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There’s a major event going on in Achaea that is probably coming to a conclusion as I write this. I sit here, invisibly, in a room with Ugrach, the Lord of the Undead, being ‘possessed’ by Achaea’s producer, and roleplaying with some major players in the current Big Event, and helping to decide the fate of a major storyline.
I love this stuff. I look at who else is with us, and I see a few invisible Gods (who can’t see me), and a whole raft of players (who can’t see the Gods or me). I don’t claim that our games are better games than World of Warcraft or Everquest or whatnot. I don’t really believe in objectively better or worse content. It’s all a matter of opinion. But I tell you what: Those big guys can never, ever do what we and all sorts of other indie games do. They simply cannot, by their nature, provide the intense kind of roleplaying experience that text games can do. The combination of the freedom that text gives developers and the freedom that a relatively small userbase text guarantees is extraordinarily liberating and it is amazing to watch our players take these intricate storylines and run with them. Sorry to cheerlead, but as much as I admire the Blizzards of the world, I think there’s also something very cool about small indie communities, dedicated to preserving an intimate experience.
There’s always debate among both devs and players over which popular intellectual property’s specific characteristics and fan base make it most suitable for an MMO. I had a random thought earlier, however, that provides an objective way to measure its popularity among MMO fans. The hobbyist text MUD community (still thriving) tends to feel quite free about using popular IP without a license. Whether this is fan fiction or a copyright violation is a question for the courts to answer, though generally, owners of popular IP have taken a hands-off approach to text MUDs. The most notable exception is author Raymond E. Feist (whose work we licensed partly because he had prevented hobbyist MUDs from using his IP), though the Tolkien Estate has threatened action at least once, against a MUD that was selling mugs and t-shirts via Cafepress.com in order to pay its server bills.
Why, you ask? From a blog on Nintendo at About.com:
“Dr. Kimberly Thompson of Harvard University supposedly found during an independent analysis that the ESRB didn’t identify all violence. Of course, this is a matter of opinion based on what is considered “violence.” This problem is addressed in section 2’s, “Understanding Video Game Research.” The same study found that Pac-Man is “64%” violent“
Today, the US House of Representatives took the Flag of Jackassery, proudly planted it on the front lawn of Castle Dimwit and declared, “We’re for stupidity, kicking puppies, and spitting in people’s soup.” I don’t really like foul language on blogs. I rarely use it on the Forge. But damn it, the US government is just full of motherfuckers. Yeah, that’s right. I used both bold AND italics.
Today, the House of Reps passed a bill, 410-15, requiring schools and public libraries to ban access to social networks from those under 18 and, potentially, pretty much any site that allows freeform communication between users.
Via PlayNoEvil comes an editorial on MMORPG.com that makes me want to cry a little bit. It’s about factions and what the editor thinks could be changed to be better. He writes, for instance:
First should be how one is able to join a faction. Let fellow players decide who can join their faction. More importantly, if a group of players is being dishonorable, allow the players the ability to exile them from their own faction. Have a certain election system implemented where certain leaders from each faction form a council where everything is discussed on the grand scale. This would create a truly faction friendly gaming system, where all members of the faction really have to work together in order to succeed. If one leader abuses his power in removing people that should not be removed, there is always the election system to remove them from that council, so someone better can lead.
Raph has a post on his blog that references a PlayNoEvil post from the end of May talking about how Netease, the Chinese operator of Habbo, is selling physical items paired with virtual items now. For instance, order a bouquet of flowers and get a real delivery the next day. I’m not sure how interesting this really is. If I want to order flowers, I’ll order flowers. If I want to order virtual flowers, I’ll order virtual flowers. Rarely do I actually want virtual and real flowers, and given Habbo’s generally underage population, I hope they’re not encouraging teenagers to give out their real address so that others can send them virtual and physical gifts. (I can’t see a lot of use for the pairing besides gifting.)
