10-17-2007, 09:58 PM
Memoir of a Cyborg
Part 1: Apple Pie and Shared Hallucinations.
DAVE PANCHYK's view of various online games ...
WE ARE ALL of us cyborgs, as one scholar pointed out: we build ourselves with communities we choose to be part of. Just as only Italian or Thai food could not satisfy our inner gourmet, we gamers are made up of various types of games that complete us. One of my prominent parts is gaming real-time with others on the Internet for a deeper purpose than just to shoot at them.
Ambition
I am literally shaking with excitement at the computer as my character runs through the land of Dereth, seeking one last component.
It is almost Christmas, 1999, and I am trying to be the first person in the game world to make an apple pie.
Asheron's Call
I started playing Asheron's Call during the public test of the program's beta, or final pre-release, version. It thrilled me to no end: when I first heard of it, it reminded me of Dragon's Gate, the first online roleplaying game I had played.
Dragon's Gate was text-based, like the free MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. It featured many and varied races and classes, gods whose favour you could curry, and scads of interesting (and sometimes dangerous) locations in the city of Spur and its environs.
After hunting a couple of times with this one fellow, he drew me aside to a little-used side street in Spur. He told me about a secret group forming: prospective members had to show competency with all weapon types, and once inducted into the group, the character would get the group's unique tattoo.
This was an example of the game's developers - those who plan and program what the players see - acting on a player's input to create something new in the world. As in a PBM game, the world in DG was not only dynamic, but reactive to players' desires and their characters' actions.
I played Dragon's Gate obsessively on the GEnie computer network, an early competitor of AOL, in 1993. I had great fun chatting, fighting, and learning new skills, all at about CAN$3.95 an hour. A whopping credit card bill put that habit in abeyance - until Asheron's Call appeared on my radar.
Asheron's Call wowed me with its graphics, which required a 3D accelerator card. The outside locations were gorgeous, with a day and night cycle and expansive landscapes of desert, mountains, swamps and rolling hills. The advances in technology had allowed a visually stunning game. Dragon's Gate was over half a decade old; surely AC's gameplay would offer incredible wonders...
Sadly, it didn't.
The three 'races' were just three human ethnicities, and the classes were nothing more than different configurations of skills. You were allowed to create a custom character, and I did so. As my abilities were visible to many players, it was pointed out to me numerous times that I lacked in combat efficiency, usually phrased as, 'Your stats suck, dude.'
So there it was: roleplaying, my highest priority, was extremely rare in a world of combat first, everything else a distant second.
Among the 'everything else' was crafting, in which characters modify raw materials to make new and useful items. I liked cooking and alchemy, which allowed for the making of magical, restorative food. I liked it much better than hunting monsters, which was a shame, because AC's most interesting places were reserved for those who could fight their way into them.
Part of the AC hype that lured me in was 'dynamic content', in which the developers could change the game world 'on the fly', as they said. These updates turned out to be once-monthly additions of minor content - mostly monsters, of course - that often entailed server downtime.
However, I was pleased with the first update - for a while. There was a Christmas contest to discover the recipe for apple pie, and it entailed a lot of travel and experimentation; I wanted to have my character's name recorded forever for posterity. Equipped with a new robe and fez (another aspect of the update), I set out on my quest. I was beaten to that flaky-crusted grail by others, but had had a lot of fun.
After a time, though, I realized that fun was always on the developers' terms. They set up a series of hoops, and you jumped through them. AC's developers remained invisible, having only anonymous and one-way contact with 'the community' (as were called those who demonstrated on the World Wide Web the creativity that was denied them in-game). It became rapidly evident that things like the tattooed weapon-masters group in DG were not going to be possible, not for technical reasons but for corporate ones.
As my love for Asheron's Call faded, I travelled to several lonely spots to take in the sights. At one point, I stood at the top of a tall mountain. As the stars faded into dawn, I looked around. So beautiful... But AC, as a game, had no soul. As pastels began to creep along the sky, I took a dozen steps back, then ran forward. As the rising sun's rays touched the mountain's peak, I jumped off into empty space.
