I can understand your being circumspect in these days of PR hacks, paid-for review scores, astro-turfing and genuine fanboys. And yes, I do realize that you don't really have any guarantee that I'm not either, but I'll throw my 2p in anyway.
"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."
The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)
And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)
"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."
I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.
"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "
Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.
"Daggerfall, never did become a workable title."
Oblivion isn't Daggerfall either. Heck, even Morrowind, for its other problems, wasn't anywhere _near_ the Daggerfall disaster.
"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."
I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.
But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.
Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.
Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.
So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,
"If they really wanted to punish the guy they'd change it so that on his next logon the offender was stuck playing an SOE game."
Now now, I dislike griefers as much as the next guy, but forcing them to play a SOE MMO is just cruel and might leave permanent damage. We're no longer in the middle ages, you know. Regardless of what evil deeds someone did, you can't just strap someone to a chair and subject them to chinese water torture or a modern day SOE equivaletnt until their sanity crumbles.
Joke aside... actually, come to think of it, it wasn't really a joke... _anyway_, dishing out punishment on the human at the keyboard is still a prerogative of the state. A company may put in its EULA that it owns the data in your account, characters included, and may do whatever it pleases with it, including deleting it and display it on a cross on Golgotha. But that ownership may extend only to the bytes and bytes in that data, not to the player who "created" that data.
Same as, say, a forum moderator may do whatever it pleases with your posts, including deleting them. But the same forum moderator can't drop by at your house and kneecap you for posting crap on his forums. The same applies here: the company can block an account or mis-use someone's avatar, but they can't come seize the actual human and give him a righteous punishment.
And even the data on their servers, depending on the region, there may be some legal restrictions as to what they can do with it, and with which parts of it. E.g., I don't know about the USA, but here in Europe all countries have some pretty strict privacy laws. So you can't, for example, publish a web-site with the offenders' name, address, email, telephone number and/or credit card number, to teach them a lesson. That data is legally _their_ data, not yours, and they may grant you access to it for a well-defined purpose. If you use it for anything else, you may have a huge legal problem on your hands.
Noone can hold aggro on more than 17, tank or no tank. You gain aggro on an 18'th, one of the existing one suddenly stops even seeing or remembering you. They've also put a hard cap on how many targets an AOE or a cone attack can hit.
There's also a "soft" cap on how much you can enhance one aspect of any power. (Mind you, "soft" in this case is sorta like saying that hitting a wooden ceiling is softer than a concrete one;)
So basically you can't herd and nuke 1000 npcs off the whole map any more. Personally I say "good riddance", as that never was good gameplay, and it just made common the equally stupid practices of "power-levelling" and hiring "filler". It has nothing to do with tanks being powerful or not. They certainly still can solo, even on Invincible, and they certainly are still viable in groups. They just might actually need to use more than 2 powers for a change, and might get to go one group at a time like everyone else.
Frankly, the game was never supposed to be even soloed on Invincible, which is why in I1 to I4 it was basically locked on what would be later known as "Heroic" difficulty. And certainly it was never intended that any class should be able to herd a the NPCs of the whole map of a whole 8-man Invincible mission and solo them. It was the kind of God mode that just doesn't belong in a MMO. I have nothing against someone's using God mode in a SP game, but in a MMO it's just an insult to anyone playing another class.
And having a game so unbalanced that 75% of players not just playing the same class, but the exact same flavour of it (fire/ice tanker), and doing the exact same herding each time, wasn't exactly making it a good game. At that point it's not just a powerful tank class, it's something that's effectively killing all variety in the game. And it just drove off anyone who wasn't into that, and who ended up being just "filler".
I'm not sure if what you mean is that teens are more "hardcore" because 5x more of them play MMOs, or the other way around, but just in case:
Seriously, I fail to see what's so "hardcore" about a MMO. The fact of the matter is that in virtually any MMO you'll eventually go up in levels whether you have any skill and dedication or not.
I've met people who were top level, or within the last 10 levels, and hadn't yet even figured out the very basics like "pulling", "tanking", "kiting", or generally using elementary techniques for their class. Or that "no, intending to sell it for cash doesn't mean your priest can roll 'need' on plate armour". Unless they were power-levelled, I can't imagine how someone got to level 50+ without knowing how to pull or how to stun an enemy while they bandage, other than by doing the dumb thing repeatedly, getting killed, and going back at doing the same dumb thing some more.
Or I still fondly remember grouping with level people in COH which had ploughed through the segment where they deal with endurance (mana) drainers like the Malta Sappers or Carnie Ring Mistresses by sheer getting themselves and their group killed repeatedly, and _still_ hadn't figured who they need to kill first in a Malta or Carnie group. Or a fire tank who, _months_ after a major and well documented change to his class, still refused to believe that the change existed. He blamed group members, the random number generator, _anything_ except accept that, for example, the game has a hard-coded limit of maximum 17 enemies you can hold the aggro of. Or people who, by their own admission, had been permanently in XP-debt from being killed ever since they reached level 5. (Back in the day when XP debt started at level 5.) And some were even proud of it.
So, sure, you could "grind" day and night to be the first to level 60... and then be the first to get bored as the game guides you to the tarpit of "endgame content". But the fact is, a casual gamer will reach level 60 too. And even a completely unskilled and thoroughly incompetent player will also reach level 60 too. Sure, it might take a bit longer, but they'll get there too.
Heck, you don't even have to "farm" or craft. I know people who've played a tailor/enchanter and refused to use the auction house or advertise their services in populated areas completely. (Apparently going to Ironforge savagely lagged their computer.) Guess what? They got to level 60 just the same.
The fact is, modern MMOs are among the most casual-gamer-friendly games. Now a single-player game can throw a boss or level at you that just won't let you through unless you're in the top X% of players as skill goes. (Where X can even be 50%, but still, there's a threshhold.) But WoW, EQ2, COH and the like will just require enough time investment to get to any point you wish to get to. The time investment may be hideously large for some of the "endgame content" rewards, but it's still all there is to it.
So if I was to take that as the lone reason why teens play MMOs, I'd say then teens are _less_ hardcore than us old farts. That's youth nowadays for you. Back in my day... *ahem*
But I'll give you another better reason: MMOs cost less, and teens have less disposable income. So between convincing mom and dad to buy you, say, half a dozen single-player games per month to keep you reasonably busy with them, and getting a $13 a month subscriptions, guess which one is more affordable to a teen? Right. WoW is actually the _much_ more affordable way to get your time reasonably occupied by a game.
Doubly so for teenage females, who in a lot of cases aren't exactly pushed towards anything either scientific or computer-related by their parents. I'd imagine a lot have a harder time getting their parents to fork over the cash for computer games. So I can easily imagine one staying with a MMO instead if she got her parents to buy one.
Sure, all games have some limitations, such as where the content ends. For example, to take a game which did offer a GM mode so people weren't only limited to the single-player story, you still take your "Vampire, The Masquerade - Redemption" character to Toronto or visit the Kremlin, for example, because those maps don't exist.
On the other hand, some still offer a lot more possibilities. E.g.,
- some games do offer different ways to solve a quest. It's not complete freedom, but it _is_ more than a book or movie allows. E.g., in KOTOR you could help a Romeo and Juliet kind of couple marry by having their families reconcile, or have them run away from their homes, or ruin their romance and break them up, or even cause a wild-west style shootout where everyone dies. E.g., in Fallout 2, take the Navarro mission for example: you could get in through the back door and do a stealth mission, or you could get yourself recruited (getting a weapon and armour in the process) and use diplomacy and cunning to get the job done, or go in with the guns blazing and see if you can take out the twin plasma turrets before they wipe you out. Or various combinations or possibilities in between.
- there are games which don't actually have a story, but are a playground with a bunch of toys and some rules. E.g., most of Will Wright's games, since this topic is about him. You can very much explore scenarios like "what if I don't care about schools, but just build a bunch of houses surrounded by industrial areas" in Sim City. Or in The Sims you can use those virtual characters as actors to enact whatever scenarios you can imagine.
- there are games which are moddable enough for someone else to fill in whatever aspect of the story is missing. One example is Neverwinter Nights. And with games being more and more often scripted in Python, that's getting even easier. In some cases you can not only script the characters, but actually change the game system itself. E.g., I've actually used up one vacation to change the very combat rules and the way stats work in "The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia," plus add a bunch more craftable stuff, just for my own enjoyment.
Or to take The Sims again, that's pretty much the best example of a game which got modded to heck and back, in _spite_ of EA's lack of support. Maxis never actually released modding tools, their script compiler or even bytecode specs. Some people had to spend months reverse-engineering it all, for those mods to be even possible. And to add insult to injury, the last TS2 expansions went as far as to warn people that mods could interfere with the normal game, and "helpfully" offered to disable all user-scripted content.
Still, some of the scripted stuff was nothing short of amazing. E.g., someone scripted a better "buttler" kind of NPC for TS2 than Maxis's one from TS1. Better yet, it allowed such scenarios as having one sim work for another family, which TS2 as shipped didn't have.
But on the whole, I think he's talking more about a principle, than saying you get complete freedom. Games _could_ and frankly _should_ allow one more freedom and room for creativity than a book does. Even if they can't allow any possible scenario ("what if Luke joined Jabba as a henchman and led a life of crime? What if he bought a fertile farm on some remote planet? How much money could he make that way? Can he become the richest entrepreneur in the galaxy?"), they can allow a lot of minor branches along the way.
"Anyway, to summarize, what I'm proposing is like an educational game, only not in mathematics, but political science."
Oh please. One party's/lobby's/etc one-sided half of the story isn't political science, it's just dogma. I hate to break this news to you but "science" is a bit more impartial a _process_, and make no mistake it's all about "process" and "method", not about ultimate truths, and _not_ about "you're the ones to blame unless you join preaching on our side." So slapping a "political science" label on your pet dogma or conspiracy/slippery-slope/whatever theory does not make it education.
"Unless you're one of those folk that run around screaming that liberals are ruining america by, say, doing some real fucking research, or that the left made us lose the Vietnam war by protesting against it and decrying its stupidity (in which case, you're just an idiot)"
Ah, how refreshing, the fallback to "you're probably one of the enemies, and an idiot to boot." Was wondering when that would be scheduled. So if I don't join your preaching choir I'm against you liberals. Right?
Did I mention one-sided dogma and propaganda yet? Good, because it looks more and more like that to me.
How about that, plain and simple, I'm just a _gamer_ in my gaming time? I'm not either a Republican, nor a Democrat, I'm not either liberal or conservative, not left wing and not right wing. In my gaming time, I just care about gameplay, not about your preaching agenda. I'm just there to collect golden rings, shoot NPCs, or whatever the game is about, and have a fun time, not to get a dose of "liberals = good, conservatives = idiots ruining the country" (or viceversa) propaganda.
You want to discuss politics? Good. Then do it in the rest of the time. Then I'll be happy to tell you what I think about both the Republicans and Democrats. It might involve some graphic metaphors. It might also involve some pointing at Europe, where we still keep our politicians in check and they at least try to look like they're not bending over for the highest corporate bidder. It might also involve some suggestion to go vote instead of just whining about how everyone else is an idiot. Etc.
But when I'm gaming, I just want _gameplay_. That's all. The purpose there is to be entertained, not to be a medium for your political propaganda.
And yeah, that's exactly what I'm proposing: when I want to know something, involve "doing some real fucking research", as you aptly put it. I don't need some wannabe politics zealots telling me what I should think, and how I'm an idiot if I don't join in preaching their One True Faith.
Because while it may seem great when 1 nerd reaches 200 people with his propaganda, it's a two-way road. The shafting that's the mainstream media can extend just as well to games.
And for what? Chances are that anyone who actually plays something this monumentally stupid and non-fun is already doing it for the preaching part, so it's all just preaching to the choir. You won't get too many _normal_ people playing an idiotically designed game where every step is a 50% "game over, you got sent to prison" chance.
But it just starts a slippery slope that can lead to some big money muscling into this kind of territory and out-shouting the lone millitant nerd by orders of magnitude. And:
1. Let's be honest and start with the selfish reason: in my playing time, I don't give a flying fuck about it all. That's the time when I relax, forget about it all, and only care about shooting the next bear in WoW, not about politics, economics, whatever. It's the time where I _lower_ my stress levels, not the time to get someone to try to get me more frenzied about some point on their personal agenda.
There are already too many people competing for time to tell me what to think. All over the TV, radio, newspapers, billboards on the way to work, etc, I'm bombarded by basically being told what to think. Heck, even at work, the memos come around telling me again, what to think. I quite like having some time to myself when I actually get entertainment, not propaganda. I'm _not_ looking forward to games becoming yet another battle-ground for lobby groups, special interests, and PR spin-doctors competing to spoon-feed me their own version of The One True Way.
