Insomnia And The Hole In The Universe
Can't sleep tonight; my head is swimming with ideas. I got on IM earlier and had a very personal conversation with my old friend Heather that ranged from religion to sex, and then about the time she logged off, jesc came on and we talked about psychology, sex, religion, and a bunch of other stuff. It was great.
But that's not what's keeping me awake. Funny how this happens, but right now I'm thinking about computer games. Specifically, one I'd like to design and create.
I play a game called Dark Age of Camelot. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. If you haven't heard of DAoC, you've probably heard of EverQuest, which pioneered the genre, or at least the direction the genre is currently headed.
I played paper RPGs as a teenager, and MMORPGs are totally a different animal. Paper RPGs could only be so complex, because you could only keep track of so many stats and dice-rolling computations before you became overwhelmed. But that was okay, because the whole point of playing was for the human interaction, which couldn't be managed or predicted by stats and dice rolls anyway.
MMORPGs have done nothing to improve upon this. They've relieved the player of the task of rolling dice, but they've also removed most of the human element and turned the game into a monotonous drudgery of killing computer-controlled enemies. In DAoC you can at least fight against other players in Realm-vs.-Realm combat, but this isn't the substance of the game; you still have to spend countless hours killing NPC monsters to gain enough levels to be worth anything in RvR.
And MMORPGs use some serious addiction psychology to keep you playing. The higher you get in levels, the less your experience bar rises with each kill and the longer it takes to gain the next level. You want to just say "fuck this" and quit, but you've already invested so much time in your character that you can't. The stats of your character are visible to you, but the algorithms for determining combat damage and stuff are only vaguely documented. This leaves the subject open for wild speculation and superstition. Players obsess over their stats as they attempt to calculate the most efficient way to gain the next level. The whole game is very mechanical, very boring.
What I want to do is create a MMORPG that focuses on player development rather than character development. I've come up with some ingenious game mechanics to accomplish this, and that's what's been keeping me up all night. The end result would be as much a psychology and sociology experiment as a game. But I think people would play it, and I think the audience it would attract would be much more diverse than any MMORPG to date, for the same reasons Myst was so popular back in the day.
My ultimate dream is to make a living doing something I don't consider work. If I worked out the details and got the right people together to make this happen (and I already have a few in mind), I wonder if I could get some media company to front us enough money to quit our jobs and develop it. Hell, it's worth a shot, right?
But that's not what's keeping me awake. Funny how this happens, but right now I'm thinking about computer games. Specifically, one I'd like to design and create.
I play a game called Dark Age of Camelot. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. If you haven't heard of DAoC, you've probably heard of EverQuest, which pioneered the genre, or at least the direction the genre is currently headed.
I played paper RPGs as a teenager, and MMORPGs are totally a different animal. Paper RPGs could only be so complex, because you could only keep track of so many stats and dice-rolling computations before you became overwhelmed. But that was okay, because the whole point of playing was for the human interaction, which couldn't be managed or predicted by stats and dice rolls anyway.
MMORPGs have done nothing to improve upon this. They've relieved the player of the task of rolling dice, but they've also removed most of the human element and turned the game into a monotonous drudgery of killing computer-controlled enemies. In DAoC you can at least fight against other players in Realm-vs.-Realm combat, but this isn't the substance of the game; you still have to spend countless hours killing NPC monsters to gain enough levels to be worth anything in RvR.
And MMORPGs use some serious addiction psychology to keep you playing. The higher you get in levels, the less your experience bar rises with each kill and the longer it takes to gain the next level. You want to just say "fuck this" and quit, but you've already invested so much time in your character that you can't. The stats of your character are visible to you, but the algorithms for determining combat damage and stuff are only vaguely documented. This leaves the subject open for wild speculation and superstition. Players obsess over their stats as they attempt to calculate the most efficient way to gain the next level. The whole game is very mechanical, very boring.
What I want to do is create a MMORPG that focuses on player development rather than character development. I've come up with some ingenious game mechanics to accomplish this, and that's what's been keeping me up all night. The end result would be as much a psychology and sociology experiment as a game. But I think people would play it, and I think the audience it would attract would be much more diverse than any MMORPG to date, for the same reasons Myst was so popular back in the day.
My ultimate dream is to make a living doing something I don't consider work. If I worked out the details and got the right people together to make this happen (and I already have a few in mind), I wonder if I could get some media company to front us enough money to quit our jobs and develop it. Hell, it's worth a shot, right?