Killed in a smiling accident.

Are badgers simply the criminal element of Ger society, and somewhere in the wild there is an as yet undiscovered policing subfamily of blue and white striped Mustelidae called the goodger?

Who knows! I must confess that it was just meant as a distraction, a piece of flavoursome bait placed carefully on the ground, covered in leaf litter and attached to a thick vine rope that will snag you by the leg, swing you up into the captive audience tree and force you to hang there so that I can bludgeon you with rather rudimentary ruminations regarding MMOs without risk of reprisal.

My apologies.

But hey, now that you’re here and conveniently immobilised hanging upside down by your mind’s leg (a bit like your mind’s eye, but it allows your mind to wander), I feel perhaps that you would be receptive to a little wistful blathering on my part about one of my favourite hobbies. If during the course of my diatribe you start to feel faint, hallucinate or develop an intense migraine, it is possibly just the blood rushing to your head as you dangle there, on the other hand these are also known side effects when listening to me for any extended period of time.

So the real question I want to pose is this: is ‘massive’ the wrong focus for multiplayer online RPGs?

I’ve recently started playing Mass Effect due to my need for a single player game that can be dropped at the scream of a baby (which is like the drop of a hat, only faster and requiring more poo clearing), and for the short amount of time that I’ve played it I’ve enjoyed the experience tremendously. However, somewhere at the back of my mind there is the parasite of dissatisfaction, nibbling delicately on my pia mater and making me wonder how much better the game would be if my two fellow adventurenauts weren’t controlled by an AI suffering dementia on a scale that would make HAL’s red eye turn green with envy, but were instead controlled by my close friends, who I am happy to report are not demented in the slightest. Although based on the witterings of this post, that may not be as much of an endorsement as I had intended. Fighting the parasite of dissatisfaction are the antibiotics of immersion, which help me to look past the fact that my compatriots in the game have had their intelligence modelled on the philosophies and theorems of an especially thick oak sideboard and their movement routines lifted wholesale from the frantic rampage of a hyperactive puppy with chronic diarrhoea, by pointing out that all the NPCs, every other character in the game in fact, is a paragon of subtle method acting and restrained existence. There are no crowds of people whizzing past me at full pelt blowing raspberries and emoting in spurious ways, no diplomats or traders spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees as they bounce back and forward between two spots of the queue they’re waiting in. None of them dance naked on top of the Citadel tour guide terminals. Everyone I speak to uses sentences, none of them talk in tongues, I mean not one person has shouted out in the alien embassies “HAI EVR1 LUVS ME COS I TLK LEIK GIBBON”.

The level of immersion is intense. Well apart from the times when I, as commander, tell my squad to move forward and hold a position; off we charge, assault rifles blazing, I’m taking a bit of damage, actually a bit more damage than I should if I was being given covering fire and so I search around for said coverers. Lo and behold, my squad have in actual fact run in the opposite direction to the one I commanded and are even now having a competition to see who can repeatedly ram their crotch the hardest into the sentry gun we skirted around earlier, while it merrily plugs away at the privates’ privates.

The thought that followed was: could I have had this experience in World of Warcraft? I’m talking about the immersion part here not the crotch ramming team-mate part, for that I’d just need to join the first pick-up group I could find. The answer was: quite possibly, if I’d taken the time to learn how to run a private (read pirate) server, a server where I just granted accounts to my friends, and perhaps a few of their closest friends. The world would still be populated with NPCs, the major cities would be no more empty than they currently are, Shattrath, Ogrimmar and Stormwind excepted, and yet the world would be entirely devoid of smacktards intent on ruining your gaming experience in whatever manner possible.

I then wondered, what if WoW itself was like that by default? Instead of logging into a single server with a population of six thousand people, what if guilds in the game actually had their own instance of a server? You’d log into your server and all the PCs would be guild mates, and they’d all (assuming you were sensible with who you invited) share the same goals and want the same things from the game. What advantages might this set-up have?

