fractalnavel

i'm going to try and catch up on :

365 tomorrows is a collaborative project designed to present readers with one new piece of short speculative fiction each day for one year. Utilizing the broad palate of science fiction, our vision of the future creates a diverse pool of stories with something for everyone to enjoy.

365 launched August 1, 2005 and will continue until July 31, 2006

sounds like fun.  i've been looking for scfi to read for a few weeks, but haven't wanted to buy something.  i noticed that jordan's wheel of time book 11 is out now.  i didn't read 10.  i had been keeping up over the years, but along with so many others just got frustrated as the author failed to live up to the story's original promise.  so, when or if he ever finishes it, i will pick up the rest of the books.

i've also been blowing time over at , quite a bit, actually, for the last week or two.  one of the classic (but not first generation), all-custom muds.  i don't know why i'm attracted to these things.  perhaps it's the influence of my heavy-ish text adventure / interactive fiction (if) days.  muds are multiplayer, but i tend to explore them on my own, avoiding intereactions with other players.  once upon a time i had a link to a good paper on the different types of players and other mud issues; perhaps i'll find it before i post this. [ok, here's one, but it's not the one i was looking for. a bit dated and biased, but still worth looking at. ahh - here it is, sortof like a stripped down mbti ;-), same author.  worth wandering his site for more on.]

i first ran into muds in '94, back when the world-wide-web had only around a few thousand pages.  i didn't do much with them, or anything on the internet, for a number of years afterwards, for various reasons (which is kind of sad, but there were reasons...).  then at the end of '97 i ran into them again. this time it was , one of the real classics (but still not first generation).  although it's commercial, it's much cheaper than it used to be, and they offer an extensive initial free play period with automated tutoring to get you immersed in the game.  this game also has extensive history and other information on the web like player forums, so the compexity is offset a bit by this.  [the paper linked to above has a brief review of this one.]

for ishar, i've found just about zilch beyond the sparse help provided by the mud's website itself.  that's kind of a disappointment for an explorer-type like me, but c'est la guerre, you play with what you have.  i had bumped into this game here and there, but this is the first time i've made a serious attempt at prolonged character development (not role playing (yuk!), i mean in terms of levelling and equipment and loot) and exploration.  all my other forays were just dabblings.

this time around i've been interacting with others, mostly just in passing.  there's no role playing or anything, really.  mostly i've found this world to be populated by long-term players intent on power-levelling and looting.  i've seen muds focused on pk, and others that were basically just chat-rooms.  i prefer the ones with more atmosphere and good better writing, like ishar and avalon.  the one thing i miss from the if days is the puzzle solving.  in those you were basically involved in a single prolonged quest.

in a couple of recent instances i've made exceptions to the solo approach.  i teamed up with some players who seemed to know their way around, and who were basically looking for firepower to assist them in computer-controlled-character (ccc's, or mobiles = mobs) killing and looting.  i never did that before.  mind you, most of the players are teens, maybe twenties, so communications and attitudes can be interesting at times.  these guys basically do “plunge-diving” expeditions, where they know the string of moves required to get to the desired battle zone deep within dangerous surroundings.  they effectively “run” past all the dangers that they otherwise could not face head on.  this is very different from my own slow, methodical explorations, where i stand toe-to-toe with the hazards and slowly expand my character's reach as it strengthens.  anyway, i tagged along for one extended session of this, and i must say it was a pretty productive encounter, in spite of my clear slowness as compared to the others.  learned some new things, and was glad of my other researches into these sorts of things (team battling) in the past.  i wasn't at a complete loss when it came to some terms and tactics.  but it was as i suspected, it would take a lot of good coordination to effectively “team”.  as things are, i get the impression that everyone takes the simpler route in these things, which is having a leader who treats the rest of the team as simple killing machines.  anything else would be far more time consuming, and i expect that these types of players would see that as a waste.

these days there are the more popular graphical multiplayer games, the mmporpgs like everquest or world of warfare. nearly all of them are fee based, so i don't bother.  there are some other less-themed graphical worlds (activeworlds, “there”), but they have less draw for me.  there is an interesting exception to this: .  very cool and compex game, but needs far more horsepower than i have available.  even the client is about a GB in size; luckily, they distribute it with bittorrent.  i mucked about in this for a short time early this year, but for various reasons dropped. it.

ah well, to wrap up, there's all kind of stuff out there, past and present.  there used to be (and still are a few) online multiplayer air combat games, which may represent the originals in graphical mporpgs (without the first “m”, which stands for “massively”).  and there are a number of fairly serious simulator communities out there, including a “simnasa.org” which is so like the real world it isn't worth playing.

whatever you want to (virtually) do, it's out there.  even start your own universe, with all the pain that implies.  mostly what that does is fragment the player base into loads of mediocre nowheres, and then you have to deal with the crap.  which leads me to: gods aren't sadists, they're ticked off masochists.