I know this is off topic territory but it comes up so often. Censor has a very specific meaning that does not include "make it harder to get a hold of" or "make it more expensive"
When you censor something, you review and (presumably) alter the content to remove "erroneous, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable material from a work"
Ratings systems might be bad public policy, they might be ineffective, they might unfairly target part of the population, and they might be misleading. They might even *lead to* censorship - as when an artist adjusts his or her work to meet a rating. But a ratings system is not censorship and this case is not "effectively" censorship.
I did supply examples (website written to only render in IE, website uses ActiveX, etc.), but let me make a distinction between reasons for a website to be designed to require IE (none) and reasons for non-technical users to continue using IE (because a website they like requires it). All I was saying is that there are reasons that some users might legitimately need to use IE and it is not a valid criticism of their choice to say that the website they need IE for is stupid.
I know it's a bit off topic, but this myth about baseball players being lazy and out of shape is just ridiculous. Having played in college and knowing the training regimens that pro players go through I can tell you first hand that
1) They work hard as hell and the vast majority are in great shape. (Yeah, I know John Kruk and Rod Beck look like fat Softball league slobs, but trust me when I say they are the exception)
and
2) They have to be in great shape. You simply cannot play baseball for 4 hours straight just about every day in a 162 game season, plus practice, plus your personal conditioning, plus spring training, plus winter ball for many of these guys, without being in excellent shape.
This ignorant crap about baseball being easy (from a conditioning standpoint) is just that, crap.
Now as to whether it's a game or a sport, here is my take on that:
Game - any competition (physical or otherwise) goverened by a set of agreed rules.
Sport - any (primarliy) physical competition where the rules, on balance, decide the outcome. Sure there are umpires, referees, line-judges, etc., but they do their best job when they stay out and let the players play by the rules.
So sport is just the physical subset of game.
The distinction that I think is more interesting is between Sport, and Competition. The latter being things like figure-skating and dance which might be physically rigourous, but the outcome is much more in the hands of subjective judge decisions.
Anyway, in my opinion Video Games are not sport, because they are not primarily physical. And they are not competitions because they are goverend by rules. They are games. Funny how it's in the name Video Game. I love games but I wouldn't watch professional gaming if you paid me a salary to be a spectator.
Totally agree. People do some fucked-up, lazy-ass, stupid shit when designing websites (myself included). I was just trying to defend those "friends and relatives" who are committed to IE and refuse to switch. There are some (semi-)legitimate reasons for doing so.
Like it or not, many sites do have IE specific formatting. A lot of ASPs use ActiveX to hook into things like local printing. There are reasons for using IE. I'm not saying I condone the practice, but people who just want to do some banking won't take much comfort from hearing "That's a stupid way to design a website." If it requires IE, it requires IE. That's all they know.
The Slate menus (I know it's an MS site) don't work in Firefox.
As has been pointed out before even the beloved./ can render funny in Mozilla. I'm using Firefox right now and I can see that stupid formatting overlap with the menu.
Well, I think it does lead to censorship, but censorship for what you (and others) believe is a worthy reason. What is government restriction of content in public discourse if not censorship? Just because the restriction is a post fact fine, does not mean it isn't censorship.
There are a lot of hidden assumptions in the argument that our children should be protected from indecency. Don't get me wrong, they might be valid assumptions, but they are at least worth debating.
1) Exposure to profanity has long term negative effects on children.
Sounds reasonable enough, but has anyone actually studied this? The "video games made him do it" argument seems reasonable to some people too.
2) Assuming that (1) is true: The benefits of protecting five year olds from exposure to indecency outweighs the suffocation of expression.
That's a tough one to measure, but it's worth some thought. Should all broadcast shows pass a required toddler-test? It seems to me there is a pretty good argument for the public having access to broadcasts that might still be unsuitable for children. Five year olds have no business driving cars either, but the solution is not to ban automobile ownership and close down all public roads.
3) I think you (that's the generic you, not you personally) need to make some gross generalizations about indecency in order to have a coherent policy.