For a start, players would feel more like the hero in the traditional fantasy tale, part of a select group of individuals who were destined to change the world, not a nondescript part of the shambling mass of quest tourists and January Loot Sale fanatics that currently ravage Azeroth on a daily basis. The community would be small and close knit, and individuals in that community would have greater opportunities to make a name for themselves and create legends around their character. It would be easier to make player-driven storylines, because giving just one character the Immortal Songblade of Arsewhopping on a server wouldn’t mean that thousands of other players were missing out on having that item. It would also be easier to allow players on a small guild server to be able to affect the world around them in a way that mattered and changed it permanently, because again it wouldn’t be denying that experience to thousands of other players. I also imagine that the virtual world would feel less claustrophobic, because when you take your first tentative steps into the foreboding Forest of Dark & Doom[TM], you wouldn’t peer around the first set of trees only to see an entirely deforested swampland with the indigenous population of Flaming Hellforged Dire Wolves of Armageddon dashing past you, yelping and with their tails between their legs, as one hundred and forty adventurers clatter after them screaming “LOOOOOL”.

Not to mention that you could kiss goodbye to any gold seller chat and mail spam, because without an invite to your server, they’re not getting near you. There could be a public server for trial accounts, and I’m sure the gold sellers would make the place the home of their verbal fallout, but from a subscription sales point of view, it would only encourage players to subscribe and join their own private haven free from such unctuous spiced ham and the inevitable vituperation that follows.

There are many disadvantages even outside of the technical limitations, of course, but those that I have thought of so far are not all that bad, and certainly worth enduring to remove the smacktarded majority whilst maintain the ability to explore and adventure with others. Auction houses, for example, could be linked between server instances, so that all saleable items appeared to all players of the game, hence a universal economy would exist even with the worlds being instanced. And although there’s no real solution to the ‘fancy meeting you here’ effect, where you just happen to meet the same fellow adventurers day after day, you can look at it another way: Lord of the Rings would have been even harder to keep up with if the main cast had changed entirely on a daily basis, and besides, it’s not really any different from having a guild that you regularly group to the exclusion of pickup groups and others.

Obviously this is all dependent on the type of MMO. Planetside, for example, would probably be pretty dull with forty to fifty people on the server, although having said that, Starsiege Tribes didn’t have many more per game, and it was still brilliant fun, but then its maps were a lot smaller. EVE lends itself well to having as many concurrent players as its infrastructure can handle, but then its ‘world’ is actually a universe, which slightly edges out the two meagre continents of Azeroth in terms of ’space for player to spread out in’.

Perhaps my point isn’t that these multiplayer games should not be massive at all, but that the measure of the massiveness shouldn’t necessarily be the number of concurrent players in the world but could in certain circumstances focus on the number of instances of the world. Just look at the constant demand for new servers from players in World of Warcraft, who want a fresh start and another crack at the world before everything has been done and completed; if the game offered you the chance to create a new fresh instance of the world whenever you wanted, and to only invite those people who you consider to be friends or to have the same play-style or mindset as you, would people find less of a problem with reaching the end-game and stagnating?

Although, all things considered, I have enough problems with alternative characters in MMOs, without the option of creating alternative worlds.

I think I just invented multiversitus.

Anyway, must dash, I can hear goodger sirens approaching; they must have found that stash of bread and milk I stole from old Mrs Crumbly’s garden.

World of Warcraft’s achievements system will launch with more than 500 individual achievements covering every aspect of game-play, and our man on the inside at Blizzard has given us a few of the more common achievement titles and their respective achievements to be found when Wrath of the Lich King launches:

