm going to let you figure it out. Rumors of a new spell abound. Someone researches it and posts about it on the boards. The screenshot is hosted at http://l.roy.org/images/estorm.jpg. The page http://l.roy.org/ contains the tantalizing text: Copyright (c) 1997-8 by Lee Berger Here's your mission: check your documentation. I'm still laughing. Comments? You bet! [dead link]

 

Asala bint Gelam says "APC READY, WAITING FOR PASSENGERS" Tuesday, June 6, 2000 - 10:19 AM [Filed by delusion]

The patch is out today. There's just so much great stuff in it, that grovelling over each grain of greatness would be tedious for you, the reader. Take a look. As you may have seen, Turbine also has an MRPG engine for use as a hired gun, much like people use the Unreal and Quake engines to build their own games. Turbine describes it as an enhanced version of the engine Asheron's Call uses. Is this a good thing for the industry? Given the stability of the AC engine, probably. Just the other day, I was on the Obsidian Plains fighting nasty, hurtful creatures with Ely. As our session was drawing to a close, we started fooling around with the engine itself. AC's engine is pretty good about "guessing" what's going to happen given certain input. That's the reason why its latency affects players much less than, say, Ultima Online or Quake. On rare occasions, though, it guesses wrong. A wrong guess can have you sailing down a cliff, only to reappear at the top, when the engine figures out you really didn't fall. This isn't a big error, and it's one you have to take great pains to duplicate. It offers no game advantage, and it's amusing. Sometimes, though, the rare wrong guess becomes a very rare reality. Needless to say, my character careened off one of the cliffs and smashed into bits in the valley below. I knew the risks of playing with the engine in this way, so I'm still laughing when I come to my body to retrieve my belongings. Then, with one of us on the cliff and another in the valley, it occurs to me... ...Sniper guns and jetpacks. Just like the ones in Tribes. In fact, Dereth would make a very good world for a Massively Multiplayer First Person Shooter, or BIG FPS for short. Before you dismiss this as another "Dwarves with Machine Guns" rant, think about this: A good MRPG engine (AC) combined with a good strategy FPS design (Tribes) could be extremely promising, and by god, the engine's for sale. Of course, Capture the Flag takes on a different perspective when the flags are farther apart and when an army of dozens takes on a defense mounted by dozens. The FPS genre operates differently than the MRPG genre. In an FPS, you don't have a game without "winners and losers". In an MRPG, "winners and losers" don't exist in the traditional sense. In an FPS, there are "sides" - you're either a member of team A or team B, whereas in an MRPG, you have guilds with many different purposes, solo players, group players not in a guild structure, etc. You also need to preserve the "short game" aspect of a good FPS - good short games in about 15 minutes, good longer games in an hour or so. Again, winners and losers - this is a high-intensity genre, and there needs to be some degree of resolution at the end of a "round", after which you can play another round or retire for the session. Very unlike an MRPG that don't often follow a schedule other than that imposed by players. But what if it were possible to combine the two genres? What if you could play "solo" levels in order to gain experience - player experience, not in-game experience points - and fame points? Soemthing on your character roster, like a medal for defeating a specific "level" or "dugneon". There could be solo levels much like solo-playing existing FPS games, and group cooperative levels like multi-play co-op in existing FPS (co-op FPS isn't very popular, but I suspect it would be more popular in an MFPS). Character development would probably be detrimental to a game of this sort where actual kills are important and where you want to be able to let someone log in and quickly join the action. The bread and butter of this sort of game would be deathmatch and multi-team conflict (capture the flag, king of the hill, command and hold, defend and destroy, etc), just as it is in the smaller scale FPS games. The ability to enter "civilian" mode when not in a deathmatch or team play would be crucial to ensure that the game doesn't degenerate into a world-wide deathmatch, which to me has always been the least satisfying mode of FPS muliplayer gaming. The key here is a client/server combination that can adequately "guess" during lag, which AC's is quite good at. I just get all weak in the knees thinking of going to the tower at Black Hill and sniping at someone at the Waijhou hut. "Massive casualties at Glenden Wood as a squadron of scouts escort five mortar-heavy APCs to Cragstone. Details as they become available." Bringing in new audiences is going to be crucial as a dozen MRPG titles reach the market. Swords-and-sorcery MRPGs compete for the same 250,000 players. The FPS market is wide-open for the taking. Comments? [dead link]

 

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD Monday, June 5, 2000 - 8:55 AM [Filed by delusion]

