As an example, I preferred the latter for Joron, a character in Star Wars Galaxies. When I originally created him as a throwaway character to explore a new server, I decided I wanted a smuggler from Nar Shaddaa. In order to avoid the standard “my parents are dead” syndrome, I decided he was raised by a single mother who did a spectacularly poor job. Then I figured out why he was on Tatooine, and since I was much newer to RP then, I used the old new player tutorial where you got rescued by the Empire, ran around on their ship, and dumped in Eisley. Everything else developed naturally over time, whether via RP or cooperating with other folks looking for hooks for their own characters.

Conversely, with Kudon in EVE Online, I got very detailed. I started with the focus I wanted: a Minmatar combat pilot. From there, I looked at the background that fit him during the character creation, wrote a story or two that defined how he got his start, and directed his skills towards his concept. The process was far less organic and far more engineered. While I enjoyed the time I spent writing, planning, and fusing, he didn’t stick with me as much as a character that developed “on his own” over time.

Even if a player lets his character develop, usually he has some sort of concept in mind, be it nebulous or detailed. Sometimes that comes from some other famous character or person, or what seems to fit the class / profession that the player wants to use, or from the player himself.

Much like in writing, the overall process likely varies tremendously from player to player (and even from character to character). Sharing our approaches can lead to more interesting, deeper characters and greater immersion.

Casi felt like an insect high on boosters. All those facets of the eye… they had to be something like this. She’d already tapped into the surveillance camera drones slowly swarming around the joint. Not much security on them, certainly not for somebody who’d been doing this out in the deep. With their feeds all registered with her implant; she closed her eyes and let herself float in twelve places at once, watching the vaguely erotic holo-projections of sinuous shapes on the walls. Hovering wait-carts bobbed slightly in the air currents as the desperate looked for their last chance at companionship for the night, whether human or chemical.

Silently, the petite woman stood outside in the shadows, barely noticed by the thugs and pushers wending their way down the alley. The dark sky overhead swirled around the tops of the buildings and antennae, as if it had its own secrets to keep. And indeed, in a place like Rens, the night did have its own secrets. The message had come through the usual channels, bounced through countless proxies and anonymizing gateways. Casi had enough hooks into the Hypernet that she might have been able to trace it back, but that didn’t seem like it would accomplish much of anything useful. No, she figured that if her client needed to conceal his identity, that would serve her own purposes as well. Plausible deniability.

A flashing red light in the lower right corner of her vision drew her attention. Her implant told her that the time had arrived. At least two camera drones gave her a good view of the client and his little alcove. One sat right above his bald pate, looking out at the entrance. Her back wouldn’t stay unwatched during the meet. Another, outside the alcove and slightly to the side, mostly just showed one of the bodyguards. The client’s knee, maybe. But this drone revolved slightly and used wideband sensors, so she “saw” in much more detail, all the way from infrared to ultraviolet.

Pushing her way through the crowd, Casi demurred at the suggestions and propositions from some of the more adventurous types in the crowd. She’d long ago given up on that sort of companionship; direct brain stimulation from the implant hooked straight into her own wetware did things for her no lover ever could. Besides, her mind stayed on the business at hand. She needed to build her rep, and getting distracted on the way to the client meet wouldn’t build it the way she wanted.

Approaching the booth, she saw one of the bodyguards step out and hold his hands in front of him, the timeless signal across all cultures to stop. She did. The brutish male grinned slightly and reached out as if to frisk her. As she narrowed her eyes, she felt herself drop into a defensive stance she’d learned in her last gig. “I’m clean.”

“Sorry, lady. My job.”

The drone outside the alcove showed the client leaning a little to his right, so now she had a better view of the expression on his face. Or of his leer, rather. This little intrusion had more to do with intimidation and power than with personal security. Fine, let him think he ran this meet. She touched a seam on the shoulder of her cloak and it fell open, revealing a gossamer dress that clearly could not possibly conceal a weapon. “Still worried?”

The bodyguard grinned and shook his head. “Nice. You’re clean.”