• Glider: Have epic shoulders that are more than twice your characters height in width.
• Opportunist: Steal at least five guild banks within a month.
• Man Eater: Obtain a flying mount by cybering with male guild members.
• True Man Eater: Obtain a flying mount by cybering with male guild members. (Female players only)
• Mercenary: Join at least ten raiding guilds within a week with the same character.
• Triumph of Hope over Experience: Join at least fifty PUGs.
• Outraged: Use the phrase “slap in the face” in at least one hundred forum posts.
• Overcompensator: Have an epic weapon that’s more than twice your character’s height in length.
• Irony Champion: Shout three hundred times in the general channel for spammers to stop flooding the general channel.
• Abasement: Maintain a seven-days-a-week raid schedule for at least four months.
• Ridickeweluss: Attempt to use the word ‘ridiculous’ in a forum post and fail miserably.
• Cavernous Cakehole: Type two thousand words in ALL CAPS.
• Milliner: Possess at least 15 hats.
• Drama Tank: Quit and rejoin the same guild at least five times.
• All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go: Join at least ten PUGs that stand outside of an instance for half an hour waiting for a tank or healer, then disband.
• Nemesis of Originality: Create four characters with names that are rubbish variations on Legolas.
• Validated: Link fifty items in guild chat in one play session.
• Dust Collector: Spend two hundred hours posing outside the auction house or bank.
• Lust Collector: Spend two hundred hours as a naked dancing female night elf outside the auction house or bank.
• Wganker the G is Silent: Gank one hundred players that are at least half your character’s level.
• The Cycle Continues: Get ganked fifty times in Stranglethorn Value by a level 70, then return at level 70 and gank at least fifty players.
• Sun Tzu of the Battlegrounds: Shout eighty helpful commands in battlegrounds like “HEAL!” and “OMG U NOOBS!!!”
• You Don’t Want To Do That: Instruct at least three classes that you have never played how to perform their role, and what their spec should be.
• Horse’s Ass: Sit with your big, fat, show-off mount in such a way as to prevent other players from accessing an NPC for thirty hours.
• Bedhopper: Co-habit with three different guild members in real life.
• Guildhopper: Co-habit with three members of different guilds in real life.
• Mormon: Co-habit with three different guild members simultaneously in real life.
• The Greatest Person in the World Ever: Win at least one arbitrary race against a level one character whilst on your epic mount, or one duel against a level one character whilst wearing your complete set of Tier 7.
• Practising for Real Life: Spend three days begging for gold in a capital city.
• Always Doing Doughnuts: Never remain stationary for more than one second before jumping/running around in circles again.
• Moustache: Loot twenty quest objectives/gathering nodes from under the nose of a person who’s just pulled a mob away from them.
• Full House of Originality: Have characters named after an individual from Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dragonlance, The Belgariad and the Chronicles of Narnia.
• Blizzard’s Bitch: Achieve more than one hundred achievements the day Wrath of the Lich King is launched on all five of your level seventy characters.
• Sarcastic Blogger: Make up at least twenty five vaguely insulting achievements.

To a certain set of bloggers out there, who shall remain unnamed.

Dear Warhammer Online developers,

I know that you’re kind of busy at the moment what with having to, according to the more dramatic bloggers out there, remove three hundred and fifty billion percent of your game because you felt it wasn’t up to scratch. I understand that you’re trying to make your game feature and content rich, and that you’ve perhaps bitten off slightly more than you had budgeted mastication resources for, but here are a couple of ideas that I had this morning that might be fun to add (if you haven’t done so already, I’m not in the beta so I wouldn’t know):

If you’re going to have a copy of World of Warcraft’s armoury for your players, and I imagine you are because one would think that in a PvP-centric game, bragging to others is basically the core philosophy behind the design, could you go one step further and have a little Flash plug-in that people could stick on their website? This plug-in that I’m picturing would display a nice 3D-model of whatever character the player decides to show, rotatable through three hundred and sixty degrees, perhaps with a slightly tweaked renderer to make the character look like the classic Games Workshop lead models that we all know, love and have chewed upon in our youth more than is probably healthy. I imagine this character model could even be displayed complete with the little 30mm circular base with slightly dodgy looking foam grass.

Even better (and I’m sure you can slot this in too because you’re not very busy at the moment right?) have an interface to allow the player to paint their figure; I mean, half the fun of the miniatures game was painting your troops in custom colours, so why not continue the hobby with the online game. One of the things I find most depressing about many of the current stock of MMOs is the general lack of character customisation, the fact that there are very few options where the player can express their creativity and originality through their character; the reason I’ve stayed subscribed to City of Heroes for so long is the fact that if the generally grindy game-play becomes too dull, I can always flex my creativity muscle, give my muse a prod and create a bizarre new manifestation from my brain spasms.

Secondly, and along the same lines, have the plug-in also give access to the player’s Tome of Knowledge for that character, such that people can see their achievements easily but in the context of the game interface, thus making it easy for players of the game to navigate. Assuming you’ve got a suitably Hemlokian Nifty! feature in the Tome for it to capture screenshots and store them like a photo album, this would provide bloggers with an easy way to share their character’s adventures without having to constantly crop/thumbnail/rotate/gamma correct/frame in oak their own screenshots.