The bloom was off the rose; the honeymoon was over; the Asheron's Call CD was in the trash.
It was time to move on; surely out there, I thought, was the perfect MMORPG for a roleplayer.
Dark Ages
I found Dark Ages, whose dorky, anime-inspired graphics were a step backward. But atavism - a word I learned playing Dark Ages - was to be a theme of my quest.
Dark Ages had soul where Asheron's Call had none. Inspired by Celtic myth and with darkly surreal touches reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dreamlands work, it engaged me much more completely than AC had. A rich world of gods and myth, it had something I'd thirsted for: roleplaying, not just encouraged but enforced within the game. There was even a player-run law enforcement system, not to mention a political system and organized priesthoods.
Playing DA, I realized it is largely the people who make or break an MMORPG. There were - and are - some tremendous role-players in the game's international community, but they were increasingly crowded out by the young American teenagers who became the game's main constituency. It was frustrating that the game's administrators and programmers, who could have kept things on course with a firm hand, did nothing. Roleplaying in DA deteriorated.
Content updates came occasionally, but followed the same pattern as AC: they were meant to keep high-level characters and their combat-obsessed players entertained (and of course paying the monthly subscription fee, which at time of writing is US$9.95 per month, slightly lower than most MMORPGs).
Dark Ages has a free game program and free trial, and so is an excellent introduction for newcomers to MMORPGs. It's one of the few games I'd recommend. The mythic power of the game becomes evident once you've played long enough to get past the sometimes silly graphics.
With Dark Ages becoming swamped by idiots given a free hand by uncaring developers, I reluctantly began looking elsewhere. I followed one DA refugee to Ultima Online.
Ultima Online
Ultima Online is the granddaddy of the current crop of 3D graphical MMORPGs. Roleplaying with other people in the land of Britannia, the much-loved land of Lord Britain's Ultima series of games, sounded wonderful to many. Its popularity, though, made UO subject to just about everything that could plague an MMORPG. Texas-based Origin learned firsthand what their antecedents in the American West knew: it's the pioneers who take the arrows.
Origin wanted to create a dynamic world, one with living, self-sustaining ecosystems. Having a wolf population that realistically grew and shrank as wolves bred or died was a huge improvement over games in which a new wolf would suddenly pop into existence, or 'spawn', X number of minutes after another wolf was killed in the same spot.
This would have been fine had the wolves been left alone. Ask any wolf, though - or any sheep, for that matter - and they'll tell you that people are the greatest danger out there. Within hours of the new ecosystem being opened to adventurers, every wolf in Britannia was dead. Enthusiastic hunters are far less of a problem than anti-social, grief-causing players, or 'griefers'. People are the lifeblood of any MMORPG, and griefers are the bad blood.
Griefers are as tireless as they are creative. They will use any means available to torment and annoy other players - leaving aside all the methods of messing with the game program. Sexual harassment over private chat is the darker twin of being a nuisance on public chat. Theft is a constant: griefers will always find some way of stealing from other people's characters. And then there's the not-so-fine art of murder.
Player-killing, or PKing, had been around since the early days. MUDs had it; Meridian 59, newly re-launched, proudly proclaims that it has kept PKing in the game. Dragon's Gate had it, but the game was effectively self-policing: cause some violent mischief, and you'd find yourself hunted by a spontaneously-formed posse.
Given the scale of UO's game world, however, self-policing wasn't working, and the game's publisher didn't want to cut into profits by spending resources on quashing PKers. Britannia descended into anarchy as roving gangs killed anyone weaker than they - including the avatars of new players, whose influx is critical to the long-term survival of any MMORPG. The developers eventually brought order to the chaos in the form of a justice system: those who attacked other players were labeled criminals and became fair game for anyone.
Crafty griefers came up with a passive-aggressive way to twist that around. A group of them would block a dungeon entrance. Getting no response in chat, someone wanting to get by would give them a light smack to get their attention. That poor sod would then be 'flagged' as a criminal-and the griefers who then ganged up on and killed him were rewarded by the system. Justice is indeed blind.
