The talk itself is insightful, and the research Jane is doing at the Institute For The Future is very interesting. I especially enjoyed the part of the talk where she discussed Herodotus’ story of the Lydians using dice games to ease famine possibly being true. It at least rings true considering the use of video games to distract ill people from their pain and suffering.

Regardless of that Jane’s talk seems to gloss over many obvious factors. Mainly she completely fails to deeply analyze the mechanics of the games themselves. The sad fact is that games can not change the world, at least not in the way she presents.

In the talk, Jane says that in games people present the best version of themselves. Players will never quit until their goals are achieved. Not only that, but they give their strongest effort, and are ready and willing to collaborate. If you ignore the griefers and shitcockers out there, this is largely true. What she doesn’t discuss very deeply are the reasons behind these behaviors.

The simple and obvious reason is that games have no true failure. If someone tries to be a hero in real life, and they fail, there are permanent negative consequences. In the real world, you risk losing your money, possessions, freedom, health, and the health of those you care for. It’s a dangerous world, and many mistakes can not be undone. This is the cause of the anxiety people feel in the real world that they do not have in the game world.

In the gaming world there is a reset button. Even if you fail, you can keep trying with no repercussions other than lost time. In Mario, you don’t feel much anxiety trying to jump over the gigantic pit because you have extra lives. If you’re down to your last life, then you actually do feel some anxiety because failure means having to start over from the beginning again. When games do actually have negative consequences for failure, players get upset and play something else.

I think the reason she misses this is because she focuses on World of Warcraft, a game with no consequences. Death isn’t even a real consequence in WoW, or other modern MMORPGs. It’s just a momentary obstacle that can be completely reversed. Take a look at some other games out there that actually have harsh consequences for failure. How about some old NES games that have no continues, passwords, or extra lives? How about Steel Battalion which would erase your save data if you failed to eject on time? These games are obviously ludicrously unpopular.

As for the topic of virtuosos and 10,000 hours of practice, I personally don’t buy it. Measures of talent are strictly relative. How many people out there have played over 10,000 hours of golf or tennis? Now how many Tiger Woods and Roger Federers are out there? How many people in South Korea have played that much Starcraft? What percentage of them are professionals? I know I personally have played many thousands of hours of video games, but you don’t see me sponsoring PC hardware like Fatal1ty. The first person to ever play the violin was a virtuoso in their time, though they would be terrible by today’s standards. Being a virtuoso simple means you are better than everyone else. Not everyone can be great. That’s what makes greatness great.

This fact directly interferes with the factor of epic purpose. Every person who plays Zelda to the end will defeat Ganon and save the world of Hyrule. In the real world, there is only one champion, and it’s probably not you. Even if you collaborate and give your full effort, odds are you will still fail to be exceptional in the real world. Tons of people around the world dedicate their lives to sports, music, and other things from a young age. A ludicrously small percentage make it big. Strong effort greatly facilitates great achievement, but does not guarantee it.

For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that everyone actually can be a virtuoso. We’ll pretend that we can create an army of Steve Vai’s by practicing enough guitar. If that is true, then being a virtuoso at World of Warcraft is like being a virtuoso at the player piano. If an activity has no possibility of failure, then either every human being is a virtuoso at it, or none are, regardless of how much practice. It’s meaningless and unremarkable to be a virtuoso at an activity at which you are guaranteed to succeed. If every scientist got Nobel Prize, it would lose all meaning.

Let’s take this same exact TED Talk, and replace all of the World of Warcraft examples with Counter-Strike. People are not ready and willing to collaborate in Counter-Strike, often prioritizing personal kill ratios above the objectives of the team. They will not work hard towards their goal, often switching servers when faced with a superior opponent they can not beat. People are quick to cheat their way to victory because true victory is too much work, if it’s even possible. Most players quit and never try again when they can not achieve success with minimal effort. These are the same people that quit in real life. They are the boomerang generation running home to mommy because college is too rough. Sorry, I don’t believe that these people can save the world.

If you want to really change the world with games, you need games that mimic the real world. These are known as simulations. The military uses them to train people for various things, most notably flight. If you play a racing simulator for 10,000 hours as a child, you do actually have a good chance of becoming a professional race car driver. The thing is, an accurate simulation is just as difficult as driving a real race car, and will not attract many players putting in many hours. Tons of people play Mario Kart. Relatively few have even heard of Forza or Gran Turismo. If you could get people to play simulation games as much as they play Bejeweled, then you could change the world. Sadly, that will never happen because simulations are simply not fun to most people. This is why rhythm games have ludicrously simplified instruments. They make rhythm games with real instruments, and almost nobody plays them.

I do think that making the real world more like a game can save it. Make it impossible to fail at life. Give straight A+ grades to every student just for showing up to class. Remove all negative irreversible consequences from everything. Guarantee success for anyone who puts in enough effort, regardless of skill or talent. Do all that, and an army of gamers will revolutionize the real world. Then again, does such a utopian world really need changing?

Until then, I think this talk is actually kind of harmful. A lot of people who are otherwise wasting their lives away will use this to validate that time wasting. Some may falsely believe that they are saving the real world while saving Azeroth. Rather than changing the world with games, it may just be giving people another excuse to play games when they could be saving the world.

I imagine that most people, even those who only slightly care about fair play, will not tolerate this. The absurdity of it is laughable. Why should a previous game of you played against other people have anything to do with the game we are about to play today? Should we give the previous Olympic gold medal sprinter a ten second head start? It’s obvious that this is wrong.

Now, having a handicap in a game is frequently acceptable. If you were going to bowl or golf against a professional, they would give you a head start. This is because these are competitions of almost pure skill. You are not on the same competitive level, and your loss is a foregone conclusion. Giving you a handicap is just a way of making the competition interesting for all participants when the skill differential is so great.

These kinds of handicaps are not the same as head start in Monopoly. For one thing, Monopoly is a game that is largely based on chance, not skill. Also, the head start is given to a player who just won, not the one who just lost. It’s bad enough that you give one person a head start, but you give a head start to the person who doesn’t need it. That’s just wrong.

To compound the issue, this sort of head start creates a momentum issue. Whoever wins is likely to keep winning because they will continue to receive bonuses. In a game with a strong momentum mechanic only the early game matters. The player that strikes first will get boosts that allow them to keep winning and winning and winning. You might as well not even play beyond the beginning of a game with momentum.

I would hope that all of these things are pretty obvious, even to novice gamers. What surprises me is that these persistent momentum mechanics are being added to an increasing number of new video games. Why? Because it is those same mechanics that increase sales and popularity.

Think about that. A game that gives players bigger and bigger head starts based upon previous games they have played will be more popular than a game which provides fair and balanced competition.

Just yesterday I played a game called Altitude. My initial experience was very good. It’s a multiplayer team versus game. Each player pilots an airplane in a two dimensional playing field and shoots at the opponents. The controls are tight. The gameplay is complex enough to be interesting, but simple enough to pick up easily.

