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Mountains on the Left, Ruins on the Right - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

Nowadays, we have bloody-fisted fighters taking out armies, fleets of spaceships blowing up, and hordes of Orcs dancing across the landscape as methodical Elven warriors butcher them en masse. The audience is titillated with fast-paced scenes depicting people getting to and from places with very little time. I remember a movie which was set entirely on a spaceship, where the audience saw neither the beginning nor the end of the trip. It was the journey which was important. In today's "get there and beat the crap out of them" environment, gamers are offered near-instantaneous gratification in online games, console games, handheld games, and card games. You can assemble a very powerful character quickly and easily. Some die-hard purists, perhaps no more than 100,000 or so of them, wanted the now-defunct Middle-earth Online game to make it hard for people to advance in rank or skill with their characters. In particular, there were huge debates over whether player-versus-player duels should be allowed. After all, some online gamers wait for unsuspecting new players to start their characters out in obvious places. The player-killers (as they are called) savagely murder the new characters, get experience, and take their stuff. In a virtual world, this sort of behavior wreaks havoc upon the psyche of the very real players. Some people just get turned off on the whole idea of playing in an online game. But the response to the player-killer menace (in part) was to create alliances, often called guilds. People look out for each other and try to keep the player-killers at bay. It's rather clan-like, and results in some fierce competitions. Or, so I'm told. The idea of people forming gangs for the sake of mutual defense is a bit disconcerting to the traditional gamer. After all, we were taught that all the players should find ways to work together. RPGs were long touted as a great means of developing team spirit and cooperation. But in today's mega-games, players cannot possibly cooperate with hundreds or thousands of other players. Divisions and strife are inevitable. Which leads us to the interesting question of how one would go about designing a Middle-earth which could be enjoyed by thousands of people. To be honest, you really cannot design a game which is faithful to Tolkien and still pleases the masses. This was the crux of the argument between the original design team for Middle-earth Online and their (then) new managers with Havas Interactive (now a part of Vivendi Universal).

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