Games Without Frontiers

I'm sick of Diablo. I'm sick of Diablo II. Warcraft II offers no appeal or challenge for me right now, and neither does Warcraft 3. I've beaten them all. Neverwinter Nights never really caught my interest; nor did any of the other new games I have. I'm Jezzballed out. Rogue has no new surprises for me. The many games of Turbo Grafx? Seen 'em all, done 'em all. Super Mario 64 is beautiful, but I've been through it way too many times. I've run the full gamut with MAME, and I'm done with that, too.

But I still need to play something.

So I'm giving Black & White another try. The game had problems, it's true; I wasn't able to get off the first island for some reason, probably a bug. But they apparently have decent online support, so I'm going to make a new god, play it through to the end point on the first island, and if the final quest doesn't start I'll send Lionhead an email. I did pay for a working game, after all.

I still find the whole Creature thing annoying; the damned thing always learns the wrong actions, and that apparently can screw up everything for the rest of the game. I'd much prefer the game without the Creature altogether, and with less micromanaging too - something more like the old Populous.

Okay, time to take a moment for some general computer-game philosophy. I'm tired of stress while gaming. That means I'm tired of combat, tired of horror and demons and the undead, tired of screams and gore and darkness, tired of sitting on the edge of my chair with my eyes glued to the screen for fear that a moment's inattention will kill my character and waste hours of work. This is supposed to be play, damn it, not work!

So what would I like in a computer game?

Beauty. Beautiful, imaginative, interactive scenery and music. A new world, or worlds to explore. Things that are strange, mysterious, and intriguing. If other people can also play in that world, and perhaps contribute their own ideas to it, so much the better. But for once, it would be nice if I didn't have to fight them or compete with them, or with anything, including AI.

That's not to say I'm giving up on other sorts of games, just that I would like to have one totally relaxing game, too.

The first part of Black & White has some of these qualities. Things like the Singing Stones quest, for example. The beauty, music, and humor of Black & White are all things that I'd like to see reflected in a new game, too. But I'd like there to be more complexity and depth. For example, in the Singing Stones quest the goal is to find the stones, arrange them in order of tone, and the quest is over. I'd like to see multi-valued things, perhaps some of them more like the runes of the Diablo 2 expansion, in which different combinations of runes can produce different results. But those rune words are all preprogrammed by Blizzard, which is also too limiting. Ideally, I'd like to see things (I should come up with a better word than "things", but in my mind, almost anything could qualify as a "thing" in this game) in which the relationships of the constituent elements are open-ended, so that an unpredictable and enormous variety of results can take place. Nor need they be restricted to a single set - things of all sorts should be able to interact with each other, some in passive ways, some in active ones.

Super Mario 64 has some - but only some - of the qualities I'm looking for, come to think of it. So, too, does the vision of heaven at the end of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia - minus the obnoxious apologetics, of course.

It would be cool if there could be an infinite and interconnected range of possible worlds, so that players could create their own wildly differing worlds. And make the game a shared project, so that all sorts of people could contribute to it and improve it. Social relationships could take place, like some of the stuff I've heard about for games like EverQuest. It could be really cool.

Hmm, some of the visual qualities of Myst would fit into the mix, too. So: take the best parts of Black & White, Super Mario 64, Myst, and any other great game I've left out. Put in more creativity and imagination. Remove the conflict and scary parts (perhaps, if some people want to make scary worlds, let them - but give every player the full option of avoiding any area or event that they don't want to encounter. Make the whole thing online and open-source.

I'd buy it.

If it worked right, it might approximate a sort of dreamland - not the (admittedly cool) Dreamlands of Lord Dunsany and Lovecraft, but a more open, wild dreamland in which the imaginations of millions of people could just run riot, interacting with each other in all sorts of cool and unpredicable ways. Just a wild fantasy, I guess. If anyone knows of a game like that, or would like to suggest any other computer game that I might enjoy (even one with combat), please do.

And if anyone feels like developing such a game, please let me know.

Other stuff:

• Apparently George W. Bush isn't satisfied with killing tens of thousands in Iraq and thousands more here in the US with relaxed safety and environmental standards and enforcement; now he wants to poison and brain-damage your children, too. Incidentally, I picked up this NYT permalink via http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink.
  