The one problem with this game is that it has a strong leveling mechanic. The more you play, the more levels you get. As you gain levels, you gain access to better planes, weapons, and abilities. The players who have been playing longer are given a humongous advantage.

Yet the game had a lot of players, and none of them had a problem with this at all. It didn’t even cross their minds that this mechanic was a problem. In fact, they would cite it as a part of the game they like the most!

How can this be? It’s quite simple. People like head starts when they are the recipients of them. Also, it’s basic Skinner box psychology that an organism will superstitiously repeat a behavior that it associates with reward. Give a mouse a treat every time it jumps, and eventually it will think that jumping gives treats. It will be a very jumpy mouse.

Games like Altitude put the player in a Skinner box. As long as you keep playing the game, you will continue to get levels. Your actions might result in getting the levels faster or slower, but you’ll get them. Those rewards will encourage you to keep playing. They’ll also make you very happy as they increase the head start you receive in the next game, and the next game, and so on.

The same mechanic can be seen in all sorts of games these days. Achievements, levels, upgradeable items, and unlockable abilities are the hot mechanics in video games these days. Who needs to make a game that actually has good mechanics and quality fair competition? That’s hard! It’s much easier to make a Skinner box that takes advantage of basic psychology to control player behavior, and get them playing your game for hours on end.

What’s even worse is you have culprits like MMORPGs, Farmville, and others who are effectively extorting money out of the player with the sunk cost fallacy. Want to keep all the bonuses you earned in that MMORPG? Better keep up with the monthly fee. Want to get more money in Farmville? Just cough up some real cash for an instant hit you won’t have to work for.

If you are playing one of these games, I strongly encourage you to think seriously about what you are doing. Are these games actually good games? Are they good for you? Are they worth your time and money?

For game designers, can we please put some ethics ahead of our wallets? When we hear about certain advertising techniques, we deem them to be unethical. They take unfair advantage of human psychology to deceive and/or coerce people into spending money. These game mechanics are no different, except that they are present in the product itself and not the advertisement.

It is possible, and in fact trivial, to make games that effectively control people’s minds. We need to recognize this fact, and work together to create a code of ethics for game designers. Games which are designed specifically to addict players can be, and are, harmful. People are being deceived into playing golf against Tiger Woods, giving him a head start, and preferring it to a fair competition. You know something is wrong.

Thinking about this later led me ask a very important question. What is the definition of old school? Here is the top definition from the urban dictionary.

old school

Anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect. Can be used to refer to music, clothing, language, or anything really.

Personally, I feel this definition is not accurate nor is it specific enough. If someone were to try to submit that shoddy definition to a real dictionary, like the OED, it would be instantly rejected. Where exactly are the borderlines between eras? Also, old school is often used to simply refer to things that are old, but not necessarily deserving of respect. Custer’s Revenge is an old school video game worthy of no respect whatsoever. Let us try to come up with a new definition of old school in order to put an end to many geeky debates.

Let us first look upon the words that combine to form the phrase. Old means something that has existed for a long time. It is not an absolute measurement, but a relative one. Depending on the context something from five seconds ago could be considered old as well as something from five centuries ago. The only thing that can not be old under any circumstance is something from the present or future.

A school is an institution of learning. That can mean a physical building or set of buildings in which schooling takes place. But old school as we mean it is not referring to ancient university buildings. The definition I think we are looking for is the sixth one listed in a more official dictionary. To paraphrase, school can refer to a group of people who have a common origin, influence or unifying belief.

So what does old school mean? It means that something is of an older school of thought. This is most apparent in art and more recently comic books. Artists, feel free to pummel me if I botch this, but in older times they had different ideas about art. There are many schools of art such as impressionist, abstract, expressionist, realist, etc. Some of these ideas of art are very old, from the renaissance or earlier. Therefore, works of art created from these schools can be correctly described as old school.

Let us look at video games, an area in which the term old school is used quite often. In my eyes, the current school of 3d game design began in the 1990s with Mario 64 and Quake. Therefore, I have to say it is wrong to refer to these games as old school. Games like Mario 3, Pac-Man, and Final Fantasy 1 came from a prior school of thought in game design, therefore they can be correctly categorized as old school. The next school of game design that I see includes games like Guitar Hero, DDR, Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii Games. If and when the games from that school of thought come to dominate the industry, you will be able to refer to Half-Life as old school.

So, what is my definition of old school? Old school is a phrase you use to describe anything which originates from or is influenced by of a set of ideas or beliefs prior to the modern one. That’s not a perfect defintion, semantically speaking, but it gets my point across. A comic made in the golden or silver age style is old school. An anime made in the 70′s style of Astroboy or Tetsujin 28 is old school. Sailor Moon is not old school, because it is cut from the same artistic cloth as the anime of today.

Let us all work together to reach a unified definition of old school and to propogate it throughout the geek world. Perhaps if we try hard enough it eventually will be put into the real dictionary.

The idea I came up with is to make an emulator that emulates nothing. Instead of trying to make something to emulate a game console just make up a brand new amazing game console on paper and emulate that. If you’re computer savvy you probably realize this is essentially what Java is, a virtual machine. But imagine if someone made up a brand new virtual machine designed for games.

I’m confident that if such a system were implemented and supported by developers it would create a new revolution in PC gaming. It would make it easier to program PC games since developers would no longer worry about users having different hardware. They would just have to write games to work with the virtual machine without caring about what hardware is underneath. The emulator’s interface can include means to distribute games over the net and include an online matchup system for multiplayer gaming.

Think of it like this. What if the XboX 360 was a free piece of software that ran on any computing device ever instead of being an expensive piece of hardware. It would be like having a game console that never became obsolete. People would continue to use it and make games for it forever. Game developers would make money based on how many copies of their games sold and how much they sold for. The company developing the emulator would charge a fee for having games listed and perhaps advertising in the interface, but not during games.

All the detriments of PC gaming would also go away. No more difficulty installing games or not getting them to work. No more complications with patches. No more tricky copy protection schemes. All the detriments of PC gaming would be eliminated without getting rid of any of the benefits like the KVM.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this. And some people might argue that Steam is almost this already. The difference is that Steam is really just a front end for MS Windows. For Steam to fulfill this role and achieve all the benefits it would have to become much more than it is.

There is one negative to this that is the full power of PC hardware would not be able to be easily harnessed. The performance would be well above that of Java or VMWare, but it would not come close to fully utilizing the hardware. The emulator would always cause a performance hit by nature. One solution is to have an operating system instead of a VM. Maybe there can be an OS on a LiveCD or such, but I do not think that by taking on the OS route will this be successful. We’re just going to have to start shying away from crazy insane graphics and put more emphasis on making games that many people will buy.

While sorting out those old GamePro magazines I stumbled upon something very interesting. In the labs section, on page 30, where they review new hardware accessories, of the March 1997 issue #102 there is a small box containing a review of a third party PlayStation controller. The box is titled “The Alps Adventure” and it is a review of a controller simply called “The Gamepad” that is made by Alps Interactive. The picture and text of the review follow.