2. Because I find it all insulting. There's something inherently insulting in an attitude saying basically, "I know you're too retarded to use your own brain. Here, forget about using that stupid little brain of yours, let me tell you exactly what to think and how to view this problem." That's the underlying attitude of all these busibodies and zealots -- ranging from Jack Thompson, to religious zealots, to the local "back in my day the grass was greener" nostalgiac, to whatever -- trying to tell you what to think: they think everyone else is just too stupid to evaluate a problem on their own, or to have a list of priorities of their own. And I find that insulting.
Doubly so when it's from people who aren't qualified to discuss it anyway. People who can't balance their grocery expenses tell me exactly how I should view balancing the economy. People who can't even fucking find France or Iraq on a map, tell me exactly what I should think about them or about the US presence there. People who can't even deal with a new guy at work, tell me about how whole countries should deal with each other. Etc. Hello? So someone utterly incompetent and unqualified is trying to call me even more stupid than that?
3. Because it's just not fun to play such idiocies. Look at the description in the very summary here. Everyone who actually expected a game and gameplay -- as opposed to pre-existing zealots looking for something to reinforce their zealotry -- _complained_ about it. Unsurprisingly, because it violates several principles of good game design, starting with: don't create "bang! you're dead!" situations where the player suddenly loses for no fault of his own and without any chance to react. The thing doesn't just give gameplay a secondary role, after preaching, it outright deliberately tries to not be fun to illustrate a point.
4. Because I quite like choosing games purely on gameplay reasons, and not on which side did the publisher align with. I can just see a future in which MS games just serve to preach that outsourcing is good and monopolies are good for the economy, Vivendi games just preach that the USA sucks, EA Games got paid by some lobby group and preaches a third thing, Sony games a fourth, and Nintedo gets yet another party's or lobby's money to carry their message. And where you end up choosing games and companies based on whose message
"You know, more games should (no, not kidding) have political leaning and teach people about the political situation of today, and the history of American meddlins in the middle east."
I.e., instead of games I should get pure propaganda.
And not even that, but some nerd's unilateral lopsided own One True Way in which everyone should think. Forget about thinking for yourself, let Mr Game Designer tell you exactly what you should think about economics, politics, ecology, etc. Never mind that he isn't actually qualified to talk about any of those subjects, and never got any actual education or training in those fields. He's not any more qualified than your average cabbie or barber talking about how to balance the economy when they can't balance their bank account, but don't mind that. No siree, don't let such things as "education", "expertise" or "reviews by qualified peers" (qualified and peers in that field, that is) get in the way of being taught the One True Way to see a problem. Trust Mr Game Designer. He's read something vaguely on that topic in a blog once, so he's qualified to tell you what to think.
You know what? No, thanks. If I want information, I'll take it from someone who has a Ph.D. in that field, not from cabbies, barbers, game designers, and other completely unqualified people talking out of the ass.
And either way, it's still propaganda. Where have we heard that before? Oh, right, there was this Chinese game discussed right here last week: Learn From Lei Feng Online. Let some propaganda spin-master tell you what to think. E.g., how dangerous the capitalist spies are and how you, as a good Chinese citizen, must unmask them and thwart them at every turn. (I.e., go tell the police when one of your friends says unpatriotic stuff already. They're probably a spy working for those capitalistic pigs.)
Does it sound like disgusting propaganda yet? Well... what makes you think I'm happier to hear _your_ propaganda?
Whatever happened to the idea that a game is just entertainment? If I play a game, it's just to waste some hours unproductively and hopefully in a fun way. If I wanted to spend it taking sides and shouting pro- or anti-government slogans, I'd go to some party's meetings instead. It's that simple.
Being force-fed propaganda isn't a game, and isn't fun. Being preached at isn't fun. Having the game punish me for stuff out of my control, just to illustrate someone's own agenda, isn't great gameplay. It's that simple.
Even the idiot discussed in his article, what did his friends tell him? Right. "I've had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins" Ah-ha. They complained. I.e., they weren't finding it fun to play.
What's his answer? "I'm like "Yeah, that's the point."" I.e., his goal wasn't to make a fun game, his goal was just to shove his personal ideology and agenda down people's throats. No, that's _not_ the whole point of game design.
In a nutshell, no, I don't think we need more games like that. I think that what game designers should be doing is design a good _game_ and devote more time to _gameplay_. If you need to sacrifice gameplay for any other agenda points, then that's your clue that that point doesn't belong in the game.
Basically what you describe there is insightful in its own right, but it's basically a sub-set of what Bartle described for MUD players. His division went something like this:
- socializers: basically the people who are there to chat, make friends, organize a guild, organize a player town/community/whatever, and generally be social about it
- achievers: people who want to have the highest score, a level 60 character, the biggest player house or the full epic suit for their class, etc.
- explorers: people who like discovering stuff. It can be finding a new quest, a new piece of the story, a new area, seeing a new instance, or finding out some cool new trick using the tools the game gives them. E.g., that you can get some cool effect by using two spells as a combination. (A lot of people who "just like to play the game" actually fall in this category: they like constantly being given new stuff to do or new pieces of the story. Then again, some don't fall in this category.)
- killers: these are the people whose fun is to annoy, harrass, humiliate, and whose greatest achievement is if they can get someone to leave the game completely, effectively perma-killing them from the game. A.k.a., "griefers". (Note that unlike what the term "killer" might imply, this isn't equivalent to "pvp players". Not all pvp players are killers, and not all killers are into pvp. Indeed a lot find more effective ways to harrass their victims.)
Basically while your distinction does have merit, and indeed is made by Bartle himself too, you seem to be sorta lumping the achievers and killers in one large category, and the socializers and explorers in the other. The distinction does exist in Bartle's paper too, as one of the divisions of his set: people who "play with" something/someone, versus people who "act upon" something or someone.
But it's only half the story. Dividing it again, gives some important distinctions too. For example while both might grind to level 60, an "achiever" may do it just for achievement sake, while a "killer" might do it to better gank or humiliate others.
And yes, you're right in another aspect: it's one of the major reason for social frictions among players. Many of those falling mostly in one category can't possibly understand what those in another category find fun in that. Maybe they're immature? Or whatever.
Nope. The whole revolution and "dictatorship of the proletariat" was Lenin's addition, and the reason why his "bolshevik" faction split from the "menshevik" faction that advocated gradual reforms, i.e., from the actual Marxists. Marx's vision was more of a long term utopia in which eventually the production levels become high enough to comfortably support everyone (and indeed in the 20th century they did), and basically there's no more reason to be a slave to those controlling the capital.
Marx's communism, since you explicitly mention that, was indeed all about sharing, as the GP mentioned. It was simply about having plenty to share. In his utopian vision there was no need to replace one set of slave owners with another set of slave owners, Soviet-style, because his utopian vision was all about a time when there's simply no more need for slaves or slave-owners. (By "slaves" and "slave-owners" I pejoratively mean the 19'th century workers and factory owners, not slaves on a cotton plantation.)
Transforming that into a "screw this, we'll just shoot everyone who stands in our way" theory is Lenin's work, and partially because Russia just wasn't economically at the point envisioned by Marx. There was no over-abbundance to share, but an impoverished country ravaged by war, with too little industry to be anywhere _near_ Marx's vision.
At any rate, if your country went the social reforms way, yes, you're not anything like Lenin's Soviet-style communism, but you may be closer to Marx's ideas than you think.
"Well, actually, you can't have a communist democracy, because communism requires a totalitarian government. You simply can't allow the slaves, sorry, the workers, to choose other forms of government, because they'll choose the freedom provided by personal economic power (money) if you do. That's why every communist leader has been a dictator."
No. Trying to enforce _your_ own point of view, regardless of what people want, is what's incompatible with democracy. It's not even just about communism. The USA McCarthy era trying to enforce capitalism and weed out any communist thinking wasn't a particularly democratic process or a case of "land of the free".
Freedom and democracy mean that the people are able to choose whatever they choose, including communism, capitalism, something in between, or something very stupid. (E.g., ancient Athens democratically chose to wage war on Sparta, even though the power of Athens was naval and Sparta was landlocked on a mountain. And most land battles had been won for Athens by the Spartan elites. Let's just say Athens never recovered from that mistake.) But that's what democracy means: letting the people choose for themselves.
And there's this fundamentally post-McCarthy American point of view that, given freedom and a right to choose, anyone would choose a cult of the psychopaths. (In the medical sense, not in the axe murderer sense.) That anyone would choose a dog-eat-dog world, where it's only right to be chewed up and spit out by those more powerful than you. And that there are no other shades of grey.
In practice, in Europe for example most countries have democratically chosen something in between. Something where enough economic freedom is left to keep the economy going, but there are plenty of safety nets for those who aren't CEOs. Some countries, as was pointed out, veered pretty far to the left.
But even if I was to accept your points, the GP point still stands: there's something particularly stupid in claiming basically "everything I don't like is communistic." In this case someone argues that "working" in WoW to gain an advantage over other players is somehow communistic, because he doesn't like that. Excuse me? Last I've heard having to work to gain an advantage was the very fundament of capitalism.
That's really the whole problem. For some people "communism", "capitalism" and so on have lost any trace of their real meaning and are some generic synonim for "evil" and "good". Everything they like, including getting a free meal, is "capitalistic" and "democratic". Everything they dislike, e.g., having to work to get a reward, is inherently "communist" and "totalitarian". They've become just buzzwords triggering some Pavlov's Dog kind of prescribed response, without any thinking involved.
Exactly why _do_ you feel a need to advertise your sexuality in a fantasy RPG? Other than a way to be an attention whore, that is.
Exactly what difference does it make anyway? Do gay players get different costumes? Different quests? Do you get to give Onyxia a stern talking to and redecorate her room if you're gay, instead of killing her like us macho heterosexuals? Or what?
I keep hearing about how a GLBT-friendly guild was needed, presumably as opposed to all those who've been unfriendly. So please enlighten me... Exactly which guilds explicitly asked you about your sexuality when you joined? The ones I've been in asked me about the classes I play, whether I have teamspeak installed, maybe the country I'm from, several asked my age (apparently making sure I'm not 13 years old), but not one asked about my sex life yet.
I've been in guilds and groups in several games and more than one server even in WoW, and the question never ever popped up at all. I haven't yet seen any guild ask me "but first, are you straight? we don't allow gays in our guild." I haven't yet seen any group advertise as "LF1M straight heterosexual for UBRS". I have seen groups advertise "LFM, but no more rogues, we have enough", but never ever seen one advertise as "LFM, but no gays and lesbians."
Basically from where I stand, and from what I've seen in-game, the issue doesn't even exist unless _you_ choose to shove it down people's throats and advertise your sexuality in a non-sexual game.
So _why_ do you need to advertise your sexuality in a non-sexual game? It's just a game, and kids play it too. It's not a matchmaking service for either gays or straights, nor a forum for sexuality-related discussions.
So basically you don't see the rest of us advertising "straight heterosexual guild looking for members" on the chat channels, how about returning the favour? How about realizing that we're all there to play the fucking game, and not to get a dose of sexuality debates, persecution complex whining or attention-whore drama on the public channels?
I don't give a damn about your sexuality, and make no mistake, Blizzard doesn't give a damn either. All they did have against is _polluting_ the public channels with some topics that just don't belong there.
Amazing how the same lame sophistry dating all the way back to the first MUDs, and maybe even before, still gets spewed as if they were some deep revelation about humanity.
In fact, probably even before. I can imagine some "but I really want to start directly at the top of Pong's high score table" whiner sitting on the side and spewing rationalizations about how actually playing the game is "work", and how those poor Pong players got scammed into working in their free time and paying for it. (And make no mistake, playing arcade games used to cost a _lot_ more than 13$ a month.) Fast forward a bit in time and you find the same kind of people whining about how deluded people are to invest any kind of time or effort into their entertainment and, god forbid, to cooperate with other players.
That's all that levels, xp, epic equipment, or PvP ranks are: a way to keep the score, not all that different from Pong's or PacMan's high score table, or from a RL football team's rank in the leagues and championships. And some people "grind" for that score (in fact, for some trying to beat the high score _is_ the challenge and the fun), some people just play the game for what it is and let the score just happen on its own, and... some busibodies stay on the sideline and try to sound deeply philosophical in their lament about how sad it is that people put up with "having" to spend hours on their entertainment, or "having" to interact with other people or whole groups. (E.g., the group around the arcade machine.)
