Comments for Intelligently Artificial

Comment on A Change is Gonna Come by Tony Jones

Tony Jones — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:55:11 +0000

Condider it? Well it is 9pm on a Friday and the third G+T is just sliding down nicely.

Ish me, innit?

Comment on A Change is Gonna Come by Tony Jones

Tony Jones — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:53:54 +0000

Oh, I do enjoy this stuff! But sadly, the people who need to read it and condider it will do neither of those things

Best wishes
Tjay

Comment on Selling Yourself Short by Tony Jones

Tony Jones — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:49:34 +0000

Hi Twitchdoctor
In human nature there are noble instincts and base instincts. And it has usually been more commercial to appeal to the base ones unfortunately

Comment on Managing Expectations by Twitchdoctor

Twitchdoctor — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:21:51 +0000

I think what I’m trying to get at here is the difference between a role you are given to play and the role you create yourself. I’ve been pretty lucky with the two guilds I’ve been involved with in that both included some fantastic RPers who taught me a lot of what I know. And the one thing that both groups had in common was that they didn’t wait around for the game to give you a story but instead worked on developing their own individual and collective stories. SWG was great for that in the early days because it was even more story light than any other game. As a sandbox, you could be and do pretty much anything you could imagine. Sometimes the stories were relatively simple (going on a hunting expedition, getting together an exploration party, hitting the shopping malls) but sometimes they were more elaborate and interwoven with backstories and sidestories on the guild site.

In POTBS there was a lot of interesting discussion about what exactly a game nevertheless needs to provide in order to support a more open style of RP and we never did come to a consensus about that. But I am worried that that kind of RP won’t really be available in TOR. You will certainly be able to inhabit what will, I hope, be immersive stories. But you can’t really graft your own onto that without a lot of difficulty. In something like _Dragon Age_ for example, you can be pretty heavily immersed in the damn good story and the role you are playing within that story, but you can’t step outside of those parameters in any meaningful sense. And you can’t really get any kind of complex character background going unless you are already given that. So you can’t for example set up a character like mine in POTBS: a woman accused of murdering her abusive husband and fleeing to the Carribean who is nevertheless taking the rap for her sister’s intervention to save her. So it doesn’t seem that odd to me. In fact, since I got into MMOs it is really the only kind of RP I’ve known.

Comment on Managing Expectations by DamarisM

DamarisM — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:34:00 +0000

How odd. I’ve always thought of RP as relying heavily on gripping and intriguing story, which has always been the biggest difference between MMO’s and MMORPG’s. WoW is story light (the story is more of a background theme) and grind heavy with emphasis strictly on leveling up to better beat other players and get better equipment. To be thoroughly engaged as a role player I have to feel like I’m playing for something more than that. I agree with the love affair with Bioware games in general simply because they usually do create wonderfully emersive atmospheres and story lines Without that you’re simply playing for ego. :\.