All of this, though, I learned from previous players and from articles on the game. What I experienced was another typical game that bored me within hours. The crafting aspect was much stronger in UO, though: you could mine metal for the raw materials to make armour, for instance. UO hit the dustbin in pretty short order, and I saw that EverQuest, the one that started the big MMORPG boom, was marked down in price: US$10 with a free first month included (as is standard).
EverQuest
EverQuest is hardly different from the other games, only it's...more. The crafting is rich, the combat varied, the locations extremely diverse, the races and classes numerous. The graphics aren't as showy as AC's, but they're much more creative: the gnomes' clockwork city and the psychedelic underground domain of the dark elves make the game worth its price. It's got so much content that if you do get bored, you can start a different character and be bored in an entirely different milieu.
For roleplaying, though, EQ was nothing special, even on the roleplaying server. I stayed with the game a few months just because it manages to be so addictive, but eventually I moved on to continue my quest.
Dark Age of Camelot
Dark Age of Camelot, by the same lot who made Dragon's Gate an age ago, arrived with much hype. An Arthurian-themed MMORPG, it offered lush graphics like AC but with deeper gameplay. Not as deep as EverQuest, but it did offer realm-to-realm combat: higher-level characters from the Arthurian realm could fight those from the fae- or Nordic-themed realms. It was a great way to channel the energies of PKers, but I didn't want to pay my dues whacking monsters in the endless forests to see what it was like. I moved on, although my wife still plays and uses crafting to make armour and components for siege engines.
MUSHes
The atavistic urged kicked in more strongly, and I checked out various MUDs and MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), the latter much more role-playing oriented. The MUDs were basically EQ without graphics; in fact, EQ's developers were compelled to make a legal deposition denying they used progamme code from the Diku MUD-variant in their own game.
For me, at university in the late 1980s, the MUD experience never took root because our Soviet-era computer lab had only green-glaring VT100 terminals with intermittently-working space bars and no backspacing capability: 'Greetings, mynameis-oh hellsorry...' became the limit of my roleplaying abilities. Given the tortuous command navigations required to get to such games in the first place, it quickly became not worth it. Besides, at that point my friends and I were all young enough that it was possible to get a 'real' gaming session together to play a pen-and-paper RPG. MUSHes vary in quality, being small enterprises run for free; many are set in recognizable worlds, even copyrighted ones. Being small potatoes, they fly under the radar of rapacious corporate lawyers. You find excellent, creative roleplayers in these text games; however, most MUSHes are sparsely populated, and compounding the issue is the fact that big clumps of them live in particular time zones. You have to have someone to roleplay with, after all, and coordinating people between GMT and PST is tricky.
The MUSH idea was updated and refined by Skotos Tech for their Castle Marrach game. They produce others, including the upcoming Lovecraft Country, and wisely assembled partnerships to provide a strong roster of games for the US$12.95 monthly fee they charge. Meridian 59 is an old-school graphical MMORPG complete with player-killing; The Eternal City is a Roman-themed MUD; Grendel's Revenge has playable monsters; Gang of Four and Galactic Hegemony are more strategy games. Also included is Underlight, a graphical MMORPG with engaging gameplay in a shared dreamworld, with wonderful players who have the power to assign each other quests.
Recently, A Tale in the Desert emerged as an MMORPG with a truly original spin: there is no combat. Instead, you cooperate and compete with others to build ancient Egypt into a perfect society. You learn crafting skills and raise the level of technology, and can choose to focus on spiritual or physical disciplines instead. Its small size means lead developer Pharaoh can focus on true dynamism within the game world: when he showed me 'Oz', the game's control-panel environment, he made a yellow brick road appear under my feet with a few keystrokes. It's not a role-playing Mecca, but it is an oasis in a wasteland of 'murder the monster' games.
Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games are by turns frustrating and fascinating. They cover a variety of experiences, and there is likely one out there to suit any cyborg.
Some Useful Links:
A Tale in the Desert: http://www.atitd.com
Dark Ages: http://www.darkages.com
Skotos Tech: http://www.skotos.net
Dragon's Gate: http://www.mythic-realms.com
Questions or castigation may be directed to the author at:
dpanchyk@hotmail.com
Part 1: Apple Pie and Shared Hallucinations.
