Summer Reruns – Fumbling with Questions that have No Easy Answers

I was away over the weekend, so I did not get a chance to write anything last night.

Plus, it is summer, the MMO scene is pretty quiet right now, and nothing being added, changed, or launched this year looks be set to change the MMO market in the slightest.

MMOs have become pizza. They vary a bit from vendor to vendor. You might not like the ingredients from one, and another might not keep their place very clean. But they are all round and share about the same set of toppings and what not. And if you like pizza, you will probably find a place that suits you.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would recycle some of my attempts at serious thought about pizza… erm… MMOs. Some of these are more than five years old. Have things changed that much since?

Or is it more a matter of the more things change, the more they stay the same?

Anyway, this is an open invitation to comment on some old posts if nothing else.

9 thoughts on “Summer Reruns – Fumbling with Questions that have No Easy Answers”

  2. bhagpuss

    You probably were hoping for more than that. Okay, first thanks a lot for getting me reading old posts instead of playing new MMOs. I really have so much time on my hands, after all…

    I read four of the posts so far and scanned the comment threads. Your prose style is light, deft and colloquial without ever becoming trivial while your analysis is oceans deep. This has been my favorite blog for as long as I’ve been reading blogs and when you post golden oldies like this it just makes me aware that should go back and read all the posts from before I discovered TAGN.

    I also did an ego-scan on my replies and that reminded me of another thing – how I wish I’d saved every blog reply and forum post I’d ever made to a text file. It would be like having what I’ve always wanted, a diary. I’m pleased to be able to say that, reading myself back, I still agree with what I said. Approximately.

    The posts I’ve read so far suggest you’ve selected a theme, the one Ardwulf raised in his recent “What Was Lost” post. It seems there’s a bunch of people who there or thereabouts think a baby got thrown out with some bathwater a while back. I think the baby’s still there, half-way down the drain but clinging on.

    You point out in one of the posts that fun’s not what it’s all about. I used to say that over and over and over on the old SOE forums (back in the Whineplay days). After a long while I began to wonder about that, went through another few years of thinking maybe it was all about the fun after all. Coming out the far side of that now. My current feeling is that it’s all about the satisfaction.

    It’s so confusing, though. I played Everquest weekend before this; it was still hard, compared to every other MMO I play. I posted about that. I went back again after, played some more, had an even better time. Then I played GW2 for days and days and posted about how annoying it was. I despair of any game developer being able to manage my emotional response, far less the individual responses of several hundred thousand players.

    We should just give thanks there are any MMOs at all.

    Like

  4. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @Bhagpuss – Thanks for holding down the comments fort while I was off at Lake Tahoe. (Which looks remarkably like Evendim in LOTRO.) I wrote this post a week early knowing I wouldn’t be around for my usual weekend post planning, so it was a happy coincidence that Flosch put that post up. I think I put it in the feed for my “on again, off again” side bar blogespehere feed. Now to figure out what else I have to post this week.

    I suspect it will consist of far fewer words than last week.

    Like

  5. Pingback: Man Shall Not Live By Pizza Alone | Stropp's World

  6. flosch

    Thanks for the link! I have to admit I never noticed the “items from the blogosphere” section on your sidebar. Then again, I mostly read feeds through RSS and my feed reader, so…

    And if you have a choice of posts, the ones about your personal gaming history are probably my absolute favorites on this blog, so I’d vote for one of those! (Like the Apple II ones, or the one with the Sega Genesis).

    Those don’t seem to come in small serving sizes, though…

    Like

  7. HarbingerZero

    The only thing better than pizza is cold pizza. Since I still have another dozen or so articles in my feed, I’ll hold off on these though, for the time being.

    At some point, I may have time to write one. Hopefully.

    Like

  8. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @flosch – I had that sidebar thing back when Google Reader supported sharing to an RSS feed. Then they killed that to push people to Google Plus. Then they killed Google Reader.

    The Old Reader has that option, so I started it up again. However, The Old Reader is also still having issues with having enough power to cope with the load. so that feed is listed as “down” about half the time I look at the front page. It is something of a stand-in for “If I wrote a post on that topic, I would link this post.”

    Like

  9. flosch

    Hmm… that is an interesting idea. I never thought of that. ttrss has a “publish to my feed” option, too. I might play around with that.

    Like

Comments are closed.