My dream MMO is what I think of as “an epic”.
But let me clarify that word so as not to begin this post by throwing you off track.
dictionary.com Unabridged
noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer’s Iliad is an epic poem.
The epical is, strictly speaking, The Epic.
The Epic is a poem, by definition (so “epic poem” is redundant). Other uses of the word are metaphorical, and it is a metaphorical sense that I am using it, too. I don’t pine for a long poetic composition online, so put that right out of your head.
Here’s a definition appropriate to my needs:
American Heritage Dictionary
A series of events considered appropriate to an epic: the epic of the Old West.
Another example of the word “epic” in use at first blush may seems off target.
Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem
The book explains that the topic often came up over tea, the occasional speculation as to who might be doing what, followed by nothing happening. Not very epic, even if it rhymed.
But the book opens with this quote:
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
G H Hardy
“Immortality” is as good a word as any to describe a lack of the normal - for people especially - mortality. In that sense, “immortality” is so central to the epic, the above appeal doesn’t seem entirely ridiculous as justification for labeling 357 years of nothing happens as “epic”.
Still I have to think it was Fermat’s Final Theorem which turned out to be epic, rather than the quest to solve it or even the solution. The epic series of events were all Fermat’s victories. Fermat’s Final Theorem will be remembered when Wiles is forgotten, too.
Fodder for the comment thread:
* An epic series of events makes an epic.
* Immortality is an important ingredient, too.
* The only way to determine if something is immortal is to wait ’til everything around it is gone and forgotten, then see if you remember to see if it is still there.
Ok, so as I said, my dream MMO would be an epical online game. I might ramble on some more about that if anyone seems particularly interested in the topic.
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Let me be the first to seem more interested in this than anything else you could possibly ramble on about even if we were both immortals and had all the time in the world.
I won’t hold you to it, though, ’cause sometimes I change my mind about how epic Daisy Dukes are between drinks.
Well, no wait, actually I never change my mind about how epic Daisy Dukes are, even if somebody busts out the Dictionary on me.
So in your pining for that Epic, do you pine to be the hero, the one that becomes immortal? Or would you settle for being one of the events of that Epic?
With regards to Fermat’s Final (Last) Theorem, you seem to consider Fermat to be the hero, could it not be that the Theorem is the hero and Fermat defines the event that started that epic?
Trin: I don’t think the hero becomes immortal at all, but rather his achievements do.
Then I’m suggesting that in order for his achievements to be recognized as epic, he’s got to die.
But this isn’t really a perma-death thing… What I’m thinking is that everything has to die (or change significantly, or fade into Bolivia, etc.) in order for the MMO itself to be epic.
Like that “epic of the old west” example: it’s only due to the old west being gone now.
I could go either way on whether it’s Fermat or his theorum that is the hero. Not at the same time, I mean, just that yeah, yours is as valid a take on it as mine.
It just seems like he challenged the world to defeat his riddle, and defeated all comers for centuries after. Even after he was dead!
But I may be reading too much into that. I actually almost wrote it your way originally.
Odysseus is a good example of the classic hero. Like you had mentioned before with the idea of the Weapons or Armor of a hero retaining the original classification as ‘heroic’. The previous owner of the item is long gone but the legend and mythos of the hero’s achievements live on in the item itself. Or something like that, maybe I missed the point.
But yeah man I’m very interested in this topic.
Looking back, I stumbled across your blog back in 2005 for the first time, but I distinctly remember the post that made me subscribe to the rss feed; one on Angus’ blog (that he’s since deleted many times over,) where he described you describing your perfect game. Reading it I couldn’t help but think, “At least one of these guys is a fucking genius.” I’m definitely curious to see if it was you. : D
Oh its him alright.
You just wait until you see this next thing he’s gonna do, its gonna be awesomest thing you ever seen, its gonna blow your hatholder right off your hatholder holder and prove his genius ONCE AND FOR ALL.
“Do that thing you do, now Jeffie, *cracks whip* do the thing, now, c’mon boy, show em, do that thing!”
