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I Was Young And I Needed The Money
The Escapist this week is running a great article by Richard Bartle entitled I Was Young And I Needed The Money. He doles out the sordid details of his experience developing a never-released sexy text MMOG. From the article: "All we required was some fiendish mind-control system to persuade people to play a text game when they really wanted to play EverQuest. So, that would be sex, then. I'd written a pitch for a sex MUD about five years earlier, but the funding fell through. Now was the time to dust it off! The thing is, sex in a text world has three things going for it that sex in a graphics world doesn't ... "
Writing it?
I wonder when idiot web designers will stop trying to make the web look like a postcard instead of a text document. The article's formatting has got to be one finest examples on how not to design a web page. Custom controls for scrolling? Background that can't be turned off? (white, of course, just to add some extra whallop of razor pain in the eye to the content) Reading window constrained to about a quarter of my screen area and centered like a postcard? Who hires these people, and why? The fact that the article's content is about a text-based game makes the above doubly ironic.
I'm wondering if that article is some elaborate form of trolling, or what. Even _if_ someone bought a game just to "cyber" (sad as it may be), if I put on my thinking cap and try to think about it with a straight face, it seems like a collection of bad ideas and missing the point by a mile.
E.g., his #1 reason for text-based sex is that it's free form... then he mentions implementing it as a modification of the combat system. WTF? There goes "free form" right out the window.
E.g., his #3 reason is that women prefer their sex in text form. Yes, that means novels and stories, not some automatized spam. I'm not sure if even any guy would actually get off on replacing MUD combat with some spam of "You thrust your tool in." and "You pull your tool out." If anything, just thinking about some automated macro there seems to me a major turn off.
Also I don't know what studies he's read there, because all that _I've_ read points at women being put off by "R U A GRL??? WANNA CYBER???" kids in online games. It pops up again and again as the reason why they're playing a male character.
(Oh, yes, there are women playing online games all right. But the funny thing is, the naked elf chick dancing in the Stormwind fountain probably isn't a RL woman. Chances are higher that the dwarf male with the beard down to his knees or the massive tauren male with a huge mallet are the RL women.)
Basically I can hardly believe that this is the same guy who had the insight to describe the types of MUD players, or create the first MUD in the first place. Oh yes, I can believe that he's seen plenty of cybering on his MUD. Can give one the idea of just making a game around that. But then, didn't they have meetings of MUD players and such? Might give one suspicions when the only ones that show up and are female (again, yes, they did exist) are the ones who weren't playing a virtual prostitute.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A note for the tagging beta people: I suggest you need a new tag called "sex-bad-violence-good". This article should be tagged with it, along with yesterday's one about the scandalous "sex scenes" in Oblivion, the shocking hot coffee mod etc. It's such a huge issue. It's the elephant in the living room of games culture. Or maybe there are two elephants. And God knows what they're doing together, but you better not make a game out of it.