MMO Election Tactics In A Tale In The Desert

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a GameGirlAdvance article describing the political machinations inside the game world of A Tale In The Desert, the intriguing non-combat-based MMO title that article author and ATITD development intern Jia Ji describes as "..historical simulation, a mixture of the Sims and Civilization with real people thrown in to make it interesting." Of particular interest are the tactics being used in the game to garner votes in the election for Demi-Pharaoh - "Some players are bribing other players for their votes with ingame resources or favors. Others are forming political parties to used their combined voting power to sway the election process.. we even have the equivalent of a 'Green Party' which believes that mining, heavy industrial production, and other activities that have a detrimental effect on the gameworld's environment should be limited and regulated."

Comments

Re:Hey all.

[Teppy]

In fact, polution does matter in ATITD - it screws up farming, fishing, and a number of other activites for your neighbors. (I'm the designer of ATITD.)

Finally, a follow-up article

[Jia]

Hi, I'm Jia, I wrote that article. Anyway, I'm glad that Slashdot finally posted up a follow-up article to the one from four months ago considering we're the only MMOG that actively supports linux and we've been live for over three months.

Our free downloadable linux client is at http://atitd.com/eClient-linux.run. Our engine is also partially open-sourced. "A Tale in the Desert" owes a lot to the open source community too. We're a small company with only two lead developers that basically coded the entire game on their own. Thus, we make use of alot of free software such as, eCal3D (download source here, a derivative of Bruno Heidelberger's Cal3D.

I'm not sure why some Slashdot readers are so hostile to the idea of a "cooperative thinking game." Isn't that what the open-source movement is all about? Does everyone really love mindless hack-and-slash leveling treadmills that much? I guess we'll find out if SWG becomes a success (and I wish Raph Koster the best of luck too!).

Anyway, this is just the first in a series of articles about ATITD I plan on writing for GGA. The next one will probably be about the player-run legal system. So far players in our game have drafted, voted on, and passed laws about theft, land ownership, property permissions, social taboos, obsenity laws, and even virtual rape. Feel free to continue to link to future news about us since we can't afford to advertise on Slashdot (contacted OSDN's advertising department, figure they quoted was 10 times what we paid for our Penny Arcade ad deal).