And yes, some form of coop play always existed even in those arcade machines. Ever since the first game got a fire button to mash, in addition to the directional joystick/trackball/whatever, I recall people "grouping" and having specialized "group roles" at the arcades. E.g., one would guide the character/ship/whatever around and dodge enemy fire, and one was mashing the fire button and dropping the AOE "bomb" at the right moment for maximum effect. I.e., using the modern MMO terms very loosely, one was the "tank" keeping the team from taking damage and one was the "damage dealer", even if noone used those words at the time. I.e., even when the game didn't actually offer the in-game mechanics for that, some found their own makeshift ways to cooperate and interact with other humans, regardless of how many others sit around and whine about how everyone else should be a loner.
Get this: it's not a matter of "work" or "grind" to some end. That's the actual game. It's ok if I "have" to spend some hours doing quests in WoW, because exactly that was the whole point and purpose in the first place: to waste some hours in a game. Gaining some level or armour piece at the end is just a virtual pat on the back, but the real purpose was to waste those hours in the first place. That's what entertainment is all about: filling your time with something better than staring at the walls.
It may surprise you, but it's not just MMOs. Actually _most_ of the RL passtimes need some time or effort, and most are someone else's "work". Do you enjoy tweaking your car? That's a mechanic's "work". Do you enjoy going dancing? A professional dancer would call that "work". Taking digital photos in the park with your cool new camera? Yep, pro photographers would call that "work". Play tennis or basketball with your friends? That's a pro athlete's "work". _Watch_ sports? Sports journalists do that for a living. Watch a movie and maybe discuss them with your pals? Yep, that's a movie reviewer's "work". Etc.
You'll notice that they also all involve some time spent on that hobby. E.g., a movie buff may spend hours a day "grinding" through movies on their DVD player. E.g., someone with a digital camera may "grind" for hours taking photos of squirrels in the park. Etc. Some of those, *gasp* may even involve "grouping" with people. E.g., going dancing with a couple of friends instead of doing it solo. Some of those *gasp* may involve joining some kind of a "guild". E.g., joining some photo community or whatever kind of associati
If you carve a neat definition of what a game is, you can pretty much claim anything whatsoever. If you look however at the grand scope of what people do to keep themselves entertained, there were always a _lot_ of things people did alone, not only Solitaire. E.g.,
- reading a book or watching a theatre play or music/dance performance (I like to think think that when people in ancient Greece watched the Illiad or Odysey, it _didn't_ involve any real multi-player interaction. It may have been in a public place, but as far as watching the play was concerned, it can jolly well be a single-person thing: just me watching the play, not engaging in elaborate social games with the other viewers.)
- playing with toys or dolls (a lot of kids did at least some of that alone. And dolls are a particularly interesting case there, because they have always been used as, basically, an NPC. Ask any little girl who's ever had an imaginary tea party or enacted some scenario with her dolls. Or any little boy who's did the same with "action figures", "toy soldiers" or the like. They're not a new invention either: you'll find that such toys were being made since ancient times.)
- pretty much any creative activity (ranging from pure passtimes like Tangram or Origami to actually sculpting a statue or writing a novel. The best novels were written as a solitaire activity, not as some MUD/LARP/whatever kinda interactive multi-person improvisation exercise.)
- any scientific or learning activity that people ever did as a passtime (This is important since Raph Koster's Own claim in his theories about fun in games is that fun is learning in a controlled environment.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And since the computer is just flexible enough to do much of the same things, claiming that doing the same as people did for thousands of years is wrong, well, it's just outright stupid. For example, RPGs are also all about telling a story, who's he to say that taking the same model as books do is wrong? The "just me and the content provided by the author" worked for books or theatre plays for thousands of years. Or since a lot of games involve puzzles, who's he to say that Tangram was wrong and it should have been purely multi-player all along?
So basically Raph Koster is talking out of the ass, as usual. The guy just needs to take a break from his "I'm so great and know it all" ego trip, and start thinking before shooting his mouth with such idiocies. It's just yet another stupid claim in his long history of stupid claims and rationalizations.
And why are people still caring about what he says, anyway? We're talking the guy whose latest claim to glory and to knowing everything about fun in games is... Star Wars Galaxies. Hello? It's the game that was boosted by _the_ biggest franchise in history _and_ by the fact that anyone playing another Sony game gets it at a discount (or anyone with Station Access gets it for free) and drove it into the ground. It has two orders of magnitude less players than WoW, and more importantly, it has less of them than the point where other games were considered a failure.
If you want to learn about good design, fun in games, and generally making a successful game... why not ask those who _did_ make a fun and successful game? It seems to me that when it comes to voting with your wallet, the vast majority of the MMO gamers have voted that WoW is more fun than SWG. So why not ask Blizzard about how they make a successful game, instead of paying attention to yet another round of "I know better than all of you what you really want" bullshit from Koster?
And not many of the remaining players would claim that SWG fun, if you asked them. It's just an unimaginative _merchandising_ exercise, not much smarter than getting a license to print Star Wars t-shirts. The whole game is just an exercise in meeting Star Wars characters and playing with official Star Wars props in an otherwise sterile sandbox of a
Oh, I'm sure it can still be done with an aimbot, which just makes the "let's screw up the game interface to stop cheating" idea even more stupid. You'll notice I've explicitly qualified it as: _their_ scripting language doesn't allow that.
Seriously, it's all just... surrealistic. Their problem and battle isn't against external programs or whatever, it's against their own scripting language. You'd guess they could modify that language, or log whose scripts were running for hours without any keyboard input, or a gazillion other things. But then you'd guess wrong, obviously.
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, so I only know the bits that were in the news. And according to the news, Linux was _the_ defense Sony used to get the PS2 classified as a "computer", which in turn was the defense they used so they don't need to pay customs. So I'd assume they considered that necessary in some way.
Actually -- again, bearing in mind that I'm no lawyer or accountant -- the thing here is that for that kind of taxes, e.g., VAT, it's not that toys or video game machines alone get some extra-high tax. There is no "video game machine tax" as such. It's that goods are divided into broad groups which get different taxes, with the stuff considered essential getting a tax break. E.g., you pay less VAT for food, an essential thing, than you pay for selling a TV, which is considered less essential.
Apparently at some point computers were deemed important enough to get some form of tax or customs break. Other things, such as video recorders or whatnot don't get it.
So it wasn't exactly Sony dodging some extra "video game machine tax", but rather having to fit one of the definitions that get a break. Since they can't define their machine as "food", for example, (or not without getting laughed at), they went for defining it as a "computer".
Strangely enough, the SWG team too seems to give even less of a rat's rear about people botting.
E.g., not only they've tollerated Entertainers grinding xp while AFK all along, the info on how to set up a looping macro that gets you XP over time is part of a FAQ stickied right at the top of the official NGE Entertainer boards, on Sony's Station forums.
Let me stress that again: we're _not_ talking just automation, in which you absentmindedly press 2 buttons while watching a movie. (You can do that without macros in SWG anyway.) We're talking full-time, fully automated botting, in which you go to sleep or to work and leave the character online to get XP for a whole day. _That_ stupid.
In _public_ places. We're not talking about someone hiding in some remote place or in their player-house and hoping that Sony won't notice them. Go to the Mos Eisley cantina (i.e., _the_ main cantina in the game, as far as players are concerned) and you'll find a dozen AFK Entertainers dancing around on full-auto, grinding XP while their player is not even at home or awake.
E.g., the _only_ measure they've finally taken against fully automated grinding in combat classes, was to screw up the interface so you can't target an enemy. The character just shoots at whatever is under your crosshair, just like in a FPS (but really with all the bad sides of both a MMO and a FPS, and none of the disadvantages), just because that's something their scripts can't automate. Before you could have a script that basically says "target nearest enemy, attack, cast special attack, cast another special attack, heal, repeat" but their scripts can't say "turn the view so the nearest enemy is under the crosshair."
Again, the key there is that "repeat" at the end. (Well, technically it's a/macro command, calling itself again in a tail recursion way.) We're not talking pressing buttons while watching TV. We're talking people leaving their characters online for 8 hours fully unattended, to farm the NPCs in some area for xp.
Now roll that around in your head a bit. They royally screwed the interface and pissed off a lot of customers, rather than tackle the rampant cheating head-on.
Sony doesn't actually give a flying fsck about Slashdot or Linux as such.
Sony needs Linux on their console for the same reason they've needed it on the PS2: to dodge import taxes. I don't know what the situation is in the USA, but in the EU if it's a general purpose computer, it doesn't get taxed the way toys do. And EU is a games and consoles market of the same order of magnitude as the USA (if marginally smaller), and twice as big as Japan. So being able to say "see, you can boot this CD on it and have a general purpose OS that makes it a general purpose computer" is gonna make Sony a _lot_ of money in dodged import taxes.
Even better, what this means is that it can be more competitive with Microsoft and Nintendo who chose not to dodge those taxes. Sony needs to take much less of a loss to give those a nasty price competition.
And as the final exhibit: notice how Sony never actually bothered marketting or even selling (more than theoretically) that Linux they've flaunted all along for the PS2. They _didn't_ really want you to play Tux Racer on their subsidized machine.
Think about it this way: they sell the consoles at a loss and make the money from games. Each console bought just to run Linux and troll Slashdot in Mozilla is for Sony just a loss. Each console that you run gnometris (Gnome's tetris clone) or kshisen on in Linux, instead of buying a game from Sony, is just a loss. It's not something they want you to do, but a nasty risk they're willing to take, in the hope that they'll lose less with that than they gain by dodging customs.
So basically, don't let that ego blind you. We nerds like to pretend that the world revolves around us, and Sony would bend over backwards to please Slashdot. In practice, Sony couldn't care less about Slashdot. It's just a business decision, in which Slashdot played _no_ role whatsoever.
Ok, the word "conspiracy" was the wrong one to use there, but still, you get the idea. I won't deny that he _might_ have financial interests there, but I'm just saying that he _might_ just be genuinely that retarded. He _might_ just be an arrogant snob genuinely resisting all that's new and threatening to his elitist view of the world.
People can act just as retarded -- if not even more retarded -- for ego masturbation reasons (think "I'm elite because I watch artsy pretentious movies, you're all a bunch of uneducated barbarians because you play Planescape Torment") as others do for financial reasons. When someone's self-esteem is based on being holier (or more cultivated) than thou, they can defend that premise to death, because accepting the alternative can be more devastating than death.
Which of them it really is, we'll probably never know. Maybe a little of both.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Basically don't assume that Ebert necessarily is part of a conspiracy, when the same happens every day even with people without a vested interest. The fact is, in every generation there will be a resistance to what's new, and snobs arguing that the old ways were better. Even when there's really very little conceptual difference, there will be some snob going nostalgic about how in his day people were going to the theatre instead of these newfangled movies. E.g.,
- The Theatre. Nowadays it's such a posh thing and "culture" to go to the theatre, and we throw Shakespeare's name around like a sign of being soo educated. In the early days of the movies, the theatre was thrown around as the place properly educated citizens go to, and movie snobs argued that movies are crap for idiots, and rots the mind to boot. But back in the early days of Rome the theatre was considered a decadent thing and forbidden by the law, to prevent it from rotting the mind of the youth. The first theatre that was a permanent building was officially mis-named a "temple", and had a small shrine, so it could be slipped around the law.
- Chess vs RTS or vs modern tabletop wargames, like, Battletech or Warhammer 40k. Nowadays playing chess at some posh club counts as socially acceptable and an intellectual exercise, playing Warhammer 40k at the games shop is seen as something for nerds without a life. We have international chess tournaments, and it's seen as a reason for national pride to win one, but a Battletech tournament is something noone respectable would admit even watching a recorded clip of, unless it's as something to deride and lament.
However, Chess was invented as basically just a strategy game, nothing more, nothing less. The original names of the pieces closely reflected actual units used in the field at the time. E.g., infantry, war elephants, etc. In fact, originally a 4 player strategy game, with each player starting on one of the 4 edges of the table with half the pieces one side has nowadays. Except they had a major problem finding 4 players all the time, so it got reduced to two, and each player took two of the former armies. One of the Kings got renamed to Grand Vizier in the process and given the nastiest abilities in the game. (The Queen was little more than the King's personal slave back then in that part of the world, so she didn't get to star in a war game. That's also how come a foot soldier, presumably male, can be promoted to Queen: the original promotion was to Vizier, not marrying the King. The European piece names, like Queen or Bishop, came much later.) So basically what we have is a game that at the origin was no better or worse than nowadays the WW2 strategy or wargame of your choice.
The list goes on and on, and doesn't only include cultural things. E.g., coffee, which nowadays most of us nerds pretty much live on, stirred some great protests when it got introduced, e.g., in London. AFAIK some ladies' organization even went as far as to argue that it makes the men impotent.
That's all there is to it. Some things are seen as socially acceptable or "culture" just because they've been around longer. There'll always be a bunch of people who make it their life's mission to preach that everything old is good, just because it's old, and anything new is crap, just because it's new. And not only old people. There'll always be a bunch of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) who'll side with what looks fashionable just because they want to look fashionable and cultivated too.
