Common People

I should probably begin this post with an apology. I wrote it in response to Redbeard's thoughts about the importance of NPCs to our game worlds. There are two distinctly separate threads in Redbeard's post and I've allowed them to get horribly tangled in my reply.

The first is how important NPCs are to making the world feel inhabited, lived-in, convincing, real. It's something Bethesda found out the hard way in Fallout 76. Even when they realized their mistake it was far too late for some people.

The second is whether the ever-spiralling importance and significance of the player character in relation to events that shape the imaginary world serves to distance the player from the game. I should really have posted about the two things separately. I may well do that another time. For now, consider this a broad introduction to both topics.

On the first I wouldn't imagine there would be a huge degree of dissent. If you're interested in immersion, role-playing, narrative or lore, NPCs are absolutely essential. Even if all you care about are stats, gear, progression and glory, complete and total disinterest in the imaginary world that provide them would be difficult to maintain. If you really felt no need for any of that, chances are you'd be playing another kind of game entirely.

Anthropomorhic animals have a head start when it comes to emotional engagement.

Something like a battle royale, perhaps. As Mrrx explains in an excellent post on the game that's supposedly every parent's nightmare (tm The Daily Mail), there are plenty of ways to engage players without using NPCs. Just not in an MMORPG. Although maybe Fortnite is an MMORPG. I might wait until I've played it before I leap to any conclusions on that.

The extent to which NPCs matter varies from gameworld to gameworld. In games with strong, linear narrative structures like FFXIV there are times (quite a lot of times in my limited experience) when it seems as though the main reason players are even allowed into the game is to facilitate the stories of the NPCs.

In the kind of MMORPGs I prefer, the NPCs take something of a more democratic stance. They live there, you live there (well, your characters live there and you through them), you'd all just better try to get along.

In the original EverQuest, World Warcraft or EverQuest II, in Guild Wars 2 and most especially in the exemplary Vanguard, I never felt my characters were substantively different to the townsfolk, farmers and guards, who handed out jobs that felt like the kind of things Steinbeck would have had the Joads do, had they lived in Norrath not the Dust Bowl. The threats may have been wasps the size of turkeys or ratmen stealing apples but the reason they had to be stopped was so the crops could be brought in safely and merchants could bring them to market.

All of those games did have detailed and epic narratives but they took place somewhere high above the mortal perceptions of my humble characters. In some cases quite literally, away in other planes of existence.

EverQuest is one of the rare games I've played where even non-speaking NPCs seem to have personalities.

The practice then was to tell those stories only in raids. And by most estimates of the period only something like ten per cent of players raided. The rest of us picked up fragments, rumors, scattered news from the ethereal front lines.

It reminded me of warfare before modern telecommunications, where everyone knew something was going on, something that might change their entire way of existence, but it was all happening a long way away, somewhere across the water. If the war ever came to you, by the time you heard about it, it would be too late to do anything - as if you even could - so why worry? Meanwhile gnolls were stealing babies and orcs were in the woods and someone better do something about it and the someone might as well be you.

I used to feel very strongly about this kind of thing. Long before there were any MMORPGs I played a little Dungeons and Dragons. The group I was in played a bunch of different tabletop rpgs over five years or so in the mid-eighties but our first campaign was AD&D, first edition, and it set the pattern for all the others.

No-one was interested in fighting gods. We drew our line at trans-dimensional travel. Small dragons terrorizing market towns we might deal with if we felt no one else was going to do it The occasional minor demon lordling, at a pinch. By the time we hit level eight, though, our suspension of disbelief was shot.

That's why we kept starting over and over in new campaigns and new systems. Well, that and the insatiable curiosity for novelty among some of the group, plus the almost pathological passivity of the rest.

GW2 balances the very large with the very small rather well. Figuratively and literally.

When I transferred my roleplaying affections to online games I kept that mindset. Or tried. For many years I remained uncomfortable with extraplanar excursions and battles with demi-gods. I played so many characters partly so I could keep going back to the beginning, the leveling game, where the enemies were mortal and the stakes small.

As Redbeard says, "MMOs present a conundrum: you need to keep people interested by showing off "more" and "better" and "cooler" with each new expac". As characters get stronger so must their opponents and you can't sell your third, fourth, fifth expansion with a marketing campaign based on "yet more farmers with beetle problems in the lower fields, only this time the beetles are really big".

