So, who really owns the computer games people play?

One thing I've always found fascinating about online games with persistent worlds (games where the world doesn't change, but lots of people can interact together in the same world) is the concept of who actually owns the content. I don't mean the overall game itself, because that is obviously owned by a company that made the game, but the specific property that each character owns within the game.

Think of it this way: If you're an elf who owns a +5 Sword of Death (I'm sure some game has something named like that), and you log out, that sword is still in your in game inventory somewhere. When you sign back on, that sword is still there with your character. Some other player doesn't get to just go into your private inventory and steal it (unless you're playing some twisted game where you can do just that, but I have yet to see a successful one that has survived longer than a few hours with that kind of play style). So, do you really own that sword, or is it the property of the company that makes the game?

That's an issue that has been argued back and forth since the creation of games like Ultima Online, long before World of Warcraft and the latest Star Trek Online. The game companies will always argue that THEY own the property within the game, and that you are just playing in THEIR world (Sony Online Entertainment used to make that argument of "You're in OUR world now" on their marketing materials for Everquest). But that's an easy argument to make before getting into the nitty gritty. A customer IS paying money for the experience of playing the game, and there is a somewhat legal precedent that as long as the company honors its commitments (meaning all of your stuff is there after you leave and return to the game), your business arrangement remains. There are any number of customers who have ended their business arrangement with a company when the company has lost their equipment (thus, they have felt a breach of unwritten contract was reached). Therefore, in legal terms alone, a company that runs a computer game may have been making the accepted agreement of honoring that unwritten contract by continuing to take money for services. The challenge is convincing a judge of exactly what those "services" actually were.

But that's going further than I wanted with this post. What I was really wanting to talk about are these people who sell their accounts, convinced that the property within the game is theirs. I actually find myself somewhat fascinated by the advertisements they make on Craigslist and other such places. A lot of these ads involve the most popular game on the block, World of Warcraft, and way too often someone tries to sell his or her account for hundreds of dollars. What caused me to want to write about it was how someone actually had the nerve to write: "You are paying me for the time I put into making this character." In other ads, I've seen words such as: "I wanted to get something back for all of the time I put into building this character."

Now, I play World of Warcraft, and I have a lot of fun playing the game, as I believe many other people do as well. Not once have I ever thought that I was producing work, that my tribulations were actually part of the process I must endure before I have a commodity that I can now sell back to another customer who will value the time I've have endured in this game. No, I had fun doing what you do when you play a game, and never was it thought of as work. Oh sure, the quests might have been difficult, and I might have been frustrated from time to time, but it's not a job, and trying to convince someone that he needs to pay me hundreds of dollars for my account because of my "work" is just ridiculous.

But I see it all of the time. What is even more interesting is that selling one's WoW account is not authorized by the Blizzard, the company that owns the game. Nor is buying or selling of gold, the currency used in the game. Yet people still do it.

And I've often laughed at the arguments people make to justify it. Here are some of my favorites:

1. It takes a lot of time to accumulate money in the game. I work hard in my regular job, so I should be able to use that money to save time in the game because unlike the kids who play this game, I don't have as much time to waste on the game.

If it's wasted time, then don't play the game. Part of the challenge of the game is being able to accumulate wealth in the time that you're actually playing it. Being a CEO of a company OUTSIDE of the game shouldn't suddenly make you a god in the game. Cheating in the game is cheating in the game.

2. Buying gold (or a character) doesn't hurt anyone else, so why should they care?

Buying gold actually causes massive inflation in the game so that those who play the game must pay outrageous prices for items they buy from other players. Essentially, that CEO with his outside money is making it impossible for anyone to play the game without investing outside money into the game to bring the game back to an even playing field. It does affect other players, and it ruins the experience of the game. Also, Blizzard has pointed out that people who partake in the gold selling community also contribute to illegal programs in the game that are used to accumulate money through exploits. It also causes a lot more hackers to play the game who go after legitimate players and take over their accounts, selling their goods when they take over their accounts and then going onto the next victim.

There are a lot more points to make about this, but the main point is that virtual worlds are living worlds of their own that do much better without outside stimulation that brings outside forces into the inner dynamic. While some games welcome microtransactions that benefit the game making company, virtual economies do not benefit from profiteers who try to link outside money with internal money economies. Even the microtransaction models of some games out there ruin the experiences for normal players. This type of behavior practically destroyed the Ultima Online housing market because you couldn't get a home unless you were able to buy it through Ebay, back during the hey day of UO. When new housing opened up, that Ebay market died almost overnight. People who used to make $150 for a keep (large house) could no longer get that, so they let those properties just collapse, and then players were able to place homes for the price of housing that existed within the game. It practically changed the market within the game overnight, which was a great thing.

Anyway, that's my rant for this topic today.

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Criminal nabbed through World of Warcraft account

The story is here.

Turns out that police sent a subpoena to Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft to track down a fugitive who was trying to escape justice. Now, I'd be all for this particular turn of events if the fugitive had actually done something OTHER than a drug crime. His crime was dealing in multiple controlled substances.

I'm not into drugs, nor have I even dabbled in it. Been against them personally for my entire adult life. But I am not a fan of criminalizing drugs; always felt the solution was to treat the addicted rather than put them in jail.