What I think is potentially more useful to the end user in this kind of situation would be selling physical representations of in-game things where the value is largely created by the context of the game. Flowers exist regardless of the game, and there are better ways to buy flowers than from Habbo. But, for instance, Simutronics sells illustrated character portraits to its players. Those portraits are not great works of art, but the context of the game grants them value. Similarly, we’re looking into making custom-created 3d models of a player’s character (via a 3d printing process) available to players of our unannounced game.
Food courts across America experienced a dramatic up-surge in business yesterday as distraught teenagers flocked to the them to stuff their gullets with burgers and burritos after MySpace, the trendy site that is responsible for more incidents of spontaneous eye-bleeding than any since a rash of sites containing twinkly star backgrounds and colorful, animated divider bars came briefly to prominence in 1995, went down as a result of heat-wave related blackouts in California. For twelve hours, cries of “OH NOES!” went up in bedrooms across the land while greedy food court mavens jacked prices up to take advantage of the crisis.
Note: Runescape announced they broke 1 million subscribers in early May, 2007.
Runescape is now reportedly at 800,000 subscribers (with, they claim, 5 million unique users/month), and recently broke 200,000 simultaneous players. Will it be the second Western game to break a million subscribers? Here’s the Google Trend data for search volume. As you can see, the growth rate is declining, though growth continues.
I know someone out there has to know what this game is called. Chris Kohnert (our CTO), and Jeremy Saunders (one of our producers), and I were in the “AdventureDome” (a large indoor area with rides, etc) in Circus Circus in Vegas during one of our annual trips diverting ourselves until the sun went down. (The rest of the group was hanging around somewhere else in the AdventureDome.) Circus Circus is almost completely without merit, and I realize that, so please, no need to mock us for our presence there. In any case, one of the employees of the place was playing some sort of Japanese import video game I’d not seen before that involved somewhere between 6 and 8 buttons that you had to press beat-matching style to 6-8 lines of descending graphics on screen.
This guy was inhuman. I have never seen anything like it. His hands moved literally in a blur and he seemed to rarely-to-never miss a beat. We must have stood and watched him for 10 minutes before moving on. I’m sure the guy loved it. Arcade employees don’t strike me as having a lot to envy generally, unless job insecurity is a bonus in your life. I’d never seen the game again until today on Google video, and if anyone knows what it’s called, I’d be obliged. Thanks! (Incidentally, the guy in the video is not quite as good as the guy in Vegas.)
The NPD group released its June best-selling PC games today. They are:
- World of Warcraft
- Half-Life 2 Episode 1
- The Sims 2 Family Fun Stuff
- Cars Radiator Springs Adventures
- The Sims 2 Open For Business
- The Sims 2
- Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
- Guild Wars Factions
- Heroes Of Might Magic V
- Age Of Empires III
20 months after release, it still sits on top. That’s just incredible, particularly for an MMORPG.
Interesting article in Wired by Clive Thompson about the pleasure that can be derived even from being very unskilled at a game. It seems that some very smart Finns over at M.I.N.D. Labs have been hooking up volunteer gamers to various biosensors and watched their biological reactions to Super Monkey Bowling, which is a mini-game in Super Monkey Ball 2, or something. I start to glaze over when there are too many monkeys floating around. Monkeys are distracting.
What they found was pretty darn interesting: When a player succeeds and knocks down a lot of pins, his or her body registers signs congruent with a pleasure reaction. That’s expected. When a player barely misses and does poorly as a result, frustration results, which is also expected. What’s a bit unexpected is to discover that when a player misses by a large margin, his or her body produces the same signs as when he or she succeeds.
As Clive mentions, that is totally the sign of a well-designed game. Expecting losing itself to be fun is probably asking too much, but if you can create such a joyously delightful experience that the process that leads right up to losing is fun, you’re probably going to do ok.
I wanted to include the ‘eulogy’ post that Maya, Achaea’s producer, made to announce Carl’s passing. She knew him better than I, as she was of the same generation of player as he (and moved up through the ranks to become take over Achaea entirely from me), and they butted heads rather prominently, as their roles in-game put them at odds.