Re-fastening the cloak, she slid sideways into a seat and nodded at the client. “Not a man with a lot to say, is he?”

“I’m not paying him by the word, Casiella Truza. I’m paying him to do a job.”

She smiled slightly before responding, “And I’m here for basically the same reason. Something you need done?” The ambiguity of the message hadn’t detracted from its core point. Somebody needed some encrypted card sliced open, and a colleague had suggested her name. While the identity of the suggester intrigued her a little, the possibility of broadening her circle intrigued her more.

The client nodded before withdrawing a small metallic case and setting it on the table. Nodding at it, he explained, “The card’s inside. Do what you need to do, then contact back to the same address. We’ll send someone to do the pickup.”

“Pay?”, she asked as she reached for the case.

A thin smile. “Well, time counts for a lot, so…”

Just at that moment, her implant pricked her. Time seemed to slow down, at least relative to her actions. In the space of two seconds, she integrated the visuals from the surveillance drones, filtered through the ambient noise, heard the swish of a weapon as its owner pulled it from its holster, and jumped to her left. A wet crumpling sound came from what, until that moment, had been her client’s head, and his face collapsed inward from the energy of the projectiles. The second bodyguard reacted more quickly than she’d ever seen from a non-capsuleer, and so as she continued to roll to her left out of the alcove, he returned fire. Futilely, evidently, as his own torso exploded against the back wall with the now-familiar wet sound, and the wall just next to her exploded. She barely restrained a little cry as a bit of the shrapnel pierced her hip, but that didn’t stop her from popping up inside the crowd and running in a low crouch. Screams of partiers who’d been shocked into sobriety by the sudden violence provided context for the data feed from the drones, as the bodyguard-turned-assassin pushed through the crowd, scanning for her.

Casi tumbled out a side door into the alley and jumped straight up to grasp a railing there, flipping vertically into an impressive handstand. Just in time to see the killer race out the door, weapon drawn. He grunted for a moment before dashing into the shadows. Stealth wasn’t his strong suit, as the garbage receptacles flying out of his path could attest.

After a moment, she let herself rotate back to her normal orientation and dropped down, hard, onto the alley floor. Her implant’s biofeedback display had never flickered this urgently. A temporary neural shunt now prevented her from collapsing in pain, she saw, from the shrapnel in her hip. That didn’t do a lot for the blood gushing from her femoral artery; she only had a short time before the implant would shut the left leg down completely.

She allowed herself another pulse from her adrenal gland, as wired as the rest of her body. The familiar slowing of time allowed her to pick out an approaching food delivery unit and perform a brief man-in-the-middle attack to hijack control of the on-board navigation system. Warehouse orders transformed into new instructions to drop off a load at the nearby shuttle bay. Inelegant but effective.

The cargo unit did have a passenger seat, so Casi didn’t need to wedge herself into any shipping containers. She settled into the seat and let the frantic biofeedback unit do whatever it wanted, short of inducing an emergency coma. Not that she would really feel any different right away; the neural shunt not only blocked all input from her left leg and hip, but also prevented any voluntary muscle movements so she’d not damage things further.

Screaming law enforcement vehicles whipped past the cargo unit, cutting it off briefly before it could enter into the shuttle bay. Not by accident, only drones operated this particular facility. Her craft rested in a docking cradle near enough to the entrance that she could drag herself into it. The pod would keep her alive, of course, once she got in it.

She paused outside and smiled. Reaching inside her now-shredded cloak, she withdrew the case from an interior pocket. Someone evidently felt very strongly that the data on it should stay secret. That just made things more of a challenge.

As the contacts from the pod snapped into her implant, a system-wide security alert blared in her head. The Republic Security Services warned all officials and security enforcement personnel to be on the lookout for a dangerous and armed individual, wanted in connection with the murder of a senior official.

If the pod had let her blanch, she would have done so. The face and ID attached to the alert didn’t show the hulking bodyguard who’d vanished into shadows of the side alley.

They were hers.

