Jeff Freeman

The suspense of waiting to see if the PKs were going to risk opening the box containing my house key, or if they'd decide it was probably just a trapped box full of kindling and deathrobes and leave it behind.

That was in UO, back when losing a house key essentially meant losing the house, everything in the house, plus likely losing a place to put a house, too.

The fear really came from the suspense of the situation, plus how upset my darling friend and housemate would be (and at me).

That made it a real-world consequence: my friend would not have been roleplaying disappointment, but would have actually been really disappointed, IRL, and I'd have been really, IRL, ashamed of myself for having been so stupid as to forget to bank the key prior to running out of town.

Kithicor at night was impressively creepy. 'Not on the same scale as UO's original, frighteningly bad design, but still among the best there's been.

Combat log data? Now you got me drooling. /infogeek

Funny thing is, it'd be better to generate something like that client-side, I think, and upload it to a server when you exit the game.

i.e. Just like thotbot receives its data, but in this case you ought to be able to upload your data to your own web site, or your guild website, or just leave it local and access it with a desktop 'wadget'.

I say funny, because WoW's in a much better position to deliver such a thing, via user UI mods, than even DR - plus at least one of the devs there didn't seem too keen on the idea of client-side data generation anyway.

Regarding WoW's XML support: well it's not actually support, is it?

Regarding EVE's: I'm a big fan of how well they have delivered in this area. I didn't know they also had character data available.

I'm not sure it is a valid response to "this is cool!" to say, "hey, some other game does it, too."

I mean... ok, so it's NOT cool?

As I said on another blog, if cable news networks can report utter fabrications about video games in prime-time to millions of people, then my blog posts - and posts on massively - shouldn't be held to a higher standard than that - or any standard, I guess.

Because that's profiling, and profiling is wrong!

It's not as if he claimed the XML feed was full of hardcore porn, marketed to teen-agers obviously, as you can infer from it being an *eXtream Markup Language* file.

Got a topic for my next post, though.

You linked Raph's name to his wikipedia entry??

INCREDULARITY ATTACK.

I'd subscribe to a DDKS weekly-rant feature in a heartbeat. :)

Now there's some passion. He doesn't just want SL posts stopped, but wants some HEADS to ROLL, too!


Heh.

Did you know that adblock plus blocks users from posting comments?

(Not a terrible thing to ask people to turn that off if they want to play here, but... it was a lucky guess to figure it out. Heh.)

Trying this again.

Couple off the top of my head:

Fantasy: Items are individually hand-crafted by master artisans - everything from the mundane to the mystical. Beyond a middle-ages setting, having to get shirts, shoes, toothbrushes, automobiles, and so on custom-crafted seems ridiculous to me (especially when some future setting gets saddled with elements of a lifestyle far more primitive than what we have now.

But there's a LOT of game-play there, too - and a temptation to stick it in anyway, even if it is ludicrous.


Sci-fi (or really, anything more modern than medieval European fantasy settings): Modern economic systems (and all the little things that go into that), which would seem silly in a more primitive world, provide a completely different sort of gameplay than the "dark-ages craftsman"-model, but potentially just as compelling. Talking about stocks and corporations, mergers and acquisitions, insurance, investments, loans and debt.

I think you're doing swell!

Additional and more general commentary here:
http://mythicalblog.com/index.php/blogging/massively-asks-how-we-doing/

I don't think it's unfair to point to Star Wars. SWG was highly criticized by fans not for the fact that it was Star Wars [snip!]

Heh. I'm talking about Star Wars as an IP, rather than about SWG (or any SW game) specifically.

What I mean by "no fair" is that SW is fantasy, so using it as an example of a non-fantasy genre is... less than ideal. :)

I'm seeing the potential for a couple different statements:

1) Everything that makes fantasy great can be done with another genre.

2) Everything that makes fantasy great has been done to death, but other things could be done with a different genre.

I find the 2nd more compelling, presonally... I tend to think if you're going to do everything just as you'd do with the fantasy genre, then what's the real point of using any other genre?

I also find the statements to be somewhat at odds.

My feeling is that different genres are better and worse at delivering different things, and so the point of using a different genre would be to deliver something different.

If any genre can do what fantasy can do, then can't fantasy do what any other genre can do, too?

I guess I'm looking for just the opposite: "This is what sci-fi does well, which fantasy does poorly... so even though vice versa with that, it's worthwhile, because that has been done to death."

On a semi-related note: (I'd post a link, but my internet is being slow and stupid at the moment), you should check out David Brin's blog for a somewhat recent post in which he asks, "Is the era of sci-fi over?" He's a sci-fi author (just in case you didn't already know that), speaking of sci-fi in film, but I found it strangely relevant to this discussion, and very interesting.

And un-related: Also in that same post, he asks for market-size estimates on virtual worlds, etc... That's gotta make you curious what he's up to, eh? :)

"All the more reason to evolve beyond fantasy."

If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the main reasons for the domination of the fantasy genre is its familiarity, and that is also the reason to move to something else?

Or are there other answers to the "Why fantasy?" question that you also feel are also justifications for doing something other than fantasy?

I understand that you also mentioned the character-centric aspect of fantasy's heroic arc as being tired, but you went on to say that the character-centric aspect of fantasy could be achieved with a different genre.

As I see the heroic arc being central to the value of fantasy's focus on individuals, I'm getting what I think you meant to be two separate points all muddled together.

That is, altogether it's not really an argument against it so much as an argument against fantasy being necessary to do it... which is fine... but if it's old and busted, then wouldn't the argument against "fantasy for the sake of the focus on individual characters" more reasonably be, "You shouldn't be doing the heroic arc thing again anyway."

I'm not presenting the above as a strawman tactic, but just to explain my confusion. That is, I don't think that's actually what you are saying, but I'm just reading it wrong.

Can you elaborate more on the distinction between heroic-arc and being character-centered?

On a different note: I think it's important to point out that Bartle's "why fantasy?" question was really addressing a more specific genre than "fantasy". He's really speaking specifically of the "swords and sorcery" genre - medieval European knights and wizards-type fantasy.

No fair appealing to Star Wars - it is fantasy. And though that approach to moving beyond fantasy (dressing up the swords-and-sorcery genre in sci-fi drag) worked great for the Star Wars movies, it's been harshly criticized by MMO fans.

Random thought: One of the best things to come of this discussion, I think, would be the identification of the critical elements of the fantasy genre that have lead to it being the predominant genre - so that anyone who does attempt to colonize some new territory will know what they need to replace or take with them.

Another random thought: Once upon a time, almost all the movies made and the vast majority of the big hits were Westerns. The breadth and duration of that genre's dominance on motion pictures absolutely dwarfs the predominance of fantasy in MMOs... Without anyone really feeling any particular need to combat that fact, eventually things changed.

A "Why Westerns?" discussion in which the assumption being challenged is that westerns will forever dominate the motion picture industry would seem pretty silly to us now.

Could be that challenging the current assumption about fantasy turns out to be funny, if the assumption itself winds-up being silly.