Well, as long as all this build-up and the performance anxiety and stuff doesn’t make him totally screw it all up heh.
Y’know, there’s like, no pressure there ahaha.
Aw he’s gonna blow it off and put up another schrodinger superhero photoshop thingie that I won’t understand as a distraction or argue semantics about whether he’s a genius or not to get off on a technicality or say he’s “too busy” or “sick with the flu” or something so that he doesn’t have to perform this sucks AHAHA,
Plus he’s all pooped out and sickly like E.T. from being worked with reverse psychology by all the dudes that wanna milk his brains for things they can steal.
“Nah. Got anything else?”
“Well, I had an idea for blah blah blah…”
“Nah. Got anything else?”
Har.
Well, I do feel like I might be repeating myself.
Haven’t I posted this before?
I would be quite interesting to see how you go about solving the epic problem.
For what exactly are you making epic? By your definition, the MMO itself technically can’t be epic because it would have to die first. And then we’d all just be remembering the MMO and saying “Man, that was cool.”
So I assume that instead you are offering how to make an MMO in which the player feels like they are part of something truly epic or and forging something epic..
Either way, I’m sure as a post it would be fascinating.
Jeff: Although it seems like you may have told ten thousand developer guys your stuff over the years, I’ve actually only seen you do little bits and pieces of it over a LONG-ass period of time.
And way more than half of those bits and pieces is from like, five or six apocalypses ago, Galactus Style, seriously.
You’re like, several Ages older than the OMM forums, man, you oughta be WAY past that “hmm, I might be repeating yourself” thingie already heh.
And it ain’t like you can’t evolve your ideas a little more every time you do it, y’know?
Prolly my favorite quote from Stephen King (on the topic of writing) is “you can’t be afraid to kill your babies.”
Don’t be afraid to kill your babies!
Like, for example, I’d much PREFER to see you do a NEW version of your anamorphic terrain thingie, compared to you just finding whatever you wrote about it a long time ago and posting that.
That makes sense, yah?
Plus you oughta consolidate all that crap here, that’d be awesome, and it’d be even more awesome if it was temporally coherent and consistent, rather than a collection of fossils from different geological time periods heh.
And I’m not just saying that ’cause I love that environment where tons of folks argue about all that kinda stuff ’cause it makes me smarter.
I mean, there’s prolly like, other little reasons that would be good, even if I can’t think of ‘em ’cause I’m motivated purley by self interest.
I know you are all like “oh I don’t wanna argue about permadeath, that’s a dead horse, and blah blah blah” because you wanna be one of the snarky cool kids, but screw that, man, that punk rock critic “I hate newbs” stuff is fer people who BARELY made the newb cut, that ain’t for dudes that go back to the Age of Wood ahaha.
Plus those guys can’t produce the goods, man, where some of us can whip a dead horse and make it do tons of shit that nobody’s seen a dead horse do before, stuff that’ll keep awake at night ahaha.
So, not only do I want the rest of this Epic thingie, I want tons more than that!
Break it up into a million pieces if you got some kinda perfectionist complex or something, that way, any one piece won’t freak you out so much heh.
Gawd I hope this isn’t fulla typos, I can’t self-edit right away after I write something.
Anyways I was thinking along the same lines as Ravehawk, but I’m assuming that its supposed to be “taking part in a series of Epic adventures,” since Jeff’s mortality twist makes me think about the way that individual Epic Adventures (even though they themselves might be composed out of a lot of smaller adventures) need to come to an end and have a resolution that taps into a lot of heavy themes like getting old and the circle of life and all that sorta stuff or they wouldn’t be all that Epic.
And at first I was afraid that Jeff was all into some kinda overly serious sword-and-sandal thing, ’cause this is like, his artform, and one of the characteristic of Epics is that a “style of sustained elevation is used.”
