I’m a damn dirty liar. I didn’t lie intentionally, but that doesn’t make me any more of a liar. In fact, my lie was one of omission, rather than deliberate. For this, I apologize.

You may recall a while back about a month ago I ‘banned’ myself from World of Warcraft. My reasoning was just and sensical. And it didn’t survive contact with reality.

Here’s the reality: I need to be be playing a MMOG. All the time. Not “all the time”, just … you know, I need a MMOG to be playing. And it needs to capture my attention.

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We’ve switched to playing EQ2 on Thursdays, because I really should be working on Massive Update on Wednesday nights. Pretty much all Wednesday night …

This was our first week using our new timeslot, and it was mostly a bunch of fun. On Thursday I was still very much sick; I didn’t remember most of the previous day, and I was still drugged out of my gord. I was also pissy, since my wife and I had intended to go to her folks place that night to celebrate my birthday.

Instead we stayed in, had (more) soup, and hooked up with Brian the Tank and Necrowarty to continue our loooooooong journey through the content in the Steamfont Mountains.

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I want to apologize for my quietness here. I’ve been struggling with my health since I got back from AGDC; lots of being tired and such. Then last week my wife got sick, and it took pretty much all of my resources to a.) get her well b.) play through and write a Halo 3 review and c.) not get sick myself.

With those missions accomplished, I fell on my face yesterday and I’m now ’stonking’ sick.  It’s nothing too serious, just a really really bad cold/flu thing, but it’s kicking my butt. I’m probably down for the count well into tomorrow. Wanted to link the Halo 3 review, though, because I’m kind of proud of it - my first /. Games review before the game in question went up on a retail shelf. Go me.

Luke also put out a XPlatform episode from back near PAX, which I sat in on, and which you can check out here.

Also: Happy Birthday to me. I’m 27 today.

Be well, citizens.

Take a wild guess what this week’s Big Story is about? If you guess Metaplace, you’d be right.

I did a little tiny bit of reporting to go along with it, and interviewed Raph about the just-post-announcement reaction in the office, and attempted to clarify a few things. Interesting stuff.

The Big Story

Earlier this week, for the TechCrunch40 Conference, Areae pulled back the curtain on their project, the mysterious game that veteran MMOG designer Raph Koster has been working on since his departure from Sony Online Entertainment. The name of the ‘game’ is Metaplace. Essentially, Metaplace is going to be a virtual world toolkit. The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to “bring virtual worlds to the web,” instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden.

As the site puts it:

“We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games… and set up doorways from one to the other.”

Virtual World News and GigaOM have writeups of the presentation at the TechCrunch Conference, while Areae’s Community Manager Tami Baribeau writes in a post why gamers should care. Over at his site, Raph just breaths a sigh of relief.

There’s been plenty of other discussion of this topic by now, from the Fires of Heavens board to F13, and you can get a general sense of what the hardcore market thinks of the idea from those posts. Terra Nova examines the idea from the academic’s perspective, while the gaming news sites … haven’t really posted much about it. If you’d like to come to your own conclusions, I can help. First, go check out the demo of Metaplace from the conference.

Nothing’s anything until it’s official, but Warcry has some details on a possible release date for Gods and Heroes.

And the winner is …. [drumroll] … February 2008! YES! That should be plenty of time to fix the current issues with the game, and might even let the developers have a couple of days off for Christmas. :)

Perpetual folks: I really hope this is the current plan. Good luck! I’m rooting for you. Here’s the pre-order extra -

Purchase Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising and receive:

* LIONHEAD HELMET: Known as the helmet of the great heroes of Rome, aligning the bravery of heroic feats with the symbolic prowess of the lion. Choose one of three class-specific versions: Gladiator/Soldier: Nomad/Scout: or Priest/Mystic. NEMEAN LION MINION: Command the King of Beasts in battle 16-SLOT INVENTORY BAG: The largest bag available in-game for all your loot and rewards. RESERVE YOUR CHARACTER NAME* (FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE): Stake your claim on a unique persona. RESERVE YOUR GUILD NAME* (FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE): Establish an exclusive identity for your group. EARLY ACCESS TO THE LIVE GAME: Enter and begin playing the game up to 5 days prior to release.

Update: Le sigh.

Mass Effect, the sci-fi RPG from BioWare that’s due out on November 20th, is starting to see a lot more press coverage as the big day approaches. I’ve really appreciated most of it, as I’m very much looking forward to the game. For the most considered approach to the new information, this 1up/Gamevideos piece is probably the best you’ll get.

However, along with new videos and text information there’s been a lot of tittering. Why? Because gamers are fucking four years old! The following story has garnered it’s own news post on dozens of websites:

Mass Effect To Include Sex Scene

Mass Effect has earned itself a 12 rating from the BBFC for containing moderate violence and some steamy hanky-panky … The scene is the sort of thing you’re likely to see in most films at the cinema, with a brief flash of a breast and some jazz saxophone wailing in the background. You can tell those involved really like each other and will probably pursue the relationship further, for example. Developer BioWare has even given players the chance to see a lesbian encounter, depending on the the sex of your character and the choices you make throughout the game

GAAH. HOW IS THIS NEWS? News would be if you butt-fuck a kangaroo in the game while singing the national anthem! News would be if you kill a bunch of kids and then do an irish jig on their corpses. There has been sex in lots of games now … why is this news?

Oh, of course, because they’re LESBIANS! And two chicks doing it is TOTALLY HOT!

Fucking hell. This is why we can’t have nice things, guys. As long as shit like this is ‘news’, no one is going to take gamers, game reporting, or the games themselves seriously.

Even fricking television is over this crap now. Prime time TV has lesbian characters if not ‘all the time’ then frequent enough so as not to be all that notable. Sci-fi shows have been over this crap since Buffy.

If games are ever to be respected as an art form, gamers are going to have to get over it. People have sex. Relationships are formed, broken, etc. Not every interaction with a game world should be done via a gun or sword. I keep joking to my friends when we play EQ2, upon seeing a really nice monster model, “It’s beautiful! Let’s kill it!” The reason, of course, is that we have no other way of interacting with the game world.

In the real world, sometimes you just talk. Sometimes you have sex. Sometimes it’s with someone of the same gender. In a movie, tv show, or book, that interaction would be completely non-notable. If you have problems with graphic sex or non-hetero sex maybe you’d raise an eyebrow, but it wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary. Here, the very fact that two characters knock boots gets a whole fricking story.

GROW UP!

Update: For a tasteful appraisal of this topic, please reference Penny Arcade’s treatment of this development.

I haven’t done my homework in a while, and since I *just* saw Psychochild last week I think it only fair that I jump through some hoops. (yay blogfodder)

Here’s this week’s homework question:

Most geeky people remember having construction toys as a kid: Legos, erector sets (heh heh), and so on. More modern games have taken this, with the Pirates of the Spanish main constructible strategy game. So, the challenge this week is to think of a video game with the theme of construction. This could be a single-player game, or a system in an online game.

A few games that he didn’t mention spring immediately to mind, one that I am not very fond of and two that I’m really really looking forward to.

Second Life, obviously, can be a very construction-heavy experience. In fact, one could argue that by default building things is the only real game element in that world. Having enjoyed Hemlock’s recent commentary on elements of the 2L landscape, I know that there’s a lot of stuff involved in making a space in Second Life. Just not my cup of tea, though.

Spore is another title that this recalls to me, based on comments made by Will Wright at SXSW this year. He likened the title Spore to toys, and called his philosophy one more of toy-making than game-making. He wants to give users the ability to make their own fun, instead of forcing ‘the one true way’ onto people. This is something that resonated with me very heavily; I have a feeling if Spore is ever released it’s going to go over really big with folks.

The other title that springs to mind is Little Big Planet, which (considering the dissapointment factor in Lair and Heavenly Sword) really is turning out to be the reason I bought a PS3. I can’t wait to get my hands on that game, for both a consumption and construction experience. I’ve never really been much of a builder (never did mods or NWN modules), but the simplicity and ease of use implied by everything I’ve seen in LBP so far has be really enthusiastic. I’m especially looking forward to playing/building with my wife. She has a much better aesthetic eye than I do, and I think together we could make some pretty cool stuff(tm).

Online games, though, are generally my cup of tea, and construction in an online space is a tricky widget. Psychochild already mentioned housing in online titles, which is my personal favorite way to build in a MMOG. SWG’s housing is a treat, and I’m really looking forward to whatever Blizzard comes up with for WoW.

What would I like to see in a future game, though? That’s the question. Well, I’ve argued before for non-combat co-op options in games, and this seems like a great opportunity. A group could get together together in a game to take on a specific project, a very particular type of quest. The blueprint/quest would have exacting requirements for resources, which the group would then have to gather from the environment. Once assembled, the resources could be used to construct the boat/house/etc via mini-games ala Puzzle Pirates.

Really, now that I think of it, Puzzle Pirates’ crafting system is one of my favorite ways to construct things online. I especially like the nature of charity surrounding crafting; You can sign up to work for a shop and get paid for your efforts as you make clothing/swords/etc … but you don’t *need* to be signed up to play the minigames. In essence, if you really like a type of puzzle you can craft another player’s goods for the fun of it.

Why the hell aren’t there more games where you can say something like “I’m going to go craft for fun?”