Developers seem to have two fundamental solutions to the problem of how to keep the players from noticing they just bought the same game for the umpteenth time: spectacular visuals and extremely big numbers. The new cities and zones become more fantastical, more other-worldly, more alien. The mobs become bigger and tougher and louder. All the numbers go up.

In many MMORPGs, higher levels turn into a dadaist fever dream, where you find yourself fighting woodland animals that could easily solo the raid bosses your guild took months to master a couple of years ago. Instead of battling ancient lich-lords you're back to beating up badgers because handing ten of their skins to a gate guard gets you a bracer better than the one the elder dragon dropped at the end of the last expansion.

My berserker in EQII now has 166 million hit points self-buffed. In solo instances the bolstering system bumps that to over half a billion. I upgraded one of his Ascension spells to Expert yesterday. It hits for between 86,340,040 and 178,114,878. The numbers are so big I can't read them without punctuation. That spell can be upgraded three more times.

Gnomes, eh? What you can do? Well, punt them, obviously.

Account based systems just confuse matters further. All my characters in Guild Wars 2 have senior military rank. Everyone who's anyone recognizes them on sight, even though most of them have never done anything more adventurous than some dailies and a few holiday events. It's disorienting. At least my EQII characters had to finish a few quests before people started addressing them as Mortal Champion or Drakinvess.

At some point it really ceases to matter whether opponents are the avatars of gods or overgrown domestic pests. Trying to hold the line on suspension of disbelief in the face of numbers that big would be fatuous and self-indulgent. It's a game now. The only question is whether it's a good one.

As the explosions get larger, the stakes higher (We have to save the world! What? Again?) and the numbers bigger, immersion and emotional involvement, for me at least, retreat into a dark corner and sulk. NPCs, though, they just keep on trucking.

Each new hub city, each forward camp and outpost, needs to be populated with people for whom all this is normal life. Or life, anyway. Often the NPCs I find myself working with seem almost at a loss to understand how they got there. Particularly the gnomes. The number of quests I end up taking on for gnomes who've somehow found themselves out of their depth in dangeorus waters yet again would fill a large volume of my virtual memoirs.

Social distancing in Khal bank.

I don't mind the gnomes. Their confusion and ineptitude does, at least, make some attempt at grounding the insane enterprises in which we engage. I'm in no doubt what I'd prefer, though.

Nothing beats recognizeable, human-scale cities and villages, their streets filled with murmuring shopkeepers and the hum of daily life. Bree in Lord of the Rings Online, as Redbeard suggests, or my favorites, Ahgram and Khal in Vanguard. It's ironic the full name of that game is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It always felt so much more like Vanguard: Tales of Ordinary Folk.

But Vanguard enjoyed the luxury of failure. There was never even a first expansion to shunt us into the Planes or back to the alien homeworlds from which several of the playable races supposedly came. It's easy to stay true to your roots if you never leave home.

I suspect incompetent NPCs, battles with demigods and vastly inflated numbers will be the best MMORPG players can expect for the foreseeable future. Better that than maintenance mode and closure, I guess.

Might as well just accept it and play on.

Punishment of Luxury: GW2

There are five new overland maps in GW2's second expansion, Plane of Fire. All of them are visually stunning but the most breathtaking of them all is both furthest in and farthest out - Domain of Vabbi.

Vabbi is part of the empire of Palawa Joko, an undead lich (is there any other kind?) of immense power. Joko has a long and convoluted history, none of which means much to me, but his grandiose and absurd posturings, coupled with a predilection for grim and grisly sadism, are all too familiar from any number of real-world analogues.

It would be hard not to notice just how deeply the whole expansion draws from recent real-world history but Vabbi hammers the point home with a determined lack of subtlety, just in case you were missing it. I'm enjoying that aspect of PoF a lot although I'm not sure how well the liberal-leaning politics will sit with everyone.

I particularly liked the lengthy briefing on the current political situation in Vabbi given immediately on entering the map by Agent Hamma of the Order of Shadows. She hails you and then lectures you at some length on the complexities of handling an indigenous population under the indoctrinating influence of a dictator. She places great emphasis on the damage you could do if you just charge in and attempt to "fix" things by force of arms, reminding you that reconstruction is every bit as important as regime change.