And this is really all you see here too. There's no need to assume some conspiracy when an old-fart movie-buff argues that games are crap and movies are culture.
A pretty nice Diablo with lightsabers and blasters, only in an over-the-shoulder view. In fact, I dare say that if you want to wear a stormtrooper outfit (without the helmet) and wield a lightsaber, or play a nasty droid with a blaster carbine/sniper-rifle/dual-pistols, PSO might even be as close to Star Wars as you can probably get without an official license from Lucas. (And a better game than the officially licensed SWG. Not that that says much, SWG being crap at the moment.) Or play a Force character with a lightsaber, shooting lightning from your fingertips. Gotta wonder how Lucas didn't pick on them yet.
You do get to meet other people in the lobby, but once you've created a multi-player game, the planet section is instanced just for you and your team. Up to 4 people may be in a team, yourself included.
A nice touch is that they have a second set of single-player missions, instanced only for 1 character: you. It's not just the same as the multi-player ones, but really a completely different set of optional missions.
Only the multi-player missions advance the "story" and unlock further sections of the planet, but if you truly feel anti-social you can start a multiplayer game and password-protect it.
A nice touch ever since the original Dreamcast version is the strictly-coop PvE theme in missions and in the lobby, though I think in the meantime they did add special PvP missions. But if you're not in one, really, another player can't harm you in any way. They can't lead monsters to you (monsters never follow through doors and gates), they can't block your retreat, they can't kill-steal (as long as you got one hit in, no matter when, you'll get your share of xp), etc. The nice side-effect is that incidentally this also tends to weed the griefers, gankers and other smacktards out, since they get bored and leave
A plus for me, though your preferences may vary, is that it basically _is_ a console game, even if it runs on a PC. So basically you can plug your gamepad in and play it like a console game. But as I've said, preferences may vary. Playing it keyboard-only does feel more unwieldy than a proper PC MMORPG, maybe with the exception of SWG's crap new FPS-like interface brought by the NGE.
Another downside is that the graphics still are, well, the Dreamcast graphics. A few more costume textures have been added, but it still is, well, the kind of game that would run perfectly well on a Pentium II and a Kyro graphics card. That actually doesn't do it justice, since the graphics are nicer and more colourful than the PC games from that era, but the polygon counts _are_ low. Whether that's a big problem for you, only you can choose.
2. City Of Heroes
This one is actually a proper MMORPG, but the vast majority of missions are instanced. You can still run around the streets beating up villains ad interact with other players, but you can also take your group into a building that's been instanced for your team only.
On the plus side, instanced missions automatically adjust to being either soloable or apropriate for a team of 8. So it's nice for both soloers and for those who'll argue that WoW's 40-man endgame raids are the alpha and omega. Well, here you don't get 40, but 8 is still a decent team.
More importantly is that everyone who took part in an instanced mission from the start, _will_ get the full reward for it. In effect, in WoW terms, it's like joining a team makes you automatically have that quest too. Regardless of whether you qualify or have done it before or whatever. So you _will_ get people to group with for missions at any level. You can do only 8-player missions from level 1, if that's your cup of tea.
Another plus: the damn best character creation ever. You can choose the exact look and colour for each body part, so you can make anything from spandex, to an axe-wielding dwarf in plate mail, to a biker in jeans and leather jacket, to a samurai or martial artist, to a droid, to whatever else. Seriously.
"And really? Truth be told, who wants to read any more than the rare preview to say "omg this game is gonna sucks bad?""
Well, I, for one, wish someone gave me the full, honest picture for a start. If I'm gonna blow my money on a product, be it a game or a watch or a TV or whatever, I'd like to have the full picture, not just a lopsided hype-only half of of the story. I'd very much like to know the good _and_ the bad, so I can make an informed decision if it's the kind of game I'm looking for.
Frankly, I never got the seemingly rampant point of view that if you dare say anything bad about a game, or even admit that you read negative reviews, then you're a horrible person, an anti-gamer or game-hater, a troll, and/or a fanboy of the competition. There's this idiotic notion that if it's a game, we should all treat it nicely and say only the nicest stuff. God forbid that someone would be so inconsiderate and hurt the poor developpers' feelings by saying that a game sucks.
Why? It's a product I'm buying, and not even a cheap product. Why is it so fundamentally wrong to make an informed decision about buying it? Why is it so wrong to give me the whole picture instead of a sweetened sales-pitch?
It's the same as any other product. If I buy a TV, I want to know if this model's image looks kinda fuzzy or the de-interlacing makes it laggy for console gaming. (Some HDTV models do just that, for example.) I _don't_ want the reviewer to carefully skip all the bad parts. If I buy something as cheap as, dunno, a pair of cheap computer speaker, it would be nice if someone told me in advance "dude, playing anything through these, sounds like playing it through an old Casio watch stuck in an empty plastic barrel". (Don't laugh, I have some speakers that sound just like that.) Etc. All I'm asking is the same for games. It's not that unreasonable a request.
And on the topic of previews, I don't expect them to predict the future and say "omg, this game is gonna suck". But it would be nice to tell me what works now and what _doesn't_ work now. Does the AI actually do yet what the developpers said it would do? Do the graphics actually look like in the developpers screenshots, or maybe in practice do you have to turn the graphics quality to a _lot_ lower to get more than a slide-show? Does the game system and resource system make any sense, or do you "mine for fish" like in the VG Cats comic strip and get bone by cutting wood? Does the story, as much of it as you can preview, make any sense? How's the balance so far? Does one class kill everything by just repeatedly clicking the left mouse button, while the other needs 15 mana potions per fight? Etc.
(BTW, the above are not even exaggerations, sadly, but actual examples from games I've played.)
It doesn't even have to be the meat of the preview, you know. It can just be a "stuff that doesn't work yet" section at the end.
Yes, we all know that it could get better before release, and feel free to even include a reminder if you wish. But ffs, don't make it sound like it _already_ _is_ better anything that ever happened before, sex included, and so perfectly realistic and detailed that God himself is taking notes for the next time he creates a world.
**AA will blame it all on piracy. Everything. Every time. It doesn't matter if they've just released less CDs in the same proportion, or they just had two months of crap movie releases that noone wants to watch, or whatever. It's those damn pirates. Why, surely our latest movie with bad acting, bad directing, and a cliched script that's a verbatim clone of a prescribed recipe, why, it must have been secretly a great success. Surely millions, nay, _billions_ of people were just dying to see it, and only piracy kept them from going to the cinema.
(To be fair, though, they do occasionally have candid moments when reality and common sense hit them upside the head. A la the "whoa, people SMS their friends that the movie was crap. Who would have guessed it? We were so sure everyone takes _all_ their information _only_ from our marketting." kinda interview that was linked to on/. last year, IIRC. Well, ok, phrased less stupidly, but that was the gist of it. Someone was dead surprised that people talk to each other.)
The games industry also has other scapegoats. E.g., it was WoW. Surely the only reason why noone bought our game is that they were playing WoW. E.g., we didn't astroturf enough message boards, publish enough screenshots (surely 1000 wasn't enough), and buy enough ads-disguised-as-reviews. Surely that's the only thing the competition did better. E.g., it's the PS3. Verily, the only reason why people didn't buy our game is that they're waiting for the PS3.
Basically both will blame someone else, but the games industry members still point the finger at each other too. The game industry still doesn't have an *AA kind of cartel, so they don't have to be careful about stepping on each other's toes. So Nintendo blames Sony, Sony blames Microsoft, and all 3 blame Blizzard. The *AA on the other hand, acts as a block, so whatever arch-nemesis they have it _must_ be something from outside the block.
The thing is, while I did mention the morally wrong area of presenting one thing as the other, I don't consider it easy to do. People tend to recognize work as just that.
If I tell some kid, "hey, kid, you're free to come play with my lawnmower on my lawn", then _if_ they come, the assumption will be implicit that it's _play_. They can do what they want with it, including mow a giant cock outline on my front lawn, when they feel like it, or not come at all. If I start also giving them a schedule ("it's gotta be done by 6 PM when my mother-in-law drops by") and goals to meet ("and you damn better mow it all, uniformly") they _will_ recognize it at work and pipe up with "yeah, right" or "How much are you paying me for that, then?"
It's been tried before, e.g., in Origin's "volunteer" debackle. They gradually piled goals and schedules upon those guys until they sued. But here's the thing: it wasn't that those guys mistook work for play. It was simply that the people Origin was taking advantage of were "Nice Guy" or "Nice Girl" types who didn't jump at the lawsuit option immediately. But they knew it was work.
It won't work again anyway, because the precedent has been set. Anyone pushed into that situation now knows unequivocally that it's work and that they can legally demand adequate payment for it.
So basically that grey area doesn't even actually exist. The confusion between "work" and "play" doesn't exist. Period.
Even the gold farmers mentioned there know that they're working. Whether it's the independent Hong Kong guy making some money at home with gold trade, or some of the more organized companies with employees supervising the farming bots, they _know_ they're doing work and earning a living there. Those employees get paid for it, and they know they're just that: employees. The confusion doesn't exist.
The only place where that supposed confusion appears is in idiots' blogs and posts along the lines of "lol, wtf, those crafting guys are, like, _working_ . I bet they'd also pay to do RL work if someone told them it's a quest, lol." Sometimes phrased more eloquently or literate than that, but that's the gist of it. It's just an insult, just a snotty way to say "well, I'm superior because _my_ fun involves X, unlike those poor idiots doing Y. Can you imagine someone retarded enough to do Y for 4 hours a day? And call it fun? Geeze, those guys so need to get a life." That's all there is to it. It's just a false premise to build an implied insult on, nothing more.
And it's not even a new argument. Anyone who's been on MUD's in the 90's has seen the same argument going on for ever. Everyone who was doing X was busy inventing ways to argue that only confused idiots do Y instead. PKers-vs-Carebears or MachoWarriors-vs-Crafters or Socializers-vs-Explorers-vs-Achievers-vs-Killers or whatever. It's been done before for ages. As soon as someone first made a game with two possible ways to spend your time in it, the category of idiots was born that expound at great lengths in how many ways X is the One True Way, and how anyone doing Y is some poor confused retard.
And such fabricated axioms and circular reasoning, complete with a dose of the armchair-shrink or armchair-philosopher trolling, were flung around every day. Seeing yet another rehash of the same "I bet they'd pay to do real work too" falsehood isn't some deep philosophy, it's just getting tiresome.
I see no moral dillema there
on
When Work is a Game
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the distinction from my message still stands:
- If I'm doing it for fun, and I'm free to do it or not, and when to do it, then it's "play"
- If I'm doing it because someone made me do it, and doubly so if it has some deadlines and schedules I must meet, then it's "work"
The same distinction appeared in the lawsuit of the UO volunteers vs EA and Origin. If you give someone schedules and goals they must meet, and X hours per week that they _have_ to do that stuff, then it's no longer "play". It's "work."
I think the same applies here. Whether it's actually resulting in a finished physical product (e.g., my "crafting" potions actually controls some RL lab equipment), or it's game content (e.g., if the game lets you create new content for the other players), or it's "services" (e.g., acting like an unpaid support help-desk for confused newbies), or whatever, is in the end irrelevant. The question is whether I'm doing it for fun, whenever I want to, or not at all if I don't want to. If "yes", then it's "play", if "no", then it's "work".
I don't really see an ethical problem in either case:
- if it's purely kept at "play" level, I have no problem with whatever other benefits they get out of it. But then by definition they can't give me deadlines or goals to meet. This means that they're willing to take the risk that I'll not log on at all in one day, or maybe log on only to chat, or maybe I'll screw up every single crafted product today, e.g., by aborting it in mid-crafting or pressing the wrong buttons. (Which, if there's some actual machinery following my actions, will result in ruined products or materials for the company.) Or maybe I'll quit without notice and move to another game, and they can't give me an NDA or non-compete clause. To still qualify as "play", they're gonna have to accept those risks, and methinks they won't want to.
- if it's "work", then, well, I think the same applies as with any other job. They _can_ give me goals and schedules, but I'll negotiate an adequate salary for my work. Sure, liking my job is an important factor, and it will certainly get factored in my decision whether to take the job or not. (It got factored in taking my current programming job too, after all.) But in the end it's just a job interview. No more, no less.
The only ethical problem arises when a company tries to, well, basically lie to you. I see no need for euphemisms there. If they try to make it sound like "play", but have the expectations associated with "work", then it's simply put a fraud. And as EA and Origin found out, it might even be against the law too. If you expect "work" from someone, then you might have to pay them at least the minimum wage, and accept that they have the same legal rights as any other workers. (E.g., you might not be able to "ban" them without notice, starting immediately, unless you have a damn good legal ground for that.)