Unfortunately, way too many resources are spent chasing drug crimes, so that other things are left behind. And even worse, drugs are so visual in our society that it gives avenues of criminal behavior the go, rather than treats it as a symptom to be cured. If gangs are going to do bad things, I'd prefer they stuck to actual crimes so that police went after that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, in this society, that's never going to happen.

Too many careers are made on the enforcement of drug crimes, and that's not a boon for an enlightened society.

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The Hobbesian Model in Retrospect: A case study approach to studying creation of government in online games, such as Ultima Online

One of the hidden attributes of philosophy is the realization that no matter how much stock you put into a theory, the chances of that theory ever being challenged by real world circumstances are so miniscule that such events will either never happen or happen so far after someone’s lifetime that criticism is irrelevant anyway. Well, let’s take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of political philosophy that even non-theorists are required to study ad nausea: Why do societies and civilizations come together in the first place?

We all know the Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau models that stem from these conversations, and we all know how one buys into one theory or the other as to why people get together and allow themselves to be ruled over, or why someone gains power in what should be an almost impossible act of acquirement. I mean, what rational person gives over his or her power to some total stranger all in the name of protection from danger and a desire to avoid loss of belongings or life? If you look at that dynamic today, it seems almost ridiculous because why should any normal person feel that others should be in charge of him or her just because one is a part of every day society? Political scientists like to think they have it all figured out, depending up on what their particular bent is on the theory, but what I’ve always found fascinating is how little the average person thinks about these things, because the average person is the one who gave up power in the first place and continues to do it on a daily basis every day he or she does exactly what government tells him or her to do.

But before going off on that tangent, who was right? Did we get together to create a society for the sake of community, or was it something even more basic like Hobbes projects, and we just got together because we’re scared to death of each other, feeling that we’re probably a lot better off with some neutral administrator than we are trying to fend for ourselves? Unfortunately, we’re so far into the game that we no longer have to even ask why we got into it in the first place. We’re incapable of getting out of it, so why should it matter why we got into it way back before we even started writing histories about it?

Fortunately, there was a stable platform where this question was being asked, and there were a lot of people participating to give us exactly the answers we might be seeking about this situation. To find the answer, we have to go to the one place that scientists are still apprehensive about going: Computer games.

The problem with trying to test political theories, or even just philosophical theories, with computer games in the past is that they have mainly been seen as an environment that gives us access to children, and of course there is the stigma that we are almost always talking about a game of some sorts. Thus, scientists avoid being seen in that medium, because it then indicates that their science isn’t scholarly, so we miss a lot of information that is both fascinating and ground-breaking. Fortunately, we’re a little more enlightened these days concerning such issues, so a lot of scholarly research is coming from the genre of computer games.

But even more important is that games have evolved into sharing an agenda with another one of those new areas for exploitation, and that is the world of social networking. With the advent of Myspace, Facebook and other networking tools, scientists are now finding themselves with access to a lot of social data that they only conjectured about before. In the past, a scientist would study a bunch of students at some particular college or series of colleges, almost to the point where we probably know more about sophomores in college than any other entity on the face of the planet.

But something new happened in the 1990s, and it passed by a lot of social scientists without them even realizing it was happening. One of these games that came along was called Ultima Online. It was created by a group of computer gaming professionals at a company called Origin, and it was the culmination of a series of medieval setting role-playing games, called Ultima, which had, at the time, recently received resounding success with its seventh version, Ultima VII. It would continue on with several other continuations, specifically Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, but when Ultima Online was released, it was to the fanfare that was created from the global success of Ultima VII, a game where you arrived in the world of Britannia as the immortal avatar, a human who has achieved a sense of full enlightenment and brings that enlightenment to the welcoming, and not so welcoming, people of Britannia. The originator of the series, and the owner of Origin, was Richard Garriott. He would come to be known as Lord British, the sovereign who lived within the lands of Britannia.

Ultima Online was one of the first graphically enhanced multi user dungeons, where many people could play the same game at the same time. To handle the expected player capacity, different “shards” were developed, which housed exact duplications of the world of Britannia. The explanation was that the wizard Mondain had broken a gem that shattered into shards, each one being a different representation of the known world. The entire world of each shard was identical, but once the game went live, the world would change demonstrably, so that if you lived in one shard, you might not recognize the environment in another. An example was an early misunderstanding of this fact when I found a house near the city of Yew that had a training dummy in it I could use to train my fighting skills. Being on another shard, and not recognizing this nuance, I found myself wandering that same area near Yew, wondering why I could not find the training dummy house, no matter how much I searched.

A feature that made Ultima Online unique was that you could be attacked by other players, if you were wandering around outside of the safety of a protected town. In town, the guards would kill anyone who committed a crime, like stealing or attacking another player without cause, but outside of their protection, you were pretty much on your own. In the game, they called this player killing, or “pking”. At one point, a new player would realize that leaving a city could be dangerous, and thus, would either stick close to town, or be very cognizant of surroundings when traveling.

This brought about an interesting dynamic that leads to the focus of this study. At one point, there was the realization that going outside of town might be dangerous, but there was an entire world out there to explore. Either you hid in town and missed everything outside of town, or you took a chance. In the beginning, you took a chance alone, and after some time, you were probably killed by someone who made his or her livelihood by preying on unsuspecting tourists. But slowly, something emerged that acted as a compensation to this sort of behavior: The player town emerged.

