Monkey Vs. Robot Vs. Vampires

They used to think that Human Blood had some kinda magical life-giving property to it, something that made Vampiric Immortality make sense.

It was reasonable to think that, y'know, since every time anybody started leaking blood, back in the olden times, for whatever reason, there was a good chance they were gonna croak, or at least not feel like dancing a jig to a Sea Shanty.

But nowadays vampires are just a bunch of things that go around getting excited about drinking motor oil out of robots that are far more complex than them on a mechanical level, when you compare digestive systems and stuff.

And we're sorta stuck with that, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because "eating someone's life force," insteada drinking the motor oil out of their fuel lines or biting into their braincase and sucking out their central processing unit, doesn't look that cool on TV.

Older Brothers Disease

One of the coolest things I ever saw was on the Vampire Bloodlines forums.

It started out as some guy saying that that level with the Haunted Hotel was the scariest goddam thing ever, and that he couldn't play through it, and then a bunch of folks started commenting on how great that level was, and comparing it to other "scariest goddam things in gaming history."

And then one of the game designers showed up and told the original guy that it was the best compliment he could ever imagine getting, and that he'd take the guy's savegame and play through the level for him and save it so that the guy could get on with the game.

As an Older Brother, I love to scare the living shit out of people, that's just one of those immutable laws of nature and shit, y'know, I grew up torturing the crap out of my little brother with all sorts of overly-complicated scare thingies, until I started feeling sorry for him heh.

Like this one time, in the middle of the night, when he was sleeping, (we had to share a room 'cause we were poor y'know), I made my bed look like I was still sleeping in it by lumping up the sheets, and then I crawled under his bed and I lifted the whole thing up in the air and shook it all Linda Blair Exorcist style.

That's a goddam horrible way to wake somebody up, with him screaming to the lumped-up sheets in my bed for help, and getting no response, as if I was dead or something, haha, awyah, and I know I'll be spending a few thousand eternities in hell paying for that one heh.

But that's just the kinda shit that all Older Brothers do, man, we're just designed like that, so I know I won't be burning alone down there in the inferno of Little Brother Justice or whatever ahaha.

Anyways, I try to keep that shit in check, as best I can, 'cause I know its more of a curse than anything, y'know, you don't make yerself any friends doing that kinda shit to people all the time, that's just like going around and giving folks titty-twisters or something.

And some folks really can't handle a scare at all, its downright dangerous to scare 'em, 'cause their fragile psyches can permanently crack like eggs and shit, so there's that to worry about too.

But sometimes, when I think about making a game, I think about how much fun it would be to use the goddam things to scare people to death, and what a great compliment it would be if your shit was so scary that you actually gave somebody a heart attack and killed them.

Okay that's horrible, I know, I'm already adding a few thousand years on to my Hell Sentence for just thinking up that one, but I can't help it, y'know, I'm an Older Brother, man, I got that Older Brother Disease, I got that Evil Blood running through my veins and shit, all I'm really wondering is whether or not scaring somebody to death is considered murder or not ahaha.

I guess nobody has ever died from watching a scary movie, but a scary movie never made my heart jump like the shit that made me gasp and toss my mouse up in the air in that Aliens Vs. Predator game, either.

And then there's the stuff in that one Asylum-slash-Orphanage in Thief 3, thats another "classic" one, the Thief games had a lot of that awesome Older Brother Scare shit in 'em, although a lot of 'em were slow-building scares that just made you wanna get the hell outta some place as fast as you could.

MMOs seem to steer clear of that shit, like they'll lose customers or something if they do it, and mebbe they would, I dunno, mebbe the crowd that likes Scares is some minor subset or something, I know my stalker Ex-girlfriend totally hated that kinda shit, even though she's scarier than hell to me heh.

There was some dungeon in EQ1 that made her cry once, that's a pretty good compliment in my book ahaha.

Anyways, what got me thinking about this junk again was the way that the spawning system for LOTRO wights totally takes the scare out of 'em, y'know?

There's a few good ones, like the ones that crawl outta the ground when you go up to a tomb door, but just having them all wandering around on the lawn so you can see 'em coming from a mile away is a total buzzkill, I mean, it seems like they oughta be something that you don't see coming, something that suddenly lurches out at you from around a corner and twists its neck with a hideous cracking noise or something, y'know?

Or at least something that operates on a scarier level than just spawning every-so-many-feet and wandering around randomly or whatever, y'know, like, if they all shuffled along in the same direction, then that would be scarier, 'cause it'd seem like had a purpose, or something.