DAVE PANCHYK's view of various online games ...
WE ARE ALL of us cyborgs, as one scholar pointed out: we build ourselves with communities we choose to be part of. Just as only Italian or Thai food could not satisfy our inner gourmet, we gamers are made up of various types of games that complete us. One of my prominent parts is gaming real-time with others on the Internet for a deeper purpose than just to shoot at them.
Ambition
I am literally shaking with excitement at the computer as my character runs through the land of Dereth, seeking one last component.
It is almost Christmas, 1999, and I am trying to be the first person in the game world to make an apple pie.
Asheron's Call
I started playing Asheron's Call during the public test of the program's beta, or final pre-release, version. It thrilled me to no end: when I first heard of it, it reminded me of Dragon's Gate, the first online roleplaying game I had played.
Dragon's Gate was text-based, like the free MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. It featured many and varied races and classes, gods whose favour you could curry, and scads of interesting (and sometimes dangerous) locations in the city of Spur and its environs.
After hunting a couple of times with this one fellow, he drew me aside to a little-used side street in Spur. He told me about a secret group forming: prospective members had to show competency with all weapon types, and once inducted into the group, the character would get the group's unique tattoo.
This was an example of the game's developers - those who plan and program what the players see - acting on a player's input to create something new in the world. As in a PBM game, the world in DG was not only dynamic, but reactive to players' desires and their characters' actions.
I played Dragon's Gate obsessively on the GEnie computer network, an early competitor of AOL, in 1993. I had great fun chatting, fighting, and learning new skills, all at about CAN$3.95 an hour. A whopping credit card bill put that habit in abeyance - until Asheron's Call appeared on my radar.
Asheron's Call wowed me with its graphics, which required a 3D accelerator card. The outside locations were gorgeous, with a day and night cycle and expansive landscapes of desert, mountains, swamps and rolling hills. The advances in technology had allowed a visually stunning game. Dragon's Gate was over half a decade old; surely AC's gameplay would offer incredible wonders...
Sadly, it didn't.
The three 'races' were just three human ethnicities, and the classes were nothing more than different configurations of skills. You were allowed to create a custom character, and I did so. As my abilities were visible to many players, it was pointed out to me numerous times that I lacked in combat efficiency, usually phrased as, 'Your stats suck, dude.'
So there it was: roleplaying, my highest priority, was extremely rare in a world of combat first, everything else a distant second.
Among the 'everything else' was crafting, in which characters modify raw materials to make new and useful items. I liked cooking and alchemy, which allowed for the making of magical, restorative food. I liked it much better than hunting monsters, which was a shame, because AC's most interesting places were reserved for those who could fight their way into them.
Part of the AC hype that lured me in was 'dynamic content', in which the developers could change the game world 'on the fly', as they said. These updates turned out to be once-monthly additions of minor content - mostly monsters, of course - that often entailed server downtime.
However, I was pleased with the first update - for a while. There was a Christmas contest to discover the recipe for apple pie, and it entailed a lot of travel and experimentation; I wanted to have my character's name recorded forever for posterity. Equipped with a new robe and fez (another aspect of the update), I set out on my quest. I was beaten to that flaky-crusted grail by others, but had had a lot of fun.
After a time, though, I realized that fun was always on the developers' terms. They set up a series of hoops, and you jumped through them. AC's developers remained invisible, having only anonymous and one-way contact with 'the community' (as were called those who demonstrated on the World Wide Web the creativity that was denied them in-game). It became rapidly evident that things like the tattooed weapon-masters group in DG were not going to be possible, not for technical reasons but for corporate ones.
As my love for Asheron's Call faded, I travelled to several lonely spots to take in the sights. At one point, I stood at the top of a tall mountain. As the stars faded into dawn, I looked around. So beautiful... But AC, as a game, had no soul. As pastels began to creep along the sky, I took a dozen steps back, then ran forward. As the rising sun's rays touched the mountain's peak, I jumped off into empty space.
The bloom was off the rose; the honeymoon was over; the Asheron's Call CD was in the trash.