The player town was a collection of self-made homes that its owners banded together to create a small society. Leaders were elected, commerce was developed and encouraged, and, most importantly, security was developed. Players did not have the advantage of automated guards appearing in their towns when criminals appeared and acted in such interests, so players had to become the guards themselves, often serving as militias that acted against anyone who worked against the interests of the town. As these towns grew stronger and larger, the security they offered grew as well. If a town member was attacked near town, the town militias would band together and go after the pkers. Eventually, these militias became armies, and from time to time, an attack against town members, or to people allied to the town, would result in a force of players who would travel to the power base of those who orchestrated such negative actions, often leading to deadly force.

In a very short time, players banded together and created small civilizations within the game that had their own leadership, and quite often their only reason for banding together was the protection of all. Others would join to engage in safe commerce, because it was often difficult to find customers outside of major cities, but customers often sought out player cities rather than game-run cities as the venders in player cities were a lot more accommodating to dealing economically than a system that was mainly computer driven (the major cities, which would not allow the placement of player venders).

For years, this was the model of city creation in Britannia. Some cities rose or fell based on how they handled outside elements. Some of them became famous, while others lasted mere moments before disappearing forever. An example of one of these cities that lasted for several years of renown was Shannara, named after the famed novels by Terry Brooks. This was also one of the cities that serves as an excellent case study for the changes that occurred after the introduction of Trammel.

Trammel is one of those concepts that can lead a former Ultima Online player to immediately start frothing at the mouth. It is probably one of the most controversial moves an online gaming company has ever done, short of the New Gaming Experience that was introduced to Star Wars Galaxies by Sony Online Entertainment, which for sake of simplicity, changed an online game so drastically that it is still unclear to this day as to whether it saved or destroyed a game that was seriously suffering in its ability to maintain its player base. Players had been leaving SWG in droves over many changes made in the game by SOE over the years, and this was supposed to fix things, but the controversy over the drastic changes have divided that player community forever, often leading to vehement disagreements between current and former players.

But Trammel was an animal of a completely different nature. Ultima Online was attracting a lot of player killers in the game, and over a particular Christmas holiday season, the number of pkers and thieves, another annoying distraction to players in the game, increased drastically. The UO message boards were filled with angry players who demanded that Electronic Arts (the new owners of Origin who had pushed Garriott from the company after the purchase) do something about it. The result was Trammel.

Trammel was a mirror world of Britannia that was added to every shard. The player would cross through a portal to this new world, and it would be a place where pkers could no longer attack unsuspecting players, and thieves could not steal from anyone as well. Those desiring the player versus player experience could travel through the portal to the old world, now known as Felucca, and everything that happened in the past was still active in Felucca. But Trammel was safe.

So, the majority of the player base moved to Trammel. Felucca became a graveyard, which was fitting because the lands of Britannia were made to appear dark and forbidding, much like a graveyard. Very few players decided to remain in Felucca.

This killed player cities almost overnight because those that existed were now in the “dangerous” land, and some people made it a habit to not even visit Felucca anymore. Then, after a number of months, the developers of the game opened up housing spaces in Trammel in what was a huge land rush that rivaled the land rush that took place in the prairies of the great northwest of the United States. The evening that housing was turned on was an event itself, with almost the entire player base signed on to grab pieces of land that they were looking forward to, finally being able to put down a huge house instead of relying on tiny little houses that had been all that could be placed in what land was left of Felucca in the old days of Ultima Online.

After housing was opened up on Trammel, the first player cities were created there as well. Liberalis was one of the first player run cities to launch on the Napa Valley server. However, after it was created, it quickly died out. Then, with almost every city that came after, the cities lasted a short while and then were abandoned.

What was discovered was that the reason for creating player cities was gone. Without the danger of pkers, without needing a place where people could gather for safety, other than the game’s manufactured cities, there was no reason to put one’s effort into such areas. The guilds that were active during this period slowly dwindled away, players finding themselves playing other games instead of Ultima Online. There seemed to be little challenge left in the game; without a need to band together, the point of Ultima Online was pretty much lost.

Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest helped players of UO realize what was missing in the game, specifically quests and something to do. Ultima Online was one of the few sandbox games, meaning that the players made the environment, not the game designers. Without a need to band together to create societies, which was crucial in the older days of Ultima Online, there was really no reason to continue playing the game.

Ultima Online is still around today, but it is a shadow of its former self, many of its prominent players having gone onto different games, often brining their entire clans with them as well.

For political philosophy, the Ultima Online experience offers a unique opportunity to explore the nature of individuals to band together and create societies and civilizations. Unfortunately, few games since then have offered an environment that produces a similar necessity, so it is unknown if there will be an opportunity to view such a dynamic again. But it is important that social scientists keep their eyes on such possibilities, because like Ultima Online, those opportunities often do not last long, and once discovered can change so quickly that the opportunity may be lost before it was ever realized.

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What I Learned from Computer Games About Foreign Policy and War

In 1983 and 1985, two computer games emerged that created a buzz in what would be a continuous projection of foreign policy and war, in which computer games might simulate actual real world situations, eliminating the need to actually go to war to experience the effects of war. Before this, from the 1950s, with A.S. Douglas’s simulation of tic tac toe in 1952 and William Higginbotham’s infamous “Tennis for Two” in 1958, numerous games emerged that helped evolve the genre from mainframe systems to personal gaming systems in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was Bruce Ketchledge’s 1983 game Geopolitique 1990 and Chris Crawford’s 1985 Balance of Power that really changed the industry in the eyes of potential foreign policy usage.

