It's a struggle to tear myself away from Star Wars Galaxies. I bought two copies Friday, but Jane's Vaio laptop won't do hardware transform and lighting so I'm in here alone. Well not quite - somehow people on the fence about massively multiplayer online games have been lured by the mythology and promise of this title; I played because my friends were playing - I played because I expect a wide range of novice and experienced players to mess with and mess around within that gaming system.

Yesterday Justin and I hunted far and wide for curtains for the freshly-painted dining room. We went to seven stores over the course of four hours. By the end we didn't even know what we wanted anymore. But Justin wanted to achieve something, so we finally settled on some semi-transparent ivory-colored cotton panels we saw at the seventh store.

This morning we were reflecting on the odyssey. "I think we got good experience," Justin said, "even though we only bought one thing. I think we've increased our shopping skill, and our interior decorating skill. I think we're another step closer to leveling up in design."

Can you tell that someone's been playing an awful lot of Morrowind?

Update: Justin and I were just working on the book we're writing together. Suddenly he stood up. "I have to go," he said. "Star Wars Galaxies is out today. I'll be right back." And off he drove.

See you online!

by Jia Ji
I recently began working at eGenesis, the developers of "A Tale in the Desert" (www.atitd.com), a massively multiplayer online game set in ancient Egypt that just went live about four months ago. It's a small company with a unique product, a MMPOG with no combat but an amazingly complex socioeconomic and legal system. Usually, I describe our game as a historical simulation, a mixture of the Sims and Civilization with real people thrown in to make it interesting.

In ATITD, one of the main goals is to overcome complex challenges called "the tests." We activated one of the tests last week, "The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh." At its core, the test is simple: the people of Egypt elect one player to be the Demi-Pharaoh (DP). The DP's sole impressive, but horrible, power is the ability to permanently exile up to seven player characters (but not accounts) from Egypt. It's really a test of the playerbase's ability to identify leaders who can resist the abuse of power. This is one of the tests in the discipline of leadership - there are also tests in six other disciplines: art, the human body, conflict, worship, architecture, and thought.

From Declan's Politech list this morning: A link to a blog that described and linked to an economic analysis of EverQuest avatar sales, which determined that "ability seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount."

OTOH, this may simply reflect the mostly-male EverQuest demographic's preference for avatars of their own gender. Are there any studies out there on the different demographics/social tendencies of the various big MMORPGs?

For proof that there's a ton of innovation and good spirit in cheap game-making, look no further than the recent OgreCave interview with James Ernest founder of Cheapass Games. Cheapass has been earning winks and smiles in the paper games industry since they offered people a chance for some organized fun for under $10. Now according to Allan Sugarbaker's interview, they're working on full-color titles and game software tie-ins.

I was pleased to read that they often start their designs from themes and let the game mechanic unfold from that. It gives me hope for my place and people ideas for as-yet-unpublished games. That, and it's always nice to read about hardworking independent artists. James has made game-sharing more important than game graphics or game perfecting. Bully for Cheapass games. Have you tried to buy a nice German boardgame lately? Puerto Rico doesn't go for less than $26 on eBay!

i was checking out the store* section, here on GGA and I had a thought. how realistic might it be to have tee-shirts made up with the new (very cool) mascot on it? might that involve licensing and all that jazz? Hmm that would be a damned cute tee though, wouldn't it? check out playstation's tees

Today, I mentioned to a friend that I was playing Morrowind, an RPG on the PC. "Oh, that's hardcore." Why? "Because it's so complex."

I step back a bit from the gameplay, and I realize, yes! It is quite complex. There's plants I can harvest to make potions, and devices I can use to remove or amplify specific potion effects. There's magic and negociations and factions and small hamlets and large cities packed with people with requests. The game keeps drawing me back in because I want to explore further.

