"I'm so addicted!" "It's so addicting!"

Mr Shouty thinks this game is addicting...

It's really surprising how in terms of online multiplayer games, or even single player, the phrase "It's so addicting!" is said with a possitive inflection.

I mean, just chew on that for a second. Is that really a possitive quality?

Perhaps to the person addicted it is. But I imagine people on heroin probably think the world of heroin as well.

Anyway, I'm off to play farcry 2 some more, as I've got an itch to play it...

Endless Running...

Endless running? Does it, under the guise of exploration, let developers pad out the time of a mmorpg or even a single player RPG?

One of the things about grand theft auto is that if you wanted to get out and jog amongst the roses, you could. Or you could steal a car and put your foot down on the accelerator. I think that choice is pivotal myself. I really hate seeing the opening of a cave mouth, for example, and knowing all I'm going to be doing is waiting for it to come, then outside there'll be a stretch of empty land no doubt, which I'll just be waiting for that to go past.

I guess in fallout 3 I went with it, but there seemed to be more stuff crammed into a smaller space there. Mmorpg developers think making a world means simply incrementing the space between interesting things by ten or twenty times what it was before.

Risk #2, Transparency

Even more comments along from my last post and last time at mmocrunch.
I'll quote Inktom,

Unfortunately Hulkageddon 1 and 2 has made safe mining impossible even in empire space. Since Apocrypha and the introduction of wormhole space, you can get that 0.0 feel and profitablility without venturing past gatecamps getting to null or lowsec. They even have wormholes that lead to 0.0 and that enables the term: Stealth mining. But that requires a few hulks and an orca. HUGE RISK! But tremendous reward if you pull it off.

But EVE is not for everyone, but gets the risk/reward ratio right.

My responce

No, not a huge risk. It’s just the impression of a huge risk – what info do you have to prove it’s a risk?

For example, say someones in front of me, flips a coin and it’s my call, heads. They hand me hundreds of game coins and I go weee! Also I don’t lose my game coins.
Now imagine someone goes off into a black box, then comes back out and hands me a few hundred game coins?

Did I face a big risk? Did they flip a coin while they were in that black box? Or did they just decide to hand out game coins to me?

Should I go weeee! or would I just be fooling myself?

Without transparent risks or atleast some level of transparency, you don’t know.

Games 'that are art'

Continuing on from play this thing

I think he's right, it's not art. A finely crafted chess set might be art as an object, but that doesn't make the game itself art. Nor does a bunch of arty stuff in a video game make it rise above being a game. It's just a crappy game with a bunch of art tacked on, in this case.

Now, can you make art by playing a game? Yes, yes you can. But that still doesn't make the game become art itself. A paintbrush can make art - that doesn't mean a painbrush IS art itself.

It's actually quite annoying to see people create art with a game in their own heads, then attribute what they created as being part of the actual game/activity. It attributes too much to the game and does not give credit to their own creativity. Table top roleplay suffers from this extensively.

Quick Review : Scribblenauts game

We got scribblenauts for our son, which was much anticipated by him. On the rare occasions I played it myself, it proved a pretty good mix of classic puzzle, plus it's special feature of being able to type words and get the object. As a bonus, I'm sure that helps a childs spelling too!

Since there are so many words you really end up drawing on your imagination to an extent I'm certain no other computer game does at the moment. However, at other times it can just require a combo of a couple of known items to solve something. The good thing in that case is that it often requires a bit of fine tuning of your actions and plan, so it's not a total pushover. Also there's some replayability in trying to figure out a less cheesy way of solving it latter. Sometimes dropping a car on them just isn't enough! ;)

Another good feature, probably a very important feature in a game like this, is that it comes with a level editor. My son made a couple of levels and yes, I failed them a few times before beating them!

It's really engaging and I think would help improve not just childrens imagination and spelling/word range, but adults too. Also it's alot different from most other games out there that copy the old cut and dried formats. It's a bit of gaming history already, that way. I'd really recommend getting it!

Grinding out grind

Grind reminds me of the old woody allen skit/joke, where he's telling his therapist he hardly ever has sex with his wife, only once or twice a week. Then his wife complains they always are having sex, usually twice a week!


Clearly game companies like you being a subscriber for a long time. But this doesn't mean they have to drag out gameplay. Take EVEs skill learning - do you have to grind that out, or set it up and it takes time, but it does so automatically and even while offline.

Now imagine if you killed a monster and got some XP, but then there was also a large amount that slowly trickled into your character, even while your offline. You don't have to grind all that XP, and the company gets it's maintained subscription.

The mmorpg model has been really strange in how it's maintained the same pattern of stretching out content, even though it drives everyone mad, rather than looking at ways that both developer and player can come to a compromise. Or is grind as we know it supposed to be a compromise?