90+%: It's all fun and games until an 18' tall shreth moves in next door. As if the comedy value of a Shadow Lieutenant killing five people shopping in Waijhou before getting taken down wasn't humor enough, the Direlands are getting tougher in this week's update. In fact, Turbine has recommended anyone not sufficiently prepared for an increased level of difficulty to get out of Dodge before it happens. The immediate results will be less low level characters in the Direlands, busier lifestones, and messageboards chock-full of people who love it and hate it. All in all, this should be a pretty good move, especially if the mid-level characters who hunt the Direlands drudges can still find some in areas where "the new big bad stuff" is coming. Whatever happens, I hope that one of these big nasty creatures finds its way into Fort Tethana on rare occasion and racks up a body count, just for laughs. However, should you decide that an extended "high level" game isn't what you're looking for right now, there's a new server going up. Re-live the experience of the beginning of final for a few weeks or so when most characters aren't running around in matching 150+ AL armor, and when nobody yet has that 112% yumi. Of course, you're going to see a lot of vassal-fishing, but that's a small price to pay for a fresh start. Sounds like another win-win. Comments? [dead link] 10-%: If the Darktide devotees want another server (and from the messages I receive, that much is loud and clear), the writing is on the wall: get the Darktide population consistently at the level of the other servers. In fact, make sure it's the most heavily used server of the bunch. There's a catch, though. Instead of telling the visitors from the normal servers that there is life after that first login-pk, you'll have to show them. That's right, you'll actually have to interact with the "tourists" that many high-level Darktide players look down upon. Instead of laughing at "tourists" making PK characters and killing each other at spawn points, the high-level Darktide crowd actually has something to gain by getting the first-time visitor to stick around... ...specifically, elbow room. Comments? [dead link]

 

CAREBEARS IN BARNYLAND Thursday, June 1, 2000 - 9:14 AM [Filed by delusion]

Why, as gamers, do we need to constantly engage in a testosterone-fuelled battle to prove our "street cred"? Will we be looked down upon if we're not seen to be engaging in "eXTReMe gAmIng"? Some would have you believe that their characters never die, they never miss, and they're never defeated. They simply OWN YOU. You don't play the "real" game. You go to Trammel to play in "Barneyland" UO. You log on to Thistledown to play "Carebear" AC. Wimp. After all, there's only one way to play these games, and you, by god, aren't cutting the mustard. You're playing the wrong way. Pansy. "Hey, it's just the lingo!" "I didn't make it up, I just say it because that's what everyone else calls it." Just because it's in wide use doesn't make an insulting term any more acceptable. You know, in this country, there was a time when it was perfectly acceptable to refer to anyone with African anscestry a "nigger". In the some circles, it still is. Fortunately, times change, and so do people. In AC, "Carebear" assumes that there are simply no challenges on any server other than Darktide. The same applies to EQ's regular servers. It's a supposition that is, at best, uninformed. More often, it's willfully ignorant and it ensures that nobody will take you seriously except people who already agree with you. Do those who have fun playing on a regular server threaten the power structure of those who would demean them as "carebears"? If not, then what's the point of all the bluster from the 10% of the community who plays on Darktide? If they don't want the 90% describing Darktide as a land of idiot d3wd PKs (and I'm not saying they are), the first step toward that is not to treat the majority like they play a no-challenge game filled with ponies, daisys, and cotton candy. Competition and challenge exists for the people who play the regular servers, it's just channeled differently. There's always competition when people compete for the same resources, be it in the real world or simulated worlds. Comments! Put me in my place! [dead link]

 

UP NEXT: "WHO WANTS TO STOP BEING A COMPLETE JACKASS" Wednesday, May 31, 2000 - 10:15 AM [Filed by delusion]

This has been submitted to every AC news site: This contest is for anyone on the Frostfell Server who is of level 5 or higher, and pays the one mote/speck/shard admission fee. The contest consists of the two monarchs (Mr Magoo and The Lady Rose) putting the eligibles through any test they please is order to pick a winning husband/wife and then get married. This event will take place on Friday June 2, at 6 pm pacific, (9pm eastern) at the Yanshi meeting hall! If you have any questions please /tell Toshima on Frostfell. Online marriage is quite cheesy enough without turning it into a game show. Don't give me the "it's role-play" line, either: role-players don't name their role-played characters after cartoon characters. Who Wants to Post a Smartass Comment? [dead link]

 

A GOVERNMENT WITHOUT A NATION Wednesday, May 31, 2000 - 9:48 AM [Filed by delusion]

