Being Sick Sucks!

Last week I started feeling sick; the typical sore throat, murky sinuses, itchy eyes, muscles sensitivity, and feeling really run down.

Three days later, I rolled a critical fumble and I was told I had a severe flu — immediately they told me to go home, drink plenty of liquids, and take Ibuprofen every 4 hours. That night my temperature was a 102 — my mind was whirling a hundred miles an hour and I was never really sure if I was asleep or awake.

Then things started getting better — but it was not the end to my dilemma. Perhaps I had entered the eye of the storm.

Unwittingly we had a big garage sale that day and with my flu licked, I pitched in whole-heartedly moving and setting up tables, standing outside talking with the old geezers coming to screw me out of 50 cents over books and baubles.

That night, I fell into a heaving wreck of coughing, wheezing, and uncontrollable shaking. My temperature soared again and I felt the world falling around me. I went to emergency where they told me I had pneumonia and bronchitis. After spending three times what I made at the garage sale and four hours of my life — I escaped with a fist full of drugs.

Ahhhh the life on drugs is serene — as I lay in bed staring at the dust mites on the ceiling I had an epiphany of incredible game articles whiz through my mind — of course now I cannot remember a single one, but that night I could have written a magazine of articles on every facet of gaming.

Still recovering, I now dare to do anything more than walk around the house. I feel grand as long as the medicine is at full strength, but every now and then the ugly head of pneumonia rises and I hack and cough my lungs out.

Regrettably I am pushing off the production of my latest show, the Travels with Troy a bit to recover. I hope to have the show done later this week.

Adult Games Needn’t Be Profane

I am looking with great anticipation to the new MMO game, Age of Conan, by Funcom. What truly intrigues me about the game is review after review that paints the game as aimed at adults or designed for a mature gamer.

Before I get too much into my philosophy on this, I want to clear the air on what I think is an Adult Game. Many, I believe, think adult games mean lewd, profane — often pornographic, and to some lesser extent extreme violence. Although, these descriptions fall into Adult Games, I do not believe they paint a complete picture of what I hope Funcom, and others in the game development community, mean by this.

To me, Adult Games, are those that are created for gamers who have the ability to concentrate and analyze complicated systems and revel in adult themes. Adult themes does not necessarily nudity and violence, though they could. What I mean by themes is character mortality, character achievements, and ultimately character Resolution.

In Character Mortality, I think we need to seriously look at the death of a character. In a fantasy world such as AoC (Age of Conan), death can be permanent but there are always options for a player to bring his character back to life. This resurrection process, however, needs to be lengthy (as in time out of the game) or difficult (either incurring expense in ingame money or quests [performed by subordinates]). We must put into the game the obvious threat of death — and not a death that simply plops the character to an entrance zone with some minor debuffs. As “Adults” we must understand and quantify the dangers of adventuring and fighting. This would accentuate combat and make each battle more meaningful. Death would be less common, but mean something to each player.

Character Achievement also needs a hand at bringing it into more adult themes. Instead of the simple “Candy Reward” after each quest or mission, we need to accentuate long term growth of our characters in the world with long term results — land, status, marriage, children — simply put a legacy that matters in the course of history in the game. As long as we simply give “candy” in items or titles without engaging our characters into the day to day activities of the world, we are playing like children.

And ultimately, we need to address Character Resolution, or ending our character’s career — and not just ending it when we get bored or our subscription to the game runs out. One adult theme that we need to seriously look at is time in the game — the worlds of MMOs run at a much accelerated time than ours, but our characters are ageless and the world does not change. This is a serious flaw in common MMOs today, and must be addressed with adult themes of time, aging, seasons, family, heads of state, governance, and geopolitical fluctuations.