Seriously, does the phoneme 'fuk' have some magical power outside the bizarre cultural importance we attach to it? Would Paul Muadib be able to shatter your sternum by yelling "crap crap crapity crap"? No. The argument about profanity is ultimately a circular one. Swearing is bad because people don't like it and people don't like it because it's bad.
I cannot believe that we are so immature as a society that the fear of a five year old hearing a few swear words has people considering any kind of criminal punishment, Draconian or not.
While I certainly wouldn't begrudge Rubin, or anyone else for that matter, the chance to be recognized for his contributions, I'm not sure that the celebrity model would be good for games. You could make a pretty good argument that the celebration of fame in the film world has done some harm.
Think of all the actors/directors who continue to produce crap and get paid $20 million for it because they have a recognized name. Without celebrity worship, we might have been spared Terminator 3, Gigli, and everything Michael Chriton has done since Andromeda Strain or perhaps Westworld.
(momentary pause to appreciate memory of the burning Yul Brynner robot)
Think of all the afternoon TV slots dedicated to what Brad Pitt had for breakfast or what kind of fabric is squashed up J-Lo's ass this week.
Rubin makes the argument that unrecognized developers become jaded and content suffers. I'd be afraid that celebrity developers would become blinded by the crowds and the content would suffer. Or maybe we'd be distracted by so many award shows and "G! True Siliwood Stories" that we wouldn't pay attention to qaulity.
There must be a better way to recognize and reward talent than the American Idol route.
Actually, it's the idea that is the virus, not the result. The idea of getting more drive space easily is what replicates and spreads. Sure, some people try the idea and destroy their HD, but that is analogous to a real-world virus that kills its host. Presumably, the successful virus propegates before causing a fatality.
That's some nifty logic there. Because the copyright holder doesn't make the material available to you through other means, it's ok to steal it.
Hey officer, my neighbor wasn't releasing his invention to the public, so I stole it! I mean, how else was I supposed to get it?
NOTE: I too believe that out-of-circulation ROMS *should* be made available to the public for free. But it is a false rationalize to say that trading copyrighted ROMS without permission isn't theft.
Well, I'm not looking for the same thing in an RPG that I am from Doom or Super Mario World.
I never said that the absence of death will ruin the story. What I said was making everyone in the world of Dereth (or wherever) immortal puts a lie to the premise that the world is in danger. It takes me out of the story, and that, IMHO, is a shame.
If you really want to pretend that the story is consistent, do what the new Prince of Persia game does when you die and have the Prince say "No, that isn't how it happened..." as it loads your game
Yeah, that was a pretty good conceit on the part of Sands of Time, but most of the time the developers have already crafted an in-game explanation for resurection (special stones, clones, falling asleep and waking up somewhere else, whatever) all of which are in conflict with the idea of actual danger. The problem isn't so much that I know I won't die - but that my in-game character knows that she can't die. The way most games explain the abscence of death, my character knows that she'll just pop back into existence if she bites it in the field. It's a subtle point, but it's one that I would be interested to see addressed.
Also, and I have already admitted to being in the minority on this, I think that a "great or compelling story" *is* fun in and of itself and I'd like to see some games go in that direction.
Am I saying that traditional MMORPGs are bad?
No
Am I saying that people who like them are wrong?
No
Am I saying that you can't make a good game without perma-death?
No
All I am saying is that there is some narrative downside to the idea and it would be interesting to see different ways to handle that.
I've often wondered why someone hasn't integrated griefer penalties into the game world (or maybe they have, I don't know). Instead of noob areas or "combat dampening fields" or other weirdly artificial solutions, how about a police force that will come after you if you start knocking off other players for thrills? Or maybe killing other humans carries a karma penalty that brings bad luck or something. The specifics would depend on the game world itself, but I'd like to see someone try to account for bad behavior with a little more regard to the integrity of the game's story.
Would you play these games if they had Perma - Death?.. my guess is not.
Depends on how it was done, I suppose. If death was permanent and common then it probably wouldn't be much fun. But if death was a very unusual outcome, then I'd probably play because I would expect the developer had found something more interesting for players to do than mash on the keyboard and kill hordes of imaginary Tolkien knock-offs.