You'll be thrilled to note that there's going to be a UO2 HoC (House of Commons) chat on Stratics. Well, maybe you won't be, but I am, because I'm a connoisseur of high comedy. According to the mission of the original UO HoC: The Ultima Online House of Commons is a collaboration between the makers of UO (the Development Team and Game Masters) and Stratics to bring you the means to express your views about UO through an open forum. As the motto above states, our goal is to form a more common bond between the Peoples and Rulers of Britannia. How do we do this? Read on... Not to belabor the obvious, but forming "a more common bond between the Peoples and the Rulers" of Neo-Post-Apocalyptic-FurryBritannia is somewhat difficult, as there are no "People" to "Rule" yet. But why quibble? The various gaming news networks are bound and determined to have a news service for each and every game out there. It's no longer enough to have a site for the Big Three (UO, EQ, AC). Now you have to have sites for games that aren't out. Nothing new about that, either. As I recall, both the Crossroads of Britannia and the One Site began during the beta. Now, the networks scramble to get a site up as soon as the game is announced, sometimes years before the beta. Other sites linger on even after the odds of them seeing the light of day dwindle into absurdity. "This game might be a hit someday!" It's called "hedging your bets". It's no longer acceptable to have one or two really good sites that do one thing (in that case, STATISTICS and GAME DATA) really well. Now you have to be all things to all people. At least that's the thought process. Everyone's a network now. Everyone. So should it surprise me that there's a UO2 HoC? Probably not. Maybe I'll see you there tonight. Let's watch yet another specific-purpose entity become a generalized diluted offering. Maybe next week I'll catch you at the Star Wars Online HoC and the Rune Conquest HoC the week after that. Comments Network [dead link]

 

The Bravery of Being Out of Range Monday, May 22, 2000 - 1:42 PM [Filed by delusion]

Do we, as gamers, let the minority with the most at stake - the "vested interests" in political terms - determine the evolution of the games we play? Given the less than stellar performance of this model in the US political system, I certainly hope not. Let's toss the analogy aside and dig in. The issue here is fair reward for fair risk in Asheron's Call. In order to accomplish this, you also need to institute a program of reducing the rewards for reduced risk. I'll indent while making some notes about UO for those of you who want to skip back to the AC commentary in a few paragraphs. In a game like UO that has more viable non-combat career choices, it gets a little more difficult - OSI certainly jerked around fishing during the "feast or famine" patches oh so long ago. I remember doing a statistical analysis on fishing based on the numbers OSI put out in its internal patch document (which was very similar to Turbine's Build Notes, but was SUPER SECRET and only supposed to go to interest and support volunteers and employees - it generally got to Dr. Twister within a day). This analysis clearly showed a MASSIVELY high amount of loot generation for a Master Fisherman. I sent it to the Dev Team, and gave it to other interested parties, but if anyone at OSI was paying attention, they were keeping it a better secret than the internal patch document ever was. The response to the fishing patch aftermath was the infamous fishing nerf. 'Feast or famine' is a very appropriate metaphor when talking about fundamental changes in stock fish availability, perhaps less so when the goal was large pillows, paintings, and globes. Suddenly, a Master fisherman was all but worthless, ad it had been for most of UO's existence. A Grandmaster Fisherman could still get items, but to call it 'toned down' would be an understatement of criminal proportions. I again did the analysis according to OSI's own numbers. My experiences matched the statistics nearly perfectly. I tested for hours, and compared my results with others'. Be they novice, journeyman, or grandmaster, their numbers reflected my revised analysis numbers nearly perfectly. When I was audacious enough to tell a GM that my analysis did, in fact, hold true, I was assured that this wasn't the case, that I was doing something wrong, that I couldn't possibly disagree with official doctrine (which dictated that fishing was merely 'toned down a few percent') and be right, that quite frankly, I was causing trouble in #uo-council and being an ass by even suggesting it. So, despite agreeing that the original numbers were too high and that some sort of moderation was needed, statistical analysis and testing the numbers in-game wasn't of interest. Apparently, neither was the fact that the overkill of the original fishing boost was obvious to anyone who tested it on Test Center... You know Test Center, that server they used to use for testing before it became a play shard for the elite. As with many things, the changes were on Test Center for weeks, and any notes from players about the success of said patch were ignored before publishing to the regular servers, whereupon which the regular servers' players echoed the exact same sentiments the Test Center folks had. This was, of course, a big shock to OSI: If you don't fix something, it stays broke. That's a model of how not to do things. Turbine's been good about testing code before it gets published. In fact, during the last patch, test code was accidentally published, but it was pretty well-tested at the time, so its inclusion was anything BUT a show-stopper. In fact, even though they removed it