Africa, The MMOG

Via Joystiq, an MTV Games story about a MMOG that attempts to encompass Africa in a game. From the article: "Less reserved, Adam Ghetti, the teenage creative director at Rapid Reality, the company actually creating the game, said he hopes the game will right some wrongs. 'The white American board developers of the large MMO development companies out there right now don't honestly have the right background and knowledge on the continent of Africa and its lore, mythology and rich history, and quite honestly neither did I,' said Ghetti, who is white. 'They just don't teach it over here.' The game is designed, in part, to change that."

Comments

Hmm...

[The-Bus]

It better run on Ubuntu!

factions

[Anonymous Coward]

Which faction will you roll your character as Tutsi or Hutu?

Ah, PvP!

If its done right...

[MrTester]

this could be a great thing.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of fantasy, until I realized that 99.9% of the fantasy genre is taken directly from Tolkein. The same can be said about fantasy games. Its all Knights, Wizards, Orks, Elves, Dwarves and Dragons. Maybe they will mess with the names, but the roles are set in stone.

Anything realizeing a vision of its own would be a welcome change.

Not that any of that will help a crappy implimentation...

Re:If its done right...

[qw(name)]

Tolkien didn't create all the races found in his books either. He was a giant who stood on the shoulders of lesser known giants.

This does not sound good...

[Stormwatch]

"The average cycle on MMOs is two to four years," he said. "We can turn out the same content, better graphics, better gameplay in eight months to a year." He said games from his company, including "Africa," will have graphics that surpass the current industry gold standard of the Unreal Engine 3. When he talks about the ability for every computer-controlled character in "Africa" to react uniquely to each human-controlled character, he scoffs at prospective doubters. "They say it's impossible. Maybe if we were doing it in the archaic way everyone else tries to do it."

Uh-huh. Yeah, sure. Whenever anyone makes such wild claims, you can be certain that they will blow it. This game will be either full of bugs or delayed for years.

Re:This does not sound good...

[CFTM]

My initial impulse is to agree with you, but sometimes someone really does have a better way of doing things. Robert Rodriguez [Sin City] said the same thing with his movies and he ended up being correct.

Africa

[Alex P Keaton in da]

I think one of the issues that we (Americans) have is that you normally hear of "Africa." It is the only continent that is mentioned as a country (aside from the obvious Australia which is a country, or Anarctica, which has no countries). I don't think people(in general) realize that Africa is made up of distinct countries with distinct cultures.
Then again, many of my country men can't name 10 state capitals in the US... so maybe understanding other cultures is too much...

Re:Africa

[MMaestro]

Its because Africa is more or less the black sheep of history really. With the exception of Japan and Russia, nearly every single major imperial/regional/military power in history has exploited Africa at one time or another (slave trade, colonies, subjugation of local population, civil wars, colonial wars, 'border disputes', 'skrimishes', colonial fighting during World War I and II, etc.) No political group/government/nation really wants to get involved with Africa since it'll open up a lot of old historical wounds.

U.S. won't touch it since African American sentiments are still touchy especially in the South. Britain more or less wants nothing to do with Africa (usually due to monetary and military cost), same with Russia, China and Japan. Germany is too restricted to help effectively and France has been giving the finger to everyone lately. Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, Mexico; too weak or lack of interest for whatever reason. The U.N. has been working in Africa but we all know how much of a failure that is (Somalia is still a battleground with the withdrawal of U.S. troops, genocide is CURRENTLY being committed in Darfur, Egypt is tangled in Middle East affairs, theres the widespread AIDS crisis, etc.)

What's the... point?

[infiniter]

The things most worth talking about in Africa are unfortunately pretty nasty... things like ethnic cleansing and the yearly starvation of hundreds of thousands. Somehow I don't think that's what they have in mind here...

It looks like the goal is more something along the lines of stereotypical Africa... a lot of elephants and odd piercings. That, somehow, doesn't seem educational either.

I'm just confused. It's to be a fantasy game, but it's still somehow supposed to teach about Africa? Did anyone learn about Europe from LOTR? Raise your hands, now...

Re:What's the... point?

[the grace of R'hllor]

I think *you* are the point of making a game like this.

Africa is a friggin' continent, for god's sake, several times larger than the US, with a lot (!!) more history. I am assuming you are from the US, here, for reasons that should be obvious. If, all over Africa, there were nothing other than millions starving to death or dying of AIDS, if everyone were killing everyone else, it would be a complete wasteland within the decade. And it's not. Mythology might be heavily animal-based, but so it is with American Indians. Not surprising, when you're living among so damn many of them.

As for your jibe concerning LOTR, there's a difference to fantasy in an imaginary world, like LOTR, Krull or Star Wars, and fantasy based on mythology, like American Gods, Chronicles of Narnia or even The Iliad. Fantasy has many levels. If you look at Neil Gaiman's books, they tend to be about our world, with legends and mythology made flesh. Something like that would work well in 'the cradle of humanity'.

The execution of the whole deal would be tricky, though, you're right. It's too easy to fall into triteness, rather than actual interesting cultural exchange.

Re:What's the... point?

[jdray]

This may be something of a troll, but since Africa is a continent, as you point out, you should compare it in size to North America, which is also a continent, rather than America, which makes up some fraction of North America.