I dunno, whatever it is, it just set something off in my brain that it wasn't right, y'know?

And then I started thinking about how scaring the living shit out of people was probably against the MMO Designer Code of Ethics or something anyways, 'cause hardly anybody ever does it, even though these games are almost entirely about fighting monsters heh.

And I know there's a good reason not to do the Scary Thing all the time, 'cause I know that even if it isn't scary, grim and intense and stressful dirty-murky-dark-n-muddy environments wear away at you after a while, they're just depressing or something, and nobody wants to be stuck hanging out there and stuff, its the same kinda thing that makes the suicide rates go up in gloomy places where it drizzles all the time, you need breaks from that junk where you get to go and hang out in the Beer Commercial Sunshine Land of Sky Blue Waters or the Happy Green Ewok Village or something to let your nerves settle back to normal and recharge or whatever.

But you'd think there'd be at least a few more scare-the-shit out of you moments and a little bit more of an appreciation for suspense and all that than there seems to be with all these games fulla monsters, y'know?

Especially in anything with zombies and ghosts and shit, I mean, wtf are people who really hate being scared (and don't love-to-hate being scared or something heh) doing in a zombie-n-ghost fighting game anyways?

I mean, seriously, c'mon, get outta there and leave that shit to the Older Brothers heh.

And Older Sisters, too, now that I think about it, there's no sense in being sexist about it, I just didn't think through it 'till now.

Anyways its not that I haven't seen some pretty great stuff, in LOTRO and WoW and all that (EQ had a shit ton of that kinda stuff), its just that, in general, its always so goddam tame that's its almost like its ruining the whole point of having wights and whatever in the first place, and it seems strange to have such a total disregard for it if ain't on purpose, and none of it matches up to how scary shit is in the really scary games.

There's no moments of impending doom like when they rolled out the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes back, or little cinematic bits like they did in DOOM 3 (and a lot of other horror games) when they introduced some new robo-alien-demon (bleh) menace and froze up your controls (grr! nooo!), or anything like that.

And I just thought it was interesting to think about what the self-imposed limits are with that scare-the-shit-out-of-you kinda stuff and why its different in MMOs than it is in single-player games 'cause they think they'll do better and appeal to a wider crowd if they don't scare the living shit out of them or something heh.

Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure that's right.

And if that's really the way its working, its just gotta burn some of the Older Brother Game Devs up that they gotta hold themselves back like that when what they really wanna do is make people have heart attacks and fall out of their chairs and throw their mice up in the air and shit heh.

And I wonder if a game that was "Too Scary For Some People To Play, You Need To Sign This Release Form" would really do better or worse than a game with yard after yard of random whack-a-mole monsters spawning on a lawn and wandering around aimlessly with their hands in their mouths and junk ahaha.

Not Enough Portable Holes

"Okay I've got fifty feet of rope."

"Dude that's like two hundred pounds of rope, ain't it?"

"I dunno."

"I got a bag of fifty iron spikes and a hammer we can use to pound 'em into rocks and stuff so we can climb."

"I got a ten foot pole to check for pit traps and stuff."

"Dude you are gonna get seriously tired carrying a ten foot pole around."

"How many iron rations do you got?"

"I got ten."

"What the heck are iron rations anyways?"

"I dunno, I always imagined 'em as a brick of orange play-doh, jam-packed with a day's supply of nutrients, wrapped in aluminum foil, even though I know they din't have no aluminum foil back in the ancient times."

"Yah, it was prolly wrapped in iron foil, back in them days, hence the iron rations bit."

"How much water do you got?"

"I got a wineskin with seven days worth of water."

"Dude that's like twenty-one gallons of water or something, ain't it?"

"I dunno, I just paid for it and marked it off on my character sheet."

"..."

"Mebbe I just carry all that water on my horse."

"Is he bringing his horse down into the dungeon?"

"Uh... yes?"

"Dude, you are the one that made this game, you coulda added more water fountains and ladders and whatever and then we wouldn't have to carry all this crap around with us all the time."

"Yah and we carry all this crap around and then we always find out we need sixty feet of rope and a twelve foot pole to do anything."

"Yah this game sucks."

Transdimensional Conundrums

In a Parallel Universe, Dundee didn't take the job with SWG.

And he didn't become a "space guy" at all.

And instead, he kept working on his piddly little experimental UO emulator server, and fooling around with Permanent Death, and his Estate Idea, and Weapons With History, where a weapon, over the course of generations, would keep track of all the things it killed and the folks who used it, and became a magical Orc-Slayer Sword, once it killed enough Orcs, that may be passed down from father to son, or recovered from the famous tomb of a dead player, but it would only "light up" and show its magical nature if it was held by someone from the family, or something like that.