The two games were similar. You spent the majority of your time in negotiations between international powers, and in the end you ended up with a high score or thermonuclear war. The real difference between the two games was that Ketchledge’s game played out the nuclear war in all its 1983 pre-CGI glory while Crawford’s game ended with the prescient words of "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." As a player of that game when it first released, I can tell you that when you received that message, it had a much stronger impact than any computer graphic series of explosions ever could have.

What was unique about these series of games was that they used a series of negotiations with foreign entities that can now best be described as a tit for tat strategy, where you continue to reward your opponent until you achieve your goals. The difference was that the computer saw each negotiation as separate and distinctive, meaning that previous successful negotiations did not necessarily create a much more conducive environment for future negotiations. You had to treat each series of negotiations as unique and untied to anything else. The only exception is that negative steps in the negotiation process managed to lead to a much more hostile set of relations between your country and the one that might eventually be your nuclear opponent. It is a lot like negotiations with North Korea, to be honest. One mistake, and one set back, sets you back years, and the new series of negotiations pretty much start you up as if you’ve never been on a positive path before.

Since those series of games, there has been a belief in computer gaming circles that simulations can be designed in such a way that they might emulate the actions of real nations in the world. A number of games have been released that attempt to do just that. One well known entity has attempted to take a more historical approach, and it has been very successful, both in implementation and in sales as well. Sid Meier’s Civilization series takes a leader from the creation of a city to the development of an entire empire that can span the globe. The terrain used can be pretty much anything from barren wastelands to an actual excellent representation of the planet Earth. The game has gone through several sequels to itself, including the colonization of both the New World, and a planet of the star system Alpha Centauri. But what makes Civilization so unique is that even though it includes famous, and infamous, leaders of Earth history, any number of chances can change the entire course of one’s civilization.

Civilization IV is the latest in the series of this game, and there is something those who study foreign policy and war can recognize as an unexpected benefit. To explain this benefit, let me just tell a small story of a particular game I was playing.

In this game, I was the most powerful nation on the planet. There were ten or eleven strong opponents against me, representing all sorts of different civilizations, like Catherine of Russia and Lincoln of America, for example. In this scenario, I had gone to war against Catherine of Russia because of reasons that are not really important for this discussion, but at the end of the war, I managed to wipe out Russia’s civilization. This left me in a position of peace with the rest of the world, because Russia was my only real adversary for many game years of playing. However, something started to nag at me as I conducted peace with the rest of the world. I had developed this humongous army to finally wipe out the Russian empire, and now I was sitting on it, and it was doing nothing. I started to focus my economy on peacetime needs, and as I continued the years moving forward, that huge army that was now sitting there doing nothing just seemed like it was waiting for me to do something. Anything.

And isn’t this very much how the world is as well? After World War II, the United States was this behemoth of massive military proportions, and that military industrial complex ended up dictating a lot of our foreign policy from that point forward. It would not be a hard argument to make that we had this huge army that was just looking for some place to put it. Even today, with two wars having just been fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that this army needs to be used for something never escapes the thought process of those in power. An idle army is a scary entity for a lot of countries. Sometimes, an idle army is the reason a country collapses, or falls into civil war. There are so many scenarios that can go bad, yet in the United States, we ignore what has happened to so many other countries and throughout so much of history, often by stating, “well, that can’t happen here.”

A final lesson, at least for this essay, is that of the human factor. We often look at statistical projections and number projections and make determinations of economic circumstances, but quite often it’s frowned upon to do that with political behavior. Political science used to be a science where the belief was that projections are not part of the science, because anything can happen. However, more and more political scientists are becoming tied to statistical research so that it is not surprising that a lot of foreign policy projections coming from political scientists, or political economists, also now start projecting future international behavior. Very dangerous, and quite often very wrong.

An example comes from a very interesting world domination game called SuperPower. It uses very real world information to make up the countries that come against you, but at some point in the game Belgium goes nuts and tries to take over the world. This example is why political scientists are wise in avoiding projections in international affairs that rely on statistical argumentation. The thing that is missing in the game is rationalization. The reason Belgium has not taken over the world is that people are involved, not numbers on a computer. Yet, when you crunch numbers with no concern for the thought processes of the people involved, you come up with all sorts of funky answers.

These are just some of the interesting connections that can be made between computer games and international relations. Unfortunately, scholars are very apprehensive about connecting themselves to a medium often considered the canvas of children. Therefore, it is very possible that many great insights can be achieved by computer games and the study of those games, but like in so many similar situations where history is doomed to repeat itself because no one remembered what happened before, we might be too proud to ever realize the answers were found in a place no one of importance will ever see.

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Fallout 3: A computer game looked at from the perspective of good writing

I've been spending the last week playing a game called Fallout 3 on the PC. Now, this might be perceived as a "geek" post, because I'm talking about a computer game here, but that's not what I wanted this to be. Instead, I want to talk about the writing in this game, because while I've read a lot of books in my time, I have yet to experience the writing that you find in a game of this magnitude.

