I guess it's bad form to request spoiler warnings on decades-old books, but I happen to be currently halfway through the Stand and now will not be able to enjoy the ending quite so much. Oh well..
Have we ever seen an object pass through our solar system in a hyperbolic orbit? If there are so many objects in interstellar space you'd think we'd see a few of them slingshotting around the sun now and then,
According to historian Francis Parkman, Amherst first raised the possibility of giving the Indians infected blankets in a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who would lead reinforcements to Fort Pitt. No copy of this letter has come to light, but we do know that Bouquet discussed the matter in a postscript to a letter to Amherst on July 13, 1763:
P.S. I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.
On July 16 Amherst replied, also in a postscript:
P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.
On July 26 Bouquet wrote back:
I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed.
We don't know if Bouquet actually put the plan into effect, or if so with what result. We do know that a supply of smallpox-infected blankets was available, since the disease had broken out at Fort Pitt some weeks previously. We also know that the following spring smallpox was reported to be raging among the Indians in the vicinity.
To modern ears, this talk about infecting the natives with smallpox, hunting them down with dogs, etc., sounds over the top. But it's easy to believe Amherst and company were serious. D'Errico provides other quotes from Amherst's correspondence that suggest he considered Native Americans subhumans who ought to be exterminated. Check out his research for yourself at www.nativeweb.org/pages/l egal/amherst/lord_jeff.html. He not only includes transcriptions but also reproduces the relevant parts of the incriminating letters.
It's impossible to transmit information faster than the speed of light because simultaneity doesn't exist.
Depending on your reference frame, event A might happen before event B, or vice versa. And since there is no rest frame, no one timeline is privileged above the others. The speed of light isn't just a universal speed limit, it places bounds upon causality itself. So when we talk about communication across interstellar distances, we're speaking nonsense: the idea that event A on Earth takes place at the same time as event B on Alpha Centauri just isn't coherent.
I'd like to see a push to use the extra power of PCs for more than just better graphics. Minecraft is a great example of a game where the fun comes not from the way the game looks, but from the total interactivity of the gameworld. Sure, modern games let you wander through beautiful, expansive environments, but it seems like among many AAA titles there's less and less to do in those places - just a few preset interaction points which guide you down a linear story path. The sandbox games in the tradition of GTA make a few steps in the opposite direction, but the freedom in those games is mainly the freedom to go wherever you want and kill whomever you want: the world is still static.
I imagine a game where every object in the world has multiple possible options for interaction. Where you can walk through a lovely forest as seen in the Cryengine video in TFA, but know that you can pick any plant, cut down, prune or climb any tree, build structures, create crafts, cook food, etc. Currently the only games with this level of environment interaction are roguelikes like the Unreal World and Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, and a couple online games (Wurm Online, Haven and Hearth), every one of which is a pet project of a single person. None of them have remotely close to the amount of resources available to an established development studio.
The idea of a game like this used to be simply wishful thinking, but as PCs get more powerful something along these lines seems a lot more possible. I also think this is a genre uniquely suited to the PC platform, as the console gamepad isn't very good at navigating a complex menu of possible interaction with the same object.
Exactly. It makes financial sense to do it this way (at least for Sony and Microsoft - LordStormes is right that Nintendo is going to have to bring out a new console soon.) It just means that for a few years, PCs are going to be much better at graphics than consoles.
Again, the main difference now is that consoles _aren't_ going to be upgrading next year or the year after. It's going to be another few years before we get a new generation of consoles, in which time PCs will outpace consoles to an unprecedented degree.
The main difference this time around is that this console generation is going to last a lot longer than previous generations. Five years in to the 8-bit, 16-bit, PS1/N64 and PS2/Xbox generations, we were gearing up for the new generation of consoles to be released. In contrast it's been five years now since the 360/PS3/Wii came out, and it's looking like it's going to be another five or so before we see their successors. PC hardware has surpassed console hardware and the gap will only grow in the coming years, to an unprecedented degree.