As you stand there, taking it on the chin, you may hear the echoing, unnatural voice of the Awakened Affirmation System. This Orwellian device regularly booms out across the landscape to exhort and encourage both the living and the dead, adding considerable weight to Agent Hamma's words. It's chilling and amusing all at once, typical of the black humor that runs through all of Vabbi and much of Path of Fire itself.

The wiki entry for Vabbi tells us that "the province boasted ornate and lavish architecture, fashion and decor in its settled areas before Palawa Joko's return". It still does - and then some. ArenaNet's superlative art department evidently pay no heed to the maxim "less is more". For them it seems more can never be enough.

There is a small problem with this approach, or there is for me, at least. My sense of wonder can only respond so many times to this kind of over-stimulation before the safety switches begin to trip. After a while one glorious sight begins to run into another in the kind of art-gallery burnout often seen in crowds hurrying past each masterpiece to get to the next.

As it happens, Vabbi does have an actual art gallery. I stumbled across it entirely by accident while I was wandering through the confusing halls of the Vehtendi Academy. The Academy is where cadets train for service in Joko's living administration (as opposed to his undead one, The Awakened, where no doubt they will go on to serve in due course, for a very great deal longer and without any further need for pay or benefits).

The dialog between cadets is extensive and often amusing, as it is throughout the new expansion. This aspect of the original game - lengthy and well-written exchanges between background NPCs that add depth and texture to the world rather than further a particular storyline - was sadly lacking in Heart of Thorns but here it's back in full force.

There's an opportunity to talk to some of the cadets about the history they're being taught. Unsurprisingly it bears little relation to reality but good luck trying to convince the heavily indoctrinated faithful otherwise.

In a way you can hardly blame them for laughing at you when you try to explain that Palawa Joko did not defeat Zhaitan or Mordremoth in single combat. Coming from a midget in a playsuit, the claim that you and your friends did both of those things is more likely to inspire a pat on the head and a discreet call for nursie than any change of world-view.

There are other travelers around who might back you up but they have troubles of their own. I was standing staring up at a massive painting in the gallery when I was unexpectedly joined by Explorer Mora.  She began to explain the context of the painting we were looking at, to my considerable interest, but she made the mistake of using her lecture-hall voice.

Apparently, loudly and openly questioning the authenticity of Palawa Joko's many achievements, even if merely displayed in oils, attracts the attention of the Awakened. Very unfavorably so. When Mora deciphered the meaning of the painting we were admiring to be Joko Giving The Gift Of Magic To The World it was definitely unwise of her to be so openly skeptical.

Hard though I tried, I was unable to keep her alive through the relentless assault by the guardians of the gallery that followed. I mopped the remainder of their forces up afterwards but it was too late for the rest of the tour to continue. Mora was gone.

As a dynamic event it was perhaps a tad overtuned, shall we say, but conceptually it shone. I would very much like to hear Mora's interpretations of the rest of the paintings and I fully intend to try again. I fear, though, that it may take a fully-armed tour group to keep her upright long enough to get round them all. Maybe I could recruit a cadre of sufficiently militant art-lovers via LFG.

If not, then onward: Vabbi is stuffed with wonders. There's the Garden of Sebhorin, where effete nobles engage in louche and lubricious repartee even as Kralkatorrik's Branded stalk the upper terraces. I spent a long time wandering the halls, admiring the fountains and killing the intruders. Mostly I was looking for the waypoint. Never found it.

I only passed by the great Kodash Bazaar at a distance but I strolled around the huge Necropolis for some time. The Awakened there seem happy in their work. I watched a mummy sorting organs for the canopic jars and listened to him cheerfully muttering to himself.

You don't often hear the undead being so cheerily, pragmatically positive about, well, anything. Certainly neither the Risen of Orr nor Ascalon's Ghosts ever sound like they're having much fun. Watching the mummies, happy in their work, you can see why the living might aspire to an eternal afterlife as part of Palawa Joko's undead civil service.

There's still a great chunk in the middle of the map I haven't opened yet. More wonders await. The question is, how many more can I take?

Oh go on, then. Just a little one.

One Size Fits All : EverQuest

A post by Telwyn at GamingSF reminded me of something I hadn't thought about for years, namely the way just about every MMORPG has vendors who stand around selling things that no-one wants to buy. It's not just weapons and armor, either.

