Oh, the Duality! (Rant)
Second Life is such a flirty tease. It's all sexy and suave, full of naughty suggestions and bursting with possibility, but when you actually get there it's such a flat, lifeless space. Was all that stuff just implied, not promised?
There's hints of it when you look closely. Yes, there's actually shadows, but if you turn them on even the most noble of machines is reduced to a crying mess, begging for relief from the strain of rendering them all. Sure, you can get all these great high-resolution textures which look spectacular, even up close, but it'll come awfully close to melting your broadband connection in the process.
Text-based games have been around for ages, ever since Adventure, and while they haven't always been the most innovative, a good number of them strict derivations of other such games with only minor half-baked tweaks, you can do so many things with text that it's possible to build grand universes with relative ease.
Clearly graphical games are having a bit of trouble in that department. I'd argue that prior to the arrival of World of Warcraft, there wasn't a game that could capture the feeling and spirit of any text-based game. Diablo, and the later Diablo II, were like table-top gaming reduced to the most basic hack-and-slash elements. There was a community, but a loose one, and guilds were for people who were taking the game far too seriously.
There were many games prior to that. Dozens, if not hundreds, which tried to build on the whole "RPG" genre. Some had great graphics, some an amazing story line, a few even had both those things but were restricted to a console platform that was mostly single-player, or at the very best, you and whomever else was on the couch at the time.
Second Life is neat, but it just doesn't seem to be all the way there. It's no substitute for text-based games of a similar sort. Sure, it can be pretty, if you give it time to load, but it has such a "Version 1.0" feel to it.
Undoubtedly there will be a game in the future that's all the things Second Life is, and more. Maybe it'll be when everyone has quad-core computers and gigabit connections, but that day isn't all that far off. It took twenty years for graphical games to eclipse text-based ones, becoming entirely superior, and with all that technology in place, this next leap won't be all that dramatic.
It'll probably happen and we won't even notice.
There's hints of it when you look closely. Yes, there's actually shadows, but if you turn them on even the most noble of machines is reduced to a crying mess, begging for relief from the strain of rendering them all. Sure, you can get all these great high-resolution textures which look spectacular, even up close, but it'll come awfully close to melting your broadband connection in the process.
Text-based games have been around for ages, ever since Adventure, and while they haven't always been the most innovative, a good number of them strict derivations of other such games with only minor half-baked tweaks, you can do so many things with text that it's possible to build grand universes with relative ease.
Clearly graphical games are having a bit of trouble in that department. I'd argue that prior to the arrival of World of Warcraft, there wasn't a game that could capture the feeling and spirit of any text-based game. Diablo, and the later Diablo II, were like table-top gaming reduced to the most basic hack-and-slash elements. There was a community, but a loose one, and guilds were for people who were taking the game far too seriously.
There were many games prior to that. Dozens, if not hundreds, which tried to build on the whole "RPG" genre. Some had great graphics, some an amazing story line, a few even had both those things but were restricted to a console platform that was mostly single-player, or at the very best, you and whomever else was on the couch at the time.
Second Life is neat, but it just doesn't seem to be all the way there. It's no substitute for text-based games of a similar sort. Sure, it can be pretty, if you give it time to load, but it has such a "Version 1.0" feel to it.
Undoubtedly there will be a game in the future that's all the things Second Life is, and more. Maybe it'll be when everyone has quad-core computers and gigabit connections, but that day isn't all that far off. It took twenty years for graphical games to eclipse text-based ones, becoming entirely superior, and with all that technology in place, this next leap won't be all that dramatic.
It'll probably happen and we won't even notice.