Those of you whom know me know how much of a fickle person I can be. Especially when it comes to playing computer games.
Usually, I can be quite enthusiastic at first.. even over the top, but my interest quickly wanes as I discover the game to be quite repetitive and non-challenging. Hence my lack of desire to play something like World of Warcraft or Everquest on a regular basis. Or even a non-regular basis. My problem is this:
If I do like a game, I still don’t want to play it every night/day. I value my time more than that (and instead spend it on endless new projects I seemingly quickly abandon). Online games (particularly MMO’s) require ongoing monthly payments. Now if I only play a game 7 times in a whole month, I’ve wasted a ton of money for nothing. Months may go by when I don’t play anything at all, either too busy with the kids or other Real Life situations or just not interested in playing games. I prefer to be learning how to MAKE games.
Which brings me up to the current line of thought.
While I was in Sydney, Scott was showing me this MMO he and Robin have started playing called “Guild Wars. It’s an online MMORPG where you only pay once and get all updates free. This may be of more interest & use to me as I can play it as often as I want (or not play it as often as I want) and it will be no more of a financial burden to me. It’s still a relatively static MMO with a top level of 20.
Another friend has told me previously about a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game called Second Life. I had read about this quite some time ago and decided it wasn’t something I could get interested in. However.. he mentioned it again when I was talking to him today and I had quite a long look over the website and other information sites related to it. It seems like it might be of interest after all. You see, if you only want a basic account, there’s a once-off fee to get an account and no ongoing fees. If you decide after that you wish to become more involved in the game more permanently, you can pay an ongoing fee and have your own land, etc in the game. Also, in this game you can make vehicles, clothing, animals, swimming pools, homes.. anything you want and sell it to other people. You can even write your own in-game games for people to play, using the game’s scripting language LSL (Linden Scripting Language) which is a bit like C++/Java. This could be where an MMO would grab my attention. You can even add effects to objects you make such as gravity or program it to react in different ways to people and other objects in the game (also the weather).
It remains to be seen.
The game has a 7 day trial account which you can test it out with, so I might give it a go tonight and see what I think. If it looks good enough, I might get a basic account. The Australian dollar has hit an all-time high, apparently so this would be the ideal time to make such a purchase.
You can even sell your objects, land, etc in an online auction site akin to eBay for real money. Some people apparently make good money to help their “real-life” existence this way. I was just reading how a guy makes enough money in the game selling property, etc to fund his own mortgage. My friend has received two requests for jobs at around US$1000 per job to do some in-game programming for some people. That’s not bad at all! Let’s see where it takes us.