Food, drink, potions, crafting and harvesting tools - you name it and there's probably an NPC with an inexhaustible supply standing ready to serve your characters day and night (literally). It goes deeper than that too. If your game has housing of any kind then odds on there are basic tables, chairs, beds and bookcases up for sale in a crafting hall or town square somewhere not far from your door.

The longer established your game of choice, the more extensive the range of merchandise available, but even brand new MMOs start out with busy marketplaces and well-stocked tradespeople. And it makes sense in a way, there at the beginning, as hordes of eager adventurers pour out of the gates of the tutorial dressed in little more than a few meager quest items and the odd stat-free drop, while the crafters have yet to find their way to the forge.

Whether anyone actually gears up at an NPC vendor even in those early days in any modern MMO I'm not so sure. It probably depends on any number of factors: how generous the developers have been with the loot tables in the starting zones, whether gear progression is tied to questing, how fast the leveling speed is set and so on. My guess is most of those NPCs find the trade going only one way as they shell out for an endless stream of beetle mandibles and spider eyes without ever earning a copper back from sales of their unfashionable stock.

When I first stepped out into Norrath those many years ago, though, things were very different. I had no concept of "gear progression" for a start. EverQuest, famously one of the most inaccurately named MMORPGs of all time, didn't begin to use questing as a primary means of supplying usable equipment until many years later. In those days we wore and wielded what we could find and we felt pretty darned lucky if we found, well, anything.

Back then I very definitely wasn't concerned over the quality of the armor and weaponry the NPC vendors had for sale. My big problem was with the prices they charged. I remember standing in North Qeynos scrolling through the stock on the marketplace vendors, wondering how anyone could ever hope to save up the outrageous sums they wanted for basic leathers.

That, of course, was when the sight of a gnoll waving a stick could start a feeding frenzy among new players. It might be a  Cracked Staff (non-magic, no stats)! Such a windfall, not something you could expect every session, meant either a major upgrade to DPS or, if you already had one, a boost to your finances of around a platinum piece, always assuming your character had good faction and high charisma.

In such a world, armor selling for two or three times that per item seemed almost unimaginably
desirable, and equally unimaginably out of reach. Even now, seventeen years later, I can recall the astonishment we felt when some high levels (they must have been in the low twenties at least!) swung by the bank in Qeynos and dumped a whole set of chain armor on Mrs Bhagpuss's shaman. It felt like winning the lottery.

It was relatively common back then for higher levels to offload trinkets and trash from their packs on passing newbies, the basic principle being that one man's trash might as well be another man's treasure. And how were we to know otherwise? In those days, hunting out of Qeynos, the East Commons Tunnel marketplace was little more than a rumor and the advent of the NPC Broker system was still several years and a space voyage away. We had no way of judging value other than the prices we saw on the vendors in the starting towns and villages and those vendors were gougers, every one.

They didn't sell rubbish though. The items the vendors had were either identical to the stuff that dropped, often without even the names changed, or, in some cases, better.

The sequence I remember went thus: you began with the newbie short sword you were given at character creation. That, you upgraded at the earliest opportunity to a rusty version, as soon as you could prize one out of a gnoll pup's lifeless paw.

You'd then use your minimal smithing skills to put a dull shine on it with a sharpening stone. That would give you a Tarnished Short Sword, which would most likely have to last you until you were high enough level to hunt bigger game in a dungeon like Blackburrow, where, theoretically, a Bronze weapon might drop.

Might but rarely did. If you had the coin, though, you could skip the unwilling middleman, avoid the RNG shuffle and simply buy a generic Short Sword from a vendor.

If you follow those links you'll see that not only is the vendor-sold sword always available it's also a superior weapon to any of the others mentioned so far. In fact, dropped weapons didn't supersede vendor-bought until you hit Fine Steel, which you wouldn't normally have expected to see until you began grouping in earnest for serious dungeons like Unrest or Mistmoore.

Can I help you, Sir?

So, when MMOs were young and we were innocent (relatively speaking), these basic vendors did serve a purpose and weren't, after all, so basic as you might imagine. I certainly bought my share of Swords and Staffs from NPCs before I had characters high enough to twink their juniors with hand-me-downs.

