Saturday 26 October 2002

Pic of the day: "I bought this game to meet chicks, but this is ridiculous!" (Screenshot Dark Age of Camelot.)

Excitement online

Wow, I really wrote a great entry one year ago! It seems such a shame to spoil that by writing about my DAoC character being saved by Supergirl. Instead I'll say something profound (by 3 AM standards at least) about conflict and cooperation. Or at least about Sims Online.

People are suckers for conflict, isn't that so? Take all these multiplayer games that we play online: Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest ... They all are heavily focused on violence and conflict. Between players, or groups of players, or between the players and fictional characters. I ask myself: If you made a massive multiplayer game in which the characters went out in droves to pick flowers and berries, how well would it sell?

(In all fairness, I have fond memories of picking berries together with cute young women, but that's all a long while ago.)

No, constructive activities don't seem to hold the same appeal. Or do they? I guess the new massive multiplayer game will give the answer. No, not the Star Wars one. I mean The Sims Online. It is being beta-tested now, so I guess it will hit the shelves next year not too late. It is set up in such a way that cooperation is rewarded, while conflict is optional and there will be nothing remotely like player killing.

Maxis seems quite optimistic about their game. I am quite interested too, but I do not hold quite the high hopes they have. Oh, there should be a market for a less conflict-driven game. But I'm not sure you can cite the sales of The Sims as an indicator. Yes, I know the game was the best selling for 2000, and probably for the years after too if you sum up all the expansion packs too. And it's not about killing monsters, like the long long row of other games filling the shelves. (Or, in the case of Grand Theft Auto, about killing innocent pedestrians for fun and profit.) You build small homes for your small people, and try to keep them happy. Oh yeah. So what's this I hear about people drowning their Sims in the swimming pool? ^_^*

***

I remember when I was sitting at the burger outlet at the bus station in Kristiansand a few years ago, they had a TV and there was some American movie on it with lots of screaming and yelling. And I came there sometimes to eat, and usually there was some American TV series or movie with lots of yelling. I don't watch movies much, I found it half irritating and half amusing. Evidently, I concluded, people there really liked emotion. The more intense, the better.

Intense emotions don't need to be negative. There's the whole thing with falling in love, for instance. Well, it turns negative after a while when they break up, but it feels very positive for a while. Or so I have heard. It may be that Sims Online could become a breeding ground, as it were, for online romance. I have heard that some happy couples have met in chat rooms, or even in EverQuest. (I very much doubt it has ever happened in DAoC, which is rather Victorian in such matters. You can't ever appear out of full body armor, though some classes do have cloth armor at least. Quite a change from The Realm by Sierra On-line back when I played that ... you would usually have some girls in white underwear in the public squares. Not that you can't flirt without underwear, but it helps.)

There's also the little fact that The Sims seems to sell in about equal numbers to boys and girls, while traditional violence games sell mainly to boys. If the online game goes the same, that would certainly help the flirting. Also, as studies from schools show, men tend to behave better when there are women around.

Even so, I'm not going into anyone else's swimming pool in Sims Online, ever...