ANNOUNCE NEWS #2324
Date: 7/17/2006 at 4:44
From: Maya, the Great Mother
To : Everyone
Subj: Words cannot express.Earlier today, I received grievous news about the untimely death of the player behind one of Achaea’s best-known characters. You knew him, or have likely at least heard of him, as Covenant Stormcrow, he who was the Heart of the Forest for 100 in-game years.
Of the many heartwarming stories behind RL relationships first conceived in Achaea, that of the players behind Covenant and Judiel Stormcrow remains one of the greatest. Meeting first here in early 2000, the two soon met in real life and wed, crossing countries to do so. In September of 2001, they welcomed into the world their son. They would have celebrated the 6th anniversary of their marriage this October.
The player behind Covenant mentored, guided, befriended, roleplayed alongside, and otherwise touched the lives of many here for many years. When I personally knew Covenant as a player, years ago, we more often than not butted heads as leaders of adversarial factions. Oh, he was a stubborn one (as am I!), but despite any past in-game differences, he has my deep and everlasting respect as a person, and as one of the legends of Achaea. He was a pillar of this community, a community that would not be what it is today without him and others like him to nurture, shape, and guide it.
Despite the fact that we ostensibly roleplay as characters other than our true selves in Achaea, the relationships and the emotional and psychological experiences that we create here often transcend simple ‘play’. Even if we are never lucky enough to meet in person, we grow to know each other, to respect and care for the minds and souls behind the textual characters in a very real and profound way. I do not know much of his life outside of Achaea so I cannot speak of it, but I am certain he was as loved and respected there as he was here. We were truly blessed to have known him and his integrity, his spirit, his heart.
I have pinned the current topic on Achaea’s Forums about Covenant, on which there is more information. Please feel free to leave your memories and respects therein.
Love, support, and condolences from all of the Garden to the bereaved: the player behind Judiel, the rest of Carl’s family, and to all those who knew him here. We share your sorrow. You are deep in our hearts.
Walk in shade, old crow.
I was gone this weekend and during our Monday morning meeting, I got some bad news: An Achaean player named Covenant Stormcrow, who had been a very prominent member of the community for years, had drowned on a family vacation. Covenant (or Carl as he was known outside of Achaea), wasn’t the founder of the Sentinels (both a class and a guild oriented on combining strength of arms with druidic skills), but he served as its leader, known as the Heart of the Forest, for a record 100 in-game years (over four real years), which is quite a singular achievement given the acrimonious politics that have often surrounded the forest guilds. Strong-willed, a natural leader, and a principled player, Covenant stands in the foremost rank of players in Achaea’s ten-year history to my mind. He is survived by his wife, whom he met on Achaea, and his young son.
Farewell Carl. We’ll miss you. 
I’m not really a fanboy type of person, but if there’s one thing that gets my obsession juices flowing, it’s Tolkien. I’m certainly out-obsessed by many many people in this category, but for me, it doesn’t get any better than the history of Middle-Earth. I enjoy Lord of the Rings (I actually prefer the movies to the books, frankly), but I love the Silmarillion.
The print comic strip Fox Trot, by Bill Amend, is running a multi-day ’storyline’ where Jason, the computer geek kid, farms gold from World of Warcraft to sell. Nothing ground-breaking here, but even as tech-savvy as Fox Trot usually is, it was surprising to see on the same page as bland lowest-common-demoniator fare like Garfield and Family Circus.
All of our games and websites (but not forums), including this blog, were down this morning from about 1 am to about 1 pm. Our ISP’s upstream provider, above.net, screwed up and it took nine of those twelve hours for our ISP to convince above.net that the problem was on their end. Needless to say, I am not pleased.
There is absolutely nothing that I hate more regarding the professional side of my life than downtime. Nothing. I get physically nauseous when our games are down, particularly when it’s essentially out of our control. I rage at our ISP to my CTO. I pace around the room and get nothing done. I hit ‘reload’ on my browser pointed at ironrealms.com every few seconds. I call our ISP and alert them to my current level of unhappiness with their service. I apologize to players on the forums, feeling completely impotent because though it’s our responsibility to stay up, we are powerless to change the situation for the moment. No minute is ever longer than a minute where we’re down. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does…ugh. Just…ugh.