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I can understand your being circumspect in these days of PR hacks, paid-for review scores, astro-turfing and genuine fanboys. And yes, I do realize that you don't really have any guarantee that I'm not either, but I'll throw my 2p in anyway.
"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."
The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)
And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)
"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."
I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.
"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "
Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.
"Daggerfall, never did become a workable title."
Oblivion isn't Daggerfall either. Heck, even Morrowind, for its other problems, wasn't anywhere _near_ the Daggerfall disaster.
"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."
I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.
But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.
Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.
Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.
So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,
"If they really wanted to punish the guy they'd change it so that on his next logon the offender was stuck playing an SOE game."
Now now, I dislike griefers as much as the next guy, but forcing them to play a SOE MMO is just cruel and might leave permanent damage. We're no longer in the middle ages, you know. Regardless of what evil deeds someone did, you can't just strap someone to a chair and subject them to chinese water torture or a modern day SOE equivaletnt until their sanity crumbles.
Joke aside... actually, come to think of it, it wasn't really a joke... _anyway_, dishing out punishment on the human at the keyboard is still a prerogative of the state. A company may put in its EULA that it owns the data in your account, characters included, and may do whatever it pleases with it, including deleting it and display it on a cross on Golgotha. But that ownership may extend only to the bytes and bytes in that data, not to the player who "created" that data.
Same as, say, a forum moderator may do whatever it pleases with your posts, including deleting them. But the same forum moderator can't drop by at your house and kneecap you for posting crap on his forums. The same applies here: the company can block an account or mis-use someone's avatar, but they can't come seize the actual human and give him a righteous punishment.
And even the data on their servers, depending on the region, there may be some legal restrictions as to what they can do with it, and with which parts of it. E.g., I don't know about the USA, but here in Europe all countries have some pretty strict privacy laws. So you can't, for example, publish a web-site with the offenders' name, address, email, telephone number and/or credit card number, to teach them a lesson. That data is legally _their_ data, not yours, and they may grant you access to it for a well-defined purpose. If you use it for anything else, you may have a huge legal problem on your hands.
Noone can hold aggro on more than 17, tank or no tank. You gain aggro on an 18'th, one of the existing one suddenly stops even seeing or remembering you. They've also put a hard cap on how many targets an AOE or a cone attack can hit.
There's also a "soft" cap on how much you can enhance one aspect of any power. (Mind you, "soft" in this case is sorta like saying that hitting a wooden ceiling is softer than a concrete one;)
So basically you can't herd and nuke 1000 npcs off the whole map any more. Personally I say "good riddance", as that never was good gameplay, and it just made common the equally stupid practices of "power-levelling" and hiring "filler". It has nothing to do with tanks being powerful or not. They certainly still can solo, even on Invincible, and they certainly are still viable in groups. They just might actually need to use more than 2 powers for a change, and might get to go one group at a time like everyone else.
Frankly, the game was never supposed to be even soloed on Invincible, which is why in I1 to I4 it was basically locked on what would be later known as "Heroic" difficulty. And certainly it was never intended that any class should be able to herd a the NPCs of the whole map of a whole 8-man Invincible mission and solo them. It was the kind of God mode that just doesn't belong in a MMO. I have nothing against someone's using God mode in a SP game, but in a MMO it's just an insult to anyone playing another class.
And having a game so unbalanced that 75% of players not just playing the same class, but the exact same flavour of it (fire/ice tanker), and doing the exact same herding each time, wasn't exactly making it a good game. At that point it's not just a powerful tank class, it's something that's effectively killing all variety in the game. And it just drove off anyone who wasn't into that, and who ended up being just "filler".
I'm not sure if what you mean is that teens are more "hardcore" because 5x more of them play MMOs, or the other way around, but just in case:
Seriously, I fail to see what's so "hardcore" about a MMO. The fact of the matter is that in virtually any MMO you'll eventually go up in levels whether you have any skill and dedication or not.
I've met people who were top level, or within the last 10 levels, and hadn't yet even figured out the very basics like "pulling", "tanking", "kiting", or generally using elementary techniques for their class. Or that "no, intending to sell it for cash doesn't mean your priest can roll 'need' on plate armour". Unless they were power-levelled, I can't imagine how someone got to level 50+ without knowing how to pull or how to stun an enemy while they bandage, other than by doing the dumb thing repeatedly, getting killed, and going back at doing the same dumb thing some more.
Or I still fondly remember grouping with level people in COH which had ploughed through the segment where they deal with endurance (mana) drainers like the Malta Sappers or Carnie Ring Mistresses by sheer getting themselves and their group killed repeatedly, and _still_ hadn't figured who they need to kill first in a Malta or Carnie group. Or a fire tank who, _months_ after a major and well documented change to his class, still refused to believe that the change existed. He blamed group members, the random number generator, _anything_ except accept that, for example, the game has a hard-coded limit of maximum 17 enemies you can hold the aggro of. Or people who, by their own admission, had been permanently in XP-debt from being killed ever since they reached level 5. (Back in the day when XP debt started at level 5.) And some were even proud of it.
So, sure, you could "grind" day and night to be the first to level 60... and then be the first to get bored as the game guides you to the tarpit of "endgame content". But the fact is, a casual gamer will reach level 60 too. And even a completely unskilled and thoroughly incompetent player will also reach level 60 too. Sure, it might take a bit longer, but they'll get there too.
Heck, you don't even have to "farm" or craft. I know people who've played a tailor/enchanter and refused to use the auction house or advertise their services in populated areas completely. (Apparently going to Ironforge savagely lagged their computer.) Guess what? They got to level 60 just the same.
The fact is, modern MMOs are among the most casual-gamer-friendly games. Now a single-player game can throw a boss or level at you that just won't let you through unless you're in the top X% of players as skill goes. (Where X can even be 50%, but still, there's a threshhold.) But WoW, EQ2, COH and the like will just require enough time investment to get to any point you wish to get to. The time investment may be hideously large for some of the "endgame content" rewards, but it's still all there is to it.
So if I was to take that as the lone reason why teens play MMOs, I'd say then teens are _less_ hardcore than us old farts. That's youth nowadays for you. Back in my day... *ahem*
But I'll give you another better reason: MMOs cost less, and teens have less disposable income. So between convincing mom and dad to buy you, say, half a dozen single-player games per month to keep you reasonably busy with them, and getting a $13 a month subscriptions, guess which one is more affordable to a teen? Right. WoW is actually the _much_ more affordable way to get your time reasonably occupied by a game.
Doubly so for teenage females, who in a lot of cases aren't exactly pushed towards anything either scientific or computer-related by their parents. I'd imagine a lot have a harder time getting their parents to fork over the cash for computer games. So I can easily imagine one staying with a MMO instead if she got her parents to buy one.
Sure, all games have some limitations, such as where the content ends. For example, to take a game which did offer a GM mode so people weren't only limited to the single-player story, you still take your "Vampire, The Masquerade - Redemption" character to Toronto or visit the Kremlin, for example, because those maps don't exist.
On the other hand, some still offer a lot more possibilities. E.g.,
- some games do offer different ways to solve a quest. It's not complete freedom, but it _is_ more than a book or movie allows. E.g., in KOTOR you could help a Romeo and Juliet kind of couple marry by having their families reconcile, or have them run away from their homes, or ruin their romance and break them up, or even cause a wild-west style shootout where everyone dies. E.g., in Fallout 2, take the Navarro mission for example: you could get in through the back door and do a stealth mission, or you could get yourself recruited (getting a weapon and armour in the process) and use diplomacy and cunning to get the job done, or go in with the guns blazing and see if you can take out the twin plasma turrets before they wipe you out. Or various combinations or possibilities in between.
- there are games which don't actually have a story, but are a playground with a bunch of toys and some rules. E.g., most of Will Wright's games, since this topic is about him. You can very much explore scenarios like "what if I don't care about schools, but just build a bunch of houses surrounded by industrial areas" in Sim City. Or in The Sims you can use those virtual characters as actors to enact whatever scenarios you can imagine.
- there are games which are moddable enough for someone else to fill in whatever aspect of the story is missing. One example is Neverwinter Nights. And with games being more and more often scripted in Python, that's getting even easier. In some cases you can not only script the characters, but actually change the game system itself. E.g., I've actually used up one vacation to change the very combat rules and the way stats work in "The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia," plus add a bunch more craftable stuff, just for my own enjoyment.
Or to take The Sims again, that's pretty much the best example of a game which got modded to heck and back, in _spite_ of EA's lack of support. Maxis never actually released modding tools, their script compiler or even bytecode specs. Some people had to spend months reverse-engineering it all, for those mods to be even possible. And to add insult to injury, the last TS2 expansions went as far as to warn people that mods could interfere with the normal game, and "helpfully" offered to disable all user-scripted content.
Still, some of the scripted stuff was nothing short of amazing. E.g., someone scripted a better "buttler" kind of NPC for TS2 than Maxis's one from TS1. Better yet, it allowed such scenarios as having one sim work for another family, which TS2 as shipped didn't have.
But on the whole, I think he's talking more about a principle, than saying you get complete freedom. Games _could_ and frankly _should_ allow one more freedom and room for creativity than a book does. Even if they can't allow any possible scenario ("what if Luke joined Jabba as a henchman and led a life of crime? What if he bought a fertile farm on some remote planet? How much money could he make that way? Can he become the richest entrepreneur in the galaxy?"), they can allow a lot of minor branches along the way.
"Anyway, to summarize, what I'm proposing is like an educational game, only not in mathematics, but political science."
Oh please. One party's/lobby's/etc one-sided half of the story isn't political science, it's just dogma. I hate to break this news to you but "science" is a bit more impartial a _process_, and make no mistake it's all about "process" and "method", not about ultimate truths, and _not_ about "you're the ones to blame unless you join preaching on our side." So slapping a "political science" label on your pet dogma or conspiracy/slippery-slope/whatever theory does not make it education.
"Unless you're one of those folk that run around screaming that liberals are ruining america by, say, doing some real fucking research, or that the left made us lose the Vietnam war by protesting against it and decrying its stupidity (in which case, you're just an idiot)"
Ah, how refreshing, the fallback to "you're probably one of the enemies, and an idiot to boot." Was wondering when that would be scheduled. So if I don't join your preaching choir I'm against you liberals. Right?
Did I mention one-sided dogma and propaganda yet? Good, because it looks more and more like that to me.
How about that, plain and simple, I'm just a _gamer_ in my gaming time? I'm not either a Republican, nor a Democrat, I'm not either liberal or conservative, not left wing and not right wing. In my gaming time, I just care about gameplay, not about your preaching agenda. I'm just there to collect golden rings, shoot NPCs, or whatever the game is about, and have a fun time, not to get a dose of "liberals = good, conservatives = idiots ruining the country" (or viceversa) propaganda.
You want to discuss politics? Good. Then do it in the rest of the time. Then I'll be happy to tell you what I think about both the Republicans and Democrats. It might involve some graphic metaphors. It might also involve some pointing at Europe, where we still keep our politicians in check and they at least try to look like they're not bending over for the highest corporate bidder. It might also involve some suggestion to go vote instead of just whining about how everyone else is an idiot. Etc.
But when I'm gaming, I just want _gameplay_. That's all. The purpose there is to be entertained, not to be a medium for your political propaganda.
And yeah, that's exactly what I'm proposing: when I want to know something, involve "doing some real fucking research", as you aptly put it. I don't need some wannabe politics zealots telling me what I should think, and how I'm an idiot if I don't join in preaching their One True Faith.
Because while it may seem great when 1 nerd reaches 200 people with his propaganda, it's a two-way road. The shafting that's the mainstream media can extend just as well to games.
And for what? Chances are that anyone who actually plays something this monumentally stupid and non-fun is already doing it for the preaching part, so it's all just preaching to the choir. You won't get too many _normal_ people playing an idiotically designed game where every step is a 50% "game over, you got sent to prison" chance.
But it just starts a slippery slope that can lead to some big money muscling into this kind of territory and out-shouting the lone millitant nerd by orders of magnitude. And:
1. Let's be honest and start with the selfish reason: in my playing time, I don't give a flying fuck about it all. That's the time when I relax, forget about it all, and only care about shooting the next bear in WoW, not about politics, economics, whatever. It's the time where I _lower_ my stress levels, not the time to get someone to try to get me more frenzied about some point on their personal agenda.
There are already too many people competing for time to tell me what to think. All over the TV, radio, newspapers, billboards on the way to work, etc, I'm bombarded by basically being told what to think. Heck, even at work, the memos come around telling me again, what to think. I quite like having some time to myself when I actually get entertainment, not propaganda. I'm _not_ looking forward to games becoming yet another battle-ground for lobby groups, special interests, and PR spin-doctors competing to spoon-feed me their own version of The One True Way.