again after they realized what had happened, the could have left it in, quite frankly. The code in question lowered XP gained by low-level characters slowly whittling away high-level creatures from the safety of a ledge or perch or wall. Cheap kills are still possible, but some are just not rewarded as well. Of course, people complained. As players, we need to ask ourselves whether or not we want a game by committee or whether we trust Turbine to make changes that are good for the long-term viability of the game. Trust doesn't come easy in this genre; it's difficult to earn, and easy to lose. Turbine's made mistakes, as do all online game companies. The key here is that they admit to them, and they resolve them quickly. Most importantly, they don't blame the players for the mistakes of programming. In other words, I trust Turbine, - they've earned it. If it comes to the vocal bitching minority and Turbine disagreeing about the future of Asheron's Call, Turbine's got a great record. The vocal minority are going to have to do better than bitch about free XP being unfairly stolen from them before I can take them seriously. If you want to be taken seriously, make constructive suggestions that amount to something other than "don't affect my favorite twink of the month!" Let the Dev Team do its job, it's good at it. This month's "The Spin from Turbine" speaks volumes: The intention was to prevent people from slaying things that are way too strong for them by wearing them down over time with no risk. Also, this did not stop those players from doing this, it just made it so that they didn't gain XP faster than those players who do play at a risk, with all the hardship and struggle that entails. Honestly, if you're 10th level and you're camped out at WaiJhou or Fort Tethana or elsewhere in the Direlands, you forfeit any right to complain about what happens there. Your first clue should be that you're 10th level, and that drudge ravener that sent you careening back to the lifestone was over 57th level. What's more, at 10th level, when you inevitably start begging for a ride back to the eastlands (despite there being a convenient Sho Roadside Portal near WaiJhou, and a Hilltop portal at Tethana), you're going to annoy the hell out of everyone who is actually sufficiently prepared to be there. We rationalized that by reducing the XP granted to people using exploits in the game, we were, in a sense, rewarding those who play heroically. Should the guy cowering behind a door and attacking a monster that is levels beyond his abilities get the same reward as the valiant hero who bravely charges in? Legends tell us of great warriors and magicians who stood toe-to-toe with monsters to do battle . . . Little is written about cowards who slew the dragons without any personal risk. The risk-free game is an example of the bravery of being out of range. It's not the game that Turbine designed, so don't be surprised when they fix it. Again, let the Dev Team do its job, it's good at it. Of course, some people don't want risk. Just ask anyone with a 30th level or higher character that's died less than 60 times. Elsewhere, in the "Build Notes" from earlier this month... Everquest players, pay close attention: We had a problem with certain generous chests that gave players an incentive to wait in long lines to get their booty, usually at little or no risk. All you had to do was wait your turn. This is not very heroic, and unfair to those players who want to get a nice chest of loot but have better things to do than wait in a line for hours. It also created lots of complaints about players who did not follow the “etiquette” of how to wait their turn. Therefore, we made some changes. The good news is that these chests will regenerate their treasure much faster than before, so if you are waiting your turn, you will have to wait much less time. The bad news is that the chests are locked, so just waiting there won't do any good. The good news is that the keys to these chests are now part of monster loot throughout the world. So go out and fight powerful monsters anywhere you like, and if you are lucky, you may end up with a key that will unlock any one of these wonderful chests. You can then make it your quest to fight your way to such a chest and, without having to wait in a line, open it up and enjoy your booty. Though players who did not mind the wait are sure to be disappointed, we know that far more players will be pleased by this change, as it rewards true adventurers with mini-quests that yield great rewards. The subtext in that paragraph is critical in understanding the key difference in how Trubine treats Asheron's Call versus the way Verant treats Everquest, and a wonderful illustration of an earlier point I made about programmers taking responsibility for mistakes, be they code bugs or unforseen design problems. "Line etiquette" is a symptom of a broken game design. Turbine recognizes this, and repeatedly chooses to fix the problem instead of trying to fix the player by enforcing absurd behaviors like queueing up for loot. In Everquest, you get increasingly intricate looting rules enforced by the tattle-tale system instead of the game engine. The new Everquest player is thrust into a situation where there are complex (and artificial) rules of behavior that have very little basis in common sense. Not knowing them is dangerous, as many of them are bannable offenses. Turbine's come up with a solution that's apparently novel in this genre: fix the game instead. Let's get that experimental code in-game again, and to the nay-sayers, let the Dev Team do its job, it's good at it. We zap and maim/With the bravery of being out of range [dead link]