But I still don't think we'll see too much of a change in buying habits. The thing is that even though the current generation of consoles is behind in technology, they still can deliver some really snazzy visuals on high-def TVs. So while PCs might get ever more powerful, if amazing-looking games like Uncharted 2 keep coming out on consoles I don't think we'll see large-scale migration back to the PC. In a few years PCs might be multiple times as powerful as a console, but I think the graphics provided by current consoles will continue to be good enough for the average consumer. And console games of course will continue to become slightly better-looking as developers learn to take the best advantage of the hardware - compare early PS2 games like Dark Cloud to something like Shadow of the Colossus for a good example of how graphics can get much better over time even on the same hardware.
But that way your normally warmer parts would be actually at the same temperature as your outer parts. Wouldn't then the vaccine get spread along all of your body?
Well, I guess it depends on whether the engineered bacteria simply tends to avoid high temperatures, or is actually killed by high temperatures.
I imagine if that got to be a problem, you could just take a really hot bath for a few hours... bring the extremities of your body up over 98.6 and you're cured.
That sounds great, but if you look closely, you're saying that _outside of the context of the problem _ there's a twice as likely chance for a couple's second child to be the same sex as their first than for it to be different. Obviously if I already have a boy then my second child still has an equal chance of being a girl or a boy... but when you say that boy(1)/boy(2), boy(2)/boy(1), and boy/girl are equally likely, you're saying that when a couple already has a boy, they have a 2/3 chance of having another boy.
Not quite. Let's ignore the restriction that one of the children has to be a boy. Then let's examine all possible outcomes when a family has two children.
Whenever a family has a child, let's say that the probability that it is either a girl or a boy is 50%. (It's slightly different, but that will gum up the conceptual math now; you can factor that into our calculations later if you want to get a slightly different answer.) So a family with one child has two equally weighted possibilities:
girl (50%)
boy (50%)
When this family has a second child, this is another event with two equally likely outcomes: that the second child will be a boy, or that it will be a girl. The probability that the family who had a boy has a second boy is now the same as the probability that that family now has a girl.
Thus "boy-boy" and "boy-girl" are equally likely.
"Girl-boy" and "girl-girl" are also equally likely. Since the first birth was also fifty-fifty, there are now four equally likely outcomes:
All this is true BEFORE Gardner's problem begins. When the father says "I have a boy", he's telling us that he isn't among those families who had two girls. The removal of the fourth possible outcome for families with two children doesn't change the fact that the first three were equally likely. So for families with two children, at least one of whom is a boy, we have _three_ equally likely outcomes:
boy/boy (33%)
boy/girl (33%)
girl/boy (33%)
This must be correct because we have derived it from the simple fact that when a family has a child it's roughly equally likely to be a boy or a girl.
Only one of these three outcomes has two boys, so the chance that the father has two sons is 33%.
But MMO games are _already_ limited by latency. I don't think it's possible to get rid of that teeny bit of lag, and you're right that it would make it impossible to do the twitch-based stuff. But who said we'd be doing any of that in an MMO?
Just.... no. There are many reasons graphics are done client side. Let me know when you figure them all out. Sure, something like this is theoretically possible, but only if you want to pay upwards of $200 per month to play that game. Since it's a lot cheaper for me to buy a really nice graphics card, why not render client side?
I'm not saying this is possible right now. But don't you think that it might be feasible if in a few years bandwidth has drastically increased and processing power has become much cheaper? I can see lots of reasons to keep graphics client-side, but also lots of reasons to move it server-side.
-The game is playable on any computer with a video card strong enough to play HD video.
-Developers only have to worry about one particular piece of hardware: whatever beast of a machine is going to be running the game. Graphics can be on 'ultra high quality' all the time because it will always be running on top-of-the-line equipment. Perhaps the architecture can even be a bit more economical than one CPU + GPU per game stream.
-Exact synchronization is possible: the state of the gameworld that you see is exactly the same as what everyone else sees. Lag is still a problem, but it no longer results in diverging game states - it's just a ping problem.
This particularly allows MMOs to become a whole lot more detailed in their simulation.
