71–80 of 195 posts
The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being discovered. It’s a common pattern — maybe the issue isn’t with the game…
I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional video game where it doesn’t remotely matter at all than in real life.
Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is limited to video game activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional video game where it doesn’t remotely matter at all than in real life.
So being wired to find that entertaining is a good thing? Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is limited to video game activity.
The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…
Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional video game where it doesn’t remotely matter at all than in real life.
So being wired to find that entertaining is a good thing? Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is limited to video game activity.
23 comments so far and few if any seemed to be troubled by the fact the game players we're so willing to kill __everything__. Untethered?
So from what I recollect as a player the killing was economically motivated rather than motivated by ultraviolence. Not sure if that's any better...
They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.
The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…
I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to blame the players for the system failing. To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply flawed. Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this ene…
Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem.
>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.
A rose-colored summary.
We also frequently engage in futile activities that seem profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse - climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean plastics, etc.
What is ecologically optimal should also be what's economically optimal, because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by pretending to push them "outside the system."
If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.
In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").
The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool, but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than undermine it.
MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…
How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?
It is a similar amount of effort to what goes into making the equivalent object in a 3D game, and if you have the skills and the time, sure, clone other people's stuff, or make your own riffs on them!