I spend a lot of time on a specific community that primarily uses a forum (SMF in this particular case) for almost everything. Many communities use these applications as sot of a “poor man’s CMS”, particularly as the community organizers and leaders don’t necessarily have a great deal of expertise in web applications or system administration. While a number of applications (bbpress, Google Groups, etc.) do have support for some of these mechanisms, I’d particularly appreciate a third-party indexer that builds upon existing sites, maybe through scraping.

The mechanisms I want to see

1. Share out comments I’ve written into my lifestream. Some of my posts on forums I frequent really don’t have a lot of value, but some of them took a lot of thought and concern.
2. Follow comments from my friends. Other indivdual posters frequently have intelligent, thoughtful posts in threads or sub-forums I don’t normally read, and I’d like to subscribe to their posts.
3. Find other forums where my friends participate; after all, if we spend a lot of time interacting with them in one context, we likely share interests and potential friends.
4. Search across forums similar to how Google enables us to search across blogs. Currently, forum posts do get indexed but a special “forum search” would help lead to #2 and #3 (particularly if it had an API).

Coyote by Allen Steele
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Anathem by Neal Stephenson

First, as noted, what pulled me to the game had nothing to do with the content, the mechanics, or anything directly controlled by the developer and publisher. My social connections pulled me into it: I have a sibling that lives halfway across the country. We didn’t grow up together, but now that we’re adults, we’re trying to find ways to have something approaching a normal relationship. Since we both are definitely gamers, this fits naturally. We’ve tried three different games so far, including this one. Whether we stick with the same game or not doesn’t really matter, but trying to does.

Second, when I mentioned all this to some friends, several immediately asked what server I was on, class, faction, etc. This includes folks I didn’t even know played the game. I’m confident that it holds true across other games, too. I likely have friends in a lot of games and don’t know it.

Why can’t I find friends from Twitter, email, other games, social networking sites, IM, even forums? Because they don’t share their graphs. (Any such architecture clearly would need an opt-in design; privacy is a sine qua non.) I don’t know who I know there, even if they’d like me to know. Web 2.0 and social networking fit naturally with MMOGs for any number of reasons, but the fact that “community” always represents a core building block should rank high among them.

Developers really miss major business opportunities for customer growth and retention here. If they make it easy for me to see that I have 17 friends in a game and that 10 of them are on the same server, I’m much more likely to want to try it, no matter what. And if they can provide the tools to stay tightly connected to my friends in their game, I’m likely to keep playing and even go out and try to get other friends to play.

CCP says that EVE Online will be adding some social networking tools in 2009, though I have yet to see any meaningful details on that. Bioware’s SWTOR has some rudimentary social networking in their forum site, and hopefully that will carry over to the game design. Metaplace really focuses heavily on this, though they’re not a traditional MMOG. I believe some of the more casual, youth-oriented worlds get this right, and that could partly explain why worlds like Habbo Hotel have so many more subscribers than traditional MMOGs.

They could include something like the Facebook home page, so you can see when a friend gets a new badge or new achievement, or hits max level, or anything else public about the character. Or maybe micro-blogging (think Twitter) so players can put out very short updates of what they’re doing. Export these things as RSS feeds so I don’t have to log into your game or even subscribe, because they will make me want to subscribe and log in to play with my friend.

In other words, we already form tribes. If we can strengthen our tribes, if you give us the tools to connect to our friends and we’ll stay in your world. If you don’t, somebody else will, and we’ll head over there instead.

Update: GamerDNA seems like it’s doing a pretty good attempt at this stuff.

I’ve never read several of these, principally those that fall into the “fantasy” side more than the “sci-fi” side.

But The Man in the High Castle seems like a natural for Hollywood, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened yet. Snow Crash would likewise come out well.

The Foundation series could possibly do it, though of Asimov’s works the R. Daneel Olivaw mysteries probably lend themselves best to screenplays. We won’t mention the travesty of I, Robot a few years back.

More recently, Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series seems like it could really work as a screenplay, and the author has expressed interest in that happening someday.

I’m wondering what presents more challenges to screenwriters and directors: far-future (like Foundation) or near-future (like Snow Crash)?