If it was permanent.. they'd have to make the games so easy.. that it would suck ass
OK, but how is that any different than making it easy by eliminating death altogether? As someone pointed out earlier, that means you can take all kinds of foolish risks without fear of losing too much. That meets at least one definition of easy. I don't think these games are hard, just time consuming, and that's where permadeath becomes an irritant for people. I'd be frustrated too if I spent half my waking hours pumping up a character only to lose him/her after six months. However, I don't have that much time to commit and I'd like to see a few more games that eschew the EverQuest model and focus on providing an interesting story.
I know I am in the minority in this opinion, but that's life.
The fact that everyone is essentially immortal has always bugged me about online games too. Yes it would be a bummer to lose all of your hard earned skills and baubles, but the absence of perma-death sure ruins the already tired stories these games have. If everyone in Dereth/Velious/Rubi-Ka/etceteraland can come back from the dead, the concern about being overrun by the bad guys seems, well, less than concerning.
And by the way, Middle Earth Online developers: What is the difference (in MMOG terms) between "death" and "collaps(ing) into unconsciousness and wak(ing) up in a safe place"?
Not that Tivo doesn't have it's drawbacks, but it always cracks me up when someone complains about the feature set and the hacks required to get more storage or a network connection and then proceeds to gush about their homebrew system. I mean, what's the difference between hacking the Tivo and building a MythTV?
I have always thought that adventure games didn't die, they just got eaten up by other genres. There are plenty of games, especially in the console world, that involve solving complicated environment puzzles. It's just that puzzles by themselves can't support a whole game.
I just finished Mysterious Journey II, a child of the Myth school, and found while the puzzles were generally interesting and about the right difficulty, they actually interfered with the story instead of complementing it. Puzzle games are always weirdly disjointed in that way in my opinion. Any tension (you must get off the exploding space station!) is destroyed after you spend 45 minutes manipulating a cryptic set of levers and buttons to open the airlock. I guess the danger wasn't so imminent after all. (Who the hell designed that system anyway? That's not OSHA compliant). The same thing can happen in FPS games, but it's less frequent. The fact that you also get to run around and shoot things in addition to finding the right sequence of buttons also helps mitigate the problem.
I don't think adventure gaming is dead, I just think it doesn't stand on it's own as a genre anymore. Adventure game puzzles are all over the place, in RPG games, in Shooters, in Platformers. And they are still fun.
I saw it at E3 and, while it does have content from Norse mythology the current incarnation is nothing like DaoC (aside from the similarities that the current crop of MMO games all share). I'm not sure how Mythic can argue the content claim.
Aside from the super-duper graphics and wicked-cool effects, the most interesting thing about the game was the emphasis on small party role-playing. I always hate the fact that in MMO games, everyone in the world is a superheroic adventurer and you all complete the same quests. In Mythica, in addition to the big open area where everyone is yelling at each other about who r0x0rs, most quests and adventuring were supposed to take place in non-public (not quite private, but restricted) areas. You'd pull together a party of a half dozen players or so and go off on a quest that was all your own. No camping, no poaching. From what I remember these areas were fairly large and you could remain in the non-pub areas between logons.
The other problem I have with MMO games - the illusion wrecking respawning - was also addressed, at least partially, by the developer. Since the whole thing takes place in tha afterlife, the fact that you magically rematerialize after every "death" is at least superficially explained by the rules of the world and doesn't conflict with the story. I always found it less than compelling to know that everyone in the world of Asheron's Call is basically immortal. Makes you figure that humanity has the edge in the long run taking the world back from evil. Of course, there are also likely to be some sanitation and food supply problems with an undying population.
OK, I suppose that was a little off-topic, but I thought the content bore little resemblance to DaoC.
PS - regarding non-fantasy MMO games (I know many have commented but): The Sims EVE Anarchy Planetside Earth & Beyond Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (love it!) A Tale in the Desert etc.
There may be a glut of Tolkienesque worlds, but it's not true that there are *no* alternatives.