And all that just came from from meditating and musing about ways to make lewt and treasure more interesting, and how to store a player's "advancement" in something else besides a "level treadmill," y'know?

And then there was his Organic Dungeon Spawning thingie, where Dungeons would spawn dynamically and begin to build in strength, and eventually threaten nearby player-made towns, with "scouts," at first, and then sieges, eventually, unless something was done to stop them.

Which was an idea that was almost borrowed by the guys that did Horizons, but then they gave up 'cause it was too hard to do, or whatever, and they made yet another static etch-a-sketch game world where everything respawns and endlessly erases everything the players do, even though, if you think about it, that isn't acutally any different than make everything out of dynamic puzzle pieces that can go together in different ways, from a technical perspective, except in how you keep track of the meaning of it.

Well, as long as you think about it ahead of time.

Just like Dundee's Anamorphic Terrain thingie and the random dungeon stuff (that we had twenty years ago in Daggerfall heh) isn't really really any different than arranging the entrances and exits to a series of "instances" made out of dumb little bricks with some spawn points that you may or may not use.

And then there was the Divination thing, where Wizards would get Divinations about relics and artifacts like Orc Slayer Swords in the Tombs of Dead Player Heroes, that would start quests, at the cost of owing a Demon something, and eventually Demons would become strong enough, through this mafia-like procession of owing favors, to open a gate and attack the town.

Which would make the Wizard pretty unpopular with the locals heh.

Awesome junk like that.

I think its kinda weird that Dundee became a space guy, 'cause I always thought of him as more of a "let's all ride around and seige castles" 13th warrior No-Elves-And-Barely-Any-Magic kinda dude, but with the "success" of Jump to Lightspeed and the friends he made and stuff, everything that happened makes sense.

Although his current interest in social-networks or whatever is completely bizarre to me, I don't get that at all, even when I think about the experiments he did with Player Policing and stuff, 'cause those were all in-game sorta things, and not out-of-game sorta things, well, at least in my mind, and I'm not a big fan of all that out-of-game baggage, I tend to think of all that kinda stuff as crutches players constructed to get around gaping holes in the game's logic and signs that something in-the-game is broken or at least needs some smoothing-over.

But I'm weird, y'know, there are very few people who share the context that I look at everything from, and the list is always growing smaller, 'cause the crusty old jaded gamer guys don't really tend to share all the experiences they're drawing on, y'know, 'cause it'd be so much work to spell it all out and you'd prolly forget about ten million important points anyways so why bother heh.

But we do need to bother, or we're gonna lose all that info, and pretty soon there won't be anybody that knows what usage-based skill stuff is, all the different benefits and things that suck about it, and the improvements Dundee played around with, automating things, and the offline "training" bit that was sorta half-adopted by Eve Online.

And eventually all that junk will have to be rediscovered the hard way, when it might've been really useful, as an option, earlier on.

Its still the only way I can see newbs and high level guys grouping together more-the-merrier style where everybody gains something, y'know, 'cause everybody gets experience just for swinging at the monster, and not just killing the monster.

And the Weapons With History thing is an example of using the power of computers to go somewhere farther than we ever could've gone with Pen and Paper, and not just "doing as good" as Pen and Paper, y'know?

Same with filling a graveyard with the grandfathers of the current players, and having your players really be the guys that make the History of your game, that junk is awesome with a kind of depth that we could barely scrape our nails into with Pen and Paper stuff, 'cause it'd be such a pain-in-the-ass to keep track of all that shit.

Yah, we all hated keeping track of how much water and iron rations you needed to drink and eat and shit, let alone how many orcs you killed, but pretty much every computer game keeps track of how much orcs you kill, even though they hardly do anything that makes sense with it (like giving you a +3 bonus against Orcs as an Orc Slayer or something heh).

Anyways I think about that Parallel Universe sometimes, the one where Dundee is still Dundee, and still grinding away at his piddly little Experimental Server, and what a lucky bastard that Parallel Universe Version of Me is, having all that fun, doing junk at least ten years into the future of the shit I'm doing over here in this crappy Parallel Universe where everything got all fucked up ahaha.

I mean, seriously, all that junk I been talking about was from like ten years ago in this timeline, and that was just the beginnings of where ever we woulda gone by now.

And I think about what we traded all that for, and I'm like, totally fucking bummed man, we got totally fucking screwed in that deal man I mean we got seriously donky cocked ahaha.