2. Because I find it all insulting. There's something inherently insulting in an attitude saying basically, "I know you're too retarded to use your own brain. Here, forget about using that stupid little brain of yours, let me tell you exactly what to think and how to view this problem." That's the underlying attitude of all these busibodies and zealots -- ranging from Jack Thompson, to religious zealots, to the local "back in my day the grass was greener" nostalgiac, to whatever -- trying to tell you what to think: they think everyone else is just too stupid to evaluate a problem on their own, or to have a list of priorities of their own. And I find that insulting.
Doubly so when it's from people who aren't qualified to discuss it anyway. People who can't balance their grocery expenses tell me exactly how I should view balancing the economy. People who can't even fucking find France or Iraq on a map, tell me exactly what I should think about them or about the US presence there. People who can't even deal with a new guy at work, tell me about how whole countries should deal with each other. Etc. Hello? So someone utterly incompetent and unqualified is trying to call me even more stupid than that?
3. Because it's just not fun to play such idiocies. Look at the description in the very summary here. Everyone who actually expected a game and gameplay -- as opposed to pre-existing zealots looking for something to reinforce their zealotry -- _complained_ about it. Unsurprisingly, because it violates several principles of good game design, starting with: don't create "bang! you're dead!" situations where the player suddenly loses for no fault of his own and without any chance to react. The thing doesn't just give gameplay a secondary role, after preaching, it outright deliberately tries to not be fun to illustrate a point.
4. Because I quite like choosing games purely on gameplay reasons, and not on which side did the publisher align with. I can just see a future in which MS games just serve to preach that outsourcing is good and monopolies are good for the economy, Vivendi games just preach that the USA sucks, EA Games got paid by some lobby group and preaches a third thing, Sony games a fourth, and Nintedo gets yet another party's or lobby's money to carry their message. And where you end up choosing games and companies based on whose message
"You know, more games should (no, not kidding) have political leaning and teach people about the political situation of today, and the history of American meddlins in the middle east."
I.e., instead of games I should get pure propaganda.
And not even that, but some nerd's unilateral lopsided own One True Way in which everyone should think. Forget about thinking for yourself, let Mr Game Designer tell you exactly what you should think about economics, politics, ecology, etc. Never mind that he isn't actually qualified to talk about any of those subjects, and never got any actual education or training in those fields. He's not any more qualified than your average cabbie or barber talking about how to balance the economy when they can't balance their bank account, but don't mind that. No siree, don't let such things as "education", "expertise" or "reviews by qualified peers" (qualified and peers in that field, that is) get in the way of being taught the One True Way to see a problem. Trust Mr Game Designer. He's read something vaguely on that topic in a blog once, so he's qualified to tell you what to think.
You know what? No, thanks. If I want information, I'll take it from someone who has a Ph.D. in that field, not from cabbies, barbers, game designers, and other completely unqualified people talking out of the ass.
And either way, it's still propaganda. Where have we heard that before? Oh, right, there was this Chinese game discussed right here last week: Learn From Lei Feng Online. Let some propaganda spin-master tell you what to think. E.g., how dangerous the capitalist spies are and how you, as a good Chinese citizen, must unmask them and thwart them at every turn. (I.e., go tell the police when one of your friends says unpatriotic stuff already. They're probably a spy working for those capitalistic pigs.)
Does it sound like disgusting propaganda yet? Well... what makes you think I'm happier to hear _your_ propaganda?
Whatever happened to the idea that a game is just entertainment? If I play a game, it's just to waste some hours unproductively and hopefully in a fun way. If I wanted to spend it taking sides and shouting pro- or anti-government slogans, I'd go to some party's meetings instead. It's that simple.
Being force-fed propaganda isn't a game, and isn't fun. Being preached at isn't fun. Having the game punish me for stuff out of my control, just to illustrate someone's own agenda, isn't great gameplay. It's that simple.
Even the idiot discussed in his article, what did his friends tell him? Right. "I've had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins" Ah-ha. They complained. I.e., they weren't finding it fun to play.
What's his answer? "I'm like "Yeah, that's the point."" I.e., his goal wasn't to make a fun game, his goal was just to shove his personal ideology and agenda down people's throats. No, that's _not_ the whole point of game design.
In a nutshell, no, I don't think we need more games like that. I think that what game designers should be doing is design a good _game_ and devote more time to _gameplay_. If you need to sacrifice gameplay for any other agenda points, then that's your clue that that point doesn't belong in the game.
Basically what you describe there is insightful in its own right, but it's basically a sub-set of what Bartle described for MUD players. His division went something like this:
- socializers: basically the people who are there to chat, make friends, organize a guild, organize a player town/community/whatever, and generally be social about it
- achievers: people who want to have the highest score, a level 60 character, the biggest player house or the full epic suit for their class, etc.
- explorers: people who like discovering stuff. It can be finding a new quest, a new piece of the story, a new area, seeing a new instance, or finding out some cool new trick using the tools the game gives them. E.g., that you can get some cool effect by using two spells as a combination. (A lot of people who "just like to play the game" actually fall in this category: they like constantly being given new stuff to do or new pieces of the story. Then again, some don't fall in this category.)
- killers: these are the people whose fun is to annoy, harrass, humiliate, and whose greatest achievement is if they can get someone to leave the game completely, effectively perma-killing them from the game. A.k.a., "griefers". (Note that unlike what the term "killer" might imply, this isn't equivalent to "pvp players". Not all pvp players are killers, and not all killers are into pvp. Indeed a lot find more effective ways to harrass their victims.)
Basically while your distinction does have merit, and indeed is made by Bartle himself too, you seem to be sorta lumping the achievers and killers in one large category, and the socializers and explorers in the other. The distinction does exist in Bartle's paper too, as one of the divisions of his set: people who "play with" something/someone, versus people who "act upon" something or someone.
But it's only half the story. Dividing it again, gives some important distinctions too. For example while both might grind to level 60, an "achiever" may do it just for achievement sake, while a "killer" might do it to better gank or humiliate others.
And yes, you're right in another aspect: it's one of the major reason for social frictions among players. Many of those falling mostly in one category can't possibly understand what those in another category find fun in that. Maybe they're immature? Or whatever.
Nope. The whole revolution and "dictatorship of the proletariat" was Lenin's addition, and the reason why his "bolshevik" faction split from the "menshevik" faction that advocated gradual reforms, i.e., from the actual Marxists. Marx's vision was more of a long term utopia in which eventually the production levels become high enough to comfortably support everyone (and indeed in the 20th century they did), and basically there's no more reason to be a slave to those controlling the capital.
Marx's communism, since you explicitly mention that, was indeed all about sharing, as the GP mentioned. It was simply about having plenty to share. In his utopian vision there was no need to replace one set of slave owners with another set of slave owners, Soviet-style, because his utopian vision was all about a time when there's simply no more need for slaves or slave-owners. (By "slaves" and "slave-owners" I pejoratively mean the 19'th century workers and factory owners, not slaves on a cotton plantation.)
Transforming that into a "screw this, we'll just shoot everyone who stands in our way" theory is Lenin's work, and partially because Russia just wasn't economically at the point envisioned by Marx. There was no over-abbundance to share, but an impoverished country ravaged by war, with too little industry to be anywhere _near_ Marx's vision.
At any rate, if your country went the social reforms way, yes, you're not anything like Lenin's Soviet-style communism, but you may be closer to Marx's ideas than you think.
"Well, actually, you can't have a communist democracy, because communism requires a totalitarian government. You simply can't allow the slaves, sorry, the workers, to choose other forms of government, because they'll choose the freedom provided by personal economic power (money) if you do. That's why every communist leader has been a dictator."
No. Trying to enforce _your_ own point of view, regardless of what people want, is what's incompatible with democracy. It's not even just about communism. The USA McCarthy era trying to enforce capitalism and weed out any communist thinking wasn't a particularly democratic process or a case of "land of the free".
Freedom and democracy mean that the people are able to choose whatever they choose, including communism, capitalism, something in between, or something very stupid. (E.g., ancient Athens democratically chose to wage war on Sparta, even though the power of Athens was naval and Sparta was landlocked on a mountain. And most land battles had been won for Athens by the Spartan elites. Let's just say Athens never recovered from that mistake.) But that's what democracy means: letting the people choose for themselves.
And there's this fundamentally post-McCarthy American point of view that, given freedom and a right to choose, anyone would choose a cult of the psychopaths. (In the medical sense, not in the axe murderer sense.) That anyone would choose a dog-eat-dog world, where it's only right to be chewed up and spit out by those more powerful than you. And that there are no other shades of grey.
In practice, in Europe for example most countries have democratically chosen something in between. Something where enough economic freedom is left to keep the economy going, but there are plenty of safety nets for those who aren't CEOs. Some countries, as was pointed out, veered pretty far to the left.
But even if I was to accept your points, the GP point still stands: there's something particularly stupid in claiming basically "everything I don't like is communistic." In this case someone argues that "working" in WoW to gain an advantage over other players is somehow communistic, because he doesn't like that. Excuse me? Last I've heard having to work to gain an advantage was the very fundament of capitalism.
That's really the whole problem. For some people "communism", "capitalism" and so on have lost any trace of their real meaning and are some generic synonim for "evil" and "good". Everything they like, including getting a free meal, is "capitalistic" and "democratic". Everything they dislike, e.g., having to work to get a reward, is inherently "communist" and "totalitarian". They've become just buzzwords triggering some Pavlov's Dog kind of prescribed response, without any thinking involved.
Exactly why _do_ you feel a need to advertise your sexuality in a fantasy RPG? Other than a way to be an attention whore, that is.
Exactly what difference does it make anyway? Do gay players get different costumes? Different quests? Do you get to give Onyxia a stern talking to and redecorate her room if you're gay, instead of killing her like us macho heterosexuals? Or what?
I keep hearing about how a GLBT-friendly guild was needed, presumably as opposed to all those who've been unfriendly. So please enlighten me... Exactly which guilds explicitly asked you about your sexuality when you joined? The ones I've been in asked me about the classes I play, whether I have teamspeak installed, maybe the country I'm from, several asked my age (apparently making sure I'm not 13 years old), but not one asked about my sex life yet.
I've been in guilds and groups in several games and more than one server even in WoW, and the question never ever popped up at all. I haven't yet seen any guild ask me "but first, are you straight? we don't allow gays in our guild." I haven't yet seen any group advertise as "LF1M straight heterosexual for UBRS". I have seen groups advertise "LFM, but no more rogues, we have enough", but never ever seen one advertise as "LFM, but no gays and lesbians."
Basically from where I stand, and from what I've seen in-game, the issue doesn't even exist unless _you_ choose to shove it down people's throats and advertise your sexuality in a non-sexual game.
So _why_ do you need to advertise your sexuality in a non-sexual game? It's just a game, and kids play it too. It's not a matchmaking service for either gays or straights, nor a forum for sexuality-related discussions.
So basically you don't see the rest of us advertising "straight heterosexual guild looking for members" on the chat channels, how about returning the favour? How about realizing that we're all there to play the fucking game, and not to get a dose of sexuality debates, persecution complex whining or attention-whore drama on the public channels?
I don't give a damn about your sexuality, and make no mistake, Blizzard doesn't give a damn either. All they did have against is _polluting_ the public channels with some topics that just don't belong there.
Amazing how the same lame sophistry dating all the way back to the first MUDs, and maybe even before, still gets spewed as if they were some deep revelation about humanity.
In fact, probably even before. I can imagine some "but I really want to start directly at the top of Pong's high score table" whiner sitting on the side and spewing rationalizations about how actually playing the game is "work", and how those poor Pong players got scammed into working in their free time and paying for it. (And make no mistake, playing arcade games used to cost a _lot_ more than 13$ a month.) Fast forward a bit in time and you find the same kind of people whining about how deluded people are to invest any kind of time or effort into their entertainment and, god forbid, to cooperate with other players.
That's all that levels, xp, epic equipment, or PvP ranks are: a way to keep the score, not all that different from Pong's or PacMan's high score table, or from a RL football team's rank in the leagues and championships. And some people "grind" for that score (in fact, for some trying to beat the high score _is_ the challenge and the fun), some people just play the game for what it is and let the score just happen on its own, and... some busibodies stay on the sideline and try to sound deeply philosophical in their lament about how sad it is that people put up with "having" to spend hours on their entertainment, or "having" to interact with other people or whole groups. (E.g., the group around the arcade machine.)
And yes, some form of coop play always existed even in those arcade machines. Ever since the first game got a fire button to mash, in addition to the directional joystick/trackball/whatever, I recall people "grouping" and having specialized "group roles" at the arcades. E.g., one would guide the character/ship/whatever around and dodge enemy fire, and one was mashing the fire button and dropping the AOE "bomb" at the right moment for maximum effect. I.e., using the modern MMO terms very loosely, one was the "tank" keeping the team from taking damage and one was the "damage dealer", even if noone used those words at the time. I.e., even when the game didn't actually offer the in-game mechanics for that, some found their own makeshift ways to cooperate and interact with other humans, regardless of how many others sit around and whine about how everyone else should be a loner.