 

"UO3" or "I wonder if they read the 'fan sites' during E3?" Thursday, May 11, 2000 - 10:11 AM [Filed by delusion]

A Lumcorp™ exclusive: A sneak peek at "UO3 - Ultima Orygin Product Arts: Games Electronic Not A Sequel: Mirror" Comments? Of that I have no doubt. [dead link]

 

IT'S PATCH DAY. THAT'S A GOOD THING. PLAY. Tuesday, May 2, 2000 - 9:22 AM [Filed by delusion]

UO has UO:R to look forward to. EQ has Ruins of Kunark. AC has yet another patch. AC players are the big winners here. Turbine's spoiling us. Not only do we have a patch day we can look forward to instead of fear, but Turbine's idea of a six month plan is six updates, each with bug fixes, content, and eye-candy rather than being only 50% done over a month after the deadline. Here are just a few reasons I wish I were home right now: Removed the "You have been saved" text messages because they were, well, wrong. Anything that lessens needless spam is good. Add a mage "words of power" filter and I'll giggle like a little girl. Introduced restore-character functionality. Deleted characters may be restored up to the hour time-limit as was previously given to the temporary slot. Characters are now invulnerable to all attacks for a minute after they die. They forfeit this immunity if they are teleported, cast a spell, or attack. We also added an @deaths command that prints out how many times your character has died. We thought players would be curious to know this info. This change, in particular, is a lifesaver when you have three corpses to retrieve and your lifestone resembles a Gold Phyntos Wasp Union, Local 285. Added multiple tabs to spell-cast panel -- players can now sort their spells in nice, tabbed panels. Early reports from the field are very positive. Multi-school mages have long had to pick and choose which spells they wanted handy. Now they can have 50 key-bound spells instead of 10. Precasting is back, biatch. It's just not where you left it. Magic defense divide-by-10 divisor way too big. It's now divided by 7. Fighting liches just got a little bit easier. AIs will no longer use self-targeted transfer spells to boost stats that are already full. Fighting liches just got a little bit harder. Perch eliminated. Some rock pillars still had physics. Removed it months ago, but somehow it didn't get checked in. People were using these as perches to plink Olthoi. Now, the object has no physics. No more perching! This is what's going to cause some people to go through boxes of Kleenex. You know, because risk-free experience gain is like heroin: good while you've got it, but miserable when it's gone. This is only going to affect the more unskilled archers; they'll have to learn the game the rest of us have been playing. Here's your first hint: when you see Tusker Guards closing in, run. Hide PK's level if appraise fails. On Darktide especially, assess other and decieve other might actually be worth learning now. Hot kimchi mass and encumbrance swapped. I thought mass WAS encumbrance. In any case, kimchi is delicious. Take my word for it though, if you're ever invited over to a Korean home and are offered several kinds of kimchi, and one has these stringy rubbery strands that seem like really chewy noodles, don't ask what it is, you don't want to know. Stick to the regular hot kimchi, it's wonderful. All of this, and a new fledgling town is sprouting up in the direlands. Can I call in sick after I'm already here? Comments? [dead link]

 

THIS ISN'T A GIFT HORSE. THIS IS A FERARRI, AND YOU'RE STILL LOOKING IT IN THE MOUTH. Sunday, April 23, 2000 - 6:47 PM [Filed by delusion]

Last night, there was another event in an ongoing plot in Asheron's Call. In the final battle (of this stage anyway), the reward for the person who vanquished the shadow general was a nice set of (heavy) blue Celdon armor. After this event, the Umbris Shadows (which only increased in number as this plot has developed week by week) are mostly gone. You know, because they were defeated. Not a hard concept to grasp. The message boards were promptly filling with comments about what had transpired: For those of us who do have a RL to live....Oh well, maybe some day Turbine will make some thing for the casual player...(Small random unannounced town attacks) --- I'm playing to quest with friends and have fun. AND I DON'T LIKE MISSING QUESTS BECAUSE I WAS HELPING A FRIEND!!!!!! --- I'll go back to powergaming now that I've seen RP'ing and questing is a waste of time.. --- The entire shadow event is a load of BS ... I can't even survive Teth without shadows! How the hell do you expect me to kill a shadow general! Frankly, the entire concept is complete bullshit. Oh, and if you are not on when it happens, hahah, your screwed. --- No one cares about the Umbris per se. They were just thrilled to have a high level loot source besides 5 nobles and an overlord. Now that's gone. Fortunately, there some voices of reason amidst the rabble. I'll only quote one, specifically Fragilesoul of Thistledown: If I hear one more person bitching about how they didn't get into the nexus or didn't get to kill a shadow captian, I think I'm going to puke. Is everyone so self centered and greedy? COD's Dev Board has a more thoughtful thread about the subject, including comments from Jason Booth. Remember, COD expires messages quickly, so hurry! Turbine puts a lot of effort into maintaining ongoing "play anytime" as well as "real-time" events that only happen once. They're consistently adding actual content in a game world that changes; you're not going to see mirror lands or new exclusive levels to camp that require 40 people to pre-register via a form filled out in triplicate. The AC community has it better than anyone else. Don't blow it. Your thoughts? [dead link]

 

These are fantasy games. I shouldn't have to spell it out for you. Thursday, April 20, 2000 - 3:33 PM [Filed by delusion]

Yes, there really are little Japanese girls who play UO, look adorable, type in kawaii speech, and send in their pictures for all to grovel at. And they're all really female, honest. I wouldn't lie to you for the sole purpose of amusement. This is a news site, after all, we're not here to entertain you. There should be a test when you log onto the internet. It should involve ensuring the ability to detect subtlety and irony. Failure should result in immediate disconnection. But no, due to some rather pesky rules, they let anyone on. So I'll spell it out: Kiki and Kakori do not exist. Ely did the magnificent writing. The pictures came from... Well, let's not go there. I created the sig. Wait for the t-shirt. Thank you. Irony is dead. If you can backpeddle quick enough, you can pretend you knew all along. Kawaii

 

CONVERGENCE Wednesday, April 19, 2000 - 4:34 PM [Filed by delusion]