I’m confidant that this would all be easy to do, probably only a couple of lines of code, and so I’m sure you can fit it in during a lunch break or something.

Love and kisses,

Melmoth.

Zoso pointed out a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article this morning, about the free-to-play, your-soul-in-a-silk-purse-for-upgrades Korean MMO Air Rivals. It looks like a game deserving of a lengthy late night session of manly joystick waggling for sure, but it was Jim Rossignol’s almost throwaway comment about trying the free Robot MMO Exteel that got me to a-thinking, which for me is a rare event indeed.

Where is my BattleTech MMO? Where are our decent stompy robot MMOs? Yes there’s RFOnline and Exteel, but you’ll notice that I pre-qualified my statement by using the word ‘decent’. Surely it’s not just the Koreans who are madly, deeply in love with giant mechanical fighting machines?

EVE Online, now there’s a game where they have character development, and to a certain extent vehicle development in parallel. Vehicles aren’t just expensive mounts in EVE, or a convenient representation of how a player deals damage, they’re so much more. The ships in EVE are tweaked and upgraded and enhanced and even named. ‘Love my badger’ is no longer just a search term that will get you to a website with strangely bearded West Country folk who maintain questionable relations with members of the Mustelidae family.

So if you’re listening CCP, seeing as you are already working on the other MMO that I want to see most of all in the world, how about expanding your EVE universe to have giant mechanised combat on the surfaces of the various planets that the players fly past on a daily basis and pay little heed to, or simply buy the BattleTech rights from Wizkids and give us the decent stompy robot MMO we all desire.

I had a chance to pop my head into the Wizard101 beta last night briefly. I didn’t get terribly far, but I managed to get through the character creator. Even from that stage of the game alone it’s readily apparent that it’s very similar to Toontown Online: big cartoon fonts, a simple interface and a naming system that forces you to choose from a series of lists, one for your forename, and two to make up your surname. I can see why they do this and it’s not a bad system, it certainly allows for creative combinations within the strict confines of names that don’t refer to frantic fornication between friendly flexible females.

However, a word to the wise at KingsIsle Entertainment: in the UK and possibly other places, pants are underwear, not trousers or pantaloons.

So without further ado, I present my new character: Brian Boompants.

He’s a storm wizard, you know. Lots of wind.

It’s currently in beta so there’s the Inevitable NDA at the moment, but there’s plenty more information available on the Wizard101 website and on places such as West Karana.

And if playing as a windy-panted wizard sounds appealing, you can still sign-up to help test the game at the time of my writing.

That nice Mr Sony celebrated the 5th anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies by sending an e-mail saying my Star Wars Galaxies account had been reactivated for July, which I thought was particularly decent of him as it was only ever a free trial account. During the trial I’d done a few quests, tried my hand at dancing for a while as a Mon Calamari named after a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, but spent most time flying around space shooting down TIE fighters. Still no word through about the Jumpgate: Evolution beta, so I thought I’d pop back into SWG to see if I remembered how to fly a Y-wing. I did. I also remembered Y-wings are lumping great assault fighters that handle like bricks, which is a bit of a problem as a rebel pilot. The next available fighter is the good old X-Wing, but I was approximately sixty eight billion XP away from qualifying for it. Alternatively I could go back to the previous ship, the Z95 Hyphen-wing, a lovely nippy little thing, the only drawback being it’s so small that you can only mount very lightweight components (and if you need to stick some shopping in the boot or pick the kids up from Jedi Academy, forget it). The ideal solution would be a “High Mass Variant” Z95, still agile but capable of mounting heavier components, but a quick browse of Intergalactic eBay only turned up a couple of people selling them for way more money than I had.

What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality? I’ll tell you what turns a man neutral in Star Wars Galaxies, the Mark 2 Dunelizard. The heavy version of it packs the same punch as a Y-wing Longprobe with the manoeuvrability of a Z95, for less than 1/10th the price of a Z95 HMV. Bargain! Course you can’t fly them as a rebel pilot, so I toddled off to the nearest Rebel officer and told him I was resigning my commission as I’d been slightly mistaken when I joined up in saying my whole life had been dedicated to fighting the Imperial scum and faithfully declaring to fight for the Rebel cause forever, and what I really meant was I’d only be sticking around until I found the neutrals got much snazzier ships. Then it was off to a neutral recruiter, and back into space to shoot a bunch of pirates.

