It’s coming to get you, whether you like it or not. (“Or not” being more likely for me and these fine authors.) It’s soulless. It’s relentless. It’s remorseless. You just can’t get rid of it.
It’s coming. It will eat your brain and suck your soul. In the end, you will embrace it, and you will be happy.
Be aware and beware.
I’m not sure I’d complain much about a world of perpetual sex and drugs. Especially if said sex and drugs were part of a society-wide imposed system of complacency.
Of course not. You couldn’t. That’s sort of the point, for good or for ill.
I beg to differ, Tesh: NEVER GIVE UP – NEVER SURRENDER !
And if we have to start our own MMO among the few of us, so be it!
(you can be lead designer, Kleps is in charge of politics/marketing, Nils does all the maths and I’ll take teh funnies because I’m lousy at everything else).
It would be a hit, I’m telling you.
(p.s. can you ignore my first comment, some dabbling at a wp testpage messed it up, heh.)
Heh, I’d rather be the art director and leave the design lead to Psychochild, but hey, thanks for the vote of confidence! I’d love design, and I’d probably still chip in, but I’m better with art. I just don’t write about it much so I don’t step on professional toes at work.
Yes Tesh, that was the point.
Politics and marketing? I’d be that guy who is always making headlines for being a total jackass to customers.
Right, right. Me no ready gud 2day.
I think you’d make a thoroughly fun PR guy. Better than any poncy “make everyone happy” mealymouthed corporate drone.
@Tesh
Art director it is then! and the more the merrier ofc! ^^
@Kleps
I figured you had the political incorrectness and sharpness of tongue we need for this job. <3
Also, remember there's no such thing as negative publicity!
@Tesh:
The problem is that I’d probably be too honest. Sometimes you need to BS a bit to keep up good impressions. I’d be like “we are heavily buffing the samrurai class, which is really damn stupid because we’ve pretty much figured out that the only reason the class looks bad is because 99% of them are idiots.”
@Syl:
“Yea, our game is more or less a fundraising front for the KKK.”
Misread sarcasm can cause so much trouble.
In related news, I hate the word gamification. Games are awesome. Games are how children learn. Games are fun. They are not pointless and ever-increasing tallies of numbers hooked up to reward pellet-dispensing levers.
Those boxes that they put rats in to test behaviorist theories: NOT GAMES.
Rewarding unenjoyable activities doesn’t make them games. It makes them jobs.
Whenever someone gets too deep into delivering a sermon on how gamification will save the world, I usually just say, “Yeah… gamification… making a game out of something that isn’t a game… you know, pedophiles do that with kids…”
It usually stops the conversation dead. As it should.
Evolution man, evolution. I’ve already embraced it, I’m already happy. I love my master, gamification, or at least that what he told me to say.
The problem with that is some of us have long memories. Remember the whole “multimedia” push in the 90s? A lot of the same language, and what did it give us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Pictures
I mean, has Jane McGonigal or the rest even shipped anything besides a really simple web game based on gamification? Most of us just see it as those stupid badges you click past while browsing memebase.
I seem to recall the last time we tried to apply game theories to reality, we ended up having things like people ignoring the actual results of Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments, pass that flawed info on to eager politicians, and somewhere down the road to things like Mutually Assured Destruction.
The problems with any of these things tend to be things like:
1) No matter how great your idea may be, the wrong group of people can take it in a really wrong direction or draw a completely innacurate conclusion. Frequently the creator of these ideas forget that that wrong group of people can sometimes be their own group.
2) No matter how great your idea may sound on paper, you can’t change human nature. See Communism.
3) No matter how great your idea may be, you may simply be wrong. Try listening to people who actually do what to you is a grand idealized abstract. See the difference between what any Architect wants in a building, and what Engineers make them change for the building to actually BE CAPABLE OF BEING BUILT, MUCHTHELESS ACTUALLY WORK.