It was time to move on; surely out there, I thought, was the perfect MMORPG for a roleplayer.
Dark Ages
I found Dark Ages, whose dorky, anime-inspired graphics were a step backward. But atavism - a word I learned playing Dark Ages - was to be a theme of my quest.
Dark Ages had soul where Asheron's Call had none. Inspired by Celtic myth and with darkly surreal touches reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dreamlands work, it engaged me much more completely than AC had. A rich world of gods and myth, it had something I'd thirsted for: roleplaying, not just encouraged but enforced within the game. There was even a player-run law enforcement system, not to mention a political system and organized priesthoods.
Playing DA, I realized it is largely the people who make or break an MMORPG. There were - and are - some tremendous role-players in the game's international community, but they were increasingly crowded out by the young American teenagers who became the game's main constituency. It was frustrating that the game's administrators and programmers, who could have kept things on course with a firm hand, did nothing. Roleplaying in DA deteriorated.
Content updates came occasionally, but followed the same pattern as AC: they were meant to keep high-level characters and their combat-obsessed players entertained (and of course paying the monthly subscription fee, which at time of writing is US$9.95 per month, slightly lower than most MMORPGs).
Dark Ages has a free game program and free trial, and so is an excellent introduction for newcomers to MMORPGs. It's one of the few games I'd recommend. The mythic power of the game becomes evident once you've played long enough to get past the sometimes silly graphics.
With Dark Ages becoming swamped by idiots given a free hand by uncaring developers, I reluctantly began looking elsewhere. I followed one DA refugee to Ultima Online.
Ultima Online
Ultima Online is the granddaddy of the current crop of 3D graphical MMORPGs. Roleplaying with other people in the land of Britannia, the much-loved land of Lord Britain's Ultima series of games, sounded wonderful to many. Its popularity, though, made UO subject to just about everything that could plague an MMORPG. Texas-based Origin learned firsthand what their antecedents in the American West knew: it's the pioneers who take the arrows.
Origin wanted to create a dynamic world, one with living, self-sustaining ecosystems. Having a wolf population that realistically grew and shrank as wolves bred or died was a huge improvement over games in which a new wolf would suddenly pop into existence, or 'spawn', X number of minutes after another wolf was killed in the same spot.
This would have been fine had the wolves been left alone. Ask any wolf, though - or any sheep, for that matter - and they'll tell you that people are the greatest danger out there. Within hours of the new ecosystem being opened to adventurers, every wolf in Britannia was dead. Enthusiastic hunters are far less of a problem than anti-social, grief-causing players, or 'griefers'. People are the lifeblood of any MMORPG, and griefers are the bad blood.
Griefers are as tireless as they are creative. They will use any means available to torment and annoy other players - leaving aside all the methods of messing with the game program. Sexual harassment over private chat is the darker twin of being a nuisance on public chat. Theft is a constant: griefers will always find some way of stealing from other people's characters. And then there's the not-so-fine art of murder.
Player-killing, or PKing, had been around since the early days. MUDs had it; Meridian 59, newly re-launched, proudly proclaims that it has kept PKing in the game. Dragon's Gate had it, but the game was effectively self-policing: cause some violent mischief, and you'd find yourself hunted by a spontaneously-formed posse.
Given the scale of UO's game world, however, self-policing wasn't working, and the game's publisher didn't want to cut into profits by spending resources on quashing PKers. Britannia descended into anarchy as roving gangs killed anyone weaker than they - including the avatars of new players, whose influx is critical to the long-term survival of any MMORPG. The developers eventually brought order to the chaos in the form of a justice system: those who attacked other players were labeled criminals and became fair game for anyone.
Crafty griefers came up with a passive-aggressive way to twist that around. A group of them would block a dungeon entrance. Getting no response in chat, someone wanting to get by would give them a light smack to get their attention. That poor sod would then be 'flagged' as a criminal-and the griefers who then ganged up on and killed him were rewarded by the system. Justice is indeed blind.