For starters, the game is a sequel to a series of post-apocalyptic games called Fallout, which is also a loose sequel to a very old 4 color game called Wasteland. Like the very first Wasteland, the premise is that there was a nuclear war, and you are leaving one of the vaults where people escaped to, and you are seeing the new world for the first time. It's a dangerous, horrible place filled with tons of radiation, and the adventure you have is completely unique to you. There is always a strong mission within the story itself, but you're free to do whatever you want to do, and you don't even have to solve the original quest itself if you don't want to. Or you can. The choice is up to you.

Fallout 1 and 2 are considered amongst the greats of roleplaying games (rpgs) in computer gaming history. The story is almost identical, although in the sequel (Fallout 2) you play the descendant of the original vault dweller who leaves into the wasteland to explore. Fallout 3, well, it's like they went back and redid the whole story from scratch, and it's a wonderful adventure because of it. The whole thing plays like it's brand new, and the interface is a lot like a first person shooter, although a better comparison would be to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which is not surprising because Bethesda is the company that did Oblivion, and the company that did Fallout 3.

But I wanted to talk about the writing. One of the things that makes Fallout 3 unique is that the story and the way the story is told is just magnificent. This isn't some "look, there's a bad guy, aim your weapon and kill him" kind of game. Everything you do has moral choices, and even the way you go about doing things has so much richness behind it. In the story, you are "born" to a father who allows you to choose what your character is going to be like, and you actually grow up with that father leading you through some of your most important events in your childhood, up to the point where he escapes from the vault and leaves you to follow after him. The way this is done is told so well.

You have a portable device that you use as your inventory and character screen, and it also acts as your way of handling data within the game. It's where you first receive a radio signal from something called GNR. Then you receive another radio signal from something called the Enclave, which is the successor of what used to be the United States Government. Then as the game goes on, you receive other radio signals, including a really stereotypical Chinese broadcast that keeps telling you to stop doing the dirty deeds for those capitalist pigs that are sending you to your deaths in the war against China.

What's really cool is the uniqueness of those radio signals. GNR is run by Three Dog, and he's the coolest dude in the capital wasteland. You can eventually meet him, and he's just as cool in person as well. And his news is timely and up to date. It's like listening to a regular radio station. Or you can change the signal to the Enclave and listen to patriotic reports and music from President Eden. That's just a scratch on the surface of the radio stuff alone.

And that has little to do with the whole story itself because you have so much land to explore, and almost every little place you go to has some huge back story to it that you can delve into. Or not. The first city I went to was called Megaton, named after an unexploded nuclear missile that crashed into the center of the town. It is surrounded by the Children of the Atom, who worship the Atomic Bomb. The rest of the city isn't all that sane either as their sheriff is some guy in a cowboy hat who wants to instill "frontier justice".

There is so much going on in this game that I am in awe of the greatness of the writing. You turn a corner, and then suddenly there's a story of something you hadn't expected before. The whole adventure takes place in Washington, DC, so you can imagine the different types of stories that can occur. The time line is a little different as well, as the universe of Fallout 3 kind of veers off from ours after World War II, leading into some Twilight Zone-ish kind of world where things are just "different".

I don't play a lot of computer games anymore, mainly because I find them to be really redundant and boring. This game, however, redefines what computer games should be because it put the story back into the world and never compromised. There's a reason it's being hailed as one of the best games ever made.

If I ever get involved in computer game creation again, it will be for this type of game because this is how storytelling should be.

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Review: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

For those of you like me who have grown tired of World of Warcraft (WoW), a new game came along called Warhammer Online. Now, like WoW, this is one of those games where you benefit from knowing a bit of the backstory before actually playing the game. With WoW, I was not a big fan of the real time strategy games, Warcraft, so I went into that game knowing very little of the backstory world. Eventually, I kind of caught up with it as I played the game for the year or years I was playing. But still, there was a lot of the history that made little sense to me, and it just wasn't worth figuring out.

The same thing happens with Warhammer. There's a huge backstory in this game, which you probably understand if you were enamored by the many Warhammer real time strategy games, but I never was, so again, I find myself wondering why I care about this or that particular part of the story. That's a criticism for those who aren't part of the mythology of a game, and unfortunately, they don't seem to care. For that matter, I am looking forward to Star Trek Online and Stargate Online, mainly because I love those particular mythological stories, but I guess that's what makes the fanbois happy with the game I'm discussing now.

First off, installing it kind of sucked. I've not been a real fan of Electronic Arts lately, even though I once worked for them. They seem to be forcing people to have the best equipment to install certain games, and many people have been stuck in the inability to install this game because it does not recognize older dvd rom drives. I had to go out and buy a new dvd rom drive to install this (well, got it for more reasons than that), but many other people have been extremely frustrated and have never gotten past the installation.

Game play: The game is designed to be much like Dark Age of Camelots realm warfare. At the same time, it steals directly from WoW in that it makes your character "flagged" when you do something realm versus realm (rvr) like. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of functions in the game that just remind you of WoW, but that's the problem with most of the games these days. Nothing really seems all that original.

So, this gives you a lot of opportunities to fight other players from the other realm. That can be fun and fast paced, but eventually it becomes an e-penis battle of proving who has the better character than others, with lots of bragging rights for killing lots of people from the other realm. That gets old really fast.

