I recently started playing LoTRO again (and tried Rift on a free weekend), and my desire to blog also picked up. It’s curious; I’m a very solitary person within most MMOs. For example, I just finished leveling a minstrel (usually a very group-friendly class) to 65, almost entirely solo. Despite my reticent nature in-game, I’m happy to talk about what I’m doing in an MMO when I’m not actually playing it.

Why do I want to talk about MMOs more than single player games or multiplayer games? Is it something about the persistence of an MMO compared to the more transient experience of multiplayer matches? Is there more of a story to an MMO? There’s a pretty good story in most single player RPGs, but I don’t feel compelled to write about those so much. I spent a lot of time playing TF2 and Starcraft 2 and League of Legends with other people, but I don’t feel the need to blog about it. It must be the persistent world that makes me feel like sharing, the non-instanced nature of an MMO. Anyone can log on to Steam and find me for a TF2 game, or friend me on League of Legends and ask if I want to play, or I can join a variety of Vent/TeamSpeak servers and play a match with friends, but all those interactions happen outside the game world first. The MMO is always there, always on, always the same, and somehow that makes me want to write about it. Maybe it’s a way of connecting with my character who’s idle while I’m not able to log in, and maybe it’s a way of connecting with other people who are doing the same thing, yearning for a bit of persistence while we await another opportunity to enter that world and play.

Whatever it is, I’m happy that my on-again off-again relationship with LoTRO has finally reached a major milestone.

Gallatin at 65

It’s kind of crazy how much work still remains in LoTRO. As you can see, I’ve got trade skills to master, I need to figure out Legendary Items and maximize what they offer, I’ve got plenty of skirmishes to run, deeds to finish, traits to earn, and dungeons to explore if I ever decide to start grouping on a regular basis. I’ve reached level cap, but I certainly haven’t come close to maximizing Gallatin’s potential, and I hope to spend some time figuring out how to make him a useful member of a group instead of a solitary War Speech minstrel. He’s also got a big house to decorate!

The update wasn’t all that large and I got to play for a little bit. There are interface updates – the experience bar is a little bigger, a little brighter, there’s a Skirmish button next to your bags, and there’s a Store icon at the right side of your toolbar. I got a bunch of deed updates and I got some Turbine points for deeds and reputation. People in my guild were talking about having thousands of points – I only had 80 I don’t think I’m a completionist, or maybe my point total just isn’t correct yet. Turbine had a note about a problem with points, so I’ll wait and see what I end up with in a couple days.

I thought, as a current subscriber, I’d get a chunk of points to play with, but they haven’t appeared yet. I think the only points that registered were due to my standings with various factions.

I finished up some Moria quests and logged out. I’ll check out the new zone when I get a little more time to play. So far, so good? Beyond the update problem, everything was stable. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the F2P is live for everyone, though. I wonder if they’ll stay stable through the weekend.

I’m not the obsessive MMO player I used to be, where I’d follow official and unofficial forums like a dog on a scent. I couldn’t tell you what my monthly fee might be if I decide to keep subscribing. Does it stay the same? Does it increase? What happens if I stop subscribing? Does my gold disappear? What about the characters I already have over the cap?

I know I could find these answers in a thread on the official forums, but I hardly take time to blog any more – I’m hoping that nothing really changes, I get charged the same amount, and the game I’ve casually enjoyed through 56 levels, deep into Moria, doesn’t change too much for me.

I’m happy Turbine is experimenting, I like some aspects of the free to play model, and I think it’ll be good for the game, but I’m also being selfish. I don’t want to do any extra work. Sue me, I’m lazy I’m looking forward to logging in and checking things out, though. Think I have to give it the usual patch-day level of expectations? Probably. Right now the updater is bombing out behind my Word Press window – maybe it’ll be tomorrow before I get to check things out.

I’ll post my opinions about the F2P changes, and if it impacts an old casual subscriber, or if the game just keeps ticking along for me.

Anyone else going to start playing, or return to play, now that it’s free?

I found the above site from a link in the Gamers With Jobs Dwarf Fortress thread. Someone was pointing to a story Tim Denee drew about one of his Dwarf Fortress games, and I found the link to his store at the bottom of the story. Great illustrations, and great marketing for his prints. I love seeing people take their hobby, marry it to their skills, and put it up for sale for other hobbyists who’d never be able to find prints like that in a stupid mall store.

That still doesn’t mean my wife is going to let me put it up in the living room, though.

I really like the Bronzemurder story print too. Maybe I’ll have to buy it for my office

Hope everyone’s doing well – I haven’t posted in a while, because I’ve largely been out of the MMO scene, and I usually find myself most motivated to blog when I’m playing an MMO, opposed to playing single-player games. A quick recap would find me mostly playing through Fallout 3, replaying Dragon Age:Origins, playing Mass Effect 1, or playing Team Fortress 2 or League of Legends for my multiplayer fixes.

I’m still subscribed to LoTRO and playing on occasion, slowly working my way through Moria. I should emerge from the mines shortly after the game goes free to play, and maybe I’ll be back to update then. I’d like to be back – we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve finished my last course for my Masters degree. All I need to graduate is to finish my qualifying paper and have it approved, and I’m officially finished. Then I have to figure out what I want to do next! Doctoral degree? Top-secret gaming/university project? Write a book? I think it’s going to be one of those three, although there’s an outside chance I’ll work on a teaching certificate as well. Plenty to do, not enough time to game!

I’m trying to get an iPad through work, but it’s an incredibly political item to requisition, apparently. I work with software that has an iPad application, and I think I have a great reason for testing it and seeing what else we can develop for it, but it’s turned into “He’s getting one? I want one too! In fact, I want HIS!”, with much foot-stamping and other grown-up behavior going on. *sigh*. We’re asked to innovate, and then questioned when we ask for tools to investigate innovation. Yay for corporations. Meanwhile, much, much more money is being spent on other items.

