Shiny Things - April 9th, 2008

08:08 am - Arden

bushi7 sent me a link to this Wired article on the world of Arden, a MMORPG designed by IU professor Ted Castronova. I'd heard about this some time ago, and thought it looked pretty dull. Sadly, I was right. Castronova even says so. He's says now he's learned from his mistakes, and hopes to do better with a new release this summer, titled Arden II: London's Burning. Setting aside for a moment that putting an apostrophe in a title is a poor way to make it exciting (is that possessive or a contraction?) his comments in the article and the accompanying slide show make it clear that he's ready to embark on brand new mistakes:

* "You need a core group of 60-hour-a-week people."

Okay, so much for me planning on having anything to do with this guy's projects.

* "Arden II is going to be more of a hack-and-slash D&D game," he says. "London's literally on fire when you start, there's a riot, and the first thing you do is kill lots of rats. This is going to be a game about hitting rats, chasing down cockatrices. Some would say, What a waste of time. But I have no problem with it. I like ordinary gameplay. Human nature likes to hit rats more than it likes to read text."

Ooo, I've always wanted to kill rats! Well, actually, no. What I really want is to explore a world that has interesting things to discover, interact with characters that do something other than send me on pointless quests they could do themselves, develop interesting new abilities, and develop my own character into someone who has power and influence over the game world. Maybe I should mail this guy a copy of A Theory of Fun. It sounds like he has as clear an understanding of fun as you'd expect from an economist (except perhaps for Steven D. Levitt).

Probably the most fun anyone has ever had from Arden will come from reading this excerpt from the Wired article's accompanying gallery:

There's a cottage in the distance, and as I approach it I see a Brigand attacking a Wench. (Not my terminology--the game's terminology.) I'm so lacking in skills, weapons, and experience that I can't come to her aid. Luckily, a cow that's been grazing nearby bites the Brigand on the ass. That's passing strange... Between the two of them, the Wench and the cow manage to subdue the Brigand.

"Action! Drama! Violent cows! Now this is more like it. (Apologies to the reader, I was so overwhelmed by this sudden burst of action that I forgot to take a screenshot.)

This guy doesn't need another $250,000 grant. He needs to talk to a couple of good GMs. And maybe an interaction designer. This frustrates me greatly: this is probably the closest I will ever get in geographic proximity to anyone developing this sort of game, and it would be awesome if it didn't suck.

Hmmm. Arden's web site has a link for "downloading and improving the world of Arden". And I have the Neverwinter Nights software it's built on. Still, it would be much more encouraging if they provided a way to share your improvements with their team...

11:19 am - Bookmarks in your RSS Reader

I love RSS. It gives me one place to read all the things I want to read (except LJ: LJ's RSS feed sucks. *sigh*). I use Google Reader because that way it doesn't matter if I'm at work or at home or on a borrowed machine. The one thing I really want in my RSS reader though (besides LJ) is links to web sites that I found but didn't have time to read right away: bookmarks. That way I can read them when I have time, which--to me--is the fundamental value of an RSS reader. The trick was to find a mechanism to add web sites to an RSS feed as conveniently as possible.

And I found it: Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us provides an RSS feed of bookmarks for your account. It doesn't update very promptly, but that's fine: I didn't plan on reading this stuff until later anyway. And on computers I use regularly it's pretty easy to add a button to the browser that lets me save a website in two clicks. Woohoo!

Current Mood: chipper