Yeah, there are tons of hurdles in the way. But I don't think it's as far off as it seems. OnLive claim to be able to do exactly this with many AAA titles right now. I'm not claiming that it's something we can do right now or even within the next few years -- but I think it's definitely not four or five decades away.
how long until we see a MMO that is run _entirely_ server-side - that is, a game that does all graphics and game logic calculations server-side, OnLive style, and simply streams HD-video to each client. If this considerable hurdle could be jumped, we might be able to see a lot more in the way of a dynamic MMO world, with actual physics, terrain deformation, collision detection, and a bunch of other features that are tough to do with the current client-server system.
Mars's atmosphere is about 1/1000 the density of earth's. I think we should just dig a big hole about 1/1000 the area of Mars's surface (about the size of Iowa), many miles deep, and let the atmosphere collect there. Then we'd have a region with the pressure of Earth, and due to its much smaller area it would be easier to bring in the right amount of various gases to create a breathable atmosphere.
The Great Firewall of China blocking a song that criticizes the Great Firewall of China is not ironic.
It would be ironic if the Great Firewall of China blocked a song that _praised_ the Great Firewall of China.
This would be a severely limiting factor if that were all the game had to offer. There were many avenues to power in ToA, and only the ones with the most potential power (mage, dragon) were the high risk ones. Different vectors had different limiting factors.
For example, being a priest of a god gave you a number of magical powers, different for each god, that increased as your congregation grew. Those powers were often focused on group effects: The priesthood of the honorable god of defense and battle (as opposed to the aggressive god of destruction and battle) were going to be able to share the life between all the followers in a given area so that none of them would die until they all did. Some were individual: the priesthood of the animal god were supposed to be able to change shape. Followers of a given god got passive powers on a much smaller scale. The strength of these powers varied based on how closely the priest's actions matched the philosophy of his god, so the restricting factors were size of congregation and code of conduct.
Training up to be a powerful warrior was also filled with risks. But in combat, the divide between high skill and low skill wasn't too wide. While a high skill player could generally whip the ass of a newbie, with the right strategy and a bit of luck the low skill player could land a killing blow. And a high skill character cornered by three or four lowbies would have to fight for their lives. This means that anybody could make a contribution to the battle side of affairs. The true risk/reward equation was that to field an army, a settlement would have to make a lot of sacrifices that would be for nothing if the army was defeated: food, supplies and gear that simply would be lost if everybody in the army died.
ToA's slogan was "You can do it, but it'll cost you." The developers were focusing mainly on making a game that was fun to play as a "normal" character - one that doesn't take too many risks, skills up to moderate levels in the crafting and combat skills of their choice, participates in their settlement, and lives a day-to-day life. A bid for greater power would generally be rejected. This means that true power would be rare - not many would even try for it, and most of those who did would die before attaining it. And even if you see a super-powerful character, chances are they're running out of lives, so if you want to organize a posse of torch-waving villagers and siege them, you have a good chance of actually taking them out. These mechanisms underlie the main thrust of an idea that power isn't meant to be the point of the game
And even as a "normal" character, the game was really diverse. Each race represented a different playstyle. There were fourteen different mutually incomprehensible languages, one for each race, that you could learn with effort. Options ranged from the pixie, who was 1 foot tall and could fly like a hummingbird; to the dragon, who was 25 feet tall and could breathe fire and fly like a 747, but only after a long, grueling period of maturing during which they were less powerful than everybody else (it didn't help that their body parts were important reagents for all sorts of different things); to the raknar, who were beast-like spider people who were incapable of learning any other language but could walk on walls and ceilings and spit web at people, and had to drink living blood every so often; to the goblins, who were venomous, aquatic creatures; to the arrwics, who were basically Liontaurs and had a speed and stamina advantage on everyone else; to the gargoyles, who were animated lumps of rock, juggernauts, could glide like a hangglider (but not gain altitude), and could basically ignore food, drink, poison, disease, the harshest weather, air to breathe, but could only move at a snail's pace; to the doppelgangers, who could change shape to mimic almost any race with enough skill; to the gryphons and minotaurs, and also the dwarves, elves, humans, orcs. Enforced by grueling, dangerous
Permanent death will never work in a static, quest-based MMO like World of Warcraft. But it could definitely work in a game that actually tries to simulate a virtual world.
