If only I had known, before arriving at the palatial estate in the foothills of rural Connecticut, the horrors that awaited me within, I may have contented myself with remaining in my modest city apartment in Boston. My grandfather’s passing, while sad, was an event not unexpected by my family, and as my father and uncles are inextricably occupied with their businesses across the Old World, it fell to me as the eldest to assume responsibility for the family seat of power in the Americas. Alas, the richness of the estate was matched only by the evil and insanity lurking beneath the deepest roots of the wine cellar.

Old school baby, old school!

But many newer games now have hooks or preset item positions to make sure we don’t muck up the look and feel of the place.

Tell me the game designers of LotRO want us to be creative players.

You are right, Psychochild … there is at least some creativity in MMOG … some, more than others. UO, SWG – lots of creativity. Lotro, not so much.

The question is not whether creativity is possible, but whether creativity in encouraged or restrained. Do you really believe we are encouraged to use our divine spark to kill those next 10 rats.

Also, bitterly, yours – Tuebit.

If you want to have personal sandboxes for people to enjoy their own worlds regardless of what other people think, I suspect you’ll find that providing that service isn’t a very profitable model. If only there were someone around here we could ask how profitable it is compared to following trends like making social games…. Oh, Tachvert!

I’ve been regularly surprised at just how creative folks get, even with the “limited sandbox” of, say, farm-like social games! “Wow, they figured out a way to pile benches and rocks together for a trompe l’oeil 3D effect…” So don’t count creativity as down and out because of more tightly-controlled experiences.

That said, I’ve noticed that I’ve been much more likely to “watch” games and play in more-or-less expected ways over time. Whether that’s due to the glossy HD graphics effect, or my neurons shutting down in response to my advancing age is left as an exercise for the reader.

You can excercise your full human capacity for creativity while sitting in an empty cell or on a barren hillside. You can even excercise it while slumped on a couch watching daytime tv. You can certainly excercise it in an MMO.

Whether what you create is likely to be of interest to others or to further the progress of humanity in some concrete fashion is entirely another matter.

I’m calling bullshit. Now, you might successfully argue that they evoke less of the imagination, but actually playing a game is a fairly creative effort. It’s something us gamers, and especially many game developers, take for granted. If you want to see this in action, get one of your older family members who just doesn’t “get” gaming to try to play a hardcore game. (No, the Wii doesn’t count.) It takes a bit of imagination to really get into it. (That’s one of the truly brilliant bits of the Wii, it takes less imagination to understand that swinging an item simulates a tennis racket than how pushing a button does.)

Game designers don’t want their players to be creative.

One person’s creativity is another person’s horrible exploit that ruins the game. Guess who is going to complain louder? Squeaky wheel and all that.

Even if you have a fairly balanced game, people still expect you to do something… anything! People got pissed off at me when the updates to Meridian 59 ever slowed down. Plus, adding new content means that you’re going to disrupt something, which creates perceived imbalances, which requires more adjustments (and nerfs), etc. It’s the circle of maintenance programmer nightmares.

And any time a game comes out that encourages player made content, the glorious-ones jump at the chance to point out that 99.9% of anything player-made is shit.

That would be because most of the time the user created content was intended to provide the content to be enjoyed by others. If it’s shit, then it doesn’t really make great content for others to enjoy. All you have a is a bunch of shit where only the individual who created it cares about each tiny little pocket.

If you want to have personal sandboxes for people to enjoy their own worlds regardless of what other people think, I suspect you’ll find that providing that service isn’t a very profitable model. If only there were someone around here we could ask how profitable it is compared to following trends like making social games…. Oh, Tachvert!

P.S. Get off my lawn.

Your fucking lawn? I was here first. Shove off, n00b.

Bitterly yours,

-Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green