I Just got back from the residence of [1]Jp and [2]Jen. Had fun
watching Jen play Final Fantasy IX, and Jp ranting about various
programming-related things.
I'm reading [3]Lucifer's Hammer by Niven. It made me think about what
I'd do if a comet hit the earth, or if some terrorists blew up
society. I was kind of depressed about it, thinking that I'd be
useless in such a situation, but I guess if it happened, I would try
to get to a point where I could start working on technology again.
Rebuilding power grids, machines, communications networks, and so on.
I would certainly learn a lot. The way [4]dash speaks sometimes, I
wonder if this might actually happen in my lifetime ;)
Virtual Worlds!
I recently purchased [5]The Sims Online (requires Flash). Right now,
I'm eating dessert (cake) as my room mate plays with her kitten, and
classical music plays on our state-of-the-art sound system. The
dessert is buggy; I finished eating it, tried to clean it up, but when
I stood up, half of it reappeared, and I had to continue eating it.
Anyway, it's an interesting game: it's social, rather than
role-playing based, unlike most existing massive virtual worlds. It's
obvious that many elements of the game were designed to get people
_together_ so they can communicate and have fun. The main activities
of the game are "skilling", "greening", making money, and "having fun"
(that last item is quoted because the "fun" often isn't :). Skilling
involves doing a task like reading a book, playing chess, and so on,
all of which raise your skill level in various categories. Of course,
the book doesn't have any text that you, the player, can read, and
playing chess involves watching your Sim randomly rearrange the chess
board. But when you do this "skilling", if others in the same location
as you are also skilling on the same skill, you get a bonus. This is
one of the obvious design decisions made to get people together and
socialize.
Well, unfortunately, it's fairly rare to find people having meaningful
conversations. In "skill houses", areas which are specifically for
getting together and skilling with a high bonus, it's rare to see
people having chats other than those along the line of "need food",
"going to green", "come help skill cooking!!" and so forth, making
this bit supremely boring. Sometimes I can get a conversation going,
but I'm not very good at starting general conversations with people I
don't know. Fortunately one of my roommates is somewhat talkative, and
we've had several decent conversations so far.
"greening" is the process of making all of your various "Needs", or
status bars, go from red to green. As you do various activities:
reading books, playing pool, working out, and so on, your Needs meters
go down. Hunger, Energy, Comfort, Fun, Hygiene, Social, Bladder, and
Room. So as people are skilling or making money, they will
occasionally have to go get some food from the kitchen (and ask the
host(ess) to provide some if none is available at the moment), use the
toilet, take a shower, have a nap, and then, of course, get back to
whatever it was they were doing.
As most of you reading will know, I want to create virtual worlds, and
I bought TSO with an ulterior motive of research into what kind of VW
I want to create. I've been interested in the social ones for a while;
where people can be themselves in the game, instead of role-playing
some idealized fantasy (if they want to). While playing it hasn't
given me any new great ideas, it has clarified *a lot* what I want to
do. A social VW, but with much more interactivity and more interesting
gaming. I want a game where you can sit down and read any book in the
[6]Project Gutenberg, or play a real game of chess/connect
4/fencing/wargames with your friends. I don't know if [7]Divunal might
eventually be this game or not; It's doubtful, though, because it
seems there might be a little too much "game" there to really allow
totally free social interaction, but I'm not sure.
Oh, happy new year, and all that rubbish.
References
1. http://livejournal.com/~jcalderone/
2. http://saph.deviantart.com/
3. http://www.larryniven.org/reviews/98.htm
4. http://ghostwheel.ddts.net/
5. http://thesimsonline.com/
6. http://promo.net/pg/
7. http://divunal.com/
