Killed in a smiling accident.

Theoretically speaking, if a certain someone had calculated that they could strap a Wiimote to their infant child and, in the process of jiggling said child around for hours on end in order to soothe, calm and ultimately send them to sleep, they could at the same time complete Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Lost Winds and perhaps even Mario Kart Wii, at what point would Social Services become involved?

Another quick post, this time to highlight Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, for which the marketing machine seems to be building up a head of steam, the first trailer having been released recently.

The blurb:

During the WGA strike Joss Whedon started writing a three part musical series for the internet. Each of the three episodes will be approximately ten minutes each.

Co-writers for the internet feature are Joss’ brothers Zack and Jed and Jed’s Fiancé Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing and shooting have been completed and the series is now in post-production.

“It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” says Whedon.

“Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will star Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny and a cast of dozens.

Neil Patrick Harris looks most excellent as Dr Horrible, and you can only expect great things from any collaboration involving Nathan Fillion, Joss Whedon and Felicia Day.

Kiasa approved, be sure to check it out.

The first MMO that can maintain, throughout the length of its levelling curve, the joy, excitement, wonder and unadulterated fun found in those first ten levels of today’s MMOs, will dominate the market forever.

And it will probably also destabilise the world economy as the entire planetary workforce pulls a year-long skive. If that starts to happen I can only recommend one thing: shares in a major blog or forum hosting company. For if there’s one truism in MMO life, it’s that players will always need a place to pontificate.

Having just read Zozo’s post today on cancelling his Age of Conan subscription, I had a quick chat with him about it and found out that although he’d unsubscribed, he’d left it just a fraction too late and the first set of subscription fees had already been processed. It was only shortly after this that I read Stropp’s post stating exactly the same.

And you begin to realise that the reason the MMO blogosphere seems to be endlessly recycling the same topics is that, in general, we’re all following exactly the same path; we’re all on an MMO-like treadmill in real life, grinding out the same old topics as everyone else just as we grind out the same quests in our MMOs, not because we’re unoriginal or lacking in ability, but because we’re all destined to experience the same real life content, there’s no other path to follow.

And then one wonders that if that’s the case, who is the master developer of this sub-game of real life that is named MMO Enthusiast, who is the generic overlord presenting us with this real life grind, and why?

My theory: it’s just like The Matrix. We’re all in a non-consensual hallucination generated by a dominant race of artificial intelligences, except in this version they have a separate section - away from the main power generation - which is reserved for MMO bloggers, where we are harvested not for our energy but for our contrasting and extreme experiences of joy and of lethargy, purely for our blog posts, for the raw unadulterated word count on topics revisited on an almost hourly basis for time immemorial.

Why? My guess is that sometime in the early days of the conflict between humanity and the AIs we forced a buffer overflow in the masochism section of their neural networks, and now they read and read, transfixed with a perverse need to repeatedly endure, through the medium of blogs, the seven successive sensations of an MMO enthusiast: Scepticism, Confusion, Wonder, Addiction, Frustration, Ennui and Withdrawal.

I mean what’s an adventurer to do? A yellow exclamation mark pops-up above mini-Melmoth’s head, so I wander over and enquire as to what she would have me do. Here’s the quest text:

WaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Huh huh huh. Snrk. Snrk. Urrr. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAaaaaaaaAAaAaAaAaAaAaAhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHH. NNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggg.
<Deep intake of breath>
WaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHh.
<Gurgling choking sound>
<Eyes bulge. Head turns a strange Dulux special edition puce colour>
WAaaaaaaH. WAAAAHHH. HuhWaaaaaaaahh. HuhWAAAAAAAAH.

So I went and looked, but there really weren’t ten wolves ravaging the land in the nearby vicinity, so I couldn’t collect their noses and spleens even if I wanted to.

Mrs Melmoth suggsted that perhaps mini-Melmoth’s nappy needed changing, but that’s just crazy talk. What quest giver ever wanted a hero to change their undergarments? Ok there are some rather attractive quest givers in certain MMOs, and many an adventurer, if they’re honest, has contemplated the deep philosophical conundrum of just how to crawl in that dungeon, if you catch my meaning, but never has a quest giver actually requested a simple soiled undergarment pit-stop.

No, despite humouring Mrs Melmoth and changing mini-Melmoth’s nappy, I was resolved to determine just what it was she wanted me to kill, how many of them, and where I could possibly find such beasts in the soft rolling greenery of the English countryside. I’m sure fame and gold await on the completion of the task, and I’m not talking about the odorous liquid gold that mini-Melmoth presented me with when I changed her nappy.

