Great Views, No Spiders
Here's a photo recently posted on Zabrek's Travels, a casual blog that follows the life of a character in the "Star Wars Galaxies" massively multiplayer online role playing game. The guy who keeps the blog has played the game since the beta was opened to a small number of folks early in 2003. The beta shut down when the game was formally launched on, I believe, June 30, 2003. The game readily permits you to take a screen capture at any time, to record what you are seeing. His blog is built around the screen captures he has taken at interesting moments, or of interesting scenes.
In the game, you walk around, seeing the world through the eyes of your character. You choose your character's race and customize its appearance, and you decide how to spend your time in the game, wandering around, talking to other characters, doing tasks to earn money or increase your skill levels in your chosen professions, buying stuff, making stuff, hunting, dancing, training animals, etc. The gameplay is persistent, by which I mean both that the game is going on whether you're logged in or not, and your character lives on from one session of play to the next, progressing, not starting over each time you stop or start playing. I only played a bit, for period of a few weeks, but it is pretty fun and I would do it more if circumstances permitted.
The point of this entry is to comment on the virtual world the game presents. There are several planets you can travel among, and the planets are massive. You can wander nearly forever in wilderness or city areas. You encounter other player characters as well as computer-controlled characters, and you can talk with all of them. Groups and friendships form, such as for example, hutning parties or task forces. Animals roam around. There are plants and grasses. Wind blows the plants and grasses. Day cycles to night, stars and moons emerge, dawn breaks, etc. This screen shot I have linked to above is very pretty, and I enjoy thinking that that scene is going on, existing, in that virtual world right now... along with thousands of others like it. I don't know how the virtual world works well enough to know if a scene exists if a character is not there to view it. I suspect not, or, more likely, I suspect the answer is that it exists to some extent.
I remember one time in the game, night fell and I was outside the city walls of Wayfar, a city on Tatooine. I looked skyward to see the stars, and realized I could see an Imperial Cruiser "parked" in the sky overhead. It was the equivalent of a few miles up there, but it was massive so I could see it clearly. I happened to be a few hundred meters from an imperial outpost in the desert, and shuttle transports were traveling between the outpost and the Cruiser. The game experience is immersive enough (if your personality allows you to be immersed in such a thing), that, for me, it was a seriously "interesting" moment to first catch a glimpse of that Cruiser up there. It felt like, "Hmmm, now I can add "Looking up in the night sky and seeing a really big spaceship in orbit" to the list of things I've done in life."
Stepping back, tangentially related is a comment an adult friend made to me in approximately 1999 or 2000 when he explained why he bought a Sega Dreamcast game console. He said he was at Best Buy, and he caught a bit of a football game on TV out of the corner of his eye. He walked closer to see who was playing, and then realized it was a Dreamcast videogame. And that's now a chapter or two in the past. We're not playing with Atari 2600's anymore.
I remember in 1993, during a summer and semester abroad before going back to college proper, wondering if, when "virtual reality" really got around to becoming, um, a reality, there would be tasks and professions to be done in that space, in other words, would there be things that people would be paid to do "in there". Would there be things that would be desirable to have done in the virtual space that a computer couldn't be made to do convincingly. This goes back to the decades-old question about artificial intelligence, which I think was along the lines of: What three questions could reliably, consistently be used to distinguish artificial intelligence from an actual human? If you sat at a computer terminal and typed three questions, and answers appeared in text on your screen, AI would have "arrived" if there was no set of questions that you could ask, the answers to which would betray whether the respondent was another human or the computer itself. So, back to the question, what things might someone want in a virtual reality setting that a computer can't simulate well enough on its own? Artistic things? Analytical things? "Appropriately irrational" things?
Another angle of all this relates to questions about economies in, and surrounding, these virtual worlds. In theory, most things don't exist in Star Wars Galaxies unless player characters make them. People can buy and sell things to each other in the game, both in person and through something very much like an in-game e-bay. Markets develop, and determine prices, for products and raw materials. To make things, players have to collect raw materials, get trained and practice.
The people behind SWG are trying to create a "real" economy inside the game. Other similar game worlds have had curious issues in this regard. I remember an article in Wired magazine a few years ago about "rares" in Everquest (stuff that wasn't supposed to exist, like portable pieces of a waterfall, arising from bugs in the game, and stuff that was deliberately made to exist in small quantities), which were selling for big bucks. And non-rare virtual stuff, such as houses in Everquest, were selling in the real world, on e-bay for example, for real world dollars. Someone was quoted as estimating that there were a half-dozen or so people out there making six-figure incomes brokering virtual property in Everquest.
It's late and I've got to sleep. Staying up late on this blog is killing my early-morning rides. I'm not covering this topic as clearly as I'd hope. The other thought I meant to open and perhaps will try to hit later was to consider what specific things these virtual environments hold out to folks that make them attractive alternatives, in varying degrees, for various people, to full-time residence in the real world. And is that OK?
Another thought, for a future entry -- wonder why we don't seem to see any(?) current-generation games that are solidly, profoundly, utterly built around entirely alternative reality-schemes. In other words, why just games that generally simulate some experience or activity that is available in the real world? I understand why there are, and will always be those games -- letting you do real-world stuff you couldn't normally go out and do -- but why not some games that are based on entirely non-human, non-animal, non-anything-that-exists schemes and paradigms? Roll out totally different physics, totally non-human "first persons"/ avatars, make objectives that simply don't match anything in the scope of known sentient activity... Are there any such games? Any that come close? Any that touch in that direction? I love first-person shooters. But would I actually love being some amorphous blob of energy expanding in space and, I dunno, spinning my energy mass around singularity points in a musical, cosmic gymnatism?