Lately, on the news page and the message boards, the topics of the effects of MRPGs on players (particularly children), parental responsibility with out-of-control kids, people who are starved for attention in an MRPG culture that is saturated with people willing to pay it, role-playing evil, the use of attractive female images in marketing, and of course, Japanese holidays. Kiki writes to explain the strange occurence in a previous update which involved oni, beans, and the like: hehe for question i can answers!! first: oni is monster like orc but red and blue. in the winter come in home for after breaking...like robbers not modernized by systems of effect! then setubun to throw out!!! OUT OUT!!! >_< second:momotaro is come to attakk oni. old man is cold and need wood for hot to fire....... old lady who washing spots peach and it is mototaro!! later to kill demon king!!! for party once even i drss like demon king!!! ^-^ LOOK second: oni are goned in spring festivl... event to throw out the disengaged from homes with mame... (next month to make bean jam with same beans!!)..it is excite very much with celebrate. (w so there is oni and setubun and hope to all tales again in coming months!!! bye!! thx (w PEACE AND HAPPY IN BRITANNIA!! KIKI Well then, that covers Setubun, but what about the rest of the topics of discussion I mentioned? She sent pictures. Comments? (w [dead link]

 

GIRL YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE Monday, April 17, 2000 - 2:56 PM [Filed by delusion]

Milli Vanilli strike again, which is doubly impressive since one's dead. Mythrandia of Thistledown has the honor of being Asheron's Call's first level 10 monarch. Being that she plays an Aluvian character, that's High Queen Mythrandia to you. Unfortunately, in the words of a quickly-recalled Barbie doll, "Math is hard". Except that it's not. Here's a rundown: to get to allegiance level x, you need 2^x followers. For example, level 1 = 2^1 = 2 followers level 2 = 2^2 = 4 followers level 3 = 2^3 = 8 followers ... level 10 = 2^10 = 1024 followers Simple enough? Good. It gets less simple. 1024 followers by itself isn't enough. You have to have your 1024 followers arranged in your allegiance so that each person has two vassals underneath them, and that doesn't happen without extreme planning. So actually getting to allegiance level 10 is going to require a lot more than 1024 vassals unless you arrange them perfectly. Here's the problem: Mythandria has less than 800 vassals, yet has reached the 10th level of allegiance. Accident? Bad math? Not hardly. See what she has to say about it: My friend who happens to be an arcane mastermind discovered an elite method of creating people out of thin air using his arcane prowess and ultimately the benefit conferred from such knowlege was the creation of rank 10 level 2 mules :) I logon one day and reap the benefits. We pass the benefits on to many members of the allegiance. I laugh a bit, enjoy a little fun, then goto bed and take off for school in the morning. Get back from school, login, message Jesse and ask him if he needs an explanation of the bug. Jesse already knows about it and they have a handle on the thing. Foster replicates the bug on the same server and pops into the dev chat and tells ppl that he has done so :) We all run around as high kings for a few days and have a lovely time. This is a place where you can respond to our actions and tell me what you think about what we have done. It's fun to go around with a title of "High Queen". It's fun to have a one-hit halbard in UO, too. It's fun to be the first no matter how you get there. Then it's fun to lord it over other people who have recruited in an attempt to gain allegiance levels legitimately. It's fun to pretend like being the knowing beneficiary of an exploit is so very different than if you had engaged in the exploit directly. After all, the best way to repay Turbine's policy of treating its customers with respect and not going after people who find exploits is to flaunt it rather than report it to the development staff. Rob Pilatus died for your sins. [dead link]

 

Thinking Bigger: Rate = Distance over Time Saturday, April 15, 2000 - 6:58 PM [Filed by delusion]

I've written an article about MRPG design for developers. Hopefully players will find it interesting as well. Some of it challenges basic assumptions about how MRPGs should be designed. Some of it details specific ideas that become more and more feasible as bandwidth and CPU power increase. Origin, Verant, Turbine, as well as the many companies developing MRPGs currently in production: this one's for you. Thinking Bigger: Rate = Distance over Time Comment publicly or otherwise.

 

I'LL NEVER LOOK AT THOSE ALL-WHITE CHARACTER ICONS IN U4 THE SAME WAY AGAIN. Friday, April 14, 2000 - 6:46 PM [Filed by delusion]

Sometimes, Kakori finds me things that are too weird for words: OSI ain't the only ones fucking up Ultima, my friends. Forgive me, Richard, I have sinned. [dead link]

 

ANCIENT GREEK THEATER HAD THE SAME PROBLEM Monday, March 27, 2000 - 6:07 PM [Filed by delusion]