But I don’t think he’s totally against some kickas Pullo and Vorenus comedy bits, he loves that kinda junk too much, even though I usually try to force him into playing the overly-serious Vorenus guy straight man, which speaks volumes about what he’s willing to suffer for comedy, that’s some major points he’s scoring with the gods there ahaha.
Plus the Seven Samurai is a totally Epic movie, and the guy who did that is where the Pullo and Vorenus thing (and a bunch of Lucas crap,.and a bunch of other junk like it) comes from.
A lot of the really great guys (Shakespeare, Twain, blah blah blah) weren’t into that “sustained elevation” stuff.
Even Tolkien had Samwise and Pippin and Merry and stuff.
So I think “periods of elevation” are okay but you still need something low-brow and earthy to elevate against heh.
Yikes this is getting long and I ain’t even got into the “myth of objectivity” ahaha.
Oh well.
So I’m seeing a game where you start out as a flower, you have 2 actions, sway in the wind and attract bees. Oh shnap! A dog just ated you! You respawn as a virus in a dog’s belly. You have 2 actions, try and fuck up an organ of your choice, or pass through the digestive system and search for a more suitable victim. Oh shnap! The dog’s owner took it to the vet and you’ve been wiped out by a shot! You respawn as a beam of sunlight flying towards the earth, you can hardly aim because you’re going sooo fast, you want to land on that human, but, ohhhhh didn’t see that bird coming. As a bird you have 2 actions, attack and poop. Sure would suck to be one of the few humans with millions of stupid little things trying to find ways to kill you so that you gotta start back at teh ol sun beam. Oh dunr some dude was a human and managed to kill teh world, game over, game epic.
Dude its s’posed to be EPIC and that means that ITS GOTTA HAVE GLADIATORS INNIT.
I don’t care how wasted you are man you need to get it through your thick skull that JEFF FREEMAN LOVES GLADIATORS.
No wait, actually I’m pretty jealous of how wasted you are.
Anyways thanks for taking me along on your dog-bowels-and-sunbeam ride now my head feels like a balloon m’kay.
Well, I did photoshop this garage sale.
Surely THAT is the most EPIC garage sale that the world has ever seen!
Is that a jedi butterfly?
Angus: You could be a white cell “gladiator” that fights off disease and infection!
Most of my posts about game design really are just me thinking (or rethinking) out loud…
The main thing I’ve gotten out of this post is that I have way too many dangling threads.
I still haven’t setup my PC, which is where I like to keep all my broken promises… but I’m going to make a priority of wrapping-up the things I said I’d talk more about “later” … what with this being “later” and all.
As for my “dream MMO” - it really is the same old idea celebrating something like a tenth year in the womb. Trying to define what it was exactly - sort of a central theme or fundamental of it - is what brought me to the “epic” label in the first place. I didn’t think, “I want an epic MMO” first and then try to decide what that’d be, but the other way aroiund: “What do I want?” and then after that, “What the hell is that?”
Executive summary: My dream MMO is a cross between EVE Online and Animal Crossing.
…but who has the time to explain just what in the wide world of sports that means?
Honestly, I have about 9 tasks assigned to me at the moment, three of which are “urgent”, four are “high”, and the “medium”-priority tasks are just duplicates of other tasks rephrased to sound (apparently) less critical.
I don’t mean that as an excuse. I mean it as whining. Waaaaa. I mean, I really am busy and it’s mentally taxing enough to make devoting after-hours brain activity to booze entirely too appealing.
Meanwhile, the post I most want to write is an essay on the scarcity of design in the open source gaming community, and what that might mean for ;projects like Metaplace.
You know: given the tools (finally!) and the art and sound assets (at last!), the most popular thing to make is a clone of some other game.
Mad props there, you know? Lots of work, skill, and dedication going into making Game B just like Game A… but dammit we already had Game A, right?
My Metaplace game is gonna stomp yours Jeffrey Freeman! Aha!
The main thing I’ve gotten out of this is that now I am SURE that you are a lot like a bulldog that you pretty much need to beat to death with a hammer to make him let go of a steak.