While battling the titular waves of demented avengers, marching cheerfully out of obscurity into the path of my laser cannons, some of them would engage in a bit of banter, the typical sort of NPC thing, “Hah, lucky shot!” and that sort of thing. The effect was slightly undermined, though, by the fact that the early ships were typically blown apart in just a few salvoes, so their threats rang a bit hollow when, by the time the little vidscreen popped up with the smug pirate taunting away, their actual ship had been reduced to dust, the dust to atoms, and the atoms to nothing, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

WAR is, as they say, coming.

We can take that in its literal sense of course, or as I like to do, interpret it as some sort of new kiddie street slang for ‘fantastic’ as in “Man, have you heard that coming new CSS track?”; “This new Apple gadget is totally coming!”; “That was the most coming race I’ve ever seen” and onwards to the slightly more abstruse “We’re going out, are you coming?” and “Oh God! I’m coming! I’m coming!”.

Nevertheless, it’s comi… on its way, and this was reinforced a few days ago by the pre-purchase codes for the collector’s edition turning up. Brilliantly packaged it was too, an entire (albeit slim-line) DVD box for essentially a single sheet of paper folded in half.

Tell me, human, of this Earth device that you call email.

Despite the ludicrous packaging, the codes were all there: there’s the one for beta access, the one for the in-game bonus XP item and the one for something else, which I must confess I’ve entirely forgotten in the staggering excitement of having several strings of alphanumeric characters and nowhere to use them. It’s a dangerous item to have around though, because every time I catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye I feel the hype clawing at me, like the cold hard feeling of a general anaesthetic slowly crawling up your arm, and the irresistible wave of blackness sweeping over you as it quickly claims your consciousness. “I’ll just have a quick look at the website, what harm could it do?”; “I guess… I guess I should probably register, you know, just in case there’s a mad rush later.”; “Oh, there’s a screenshots section, is there? I’ll just have a quick peak… oh, shiny!”; “It’s probably a good idea to research the races and classes ahead of time. I mean, all the information is there, it would be rude not to.”

And then it’s two o’clock in the morning, and you struggle out from under a pile of papers of character sketches, and skill trees, and maps of the starter zones replete with quest objectives and optimised pathing routes for levelling. And you gaze in stark horror at what you’ve done, the monster you’ve created, and from beneath the corner of a pile of paper you see the pre-purchase box looking at you. And it laughs a deep, booming, maniacal laugh of victory. And you hold your hands to your head and scream.

And then you wake-up. And it’s morning. You’re in bed. You let out the calming, shaky sigh of the dream-waker, as you smile sheepishly to yourself at the foolish faux horror. But as you open your sleepy eyes in order to greet the day you find yourself staring into a papier-mâché face. And the camera quickly pans away to the ceiling to show you curled naked around a life-size recreation of your newly planned character. And you hold your hands to your head and scream.

Of course your experience might differ, I’m just saying that that’s what usually happens to… someone. Else. Who’s not me. No.

I am, unfortunately, getting the first twinges of excitement now. I say unfortunately because, as soon as the excitement gets a hold, as soon as it manages to find that first footing in the rock face of your resolve, it begins its gecko-swift ascent and plants the Flag of Fleeting Fanboyism in the summit of your mind. I’m trying to resist, trying not to get too interested in it because it’s a long way off; it’ll probably be disappointing at launch, either because it’s rubbish, or because it’s so good that the servers crash from the player load; it’ll be full of PvPwits for at least a few hours, until they’ve all buggered off and reached the level cap, and it will almost certainly not live up to the ludicrous amount of hype that the company is putting out, let alone those fanboy bloggers who orbit through the hyposphere above us in their Delusion Balloons, at the insane heights that only the most pumped-up, unrealistic, wholly conjecture-based analysis can reach.

However, having explained that I’m trying not to get excited, the gecko of excitement has indeed begun his ascent, and I’ve had a look at the various races and classes in order to get an idea as to what I’d like to play, and hopefully I’ll be able to provide a brief Melmothising of them in the near future.

In short though: War Priests and Ironbreakers are totally coming.

Let’s see, other than spending copious amounts of time covered in poop and vomit (have I mentioned the baby at all?), what have I been up to that might be marginally more interesting to those of you who come to read this blog on occasion.