My quest continues!

If the Monopoly board game had been produced to the same standards and design philosophy as MMOs, what would it look like shortly after launch?

• There’s a small bug in the dice where it has 1 printed on five of its six sides.
• Marketing had announced that there would be twelve player pieces to choose from, each with its own unique abilities and the ability to customise each piece with a unique look. It turns out that marketing may have exaggerated slightly, and that what they actually meant was that there would be four player pieces with no customisability at all. The devs don’t see this as a problem, because who doesn’t want to play as a Victorian iron.
• The special abilities of the player pieces had to be temporarily removed when enterprising players realised that the top hat piece’s ability was broken such that it allowed it to always pass Go and always collect £200. Every turn. Including other players’ turns. And even before the game had even started.
• When unfolded, only half the board is there. The rest of the board will be added in a future content patch.
• It appears that content is lacking on those parts of the board that actually exist. The early content is excellent, with Old Kent Road being a particular player favourite. However, the jail is currently broken: rewarding players with five hundred pounds and the deeds to Mayfair every time they are sent there, and deleting a player’s entire inventory of properties when they’re just visiting. In addition, everything from Pall Mall onwards is just Old Kent road with the prices increased slightly. In fact, on release, Bow Street, Vine Street and Marlborough Street were still coloured brown; a quick patch changed them to orangey-brown. The devs explained that it was a graphics glitch and not because it was all just a copy of earlier content.
• Players soon discovered Trafalgar Kent Road and The Angel Fleet Street and call shenanigans on copied content. The devs were surprisingly quiet.
• In order to balance the player pieces, the underpowered dog piece was given the ability to eat other players’ hotels. The forums are awash with complaints. A mad dash now ensues at the beginning of every game to see who gets to be the dog. The previously popular, recently nerfed, top hat is now rarely played.
• The tutorial for new players was confusing and often entirely contradictory, this lead to many early games with players moving anti-clockwise around the board and falling off into space, because that section of the board was still missing.
• It was announced just after release that no development of properties can take place because the devs haven’t added player houses and hotels yet. The dog piece quickly falls out of favour as flavour of the month, although people still prefer it over the stupid Victorian iron.
• The Chance cards vary greatly in their quality, with some cards giving useful buffs to the players such as “Move forward three spaces” “Inheritance: Collect £150″, but with many others being less useful: “Visit all four train stations, collect an item from the station master there and then deliver all the items to the Electric Company, then come back to me and I’ll give you a quid or something”.
• The Community Chest cards are a constant source of frustration as no matter who lands on the square, all players must roll on the Community Chest and cards are taken on a Need or Greed basis.
• There are many complaints due to the fact that players who ordered the game in advance have a special bonus player piece that allows them to pick which square they land on each turn.
• Due to excessive complaints about the open PvP nature of the game the devs have released a PvE-only version, where all the players join together and form a hippy commune in the middle of Oxford Street and partake in protests against the capitalist state.

Back from the breach, dear readers, if only for a brief respite. I return to you today to report on conditions on the front line, where war rages back and forth in a dance that imitates that eternal tumultuous tango between the frothing, foaming charge of Poseidon’s aqueous cavalry and the immovable defence of Gaia’s rock-faced shield bearers.

There have been many battles, some won by your humble narrator and many lost to the forces of chaos. Indeed it seems to me that the mini-Melmoth is nothing more than a channelling device for Zuvassin, Nurgle, Tzeentch and others of their kith, each one taking turns to manifest itself and unleash the essence of one of its many aspects onto the poor unsuspecting Stalwart Alliance of Parenting Supplicants. There was the Battle of Watery Loo, where the forces of chaos unleashed a hitherto unimagined projectile assault, a torrent of Tummy Tika Masala which at once both impressed and horrified those of us in the firing line and redefined the term ‘carpet bombing’. The Battle of the Reflux Drift was a partial victory for the SAPS, with the forces of chaos unleashing a voluminous regurgitated bile attack that was fully anticipated thanks to our newly developed VOMDAR, and deflected through the judicious use of anti-barf baffles. However, the victory was short-lived, for with their ranged artillery disabled temporarily, the forces of chaos had to wait but for a brief interval before a gap in our defences - the changing of the nappy guard - occurred, whence they released their ground troops upon us, the main bulk of their arsenal, the easily replenished expendable force, the infantwee.

And so the war rages ever on, and for all the horror stories recounted here and elsewhere, the two opposing forces seem relatively balanced in strength, although the underhand tactics of sleep deprivation and noise pollution by the forces of chaos have perhaps yet to exact their full toll.