You really twist yourself up into a berzerker frenzy to grip the ladder hard enough to force it to take you to the places that you see that you want to go to.
Where I’m lazy, so I’m always looking for an elevator or a rescue helicopter or some kinda deal we can make with the ladder to get the ladder to join OUR side so we don’t gotta wrestle with it so much and it’ll be funner and quicker to climb and then maybe we’ll wanna take the ladder with us on all the adventures that happen after we’re done climbing the ladder ’cause you never know when we might need a good ladder that’s on our side and folks LOVE it when something that started out as a villain transforms into one of the heroes by the end of the story and stuff.
Which explains a lot about how anything I’d say that doesn’t pertain to your specific way of climbing the ladder would be a distraction to you.
And you can’t really talk about your specific ladder ’cause that’s the only ladder you got and youd be like, giving away the fruits of all your labors.
Its hard for me to imagine you that way ’cause first off, I’m way more of a gypsy than that, and I knew you when it seemed like you used to come up with something different every day, before it all solidified or whatever into this one thing in your mind.
Your work environment doesn’t sound all that great to me either but you only hear the grumbling on the bad days y’know there ain’t no “good” kinda grumbling to hear on the good days heh.
And heck, you are partly responsible for all that grindy Orwellian Horror in “game industry” anyways, used to be that those seas were the realm of free men and Pirates and adventurers ahaha.
Wow… when I stop to think about it - which isn’t all that often, but still more often than seems healthy - I have always considered myself entirely too attention-deficit, rather than the bulldog-with-steak other way around, really. I think that “dream MMO” has been in the oven for a decade or so because I keep stopping to cook other things.
But I keep coming back to it… yeah. I hope I’ve been dragging new things back to it as well, though.
Here’s something new and different, I started working on ages ago and haven’t worked on in way too long:
http://mythicalblog.com/quest/
I really didn’t want to show it til there was something playable there, but that might take forever…
It’s a bit of a different concept than anything I’ve talked about before: and that little bit of it isn’t much of a gameplay demo, so maybe that sucks as evidence…
It has a neat gimmick - using the Yahoo image search API to fetch pics of things from the net. All you see there is character creation/class image: so if you choose “pirate” it gives you a pic of a pirate, or for “ninja” you get a ninja pic of your character.
The idea was to do the same for everything in the game though. So if you fight a troll, it shows a pic (from image search for “troll”) of a troll (most of the time). If you find a magic sword, it shows a pic of a sword, if you build a castle, there’s a pic of a castle, and so on… all populated via a function I wrote: “fetchImage( OF_WHAT, indexNum)” - where “of_what” is the search term and “indexNum” is the search result number to return.
The indexNum thing is so if you fight two rats, each rat has a different pic…
It’s meant to be humorous, as the image search results often are funny as all hell, to be anything more serious than “a goofy game” would just be impossible,..
But that’s just the gimmick… there’s an idea for gameplay that goes with it, and it’s oddball enough to count as a different ladder than the one I seem to be stuck on, I think.
I really would like to finish that thing some day - put some real gameplay in there. It’s a great idea, IMO… would be a fun game, or will be a fun game if I ever get around to finishing it.
It started as a purely educational exercise sort of thing - thus the too-much-java (and poorly written), a movie you can’t see without broadband, and the yahoo sign-in requirement. Now I’ve learned how to write bad java, play a movie, and use Yahoo’s BB authentication, I still just love the game design I had in mind for it.
I would have said something sooner, but I’m getting embarrassed about projects I’ve talked about and then just sort of dropped afterwards, so I didn’t want to add another one of those.
Guess this is different ’cause it’s already been dropped.
Yah somebody needs to make a game like that man I’m all like. “daaamn he didn’t add trolls to this yet my 1st level monkey needs something to fight!!!” heh.
I can see the whole thing, lists of funny pics for quest npcs that send you around to randomly selected places that are sure to have funny pics for ‘em and random pics for treasure and armor on your paper doll and funny monsters and stuff.
