Hawtzorz!

In the tradition of the travian 'click now, my lord!' lingerie adverts, I just saw an advert for another browser game which makes the travian ones seem a little subtle and sublime.

'One click for a roman orgy! Click now!'

Giggity giggity!

Commenting on Comments: SWTOR: When did you decide to play for years?

I noticed on another blog, someone saying that star wars the old republic didn't have enough there to be played for years.

I love the implicit assumption there - that you'd want to play for years?

When do you decide that...at what point do you say you want to play a game for, say, half a decade?

Or do you never say that, you just kinda fall into it while playing world of warcraft?

I get some people get really tied up in vitual assets - they too kinda fall into finding it intensely important to build up assets in the game world and then...to just leave it all?

But that's gotta be a kind of madness where you blame a game for not being something that lasts for years so as to make those assets 'matter' for longer, without recognising any of these issues?

Advanced Dungeons & Deadlyness. Kinda.

I was watching a game of AD&D last night. It seemed really dangerous - a fighter with 6 hitpoints being attacked by an ogre with a tree trunk that does 1D10 damage.

But then I found out criticals were optional in this ed, the GM opting to drop them. And you can go to -10 HP without dying. For example, the 4 HP wizard took 5 damage and...after having a cure light wound latter and a rest, not much.

So was it really dangerous? Or simply the danger of not doing anything on your turn?

Granted if all of your side gets knocked out, then you're dead. It's like the party itself has HP, and each party member equals one hitpoint! Remove all the parties hitpoints and you're dead! Heh!

But instant death for anyone? Even if you only had one HP, being hit by a swung tree trunk can not kill you!

It just seems deadly.

Seriously? Voice acting ups a game by millions?

Kind of in the 'Things they'll believe' basket.

Reading on another blog I hear a repetition of the idea that voice acting, even 40 novels worth of voice acting, upped the cost of SWTOR to 300 million dollars?

Now, I'm not saying it'd be free. But even one million dollars for some studio sound work?

I think this goes along with how many mmorpg gamers seem to believe it costs vast sums to run a mmorpg and that any tiny change is moon landing in difficulty to perform.

But I dunno, does voice acting cost that much? I recently heard of a guy who hired the narrator from a game to record some voice work for his wedding. It's not crazy expensive - and I don't think SWTOR is using actual actors for its voice work?

I think there's a culture out there that hears '40 novels of voice acting' and thinks this must be like building the pyramids or running a moon landing?

Character Non Death and are you really a hero for killing?

That's the thing that bugs me about the many games where you just cannot die, you just respawn or reload. So you kill, but actually your utterly safe from being killed. Oh sure, maybe your character doesn't know that he can't die. But what's going on, eh? Aren't we supposedly playing out the ancient moral imperative that if someone threatens your life, killing them in defence is okayz?

A: The games mechanics basically determine the fiction and those mechanics say you can't die. So that's part of the fiction. And so your playing out a character who cannot die, and so you can't at all be playing out the part of someone defending their life.

or

B: What, your not playing out that ancient moral imperative? So what the you playing out? Nihilism ala carte? If your going to say it's just a game, why pick one with depictions of killing in it over tetris, for example? Maybe fiction doesn't matter to you somehow - if so, okay, it's just a game but you mustn't be able to enjoy novels, which is sad for you. Or if you do, no, I don't think you have managed to turn your sense of fiction off like a light switch when it comes to games. You aught to consider that you are enjoying the fiction, and exactly what kind of fiction it is your enjoying. I bet some would think fiction full of consensual sex would be seen as RL morally wrong, yet this type of fiction, where the guy cannot die yet regularly kills others, as something just fine.

Here I'm basically against just thoughtlessly enjoying, for extended periods, killing while immune to death. If you want to consciously think about those elements when playing, yeah, I get that. But just relaxing into it and turning off your brain - like an Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper that imparts a lesson, so to does the fiction of these games impart a lesson. Over and over, for as many hours that you play, that when your immune to death, killing is just fine.

Some will say it doesn't work that way, that somehow you have infinite free will to ignore that. I would be really interested in a scientific test where a game promotes something a bit more mundane, like eating a red icing cake type of cake over one with white icing. Don't tell the participants about it and run them through a week of gaming. Then send them into a room with actual cakes, see which ones get eaten the most.