So here’s the deal: I’m a godless, soulless, technocratic transhumanist. Comments I’ve made in previous posts may have hinted at my love for technology. I like fantasy fine, yeah. It’d double coded, magic is all wonderful; I love World of Warcraft. All these things are fine.

Ultimately, though, my love has been for science fiction since I was a wee tot. Heinlein, Aasimov, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson … these are the folks that I think of when I go to my happy reading place. As has been noted many times by NPD sales, developers, and money-men, I’m in the minority. Apparently the idea of surgically implanting a stainless steel port into your skull, in order more easily connect with a computer, is something not everyone enjoys. In space no one can hear you scream, and it’s hard to love a robot.

I’m tired of it. The Sci-fi ‘niche’ is a fantastic venue for creative thinking, and it’s an incredibly evocative milieu for gaming. Here are my five reasons why science fiction makes for a better setting than fantasy …

Update: Welcome io9 readers! Make sure to check out Grimwell’s fantasy-oriented response to this post, and my podcast followup to get the full discussion.

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The Monk is Good. The Monk is Wise. Thank you for writing again so regularly, Angus.

His comments today on the schism between in-game guilds and the out-of-game requirements for entry rang very true for me. I always wondered why it was that I needed to pay some idiot architect a bunch of money for a house in SWG, when there were a bunch of perfectly good empty buildings in the NPC cities. Seriously, there’s not one apartment for rent in all of Theed?

Angus argues that in games like AO and EVE, it would have made a lot of sense to allow players to join in-game corporations:

You’d have the means to do cool inter-twisted quest stuff like the thing where you get an email from your boss telling you to kill the guy sitting next to you on the airplane ’cause he’s a corporate mole from another company, or more important stuff that everybody else in your guild actually cares about, like stopping somebody from trying to kidnap the princess and poison the king, if you were really high-up in your in-game guild. Of course, on the negative side, you might end up in a corporation with some attention-whore college boy drama queen that never shuts the hell up and drives everyone absolutely batshit. But how is that any different from the shit we’re doing now? 

I wanted to join up with one of the NPC corps about 15 minutes into EVE’s tutorial, and was very disappointed when I learned I couldn’t.

C’mon, just a little RP never hurt anybody.

With Hyrrix now off on his newest adventure, the Monday editorial will be my bailiwick from now on. As such, I’ve decided to rename it. “Random Dialogue” is an apt description of what I’d like to get across in these editorials. Namely, what is on my mind at the time when it comes to the genre we all enjoy a great deal. I’m going to generally speak from a crunchier perspective. My editorial on Questing from a while back is a good example of what I’m going for. Today I’m going to start off with some of my favorite snackable parts from MMOGs that were released in 2003.

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