The Sims Online & "Open Source" Gaming Models

One of my old friends sent me a recent story from Business2 that talks about online gaming, combined with The Sims Online and community involvement in a game. It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.

Comments

Not very incisive

[LucVdB]

It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.

The article basically says: Open Source Development projects and Online Game Mods both foster community - perhaps we can make one more like the other. Who knows what might happen! Tim Berners-Lee certainly doesn't!

I say: Sourceforge has done 100 times more for Open Source Development than Sims Online ever will. Making incremental improvements and getting something out there is going to be more effective than Blue Sky dreaming.

Failure?

[palad1]

From the article:

More than four years later, Mozilla has generated far more press releases than products and has done nothing to help the Netscape browser retake any ground from Microsoft. This was one massively multiplayer project that never took off.

Did it? Really?
Oh, I guess that lizard thingie laying on my desktop is just an explorer glitch then.

I think that the author of course doesn't give a damn about quality, but quantity. This is exactly the same debate as 'quake 1 sucks, no one plays it.'

Re:TSO: A glorified chat room.

[SlightlyMadman]

I was beta testing TSO for a few weeks, and in my opinion, it's not going to take off.
Visualize this: playing a computer game... in which one's avatar is... sleeping. For twenty minutes straight, because your stupid "energy" bar is low. Meanwhile, you are forced to chat with other players to keep your connection alive because they boot you after fifteen minutes of idleness.

I know that sounds ridiculous to any reasonably sane individual, but that's exactly what playing EverQuest is like, and it's doing quite well. Gameplay in any MMORPG consists of doing some boring and repetetive taks (i.e. killing monsters , making arrows, or selling hamburgers) until your character gets tired (or low on hp), at which point you have to lay down for a while, and wait. People tend to be satisfied chatting or, trying to sell stuff, or getting a group together while they do this, in EQ.

You also have to remember that The Sims is mostly played by non-technical women. These are people that are likely to hang out in a chatroom, anyways, so that's not idle time to them; it's fun.

Even if the damn game does inexplicably manage to sell and retain players, it doesn't offer anything new at all to the genre.

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that it will have a profound effect on the chat room industry, and the game industry is an innocent victem caught in the cross-fire.