There was a game called Trials of Ascension that I followed for years. The developers lost funding and it was never released, but I think it had an amazingly well-thought-out design. It was a full PvP, skill-based permadeath game. Characters had 100 lives each, but they were planning on adding a single life server as well.
The first central idea of the game was that real power must come via real risk. To become a powerful mage, you would have had to discover a unique set of formulae for your character's spells, all the while risking death from backfire from critical failures. The goal was that about one in a hundred players who tried to become real, full-blown sorcerors would actually make it. Those who succeeded would be rewarded with great power. I feel that that power has more _meaning_ than that of a level 70 in WoW who simply had to grind for 40 hours to get there. This significance is impossible without the risk of permadeath.
Another main tenet of ToA was that the world would be run by players. Instead of having a central currency, each town would be encouraged to mint their own currency and value it how they like. The lack of an easy way to bring goods from one place to another, and the selective availability of resources, would contribute to a real scarcity-based economy. Almost all items would be player-made, including player-written books, music and pictures. Towns would be built and territory claimed by player organizations. Players would become the leaders of the eleven religions. There were to be no NPC quests and the sole role of NPCs was as guards and hired workers.
This meant that a character could make a positive contribution to their organization from the very beginning. Not just as fighters, but as crafters, artisans, builders, farmers. And it would be that participation that would increase your character's abilities, not running a static dungeon. And if your character died, you would have left a tangible mark on the game. Starting over would not be going through the same old content another time, because each character you make would contribute to the community in a different way.
In a virtual world, you're playing both your character and your community. Your effort both improves your avatar and enriches the gameworld. When your character dies, your contributions to the community remain.
What it comes down to is this: Permanent death can be implemented in modern games, to great utility. But the game must be designed for permadeath from the ground up. Sticking it in WoW will cause a disaster.
Interesting that they should call the isolated running environment for the programs on this laptop a "walled garden." Our word "paradise" comes from the Greek "paradeisos" which was taken from the Old Persian "pairidaeza" - which means, a walled garden.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's bad form to request spoiler warnings on decades-old books, but I happen to be currently halfway through the Stand and now will not be able to enjoy the ending quite so much. Oh well..
Have we ever seen an object pass through our solar system in a hyperbolic orbit? If there are so many objects in interstellar space you'd think we'd see a few of them slingshotting around the sun now and then,
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-ever-give-native-americans-blankets-infected-with-smallpox
According to historian Francis Parkman, Amherst first raised the possibility of giving the Indians infected blankets in a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who would lead reinforcements to Fort Pitt. No copy of this letter has come to light, but we do know that Bouquet discussed the matter in a postscript to a letter to Amherst on July 13, 1763:
P.S. I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.
On July 16 Amherst replied, also in a postscript:
P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.
On July 26 Bouquet wrote back:
I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed.
We don't know if Bouquet actually put the plan into effect, or if so with what result. We do know that a supply of smallpox-infected blankets was available, since the disease had broken out at Fort Pitt some weeks previously. We also know that the following spring smallpox was reported to be raging among the Indians in the vicinity.
To modern ears, this talk about infecting the natives with smallpox, hunting them down with dogs, etc., sounds over the top. But it's easy to believe Amherst and company were serious. D'Errico provides other quotes from Amherst's correspondence that suggest he considered Native Americans subhumans who ought to be exterminated. Check out his research for yourself at www.nativeweb.org/pages/l egal/amherst/lord_jeff.html. He not only includes transcriptions but also reproduces the relevant parts of the incriminating letters.
It's impossible to transmit information faster than the speed of light because simultaneity doesn't exist.
Depending on your reference frame, event A might happen before event B, or vice versa. And since there is no rest frame, no one timeline is privileged above the others. The speed of light isn't just a universal speed limit, it places bounds upon causality itself. So when we talk about communication across interstellar distances, we're speaking nonsense: the idea that event A on Earth takes place at the same time as event B on Alpha Centauri just isn't coherent.
I'd like to see a push to use the extra power of PCs for more than just better graphics. Minecraft is a great example of a game where the fun comes not from the way the game looks, but from the total interactivity of the gameworld. Sure, modern games let you wander through beautiful, expansive environments, but it seems like among many AAA titles there's less and less to do in those places - just a few preset interaction points which guide you down a linear story path. The sandbox games in the tradition of GTA make a few steps in the opposite direction, but the freedom in those games is mainly the freedom to go wherever you want and kill whomever you want: the world is still static.