It looks like a batarang, but fear not, hardy PlayStation gameplayers. The Gamepad by Alps Interactive is anything but sinister. The cool, sleek design is actually very functional, with extra-long, rubber-coated handles for a sure grip and a responsive, thumb-friendly direction pad rather than the four buttons as on the stock PSX controller.

Some downsides are the closely spaced teardrop-shaped action buttons and the triggers, which seem more spread out than on the standard controller. Sill, The Gamepad is ready to help gamers kick some butt–even if it’s not in Gotham City.

I think it is obvious to everyone that this is almost identical to the PS3 controller designs we’ve seen around the web. I couldn’t confirm the current status of Alps Interactive with a brief web search, but I did find this site selling the controller and giving it high praise.

Like others I am skeptical of whether or not the PS3 controller will actually be comfortable to hold and use. But based on a couple reviews of the original I think that it might actually be comfortable despite it’s misleading appearance. Assuming the reviews are to be trusted. Sony had better hope that the patent holder for the gamepad doesn’t come looking for them. I think they have enough lawsuits on their hands already.

When I saw this fps implemented using the canvas element last week I knew gold had been struck. With the canvas you have the ability to create a real-time drawing surface with JavaScript. With the XMLHttpRequest you have the ability to get and send data to a web application which can read and write to a database. If you add these two things together you can make a massive multiplayer online game in a web browser that requires very little loading time, no installation and no plugins. This is the hotness. If games like Kingdom of Loathing pick up on this technology they can do some really revolutionary stuff.

As a proof of concept for this idea I have created a terrible terrible demo. It’s really simple and almost embarassing, but that’s what you get with less than an hour of work. I only tested it in Firefox 1.5, but it should theoretically work in any browser that supports XMLHttpRequest and canvas. There are two links and a canvas. If you click a link, the square with the coordinates it represents will turn black. This isn’t anything new, except that behind the scenes those coordinates are being read from XML data. If you replace that static XML data with a web application and a relational database then you’re playing with power.

Maybe the demo will be better by the time you read this. I’m going to keep working on it as a platform for creating games that utilize grids. Tile-laying games like Tigris and Euphrates and strategy games like Dungeons and Dragons combat are top contenders. All that we have to do now is expand the canvas to have real 3d drawing power with the help of the GPU.

What are the long term implications of this technology? The most obvious thing I see is another nail in the coffin of Microsoft. Looking for the reason? PC Gaming is one of the main reasons pepople still run Windows. If all the software is web-based then Firefox becomes the OS and Linux/OSX/Windows doesn’t matter. If we can make a 3d, or even a 2d MMO that works in Firefox regardless of platform we can make a killing. Even people running old versions of BSD would be able to play the game just fine. There are more PCs than consoles out there. Firefox’s popularity is growing daily. A quality game built on this platform could easily overtake the great World of Warcraft because the barrier to entry is so small. To get into most MMOs you have to install software and have sufficient 3d hardware. Signing up for this MMO would be no harder than registering for a forum on the web.

I’m going to talk about this tonight on GeekNights.

As German games go, M.U.L.E. is fairly flawed. But the flaws really can’t be blamed on any people. Half of the problems in the game are simply due to technical limitations. Because it is a video game with very minimal controls there had to be some losses. For example, the mine outfitters are on the left side of town. So if you have plots of land on the left of the map you can mine them without spending too much time. Also, having a poor a.i. which can be taken advantage of in any game with less than four players really hurts the game quite a bit. Lastly, the method of selecting plots of land is fickle, and you really need lots of skill to get the land you want.

The other ways in which the game is flawed weren’t viewed as flaws because this is a video game. But when you design a strategy game the current thinking is that you want to remove as many random and arbitrary factors as possible. M.U.L.E. has way too many random factors. Pretty much every turn somebody gets a random bonus or detriment. There is an element of gampeplay where you hunt the wampus which appears randomly. And the selection of how many plots of land are auctioned off and when can be pretty random.

One last thing about the game that is not so good is the lack of knowledge. In game theory there are ways of describing games as being games of total information, partial information or no information. A game of no information is like 3 card monte. The dealer used sleight of hand to move the card so you don’t know which card to pick, and your chances of winning are one out of three, or worse. A game of partial information is like Texas Hold ‘em, you know some of the cards out there, but you don’t know what your opponent is hiding. A game of total information is like checkers, chess or go where everything is in plain sight.

The problem with M.U.L.E. is that it is a game of total information, everything every player has is wide open. However, the rules of the game are closed. You receive points based on money, land and goods. Money points are obviously one point per dollar. Land points seem to simply be a number multiplied by how many plots of land you own. And goods points seem to be a multiplier of how many, and which, units of goods you possess. However, the multiplier for goods is unknown! How am I supposed to decide whether or not to sell a good? Let’s say I have an opportunity to sell one crystite for $50. Would it be worth more than 50 goods points if I held onto it? There’s no way to know because I can’t find this information anywhere on the Internet.

Despite multiple paragraphs about the flaws of M.U.L.E. it is still a great game. With a little bit of modification it would make an excellent board game that could be played time and time again. If I find the time I am going to work on making a new game very much like M.U.L.E without as much randomness. I know that I’ve said stuff like this before and never come through on it. But remember what I said about shit-talking? At the minimum I will design a new game like M.U.L.E. that is much more like a german strategy board game with less random crap. At the most, I will implement this game in software for online play.

This means that on those long road trips you can get your Verizon EV-DO PCMCIA card, plug it into your laptop, create an ad-hoc wireless lan and get your DSes online for some worldwide Mario Kart action!

See how easy this was? These are the only tiny tidbits of information that people needed and Nintendo was not revealing. This is not even rumor, this is fact. I used the interface myself and took pictures of it. The only way this could possibly be untrue is if Nintendo spontaneously decides to heavily modify the software between now and release. But from what I played I doubt that will happen. These seemed like very finished games. I think the only thing that is keeping them off shelves is that they need to produce enough copies and packaging and distribute them.

So Mario Kart DS and the new Superstar Saga are sold. Animal Crossing will sell to a lot of people, but probably not me. The rest of the trade show was cool, but nothing really interesting except for the pepper pad.

The second thing is a note about the lack of DS games. You might notice that there isn’t a particular surplus of titles for the DS. However, this rarity in turn has somehow increased demand. I’m not sure if Nintendo did it on purpose or by accident, but it helps them a lot. Think of it like this. There are tons of GBA and PS2 games out there. Because of this gamers have to be very discriminating in which games they purchase rent and ignore. Only the best games get money. On the DS players are dying to be able to use the touch-pad, the microphone, and especially the wireless multiplayer. But if they had a large selection of games available they would likely only buy one or two of them. Nintendo is rationing the titles. Look at me, I’m seriously considering spending money on games like Polarium, Yoshi Touch+go and Puyo-Pop. Fucking Puyo-pop. These are games I would normally ignore on the GBA. But the wireless multiplayer elements of Polarium and Puyo add so much. Add the fact that there aren’t a lot of other games out there offering access to these features of my hardware, and you’ve got big sales of games that normally would get none. I’ve already bought Mario and Kirby, my roommate bought Mario and Bomberman. At least with the multiplayer games we only need to buy one copy between the two of us. Just don’t be surprised if you see above average sales for titles like Bomberman on the DS.