• I've been reading an old novel by Robert Silverberg called Dying Inside; as far as I can tell, this is Silverberg's version of Portnoy's Complaint, but the difference is that Portnoy has telepathy. But that's just a guess, since I've never actually read Portnoy's Complaint (some day, though). This book is very whiny, very early-seventies, lots of sex and impotence (mental and otherwise), many taboos broken, and altogether rather depressing. But readable and fairly gripping; Silverberg's talent is undeniable. This may be the most "mainstream" science fiction book I've ever read. It's also rather dated.
  


• For the record, Sebastian went to get his third haircut (ever) yesterday, and for the first time he didn't cry. In fact, Teri tells me that he was absolutely wonderful. And with his new short haircut, he looks like such a big boy!
  


• Quick note to myself: an URL I want to check back on. It shows non-factory-farm sources for meat and some produce: http://www.themeatrix.com/. Plus the movie is fairly funny. Reminds me just a little of The Story of Beef, although nowhere near as gory (or as funny, of course).

Games Without Frontiers

I'm sick of Diablo. I'm sick of Diablo II. Warcraft II offers no appeal or challenge for me right now, and neither does Warcraft 3. I've beaten them all. Neverwinter Nights never really caught my interest; nor did any of the other new games I have. I'm Jezzballed out. Rogue has no new surprises for me. The many games of Turbo Grafx? Seen 'em all, done 'em all. Super Mario 64 is beautiful, but I've been through it way too many times. I've run the full gamut with MAME, and I'm done with that, too.

But I still need to play something.

So I'm giving Black & White another try. The game had problems, it's true; I wasn't able to get off the first island for some reason, probably a bug. But they apparently have decent online support, so I'm going to make a new god, play it through to the end point on the first island, and if the final quest doesn't start I'll send Lionhead an email. I did pay for a working game, after all.

I still find the whole Creature thing annoying; the damned thing always learns the wrong actions, and that apparently can screw up everything for the rest of the game. I'd much prefer the game without the Creature altogether, and with less micromanaging too - something more like the old Populous.

Okay, time to take a moment for some general computer-game philosophy. I'm tired of stress while gaming. That means I'm tired of combat, tired of horror and demons and the undead, tired of screams and gore and darkness, tired of sitting on the edge of my chair with my eyes glued to the screen for fear that a moment's inattention will kill my character and waste hours of work. This is supposed to be play, damn it, not work!

So what would I like in a computer game?

Beauty. Beautiful, imaginative, interactive scenery and music. A new world, or worlds to explore. Things that are strange, mysterious, and intriguing. If other people can also play in that world, and perhaps contribute their own ideas to it, so much the better. But for once, it would be nice if I didn't have to fight them or compete with them, or with anything, including AI.

That's not to say I'm giving up on other sorts of games, just that I would like to have one totally relaxing game, too.

The first part of Black & White has some of these qualities. Things like the Singing Stones quest, for example. The beauty, music, and humor of Black & White are all things that I'd like to see reflected in a new game, too. But I'd like there to be more complexity and depth. For example, in the Singing Stones quest the goal is to find the stones, arrange them in order of tone, and the quest is over. I'd like to see multi-valued things, perhaps some of them more like the runes of the Diablo 2 expansion, in which different combinations of runes can produce different results. But those rune words are all preprogrammed by Blizzard, which is also too limiting. Ideally, I'd like to see things (I should come up with a better word than "things", but in my mind, almost anything could qualify as a "thing" in this game) in which the relationships of the constituent elements are open-ended, so that an unpredictable and enormous variety of results can take place. Nor need they be restricted to a single set - things of all sorts should be able to interact with each other, some in passive ways, some in active ones.

Super Mario 64 has some - but only some - of the qualities I'm looking for, come to think of it. So, too, does the vision of heaven at the end of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia - minus the obnoxious apologetics, of course.

It would be cool if there could be an infinite and interconnected range of possible worlds, so that players could create their own wildly differing worlds. And make the game a shared project, so that all sorts of people could contribute to it and improve it. Social relationships could take place, like some of the stuff I've heard about for games like EverQuest. It could be really cool.

Hmm, some of the visual qualities of Myst would fit into the mix, too. So: take the best parts of Black & White, Super Mario 64, Myst, and any other great game I've left out. Put in more creativity and imagination. Remove the conflict and scary parts (perhaps, if some people want to make scary worlds, let them - but give every player the full option of avoiding any area or event that they don't want to encounter. Make the whole thing online and open-source.