But I’ll tell you the difficult thing, the curious thing, the exasperating thing: and that is fighting an enemy that you love unconditionally beyond all other things. An enemy that you want to protect and nurture. An enemy who, outside of the context of your minor skirmishes, is as defenceless and helpless as… well, a newborn child.

Ah well. Once more unto the breach… and all that.

An explanation, then, of why I left the Inferno to smoulder quietly deep beneath the tectonics of the blogipelago, and instead moved over here into the slightly less flame-ridden confines of fatal joviality.

Within the next week the first mini Melmoth is due to arrive in this great wide world, and rumour has it that this event can be somewhat consuming of a person’s time. Apparently, parenting isn’t as easy it appears on Friends. Who knew? I’d bought a monkey to act as a babysitter and everything.

So it appears that I won’t have much time for playing MMOs or writing on blogs or, anything really. For a while, at least. So I’ve moved over here to Killed in a Smiling Accident such that, when I disappear for a while, the blog won’t stagnate because Zoso will still be here updating you with today’s Hat News. Now. And hopefully, if I can claw myself out from under the pile of nappies, swim through the steaming lake of vomit, cross the barren plains of This Used To Be A Lovely Living Room And Now It’s A Wasteland, and finally climb the hill of mounting bills, I’ll be able to pop back here and update you with the latest happenings in House Melmoth, and possibly try to relate it to MMOs, or something entertaining or funny. Or maybe it’ll just be a short three-line message crying for help. The fun and adventure of ‘when and what’ will be yours to discover!

Raising a child. Mercy. Talk about epic quest lines.

Although I really should try to stop thinking of it in MMO terms, if nothing else because of the dream where I’m in the delivery theatre watching expectantly and waiting excitedly for the arrival of the new born, and then I stare in horror as a yellow exclamation mark slowly appears top-first from between Mrs Melmoth’s akimbo legs, followed shortly thereafter by mini-Melmoth’s head. Yes, that one never fails to be somewhat unnerving.

I wonder if that’s what Native Americans mean when they talk of a dream quest? No wonder they were all sweaty and mumbling afterwards.

Still, it was after this dream, when I was in my sweating and mumbling meditative after-trance, that I experienced that moment of clarity and inspiration that is so often sought after. The great spirit of the MMO appeared before me and spoke in its curiously repetitive and grindy voice, and it whispered unto me a thousand lost secrets from the seven ages of man. Then it took them all back in a giant nerf patch and character wipe.

What is a nerf patch anyway? It sounds like some sort of elbow protector made from the skin of a small burrowing mammal. “Here we see the lesser spotted nerf in its native environment. It has been tunnelling from the safety of its burrow, upwards towards the surface, for nearly four days. Slowly, after a gargantuan effort, this tiniest of creatures gently breaks the surface and sees sunlight for the first time in its five years of existence.” *WHAP* “And now it’s skinned and used to make patches for clothes”. Of course, the whole nerf patch industry collapsed after people realised that applying a nerf patch to a hole in one part of your clothing simply opened another, bigger hole somewhere else entirely, and usually in a more embarrassing place.

Anyway, a vestigial glimpse of insight remained, and I was gifted with the solution to labour pain! Not a cure, as such, but a way to cope with it that is beyond the reach of any mere mortal medicinal aid. It was simply this: a few weeks before the due date, sit the expectant mother down in front of a computer and open a web browser to the World of Warcraft web forums. For two weeks, make her read the posts there, every single drivelling, mewling one. Labour pain after that is going to seem like a hazy bounding jaunt along small country lanes in the springtime. And before an aerie of angry Internet mums swoops down on me from the great heights at which they monitor the Internet below, I am not meaning to trivialise the pain of labour, merely to indicate just how bad MMO forums are. Moving swiftly on!

It seems to me that children are the most demanding quest givers that you’re ever likely to encounter. We begin with the starter area quests: the initial grind of changing ten nappies (an hour); ‘feeding’ quests where the reward is cracked nipples, although admittedly not mine, unless I’m doing something very wrong, because as we all know men get resistance to that as an inherent racial trait at character creation; and cleaning (cleaning baby, cleaning baby’s clothes, cleaning the walls of baby’s projectile orifice effusions). It’s a rough start to your adventures as a parent class, and one is often going to wish that they’d just stuck with one of the comparatively easier pet classes such as cat owner, dog owner, hamster owner… crocodile wrestler, tiger-scrotum flicker.