Lastly, I want to talk about the gimmickiness of the features of the DS. Before the DS came out many people had fears that the touch screen, microphone, two screens and wireless would be gimmicky. Anyone who remembers the infra-red port on the Gameboy Color knows what they were thinking. It turns out however, that each and every one of these features can be used for gimmick or not. And it all depends on each individual game whether or not the feature is gimmicked or not. Take Bomberman for example. Bomberman uses the two screens very well. It also uses the wireless for multiplayer flawlessly. However, it uses the microphone in a gimmicky way. Certain gameplay modes allow making loud noise into the microphone to trigger bomb explosions or shields. I played it, and while it might be fun once, after that it sucks. It just hurts, you have to be loud and it’s not worth it. Thankfully every microphone mode has a clone mode sans-microphone. So to all you DS developers out there. Don’t feel obligated to use every feature of the DS. Use only the ones you need when you need them in appropriate ways. If you aren’t making a touch screen game like Kirby, then don’t use the touch screen at all. Nobody wants to take the stylus in and out of its holster during play. And if you aren’t making a game where voice control or communication is necessary and polished, don’t use it at all. And if you don’t really need to put anything on the second screen, don’t. Just stick the HUD up/down there and be done with it. When you’ve got a hammer everything starts to look like nails. Don’t use something just because you’ve got it. Use the stuff appropriately and your games will be better.

Then it hit me. Setting up LANs with VPN access intentionally for the purpose of playing multi-player games could be a great way to restore PC gaming. On a LAN you can provide all sorts of services very easily, and since a VPN is the only way in you can provide those services to only a select group of people rather than the whole world. It also makes everything easier by putting a single, yet very strong, security mechanism in front of all the services. No need for separate authentications or anything.

Why would this bring PC gaming back to life? Well, there are a lot of PC games out there that still work just fine. The problem has to do with lack of players, lack of quality players, or abundance of crappy players or cheaters. If someone were to setup a VPN dedicated to quality online gaming it would create a close community of quality PC gaming folk who could get their awesome game on without worrying about all the shitcockers. Not only could you lock up some game servers in the VPN, but you could also lock up some other stuff in there too. How about multiple game servers for different games, forums, IRC, informative web pages, a web server running web based games just for the LAN, etc. This type of community could allow the quality folk out there, like me and hopefully you, to get our PC gaming groove on free of all the craptasticness out there.

Imagine if there was a CS server out there that nobody could get to except for a large enough group of quality players. Imagine a place where there are servers for games that nobody plays anymore. Most of all, imagine a place where there are no shitcockers. They can’t get in, and if they do they are banned forever with no chance of getting back in. Incorporate the VPN into the LAN parties and you’ve got some even better times.

I remember back in the 90′s there were JavaScript games. Java and Flash were big and slow to download over dial-up connections. Yet people wanted to play games in the web browser. People created a bunch of CGI and JavaScript based games using form elements and gifs to create poor renditions of classic turn based games. Mostly card games IIRC. But as technology advanced we got Director, Flash and Java to provide the browser embedded games we desired.

Recently there have been advances in web technology like AJAX, SVG, XmlHTTPRequest that allow web pages to be more dynamic than ever. Without using iframes we can have pages that both update information in a database and update their display based on information from the database without reloading. I think it’s freaking obvious that we should make a game based on that architecture. It will load fast, look cool, not require plug-ins, work in any new browser, allow multi-player and just be fun.

My current vision is to recreate versions of European board games such as Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates, St. Petersburg, Carcassone, etc. using this platform. Much like the version of Settlers of Catan made with Java, this would be a huge hit and a great way to kill shit tons of time.

Now, there is more to it than in-browser games that don’t require a plug-in. ANY modern browser will run the games. That could potentially include browsers on cell phones, Palm devices, Blackberries, etc. Imagine if instead of paying your cellular carrier money to download a shit version of Tetris because they disabled phone functionality you can instead just visit a page and play board games with your friends for your standard data charge. And different style sheets for different media will enable the game to have a proper interface despite your chosen browser, device and network speed. The day when 5 people can play the same game of Puerto Rico on a phone, palm, blackberry, PC and PSP in different parts of the world will be a very good day.

Before the 16 bit era there was only one system that mattered, the NES. You either had one or you didn’t. You were measured by whether you had one and how many games you had. In the 16 bit era there were two systems, and most people couldn’t afford to get both, and most parents wouldn’t buy two extremely expensive toys for their children. Because in those days a video game console was just that, a kid’s toy. So every kid had to decide which side he was on, which console would he choose. It was usually in your best interest to get the same one your friends had so you could share games and be cool. An SNES kid was not usually friends with a Genesis kid. Thus the console wars originated, one system vs. another.

What wasn’t obvious until much later was that in any console war, both sides won. The losing consoles have always been the ones that weren’t even considered in the war at all. It was never Turbo Grafx 16 vs. anything. It was never Jaguar or 3D0 vs. anything. All the truly dead systems never even got to enter the ring. If you were in the ring that meant that people were buying you and fighting for you. At that point you already won and got profit regardless of actual market share percentage. Yet this fallacy of console wars persists to today. The gaming journalists and PR insist on maintaining the framework of a world where there are only two mutually exclusive video game consoles. And generation after generation everybody goes along for the ride. If you don’t believe me go look at all the XBoX sux0rz PS2 R0x0rz posts all over the net. Heck, people are fighting for and against systems they’ve never even played.

The game makers know this is going on, and they love it. They basically get you to blindly follow their brand regardless of actual content. Then you become a legion in an army that makes people feel cool or uncool depending on whether or not they have selected the same brand as yourself. To me it’s all hilarious.

What is specifically interesting about the new generation of consoles is that the framework of two mutually exclusive consoles has become more, not less, true. The PS3 and the XboX are directly competing for the same 15-25 year old male market share. Most games that come out for one system will come out for the other. And both are incredibly powerful systems that boast fancy graphics, sound and media center capabilities. The difference between the two will be their back catalogs of backward compatible games (PS3 wins), console exclusive games(depends on your taste) and the characteristics of the system themselves (i.e: controller). The only point in buying both of these systems would be to have access to all of exclusive games for both systems, but only someone with lots of extra money or ultra hardcore attitude would do that. At the high prices they are charging, like $400+, these two systems are more mutually exclusive than the Genesis and SNES were.

When it comes to the X vs. Y conversation, however, it has always been a conversation amongst the 15-25 year old male market. You don’t see old men or teenage girls arguing or caring about which console is superior. So among this market they see Nintendo as down and out. Nintendo doesn’t even get a vs. so it must be dead. And as far as the 15-25 year old male market, it mostly is.

But if you read online conversations about XboX 360 vs. PS3 you see the same old same old. Which is more powerful? Which exclusive games are better than the others? Which one has an ugly controller (*cough*PS3*cough*). What is making me think change is coming this generation is that Nintendo is still having a conversation. Other failed systems like SEGA Saturn or Game.com didn’t have anyone talking about them. They were eternally in the background and went without thought.

