Thursday 2 January 2003

Pic of the day: Lord of the Rings game from Electronic Arts. Nice people, nice movie, probably nice game. Too bad ...

Not gonna buy it

I went into the store and looked at the Lord of the Rings (Two Towers) game. I decided there and then never to buy it. Not that it seems to be a bad game, but life is simply too short (and narrow, too). I have already seen the movie. The game too is bound to follow the same general track as the book, otherwise there would be a very angry Christopher Tolkien or whoever is the current heir of the Tolkien estate. I mean, what are the chances of Sam seducing Frodo, or Aragorn killing the king of Rohan and becoming king in his stead? Not likely, I'd say. You are basically set the task of re-playing the story, only with various things making it difficult to do so. Meh.

In stark contrast, I have grown used to games that offer enormous freedom in the narrative. Starting with Arena, Darklands and Daggerfall, we currently have Morrowind in which there are literally thousands of combinations of races, classes and birth signs. Each of the combinations has special abilities and challenges, and then you specialize further as you play. You could play the game for a lifetime and have a somewhat different game every time. Not that I recommend that. After all, the terrain remains the same, and the NPCs (though their reaction will vary depending on what you do to them and to others, or even where you come from).

But if Morrowind is pretty free-form, it pales in the face of massive multiplayer games like Dark Age of Camelot, or EverQuest, or Ultima Online. Here you not only have various races and classes and specializations, but you also have thousands of other people who you simply cannot predict. Well, not exactly at least. They come and go, they grow and change. To shape your own destiny in such a world is very different from an obstacle course in the footsteps of an otherwise excellent book.

***

I would still have done it, if I had unlimited time. Or if I could do it instead of working. I should have been a game reviewer ... but I am simply not jaded enough. When I get a good game, a really really good game, I can spend years on it. (As I did with Daggerfall, ca 5 years of almost daily play, or at least weekly.) When I get a boring game, I just quit. There won't be any reviews from that. Shame too. Did you know I actually used to write game reviews, back in the mid 90es? No kidding. It was for a Norwegian computer leisure magazine called "Databladet". It was fun too.

Perhaps if Mythic would legalize e-bay auctions for in-game stuff, I could make a modest living selling artifacts, in-game money or leveled characters. I understand that this happens despite being illegal, but it is said to be much more common with EverQuest. Or we could have for- profit tournaments, like there used to be with Magic: The Gathering. (Not sure if they still have those.)

But there is simply not time and energy to play games that are less than cream of the crop. I'm not even sure if I am going to get The Sims Online, and regular readers know that I like The Sims a lot. But it would mean giving up either DAoC or The Sims (offline), and I am not eager for that. We shall just have to wait and see, I guess. The Sims Online is out in the USA, but not here until January 30th.

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On a more general note, I have it the same way with other things. I put on a CD at work today, then considered that it was not worth playing something so beautiful if I could not have my mind on it. What is the worth of beauty if not to be admired? Why were we given the power to create and appreciate beauty, if it did not have some value in itself? I do not believe that we just happened to be this way because something went wrong in our genes and nature never got around to fix it. No, you may debate the reality of God and angels and certainly the Resurrection of Christ; but you cannot debate the reality of beauty and creativity. (Well, actually you can. Some guy on a newsgroup tried that. "I'm not in the habit of discussing with a slab of meat" said his counter-debatant, and thus ended the discussion.) Somehow we were meant to be this way, to be able to create and appreciate beauty.

Sometimes I think that God never finished the universe, he left some of it for us. It is not like we are building the house, we are just decorating the children's room. But even so, it is a great and wonderful life to live, and I love it. In this light you may understand why I love the Net but hate television: I don't want to be a passive receiver, but to interact. And that's the same reason why I play games where I can make something new, if only by combining things, but not games where I just retrace a pattern.

I have wasted so much of my life, from now on I resolve to waste it more consciously and purposefully. To not do something that doesn't make anyone happy, such as for instance myself...