Yah, that’d be a good game, man, it really would, its like old-style rpg gaming meets random internet comedy.
And it’d be a LOT of work, too.
‘Cause I’d wanna do the whole roleplaying infrastructure, where your Black and Decker Nail Gun +3 and Beer Hat +1 had stats that affected gameplay mechanics (even if its in a simple and comedic way, that’s still a lot of work) and maybe even add some multiplayer.
“Warrior needs beer, badly!”
“Elf shot the beer!”
ANd THEN I’d want to explore all the things you could do all cheap and easy with that framework that you couldn’t do in a 2d-isometric or 3d game and stuff.
Yah, seeing that deeply into things and laughing at all the jokes ahead of time is always what makes me just get tired of stuff and say “pfft screw that, where’s the beach on the tropical island with the funny umbrella drinks and bikini chicks already” heh.
Where you are the kinda guy that ACTUALLY starts builiding the goddam thing and kicking himself for not finishing it and all that, Mister Bulldog Man.
But I think you do that ’cause going through the motions like that is one of your methods for finding gold that nobody else has noticed yet, I do the same kinda thing, I just WRITE myself going through the motions, insteada actually making anything (usually).
And then you get mad at these other game designer kids ’cause they don’t think up nothing good like that ahaha.
But coming up with stuff like that isn’t something that everybody can do, y’know, there’s lots of folks that can play musical instruments really well but hardly anybody can come up with the dumb little hit songs that totally infuriate all the super-advanced technical dudes ’cause they get so goddam popular.
And those two kinds of guys are already a tiny subset of everybody, most folks don’t even bother to try to figure how to make music, even though they like music, they got other things they’re into making and contributing that seem more important to (or at least more rewarding for) them.
And those THREE kinds of people aren’t the only kinds of people involved with music in some way.
Yah, I kinda get that MAYBE you wanted to see if you’d actually build that thing before you said anything, but talking about it and thinking about is good enough for me.
Plus, now we can move on to other stuff, like the beach with the bikini chicks and the funny drinks with the umbrellas and stuff, and at least I’m not any worse for the wear heh.
I don’t know, man… A game where you can play a monkey with a nail-gun just seems so obvious. It’s a crime that hasn’t been made yet.
There is a lot of work there, but I think functionality could be added incrementally to get something fairly decent, pretty quick, then just add on to that.
Bragging: I made that “journey onward!” video myself. I took a map from http://xkcd.com/256/, colored it, then mapped that to a sphere and made it rotate. I actually wanted to use that song for death/respawn “I get knocked down / but I get up again / You aint never gonna keep me down”. For travelling, it should be “I would walk 500 miles / and I would walk 500 more / etc”. Heh.
One more “big idea” with that was to utilize mad-lib inputs and allow players to upload pics (or point to URLs) so most of the real quest content comes from the players… maybe with a ranking system of some sort so the cream rises to the top. Main reason for that was to mitigate how much work would be necessary to make content for it, but also because lots of people are way better at making funny content like that than I am.
Anyway… yeah… How could “that monkey with a nail-gun game” not be a hit?
I just wanna say that my level 1 princess was offended. Onward Ho?
So check this out: Dragon Knight…
I downloaded the source code last night and I’ve been looking at it. The core gameplay mechanics that I want are already there, so a modding that to do the image-search thing and the user-generated quests (and with my much better class-selection list) and so on… well that wouldn’t be much work at all.
Oh yeah, forget that nail gun! The epic weapon for a monkey is an F16 flown by the hulk that fires Iron Mans.
So the monkey can get a gun that shoots F-16s flown by Hulks that fire Iron Mans?
Dude, that is totally Epic and everything but F-16s flown by Hulks that fire Iron Mans should be rare ahaha.
Man, that “garage sale” thingie could be your Auction House where you can sell all the Schrodinger Kit Kats and stuff you’ve collected as loot.
Alright, I’m gonna go check out that Dragon Knight thingie.
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