If you look online there are people talking about the DS, the revolution and even the gameboy micro. Even the 15-25 year old males who are their to put them down as kiddy toys are at the very least recognizing the existence of Nintendo. Failed systems of the past, other than the Dreamcast, were rarely offered even that courtesy. All of the pro Nintendo talk that is happening is even more astonishing. They aren’t comparing the Revolution to the new offerings from the other two consoles. They are imagining possibilities and coming up with ideas. I’ve seen multiple people come up with ideas like playing old NES games with online mutiplayer. Lots of non-gamers are really excited about hacking up the revolution to do really cool stuff with its 512MB of flash and its wireless capabilities. There is no question for these people if it is better or worse than some other piece of hardware. The question is whether it will live up to their expecations of awesome entertainment or not.

This leads me to conclude the following. Nintendo has already done a poor showing with the DS. The problem is simply that the hardware allows immense possibilities for innovating new and fun games. But there simply have not been enough developers who have come up to the plate with something really amazing. And as always, Japan keeps getting the goods first. But the DS still has one more chance for salvation if the online experience with GameSpy turns out to live up to its potential. And if the DS and revolution connect in meaningful innovative new ways it will not become another Game Gear. The revolution has two possible fates. If they open development enough and the quantity of software that takes full advantage of the potential of the hardware is released, then the revolution can storm the world by taking everyone who isn’t a 15-25 year old male and turning them into a Nintendo gamer. Heck, it would even get some of those guys too, I’m one of them. The other possibility is that, like the trend has shown, the only games that will take full advantage of the hardware in new and interesting ways will be games developed by Nintendo itself. If this is the case then Nintendo will still remain profitable. They have too much cash in reserve and too many Japanese brains and customers to allow anything else. But the chance for revolution could be lost.

I’ve been having video game conversations my whole life. And from the conversations I am witnessing across the net, this is what I can say for sure. Businessmen know nothing about games and gamers know nothing about business. The video game market will never be the same again.

First off, before we knew anything about the revolution I had some ideas about what I would like it to be and some predictions about what it actually would be. My idea was that it would be a wireless DS hub or a hub for the new GameBoy. My vision was that 16 people in one house with 16 DSes would be on a team playing a game against 16 other people in another house with 16 DSes. Or 4 houses with 4DSes each, you get the idea. That would be a revolution in gaming. Each player would have their own private screen with their personal gameplay, but the revolution hooked up to the television would provide information common to the entire team. Developers could concentrate more on the game itself and not on features like in game voice chat.

What I thought the revolution really would be was an Internet enabled game station with an incredibly new controller with all sorts of innovative interfaces. It is obvious if you go to any arcade that the big games all have special interfaces other than joystick and buttons. Games with racing wheels, dance pads and drum sets are the big money makers with all sorts of people other than gamers. Only super gamer freaks play Soul Caliber II in the arcade. Don’t get me wrong though, I love SC2. But Initial D version 3 and DDR are the most popular games in any arcade you go to. Besides air hockey, skee-ball and the crane game that is.

What Nintendo announced yesterday was something I have wanted for years. Whenever an emulation argument came up I would say “Those bastards, emulation should be OK because it’s abandonware. If they aren’t selling it anymore they shouldn’t be able to stop us from sharing it.” Nintendo responded recently by including all the old NES classics as bonuses in various games as well as on stand alone GBA cartridges. However, they were heinously overpriced and in some cases deficient. I wanted Nintendo to release every NES game ever for download at $1 or less each and release an official perfect emulator for all OSes. Now they have come through with something potentially better and potentially worse. The revolution will allow download of NES, SNES and N64 games into its 512MB of flash for perfect emulation. Presumably there will be a charge for this and some sort of DRM.

This will work, if Nintendo does the following. First, the game library has to be huge. If people can’t get all the big games by download it will fail. No FF6, forget it. If people can’t get rare games or forgotten hits it will fail. Real gamers still have their NESes or they have emulators. The only reason they will pay up is to get hard to find games. Nintendo also needs to provide some original content for download. We don’t just mean the shit that the XboX 360 is pushing either. MS thinks it is going to make money by selling unlockables in games. What used to be acquired simply by finding secrets or performing feats in a game will now be acquired by paying money. That will only fly with idiots. To make this work Nintendo can’t do that. They have to sell complete exclusive games over the Revolution download service. Example: They make a third quest to the original Legend of Zelda. I’ll buy that for a dollar, and so will many other people.

Next, Nintendo has to have the DRM not be stupid. Nobody likes DRM except DRM companies. If for any reason the DRM becomes a hindrance to gaming people will be pissed. The DRM, no matter what it is, will be broken in a matter of days anyway. The 512MB of flash, the USB ports and the SD card slot are going to be a hackers play land. this is good for Nintendo. Their systems were always a hackers nightmare with physical anti-piracy prevention like tiny GameCube discs and cartridges. Iwata spoke on how the revolution would be a revolution for developers. That it would be a system for people with big ideas not a big budget. If this holds true and just about anybody can develop for the revolution that will be huge. The blockbuster game companies like EA aren’t the ones who can take advantage of the possibilities of innovation that Nintendo is providing. Only by opening up to smaller more creative developers will we see software that takes full advantage of the hardware capabilities. This is why you don’t see a great quantity of DS software yet. The people with the resources to develop games don’t have the ideas and aren’t willing to take the risk. But the cost of entry for those who have ideas and risk is too high. If the price of entry is low there will be hordes of software. And if hackability is easy you will see articles on all the big blogs daily about the new cool thing that someone did with their revolution.

The last thing Nintendo has to do is fully maximize the potential of the wireless controller. The way I see it, wireless controllers means you can have as many players in one room as you have wireless channels. 16 is my prediction as that is how many DSes go at once and how many wavebirds go at once. But wireless also means you can have any kind of controller you want. I imagine a battle of the bands game including bongos microphones and more. If they release a wireless Duck Hunt zapper I will cry. They almost have to if they expect to sell that or Hogan’s Alley for download. And if they make a wireless power glove I’ll shit myself. It’s so bad. On the prototype revolution there are going to be GameCube controller ports and memory card slots. Whether those are only for cube compatibility or more remains to be seen. What would be extra awesome would be if the GameCube controller and wavebird were the standard revolution controllers. Maybe release a newly styled yet equivalent version for the revolution. Then have all kinds of revolutionary input devices for different games. It’s worked for DDR and Donkey Konga. Heck, entire industries pop up just to perfect a certain type of periopheral.