After talking to my friend, I browsed the 'net a little, to get a sense of the range of the game. And I saw that Morrowind supports user-generated plug-ins. Browsing the Morrowind Mod Library I found this option from Emma:

Boyfriend (8kb)
Description: Life as an Morrowind-adventurer can sometimes be kind of lonesome. Therefore, I'm proud to present Indiana James, the devoted boyfriend of your female PC Character. He is a redguard warrior, who loves a good fight, and he is always happy to accompany you on your adventures. You will soon find out that he is not only a good fighter and a nice company. He is also able to heal himself, to repair his own armor and to provide you with some useful stuff along the road. If you're short of money, he might be able to lend you some. But don't be greedy - that would most certainly affect his feelings for you. You'll find Indiana James outside his nice little cottage close to Vivec (turn left after crossing the bridge from Foreign Quarters). As the true love of your life, he of course wants you share his home, and between your adventures, he loves to cook you a good meal or to quote some poetry.

Single player games sometimes feel like a dying breed - so much industry attention is focused on multiplayer. I enjoy playing games alone sometimes, because I can experiment more and explore a story. But that doesn't mean I want to be alone in the world. I love this idea that we could create plug-ins of ourselves and then upload them to our friends. Or celebrities? Personality plug-ins for Morrowind - early traces of exchangable artificial companions.

GameSpy is running an excellent series 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming History, holding the game industry accountable for their most collosal mistakes. It is remarkable to see how many misjudgements are repeated, and how rapidly. My favourite in this regard was the Sega Saturn controller retooled for the American audience, foreshadowing the XBox oversized controller debacle (which is also covered).

These "25 most" and "10 least" features run by the major gaming news sites are the closest thing most popular gaming journalism gets to writing videogame history. It's obvious from the reporter commentaries in these pieces that the journalists in the videogame press are self-selected, dedicated fans of the hardware and software. Amidst some dead-horse flogging and groundless pontificating, they evince impressive, comprehensive knowledge of the medium; I wonder if it could be tapped in other ways besides "25 best" and "10 games that..."

I've been curious about Final Fantasy XI for some time now. How is a massively-scripted cinematic single-player adventure game series going to map to a multiplayer online world?

GameSpy's has good preview coverage of the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XI. The author, Raymond "Psylancer" Padilla, bemoans the pain-in-the-butt menus that cover the screen during play. So I was curious to see the screenshots, to see what he was talking about. But the screenshots attached to the article were all clean, showing none of the crowded interface and menus lamented at length in the piece.

Pictures are a part of game journalism. When I worked at Gamers.com, we bought video cards that ran the PlayStation signal through a computer, so you could take digital photos of your virtual travels. It was expensive and slightly a pain in the ass.

One alternative is to use the online screenshot repositories that the game companies provide for journalists. Nearly all of my game reviews for MindJack have used these official screenshots, because I'm too broke, busy and uncoordinated to be taking console screenshots myself.

But I expect more from the professional sites, like GameSpy. Maybe they use freelancers, who don't have video capture setups. Either way, as a game player, I want to see the interface. I want to see screenshots showing me the choices available in the game, the resources I must manage, the units at my command, even if the buttons are in a foreign language.

So publishers, please include more nuts-and-bolts interface and menu screenshots in your PR archives. Journalists and screen capturers, please include screenshots that show the core of the game, what a player sees 90% of the time, and not just the pretty people and pretty landscapes.

United Kingdom videogame activists FairPlay caught our attention last year when they rallied against the high price of electronic entertainment - "Video Games Are a Rip Off."

Now they're unmasking unfair, unrandom results of slot machines in the UK. Nearly all modern slot machines and video poker machines run on software encoded on chips inside the devices. Amidst the blinking lights, the sounds of falling coins, and the promise of winnings scrawled on the machines, many folks feel comfortable testing their luck against game software.

Fairplay has taken that slot machine software off the chips inside the machines, and run it on their own PCs, where they can experiment with the odds and probabilities. Evidence on their site demonstrates that most of these games don't pay out at random. The machines pay back on very fixed, and stingy schedules. The machine-makers are lying about the odds, and they're breaking the law.