I wrote this for a review of the PS/2 game Dark Summit last year and now my worst fears are realized:
If Dark Summit were a movie (and let's all take a moment to pray it never will be), the trailer would go something like this:
In a world where skiers rule the roost and snowboarders are second-class citizens, one stuntwoman in training will stop at nothing, risking her exposed abdomen and her reputation as a top-notch grinder, to take on the fascist ski-patrol and expose the secrets of Dark Summit.
Dark Summit is rated R for "Remove my eyballs with a spoon if I see this movie"
What better way to celebrate the on-time release of Doom 3 than to rehash the story of how the little-shooter-that-could changed the world and stopped global warming.
I don't know about you, but it was Wolfenstein 3D (still one of the handful of shareware titles I have actually purchased) that changed my world far more than Doom.
I guess my tolerance for nostalgia is a little low today. I need to go play some Colossal Cave.
"You are standing at the end of a hallway inside a moonbase. Around you is a crapload of demonic mutants. A small stream of blood flows out of your mid-section and down a gully."
Agreed. It's also a fallacy of appeal to the majority. I know it's conventional wisdom that fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, but how is it significant that 87% of any group agrees with the ESRB rating? Who cares. Does the study group have a background in human psychology and can they provide any insight into what a rating *should* be? Shouldn't the ESRB (or whoever) spend some time on legitimate psychological study to peel back at least some of the curtain covering the "video games made me do it" question?
Dammit. This is just like when my windows 3.1 machine had perfectly good netbios built into it and the ISP went and required something called a TC/PPI stack or soemthing. It just added CPU overhead to my machine, decreased throughput by adding all these headers and crap, and didn't solve 100% of my networking problems like it should have. Tehy can't force me to install some stupid standards software. What if I want to use SNA to access The Internet? I should have that right.
This reminds me of a product that Recourse Technologies (since defunct, I think) proposed a few years back to push IDS out to the ISPs. Stopping DoS attacks further out sounded like a good idea at the time, but I think they never got past the huge number of technical hurdles either.
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I know this is off topic territory but it comes up so often. Censor has a very specific meaning that does not include "make it harder to get a hold of" or "make it more expensive"
When you censor something, you review and (presumably) alter the content to remove "erroneous, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable material from a work"
Ratings systems might be bad public policy, they might be ineffective, they might unfairly target part of the population, and they might be misleading. They might even *lead to* censorship - as when an artist adjusts his or her work to meet a rating. But a ratings system is not censorship and this case is not "effectively" censorship.
I did supply examples (website written to only render in IE, website uses ActiveX, etc.), but let me make a distinction between reasons for a website to be designed to require IE (none) and reasons for non-technical users to continue using IE (because a website they like requires it). All I was saying is that there are reasons that some users might legitimately need to use IE and it is not a valid criticism of their choice to say that the website they need IE for is stupid.
I know it's a bit off topic, but this myth about baseball players being lazy and out of shape is just ridiculous. Having played in college and knowing the training regimens that pro players go through I can tell you first hand that
1) They work hard as hell and the vast majority are in great shape. (Yeah, I know John Kruk and Rod Beck look like fat Softball league slobs, but trust me when I say they are the exception)
and
2) They have to be in great shape. You simply cannot play baseball for 4 hours straight just about every day in a 162 game season, plus practice, plus your personal conditioning, plus spring training, plus winter ball for many of these guys, without being in excellent shape.
This ignorant crap about baseball being easy (from a conditioning standpoint) is just that, crap.
Now as to whether it's a game or a sport, here is my take on that:
Game - any competition (physical or otherwise) goverened by a set of agreed rules.
Sport - any (primarliy) physical competition where the rules, on balance, decide the outcome. Sure there are umpires, referees, line-judges, etc., but they do their best job when they stay out and let the players play by the rules.
So sport is just the physical subset of game.
The distinction that I think is more interesting is between Sport, and Competition. The latter being things like figure-skating and dance which might be physically rigourous, but the outcome is much more in the hands of subjective judge decisions.
Anyway, in my opinion Video Games are not sport, because they are not primarily physical. And they are not competitions because they are goverend by rules. They are games. Funny how it's in the name Video Game. I love games but I wouldn't watch professional gaming if you paid me a salary to be a spectator.