I'd buy it.

If it worked right, it might approximate a sort of dreamland - not the (admittedly cool) Dreamlands of Lord Dunsany and Lovecraft, but a more open, wild dreamland in which the imaginations of millions of people could just run riot, interacting with each other in all sorts of cool and unpredicable ways. Just a wild fantasy, I guess. If anyone knows of a game like that, or would like to suggest any other computer game that I might enjoy (even one with combat), please do.

And if anyone feels like developing such a game, please let me know.

Other stuff:

• Apparently George W. Bush isn't satisfied with killing tens of thousands in Iraq and thousands more here in the US with relaxed safety and environmental standards and enforcement; now he wants to poison and brain-damage your children, too. Incidentally, I picked up this NYT permalink via http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink.
  


• I've been reading an old novel by Robert Silverberg called Dying Inside; as far as I can tell, this is Silverberg's version of Portnoy's Complaint, but the difference is that Portnoy has telepathy. But that's just a guess, since I've never actually read Portnoy's Complaint (some day, though). This book is very whiny, very early-seventies, lots of sex and impotence (mental and otherwise), many taboos broken, and altogether rather depressing. But readable and fairly gripping; Silverberg's talent is undeniable. This may be the most "mainstream" science fiction book I've ever read. It's also rather dated.
  


• For the record, Sebastian went to get his third haircut (ever) yesterday, and for the first time he didn't cry. In fact, Teri tells me that he was absolutely wonderful. And with his new short haircut, he looks like such a big boy!
  


• Quick note to myself: an URL I want to check back on. It shows non-factory-farm sources for meat and some produce: http://www.themeatrix.com/. Plus the movie is fairly funny. Reminds me just a little of The Story of Beef, although nowhere near as gory (or as funny, of course).

A Warcraft 3 Nit

This is something I should have written about back when I actually noticed it, which was probably six months ago. But I think I forgot to mention it then, so here I go.

It's about the cut-scenes in Warcraft 3. Now, I take a back seat to none in my admiration of Blizzard's cut-scenes; they're the best. Whoever makes them should really be making full-length animated movies. But the writing for some of the WC3 scenes was surprisingly weak.

Example: Wait a minute. I'd better spoiler all this with my patented invisible ink (i.e. white font). If you want to read the rest of this, hit Ctrl-A or select the blank area by clicking and dragging over it with your mouse. In other words,
SPOILERS!
Oh, and there are also spoilers for RoboCop 1, if you never saw that (really great) movie.

Okay. Example: Two orc-chieftans are heading towards a massive arch-demon for a final showdown. One of them has been tainted by drinking water infused with the blood of the demon, which is source of the insane rage and evil of the orc race. In the great showdown, the other orc leader is knocked unconscious by the demon, who has shown that he is virtually invulnerable to their weapons.

And the tainted orc leader, near the point of death, throws his axe at the demon and kills it. Why is he suddenly able to overcome its incredible defenses? Because...because he really wanted to this time, apparently.

Now, this was the flaw that I desperately feared in RoboCop 1. His secret fourth directive forbade him to take action against any official of the corporation that "made" him...and at the end, he had to take action against the corporate vice-president, who was holding the president hostage. At the moment I first saw the movie, I had a terrible fear that RoboCop's humanity would enable him to make a supreme effort and defeat the programming, which would have basically been a really cheap (and illogical) deus ex machina. Instead, the president fired the VP, at which point the 4th directive no longer applied. Now THAT was logical, and very funny as well.

Unfortunately Blizzard went with the other option: an unexplained defeat of a formerly insurmountable obstacle (accompanied by the usual scream of "AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" by the hero, to indicate his Really Strong Feelings). This was just stupid. Particularly when a logical, or at least nearly-logical and far more dramatic alternative was available.

The demon had shown that he was invulnerable, and the tainted orc had shown that even though he had some protection from the effects of the demon-blood taint in his veins, it was still there. It would have heightened the drama and improved the story immensely if, in the final confrontation, the orc had wondered if the demon's protection included protection against himself...and then smeared his own demon-tainted blood on the blade before hurling it at the archdemon. The blood could have burst into flame as it penetrated the demon's force-field like defenses...it would at least have made some sort of sense, to use the demon's own weapon against him.