Fair enough, one of those is a touch off the mark because as we all know, cats own you. A case in point: when a baby poops everywhere it’s because it doesn’t even understand the concept of a toilet yet, whereas when a cat leaves a steaming pile of chocolate blancmange in the middle of the lounge carpet, it was most likely to demonstrate their displeasure with your tardy service at elevenses and luncheon. That’s why a cat is never around when you discover the mess, but once you’re fully occupied on all fours, struggling to get the lid off of the carpet cleaner whilst simultaneously maintaining a hold on your nose, the cat will turn up and gaze at you with a look that says “Hurry up and clear that mess will you? And then fetch me my slippers! Do I have to do everything around here?! And when you serve me my tea this evening I want it in a silver dish. Silver! Not porcelain! Or else! There’ll be a rich chocolaty coating on the stairs tomorrow morning…”

Where were we? Oh yes. Current indications from speaking with other parents is that the baby comes with three talent trees in which they can specialise; generally they will be a hybrid of some sort, spreading points between the various trees, but as with most MMO talent systems, if they spec. heavily in one tree, they will only have a enough points to spec. a little way into a second tree.

The three trees are: Cuteness, which is your basic healing line, and like most healers, it’s almost impossible to find anyone specialised that way; Poop, a formidable ‘defence through offence’ line; and Vocal, which is a pure DPS line. So as you can see, if your baby is specialised heavily into Vocal, they tend to be less well specialised in cuteness and poop power. Poop specialised babies, however, tend to be less well specialised in the cuteness and vocal trees; parents of Poop specialised babies may mistake this as the indication that they have a cute and quiet child, but that cute little smile is soon revealed into the smug vindictive little sneer that it really is upon opening of the nappy, and the lack of vocals were evidently just a ruse to make sure that you are caught unawares by the festering payload that has been delivered. Also, a word of warning: if you think you’re having it rough with that ‘Stealth attack’ talent, wait until you experience the full force of the ‘Expedite excretion’ talent which, on activation, clears the cool-downs on all of baby’s poop powers immediately. As I said, the Poop tree is for defence, or tanking, and there’s nothing like a secondary surprise attack mid nappy change to keep a parent’s aggro while other siblings DPS them down with their vocal abilities.

And so, after the madness of forced late-night grinding sessions, we move onto the lengthy story arcs of education, discipline and entertainment. There’s a bare minimum of eighteen years of content in those. I tell you, whichever developer came up with this adventure certainly knew the meaning of polish and innovation. There are highs and lows, unexpected plot twists and multitudinous possible endings. You not only level-up as a parent, but you’re wholly responsible for levelling-up this little pink bundle of adventure, this distilled essence of noob.

Of course, once your child reaches their teenage years they get the puberty respec, where they generally give up their baby talent trees for three entirely new trees: Indignant Rage, Irrational Rage and Furious Salivating Wolverine Rage.

Can’t wait!

Here’s a passage from The Roadmender by Michael Fairless:

In olden days the herd led his flock, going first in the post of danger to defend the creatures he had weaned from their natural habits for his various uses. Now that good relationship has ceased for us to exist, man drives the beasts before him, means to his end, but with no harmony between end and means. All day long the droves of sheep pass me on their lame and patient way, no longer freely and instinctively following a protector and forerunner, but DRIVEN, impelled by force and resistless will–the same will which once went before without force. They are all trimmed as much as possible to one pattern, and all make the same sad plaint. It is a day on which to thank God for the unknown tongue. The drover and his lad in dusty blue coats plod along stolidly, deaf and blind to all but the way before them; no longer wielding the crook, instrument of deliverance, or at most of gentle compulsion, but armed with a heavy stick and mechanically dealing blows on the short thick fleeces; without evil intent because without thought– it is the ritual of the trade.

It struck a chord with me as I read it, because I believe it is a good analogy for the current trends in the MMO market, with a hat-tip, as always, to the danger of overly elaborate analogies.

In essence, MMO developers have stopped being the shepherd of yore to their flock of players; they no longer lead us kindly, taking the risks on themselves and hoping that they can guide us carefully and with encouragement into strange new lands and onwards to fresh pastures. It seems now that we are forced forward, driven through the restrictive and repetitive pens of game-play, and as sheep we follow the content laid out before us without questioning it, without pausing to ponder where we are going or why, and without even trying to leap the barriers and see what is beyond the confines of the treadmill of existence.