Totally agree. People do some fucked-up, lazy-ass, stupid shit when designing websites (myself included). I was just trying to defend those "friends and relatives" who are committed to IE and refuse to switch. There are some (semi-)legitimate reasons for doing so.
Like it or not, many sites do have IE specific formatting. A lot of ASPs use ActiveX to hook into things like local printing. There are reasons for using IE. I'm not saying I condone the practice, but people who just want to do some banking won't take much comfort from hearing "That's a stupid way to design a website." If it requires IE, it requires IE. That's all they know.
./ can render funny in Mozilla. I'm using Firefox right now and I can see that stupid formatting overlap with the menu.
The Slate menus (I know it's an MS site) don't work in Firefox.
As has been pointed out before even the beloved
etc., etc.
Well, I think it does lead to censorship, but censorship for what you (and others) believe is a worthy reason. What is government restriction of content in public discourse if not censorship? Just because the restriction is a post fact fine, does not mean it isn't censorship.
There are a lot of hidden assumptions in the argument that our children should be protected from indecency. Don't get me wrong, they might be valid assumptions, but they are at least worth debating.
1) Exposure to profanity has long term negative effects on children.
Sounds reasonable enough, but has anyone actually studied this? The "video games made him do it" argument seems reasonable to some people too.
2) Assuming that (1) is true: The benefits of protecting five year olds from exposure to indecency outweighs the suffocation of expression.
That's a tough one to measure, but it's worth some thought. Should all broadcast shows pass a required toddler-test? It seems to me there is a pretty good argument for the public having access to broadcasts that might still be unsuitable for children. Five year olds have no business driving cars either, but the solution is not to ban automobile ownership and close down all public roads.
3) I think you (that's the generic you, not you personally) need to make some gross generalizations about indecency in order to have a coherent policy.
Seriously, does the phoneme 'fuk' have some magical power outside the bizarre cultural importance we attach to it? Would Paul Muadib be able to shatter your sternum by yelling "crap crap crapity crap"? No. The argument about profanity is ultimately a circular one. Swearing is bad because people don't like it and people don't like it because it's bad.
I cannot believe that we are so immature as a society that the fear of a five year old hearing a few swear words has people considering any kind of criminal punishment, Draconian or not.
While I certainly wouldn't begrudge Rubin, or anyone else for that matter, the chance to be recognized for his contributions, I'm not sure that the celebrity model would be good for games. You could make a pretty good argument that the celebration of fame in the film world has done some harm.
Think of all the actors/directors who continue to produce crap and get paid $20 million for it because they have a recognized name. Without celebrity worship, we might have been spared Terminator 3, Gigli, and everything Michael Chriton has done since Andromeda Strain or perhaps Westworld.
(momentary pause to appreciate memory of the burning Yul Brynner robot)
Think of all the afternoon TV slots dedicated to what Brad Pitt had for breakfast or what kind of fabric is squashed up J-Lo's ass this week.
Rubin makes the argument that unrecognized developers become jaded and content suffers. I'd be afraid that celebrity developers would become blinded by the crowds and the content would suffer. Or maybe we'd be distracted by so many award shows and "G! True Siliwood Stories" that we wouldn't pay attention to qaulity.
There must be a better way to recognize and reward talent than the American Idol route.
Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy peer-to-peer proxies. We tunneled through by force of will and we liked it.
Actually, it's rather amazing how effective technologically enforced censorship is given the size of the tireless community dedicated to bypassing it.
Actually, it's the idea that is the virus, not the result. The idea of getting more drive space easily is what replicates and spreads. Sure, some people try the idea and destroy their HD, but that is analogous to a real-world virus that kills its host. Presumably, the successful virus propegates before causing a fatality.
Hey, someone has to defend Dawkins' idea.
Oh no, is this a meme meme?
That's some nifty logic there. Because the copyright holder doesn't make the material available to you through other means, it's ok to steal it.
Hey officer, my neighbor wasn't releasing his invention to the public, so I stole it! I mean, how else was I supposed to get it?
NOTE: I too believe that out-of-circulation ROMS *should* be made available to the public for free. But it is a false rationalize to say that trading copyrighted ROMS without permission isn't theft.