I imagine a game where every object in the world has multiple possible options for interaction. Where you can walk through a lovely forest as seen in the Cryengine video in TFA, but know that you can pick any plant, cut down, prune or climb any tree, build structures, create crafts, cook food, etc. Currently the only games with this level of environment interaction are roguelikes like the Unreal World and Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, and a couple online games (Wurm Online, Haven and Hearth), every one of which is a pet project of a single person. None of them have remotely close to the amount of resources available to an established development studio.
The idea of a game like this used to be simply wishful thinking, but as PCs get more powerful something along these lines seems a lot more possible. I also think this is a genre uniquely suited to the PC platform, as the console gamepad isn't very good at navigating a complex menu of possible interaction with the same object.
Exactly. It makes financial sense to do it this way (at least for Sony and Microsoft - LordStormes is right that Nintendo is going to have to bring out a new console soon.) It just means that for a few years, PCs are going to be much better at graphics than consoles.
Again, the main difference now is that consoles _aren't_ going to be upgrading next year or the year after. It's going to be another few years before we get a new generation of consoles, in which time PCs will outpace consoles to an unprecedented degree.
A bunch of thankfully over-pessimistic malarkey.
The main difference this time around is that this console generation is going to last a lot longer than previous generations. Five years in to the 8-bit, 16-bit, PS1/N64 and PS2/Xbox generations, we were gearing up for the new generation of consoles to be released. In contrast it's been five years now since the 360/PS3/Wii came out, and it's looking like it's going to be another five or so before we see their successors. PC hardware has surpassed console hardware and the gap will only grow in the coming years, to an unprecedented degree.
But I still don't think we'll see too much of a change in buying habits. The thing is that even though the current generation of consoles is behind in technology, they still can deliver some really snazzy visuals on high-def TVs. So while PCs might get ever more powerful, if amazing-looking games like Uncharted 2 keep coming out on consoles I don't think we'll see large-scale migration back to the PC. In a few years PCs might be multiple times as powerful as a console, but I think the graphics provided by current consoles will continue to be good enough for the average consumer. And console games of course will continue to become slightly better-looking as developers learn to take the best advantage of the hardware - compare early PS2 games like Dark Cloud to something like Shadow of the Colossus for a good example of how graphics can get much better over time even on the same hardware.
Except that drug trials involve tests against placebos as a matter of course.
I just want to play a game like that! Is there any around?
You mean, aside from actual roguelikes?
But that way your normally warmer parts would be actually at the same temperature as your outer parts. Wouldn't then the vaccine get spread along all of your body?
Well, I guess it depends on whether the engineered bacteria simply tends to avoid high temperatures, or is actually killed by high temperatures.
I imagine if that got to be a problem, you could just take a really hot bath for a few hours... bring the extremities of your body up over 98.6 and you're cured.
That sounds great, but if you look closely, you're saying that _outside of the context of the problem _ there's a twice as likely chance for a couple's second child to be the same sex as their first than for it to be different. Obviously if I already have a boy then my second child still has an equal chance of being a girl or a boy... but when you say that boy(1)/boy(2), boy(2)/boy(1), and boy/girl are equally likely, you're saying that when a couple already has a boy, they have a 2/3 chance of having another boy.
Not quite. Let's ignore the restriction that one of the children has to be a boy. Then let's examine all possible outcomes when a family has two children.
Whenever a family has a child, let's say that the probability that it is either a girl or a boy is 50%. (It's slightly different, but that will gum up the conceptual math now; you can factor that into our calculations later if you want to get a slightly different answer.) So a family with one child has two equally weighted possibilities:
girl (50%)
boy (50%)
When this family has a second child, this is another event with two equally likely outcomes: that the second child will be a boy, or that it will be a girl. The probability that the family who had a boy has a second boy is now the same as the probability that that family now has a girl.
Thus "boy-boy" and "boy-girl" are equally likely.