All of this, though, I learned from previous players and from articles on the game. What I experienced was another typical game that bored me within hours. The crafting aspect was much stronger in UO, though: you could mine metal for the raw materials to make armour, for instance. UO hit the dustbin in pretty short order, and I saw that EverQuest, the one that started the big MMORPG boom, was marked down in price: US$10 with a free first month included (as is standard).
EverQuest
EverQuest is hardly different from the other games, only it's...more. The crafting is rich, the combat varied, the locations extremely diverse, the races and classes numerous. The graphics aren't as showy as AC's, but they're much more creative: the gnomes' clockwork city and the psychedelic underground domain of the dark elves make the game worth its price. It's got so much content that if you do get bored, you can start a different character and be bored in an entirely different milieu.
For roleplaying, though, EQ was nothing special, even on the roleplaying server. I stayed with the game a few months just because it manages to be so addictive, but eventually I moved on to continue my quest.
Dark Age of Camelot
Dark Age of Camelot, by the same lot who made Dragon's Gate an age ago, arrived with much hype. An Arthurian-themed MMORPG, it offered lush graphics like AC but with deeper gameplay. Not as deep as EverQuest, but it did offer realm-to-realm combat: higher-level characters from the Arthurian realm could fight those from the fae- or Nordic-themed realms. It was a great way to channel the energies of PKers, but I didn't want to pay my dues whacking monsters in the endless forests to see what it was like. I moved on, although my wife still plays and uses crafting to make armour and components for siege engines.
MUSHes
The atavistic urged kicked in more strongly, and I checked out various MUDs and MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), the latter much more role-playing oriented. The MUDs were basically EQ without graphics; in fact, EQ's developers were compelled to make a legal deposition denying they used progamme code from the Diku MUD-variant in their own game.
For me, at university in the late 1980s, the MUD experience never took root because our Soviet-era computer lab had only green-glaring VT100 terminals with intermittently-working space bars and no backspacing capability: 'Greetings, mynameis-oh hellsorry...' became the limit of my roleplaying abilities. Given the tortuous command navigations required to get to such games in the first place, it quickly became not worth it. Besides, at that point my friends and I were all young enough that it was possible to get a 'real' gaming session together to play a pen-and-paper RPG. MUSHes vary in quality, being small enterprises run for free; many are set in recognizable worlds, even copyrighted ones. Being small potatoes, they fly under the radar of rapacious corporate lawyers. You find excellent, creative roleplayers in these text games; however, most MUSHes are sparsely populated, and compounding the issue is the fact that big clumps of them live in particular time zones. You have to have someone to roleplay with, after all, and coordinating people between GMT and PST is tricky.
The MUSH idea was updated and refined by Skotos Tech for their Castle Marrach game. They produce others, including the upcoming Lovecraft Country, and wisely assembled partnerships to provide a strong roster of games for the US$12.95 monthly fee they charge. Meridian 59 is an old-school graphical MMORPG complete with player-killing; The Eternal City is a Roman-themed MUD; Grendel's Revenge has playable monsters; Gang of Four and Galactic Hegemony are more strategy games. Also included is Underlight, a graphical MMORPG with engaging gameplay in a shared dreamworld, with wonderful players who have the power to assign each other quests.
Recently, A Tale in the Desert emerged as an MMORPG with a truly original spin: there is no combat. Instead, you cooperate and compete with others to build ancient Egypt into a perfect society. You learn crafting skills and raise the level of technology, and can choose to focus on spiritual or physical disciplines instead. Its small size means lead developer Pharaoh can focus on true dynamism within the game world: when he showed me 'Oz', the game's control-panel environment, he made a yellow brick road appear under my feet with a few keystrokes. It's not a role-playing Mecca, but it is an oasis in a wasteland of 'murder the monster' games.
Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games are by turns frustrating and fascinating. They cover a variety of experiences, and there is likely one out there to suit any cyborg.
Some Useful Links:
A Tale in the Desert: http://www.atitd.com
Dark Ages: http://www.darkages.com
Skotos Tech: http://www.skotos.net
Dragon's Gate: http://www.mythic-realms.com
Questions or castigation may be directed to the author at:
dpanchyk@hotmail.com
Dave Panchyk
2004-12-06
2004-12-06