Well time really has been at a premium so MMOs were the first to suffer the +1 Pendulous Axe of Time Management. It’s hard to find an MMO that one can dip into and play with very little commitment; it’s not just the relatively small slices of time that I am afforded to play at the moment, where travelling time in some MMOs would consume ninety percent of my play experience, but also the fact that it’s very hard to just abandon an MMO at the drop of a demanding baby’s +2 Hat of Vocalised Attention Seeking. In a single player game it’s very easy to hit a pause button, press escape to pull-up the options menu (which I suppose is the modern game equivalent of the pause key), or to just abandon the game very quickly wherever your character currently stands, knowing that when you return they will be standing where you left them, perhaps picking their nose or tapping their foot impatiently, but otherwise unscathed. Not so in an MMO: if you leave your character for even a fraction of a second, turn your head to look at something on the television, say, or look briefly out of the window at all the young healthy people soaking up their daily dose of vitamin D, perhaps bend down to rub some life into the numb slabs of jelly that pass for one’s legs, or so much as blink for longer than the requisite human system requirement of four hundred milliseconds, and a thousand angry mobs will have rained down upon your character and have reduced them to zero health points before you can say “By Chronos’ hairy arse! I glanced away for no more than the duration of the blanking period of my monitor! It’s not even visible to the human eye for crying out loud!”.

Having said all that, I have been dipping into City of Villains on occasion, for a quick half hour blast here and there, generally teaming-up with Zoso and or Elf; I’ve created a new character on which I can experiment with the power-set proliferation that occurred in the I12 ‘Midnight Hour’ update, and being that my love for the Earth Control power-set is unhealthy, and in fact illegal in twelve American states, I decided to create an Earth/Thorns dominator, and thus the Iron Cactus was born. Part man. Part machine. Part succulent spiny plant.

I may have also rolled an Electric/Willpower Brute, a Dual Blade/Regen Scrapper and a Willpower/Super Strength tank, although I haven’t played any of those characters at all yet.

But I’m not an altoholic!^[1]

I’ve also dipped into Guild Wars on occasion, essentially because, like a saucepan of dark chocolate and cream melted over a stove, it’s very, uh, dip-inable. I have a dervish, Wur Lin (WUR LIN! Whirling! As in whirling derv… ok, I was slightly inebriated and it sounded clever at the time) a monk, Mun Ki, (MUN KI. Monkey! As in monk eee… er, eh?) and an assassin, Tri Badism (TRI BADISM. Tribadism! As in… Ah. Well. Look it up some time, ey? Possibly not from work. And not if you’re under 18). Anyhoo, I think that’s plenty enough evidence of my, to be expected, curious naming conventions for my many characters.

But I’m not an altoholic!^[2]

Guild Wars is terribly easy to just hop into and play a mission or two, with the option of being able to drop it in an instant should a delightful ickle pink bundle of rabid screaming poo projection require one’s immediate attention. Admittedly most of my characters are in the early teens of the level progression cap of twenty, and this essentially means that they’re hardly anywhere at all in terms of game progress, but as with my never having reached the level cap in City of Heroes/Villains, for me it’s a game about the play, rather than the progress.

What makes City of Villains and Guild Wars so readily accessible to what I dub the Radical Casual player, the “It takes fanatical dedication to be this non-committal to a game” gamer? I think it’s a combination of things:

• The short time it takes to travel anywhere. Both games have travel systems that mean you can get where you need to go, and be slaughtering your way through bags of XP in no time at all.
• The short time it takes to make some progress. In both games, quests are readily available, relatively quick to complete, and generally not terribly complex. Yes, both games have deeper, longer, more complex missions at the higher levels, but they maintain this quick-access, easy goal, mission structure throughout a large portion of the levelling curve.
• The time-minimal death penalty. Both games make it very quick and very easy to get yourself back into the fight, especially when you don’t have a rezzing character in the party. Both have penalties that could perhaps be considered more harsh than that in, say, WoW, because in WoW if you make the run to your corpse you suffer nothing but a little damage to your equipment which is easily repaired, but it is the length of that corpse run that hurts the Radical Casual player because it’s time wasted, and time is the defining limiting factor in their enjoyment of a game.

