( MMORPG) review of the MMORPG: "Outside"
Apr. 2nd, 2008 04:43 pm
For those of you who haven't played this surprisingly obscure MMORPG, this review.
Courtesy of aeschenkarnos, from a post in Metafilter.
It's almost enough to make me want to start playing WoW again.
And if
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
racerxmachina objects, relax: I can just point out it's completely compatable with Guitar Hero.
Technically, this should be "technology Monday, but oh well. here's our story today- and actually the title is quite serious- from Yahoo News:
Gamer uses virtual training to save lives
My reaction was initially twofold: 1) "Gee it's nice that gamers get good press for once", and 2) "Gee, that could have so easily gone wrong". But after a bit, I got to thinking about this in a bit more depth. the important point in this article isn't that a gamer used virtual training to save lives, but that the game actually used highly useful virtual training.
You see, back in the 1980s, one of the Big Things that was being touted about Virtual Reality (and computers in general) was that VR training was right around the corner, and was going to supplant standard learning methods. In the 90s we were going to be going into classrooms, putting on our VR goggles, and running through video-game style scenarios that would teach us anythng without the need for teachers. It's interesting to me that one of the elements of computer applications that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside is virtual training. Not that computers aren't being used for learning and training; distance learning has largely migrated over to online courses. And of course airplane, tank and medical simulators are common. But the development of a whole new style of learning has been much slower than other computer applications.
Perhaps one of the things that needed to be accomplished before virtual training could take off was improving the quality of the VR reality to get acceptable levels of fidelity. Also MMORPGs in creating flexible, open-ended scenarios was probably useful- II don't think it was a coincidence this story came out of America's Army. All this being the case, one may expect that in the last few years, more and more VR learning applications would be coming out, and indeed that seems to be the case. Which means we may yet be "right around the corner" from an explosion of VR training applications. Now, if they could only manage to miniaturize the damn VR goggles to a usable size...
Any thoughts?
Gamer uses virtual training to save lives
My reaction was initially twofold: 1) "Gee it's nice that gamers get good press for once", and 2) "Gee, that could have so easily gone wrong". But after a bit, I got to thinking about this in a bit more depth. the important point in this article isn't that a gamer used virtual training to save lives, but that the game actually used highly useful virtual training.
You see, back in the 1980s, one of the Big Things that was being touted about Virtual Reality (and computers in general) was that VR training was right around the corner, and was going to supplant standard learning methods. In the 90s we were going to be going into classrooms, putting on our VR goggles, and running through video-game style scenarios that would teach us anythng without the need for teachers. It's interesting to me that one of the elements of computer applications that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside is virtual training. Not that computers aren't being used for learning and training; distance learning has largely migrated over to online courses. And of course airplane, tank and medical simulators are common. But the development of a whole new style of learning has been much slower than other computer applications.
Perhaps one of the things that needed to be accomplished before virtual training could take off was improving the quality of the VR reality to get acceptable levels of fidelity. Also MMORPGs in creating flexible, open-ended scenarios was probably useful- II don't think it was a coincidence this story came out of America's Army. All this being the case, one may expect that in the last few years, more and more VR learning applications would be coming out, and indeed that seems to be the case. Which means we may yet be "right around the corner" from an explosion of VR training applications. Now, if they could only manage to miniaturize the damn VR goggles to a usable size...
Any thoughts?
The future of MMORPGs
Jun. 21st, 2006 09:18 pm
Well, after seeing this music video- which finally resolves the endless debate between Guild Wars and World of Warcraft- I got to thinking about the future of Blizzard and MMORPGs in general. And dance
Based on the above, it seems obvious what the next step for Blizzard should be- combine Dance Dance Revolution with Space Channel #5, to create World of DanceCraft. We can have all the regular MMORPG elements: guilds, instances, neat costumes and annoying noobs- except instead of 40-man raids, we'd have 40-man raves. Single-handedly Blizzard would reduce the amount of obesity in the Western world, at the cost of people dying from spending eight hours dancing while trying too conquer the elite dance boss in "Scholodanceme".
Eventually as VR improves, someone in Blizzard will have the brilliant idea that will result in Bliz conquering the world's economy: combining MMORPGs with office applications to form World of OfficeCraft. Productivity will skyrocket, even as worker health deteriorates, as workers will stay in the office for days on end, loked in VR trying to produce enough paperwork to get their Night Elf accountants up to level 60. Concerns about environmental damage will lessen, as few people will be seeing the actual outside world anyway. Finally, about the time somebody figures out a way to keep a person in VR indefinitely, Bliz will come out with it's final MMORPG: World of FamilyCraft, and then World of Worldraft. It will then be up to our robotic servants turned overlords to maintain our cryotubes while we retreat to completely virtual existence.
So yes, we ARE looking at the eventual end of the human race, but not Can't t
Based on the above, it seems obvious what the next step for Blizzard should be- combine Dance Dance Revolution with Space Channel #5, to create World of DanceCraft. We can have all the regular MMORPG elements: guilds, instances, neat costumes and annoying noobs- except instead of 40-man raids, we'd have 40-man raves. Single-handedly Blizzard would reduce the amount of obesity in the Western world, at the cost of people dying from spending eight hours dancing while trying too conquer the elite dance boss in "Scholodanceme".
Eventually as VR improves, someone in Blizzard will have the brilliant idea that will result in Bliz conquering the world's economy: combining MMORPGs with office applications to form World of OfficeCraft. Productivity will skyrocket, even as worker health deteriorates, as workers will stay in the office for days on end, loked in VR trying to produce enough paperwork to get their Night Elf accountants up to level 60. Concerns about environmental damage will lessen, as few people will be seeing the actual outside world anyway. Finally, about the time somebody figures out a way to keep a person in VR indefinitely, Bliz will come out with it's final MMORPG: World of FamilyCraft, and then World of Worldraft. It will then be up to our robotic servants turned overlords to maintain our cryotubes while we retreat to completely virtual existence.
So yes, we ARE looking at the eventual end of the human race, but not Can't t