And its the same thing with Sunsword, who keeps saying he needs help, and between all of us, we know so many awesome people when you think about it.

I mean, really think about it, that's always was our real super power.

But I dunno how to help him and bring it all back together, even though I love the guy.

And now I'm at the point where I'm staring back down the timeline and trying to make a course correction to swing us toward the good spot a little, if I can.

Like some kinda multidimensional madman ahaha.

But how hard would it be, really?

How hard is it to fix everything and get all the ducks in a row and just make everything right?

Not that hard.

We ain't trading anything really wonderful for it, I been giving this current state of affairs a chance for years and years now but shit seems all fuxxored up to me and I haven't seen anything really good and worthy of all the powers behind it come out of it yet.

We just gotta make up our minds and do it.

And so what if you starve (heh), as long as you advance your art and are remembered forever as a champion of some great 'cause who died a righteous death in battle, or even not remembered at all except as some dude that saved the whole town of whatsitsnuts from whatever that bad thing was that one time, back in the days before all the new people showed up ahaha.

Life is just a sitcom throughout the Multiverse, in each and every one of the different Parallel Universes, but in some of 'em, they're doing really awesome shit, that's way more fun than the shit we're doing, and I'm jealous.

How about we make those other Parallel Universes jealous of us for once, man.

Or, maybe I'm just not patient enough, if you need an easy out ahaha.

Snickering

Man I hate commercials but this shit is great heh.

The Original One
The Uh... Other Original One

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX is Missing I Think
Part X
Part XI
Part XII
Part XIII
Part uh... 14
Part uh... Dunno

Into the Woods

My little brother's kids are playing these games where you roll dice and pit siege engines and knights against monsters on a plastic battlefield arranged on a tabletop.

Miniature War Games, in other words.

Which is the primordial Chainmail pool that Dungeons & Dragons evolved from, much like Drama evolved from simple displays of Ceremonial Combat in the world of Theatre.

Story and roleplaying and all that are beyond them, still, at the age of six and seven, y'know, they don't have enough experience with the world to draw it all together into any kind of complicated picture let alone some kind of epic storyline jam-packed with twists and turns against tradition and subtle insights into the human condition and subtexts and commentary and situations that inspire us to muse over the nature of our own existence and good and evil and converse with each other and all that awesome sorta stuff yet.

But they're on their way, really.

The only reason I ever figured out how to play Dungeons & Dragons was that one of the kids that I played with had this totally kickass bohemian father who was into that Miniature War Games stuff, y'know, the guy had a "study" that was cram-packed with shelf after shelf of historical battle figurines all painted and whatever, and he taught his kid to play D&D, and his kid turned around taught all us dumb hillbillies how to do it.

Coming from a creative and superstitious culture of the swamplands, my own personal mythology made it easy for me to concoct all sorts of stories about evil wizards and black magic out of thin air and on-the-fly, and so I ended up being the Dungeonmaster pretty much all the time, except when one of the two other kids that could do it felt like giving me a break.

And so I sorta skipped the whole War Game bit, and went straight to the Storytelling thingie.

But I read tons of stuff by Gary Gygax and all them, folks who had way more experience than me with all the pitfalls of cooperative storytelling and collaborative art, fields that are still pretty much completely unexplored, except by the original pioneers who established forts out there in the wilderness, and documented and detailed all the different sorts of animals they found out there in the audience, and how to deal with 'em heh.

Fascinating stuff, really, no matter what field of art you deal with, its a layer of interaction that goes far beyond all the junk they teach you about in school, y'know.

That, and the way that the original Dungeons & Dragons junk was written with all sorts of arcane and obscure references and diction, which led to me having some kinda monstrous genius level vocabulary and knowledge of history by the time I reached the age of the thirteen (that I never used afterwards heh), is what I credit Gary Gygax with, doing for me personally.

I'm still a dumb hillbilly, but I'm much more interesting (or at least far more complicated heh) than the average dumb hillbilly ahaha.

And I can spin a mean yarn when we all get wasted around the fire and in the mood for that kinda thing.

Anyways, the world of MMO junk, to me, is in the infant Chainmail slash Ceremonial Combat stage of things.

That's okay, y'know, 'cause things never really leave that stage, not entirely, they just sorta orbit it and take brief jaunts into other areas, unless the game masters and the audience and the game mechanics can handle going somewhere else on a more permanent basis.