There is a player versus environment (pve) functionality to the game as well where you don't have to fight other players, but the environment is extremely under-developed. If you focused on just the pve environment, the leveling takes forever, and it's really not all that much fun. You go to an area, kill enemy non player characters (npcs) controlled by the computer, and maybe run what we in the gaming industry like to call "fedex" missions, where an npc tells you to deliver a book or some other stupid item to some other npc in the game. There's not a lot of intelligence developed into the pve environment of the game, so if someone comes to this game expecting that type of environment which is massively superior in Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft, you're not going to find it here.

Technical Issues: This is why I decided not to continue to play. The game is massively flawed tech wise. I lost count of how many times I flew to the main capital city, only to have the computer crash to the desktop. There is crafting in the game, but it was like the computer programmer who worked on crafting was a 12 year old English Second Language student because none of the wording makes logical sense. If this was a port from Russia, like a great game called Space Rangers 2, I would understand the bad language translations, but this is a company that speaks English, so I have no idea what their problem is.

Customer Service: Non existent. Simple as that. I joined a guild with friends and I couldn't be promoted in the guild because there was a technical problem with the game. None of the officers could promote me at all. Sent in a customer service report in game and waited, and waited, and waited. Sent one outside of game. And waited, and waited, and waited. They never responded. That kind of customer service leads to people leaving the game. Simple as that. There are also really annoying gold spammers in the game (people who mass send messages to everyone in the game that they are selling gold). The /ignore function in the game doesn't work. The spammers send messages right through the /ignore function, almost as if there was no ignore function. Customer service: doesn't care.

My overall conclusion of the game is that it could have been a really good game if it would have really tried to balance a pvp/pve game, but it didn't really try to do that. It's mainly a pvp game with no real goal in the end, unless the idea of sacking an enemy's city is to be considered "end content". It also appears to have been released WAY too early. There are so many glitches and bugs in this game, and no one seems to care. After awhile, you try to ignore those errors, but it does become massively frustrating, to the point where you start debate whether or not to continue playing.

On a scale of 0 to 10, I give Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: 5. It's not a horrible game, but if I'm paying $15/month, it needs to be a lot better.

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Starting to think about tying up loose ends

It looks very much like I'm going to be moving to Korea. Nothing else came through for me, and they definitely are offering me the position. I was told that the contract would be Fedex'd to me in the next few days (or sent by carrier pigeon...who knows), and then I can actually start working on getting the Korean E2 visa paperwork completed.

I'm going in for surgery next week for the shoulder manipulation. We've been kind of waiting a long time for this, but hopefully this will give me a lot more mobility with the arms and make it so it doesn't hurt so much on a constant basis.

Finally received my thesis back to go over one last time. It looks like once I have these fixes completed, it should be ready to send out to the three professors, and then we'll go into defense mode. I was getting really concerned about this because if it didn't happen soon, I realized I was probably going to be leaving for Korea in a little more than a month, so the defense might never come because I just won't be in the country anymore.

Been doing a lot of playing of Tabula Rasa lately. I have to admit that the game is pretty solid, and it's so much more interesting than World of Warcraft. Sure, it has a lot of flaws to it, but it's completely different than everything else that is out there, so it definitely serves to pass the time in a fun way. Plus, the one thing it has that almost NONE of the other games have is a great, solid backstory that weaves itself through the game. Most other games tend to have a backstory that is just that: A story in the background. This story is very much at the front of the game, and as you play the game you find yourself involved in the story line, which is pretty rare. There were some signs of that in Lord of the Rings Online, but most people knew the general story, yet it was pretty well done in how they incorporated the regular folk into an epic story that is really about a few dozen people. Tabula Rasa becomes one of those stories where the individual is more important than a few key players in the story line and that is both welcome and rare.

A negative, however, is a really, REALLY cheesy publicity campaign that is being used by the people who run Tabula Rasa to link Richard Garriott (the guy who designed the game) and his upcoming space tourist flight he is going to be taking. They've decided to integrate the real world space flight Garriott is taking and turned it into one of the cheesiest publicity campaigns of all time. I think the actual campaign claims that RG is going to space to "save humanity" from the evil bane (the creatures attacking in Tabula Rasa), and that somehow they're going to bring a data disk of the DNA of people playing the game. Yeah, really cheesy. I'm kind of embarrassed to be affiliated with the public relations part of a game I'm enjoying so much. The way I figure it: Go to space and have fun because you're a freaking multi-millionaire who lives in a castle in Austin, Texas. Don't pretend you're saving humanity in a computer game you've created, because even though you have a lot of geek cred, there's a point where geek cred stops being an asset and becomes a serious loser liability.

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Way overdue for an update

I realize it has been over a month now since I last added an entry, so I figured I'd just kind of recap what's going on.

1. No real job so far on the horizon. I've been trying, and I have not been very successful. I keep ending up as the "second choice" of colleges, but never the first choice. San Francisco State went with one person over me. Casper College went with the other person over me. Pacific University in Oregon went with the other person over me. They often call me to tell me that they wished they could have chosen me, but in the end, they didn't choose me. My prospects are looking really dim these days. I almost got Hillsdale College, and I probably would have got it, but I had problems with my flight, so they ended up having to give it to one of the other people who actually showed up for the official interview in Michigan. I don't really know what to do at this point. I'm not finding any success, and it's almost August now.

2. Working temporarily. I'm working for EF, which is an English teaching school that works through the University of Phoenix. It is one of those jobs that lasts only a month, and by the end of this week, I'll be completely unemployed again. Before that, I was working a temporary month or so job with the county as an election trainer. That, too, ended, so little by little my little gigs are drying up.

