lifeessence (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lifeessence) wrote,@ 2007-01-22 10:53:00 |
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As if my first life wasn't enough...
I'm curious... has anyone played with Second Life? I'm curious to see what its like... if its anything like the metaverse I imagined when reading Snow Crash... ;)
Seriously though, I'd like to know if it feels like a game, or if it comes across as more of an alternate reality. Lately I've been getting more interested in the ARG types of games, like Perplex City and reading the ARG SIG's whitepaper. WoW takes enough time that it could be considered an alternate reality, but I'm not sure where the line is between mmo and alternate reality. But I do like the fact that the line is blurry though.
"Most of the shortcomings of MMORPGs are well-documented. Leaving aside the huge demands
their upkeep can put on servers and customer service, perhaps the greatest gripe among players
tends to be the difficulty of releasing new material and patches at anything like the rate the
community would like (Smugglers in Star Wars Galaxies are a classic example – the implementation of an in-game smuggling system has now been promised by developers for over
two years, with the overwhelming backing of the player community, but has yet to be achieved).
Inevitably, also, the fine balance necessary for long-term playability becomes exponentially harder to maintain as more content is added; and new content has the disconcerting ability to make yesterday’s amazing equipment, won at the cost of a thousand hours’ play, into today’s vender trash. But there is also a more structural, and related, problem with all conventional MMORPGs, and one that even the mighty WoW isn’t immune to. Eventually, casual gaming ceases to be an option. You’ve hit top level on one or two characters, you’ve played around with all the classes – now you’d better either clear your diary three evenings a week for the next month to try and make an elite guild’s raid calendar, or you can sell (sorry, discontinue) your account and move on to a new product.
ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself. Moreover, the satisfactions of ARGs are as much aesthetic as they are egotistical, in that the pleasures they offer are as much those of contemplating characters, situations and narratives as of acting within these narratives. This has been true of aspects of many games before, but never to such a degree, or with such potential for mass involvement. The truly immersive narrative games of the past were largely limited experiences designed for single players (the old LucasArts point-and-clicks), or cases of a ‘mythos’ grafted onto essentially stationary game worlds (Ultima Online). ARGs are something quite different, fusing religion’s TINAG principle with both the active pleasures of gaming and the more passive pleasures of art; a combination which potentially calibrates them for pleasure, participation, and thus for profits, at a level even WoW might envy."
I'm curious... has anyone played with Second Life? I'm curious to see what its like... if its anything like the metaverse I imagined when reading Snow Crash... ;)
Seriously though, I'd like to know if it feels like a game, or if it comes across as more of an alternate reality. Lately I've been getting more interested in the ARG types of games, like Perplex City and reading the ARG SIG's whitepaper. WoW takes enough time that it could be considered an alternate reality, but I'm not sure where the line is between mmo and alternate reality. But I do like the fact that the line is blurry though.
"Most of the shortcomings of MMORPGs are well-documented. Leaving aside the huge demands
their upkeep can put on servers and customer service, perhaps the greatest gripe among players
tends to be the difficulty of releasing new material and patches at anything like the rate the
community would like (Smugglers in Star Wars Galaxies are a classic example – the implementation of an in-game smuggling system has now been promised by developers for over
two years, with the overwhelming backing of the player community, but has yet to be achieved).
Inevitably, also, the fine balance necessary for long-term playability becomes exponentially harder to maintain as more content is added; and new content has the disconcerting ability to make yesterday’s amazing equipment, won at the cost of a thousand hours’ play, into today’s vender trash. But there is also a more structural, and related, problem with all conventional MMORPGs, and one that even the mighty WoW isn’t immune to. Eventually, casual gaming ceases to be an option. You’ve hit top level on one or two characters, you’ve played around with all the classes – now you’d better either clear your diary three evenings a week for the next month to try and make an elite guild’s raid calendar, or you can sell (sorry, discontinue) your account and move on to a new product.
ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself. Moreover, the satisfactions of ARGs are as much aesthetic as they are egotistical, in that the pleasures they offer are as much those of contemplating characters, situations and narratives as of acting within these narratives. This has been true of aspects of many games before, but never to such a degree, or with such potential for mass involvement. The truly immersive narrative games of the past were largely limited experiences designed for single players (the old LucasArts point-and-clicks), or cases of a ‘mythos’ grafted onto essentially stationary game worlds (Ultima Online). ARGs are something quite different, fusing religion’s TINAG principle with both the active pleasures of gaming and the more passive pleasures of art; a combination which potentially calibrates them for pleasure, participation, and thus for profits, at a level even WoW might envy."