So that’s it for MMO, or MMO-like, games at the moment. As Zoso mentioned, many bloggers, of which we are no exception, seem to be experiencing the Anticipatocene era of the MMO timeline, sub-heading: “What We Do Whilst Waiting For WAR”.

My other gaming action in recent times has been Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a Final Fantasy-alike, with the various elements of a JPRG but with the rude, crude and not-for-the-prude humour that any fan of the online web comic would come to expect. With the speed of encounters, and the fact that they are not sprung on the player, but initiated by them at their choosing by walking into an area containing enemies, it’s again an ideal play style for those of us who have to regularly acknowledge a priority interrupt, we who experience random encounters of the tot kind. The game was entertaining enough to keep me playing until the end - the humour quite successfully treads that fine line of juvenile puerility without being obnoxious - but I found the combat mechanics a little frustrating, perhaps dull is the better description. I seemed to spend most combat encounters waiting for the most powerful combos to charge, and just blocking or healing damage the rest of the time, which essentially consists of pressing the spacebar a lot, or clicking a few menu options. I’m not sure if this is just indicative of the JRPG style of combat - it’s been a while since I last played Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger - but seeing as the combat constitutes the bulk of the game-play, I think there could have been a greater emphasis on tactical decisions, perhaps the Tactics style of play might have been more engaging. Nevertheless, the story was fun, the writing and art direction excellent, and the game-play was certainly not tortuous, indeed the idea of having mini-games to play through to get the maximum damage from your high-power combos was a nice touch. I’ll certainly be purchasing the next instalment when it arrives. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is available on Steam and also through PA’s Greenhouse.

In non-gaming related activities I’ve been trying to read when I can, which seems to be predominantly in those periods where one hand is occupied in holding a bottle to Mini-melmoth’s chasm-like, gorging mouth hole. I fair blasted my way through The Lies of Locke Lamora, an easy to read fantasy heist with likeable characters told through fluid, playful prose. Charles Stross’ Halting State got me through many a late night feeding session. It is, however - like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother - one of these near-future novels that rubs one’s nose in the techno-jargon of today, tweaked slightly in attempt to appear 1984-like in its predictive nature. Which, frankly, just annoys the hell-fired pants out of me, because it’s just a jarring interruption to show how clever and techno-savvy the author is, rather than a commentary on anything in particular. Constantly having your protagonists use ‘weird’ and ‘wonderful’ futuristic Google applications, by having them (in some sort of Star Trek parody) hax0r in an improbable fashion an application to produce an inverted BitTorrent flow through Google’s forward deflector shield, in order to undermine the authorities in that hip, cool and subversive manner that only asocial computer nerds can manage, is just tedious, frankly. If you want to see a near-enough-to-be-scary prediction of the future that was written in recent times (1984 is still the unassailable granddaddy, and the story that every author of this type of book should strive to achieve), then you read Gibson’s Neuromancer. No Google, no 5000 jiggerbyte iPods or Xbox 2020 editions, but it still predicts a future that we can overlay on our current reality, like a virtual map, and plot the route, as clear as the neon-bathed streets of a Chiba district at night, that humanity is taking.

Having said all that, Halting State isn’t a bad book, other than for that minor personal nitpick, which probably nobody else shares. Oh, and it mentions Scotland far too often to be subtle, often enough to be blatantly jarring after a while. Yes, we get it, you’re Scottish, and a big fan of Scotland and you believe in it as a nation, and you probably hate the English, and all that, so it’s not the UK, because that would include the English and they don’t deserve any advertising unless it’s in a bad light, such as a Hollywood villain. So it’s a story about how the Scottish police were called into investigate a Scottish crime in the heart of Scotland’s Scottish hi-tech infrastructure, or Scotlandstructure, as they call it in the Scottish suburbs of Scotland’s Scotlandscape. There’s a subtle subliminal message in there, but I’m just not quite getting it.

In other news, Mrs Melmoth and I are taking Mini-melmoth to Scotland on vacation this year. No idea why, it just seemed like a good idea.

[1]May be a lie. Regulations and guarantees apply. This statement does not affect your statutory rights.

[2]Yeah, ok, it’s a lie.

