Reviewing the real world as if it were a MMO -- sheer genius
In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world...Link (via Kottke)Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.
Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.
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I recommend reading the article that's linked to there. It's a really interesting read about the cultural antipathy towards video games.
GameSpot did a much more thoughtful and artful review of Real Life, I believe as an April Fool's piece back around 2003 or 2004...sorry I can't provide a link, but the effort to find the original has collided with the cats' campaign to be fed breakfast. The latter one.
Phillipp Lenssen did a similar thing a while ago on blogoscoped.com: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-02-11-n43.html
The term "sheer genius" is overused here.
Hahahaha! Maybe one of these MMO's is Hari Seldon's Psychohistory!
Here's an advert for 'Outside' listing some of it's many spectacular features!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v319/queensowntalia/outside-mmorpg-776685.jpg
(can't claim authorship, its just one of those things that's been floating around the innertubes).
wow...this sounds like it's worth putting time into. i wonder if there's any nudity in the whole romance sub-plot area.
Bwahahahahahaha!
My mom was always, "Quit playing that boardgame, and put down the sci-fi book too. Go play Outside!"
I always knew I hated that game. Now I know why.
Endless grinding, low reward levels, NO RESSURECTION! Badly implemented player-justice.
No wonder I never wanted to play "Outside". In fact, not even the new content attracts me much.
I'm gonna stick w. d20 Future and Mutants and Masterminds for now, thanks.
-abs
Old game review is old.
Outside needs a .WAD or a patch.
Sorta sounds like Game Neverending.
GameSpot's review of "Real Life"
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespotting/071103minusworld/1.html
Worth a 9.6
GameSpot's review of "Real Life"
Worth a 9.6
Good luck getting a support issue resolved. It's rumored to have anywhere between zero and millions of GM's, and they're generally perceived as being fickle and arbitrary in addressing player issues. That is if you can even contact a GM. None of the logs put forth by players claiming to have chatted directly with a GM have been completely verifiable and all leave quite a bit of room for doubt that the chat actually occurred.
Nobody has, thus far, been able to create a bot for it and no macros seem to be able to effectively work, though accusations of hacking abound.
FNC: it's possible you're going about it the wrong way...why look for GMs when it's an open source project?
N0wak - Thank you! That's been driving me nuts all day.
What I love about the GameSpot review is what I love about a good Life Sim game: both make me return to my life and view it with fresh wonder and appreciation. And lately, as I slide deeper and deeper into accepting the "we're all living in a sim" hypothesis, these seemingly whimsical and/or satirical exercises seem rather profound on a meta-level.
First, they beg the question: how would, say, a Sim in The Sims (or fill in your own preferred analogous "game") review the world/game s/he inhabits? Second: since there really is a pretty persuasive and reasonable argument to made in favor of the possibility that we really are living in a computer simulation (I'll try to flesh out my thoughts on this better at my myspace and/or livejournal in the next few days), shouldn't we be doing more of this kind of critique?
People who think of life as a story tend to get very depressed when it doesn't go the way they thought it would; suddenly they're tragic heroes, and generally want to end it soon. People who think of life as a game, on the other hand, seem to be having a lot of fun, and want it to keep on going. The graphics are great, it's all extremely open-ended, and anyone who's not having a blast probably isn't trying to.