If Nintendo does all these things they will swim in money. But I don’t think this will be our reality. The reality I foresee is this. Nintendo will still be stingy with dev kits to protect IP, like the are now. Developing for revolution will be cheaper, but still not open to anyone and everyone so the number of games that take full advantage of the possibilities will be limited, like the DS. Lots of people will release games that are just normal video games with meager online support if any. Nobody will do anything cool like enabling online multiplayer support in the old school downloadable games or putting duck hunt high scores online. Somebody will release clones of the old NES, SNES and N64 controllers that are wireless and work with the revolution. It might even be Nintendo. The online library of games will not be as big as it could be, for licensing reasons. But it will contain all the Nintendo classics at the least. Most likely it will also have Namco, Midway and Atari games. All the things currently release as anthology discs will be available for download. I predict that the revolution will have a default wireless controller that has fancy features like a pressure sensitive grip, Wario ware twisted, microphone type interface. It might even have a touch screen in it. If it does, then unlike the Dreamcast VMU or the GBA->GCN connector every game will be forced to take advantage of that feature. And how they take advantage will determine which games are million sellers. As far as I’m concerned the only cube games to make reasonable use of the GBA were Pac-man vs. and 4 swords. FF:CC and Wind Waker just didn’t use it well enough.

I can see what is going through Nintendo’s minds right now. They see games like Katamari Damacy, DDR, Lumines, etc. They see cell phone games like Tetris going for $5. These games are cheap to make, yet sell as well as blockbuster titles that cost millions. That is where the huge profits lie. The revolution will be a platform where you can develop a game of any level and make it available to all the console owners. If you want to make a PS3 game it has to be a huge fancy graphics extravaganza. Theoretically if you get a big idea you can get a bunch of NES devs over and make a revolution game over the weekend. Not every revolution game will be another Katamari, but that’s what they’re shooting for. You can already see it happening with stuff like Nintendogs and Polarium on the DS. The question is whether there are enough creative minds to make enough content to get the ball rolling. All I can say is that if you are the type of person who prefers a Katamari to yet another Halo/Final Fantasy/GTA then Nintendo is the place to be.

As with any piece of software let us examine the problem we are trying to solve. We are trying to make software that will entertain people. It should also challenge people’s minds and reflexes and simultaneously move them emotionally in the same way a good movie does. This software should not be addicting, and it should have as small a monthly fee as possible, free is best. This software should not have a system of leveling by which the players who pay more money or play for longer hours will automatically be superior. Only skill in brains and game control should separate players.

First, the easy technical problems. Why do MMOs have monthly fees? The architecture of the software requires a centralized server which costs money to maintain. If we were to develop some sort of p2p architecture akin to BitTorrent that would act as the server, or at least alleviate some of its load, then the monthly fee could be reduced significantly. Also if all profits, if any, were made on the initial sale of the game we could reduce costs further by setting the monthly fee at cost. It would also remove incentive for developers to add addicting elements to the game which do not enhance the quality of the game itself. And distributed computing of an MMO is interesting computer science problem number one.

Next, how do we have a game in which there are multiple players that are separated only by their intelligence/wisdom and their video game control skills? There are many possible answers to this question, but the best one I’ve come up with is Metal Gear. Metal Gear is a game series in which puzzle solving and acute control skills mean everything. There is no treadmill, simply the collection and intelligent use of resources at your disposal to accomplish your goals. In my MMO idea, everyone controls an avatar just like Solid Snake, Lara Croft or the 3d Prince of Persia. Problem solving, resource management and video game button pushing are the skills required to make progress.

How can this game move people as emotionally as a movie? It needs plot, it needs music, it needs an immersing world. My suggestion is the following. The setting of the game is a post-apocalyptic hellhole similar to that portrayed in the Terminator movies. A game of survival. Every player is a person and there are deadly killer robots ruling the planet. The game will have one large persistent world, and there will be an endgame. High quality music will accompany everything to set the mood. And everything from in-game television screens to players communicating with each other to players finding things throughout the course of the game will be used to deliver the plot. The plot will be an incredibly epic and well written man vs. machine survival story. It would rock.

Now comes the hardest part. What are the specifics of the game that prevent it from making all the mistakes of MMOs in the past? This includes all the questions like player death, cheesy techniques, asshole players, etc. These ideas have not been thought out in full, but I do have some good ideas on how the game will work. More ideas are welcome.

First off, the game will work like so. The player creates their character. This includes selecting a name and a physical appearance of the character including clothing, since clothing doesn’t matter. Next, the players will spawn in a “safe” location in the persistent world. If there are many players then multiple spawn points can be set. These safe points will be somewhat protected from the enemies, but not completely. The only humans inhabiting the game will be players. The safe “city” will have resources such as food, water, weapons, radios and a shield or turrets to keep the evil at bay. It will be up to the players to collectively manage resources properly if they hope for this place to remain safe. They will be free to form their social structure in any way they see fit, and depending on how that works out will determine if they get anywhere or just all die. Free-form social structure is interesting computer science problem number 2.

The actual game-play will be as follows. Each player has equipment that does everything it should do. Guns shoot, knives cut, radios communicate, watches tell time, etc. Making equipment like walkie talkies work the same way they do in real life is the third interesting computer science problem. In order to fight for survival, and hopefully the destruction of the evil overlords players will have to leave their safe little bases to gather more resources and mount offensive strikes against the enemy. The elements of stealth, puzzle solving, exploration, aiming, maneuvering, teamwork, etc. will all come into play out in the world.

When a player dies their corpse will lie there depending on the fashion in which they died. Dying from starvation and dying in a huge explosion are very different. All their inventory will be affected as realistically as possible. The player will then be forced to make a new character. The accomplishments of the previous character will be logged and remembered. That’s it. Since there are no levels or xp the only thing you can lose is inventory. And as there are no items that are necessarily better than others, just different items, it wont be too painful. Some items might be scarce, like powered armor with rocket launchers and jet packs. But if you have that, then you aren’t very likely to die. You couldn’t realistically expect to keep something like that forever either as the enemies will come at you in full force. You will either waste them or perish at that point. People really wont care about losing their pistol, flashlight, canteen and two grenades.

That’s the whole game? Yup. But there will be some other interesting tidbits. First off, coding the ability to switch control of enemies over to the administrators. That will allow cool things to happen during special events. Also, maybe some sort of side plots involving evolving mutant monsters near a radioactive dump. This will be yet another computer science problem to make enemies with AIs that evolve depending on player equipment and combat tactics, but also in their own configurations. It will be too much work for someone to configure enemies for all situations. But it would be undeniably awesome if they automatically outfit themselves with flamethrowers for massacre missions and sniper rifles for assassination missions, etc. And mutant enemies that actually change over time would be just one more bit cooler.

The other thing about the game will be the level of interaction will be extremely deep. Radios will work like radios, video screens will work like video screens. Robots will work like robots. Players will be able to dismantle robots for parts, assemble parts to create new things. They can re-program in-game computer systems to aid the cause. Imagine a game world where someone writes a virus in the game and it infects the enemy base in the way they coded it and that gives you the opening for an assault. That is indeed the game of all time. Imagine the game having real working duct tape. Need to strap a flashlight to your assault rifle? No problem.

That’s my idea. Tons of players with the abilities of Solid Snake fighting for survival in a very large persistent game world with incredibly dangerous AI enemies roaming about. Every important video game skill and more will come into play. The plot will be deep and have a beginning middle and end. The music and immersing world will elicit strong emotions. This is but one way to make a game with many simultaneous players on the Internet without making it just another MUD with 3D graphics. I think it’s a damn good idea for a game that provides interesting and innovative new things on all fronts. For the player, developer and administrator this will surely be something special. If anyone wants to pay me enough money to quit my job, I’ll make it.

So about the game, its definitely right up the center of my alley. It’s a space shooting game with an interesting twist. All enemies in the game are either black or white. Your ship can be either black or white, and you push a button to toggle the colors. All bullets in the game, including those shot by you and by enemies, are either black or white. Ships fire bullets the same color as themselves. If you are white then white bullets do not harm you, in fact they charge up your white power meter. White bullets do double damage and double points to black enemies. In normal mode a white bad guy will release a swarm of white bullets if you destroy it while you are white. All those rules work the same for black. In hard mode all enemies release bullets when they die, regardless of any color. At any time you can empty your power bar to fire super powerful homing missiles. The more power the more missiles. And lastly, if you kill enemies in triplets of the same color (i.e: 3w, 3b, 3w, 3w, 3w, etc.) then you get lots more points. More points means more extra lives and a higher score. And with Internet ranking its all about more score.

What’s even cooler is that the game has all sorts of unlockable modes that are both harder and easier than the normal mode. The easier modes are to help you practice and get better at the game. The hard modes are to show off after you get better. And even though the game is short it is also very hard. It’s what we in the business call “Nintendo hard”. But its not as hard as Silver Surfer, so don’t panic. But what I like most about this game is how it brings me back to the old days. Back in my day of video games you had to build up skill in each individual game. You would slowly advance from dying at the first goomba to beating the game thrice with no warps. Nowadays there is a generic skill-set. You no longer need to “get good” at a game, you just need to progress in a game in order to beat it. Ikaruga is a game you have to get good at. That is why I consider it one of the better space shooters ever. It will definitely occupy a lot of my time until I am satisfied with my skill in beating it. Its no Galaga, but then what is?

And it’s a good thing that its so awesome. Because if it wasn’t so awesome I might have stabbed something. You see in order to play HL2 I either had to buy Cedega (cold day in hell) or reboot to my tiny, barely used, perfectly clean Windows XP partition. As a result of my experience my hatred for Microsoft Windows has been renewed. The fiery passion of disgust within me is equal to that of a gazillion white hot supernova suns.

Since I downloaded the game I had to wait awhile before I could play. So I went about web browsing, messaging and text editing while I waited. Even with Firefox and gaim this was incredibly unnecessarily painful. How come when I click the Firefox icon I have to wait for the window to show up? In fact, how come when I enter any command I have to wait a noticeable amount of time for anything to happen at all? This is the same exact computer and hardware that I use every day with Linux. I have instant response times on anything. If I click the Firefox icon in Linux, it opens immediately. Yet on a perfectly clean untarnished fully updated Windows XP it does not. No wonder you people are still using IE! But even IE did not open rapidly enough. I guess you must not realize how inherently slow and shitty it is if you have nothing to compare it to.

But wait, there’s more. Sound cards, I have two of them. They both work in Linux and Windows. But Half-Life 2 has some weird bug where if sound card drivers are weird then you can’t have 4.1, 5.1 or greater sound. Only stereo sound will work. Oh, and merely having two sound cards and two sound card drivers in the system, regardless of configuration, causes intolerable skipping and stuttering in the game audio. Now much of this blame goes to the developers at Valve for having such a serious and unnecessary bug in their game that is yet unfixed so late after release. However, this type of thing wouldn’t even be a remote possibility in a modern Linux system with alsa. You just couldn’t possibly have bugs like this, the architecture of the system itself prevents you from having this problem. The same is true for many other aspects of Linux. Just to note, I have issues with the way sound cards are handled in Linux/alsa also, so it is not perfect by any means. I think only Macintoshes, Apples and Commodores handle sound properly. Oh, and old DOS boxes with Sound Blaster 16s.

And of course, everyone’s favorite. Programs which stop responding. During absolutely normal use of various programs they stopped responding. Just like that. Sometimes I would use a program, go to close it and bam! it wont close. Gotta do the old ctrl-alt-del. At least that end process now button actually worked. I remember in the 3.1 days when you would get the GPF blue screen. You’ve come a long way MS, too bad no software on my Linux install crashes ever. At the very worst I will write some software and accidentally fork wrong and have to kill off a zombie. Actually XMMS is sometimes poopy too, but I can xkill it away. This is obviously a problem with the OS since programs that I know run just fine on Linux like Firefox, gaim and gvim were suspect. And the fact that it occurred in multiple programs not just one shows that the OS is at fault for instability. How can people work like this?

So to conclude the story. Windows still sucks. It sucks the dog dick of Anubis. It’s a good thing that Half-Life 2 is so god damn fucking amazing or it would have not been worth it to suffer the pain of using windows to play it. Judging by the number of years between Half-Life 1 and 2, which is 6 years by the way, we’ll see HL3 in late 2010. Hopefully by then the world of computing will be completely different and Windows will no longer have some stranglehold of low quality over the entire marketplace. There is no reason that we should be made to suffer this tyranny of shitty operating system any longer. Seriously, it just hurts a lot to use, like stabbing myself almost. If you’re still using Windows you have a choice. But I don’t think you can really understand just how bad your situation is until you learn what alternative OSes have to offer. I used to use Windows, I know. Free your hardware.

Saying that WoW is a good game because it’s funny is like saying Tetris is a good game because the blocks are pretty.

Isn’t it perfect? It expresses my feelings about the separation of theme and play in games. Play is the only thing I care about. All the theme in the world can’t save you if your game sucks. However, a good game can be helped by a good theme. This also applies to board games, just look at *opoly. I know I’ve said this a zillion times before, but many of my friends have fallen under the WoW’s spell, and its getting really bad. You know, social life destroying and money wasting bad. This analogy expresses my feelings better than ever before and I wanted to share it.

So I blame this on the Xbox. The Xbox did what nobody would expect. Instead of taking market share away from Sony or Nintendo, it largely just destroyed PC gaming as soon as XBL came around. I mean, the thing plays counterstrike. People can now get the full PC gaming experience with an XboX, minus keyboard and mouse of course AFAIK. So what happened is PC developers switched to Xbox. They no longer have troubles with patches or having to deal with every different piece of hardware in the universe, and they develop games in much the same way as previous since Xbox is largely a Windows PC with DirectX from a developers view. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot like this though. It is my belief, and experience, that gaming was the only thing keeping many people on Windows. And in fact I thank them for allowing me to fully flee to Linux by all but destroying PC gaming.