I have to say that my elementary school education regarding Africa was spotty, and completely non-existent in high school, except for the "cradle of civilization" part. As a teen (many years ago), I could have told you that Egypt was a part of Africa, and that the Congo was, but had little or no idea what relationship they had to one another, either socially or geographically. South Africa is obviously in the southern part, and there was plenty of news about Apartheid at the time, but I had no clue what any of it meant.

In my adult life, I'm happy to say that I've had (still have, in some cases) several friends from different parts of Africa. I know how to find The Gambia on a map (not so easy), and quite a bit about the culture of Ghana (fascinating place). Unlike most Americans, I know that Ethiopia is not primarily a desert full of starving poor people.

There's so much about the world that doesn't fit into eight second sound bites, and much of it is only interesting after you've spent time learning about it, which is to say that it takes time to get enough of a picture to understand what's going on. If half of America knew as much about the cultures of this world as they do about what Paris Hilton does in her bedroom, we'd all be better off.

Re:What's the... point?

[infiniter]

That's correct, Africa is a friggin' continent. So's North America. Can you imagine trying to create a single game that captures North America? It's a silly concept.

Why does everyone not from America assume that every American is completely ignorant of the rest of the world? You can complain about America in as many ways as you like, but the fact remains that our humanitarian efforts for the rest of the world outweight the contributions of every other country on Earth combined. As soon as your country exceeds, say, the many billions of dollars that America has put towards fighting AIDS in Africa, let's talk about my ignorance.

I'm not saying there's nothing more to Africa than its problems. However, video games require a conflict in order to be interesting. I don't mean violent conflict - I mean there has to be a problem to be solved or else it's just a screensaver.

The unfortunate fact that I'm trying to convey is that the majority of the civilized world is going to look at an MMO based on a mythology they've never heard of, shrug, and walk away.

To actually educate about Africa, now, for real, absolutely requires a treatment of the problems there.

Jilting at windmills

[Locke2005]

1) Africa is a big place with hundreds of different languages and cultures. No single artwork could possible "encompass Africa", it can only try to present a small representative sample.

2) The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time! Also, much of the gameplay that works great when you're on the same Ethernet segment as the server is virtually unplayable when you're on a dial-up on a different continent than the server.

In general, you can't be all things to all people; you need to pick your battles and focus on doing just a few things, but doing them well.

Re:Jilting at windmills

[interstellar_donkey]

The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time!

I'm not sure I agree with that compleatly. I've noticed that over the last ten years, graphics hardware has evolved at a much higher rate then graphics itself, something I've attributed to a propensity to develop software graphics engines that are bloated and inefficent. In the span of 18 months, the raw power of a graphics card may double, yet the quality of the graphics output from the software may increase only 15-20% in the same period of time.

It's a trend I see in every aspect of computer hardware. For example, in 1995 I had a computer with an 80 meg HDD. The driver for the ethernet device in the latest motherboard I purchased was 35 megs. I highly, highly doubt that the network capabilities of my new computer really requires a jump from a few K to drive the device up to 35 megabytes; I simply think that the party that designed the driver produced a bloated driver because it was. . . well, easier.

I think, based on my observations, that software designers use the dramatic increases in performance of hardware to compensate for increasingly large and inefficent code. Why spend countless man hours to develop a lean, mean peice of software when you can throw a ton of stock code, make a few adjustments, and have a working peice of sofware with a noticable increase from previous generations.

If hardware development stopped today. . . if CPUs and GPUs stopped getting faster and faster, and we were forced to get every ounce of performance out of our computers, I don't see how it would be a major difficulty in expect that graphics would continue to improve as programmers were required to be efficent as well as talented. And I think if a software developer built a graphics engine from the ground up with efficenancy as the opperitive word, we could get higher end graphics on older systems.

Potential....

[ELProphet]

Seeming to be a comon thread amongst MMOG's these days (Star Trek, Star Gate...), this looks like it has tremendous potential. I truly hope that this project succeeds in all the areas that the spunky 19-year old developer hopes. If this goes well, perhaps we may see some other games in this genre; Pre-columbian Native Americans, Han-dynasty China, Shogun-era Japan. I could see this becoming a major franchise. As for that 19 year-old head, I just wish I had a company to help me put my game ideas to code...

Y0 NEED PARTY!

[Stavr0]

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I wish the author well

[Jakuta]

Africa, from an inside flavor. This will be interesting to see and i for one am going to be expectant of the views presented. Will this be of the time of Egypt? Will it cover the Congo and Llukumi existance and history of the west coast? The Ethiopia, Swahili and Zulu nations of the east coast? There are a number of pantheons and diverse cultural histories to be represented either correctly or fictitiously. Perhaps crickets are not all that would be heard and maybe you might learn something about Africa from the game, unlike LOTR which was not set in europe....

Beats my education on Africa

[RingDev]

Slaves came from Africa. Anglo-saxon men are bad.

What I wouldn't give for a Multi-Cultural class that actually studied different cultures instead of how the white Anglo-saxon male has subjugated them.

-Rick

Re:Beats my education on Africa

[ShaneThePain]

You're a racist.

Not entirely ignorant

[Ponzicar]

Americans aren't all isolated and ignorant of the world. I've had quite a few friends in Africa that I've been in contact with for a while and am trying to help out. Strangely enough, most of them seem to be relatives of deposed generals in Nigeria trying to get their massive fortunes overseas.