"Girl-boy" and "girl-girl" are also equally likely. Since the first birth was also fifty-fifty, there are now four equally likely outcomes:
Boy/boy (25%)
Boy/girl (25%)
Girl/boy (25%)
Girl/girl (25%)
All this is true BEFORE Gardner's problem begins. When the father says "I have a boy", he's telling us that he isn't among those families who had two girls. The removal of the fourth possible outcome for families with two children doesn't change the fact that the first three were equally likely. So for families with two children, at least one of whom is a boy, we have _three_ equally likely outcomes:
boy/boy (33%)
boy/girl (33%)
girl/boy (33%)
This must be correct because we have derived it from the simple fact that when a family has a child it's roughly equally likely to be a boy or a girl.
Only one of these three outcomes has two boys, so the chance that the father has two sons is 33%.
But MMO games are _already_ limited by latency. I don't think it's possible to get rid of that teeny bit of lag, and you're right that it would make it impossible to do the twitch-based stuff. But who said we'd be doing any of that in an MMO?
Just.... no. There are many reasons graphics are done client side. Let me know when you figure them all out. Sure, something like this is theoretically possible, but only if you want to pay upwards of $200 per month to play that game. Since it's a lot cheaper for me to buy a really nice graphics card, why not render client side?
I'm not saying this is possible right now. But don't you think that it might be feasible if in a few years bandwidth has drastically increased and processing power has become much cheaper? I can see lots of reasons to keep graphics client-side, but also lots of reasons to move it server-side.
-The game is playable on any computer with a video card strong enough to play HD video.
-Developers only have to worry about one particular piece of hardware: whatever beast of a machine is going to be running the game. Graphics can be on 'ultra high quality' all the time because it will always be running on top-of-the-line equipment. Perhaps the architecture can even be a bit more economical than one CPU + GPU per game stream.
-Exact synchronization is possible: the state of the gameworld that you see is exactly the same as what everyone else sees. Lag is still a problem, but it no longer results in diverging game states - it's just a ping problem.
This particularly allows MMOs to become a whole lot more detailed in their simulation.
Yeah, there are tons of hurdles in the way. But I don't think it's as far off as it seems. OnLive claim to be able to do exactly this with many AAA titles right now. I'm not claiming that it's something we can do right now or even within the next few years -- but I think it's definitely not four or five decades away.
how long until we see a MMO that is run _entirely_ server-side - that is, a game that does all graphics and game logic calculations server-side, OnLive style, and simply streams HD-video to each client. If this considerable hurdle could be jumped, we might be able to see a lot more in the way of a dynamic MMO world, with actual physics, terrain deformation, collision detection, and a bunch of other features that are tough to do with the current client-server system.
Mars's atmosphere is about 1/1000 the density of earth's. I think we should just dig a big hole about 1/1000 the area of Mars's surface (about the size of Iowa), many miles deep, and let the atmosphere collect there. Then we'd have a region with the pressure of Earth, and due to its much smaller area it would be easier to bring in the right amount of various gases to create a breathable atmosphere.
The Great Firewall of China blocking a song that criticizes the Great Firewall of China is not ironic. It would be ironic if the Great Firewall of China blocked a song that _praised_ the Great Firewall of China.
This would be a severely limiting factor if that were all the game had to offer. There were many avenues to power in ToA, and only the ones with the most potential power (mage, dragon) were the high risk ones. Different vectors had different limiting factors.
For example, being a priest of a god gave you a number of magical powers, different for each god, that increased as your congregation grew. Those powers were often focused on group effects: The priesthood of the honorable god of defense and battle (as opposed to the aggressive god of destruction and battle) were going to be able to share the life between all the followers in a given area so that none of them would die until they all did. Some were individual: the priesthood of the animal god were supposed to be able to change shape. Followers of a given god got passive powers on a much smaller scale. The strength of these powers varied based on how closely the priest's actions matched the philosophy of his god, so the restricting factors were size of congregation and code of conduct.