3. Overseas might be my only hope. I'm currently looking into working in South Korea, teaching English or debate. We'll see how that turns out.

4. My computer stopped working last week. Apparently, my power supply decided to stop working, or blew itself out. I had to take my computer to a shop to actually get it repaired. To be honest, even though I've been a computer technician before, I misdiagnosed my own computer and didn't realize it was something as simple as a bad power supply. So, I replaced that and added another gig of ram to my computer (bringing it up to 3 gigs of ram). Cost me $200 that I didn't really have, but what can I say?

5. My writing hasn't been going very well lately. I am at one of those stages in my writing where I have a novel formulating in my head, but it's not ready to come out yet. This happens to me a lot with my novels. Unfortunately, it leaves me wanting to write, but not feeling comfortable enough to write yet. I have a working title of this next project that seems to be around the corner, entitled: She Talks to Penguins. Believe it or not, it's actually a very serious project, and something a bit different from what I've tried to tackle in the past. Considering I've tackled adventure, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, epic comedy and romance, this is more of a slice of life kind of novel, which I never actually imagined I would be writing. I guess it is more consistent with some of my recent work, which included my short story "Simple Girl" that took second place from the Stockton Arts Commission this summer; for the record, my romance story, "Buried Memories," took first place from the Stockton Arts Commission the year before. "Simple Girl" was more of a moralistic type of story about a stereotyped girl who everyone seems to ridicule behind her back, but in the end she was really the wisest character in the story.

6. Relationships. None. That's never really changed. I had a conversation with Kat yesterday when we went out for a beer at BJ's, and we talked about that same subject. I guess I don't really know what it is I'm looking for these days. In the past, I was involved with some pretty strange women, dating anything from a crazy girl from Hong Kong who desired to kill everyone in the human race, fondly referring to me in a loving manner as "the last victim"; a professional dominatrix who didn't understand why men found her so intimidating; a seriously toxic semi-supermodel who used to leave the table after we eat to vomit up everything she just chowed down; several best friends with whom I may have or may not have been actually dating at the time (just couldn't figure it out and blatantly asking just gave me vague replies); a couple of 18-20 year olds, who put out airs that they were much more mature for their age until we started dating and then suddenly they were really 18-20 year olds in maturity as well; and well, a couple of others that were great but just weren't either looking for me, or not there when I was finally looking for them.

So, we somewhat concluded, or at least I did, that I'm looking for someone intelligent who can stimulate me intellectually. I don't find myself looking for the same thing other men are looking for. Sure, an attractive woman is great, and I'll spend an eternity looking at a beautiful woman (Shania Twain, I'm looking at you right now...), but there has to be more to it than that. And that's so hard to find because I think too many women are socially stigmatized by what other men are seeking that they're all convinced that most men are interested in them only for sex. And that bad disposition gets reinforced by bad choices they make in trying to find that guy who is "just like you but not you".

There have been a couple of women who have come along but they're just not interested in me, or in a relationship at the moment. Some of them have been perfect for me, and I felt I would be perfect for them. But those relationships have remained strictly friendships because they're seeking someone else, even though I sometimes suspect that they don't know what they're seeking either. What's funny is that no matter where I go, and I do go numerous places in my life, I always end up with at least one or two really close female friends who are never interested in anything beyond friendship. And my jury is still out as to whether or not that is a good or a bad thing.

7. The Shoulder. It still hurts. I can barely move my arm still, and the pain has actually spread to my right shoulder as well, so I have little full mobility, and it hurts when I try to stretch my arms behind my back, like when I try to put a belt on my pants. With that said, the pain has become lessened somewhat, and I do feel that I've been able to get a bit more sleep at night than I use to. I am heading in for a surgery consultation this afternoon, and then in August I'll actually have the surgery itself, where they stretch the shoulder into a position and then supposedly, that "fixes" the problem of "frozen shoulder". I'm hoping so because it's been over a year, and this situation has really sucked a lot.

8. Tabula Rasa. It means "clean slate" but it's also the name of the game I've been playing religiously with the spare time that I have every day. It's an online game, like World of Warcraft, but it's so much not like World of Warcraft. And that's what I was seeking: Something NOT World of Warcraft. The premise is that the Earth has been conquered by an alien race called the Thrax (or the Bane), and we've regrouped on other planets where we're trying to win back our freedom from Bane oppression. It's so much different than other games I've played, and it actually feels like you accomplish something when you play. Plus, the important thing for me, is that it has a very rich story interwoven into the fabric of the game. That's rare. The game was designed by the creator of Ultima (and Ultima Online), Richard Garriott. Great game. I highly recommend it.

9. The Thesis. My second draft was given to Marlin almost two weeks ago. I haven't heard back on it. It's 115 pages approximately, so I can see why it would take some time to read through and correct it. I'm hoping there's not much more to do, because I really want this over and done with. I've been in school way too long. Plus, I need the stupid degree so I can show that I have something in return for the two years I spent here at the University of the Pacific.

That's pretty much it for now. Wish I had more to add, but that's a mouthful alone.

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The Fantasy That Keeps On Fibbing

I don't know about you, but I seem to get these emails and letters asking me if I like to play computer games; the follow-up is that I should then pursue the "lucrative" career of being a computer game designer (or some other job in the computer gaming field). There are some distinct fantasy errors that are present in these advertisements, and their omission drives me batty.