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a cue from some other EVE bloggers and talk a little about my current skill planning.

Kudon Astraisx, currently a Minmatar militia pilot, has about 8.4m SP primarily in Gunnery, Spaceship Command, and Electronics. At the moment, he’s working on Electronics Upgrades 5 in order to fly Covert Ops ships. Specifically, I want to be able to fly stealth bombers and, eventually, recon ships. Other than that, I’m still working on support skills (engineering and a bit of mechanics) and some missile skills to increase the damage from the stealth bomber.

Casiella Truza is a cyberpunk-style hacker and researcher with 8.6m SP. She has hacking, archaeology, Minmatar invention, and lots of trade skills. She’s also got T2 Minmatar transport skills. My current plan for her is to get into exploration and build a research-focused starbase. So right now I’ve got Covert Ops 4 going; she already has Cloaking 4 and Astrometrics 4, plus the other scanning skills at level 2. I’ll train them up to 4 once this one is done, as I really want that covert ops cloaking module. In a few weeks, I’ll switch back to research skills for a while. A lot of the gameplay on this character centers around roleplay.

My third alt will remain unnamed for now, but I intend him as a combat escort pilot on Casi’s exploration ventures and maybe eventually running missions for pirate factions. At 2.6m SP, he’s just now becoming viable for that. He’s got Caldari Cruiser 4 and some missile and shield skills, but both of those areas (plus fitting) still need a lot of work. Probably in a week or so, I can get him into a Moa (unlikely, since it wouldn’t kill much) or even a Drake. Long-term, he’ll become a command ship pilot with lots of warfare link skills in case I ever really get into 0.0 warfare or such.

I’m experiencing that at the moment with EVE Online. One of my characters, Kudon Astraisx, flies for the Minmatar Republic, a collection of tribes who won their freedom decades ago in a revolution against the nearby Amarr Empire and the slavery to which they’d been subjected. I’ve consistently played him as politically naive and too idealistic for the harsh environment in that game.

Now this situation has begun to cause even greater problems, as the government he serves starts to revert from a parliamentary republic to a tribal council. This has caused him to become disillusioned at a particularly difficult moment, as a state of (limited) war has broken out between the two nations, with the Amarr having recently regained substantial portions of the initial gains by Minmatar forces.

I feel his frustration. What does a soldier do in that situation? Normally he fights on, aware that defeat would lead to an even worse situation at home. Maybe after a time he returns to his homeland, having completed his tour. From there, all manner of options open up: political activism, quiet working life, mercenary work, government service, substance abuse and depression… The list doesn’t end. We can spin out archetypical templates ad nauseum.

But the characters in EVE don’t necessarily fit those archetypes so well. They’re transhumans, who don’t die except by sheer accident due to cloning and backups. The ability to fly ships via pods rather than a bridge crew makes them so much more effective than any other traditionally-commanded ship that they can strike out and do whatever they wish. As a sandbox game, players can pursue nearly any interest that grabs their attention.

So I’m not sure where he’ll end up; maybe I’ll focus on another of my characters, or maybe I’ll continue his story in unexpected ways. What I do know is that I love the sort of universe we have in EVE, where ideal choices just don’t exist and your character’s future can play out however you wish.

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

I don’t get it. The Boing Boing post on this has lots of great comments; my favorite:

Neocron and Matrix Online have both managed to stay online for now, but they never achieved much popularity and have well-publicized business problems. Neocron recently cut their sub fee in half (to $5/month) and eliminated multi-month subscriptions; MxO nearly folded before SOE bought it and never managed to take off due to implementation problems. EVE Online doesn’t really fall into this category, although it retains some cyberpunkish thematic elements.

So the reasons why this genre flounders really escape me. Surely there’s more demand out there for a solid near-future science fiction MMORPG, cyberpunk or not. In fact, there are so few SF MMOGs out there: add Tabula Rasa and Star Wars Galaxies to the list and you’ve basically completed it. Developers have announced several games, but until they’re released or at least reach beta, they don’t count.

Markets abhor vacuums. Someone will fill the niche. Someone will get it right. I want to believe.