It's probably a copyright violation to publish the source code online. But here's a case where diligent gamers have used personal computers and emulators, with a little bit of what appears to be copyright violation and intellectual property theft, to prove an important point and reveal a greater crime - fleecing the public. Now Fairplay is pushing for stronger legislative limits on these one-armed bandits.

(From Slashdot)

The second annual Christian Game Developers Conference is taking place on July 25-27 in Portland, Oregon. There will be demonstrations of Christian games, and debates over issues particular to Christian Game Developers. Here's a sampling of what they discussed last year:

- Effectiveness of games as a media to share the Gospel - "Where does one draw the line between the content that goes into a Christian game versus the content that goes into a secular game? Have industry focus on two game categories, "Soul-winning" and "edification"?
- Funding options for Christian projects - Any similarities and differences between seeking capital for a secular game and a Christian game? What projects have received funding so far?
- Revolutionary Opportunities - What technology can we use to outpace secular projects? (Erasmatron? A home grown system?)

... and it's none other than Jason Della Rocca, the IDGA program director. The blog is called Reality Panic, and it should be very interesting. Jason's one of the hardest working, most actively involved people in the gameworld, and his writings will surely be a rich addition to the culture of gaming.

If the First Amendment is versatile enough to 'shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll,' we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection," the court said in its ruling. "The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence."

The previous case in St. Louis County had evidently argued that stories were incosequential to video-games because players can skip right through them. The Appeals Court disagreed:

"The fact that modern technology has increased viewer control does not render movies unprotected by the First Amendment, and equivalent player control likewise should not automatically disqualify modern video games."

Obviously, there's some gamers on that 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, or they're at least smart enough to listen to their gaming kids when it came time to research this case.

Looks like we won one today.

Will Wright has raised the stakes on gaming. The Sims enabled millions of people to use their computers as laboratories to experiment with human relationships. SimCity did the same for city planning - how would you run your home-town?

By making everyone an urban planner or a family psychiatrist, he's used computer games to alter our sense of power. We can practice manage the complexity of modern living through his toys.

Will Wright routinely gives lectures to large crowds of game developers hungry for his insights, drawn from calculus, weather patterns, psychology, Japanese comics and network theory. He runs a social robots laboratory in Berkeley, regularly competing in Robot Wars with his daughter.

He's a brilliant guy, completely unassuming considering he invented the best-selling computer game series of all time.

Maybe games were only a stopover as he expressed himself across culture: according to Yahoo News, Wright has just inked a TV show deal with Fox.

He's already reprogrammed millions of minds with interactive media, how could he do so with broadcasting? Fortunately, it doesn't sound like he intends to do a stiff product tie-in cartoon show:

"I'd like to fast-forward into the future a bit and explore how machines and artificial intelligence will impact human beings and how robots will help us define ourselves," Wright said. "The trick is going to be to hook a mass audience with a new concept and then Trojan-horse these ideas into the show."

Wright said there are a lot of things that he has learned in creating original franchises for interactive entertainment that he can apply to linear entertainment.

"I think there are ways to get a deeper level of creative input from an audience of a TV show," Wright said. "I'd like to explore ways to connect the loop between a show and its audience, going beyond the current methods of phoning in a vote."

Tabletop RPG enthusiasts are coming out of the woodwork all around me.

Last Friday I was at dinner for a friend of mine, who is in my band. A couple of the guests there looked at their watches around 10 pm and said they had to leave. Why? "Uh... we've got a Runequest date."

Which is funny, because I had a D&D date the next day. Saturday was all D&D - seven and a half hours, guided by the guys from Ogre Cave.

Justin: "It was great, we played D&D."

The band: "Why didn't you call us?!! We want to play!"

What's going on? Three years ago I could not find a single person who admitted to playing D&D who wasn't a professional game industry person of some sort. Now my friends are all coming out of the closet as tabletop RPG fans. Other cool people into D&D: Vin Diesel. Further evidence of mainstreaming: a new Dungeons and Dragons movie for 2004 is rumored. Is it now cool to be into D&D?

Or have I slipped into an alternate universe?

In any case, I now have a dream: an all-girl D&D group. I'll DM. Who's with me?