The finale was also basically pretty confusing. I was able to figure it out eventually, I think; the super-giant-colossal demon-god was basically nuked by a zillion of those little wisps. They were minor little units of the night-elves, and had an almost useless "explode" power. But suddenly millions of them appeared and blew up the big bad boss. The theme of the small and despised causing the downfall of the mighty and proud is an old one (Tolkien was not the first to use it), but it would have worked better if there were actually a source for all those wisps. As it was, the cut scene was hard to understand; Big Bad Demon goes to the World-Tree, but just before he can destroy it a million wisps come and blow him up. Where did they come from? Why? Do not ask, because you will receive no answer.

I will also say that the Prince was annoyingly stupid. He was practically TOLD that he was going to be turned evil, and like some moron character in a bad TV show he totally shrugged it all off. I find the "stupid character" plot an extremely aggravating one. Which is one of the reasons why I like the work of Lawrence Watt-Evans so much; his characters have the most common sense of any I've read.

Okay, enough ranting.

A Warcraft 3 Nit

This is something I should have written about back when I actually noticed it, which was probably six months ago. But I think I forgot to mention it then, so here I go.

It's about the cut-scenes in Warcraft 3. Now, I take a back seat to none in my admiration of Blizzard's cut-scenes; they're the best. Whoever makes them should really be making full-length animated movies. But the writing for some of the WC3 scenes was surprisingly weak.

Example: Wait a minute. I'd better spoiler all this with my patented invisible ink (i.e. white font). If you want to read the rest of this, hit Ctrl-A or select the blank area by clicking and dragging over it with your mouse. In other words,
SPOILERS!
Oh, and there are also spoilers for RoboCop 1, if you never saw that (really great) movie.

Okay. Example: Two orc-chieftans are heading towards a massive arch-demon for a final showdown. One of them has been tainted by drinking water infused with the blood of the demon, which is source of the insane rage and evil of the orc race. In the great showdown, the other orc leader is knocked unconscious by the demon, who has shown that he is virtually invulnerable to their weapons.

And the tainted orc leader, near the point of death, throws his axe at the demon and kills it. Why is he suddenly able to overcome its incredible defenses? Because...because he really wanted to this time, apparently.

Now, this was the flaw that I desperately feared in RoboCop 1. His secret fourth directive forbade him to take action against any official of the corporation that "made" him...and at the end, he had to take action against the corporate vice-president, who was holding the president hostage. At the moment I first saw the movie, I had a terrible fear that RoboCop's humanity would enable him to make a supreme effort and defeat the programming, which would have basically been a really cheap (and illogical) deus ex machina. Instead, the president fired the VP, at which point the 4th directive no longer applied. Now THAT was logical, and very funny as well.

Unfortunately Blizzard went with the other option: an unexplained defeat of a formerly insurmountable obstacle (accompanied by the usual scream of "AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" by the hero, to indicate his Really Strong Feelings). This was just stupid. Particularly when a logical, or at least nearly-logical and far more dramatic alternative was available.

The demon had shown that he was invulnerable, and the tainted orc had shown that even though he had some protection from the effects of the demon-blood taint in his veins, it was still there. It would have heightened the drama and improved the story immensely if, in the final confrontation, the orc had wondered if the demon's protection included protection against himself...and then smeared his own demon-tainted blood on the blade before hurling it at the archdemon. The blood could have burst into flame as it penetrated the demon's force-field like defenses...it would at least have made some sort of sense, to use the demon's own weapon against him.

The finale was also basically pretty confusing. I was able to figure it out eventually, I think; the super-giant-colossal demon-god was basically nuked by a zillion of those little wisps. They were minor little units of the night-elves, and had an almost useless "explode" power. But suddenly millions of them appeared and blew up the big bad boss. The theme of the small and despised causing the downfall of the mighty and proud is an old one (Tolkien was not the first to use it), but it would have worked better if there were actually a source for all those wisps. As it was, the cut scene was hard to understand; Big Bad Demon goes to the World-Tree, but just before he can destroy it a million wisps come and blow him up. Where did they come from? Why? Do not ask, because you will receive no answer.

I will also say that the Prince was annoyingly stupid. He was practically TOLD that he was going to be turned evil, and like some moron character in a bad TV show he totally shrugged it all off. I find the "stupid character" plot an extremely aggravating one. Which is one of the reasons why I like the work of Lawrence Watt-Evans so much; his characters have the most common sense of any I've read.

Okay, enough ranting.