I was reading a site called Women of Asheron's Call. Figuring this was going to be really good, or really bad, I decided to poke around a bit. My first reaction was "this site has some interesting information and content". The second reaction was "am I a Woman of Asheron's Call?". I started playing female characters in Ultima Online about halfway through my association with that game. I don't play digi-sluts, dominatrixes, or helpless maidens waiting for a hero. I play characters that happen to be female. My experience is that I am more likely to be treated as a human being than competition needing to be crushed. More importantly, it's interesting to play a fantasy game and be what you cannot be. If there was a role-playing game that allowed you to simulate working eight hours a day in an office job, or that allowed you to pretend you were posting long-winded rants on the internet, or one in which you did things like changing the cat box, doing laundry, and paying bills, it wouldn't appeal to me - these are things I can do. "I don't need to play it, I live it! Experience the adventure of my life! Delusion Online, the first offering of MyIPO.com!" This being a fantasy game, I think we're supposed to have a vivid enough imagination that we're willing to live up to the hackneyed cliché that "nobody on the internet knows you're a talking frog unless you tell them". Taking that as a given, I can play a well-adjusted female in a game, and be a well-adjusted man outside of it. I don't play to flirt or to start meaningful love relationships with anyone. For that matter, I don't play games to talk about real life. I can do that at my leisure outside the game, be it on the net or off it. So to get back to the point: I am a Woman of Asheron's Call, and I am a man. If you can't deal with that, that's your problem. Hopefully when I send them my entry for their Fashion Parade, they'll be open-minded enough to agree. [Page is Netscape unfriendly, works in Internet Explorer] Sadly, the invented domain MyIPO.com actually exists. At least it's not an e-venture where you sell yourself for stock. "Delusion stock falls 5 and 3/8ths after low first quarter health issues." [dead link]

 

BLACK, SPIKEY ... HARD-EDGED Tuesday, March 14, 2000 - 11:53 AM [Filed by delusion]

There's a very interesting account on CoD about a player who was summoned by dark forces and forced to make a choice that may very well affect upcoming plot developments. Normally, something like this is the sort of thing that I'd take with a grain of salt... ...except last night - before this story was published - a member of my allegiance told me the same sort of story, but with minor details and a different choice. I won't spoil it for you here, out of character, on an editorial page. This is what you wanted: the ability to have an actual impact on the plot. Now that Turbine has accomplished this, OSI can feel free to copy the idea. Other games' features, after all, are the primary source of their 'in development' ideas. hot to assimilate [dead link]

 

"STICKY MOSSWARTS" SOUNDS SO ... WRONG Thursday, March 9, 2000 - 6:50 PM [Filed by delusion]

Ether Dragon weighed in on the issue in a fashion that leaves only one question: Where can I get one of those outfits? (Note: if the above message has expired, don't despair.) Kakori's favorite beasts. Listen to them purr. [dead link]

 

ANNIHILATE OTHER VIII Wednesday, March 8, 2000 - 10:04 AM [Filed by delusion]

Enormous festering spires of darkness even more awesome than the Tou Tou lighthouse. Beautiful colored lighting. The Drudge Fashion Show. All of these changes paled in comparison to one innocent line in the build notes: Hand-to-hand combat is easier versus moving targets. You will “stick” to your target more. They neglected to mention that this applies to monsters, too. All of them. The jury's out on this one. On one hand, it makes the Direlands more dangerous, which is a good thing. On the other, melee warriors - the "human shields" of mage and archer distance fighters - have to retreat a lot earlier in combat with powerful creatures. So much earlier that it's best just not to stop to fight at all. It's not bad thing to have "sticky monsters", they just need to replace Crazy Glue with Elmers. Whatever your opinion, whether you think all monsters should stick until every PC has 45% vitae while shivering naked and poor at the lifestones or that your 185% burdened mule with 10 run should be able to outrun a pack of twenty angry Olthoi Soldiers with impunity, now is the time to speak up, because they're listening. [Update, 3:55pm - There's a new thread for comments.]

 

A DEV TEAM THAT KEEPS A SCHEDULE. GO FIGURE. Tuesday, March 7, 2000 - 1:45 PM [Filed by delusion]

By about 6:00pm Eastern, you should be able to log in again. What can you expect? Content and eye candy. New developments in the storyline during each major patch have become par for the course from Turbine, and that's a good thing. This has been one of the things that sets Turbine's offering apart from that other game. If anything can be inferred from the latest news, there are lots of high-level group challenges looming. We've also been able to consistently look forward to new eye candy each patch. This time around, we're getting improved 3D lighting effects, drudges are pissed, and golems get more polygons. This is amusing, as Turbine left it up to players to decide which creatures would get a high-fi remix. Drudges are an obvious choice, being excellent newbie food, yet still able to command respect at the Ravener level. The other choice, golems, confused even the designers: I've noticed that in the polls running on the fan sites, "Which creature do you think would benefit most from a high-polygon make over," Golems consistently come in second, next to player avatars. I'm curious as to why this is. They're supposed to be just a bunch of rocks and slabs. What's interesting here is that despite feeling that golems weren't the best way to spend artistic energy on, they did it anyway. Not because Microsoft pushed them, not to divert attention from a serious public relations gaff, but because that's what you wanted. There's a lot more here, including the ability use extended characters, dagger fixes, a fix for the 1-9 quick keys not working after inscription, the ability to gather water from fountains, numerous other bug fixes, tweaks and improvements, and perhaps most significantly: Creatures have a level-up effect now. Level up a bunny today! I suppose it's significant if you're a powerlevelling penumbra shadow with a taste for perchers, anyway. Turbine respects you in the morning. [dead link]