Get this: it's not a matter of "work" or "grind" to some end. That's the actual game. It's ok if I "have" to spend some hours doing quests in WoW, because exactly that was the whole point and purpose in the first place: to waste some hours in a game. Gaining some level or armour piece at the end is just a virtual pat on the back, but the real purpose was to waste those hours in the first place. That's what entertainment is all about: filling your time with something better than staring at the walls.
It may surprise you, but it's not just MMOs. Actually _most_ of the RL passtimes need some time or effort, and most are someone else's "work". Do you enjoy tweaking your car? That's a mechanic's "work". Do you enjoy going dancing? A professional dancer would call that "work". Taking digital photos in the park with your cool new camera? Yep, pro photographers would call that "work". Play tennis or basketball with your friends? That's a pro athlete's "work". _Watch_ sports? Sports journalists do that for a living. Watch a movie and maybe discuss them with your pals? Yep, that's a movie reviewer's "work". Etc.
You'll notice that they also all involve some time spent on that hobby. E.g., a movie buff may spend hours a day "grinding" through movies on their DVD player. E.g., someone with a digital camera may "grind" for hours taking photos of squirrels in the park. Etc. Some of those, *gasp* may even involve "grouping" with people. E.g., going dancing with a couple of friends instead of doing it solo. Some of those *gasp* may involve joining some kind of a "guild". E.g., joining some photo community or whatever kind of associati
If you carve a neat definition of what a game is, you can pretty much claim anything whatsoever. If you look however at the grand scope of what people do to keep themselves entertained, there were always a _lot_ of things people did alone, not only Solitaire. E.g.,
- reading a book or watching a theatre play or music/dance performance (I like to think think that when people in ancient Greece watched the Illiad or Odysey, it _didn't_ involve any real multi-player interaction. It may have been in a public place, but as far as watching the play was concerned, it can jolly well be a single-person thing: just me watching the play, not engaging in elaborate social games with the other viewers.)
- solving puzzles (rubik's cube, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, etc.)
- playing with toys or dolls (a lot of kids did at least some of that alone. And dolls are a particularly interesting case there, because they have always been used as, basically, an NPC. Ask any little girl who's ever had an imaginary tea party or enacted some scenario with her dolls. Or any little boy who's did the same with "action figures", "toy soldiers" or the like. They're not a new invention either: you'll find that such toys were being made since ancient times.)
- pretty much any creative activity (ranging from pure passtimes like Tangram or Origami to actually sculpting a statue or writing a novel. The best novels were written as a solitaire activity, not as some MUD/LARP/whatever kinda interactive multi-person improvisation exercise.)
- any scientific or learning activity that people ever did as a passtime (This is important since Raph Koster's Own claim in his theories about fun in games is that fun is learning in a controlled environment.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And since the computer is just flexible enough to do much of the same things, claiming that doing the same as people did for thousands of years is wrong, well, it's just outright stupid. For example, RPGs are also all about telling a story, who's he to say that taking the same model as books do is wrong? The "just me and the content provided by the author" worked for books or theatre plays for thousands of years. Or since a lot of games involve puzzles, who's he to say that Tangram was wrong and it should have been purely multi-player all along?
So basically Raph Koster is talking out of the ass, as usual. The guy just needs to take a break from his "I'm so great and know it all" ego trip, and start thinking before shooting his mouth with such idiocies. It's just yet another stupid claim in his long history of stupid claims and rationalizations.
And why are people still caring about what he says, anyway? We're talking the guy whose latest claim to glory and to knowing everything about fun in games is... Star Wars Galaxies. Hello? It's the game that was boosted by _the_ biggest franchise in history _and_ by the fact that anyone playing another Sony game gets it at a discount (or anyone with Station Access gets it for free) and drove it into the ground. It has two orders of magnitude less players than WoW, and more importantly, it has less of them than the point where other games were considered a failure.
If you want to learn about good design, fun in games, and generally making a successful game... why not ask those who _did_ make a fun and successful game? It seems to me that when it comes to voting with your wallet, the vast majority of the MMO gamers have voted that WoW is more fun than SWG. So why not ask Blizzard about how they make a successful game, instead of paying attention to yet another round of "I know better than all of you what you really want" bullshit from Koster?
And not many of the remaining players would claim that SWG fun, if you asked them. It's just an unimaginative _merchandising_ exercise, not much smarter than getting a license to print Star Wars t-shirts. The whole game is just an exercise in meeting Star Wars characters and playing with official Star Wars props in an otherwise sterile sandbox of a
Oh, I'm sure it can still be done with an aimbot, which just makes the "let's screw up the game interface to stop cheating" idea even more stupid. You'll notice I've explicitly qualified it as: _their_ scripting language doesn't allow that.
Seriously, it's all just... surrealistic. Their problem and battle isn't against external programs or whatever, it's against their own scripting language. You'd guess they could modify that language, or log whose scripts were running for hours without any keyboard input, or a gazillion other things. But then you'd guess wrong, obviously.
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, so I only know the bits that were in the news. And according to the news, Linux was _the_ defense Sony used to get the PS2 classified as a "computer", which in turn was the defense they used so they don't need to pay customs. So I'd assume they considered that necessary in some way.
Actually -- again, bearing in mind that I'm no lawyer or accountant -- the thing here is that for that kind of taxes, e.g., VAT, it's not that toys or video game machines alone get some extra-high tax. There is no "video game machine tax" as such. It's that goods are divided into broad groups which get different taxes, with the stuff considered essential getting a tax break. E.g., you pay less VAT for food, an essential thing, than you pay for selling a TV, which is considered less essential.
Apparently at some point computers were deemed important enough to get some form of tax or customs break. Other things, such as video recorders or whatnot don't get it.
So it wasn't exactly Sony dodging some extra "video game machine tax", but rather having to fit one of the definitions that get a break. Since they can't define their machine as "food", for example, (or not without getting laughed at), they went for defining it as a "computer".
Strangely enough, the SWG team too seems to give even less of a rat's rear about people botting.
/macro command, calling itself again in a tail recursion way.) We're not talking pressing buttons while watching TV. We're talking people leaving their characters online for 8 hours fully unattended, to farm the NPCs in some area for xp.
E.g., not only they've tollerated Entertainers grinding xp while AFK all along, the info on how to set up a looping macro that gets you XP over time is part of a FAQ stickied right at the top of the official NGE Entertainer boards, on Sony's Station forums.
Let me stress that again: we're _not_ talking just automation, in which you absentmindedly press 2 buttons while watching a movie. (You can do that without macros in SWG anyway.) We're talking full-time, fully automated botting, in which you go to sleep or to work and leave the character online to get XP for a whole day. _That_ stupid.
In _public_ places. We're not talking about someone hiding in some remote place or in their player-house and hoping that Sony won't notice them. Go to the Mos Eisley cantina (i.e., _the_ main cantina in the game, as far as players are concerned) and you'll find a dozen AFK Entertainers dancing around on full-auto, grinding XP while their player is not even at home or awake.
E.g., the _only_ measure they've finally taken against fully automated grinding in combat classes, was to screw up the interface so you can't target an enemy. The character just shoots at whatever is under your crosshair, just like in a FPS (but really with all the bad sides of both a MMO and a FPS, and none of the disadvantages), just because that's something their scripts can't automate. Before you could have a script that basically says "target nearest enemy, attack, cast special attack, cast another special attack, heal, repeat" but their scripts can't say "turn the view so the nearest enemy is under the crosshair."
Again, the key there is that "repeat" at the end. (Well, technically it's a
Now roll that around in your head a bit. They royally screwed the interface and pissed off a lot of customers, rather than tackle the rampant cheating head-on.
It's freakin' sad.
Sony doesn't actually give a flying fsck about Slashdot or Linux as such.
Sony needs Linux on their console for the same reason they've needed it on the PS2: to dodge import taxes. I don't know what the situation is in the USA, but in the EU if it's a general purpose computer, it doesn't get taxed the way toys do. And EU is a games and consoles market of the same order of magnitude as the USA (if marginally smaller), and twice as big as Japan. So being able to say "see, you can boot this CD on it and have a general purpose OS that makes it a general purpose computer" is gonna make Sony a _lot_ of money in dodged import taxes.
Even better, what this means is that it can be more competitive with Microsoft and Nintendo who chose not to dodge those taxes. Sony needs to take much less of a loss to give those a nasty price competition.
And as the final exhibit: notice how Sony never actually bothered marketting or even selling (more than theoretically) that Linux they've flaunted all along for the PS2. They _didn't_ really want you to play Tux Racer on their subsidized machine.
Think about it this way: they sell the consoles at a loss and make the money from games. Each console bought just to run Linux and troll Slashdot in Mozilla is for Sony just a loss. Each console that you run gnometris (Gnome's tetris clone) or kshisen on in Linux, instead of buying a game from Sony, is just a loss. It's not something they want you to do, but a nasty risk they're willing to take, in the hope that they'll lose less with that than they gain by dodging customs.
So basically, don't let that ego blind you. We nerds like to pretend that the world revolves around us, and Sony would bend over backwards to please Slashdot. In practice, Sony couldn't care less about Slashdot. It's just a business decision, in which Slashdot played _no_ role whatsoever.
Ok, the word "conspiracy" was the wrong one to use there, but still, you get the idea. I won't deny that he _might_ have financial interests there, but I'm just saying that he _might_ just be genuinely that retarded. He _might_ just be an arrogant snob genuinely resisting all that's new and threatening to his elitist view of the world.
People can act just as retarded -- if not even more retarded -- for ego masturbation reasons (think "I'm elite because I watch artsy pretentious movies, you're all a bunch of uneducated barbarians because you play Planescape Torment") as others do for financial reasons. When someone's self-esteem is based on being holier (or more cultivated) than thou, they can defend that premise to death, because accepting the alternative can be more devastating than death.
Which of them it really is, we'll probably never know. Maybe a little of both.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Basically don't assume that Ebert necessarily is part of a conspiracy, when the same happens every day even with people without a vested interest. The fact is, in every generation there will be a resistance to what's new, and snobs arguing that the old ways were better. Even when there's really very little conceptual difference, there will be some snob going nostalgic about how in his day people were going to the theatre instead of these newfangled movies. E.g.,
- The Theatre. Nowadays it's such a posh thing and "culture" to go to the theatre, and we throw Shakespeare's name around like a sign of being soo educated. In the early days of the movies, the theatre was thrown around as the place properly educated citizens go to, and movie snobs argued that movies are crap for idiots, and rots the mind to boot. But back in the early days of Rome the theatre was considered a decadent thing and forbidden by the law, to prevent it from rotting the mind of the youth. The first theatre that was a permanent building was officially mis-named a "temple", and had a small shrine, so it could be slipped around the law.
- Chess vs RTS or vs modern tabletop wargames, like, Battletech or Warhammer 40k. Nowadays playing chess at some posh club counts as socially acceptable and an intellectual exercise, playing Warhammer 40k at the games shop is seen as something for nerds without a life. We have international chess tournaments, and it's seen as a reason for national pride to win one, but a Battletech tournament is something noone respectable would admit even watching a recorded clip of, unless it's as something to deride and lament.
However, Chess was invented as basically just a strategy game, nothing more, nothing less. The original names of the pieces closely reflected actual units used in the field at the time. E.g., infantry, war elephants, etc. In fact, originally a 4 player strategy game, with each player starting on one of the 4 edges of the table with half the pieces one side has nowadays. Except they had a major problem finding 4 players all the time, so it got reduced to two, and each player took two of the former armies. One of the Kings got renamed to Grand Vizier in the process and given the nastiest abilities in the game. (The Queen was little more than the King's personal slave back then in that part of the world, so she didn't get to star in a war game. That's also how come a foot soldier, presumably male, can be promoted to Queen: the original promotion was to Vizier, not marrying the King. The European piece names, like Queen or Bishop, came much later.) So basically what we have is a game that at the origin was no better or worse than nowadays the WW2 strategy or wargame of your choice.
The list goes on and on, and doesn't only include cultural things. E.g., coffee, which nowadays most of us nerds pretty much live on, stirred some great protests when it got introduced, e.g., in London. AFAIK some ladies' organization even went as far as to argue that it makes the men impotent.
That's all there is to it. Some things are seen as socially acceptable or "culture" just because they've been around longer. There'll always be a bunch of people who make it their life's mission to preach that everything old is good, just because it's old, and anything new is crap, just because it's new. And not only old people. There'll always be a bunch of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) who'll side with what looks fashionable just because they want to look fashionable and cultivated too.