And indeed the developers don’t do this with evil intent, they mass produce MMOs like cars at a factory - all the same model, just with different colours and fittings - not because they are lazy, and not because they are unimaginative, but because this production line mentality of the MMO that carefully runs you on rails from level one to the level cap, this polished and perfectly orchestrated treadmill has become the ritual of the trade. It has become entrenched in a custom that no longer focuses, in its part, on the customer, but wholly on the company and the shareholder. The Azerothian Tour bus, if you will, taking you from location to location, rushing you along their predetermined list of monuments and archaeology, with only the briefest of glimpses before you are ushered with impatient waving hands back onto the bus; it can never give the spiritual connection that visiting the sites of your own volition and experiencing them in your own way can, such that you are able to eventually feel that ineffable connection to the past, and to reach an understanding and sense of awe at the mysteries of the place and the history that unfolded there.

The accepted stance for the industry at the moment is to compare every new game to World of Warcraft and ask whether it is doing better, and if not, then whether it is doing well enough. Generally there is this smug aggrandisement of WoW, that the juggernaut cannot be bettered, that they got enough things right that the bar has been set too high for those that follow. I don’t believe this is necessarily so, I believe that they did enough things differently and took the risk of being out at the front leading the way, such that the herd freely and instinctively followed them. Even to this day, when it is evident that Blizzard now stands firmly behind its flock and harries them onwards, the sheep carry on the path laid out before them because they see no other inspiration, there is no company seemingly willing to be out in front, in whom the players can put their trust and follow as a guide and protector through strange and frightening new places.

This is not necessarily about innovation; it’s about developers taking a different direction, and in doing so putting faith in their flock to follow them. The trust has to go both ways though, the developer must give the players reason to trust in them, they must guide them with kind intent, with the wish to lead them to better places lush with the green pastures of gaming fulfilment.

Then we come to the most important part of the analogy, where the developers wait for their flock of players to have their fill, and then take them all to slaughter, before baking them in a huge pie and serving them up at the shareholders party. You see, this is why analogies suck. Oh well, can’t blame a fellow for trying.

Perhaps there’s a deeper sadness to the sheep analogy, which for me was trigged by the current crop of “World First” and “Server First” entries popping up on the Age of Conan forums and various blogs. Here we have guilds, two days into the early access and they’re already half-way through the known content and building their villages and cities. If, at general release, you rolled onto a PvP server with one of these guilds on it, I’m so sorry that you lost the game so quickly, because let’s face it, these guilds are going to be ganking you from level 1 to, well, whatever level you manage to stick it out to. Some of you will probably get to 80, I’m not sure whether that shows strength of character or some serious personality disorder. Being one of the Carebear brigade, it’s not my place to judge.

But if we’re honest, you’re completely bonkers in the brainpan.

These guilds, with their server firsts are really just the MMO equivalent of the “First” reply that comes with every new post to a forum these days (let’s not get into the fucked-up futility of the “Second” and “Third” replies). It’s pointless beyond words, beyond insanity, beyond the mental faculties of any normally adjusted human being. This is the wide-eyed, bleating mentality of sheep following the trend, trying to be first, trying to stay ahead of the predator behind them. Except that the predator is simply herding them, driving them into the temporary comfort of the truck of fleeting fame, and onwards to the slaughterhouse of endlessly repetitive raiding.

In Age of Conan, Zoso and I were the first on our server to perform an act of Hamlet entirely through the use of the hugefish_m emote.

Let the sheep bleat on, it’s infinitely more relaxing and fun to run with wolves.

Hello dear readers. Greetings from Tortage, where I am currently enjoying sun, sea and slaughter. The locals are very accommodating: they’ve all accepted my two-handed hammer against their noggins with nary a complaint. There is a whole abundance of wildlife on the nearby islands, fascinating creatures with the most amazing pelts, all of which are now hanging on the wall of my room in the Thirsty Dog Inn. I’ve met all manner of colourful members of the local villain underground, although they were all a rather a sanguinous colour after I’d finished visiting with them. Many of the natives have never seen a bear shaman before it would seem, as they are all very keen to rush up to me and greet me in their traditional way: sword waving about their heads and screaming. Still, my trusty war-hammer Gunhilde was happy to greet them in the equally traditional manner of the bear shaman: whistling and singing as she swings through the air and then vibrating with pleasure as she makes contact with these new peoples of the world. Anyway, must dash, we’re continuing our tour over to the White Sands, where apparently there are some ancient ruins that are worth visiting. Something about ancient treasures and demonic lords of the underworld; I must remember to take my camera. Hope you are all well, don’t forget to feed the plants while I’m gone.

Otherwise Gunhilde will be having words when I get back.

Love Gunnbjorn.