So my theory, which is mine (and not Anne Elk’s) is that people tend to try an MMOG (maybe from peer pressure, maybe a dealerpublisher offers a free trial, maybe they see MMOG use glamorised on TV), then either hate it and get put off them for life, or become hooked, play that game for a long time, finally get bored, then flit around from other MMOG to other MMOG, trying to recapture that first hit but never quite finding it again.

It’s that old, old story of boy meets MMOG, boy falls in love with MMOG, boy plays MMOG unceasingly to a frankly unhealthy degree for many months, boy starts to tire of MMOG and starts looking around at other MMOGs, boy furtively subscribes to other MMOG (while still logging in to the first from time to time) and secretly enjoys it more, boy unsubscribes from first MMOG, boy suddenly finds the second MMOG isn’t so different from the first after all and rapidly tires, boy moves on from MMOG to MMOG never recapturing that original feeling and realises that first MMOG was his True MMOG, boy returns to that first MMOG but finds it’s moved on, expansions have been released, rules have changed and it’s not the MMOG he remembers, boy is spurned by first MMOG, boy is disconsolately on the verge of abandoning MMOGs for good when, in a hugely emotional finale, a “Classic” expansion is released for that first MMOG returning things to the way they were and boy and MMOG ride off into the sunset to live Happily Ever After.

(Richard Curtis can acquire the rights to Four MMOGs And A Classic Expansion Pack for a small fee.)

(And we’ll ignore the bit after the final credits roll where boy gets bored with the classic expansion pack after a week.)

I got prompted to thinking about it after unsubscribing from Age of Conan and going back to City of Heroes, so I scribbled down my MMOGing history, as per the previous post, and it did seem to suggest an ever-shortening MMOG attention span. Can anything recapture those first joyful stumbling moments getting to grips with a totally new idea, that all those people running around are *actually* *people*, fumbling with strange concepts like “aggro”, that moment when you realise that “grats” is actually a contraction of “congratulations” rather than some derivation of “gratitude” and the party chat around the time people levelled suddenly makes a whole lot more sense? Once you fire up a game, cast a jaded glance at the interface and say “there’s the health bar, there’s the mana bar, there’s my hotbar of abilities, she’s the tank, I’m the healer, he’s the DPS, those are mobile bags of XP and loot, let’s gain some levels”, is there any going back?

So I thought I’d see if other people followed a similar pattern, thanks very much for the responses. I can now confidently conclude, through the Power of Statistics, “yes and no”. (Well, I say “confidently”, based on the sample size and estimated population of players the confidence interval is approximately… erm… 0.00034%, but never mind.) Guido and Elf have a similar trajectory so far (which isn’t guaranteed to continue), but Melmoth, Stargazer and Jon vary significantly.

As it happens I’d been looking at my list again, and my longest subscriptions, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, are the two games where, at various points, I’ve hooked up with other people, either small groups of friends or guilds that really worked. The rest I either played solo, or found guilds via forums/in-game chat/random blind invite that never quite clicked (the latter cases not being terribly surprising, it’s not a good sign if a guild’s prime criteria for membership is “standing within sight of somebody with invite privileges”, but sometimes you have to give it a shot for a laugh). Maybe it’s not the game so much as the people? I should’ve asked people to list whether they were in regular groups or guilds for the games they’d played.

And then I thought: people, that’s a social thing, Socialiser… Bartle type. Your play style must affect how long you spend in a game; if primarily an Explorer, it depends how large (and varied) the game world is, if an Achiever, how long it takes to the level cap (if such a thing exists) and what avenues for advancement there are after that, if a Socialiser or Killer, it’s all about the people (to talk to/mercilessly slaughter, delete as appropriate). I should’ve asked people to list their Bartle type as well (or an even more in-depth assessment of motivation).

And *then* I thought: that’s not entirely incompatible with Theory Mark I. I might’ve been lucky and started with a game that happened to suit my playing style to start with, or maybe that first game shaped my expectations for everything that followed? I could be particularly impressionable, though. What we need is government funded study of a large group of people who have never played an MMOG, put them through an in-depth assessment of motivation of why they might want to play an MMOG, start them up in a variety of games, then test them again after six months to see if their results change.

And then I thought I’d been thinking altogether too much and I should leave this stuff to psychologists or possibly psychiatrists, so I played a bit of Guitar Hero instead. Oh, is there concrete all around, or is it in my head? Guitar solo!