Francois

Kerafyrm.

Online guild kills the unkillable dragon in everquest. I first heard about this from a friend of mine who played Everquest. He actually got the story wrong. He told me that the Dragon dropped lots of loot (items), and that the players who killed the Dragon were banned from Everquest. In researching the article I found this to be untrue. Actually "Kerafyrm" was killed, though Sony Entertainment at first tried to save their dragon by making it disappear

Mortality and immortality in games interests me. More on this later.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/26/1848238&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&tid=209

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerafyrm

http://larsen.dnsalias.net/cgi-bin/index.pl?page=screenshots&action=view&id=2080

What's interesting about abstract games is that they are just as fun as more mimetic games, (sometimes even more so.)

I'm not sure that mimesis makes games more fun or more challenging. A pure strategy game such as chess doesn't need mimesis because its main attraction is it's complex strategy. It's interesting that a chess game can be "reduced" to a system of letters and numbers, IE the pieces are so abstract as to not even need graphics at all. (Is text "more" abstract than pictures? maybe if numbers and text stand in for pieces and positions, but are text games considered abstract? What would a text game be like if it included wordplay (a metatext game?))

Mimetic design is very important for games like Resident Evil and Half-Life, where the physical appearance of monsters and how you sense the game environment (light and dark environments) are important to the emotional catch of the game.

But what is interesting about the article is that it posits that there are many possibilities for abstract design that have been neglected.

I try hard to think of how an abstract game would look today, with graphics as they are would it be rolling waves of colour that are affected by the player. When the author says abstract does he mean, pixelly graphics, or less anthropomorphized characters (and player characters)

Is tetris more abstract than space invaders? Even though it has better graphics, because in tetris you are disembodied force manipulating blocks, whereas in space invaders you are a pilot defending the world from aliens.

Some of the best games I have played are text based. Utopia online is free (though it has advertising,) near 100,000 people play it, and yet you have to imagine what is happening based on numbers and text. Text based adventure games often hold my attention much better than visually based games, maybe because the authors spend more time on story, or maybe reading text and imagining gets me in a narrative mood, and imagination is much more "real" than simulated visual input.

But again maybe I am missing the author's point. It's strange that this idea of games marching towards better mimesis is so strong that it becomes hard to think about what a more visually abstract game would be like.

All that is solid melts into air, even Gold.

It would be interesting if the Chinese workers could unionize and hold the players and companies hostage. Probably wouldn't work because the companies would have to change the game and inflate the money supply, so that all items are available to everyone. That would take the fun out for many gamers though.

It won't happen anyways because China has so many unemployed, and more importantly the government won't allow independent Unions.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/local/15066711.htm

This article is packed with thought

Art and games need rules conventions and spectators. They must stand forth from the over-all situation as models of it in order for the equality of play to persist. Mcluhan posits that art/games and life are separate, so war is not a game, the stock-market is not a game, because not everyone knows the rules.

I can think of a game I played recently called Flux, where as one played one changed the rules for winning the game (rule changes being part of the game.) Another game I have played often with friends is called Mao or Mow, where the winner of a round makes up a rule that stays for the rest of the game.

Is the rule then that the players makes up the rules as they go along? One is also reminded of Calvinball from the cartoon strip "Calvin and Hobbes." Another game where the rules change constantly.

I think (and I remember we had a consensus in class) that his characterization of baseball as a dying sport was off base (so to speak.)

Mcluhan states: "American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play." I'm not sure that Baseball and Football are so different in their specializiation. Quarterbacks are very different from Recievers which are very different from Linebackers.

Technically a linebacker could fill the role of a wide reciever, but it's rather unlikely.

Unless a sport is one on one, I'm pretty sure that there will always be specializations. This is one interesting thing about playing games such as football or basketball as a one on one game on consoles or the computer. One must switch from avatar to avatar like a posessing ghost or demon. You follow the ball, and the computer must reposition the rest of the players.

As I said in class, this article would be much less confusing if I could pin down exactly what a tribal society is compared to pre-industrial western society, compared to post-industrial society.

Also the views of such things probably would be different in 1964. The view of Japan and Japanese business culture must have been very different then.

The most interesting thing to me about the article was that the enemy team always looks like terrorists.

I guess it makes sense, that the game creators want the people who play to identify with the US army, and not shoot the US army. Still it's rather strange that the two sides see something differrent in each other. (IE if your avatar looked in a mirror you wouldn't see what the enemy sees.) That seems a rather poetic to me.

In a sense wargames exactly what the military commanders want because avatars are easier to dehumanize, generic. On the other hand, couch potatoes aren't going to win wars.

However this generic, kill the all the arabs kind of mentality is counterproductive training for the kind of insurgency that the army faces in Iraq. That kind of insurgency requires knowlege of Iraqi customs, language, detective work... a real understanding and care handling people that can't be gained from a game where one guns down pixelated Arabs.

What would a game as an army engineer fixing power generators be like. Or a game where one is trying to train Iraqi army recruits who don't want to show up for work. Or one in which the Americans try to play the middleman between Sunni and Shia parties. It would be near impossible to make an exciting game out of this, but as an art project it might be interesting.

I think the only way to simulate this kind of experience is through massive real life simulations like this:

http://www.economist.com/research/backgrounders/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5300181

It's amazing that the Army can launch weapons of mass destruction around the world but it can't train it's soldiers more than six words of Arabic or Pashto. Truly an unimaginitive institution.

This lack of grounding in reality exemplified by this kind of statement "dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out the cancer that threatens us all..."

The problem with games like these, and with things like global satellite tracking, is that we see so much, and we think we know so much and this digital revolution will change everything. But really there is very little person to person social understanding. Susan Sontag talks a lot about how with photographs we think we know so much because they look so real, and yet it's just visual information which may not be a very deep understanding.

But I suppose America's Army is more about recruiting dumb kids, it's only in basic training do they learn that they have to do boring things like learning arabic, and exciting things like taking bullets to the chest.

But back to the article: I also liked his comments at the end about how games have related to war. It reminded me of the Mcluhan article about the ritualized warfare that the tribes in New Guinea go through. Wouldn't it be better if we could just resolve international disputes over a game of CS?

We've talked about MMORPG's but not much about MMORTS's (that's Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy games. This means command from the air build your civilization type game.

Society (published by Stardock) seems to be the one that everyone is talking about right now.

Stardock say that it will be slow to build your empire (as slow as building a character in everquest or WOW). Subscription will be optional, but subscribing players will have in game advantages of non-subscribers.

Conquest will be part of the game, but not the main thrust, at least according to the site. They say they will start out with you solving a basic problem for an individual person in your empire, and then it gets more complex from there. (sounds almost like spore.)

There are a couple of other MMORTS names out there mankind, boundless planet, ballerium. All are in developement. As is the case with mmoRPG's it's mostly fantasy or sci-fi. Apparently the RTS is the only game that doesn't always choose fantasy or sci-fi settings.

Of course text/browser based games which are basically MMORTS's based in text have been around for a long time. Utopia has been around since 1999. A very addictive complex game that has 100,000 players on it. (At most 40k per server) Also very social, I felt more connected in that game than in any MMORPG, mainly because the game automatically groups you in a "kingdom," and you have to play politics within the kingdom and also with other kingdoms.

Utopia