Well, I'm not looking for the same thing in an RPG that I am from Doom or Super Mario World.
I never said that the absence of death will ruin the story. What I said was making everyone in the world of Dereth (or wherever) immortal puts a lie to the premise that the world is in danger. It takes me out of the story, and that, IMHO, is a shame.
If you really want to pretend that the story is consistent, do what the new Prince of Persia game does when you die and have the Prince say "No, that isn't how it happened..." as it loads your game
Yeah, that was a pretty good conceit on the part of Sands of Time, but most of the time the developers have already crafted an in-game explanation for resurection (special stones, clones, falling asleep and waking up somewhere else, whatever) all of which are in conflict with the idea of actual danger. The problem isn't so much that I know I won't die - but that my in-game character knows that she can't die. The way most games explain the abscence of death, my character knows that she'll just pop back into existence if she bites it in the field. It's a subtle point, but it's one that I would be interested to see addressed.
Also, and I have already admitted to being in the minority on this, I think that a "great or compelling story" *is* fun in and of itself and I'd like to see some games go in that direction.
Am I saying that traditional MMORPGs are bad?
No
Am I saying that people who like them are wrong?
No
Am I saying that you can't make a good game without perma-death?
No
All I am saying is that there is some narrative downside to the idea and it would be interesting to see different ways to handle that.
I've often wondered why someone hasn't integrated griefer penalties into the game world (or maybe they have, I don't know). Instead of noob areas or "combat dampening fields" or other weirdly artificial solutions, how about a police force that will come after you if you start knocking off other players for thrills? Or maybe killing other humans carries a karma penalty that brings bad luck or something. The specifics would depend on the game world itself, but I'd like to see someone try to account for bad behavior with a little more regard to the integrity of the game's story.
Would you play these games if they had Perma - Death? .. my guess is not.
.. they'd have to make the games so easy .. that it would suck ass
Depends on how it was done, I suppose. If death was permanent and common then it probably wouldn't be much fun. But if death was a very unusual outcome, then I'd probably play because I would expect the developer had found something more interesting for players to do than mash on the keyboard and kill hordes of imaginary Tolkien knock-offs.
If it was permanent
OK, but how is that any different than making it easy by eliminating death altogether? As someone pointed out earlier, that means you can take all kinds of foolish risks without fear of losing too much. That meets at least one definition of easy. I don't think these games are hard, just time consuming, and that's where permadeath becomes an irritant for people. I'd be frustrated too if I spent half my waking hours pumping up a character only to lose him/her after six months. However, I don't have that much time to commit and I'd like to see a few more games that eschew the EverQuest model and focus on providing an interesting story.
I know I am in the minority in this opinion, but that's life.
The fact that everyone is essentially immortal has always bugged me about online games too. Yes it would be a bummer to lose all of your hard earned skills and baubles, but the absence of perma-death sure ruins the already tired stories these games have. If everyone in Dereth/Velious/Rubi-Ka/etceteraland can come back from the dead, the concern about being overrun by the bad guys seems, well, less than concerning.
And by the way, Middle Earth Online developers:
What is the difference (in MMOG terms) between "death" and "collaps(ing) into unconsciousness and wak(ing) up in a safe place"?
Gaaaaah!
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/aladdin.htm
Maaaaah!
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/mermaid.htm
Meh?
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/rescuers.htm
Not that Tivo doesn't have it's drawbacks, but it always cracks me up when someone complains about the feature set and the hacks required to get more storage or a network connection and then proceeds to gush about their homebrew system. I mean, what's the difference between hacking the Tivo and building a MythTV?
I have always thought that adventure games didn't die, they just got eaten up by other genres. There are plenty of games, especially in the console world, that involve solving complicated environment puzzles. It's just that puzzles by themselves can't support a whole game.
I just finished Mysterious Journey II, a child of the Myth school, and found while the puzzles were generally interesting and about the right difficulty, they actually interfered with the story instead of complementing it. Puzzle games are always weirdly disjointed in that way in my opinion. Any tension (you must get off the exploding space station!) is destroyed after you spend 45 minutes manipulating a cryptic set of levers and buttons to open the airlock. I guess the danger wasn't so imminent after all. (Who the hell designed that system anyway? That's not OSHA compliant). The same thing can happen in FPS games, but it's less frequent. The fact that you also get to run around and shoot things in addition to finding the right sequence of buttons also helps mitigate the problem.