 

PRESERVE BANDWIDTH Monday, March 6, 2000 - 10:01 PM [Filed by delusion]

Anyone can make an enormous festering pile of a website. Sometimes design is what you don't include. Often, you need to throw your hat over the wall before you can motivate yourself to do your best. Here's the wall: The 5k award. Start climbing. Less is more. [dead link]

 

SECRET ISLAND LOCATION? CONSPIRACY? IS LEO AROUND? Thursday, March 2, 2000 - 5:02 PM [Filed by delusion]

The usual suspects have had a lot to say about a so-called "secret island" in Asheron's Call that lies in the Inner Sea, more frequently referred to it by its ancient Empyrean name, "that big lake between the direlands and the mainland". Relentlessly shaking down his readers for more information has yielded loads of information, almost all of it contradicted by other submissions. Roughly half the submissions were talking about other islands in other bodies of water. Luckily for Leonardo DiCaprio, the very first nutcase he met gave him the correct location of his island; Dr. Twister hasn't been so fortunate - he obviously isn't attracting the right brand of nutcase. In order to clear the air, a helpful member of Sentinel cadre submitted this: First, this Island is not unknown. It was open during beta, but closed when released to retail. Some sentinels used the Island (or used to before Twisty started all this) to hold people in a safe place that are having portal stuck issues. Basically there have been times when players get stuck in portals and won't materialize. When we find people that are in this condition, we portal them to another area, and hope they materialize. In the extreme cases where someone doesn't materialize after 4 or 5 tries, we would usually teleport them to this Island and for some reason they appear. We've been asked to now stop this practice since Twisty thinks it's a great conspiracy, and have been told that MS will be looking more closely as to why people would be able to materialize on the Island, but not anywhere else. The long and short of it is, we used the Island to transport people that we were helping, only because no one else could interfere with our work. We of course would have found another "secluded" location after this Island was opened, but we are now giving up bringing players there to help them recover from this issue. Summary: Dr. Twister's getting excited about the AC equivalent of jail. How fitting. Keanu and Leonardo, together at last! [dead link]

 

A PLAY IN FOUR PARTS Wednesday, March 1, 2000 - 10:03 PM [Filed by delusion]

Hug, tickle, entertain, flirt. [dead link]

 

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN ONLINE GAME AND A "PERSISTANT STATE WORLD"? Tuesday, February 29, 2000 - 7:00 PM [Filed by delusion]

In an online game, you fiercely battle monster AI and human opponents. In a "persistant state world", you fiercely battle the development staff. AC's dev team tackled an increasingly thorny problem during their latest major update: lag. The method they used said volumes about their approach to programming for a "live" environment, and the benefits of having a dynamic world. Portal storms still occur, and of course nobody is terribly fond of them - especially people like myself with a high speed connection who don't get much bandwidth-related lag. Centers of population are always a problem, be they Arwic's Mage Shop, Britannia's west bank, or for that matter Israel's West Bank. Arwic's Mage Shop was constantly swarmed by knots of mages practicing their skills, searching for new spells, or doing their calculus homework, which was further complicated by the fact that the mage shop was above the jewelry shop, which is another popular destination. Large guilds having meetings in major cities centers was also contributing to the problem. Turbine's response to this was twofold: many urban mage shops were moved away from their former locations to distance them from the commerce centers, and meeting halls were erected to give players a portal-storm-free place to meet. The comparison to UO is inevitable. OSI's response to overcrowded banks was to create banks in cities without them (good), and to make certain areas near the bank un-recallable areas (bad, since it increased traffic rather than reducing it). Being a dynamic world, it's possible to actually change Dereth, whereas Britnnia is a static, immobile world outside of player housing. Lord British's castle is going to be there a year from now, no matter what happens, Trinsic is structurally the same even when it's decorated with flames. In Dereth, a vast bridge exists where none had before, cities have been levelled (if only in Beta) and buildings have been added - very appropriate given that human civilization in Dereth is assumed to be new and growing. I can't really fault OSI for using a static world model; nothing like UO had existed on such a wide scale. Sometimes very good ideas (static maps, learn by watching, distributed computing projects) have unexpectedly bad consequences. Turbine clearly learned from the limitations of the static model. What I can fault OSI for is waiting well over a year to react to the overcrowded bank problem in the first place. I sure do miss celebrating St. Valentines Day in-game. Honest. [dead link]