On the plus side, we have incredibly understanding players who, though annoyed and sometimes distraught at being unable to play, are almost to a man or woman, supportive. Our players rock.
I’m going to use this opportunity to officially announce the MMO we have in development, by the name of The Crusades Online (TCO, as it will no doubt become ubiquitously known). It is a fully 3d product in which you take on one of three sides battling for control of the holy city of Jerusalem in a quasi-historical (historical with some modern elements thrown in for the sake of gameplay) setting. Christians everywhere who long for days goneby can take on the part of one of the noble Crusaders, battling the evil Muslims to wrest control of Jerusalem once and for all, in the name of Jesus. Muslims are given the opportunity to play noble warriors, battling the evil Christians to wrest control of Jerusalem, once and for all, in the name of Mohammed. And finally, Jews get to play Jewish underground resistance fighters, battling everyone to wrest control of Jerusalem, once and for all, in the name of Yahweh.
I found myself extending my lunch by about 20 minutes today due to getting sucked into Hitman: Blood Money on the 360. I was just about to make the crucial mistake of starting a new mission when the 360 auto-detected my need to get back to work and generated a “Cannot read disc” message that it is so fond of giving me. Faced with either waiting to boot up the game again (as the disc is fine) or getting back to work, I chose the latter.
Thank you, Microsoft, for your concern for my personal schedule and for forcing me to adhere to it with your none-too-subtle reminders that work has to come first. Sometimes I think you allow buggy software or shoddy hardware to slip into your products, but moments like this make me realize that you’re just looking out for my best interests.
As reported by Red Herring (via PaidContent), Sulake, Finnish developer and publisher of the ridiculously popular Habbo Hotel has raised an additional $7.65 million from Japanese investors in order to expand into Japan and then the rest of Asia, and to help launch Habbo Mobile. This follows on the footsteps of a huge ($23 million) investment in 2004-2005. Habbo is one of the most popular virtual worlds on the planet, and gets about 7 million unique monthly users, mainly in the teen demographic.
My favorite thing about Habbo are the weekly live radio programs done by Sulake’s Canadian manager (and friend), Allan Best. He’s big on doing impressions and has a couple regular ‘characters’ that appear on the radio show. It apparently enjoys a relatively high percentage of listenership by Canadian Habbo players.
Neat stuff. Go Sulake!
I’ve upgraded the subscribe feed to a Feedburner link. I’m not sure if this means that those of you subscribing via the old method (which took you to an RSS XML page at http://ironrealms.com/forge/feed) need to re-subscribe, but just clicking on the subscribe link on the upper right, below the header, certainly makes that easy enough.
From Engadget.
When Microsoft releases its iPod competitor at the end of this year, they are going to give users of their service all the songs that they’ve purchased via iTunes, costing Microsoft bucketloads, as it will still have to pay the rights holders to the songs. Those are some deep pockets! I suspect this is going to be a brilliant marketing move for MS who has shown themselves willing to take big losses on version 1 of a product to establish market share.
I just finished New Super Mario Brothers last night on my spanking-new DS Lite. What a great game. It captured everything that I loved about the 2d Super Mario platformers and added twists of its own to enhance the experience without corrupting it. My only complaint about the game was that it was a bit too easy. A few levels gave me trouble, but that was generally because I was going after all three big gold coins on that level. What’s funny is that it is pretty clearly the best game released for the DS, and it doesn’t really use any of the DS’s unique features: the split-screen and the touch-pad. It makes half-hearted attempts to use both, but the same game could easily be played on a single, non-touch screen with minimal alteration. I’m glad Nintendo didn’t try to use them more though, as they may have risked messing with the quintessential 2d platformer experience.
Raph Koster has a good post today entitled the above. He’s basically right on the money as far as I’m concerned, but I wanted to comment on one of his commandments.