I don't think adventure gaming is dead, I just think it doesn't stand on it's own as a genre anymore. Adventure game puzzles are all over the place, in RPG games, in Shooters, in Platformers. And they are still fun.
I saw it at E3 and, while it does have content from Norse mythology the current incarnation is nothing like DaoC (aside from the similarities that the current crop of MMO games all share). I'm not sure how Mythic can argue the content claim.
Aside from the super-duper graphics and wicked-cool effects, the most interesting thing about the game was the emphasis on small party role-playing. I always hate the fact that in MMO games, everyone in the world is a superheroic adventurer and you all complete the same quests. In Mythica, in addition to the big open area where everyone is yelling at each other about who r0x0rs, most quests and adventuring were supposed to take place in non-public (not quite private, but restricted) areas. You'd pull together a party of a half dozen players or so and go off on a quest that was all your own. No camping, no poaching. From what I remember these areas were fairly large and you could remain in the non-pub areas between logons.
The other problem I have with MMO games - the illusion wrecking respawning - was also addressed, at least partially, by the developer. Since the whole thing takes place in tha afterlife, the fact that you magically rematerialize after every "death" is at least superficially explained by the rules of the world and doesn't conflict with the story. I always found it less than compelling to know that everyone in the world of Asheron's Call is basically immortal. Makes you figure that humanity has the edge in the long run taking the world back from evil. Of course, there are also likely to be some sanitation and food supply problems with an undying population.
OK, I suppose that was a little off-topic, but I thought the content bore little resemblance to DaoC.
PS - regarding non-fantasy MMO games (I know many have commented but):
The Sims
EVE
Anarchy
Planetside
Earth & Beyond
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (love it!)
A Tale in the Desert
etc.
There may be a glut of Tolkienesque worlds, but it's not true that there are *no* alternatives.
I wrote this for a review of the PS/2 game Dark Summit last year and now my worst fears are realized: If Dark Summit were a movie (and let's all take a moment to pray it never will be), the trailer would go something like this: In a world where skiers rule the roost and snowboarders are second-class citizens, one stuntwoman in training will stop at nothing, risking her exposed abdomen and her reputation as a top-notch grinder, to take on the fascist ski-patrol and expose the secrets of Dark Summit. Dark Summit is rated R for "Remove my eyballs with a spoon if I see this movie"
What better way to celebrate the on-time release of Doom 3 than to rehash the story of how the little-shooter-that-could changed the world and stopped global warming.
I don't know about you, but it was Wolfenstein 3D (still one of the handful of shareware titles I have actually purchased) that changed my world far more than Doom.
I guess my tolerance for nostalgia is a little low today. I need to go play some Colossal Cave.
"You are standing at the end of a hallway inside a moonbase. Around you is a crapload of demonic mutants. A small stream of blood flows out of your mid-section and down a gully."
Agreed. It's also a fallacy of appeal to the majority. I know it's conventional wisdom that fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, but how is it significant that 87% of any group agrees with the ESRB rating? Who cares. Does the study group have a background in human psychology and can they provide any insight into what a rating *should* be? Shouldn't the ESRB (or whoever) spend some time on legitimate psychological study to peel back at least some of the curtain covering the "video games made me do it" question?
Dammit. This is just like when my windows 3.1 machine had perfectly good netbios built into it and the ISP went and required something called a TC/PPI stack or soemthing. It just added CPU overhead to my machine, decreased throughput by adding all these headers and crap, and didn't solve 100% of my networking problems like it should have. Tehy can't force me to install some stupid standards software. What if I want to use SNA to access The Internet? I should have that right.
This reminds me of a product that Recourse Technologies (since defunct, I think) proposed a few years back to push IDS out to the ISPs. Stopping DoS attacks further out sounded like a good idea at the time, but I think they never got past the huge number of technical hurdles either.