[More on all this nonsense later...]
In the game, you walk around, seeing the world through the eyes of your character. You choose your character's race and customize its appearance, and you decide how to spend your time in the game, wandering around, talking to other characters, doing tasks to earn money or increase your skill levels in your chosen professions, buying stuff, making stuff, hunting, dancing, training animals, etc. The gameplay is persistent, by which I mean both that the game is going on whether you're logged in or not, and your character lives on from one session of play to the next, progressing, not starting over each time you stop or start playing. I only played a bit, for period of a few weeks, but it is pretty fun and I would do it more if circumstances permitted.
The point of this entry is to comment on the virtual world the game presents. There are several planets you can travel among, and the planets are massive. You can wander nearly forever in wilderness or city areas. You encounter other player characters as well as computer-controlled characters, and you can talk with all of them. Groups and friendships form, such as for example, hutning parties or task forces. Animals roam around. There are plants and grasses. Wind blows the plants and grasses. Day cycles to night, stars and moons emerge, dawn breaks, etc. This screen shot I have linked to above is very pretty, and I enjoy thinking that that scene is going on, existing, in that virtual world right now... along with thousands of others like it. I don't know how the virtual world works well enough to know if a scene exists if a character is not there to view it. I suspect not, or, more likely, I suspect the answer is that it exists to some extent.
I remember one time in the game, night fell and I was outside the city walls of Wayfar, a city on Tatooine. I looked skyward to see the stars, and realized I could see an Imperial Cruiser "parked" in the sky overhead. It was the equivalent of a few miles up there, but it was massive so I could see it clearly. I happened to be a few hundred meters from an imperial outpost in the desert, and shuttle transports were traveling between the outpost and the Cruiser. The game experience is immersive enough (if your personality allows you to be immersed in such a thing), that, for me, it was a seriously "interesting" moment to first catch a glimpse of that Cruiser up there. It felt like, "Hmmm, now I can add "Looking up in the night sky and seeing a really big spaceship in orbit" to the list of things I've done in life."
Stepping back, tangentially related is a comment an adult friend made to me in approximately 1999 or 2000 when he explained why he bought a Sega Dreamcast game console. He said he was at Best Buy, and he caught a bit of a football game on TV out of the corner of his eye. He walked closer to see who was playing, and then realized it was a Dreamcast videogame. And that's now a chapter or two in the past. We're not playing with Atari 2600's anymore.
I remember in 1993, during a summer and semester abroad before going back to college proper, wondering if, when "virtual reality" really got around to becoming, um, a reality, there would be tasks and professions to be done in that space, in other words, would there be things that people would be paid to do "in there". Would there be things that would be desirable to have done in the virtual space that a computer couldn't be made to do convincingly. This goes back to the decades-old question about artificial intelligence, which I think was along the lines of: What three questions could reliably, consistently be used to distinguish artificial intelligence from an actual human? If you sat at a computer terminal and typed three questions, and answers appeared in text on your screen, AI would have "arrived" if there was no set of questions that you could ask, the answers to which would betray whether the respondent was another human or the computer itself. So, back to the question, what things might someone want in a virtual reality setting that a computer can't simulate well enough on its own? Artistic things? Analytical things? "Appropriately irrational" things?
Another angle of all this relates to questions about economies in, and surrounding, these virtual worlds. In theory, most things don't exist in Star Wars Galaxies unless player characters make them. People can buy and sell things to each other in the game, both in person and through something very much like an in-game e-bay. Markets develop, and determine prices, for products and raw materials. To make things, players have to collect raw materials, get trained and practice.
The people behind SWG are trying to create a "real" economy inside the game. Other similar game worlds have had curious issues in this regard. I remember an article in Wired magazine a few years ago about "rares" in Everquest (stuff that wasn't supposed to exist, like portable pieces of a waterfall, arising from bugs in the game, and stuff that was deliberately made to exist in small quantities), which were selling for big bucks. And non-rare virtual stuff, such as houses in Everquest, were selling in the real world, on e-bay for example, for real world dollars. Someone was quoted as estimating that there were a half-dozen or so people out there making six-figure incomes brokering virtual property in Everquest.
It's late and I've got to sleep. Staying up late on this blog is killing my early-morning rides. I'm not covering this topic as clearly as I'd hope. The other thought I meant to open and perhaps will try to hit later was to consider what specific things these virtual environments hold out to folks that make them attractive alternatives, in varying degrees, for various people, to full-time residence in the real world. And is that OK?
Another thought, for a future entry -- wonder why we don't seem to see any(?) current-generation games that are solidly, profoundly, utterly built around entirely alternative reality-schemes. In other words, why just games that generally simulate some experience or activity that is available in the real world? I understand why there are, and will always be those games -- letting you do real-world stuff you couldn't normally go out and do -- but why not some games that are based on entirely non-human, non-animal, non-anything-that-exists schemes and paradigms? Roll out totally different physics, totally non-human "first persons"/ avatars, make objectives that simply don't match anything in the scope of known sentient activity... Are there any such games? Any that come close? Any that touch in that direction? I love first-person shooters. But would I actually love being some amorphous blob of energy expanding in space and, I dunno, spinning my energy mass around singularity points in a musical, cosmic gymnatism?
[More on all this nonsense later...]
posted by Genki na Pengin at 5:30 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home