March 29, 2007 at 8:47 pm (Culture, MMORPG)
Do you keep a rabbit’s foot in your Warcraft character’s inventory in the hopes that it will bring you better loot? Do you believe that facing a certain cardinal direction while crafting an item in Final Fantasy will improve the quality of the object you’re creating? If so, you share in some of the many player superstitions common in massively-multiplayer online games. The Daedalus Project has done some research about superstitions held by players in online games.
Truly fascinating stuff–the superstitions range from the simple to the bizarre, and many persist even after game designers have specifically denied that they have any effect on gameplay.
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March 19, 2007 at 5:00 pm (Books, Horror, Roleplaying)
It’s always exciting to learn about celebrities with RPG skeletons in their closets, and here’s a particularly fun one: the NYT is running an article about Joe Hill, an author recently outed as the son of Stephen King. It’s a nice piece about the challenge of carving out your own career in the shadow of a famous parent. But the really interesting item is way back at the top of page 3, where we learn that a certain roleplaying game factored into life in the King household.
What roleplaying game, you ask? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:
The King boys grew up riffing on each other’s fantasies; in what they called the Writing Game, a literary version of tag, one brother would write for a few minutes and pass the story to the other. “We used to play Call of Cthulhu,” Owen told me, referring to the role-playing game based on the H. P. Lovecraft story. “Joe was always dungeon master. You had sanity points, and it was like, if you encountered Yog-Sothoth one too many times, you were crazy. You could only have so many adventures, and then you had to have a new character, and I thought that was brilliant.”
Truly, a finer summation of the Call of Cthulhu experience has never been uttered. It all makes perfect sense now. The Dark Tower series always struck me as awfully RPGish, in a very good way…
(Thanks to the M-Pire for the link.)
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March 15, 2007 at 6:19 pm (Roleplaying)
I recently had a chance to run a game of Castles & Crusades. After creating characters, the players all turned to the Equipment section of the C&C rulebook to purchase the usual adventuring props: weapons, armor, 50′ coils of rope, 10′ poles, etc.
While browsing through the list of equipment, one of the players noticed something that had escaped my notice until now:
As you might expect, this discovery ensured that a walrus joke (who knew there were so many of them?) was made approximately every five minutes for the rest of the evening. If I ever need to know the going rate for a walrus, at least I now know where to find it.
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March 13, 2007 at 11:31 am (Events, Roleplaying)
A reader has reminded me that MerpCon, an annual conference dedicated to gaming in Middle-Earth, is coming up again. Sounds like it will be a good one:
This year’s special guest speaker is Doctor Thomas Morwinsky, author of a number of adventures and magazine contributions set in Middle-earth. He is also the designer of several wonderful large-scale, highly detailed maps set in Tolkien’s imaginary universe, including the most detailed large-scale map of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Númenor ever made.
According to the website, Chris Seeman, Michael Martinez, and Joe Mandala (all familiar names in the Tolkien gaming community) will be there as well. And it’s free!
Once again I will be unable to attend–between several family weddings, a baby, and (most importantly, ha ha) Origins, all of my vacation time this year is already spoken for. But if you’re in the Washington area, be sure to check it out.
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March 13, 2007 at 11:20 am (Computer Games, Culture, Retro Gaming, Video Games)
OK, maybe not the best games, but the most important games. A panel of game industry luminaries has put together a list of the ten most important games of all time. The games are:
Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).
Seems like a pretty reasonable list–it’s interesting to try and identify games that were really important in advancing new gameplay ideas, as opposed to just ranking them based on popularity or nostalgia. (Although obviously most of the important games also happened to be popular ones.)
I see two possible holes in the list, however. One is that there really isn’t a full-blown computer RPG represented on the list–you could say that RPGs grew out of the adventure genre, but the computer RPG genre of the mid-80s and later really evolved into something unique. I’d nominate Ultima IV for the list–not only was it an enormously important RPG, but it was also one of the first games to successfully incorporate a coherent moral worldview into gameplay.
Secondly, and more debatably, I wonder if there shouldn’t be a graphic adventure game on that list somewhere. Granted, they evolved out of text adventures as did RPGs, but their use of graphics to enhance otherwise typical adventure gameplay had a big impact on later games and genres. I’d probably nominate King’s Quest I for that honor.
(But then, I guess nobody really asked me, did they?)
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