1. Most computer game people don't make a lot of money. Sure, some do. Most don't. For the most part, you end up being a cog in the wheel that gets crap for ridiculous hours and the job security is really, really not there. They fire you for ANYTHING in this business.

2. You MAKE computer games, not PLAY computer games. There's a big difference. Playing computer games is LOTS of fun. Making them is not. If you're a coder, you stare at computer code the entire time and wonder why Skippy the avatar bleeds colors every time he comes in contact with the evil death ball (or whatever). Or you can do one of my favorite jobs: Fix the irrigation system in Sim City. Yeah, that was fun. Or you can test games where you get to drive around a track 897,083,281 times trying to figure out why you fell into the sky on one of your turns that you can't duplicate no matter how many times you try to do so.

3. The designer jobs are easy to get. Right. There are people who have been part of the computer gaming world their entire lives who have not broken that ceiling. Good luck.

4. Some fly by night school is going to give you the tools to "make it" in the computer gaming field. Probably not. But you will spend a GREAT DEAL of money thinking it will.

5. Girls dig guys who make computer games. Okay, that one's true. I mean, nothing says sexy like "geek with computer".

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Second Life...should be "get a life"

For my mass communications class, we are required to create a character in Second Life, the online massive player computer game. Somehow, although don't ask me how, we're supposed to create some kind of ethnography from our experiences in the game. Well, here are my initial observations that might make this more difficult than I'd desire.

1. In my initial travels, I have discovered nothing but scams galore in this game. Some months ago, I wrote about the massive propensity of surveys that scam companies use to sell products to people who have no actual money to spend. It works like this: "Fill out this survey, and with enough surveys filled out, you'll earn money." What they don't tell you is that every one of these surveys really is an advertisement for a company that requires you "try" their product and then decide whether or not to spend even more money on their products. Somehow, this gets called a "survey", which no dictionary would ever equate with that definition whatsoever. Well, in Second Life, if you want to earn any money, the whole survey thing is available as a way to earn "fake" money, which they call Linden dollars (to be used in the game). Yet, you have to do these same surveys you'd have to do if you were being scammed by people outside the game. The only difference is you get game money instead of the possibility (translation: You're never seeing a dime) of real world money. I've tried to figure out how to make actual money in the game to buy things, but you either have to spend real money to the owners of the game or you have to participate in this really cheesy scam/survey thing.

2. There's no one in this world. No one. Not a soul. Okay, there are a few, but no one speaks to anyone else. It's like a game where you walk around with no one to speak to (unless they want to hit you up for simulated avatar sex) and with nothing to do because the game doesn't actually have anything to do. In the tutorial area, there was a little driving simulator (to teach you how to drive a car in the game), but I couldn't get anywhere because the only other person driving decided that driving in my path over and over again so I couldn't move would be fun. In other words, the game is so boring that he had to grief someone who was as bored as he was in order to actually have any fun.

3. The game is all about kinky sex. Several years ago, I tried playing the game. And all I found in it were business establishments that sold kinky outfits and offered S&M parlor entertainment. Of course, with no one there because as I said before, there's no one in this stupid game. I quit the game because even though a kinky sex playground sounds like it would be fun, it's not really fun when basically you're walking through a ghost town of areas with no one present.

4. So, I don't know what's interesting about the game because no one else is in it.

5. On a positive note, Kat and I created Furry characters. I'm Marty Wrigglesworth and she's my wife, Maeve Wrigglesworth. We're two furries and we'll probably run around doing stupid things, but it would be a lot more fun if there was actually a community in this game, but so far I haven't found it.

I know there's this whole community of people who are trying to build industries in this game, but I'm wondering why. It's not exciting. It's really boring, and so far nothing about the game has been interesting. My professor seems to believe that sites like Myspace and Facebook are going to end up giving into marketplace forces like Second Life so that all social networking will be much like Second Life, but I just don't see that happening. I was playing this game two years ago, and it was nothing but a sandbox for weird sex. Now, it's a sandbox for weird sex and a possibility of economic speculation. But who is going to continue to want to buy into a world where no one else is joining? I just don't see people flocking to Second Life because some people latched onto it at one point whereas the rest of the world went to worlds like World of Warcraft that continue to dominate computer gaming worlds online in unbelievable numbers.

In conclusion, I think what makes Second Life so uncomfortable is the very nature of what makes it unique. Everything in the game is player made. But the only real goal of the game is self-rewarding economics, and what's the fun in that? Why spend your time trying to get rich in a game where getting rich is all you can do? Why spend a great deal of time in a game trying to socialize with people who go afk (away from keyboard) and spend their time online getting money for the game while outside of the game (doing surveys or other ridiculous stuff like that)?

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Helium

I've gotten into a new writing site called Helium where you can write articles on all sorts of different pre-arranged topics. And then people review those articles and you move up and down on the ratings based on your article placement in that particular question's category.

I kind of equate it to the feeling I used to get when overplaying Everquest. Today's gamers really don't remember the old days of online games when you would have to sit and camp a particular monster for hours, sometimes days, to get the one item that you wanted really badly. This is kind of how Helium is. If you post your article, now you sit and keep refreshing your screen as you try to see if your placing has changed. Yeah, it's pathetic. But so was Everquest, the more I think about it.

Anyway, it's another opportunity to write, and that's gotta count for something.

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