I also think that adult-centric games are those that have robust and complicated character generation systems and physics.  Games such as WoW are definitely not adult games, even though I think they play on the scantily clad female elves and the profane violence of the evil side. I often think that Vanguard, initially, had an adult themed physical world, with a rich sense of character generation and development.  I hope that in future MMOs, designers will think less of showing skin and gore when experimenting with adult games, and concentrate more of complicated game systems with rich and powerful scripting language — to allow greater freedom and breath in the game.

These are the real “Adult Themes” in games. I am more concerned with that others think are the “Adult Themes” which are simply nudity, sex, and abject violence. I hope the people at Funcom see an adult game as more than that.

Travels with Troy; Episode III

If you have not checked out episode III of the Travels of Troy, please visit http://www.virginworlds.com and listen or head over to my page on GAX and you can find it there as well.

In this week’s episode, I have four segments of the show. In the first, I offer a bit of history on the writer and originator of the Conan mythology, Robert E. Howard. Many of his fans, and soon many MMO gamers, may not know the sad history behind the creative genius. Without letting too much out of the bag, let us just say that we should have had many more tales of Conan in Hyboria than we did.

The second segment deals with my ongoing discussion of Phantasm Adventures pushed into the MMO genre, and how I would like to see a MMO created. This week, we talk about the 60 playable races in Phantasm, and highlight a few of them with examples. It is interesting to note, that there were 12 races left out at one point due to their difficult playbability — such as not having hands to manipulate treasures or objects in the world. A MMO would be a perfect place to experiment with tough races, allowing seasoned players the option of “rolling” characters that are much more difficult to play.

I then move on to what I have been playing — which is mostly Everquest II and my new method of dual-boxing with Multiplicity. Even though everything about Lord of The Rings says I should adore the game, I am having a very rough time wanting to spend any time in it at all. The game is utterly beautiful and rich to travel through — its character creation and advancement is smooth and very engaging — treasures and appearance tabs are generous and plentiful. The question, however, is why I cannot find a sustained reason to stay in the game? I am even in a great guild, but there is something hollow about the game — and I cannot put a finger on it.

In my segment, I discuss the Free MMO Dungeon Runners. To summarize my review, you get what you pay for. With that, and without going into much detail, unless you are on a severe budget or you have very little time to invest into a MMO, I would move on to something else.

Next week: Karen, from the Journeys with Jaye stops over and we talk about Women In Gaming. We also will disucss Background Picks in Phantasm Adventures. And for those who have not discovered the site, if you are looking for bargains, surf over to http://www.slicksdeals.net

And One Keyboard To Rule Them All

Over the last several weeks I have been podcasting on a product from Stardock called Multiplicity.  What it essential does is allow you to use one keyboard to control up to 6 computers.  I recently started using it because my old setup for controlling two computers was causing increased pain in my wrist and shoulder — I basically gave up on two-boxing because of it.

I got the free 14 day trial and have been enjoying the freedom it allows me with just using my best keyboard and mouse.  I am actively trying to configure my third computer to use it — essentially I have to move some things in my room so I can put another monitor next to the other two.

The program isn’t all roses, and there are some programs either that does not work with it or I have not figured out how to use it.  I have noticed, for example, in Civilization IV that the screen centers on the mouse, and when I move the mouse to my other screen, it follows it to the edge and then just continually scrolls across the world — I remedied that by hitting the escape key and that locks the screen where I want it.  I also noticed in Call of Duty 1 that it seems to use its own mouse, so I can’t use it to control another computer.

It works quite well in Everquest II with only a few gaps where I forget where my mouse is, and have my second toon go off running because I forgot to move the mouse back to the main screen.

In honor of this nifty program, I wrote this obviously parody of a well known poem:

Two screens for the news junkie focused on hearsay

Three screens for the programmer writing code solid as stone

Four screens for the gamer who knows not of night or day

Five screens blazing for the researcher looking to atone

In the cloud where IT does it melee

One keyboard to rule them all, one keyboard to find them

One keyboard to bring them all and in the IP bind them

In the cloud where the Multiplicity lie….