For those of you who may not have noticed yet, one of our favorite websites, Lorewriter.com, has gone permanently dark – the owner of the site having gone on to bigger and better things. Even though I appreciated it while it was there, too often we don’t appreciate something until it’s gone. There are those in artistic circles that claim the best way to become famous is to die…die young (in this case the website not it’s owner) leave a beautiful corpse and your work will certainly appreciate in value. While the absence of a favorite web site is hardly the same as an absent friend it has given me pause to consider one of the subjects we discussed at the end of show 58 (out soon) with Tipa from West Karana. Here is an exchange between Samantha Murphy and the author of World of Warcraft predicts the future, William Bainbridge:
In the book you say: “WoW may have the potential to become the first real afterlife.” How?
Every movement a player makes in WoW is recorded, even their interactions with others. The avatar captures their social self. To what extent the avatar is its controller is a philosophical question, but the avatar can outlive its creator and continue functioning in WoW as a non-player character (NPC). Research is under way that will make NPCs behave more like specific people.”
As I said on the show, author Bainbridge may be a wonderful person. After all I don’t know him, not even by reputation. Still, whether one considers the concept outlandish (I do) or not, it is far from being the first concept that is “out there” of which we have received notice in our email. Indeed, a few of the emails we have received are still floating somewhere around the outer stratosphere.
What also brought this particular subject to the forefront was the fact that our own Sister Fran has returned to World of Warcraft (WoW) after taking a break from it, and indeed all gaming, for the last 49 days. It was easy for me to take a break from Warcraft for that long of course. No, it was no challenge at all. In fact, when she asked me if I wanted to run a few instances with her I replied that I would rather go to the dentist for her instead of Azeroth; the former being a bit more enjoyable for my tastes. All this worked together to consider what it would be like if Wow was indeed a “post-religious future” as author Bainbridge suggests. This conjured up mental image of the First Church of Pardo of perpetual subscriptions. Such would be one of my concepts of hell – stuck in Dalaran for eternity.
Leave the money and get out
Groucho Marx once said that he would never a join a club that would have him as a member. The more I think about those words, the more they ring true. As we discussed last week, there are many aspects of the gaming industry that leaves me feeling like a commodity instead of a customer. People like Zahn Ye, of Game Vision, on the other hand, don’t make me feel like a commodity…his concepts of free-to-play game design make me feel like he should leave a 50 on the dresser and get out. This is far from being limited to the industry that creates one of my favorite pass times.
Some of you may remember the commercial that actor John Houseman made years ago, for investment firm Smith Barney, where he touted “We make money the old fashioned way – we earn it.” Now granted, as anyone you know who may have lived through the Great Depression in the United States can tell you, the arts tend to do well in bad economic times; it is simply a matter of a need for escapism. Still, there seems to be an inverse relationship to economic downturns that my Economics professor back in grad school never considered; lately, the worse times get, the more creative ways business finds to wheedle money out of you. Take a look at a utility bill some time and go down the list of itemized “fees”. Other business’ connected with our hobby seem to be taking a page from this notebook as well. The FCC has been stymied in their attempts to prevent Comcast from throttling the internet to the point where playing your favorite mmo may one day be like trying to push an elephant through the neck of a beer bottle. In some circles Zyngas game Farmville has become known as “Scamville” . Mythic Entertainment at least, is now offering to make good additional fees their customers may have encountered as the result of the recent overbilling. While it was nice to see a change in attitude, offering sincere apologies after the blogging community pointed out that what happened was hardly an “inconvenience” is a bit like asking a member of the clergy to sell you an indulgence. It felt a lot like our mothers had to tell them to apologize. Between this and people like Zhan Ye, it leaves me with a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth – kind of like someone urinated in my morning coffee.
It left me feeling that John Houseman (or someone like him) should be making a new commercial that says “we make money the old fashioned way…we steal it.”
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
(posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster)