RE: [MLUG] Re: linux game information...

[Rick <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 12:25 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
> Interesting.  So it was designed with portability in mind.  Someday it 
> will run on a Blackberry and people will become even more disabled by it! 
> ;-)

There is talk of a mobile capable web client that would allow for basic
character management, but it's still just a rumor as far as I know.
Since the skill system is entirely time based, any "downtime" where
you're not training something is wasted, so you try to arrange it so
that one skill finishes at a time when you can quickly get another one
training.

> 
> This is a really fascinating thing.  The game seems very attractive and 
> interesting, but this means that it is an even greater danger to a 
> person's real life.  Accomplishments in the virtual world are not real. 
> The "career" you have there is not making you any money and it is probably 
> not even developing you in a useful way for real life.
> 

I don't entirely agree with this statement. While discussing it with my
wife, I explained that it is very much like any other hobby. 
1. it takes time to "accomplish" goals (skills, conquering the universe,
etc..)
2. it costs money, which I'm willing to pay because I acquire some
happiness from it
3. you "build" or "acquire" things that can be lost
4. there will be occasion that I'm right in the middle of something that
walking away from will cause me to be very unhappy

Like anything else, the in-game items have precisely as much value as
any other non-sentient thing, which is precisely what someone else will
pay for it. A battleship in Eve costs somewhere between 60-110 million
ISK. Making that much requires X amount of your time (2 or 3 hours for
me) and losing that battleship costs X amount more time to get another.
There's even a conversion rate from ISK to $ =)

CCP, the makers of Eve, have actually hired a full-time economist to
help support game economy. 
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=481

I don't know if he's worth his salt as an economist, but he certainly
does put out some nifty graphs:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=498

Eve is *very* open ended. The developers appear to try very hard to
build to build as self-correcting a system as possible, which, can lead
to some pretty unforgiving situations for people unfamiliar with the
game. For example, I assume that any person I see in a beginner
corporation (all characters are always in a corporation) in 0.0, are
either spies or scouts. Therefore, they are shot out of hand.

Spies are another big thing in Eve. One of the more famous heists made
it to PC Gamer a ways back:
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/

Now, whether that's a good or bad thing is more or less left up to the
reader =)

> It would be much more difficult for the developer, but it would be 
> wonderful if someone would create a game where the user was learning 
> important things by playing the game.  In fact, my guess is that much of 
> the future of education will be like that:  Computer "games" will teach 
> and reward learning.  That kind of instruction *can* be made much more 
> effective than book-based or classroom-based learning.  It is harder to 
> produce a great instructional program than it is to produce a book, but in 
> the next century or so, loads of freely-available bits of game code will 
> be lying around ready to be assembled into a great instructional program.
> 
> Mike
> 

There's already scads of "free" game code out there. Whether it will be
pushed into more educational games or not seems to be debatable. I think
I would be satisfied with more open-ended classroom teaching versus the
"this is Microsoft Word" curriculum.

Rick

-- 
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible
  - Frank Zappa


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