Training up to be a powerful warrior was also filled with risks. But in combat, the divide between high skill and low skill wasn't too wide. While a high skill player could generally whip the ass of a newbie, with the right strategy and a bit of luck the low skill player could land a killing blow. And a high skill character cornered by three or four lowbies would have to fight for their lives. This means that anybody could make a contribution to the battle side of affairs. The true risk/reward equation was that to field an army, a settlement would have to make a lot of sacrifices that would be for nothing if the army was defeated: food, supplies and gear that simply would be lost if everybody in the army died.
ToA's slogan was "You can do it, but it'll cost you." The developers were focusing mainly on making a game that was fun to play as a "normal" character - one that doesn't take too many risks, skills up to moderate levels in the crafting and combat skills of their choice, participates in their settlement, and lives a day-to-day life. A bid for greater power would generally be rejected. This means that true power would be rare - not many would even try for it, and most of those who did would die before attaining it. And even if you see a super-powerful character, chances are they're running out of lives, so if you want to organize a posse of torch-waving villagers and siege them, you have a good chance of actually taking them out. These mechanisms underlie the main thrust of an idea that power isn't meant to be the point of the game
And even as a "normal" character, the game was really diverse. Each race represented a different playstyle. There were fourteen different mutually incomprehensible languages, one for each race, that you could learn with effort. Options ranged from the pixie, who was 1 foot tall and could fly like a hummingbird; to the dragon, who was 25 feet tall and could breathe fire and fly like a 747, but only after a long, grueling period of maturing during which they were less powerful than everybody else (it didn't help that their body parts were important reagents for all sorts of different things); to the raknar, who were beast-like spider people who were incapable of learning any other language but could walk on walls and ceilings and spit web at people, and had to drink living blood every so often; to the goblins, who were venomous, aquatic creatures; to the arrwics, who were basically Liontaurs and had a speed and stamina advantage on everyone else; to the gargoyles, who were animated lumps of rock, juggernauts, could glide like a hangglider (but not gain altitude), and could basically ignore food, drink, poison, disease, the harshest weather, air to breathe, but could only move at a snail's pace; to the doppelgangers, who could change shape to mimic almost any race with enough skill; to the gryphons and minotaurs, and also the dwarves, elves, humans, orcs. Enforced by grueling, dangerous
Permanent death will never work in a static, quest-based MMO like World of Warcraft. But it could definitely work in a game that actually tries to simulate a virtual world. There was a game called Trials of Ascension that I followed for years. The developers lost funding and it was never released, but I think it had an amazingly well-thought-out design. It was a full PvP, skill-based permadeath game. Characters had 100 lives each, but they were planning on adding a single life server as well. The first central idea of the game was that real power must come via real risk. To become a powerful mage, you would have had to discover a unique set of formulae for your character's spells, all the while risking death from backfire from critical failures. The goal was that about one in a hundred players who tried to become real, full-blown sorcerors would actually make it. Those who succeeded would be rewarded with great power. I feel that that power has more _meaning_ than that of a level 70 in WoW who simply had to grind for 40 hours to get there. This significance is impossible without the risk of permadeath. Another main tenet of ToA was that the world would be run by players. Instead of having a central currency, each town would be encouraged to mint their own currency and value it how they like. The lack of an easy way to bring goods from one place to another, and the selective availability of resources, would contribute to a real scarcity-based economy. Almost all items would be player-made, including player-written books, music and pictures. Towns would be built and territory claimed by player organizations. Players would become the leaders of the eleven religions. There were to be no NPC quests and the sole role of NPCs was as guards and hired workers. This meant that a character could make a positive contribution to their organization from the very beginning. Not just as fighters, but as crafters, artisans, builders, farmers. And it would be that participation that would increase your character's abilities, not running a static dungeon. And if your character died, you would have left a tangible mark on the game. Starting over would not be going through the same old content another time, because each character you make would contribute to the community in a different way. In a virtual world, you're playing both your character and your community. Your effort both improves your avatar and enriches the gameworld. When your character dies, your contributions to the community remain. What it comes down to is this: Permanent death can be implemented in modern games, to great utility. But the game must be designed for permadeath from the ground up. Sticking it in WoW will cause a disaster.
Interesting that they should call the isolated running environment for the programs on this laptop a "walled garden." Our word "paradise" comes from the Greek "paradeisos" which was taken from the Old Persian "pairidaeza" - which means, a walled garden.