And this is really all you see here too. There's no need to assume some conspiracy when an old-fart movie-buff argues that games are crap and movies are culture.
1. Sega's PSO Blue-Burst:
A pretty nice Diablo with lightsabers and blasters, only in an over-the-shoulder view. In fact, I dare say that if you want to wear a stormtrooper outfit (without the helmet) and wield a lightsaber, or play a nasty droid with a blaster carbine/sniper-rifle/dual-pistols, PSO might even be as close to Star Wars as you can probably get without an official license from Lucas. (And a better game than the officially licensed SWG. Not that that says much, SWG being crap at the moment.) Or play a Force character with a lightsaber, shooting lightning from your fingertips. Gotta wonder how Lucas didn't pick on them yet.
You do get to meet other people in the lobby, but once you've created a multi-player game, the planet section is instanced just for you and your team. Up to 4 people may be in a team, yourself included.
A nice touch is that they have a second set of single-player missions, instanced only for 1 character: you. It's not just the same as the multi-player ones, but really a completely different set of optional missions.
Only the multi-player missions advance the "story" and unlock further sections of the planet, but if you truly feel anti-social you can start a multiplayer game and password-protect it.
A nice touch ever since the original Dreamcast version is the strictly-coop PvE theme in missions and in the lobby, though I think in the meantime they did add special PvP missions. But if you're not in one, really, another player can't harm you in any way. They can't lead monsters to you (monsters never follow through doors and gates), they can't block your retreat, they can't kill-steal (as long as you got one hit in, no matter when, you'll get your share of xp), etc. The nice side-effect is that incidentally this also tends to weed the griefers, gankers and other smacktards out, since they get bored and leave
A plus for me, though your preferences may vary, is that it basically _is_ a console game, even if it runs on a PC. So basically you can plug your gamepad in and play it like a console game. But as I've said, preferences may vary. Playing it keyboard-only does feel more unwieldy than a proper PC MMORPG, maybe with the exception of SWG's crap new FPS-like interface brought by the NGE.
Another downside is that the graphics still are, well, the Dreamcast graphics. A few more costume textures have been added, but it still is, well, the kind of game that would run perfectly well on a Pentium II and a Kyro graphics card. That actually doesn't do it justice, since the graphics are nicer and more colourful than the PC games from that era, but the polygon counts _are_ low. Whether that's a big problem for you, only you can choose.
2. City Of Heroes
This one is actually a proper MMORPG, but the vast majority of missions are instanced. You can still run around the streets beating up villains ad interact with other players, but you can also take your group into a building that's been instanced for your team only.
On the plus side, instanced missions automatically adjust to being either soloable or apropriate for a team of 8. So it's nice for both soloers and for those who'll argue that WoW's 40-man endgame raids are the alpha and omega. Well, here you don't get 40, but 8 is still a decent team.
More importantly is that everyone who took part in an instanced mission from the start, _will_ get the full reward for it. In effect, in WoW terms, it's like joining a team makes you automatically have that quest too. Regardless of whether you qualify or have done it before or whatever. So you _will_ get people to group with for missions at any level. You can do only 8-player missions from level 1, if that's your cup of tea.
Another plus: the damn best character creation ever. You can choose the exact look and colour for each body part, so you can make anything from spandex, to an axe-wielding dwarf in plate mail, to a biker in jeans and leather jacket, to a samurai or martial artist, to a droid, to whatever else. Seriously.
"And really? Truth be told, who wants to read any more than the rare preview to say "omg this game is gonna sucks bad?""
Well, I, for one, wish someone gave me the full, honest picture for a start. If I'm gonna blow my money on a product, be it a game or a watch or a TV or whatever, I'd like to have the full picture, not just a lopsided hype-only half of of the story. I'd very much like to know the good _and_ the bad, so I can make an informed decision if it's the kind of game I'm looking for.
Frankly, I never got the seemingly rampant point of view that if you dare say anything bad about a game, or even admit that you read negative reviews, then you're a horrible person, an anti-gamer or game-hater, a troll, and/or a fanboy of the competition. There's this idiotic notion that if it's a game, we should all treat it nicely and say only the nicest stuff. God forbid that someone would be so inconsiderate and hurt the poor developpers' feelings by saying that a game sucks.
Why? It's a product I'm buying, and not even a cheap product. Why is it so fundamentally wrong to make an informed decision about buying it? Why is it so wrong to give me the whole picture instead of a sweetened sales-pitch?
It's the same as any other product. If I buy a TV, I want to know if this model's image looks kinda fuzzy or the de-interlacing makes it laggy for console gaming. (Some HDTV models do just that, for example.) I _don't_ want the reviewer to carefully skip all the bad parts. If I buy something as cheap as, dunno, a pair of cheap computer speaker, it would be nice if someone told me in advance "dude, playing anything through these, sounds like playing it through an old Casio watch stuck in an empty plastic barrel". (Don't laugh, I have some speakers that sound just like that.) Etc. All I'm asking is the same for games. It's not that unreasonable a request.
And on the topic of previews, I don't expect them to predict the future and say "omg, this game is gonna suck". But it would be nice to tell me what works now and what _doesn't_ work now. Does the AI actually do yet what the developpers said it would do? Do the graphics actually look like in the developpers screenshots, or maybe in practice do you have to turn the graphics quality to a _lot_ lower to get more than a slide-show? Does the game system and resource system make any sense, or do you "mine for fish" like in the VG Cats comic strip and get bone by cutting wood? Does the story, as much of it as you can preview, make any sense? How's the balance so far? Does one class kill everything by just repeatedly clicking the left mouse button, while the other needs 15 mana potions per fight? Etc.
(BTW, the above are not even exaggerations, sadly, but actual examples from games I've played.)
It doesn't even have to be the meat of the preview, you know. It can just be a "stuff that doesn't work yet" section at the end.
Yes, we all know that it could get better before release, and feel free to even include a reminder if you wish. But ffs, don't make it sound like it _already_ _is_ better anything that ever happened before, sex included, and so perfectly realistic and detailed that God himself is taking notes for the next time he creates a world.
**AA will blame it all on piracy. Everything. Every time. It doesn't matter if they've just released less CDs in the same proportion, or they just had two months of crap movie releases that noone wants to watch, or whatever. It's those damn pirates. Why, surely our latest movie with bad acting, bad directing, and a cliched script that's a verbatim clone of a prescribed recipe, why, it must have been secretly a great success. Surely millions, nay, _billions_ of people were just dying to see it, and only piracy kept them from going to the cinema.
/. last year, IIRC. Well, ok, phrased less stupidly, but that was the gist of it. Someone was dead surprised that people talk to each other.)
(To be fair, though, they do occasionally have candid moments when reality and common sense hit them upside the head. A la the "whoa, people SMS their friends that the movie was crap. Who would have guessed it? We were so sure everyone takes _all_ their information _only_ from our marketting." kinda interview that was linked to on
The games industry also has other scapegoats. E.g., it was WoW. Surely the only reason why noone bought our game is that they were playing WoW. E.g., we didn't astroturf enough message boards, publish enough screenshots (surely 1000 wasn't enough), and buy enough ads-disguised-as-reviews. Surely that's the only thing the competition did better. E.g., it's the PS3. Verily, the only reason why people didn't buy our game is that they're waiting for the PS3.
Basically both will blame someone else, but the games industry members still point the finger at each other too. The game industry still doesn't have an *AA kind of cartel, so they don't have to be careful about stepping on each other's toes. So Nintendo blames Sony, Sony blames Microsoft, and all 3 blame Blizzard. The *AA on the other hand, acts as a block, so whatever arch-nemesis they have it _must_ be something from outside the block.
The thing is, while I did mention the morally wrong area of presenting one thing as the other, I don't consider it easy to do. People tend to recognize work as just that.
If I tell some kid, "hey, kid, you're free to come play with my lawnmower on my lawn", then _if_ they come, the assumption will be implicit that it's _play_. They can do what they want with it, including mow a giant cock outline on my front lawn, when they feel like it, or not come at all. If I start also giving them a schedule ("it's gotta be done by 6 PM when my mother-in-law drops by") and goals to meet ("and you damn better mow it all, uniformly") they _will_ recognize it at work and pipe up with "yeah, right" or "How much are you paying me for that, then?"
It's been tried before, e.g., in Origin's "volunteer" debackle. They gradually piled goals and schedules upon those guys until they sued. But here's the thing: it wasn't that those guys mistook work for play. It was simply that the people Origin was taking advantage of were "Nice Guy" or "Nice Girl" types who didn't jump at the lawsuit option immediately. But they knew it was work.
It won't work again anyway, because the precedent has been set. Anyone pushed into that situation now knows unequivocally that it's work and that they can legally demand adequate payment for it.
So basically that grey area doesn't even actually exist. The confusion between "work" and "play" doesn't exist. Period.
Even the gold farmers mentioned there know that they're working. Whether it's the independent Hong Kong guy making some money at home with gold trade, or some of the more organized companies with employees supervising the farming bots, they _know_ they're doing work and earning a living there. Those employees get paid for it, and they know they're just that: employees. The confusion doesn't exist.
The only place where that supposed confusion appears is in idiots' blogs and posts along the lines of "lol, wtf, those crafting guys are, like, _working_ . I bet they'd also pay to do RL work if someone told them it's a quest, lol." Sometimes phrased more eloquently or literate than that, but that's the gist of it. It's just an insult, just a snotty way to say "well, I'm superior because _my_ fun involves X, unlike those poor idiots doing Y. Can you imagine someone retarded enough to do Y for 4 hours a day? And call it fun? Geeze, those guys so need to get a life." That's all there is to it. It's just a false premise to build an implied insult on, nothing more.
And it's not even a new argument. Anyone who's been on MUD's in the 90's has seen the same argument going on for ever. Everyone who was doing X was busy inventing ways to argue that only confused idiots do Y instead. PKers-vs-Carebears or MachoWarriors-vs-Crafters or Socializers-vs-Explorers-vs-Achievers-vs-Killers or whatever. It's been done before for ages. As soon as someone first made a game with two possible ways to spend your time in it, the category of idiots was born that expound at great lengths in how many ways X is the One True Way, and how anyone doing Y is some poor confused retard.
And such fabricated axioms and circular reasoning, complete with a dose of the armchair-shrink or armchair-philosopher trolling, were flung around every day. Seeing yet another rehash of the same "I bet they'd pay to do real work too" falsehood isn't some deep philosophy, it's just getting tiresome.
I think the distinction from my message still stands:
- If I'm doing it for fun, and I'm free to do it or not, and when to do it, then it's "play"
- If I'm doing it because someone made me do it, and doubly so if it has some deadlines and schedules I must meet, then it's "work"
The same distinction appeared in the lawsuit of the UO volunteers vs EA and Origin. If you give someone schedules and goals they must meet, and X hours per week that they _have_ to do that stuff, then it's no longer "play". It's "work."
I think the same applies here. Whether it's actually resulting in a finished physical product (e.g., my "crafting" potions actually controls some RL lab equipment), or it's game content (e.g., if the game lets you create new content for the other players), or it's "services" (e.g., acting like an unpaid support help-desk for confused newbies), or whatever, is in the end irrelevant. The question is whether I'm doing it for fun, whenever I want to, or not at all if I don't want to. If "yes", then it's "play", if "no", then it's "work".
I don't really see an ethical problem in either case:
- if it's purely kept at "play" level, I have no problem with whatever other benefits they get out of it. But then by definition they can't give me deadlines or goals to meet. This means that they're willing to take the risk that I'll not log on at all in one day, or maybe log on only to chat, or maybe I'll screw up every single crafted product today, e.g., by aborting it in mid-crafting or pressing the wrong buttons. (Which, if there's some actual machinery following my actions, will result in ruined products or materials for the company.) Or maybe I'll quit without notice and move to another game, and they can't give me an NDA or non-compete clause. To still qualify as "play", they're gonna have to accept those risks, and methinks they won't want to.
- if it's "work", then, well, I think the same applies as with any other job. They _can_ give me goals and schedules, but I'll negotiate an adequate salary for my work. Sure, liking my job is an important factor, and it will certainly get factored in my decision whether to take the job or not. (It got factored in taking my current programming job too, after all.) But in the end it's just a job interview. No more, no less.
The only ethical problem arises when a company tries to, well, basically lie to you. I see no need for euphemisms there. If they try to make it sound like "play", but have the expectations associated with "work", then it's simply put a fraud. And as EA and Origin found out, it might even be against the law too. If you expect "work" from someone, then you might have to pay them at least the minimum wage, and accept that they have the same legal rights as any other workers. (E.g., you might not be able to "ban" them without notice, starting immediately, unless you have a damn good legal ground for that.)