Now in the news lately PC game developers are having trouble. Interplay isn’t doing so hot especially. Recently I played the Ur-Quan masters and reveled in my Star Control 2 nostalgia. And just now, an idea came to me. If the game developers really wanted to they could have a huge PC gaming revival on Linux and make piles of easy cash. Think about this. Take an old DOS game, combine it with the open-source DOSBox and you can create easily a stable Linux version of an old DOS game. If the game company did this and released a stable high quality version of old, some no longer available games then they could really rake it in. If you ask me will I pay $10 or $20 for some old dos games which are refreshed and built for Linux the answer will be yes. They could even do it with more recent but small time games. I mean, there are tons of PC games at the store, just 99% of them are complete poop. If some of these poop games that were forgotten, specifically the ones written in OpenGL, were rebuilt for Linux and sold at the right price the developers could make a quick buck. The cost of porting games to the other OS if they aren’t written in DirectX will be incredibly cheap and take a very short time. Also, if the games are sold as downloads then the cost of shipping, packaging, etc. will be reduced. And marketing through blogs and word of mouth in the open source community will reduce those costs as well. Seems like a near 100% profit to me. All the developers have to do is rehash the golden oldies, maybe combine them into compilation CDS, and sell them for the new system. Easy money for them, cool games for us Linux users. Heck, some people might even switch to Linux just to play these games again. In my opinion the old PC game developers, or whoever owns them now, are just stupid for not doing this.

Here are some games that would make a big splash. Myst, all the King’s Quests/Space Quests/Monkey Islands/etc., TIE Fighter, Civilization 2, MOO2, Half-Life 1/Steam (I know it will never happen), Mechwarrior 2 (also never), X-COM series, Apogee game collection, Hero Quests (also a dream), tons and tons of Sierra stuff like 3D pinball, the list goes on. Oh hell, I didn’t even think, make a Mac OSX release too. In fact, that might even be a more profitable proposition.

Why do people play MMO games? The answer is simple; they try a free trial, get addicted and start shelling out the cash. Why are they addicted? This is a harder question, but I think I know the answer. Back in the day we had MUDs. I used to play muds, but I realize now they are even worse than the MMOs of today. All we did was, literaly, walk around and kill monsters to make numbers go up to kill different monsters. The role playing was basically nil, especially in smaller MUDs. But we kept doing it. Why? I mean, at least in a Final Fantasy game or something I can understand the desire to progress plot. But people actually have a desire to level up with no actual goal. You might at first say that it’s fun. But that’s not enough, if you ask why is it fun it become very difficult to think of a reason someone would want to perform monotonous tasks repeatedly with no real benefit.

There are a few reasons I can come up with that this is fun for people. First, there is an imagined benefit. People feel that when they reach the max level or some incredibly high level that some new world of awesome opens to them. In MUDs there were areas you simply couldn’t get to unless you were powerful enough. Sometimes you could go to the areas, but the monsters there would attack you and kill you, and you would have no chance of recovering your stuff. Getting more levels allowed you to go to these places. The real trick was that these new places were no more exciting or different than the areas you could already go. It did however provide this meager and false sense of superiority. As long as there are lower level players about it somehow makes people feel special to have abilities that others do not have, even if these abilities hold no real meaning.

The second reason is world modification. Low level players can’t do much. They walk around and hit things. High level players can teleport, destroy things, steal things, etc. They are like superheros. They have the ability to do things that regular people do not. Of course, these are all fake things, as they only exist in an imaginary world. You could acquire the same effect by playing with some action figures and using your imagination. Since it really isn’t you with the enhanced abilities, it’s an avatar, an action figure works just as well. But the real reason these abilities make people feel good is because other people have to suffer their effects. In a world of supermen the computer guy is the superhero. All the strength and speed doesn’t make technology work. You’re only super when you have abilities beyond that of others. And because the players in an MMO are all real people these false powers to manipulate the imaginary world gain new glory, because other real people have to suffer their effects. A plain digital world in which you were god is no fun. But as soon as it is a dynamic world that changes all the time in which other people have to play, changing it is fun because whatever you change has positive or negative effects on other people. So in order to gain these world changing abilities people will spend lots of time and money making numbers go up.

The third reason people level up is because it works. Everyone who knows how to play the game knows how to get levels. You kill things, you make things, whatever the case may be. But basically you repeat some monotonous task that amounts to clicking buttons or typing commands to make numbers go up. And as long as you push the right buttons and enter the right commands the numbers will always go up. There is no chance of them going down. There is no skill determinant. It’s not like you might lose or you might win, you always win as long as you know how to play. And the longer you play the more you win. It’s not like Tetris or Puzzle Pirates where you can know all the rules of the game but still lose. In an MMO if you know the rules of the game you win. And how much you win is determined by how much you play. The first MUDs were the very definition of this concept. As time went on MMOs and MUDs try their best to cover this up. And this is how MMOs beat each other. At their heart they all are based on this one concept, but as time goes on each one covers it up more and more in order to look better than the other MMOs. They add crafting, exploring, flying, puzzles, customization, etc. But these are all cover-ups of the underlying fundamental game mechanic. And the MMOs that cover it up more are the ones that are more succesfull. But the ones that leave it out are not addicting, they are just good games which happen to have many players connected at once, and thus they do not do as well.

But why is this game mechanic addicting and fun? Because it is escapist. The same reason that people read fiction is the same reason people are addicted to MMOs. It helps them escape the reality of an imperfect world. Most people do not feel perfectly happy, I’m an exception rather than the rule in that I am unhappy very rarely. But living in an MMO is an escape from reality. In the real world if you do work, you don’t always make numbers go up. Sometimes you do work poorly and things go sour. Sometimes you do work that results in nothing. You try really hard to win the sporting event, but the other team is better, even though you practiced more. In an MMO whoever plays more wins, skill matters little. This is the ideal of people who have lots of effort and little skill, and thus MMOs make them very happy. It is also escapist for people with no social skills. People who think they are ugly, or are shy, or have no friends. These people can go onto an MMO where they are anonymous and actually talk to people without fear. If people don’t like them they can make a new character. These people who have no social interaction in the real world can be the most popular and powerful player in the fake world. All they have to do is spend more time playing the game, which works well for them since they aren’t spending time hanging out with friends.

But in the end, no matter how high level you are, the rulers of the MMO world are dictators who made or run the game. And some NPCs are more powerful than players ever can be. The job of the player is to work to get useless levels and useless money so that they can do the same thing again in a different context. It’s just like the world we live in. Everyone is supposed to get a job to get money to get stuff which they have to support with more stuff they have to work for. MMOs as a whole are a simplified and magnified image of our western society. The only difference is that everybody wins. There are no homeless people in MMOs unless you want to pretend to be homeless for fun or something. And sometimes you have to be rich to do that. At one point in Puzzle Pirates you had to spend a lot of money if you wanted rag clothing, as it was only available to greenies(newbies). And this is why people play MMOs. They can replace their shitty real lives with an imaginary one. They pretend to live in a world in which they work and win on a day to day basis. They make imaginary friends and lead imaginary lives. And not only are their real lives protected from any bad happenings in the imaginary world, but their imaginary selves are pretty much protected from bad happenings. The worst that can happen is you die. And I don’t know of any MMOs which send you back to level 0 when you die. People just wouldn’t play it. And why wouldn’t they play it? Because guaranteed winning is the reason those games are addicting.