I mean, when yer all a bunch of six and seven year old kids, mebbe you can't go anywhere else, and you just gotta live in the dice-rolling monster-mashing loot-the-monster world and take what you can get, I ain't gonna lay no complicated existential mindtrip on you if you ain't never had a girlfriend or seen any signs of injustice in the world or anything, y'know, we can just have fun with all the pretty colors and the scary monsters and gory-awesome special effects and simple good-versus-evil rescue-the-princess find-the-treasure stuff heh.

But that really is the most simple and fundamental layer of the thing we're all doing, y'know.

And it don't really take a genius or anything to get us out of that rut, and ride us down the road to other places, either.

Its all been done before in other mediums.

And sometimes its even been half-done in this MMO medium we got, but it always seems like all the guys who lead us down the road a bit almost always turn around and take us back to the same old camp before we really get anywhere interesting.

And the thing that really burns me up is that their excuses for turning around are so goddam lame, man.

Junk like "oh that would only work on a small population server."

Yah?

Well hey man, I've never seen ANYTHING work on a high population server, that's why high population servers are broken up into a million small population "areas" and "instances" run by separate servers ahaha.

And you almost had us all the way there!

We could've established a fort out there and defended it and colonized that new terrain!

We just needed to know that that's what we needed to do before we set out in into the woods in the first place.

And no matter what we do, there will always be a place for the six and seven year old dice rolling monster-list mashing kids, man, 'cause that's the bones and muscles of the beast we're all riding on, in more ways than one, and that simple structure will always be there to fall back on no matter what kinda mysterious and fearsome woods you ride the thing into.

But I think that mysterious and fearsome woods is exactly where we need to go.

And I ain't the only one.

I mention "colonization" a lot in passing, but that's what folks are really doing when they come to your game server, and start gathering materials and crafting and occupying homes and making friends and helping their friends with whatever advantages they've managed to wrestle from the mathematical wilderness of your game.

There's a lot more we could do with that, a lot farther we could go interacting with that kinda thing, and supporting all that kinda stuff and making it easier and more entertaining for everybody to do.

Well, once we get past this Chainmail Bit, where everybody thinks what really matters is what kinda intellectual property you got to make different flavored copies of the same old sterile War Game Figurine dollhouse clothes out of, over and over and over again.

And its not simple, its complicated, but there's all sorts of interesting shit to think about, and talk about, down that road.

Like the way I never roleplay anymore now that I'm almost always on Voicecom, talking about something on TV insteada whatever the hell is going on in the mindless whack-a-mole game I'm playing heh.

And that the really great times are when Ex-b's Wizard figures out the goddam riddle and opens the Magic Door without any of us having to look anything up on a spoiler site.

Because he's actually playing a role, there, man, even if he ain't talking in a funny voice.

But it seems like nobody is talking about that kinda junk.

And those things aren't immutable laws of nature or the end of a conversation, those are only the beginnings.

Seems like they're going everywhichway except for that way, for some reason that is totally unfathomable to me, since I ain't really talking about anything new, and its the stuff all our heroes always talked about.

For some reason, the guys like Koster and McQuaid, that really have taken us down that road some, don't seem to realize the things they've done that actually mattered, y'know, I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about all the cinematic and awesome shit that McQuaid did in EQ1, or his awesome player pathing things, besides me, and Koster seems lost in a quagmire of contemplation as to the point of his crafting junk and housing stuff and usage-based-skill-system-more-the-merrier-grouping and how all that junk relates to colonization and how he could do all that and allow people to take ownership of stuff and have it act as a guide that strengthens the immersiveness and entertainment value of the worlds he makes instead of weakening it.

With Koster, at least, it seems like he's afraid to do anything that he'd be held responsible for, as far as being a story-teller, y'know, he's always trying to hide his artistic voice and lay all that kinda stuff on his players, insteada guiding them along, as a good Dungeon Master would, y'know, its a delicate balance of not rail-roading them and not offering any entertainment or guidance or Quality Control at all, heh, but there is a balance there that you gotta strike.

Meanwhile McQuaid always seemed to be the opposite of that, heavy on story, y'know, like WoW is, but he beat us to death with the Cult Building Treadmills.

Maybe they're listening to the six and seven year olds, just because there's more of them than anybody else, but that seems so useless to me, since there ain't a lot a lot of room for improvement on that roll-the-dice loot-the-monster layer, y'know?

That shit is time tested and Mother Approved heh.

And babies aren't born thinking that the Original Carnival of Souls is a good movie ahaha.

Ah well, y'know, I'm just swinging wild and hoping to hit a nerve before I completely freeze up turn into a mummy and miss out on all the cool shit of the future when folks finally start figuring everything out.

The Eternal Struggle