Didn’t mean to rant – I meant to just point out the free games. So, go! Game for free

However, I screwed myself. I made a new character, made up a name I’ve never used in an MMO before, played through the tutorial until I got sleepy, and went to bed. I tried to log in again last night, and was greeted with the “Type in the name of a character on this account” box at login. Doh. I have no idea!

Clearly, I’m not the only person to do this; the NCSoft support site has instructions how to request the character name. My ticket is in their queue, and I’m stuck waiting to play until they hook me up.

I’m definitely ticking that “remember my answer” box under the login info once I get the character name back.

It’s a smart move by NCSoft. With Guild Wars 2 coming out soon-ish (I don’t follow the game, and I’m too lazy to google it), selling the original at a discount is a good way to get people like me to experience the original, and maybe be more likely to pick up GW2.

You can check out the sale on Steam’s NCSoft page. The original game and the two expansions are on sale individually, as well as a bundle with all three games.Cheers!

From the article: ‘Players can either be a man wearing a condom on his head named Captain Condom; a virgin named Wonder Vag; a boy named Willy the Kid who believes size doesn’t matter or Power Pap, a sexually active gal.”

Wonder Vag? Really? Please, tell me, what’s her special power? And if Willy has only one eye, I can die a happy gamer.

The argument that video games can be educational just took a punch in the face.

Damn, that’s a lot of links in the first sentence. This ain’t no flat blog post. It’s relational.

Anyway, I’m glad I caught Tyler’s tweet because Jane McGonigal has some kick-ass ideas. I remember hearing about her earlier games “World Without Oil” and “Superstruct” from someone on The Well (probably Jamais Cascio?). I didn’t get pulled into either game, but hearing Jane’s talk gave me a broader appreciation of what she’s trying to do with gaming and social innovation.

I won’t go over the TED talk in detail in this post, but the summary at the link above says

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Her talk is well worth the twenty minutes of your life if you’re a gamer and think that gamers have skills that bleed over into “real life”. She’s connecting a lot of dots for me, dots that developed over my sixteen year gaming and Internet history.

Her current project is called Evoke. The “About” page for the game says:

EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.

I wouldn’t call Evoke a game, exactly. It’s more like social networking, at least in the beginning missions I’ve been working on. It’s a thinking exercise too, and it requires some introspection. It’s not an escape from reality at all – but that’s not where gaming skills come into play, at least for me.

Over the past sixteen years (I count the beginning of my real computer life as the year I first sat down in front of Mosaic at work), everything I’ve learned from gaming has migrated into skills in my career. Games weren’t just something to play. I wrote about them, lived on message boards, tried to learn how to make games, learned how to make web sites, learned about IRC and instant messaging, learned about tearing down computers and building them back up, and learned about networking all because of games.

I learned how to quickly search the internet for information. I learned how to store and retrieve that information, and I learned how to produce more information. I also learned how to connect with other people and share thoughts and ideas about games.

I think those are the skills that Evoke draws from. No one is going to log into Modern Warfare to end hunger in Africa, but the skills people develop to play and learn more about Modern Warfare and participate online in the MW community are the same skills that can be applied to Evoke.

I’ve always been a bit of a dirty hippie (see: Well membership referenced above), a vegetarian, interested in organic and sustainable farming, interested in history and other cultures – maybe I’m a specific type of gamer already interested in the topics Evoke, well, evokes. I see people posting articles about farming, sustainable energy, power shifts, and lots of other ideas about how we can change the world.

I don’t expect any one idea, or any one person, to really change the world by playing Evoke, or any other video game out right now. I do think that McGonigal is tapping into a really powerful idea, though, a combination of games, information sharing, and social networking that does have the potential for powerful impact in the world.

McGonigal’s first two games passed me by without striking a chord, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people reading here don’t click the links or get involved. This time. Maybe though, in the future, some designers in the audience at TED will think “you know, there IS a way to make a game that’s fun to play that also accomplishes some of the things Jane was talking about.” Or maybe a gamer will say “Hey, I remember hearing about her – and this time, I do want to get involved.” Bit by bit, piece by piece, I think there’s a chance of gaming ourselves into a greater awareness of and greater service to the world around us.

I think I played so many MMOs for so long that I lost my appreciation for the genre. Everything felt like work, and my burnout from one MMO was bleeding over into any new MMO I tried, or old MMOs I reactivated.

Honestly, I probably wouldn’t be back in an MMO if it wasn’t for Turbine’s  free Welcome Back weekends. The Activity Log on My LoTRO page shows that I was last subscribed to the game in April of last year, and I only played for about a month. Then, last October, I came back for my first free Welcome Back weekend, and returned for free weekends in November, December, and January before resubscribing in February.

Maybe it was playing only occasionally that allowed me to reconnect with the world and with my character without quickly burning out again. Maybe it’s just the depth of LoTRO after a couple years of adding and tweaking and upgrading the game experience. The depth of LoTRO is pretty significant compared to a lot of other MMO’s out there; Turbine hasn’t shied away from crafting, housing, and their skirmish system is pretty damn cool. I like the Deeds/Traits system, the world lore is significant, the Book quests now have solo options (which work pretty well for me as a mostly-solo gamer), and I’m always looking forward to logging in, instead of feeling like it’s a job.

I re-applied to the Old Timer’s Guild, and hopefully I’ll get enough sponsors by the end of the month to become a full member. I’m also hoping that playing an MMO rekindles my desire to blog a bit. No promises – I’m trying to finish up my Master’s degree by the end of June – but playing MMOs seem more blog-worthy than single-layer games. There’s plenty to talk about in LoTRO, and I haven’t felt that way about an MMO in quite a while.