As the genre matured, if that's what we call it, the window of opportunity between launch and the end of a useful life for basic vendor stock (which in EQ probably lasted at least a year, or until the arrival of the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark) shrank almost to nothing. I remember going through something similar in Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard and a few more but I struggle to remember having bought anything other than consumables from the vendors in the last half dozen or so mainstream MMORPGs I've played.  

Blade and Soul, Black Desert, The Secret World, ArcheAge - theme park, sandbox or hybrid alike, just about everything comes via quest, drop, crafter or auction house. GW2 was slightly different, it's true. The plethora of Heart and Karma vendors did give an impression that low-level shopping might be a major feature of gameplay but it turned out to be a mechanic more akin to quest rewards for a game that professes to have no quests.

And yet every new MMO seems determined to roll out with the same indefatigable salesforce set up to sell the unnecessary to the uninterested. It's become a trope of the genre and one that I would miss were it to be taken away. I may not want what they sell but I'll defend their right to sell it to the end.

And anyway, they must be selling the stuff to someone, right? Else where do they get the money to buy my all my burned out lightstones?

Every Picture Tells A Story : Blade And Soul

Appearances aren't everything, so people say, but in a visually-oriented medium like video gaming they sure can help. Blade and Soul continues to impress me considerably more than I expected and much of that comes down to what I get to look at while I play.

I'd be hard-put to think of another MMORPG I've played that creates such a powerful feeling of open space. The views in B&S are huge. Every time I come to a new area I have to stop to take it all in. The sky seem vast, the mountains loom, the paths wind away into the distance between towering trees. I find myself pulling the camera back to look up. And up. And up.

There's some very solid set design going on here, too. Every small settlement and village, and there are plenty of them, seems unusually convincing. The buildings are placed in a way that feels natural, organic. So often in MMOs buildings appear to have been plonked down without any regard to how or why they might have been built where they stand. Not so here.

Another common immersion-breaker in MMORPGs comes from misalignment of expectation when it comes to size. Rift was probably the worst I've ever seen in this regard. You could comfortably throw a stone from one side of a "city" there to the other. In Blade and Soul thus far I haven't found a place yet that's been described as anything larger than a village.

It sounds trivial but I find it matters. Being sent from one quest hub to the next is not a mechanic I particularly appreciate, but here it's done as well as I've seen for a while and a good part of that relies on the language: it really helps immersion when the description the NPC gives me matches what I see when I get there.

It also matters that the NPCs who send me are so visually striking. They don't all look the same and neither do they look bland or generic. They may be nowhere even close to the genre-defying excellence of characters in The Secret World but they are at least quirky and strange enough to stand out.

Their animations are atypical, too. As I read the dialog (quickly, so I don't have to listen to the less-than convincing voice-work) I'm frequently distracted by the figure of the person in front of me preening and primping, examining her nails or rocking from side to side. It creates an odd, not entirely comfortable atmosphere. Sometimes I just want to get my quest and get away before things spiral out of control.

One thing it's impossible not to be aware of while playing Blade and Soul is that you're playing a game that has been translated from another language. That's not because of any failings in the translation itself. The writing in English is uniformly good; idiomatically sound, grammatically correct, tonally accurate. Often it's genuinely funny, too. The use of sarcasm is particularly well done.

No, it's not the translation of the original language that lets you know someone else across the world is probably getting more out of this than you are. It's literally the language itself. There it is, in front of you, on the screen in unreadable characters; on letters, signs, posters, writing on the wall.

In a way it's a strength. After all, we get along well enough with mysterious hieroglyphics in other imaginary worlds: Asuran and New Krytan in Tyria, for example. People translate those (or, more accurately, transliterate, since they are effectively ciphers not languages). I could, if I was really that bothered, find translations for these, too. I'm not that bothered. I just let them drip ambience.

If the NPCs have charm and personality then so does my familiar. In spades. I am very happy to have chosen the Summoner as my class (not least because the linear nature of the progression so far suggests Blade and Soul may not be a great game for leveling a lot of characters in quick succession). The cat that started out creepy is close to becoming cute. Familiarity breeds content.

Not to say he couldn't be cuter. In the crafting village, the first major service hub I've happened upon, I came across a Groomer. For a very substantial fee (which I don't see myself having for a long time - money is tight in this game at low levels it seems) my familiar can be morphed and molded quite literally out of all recognition. I don't know, though. I'm kinda used to him how he is.

I especially like the way he looks so tentative, nervous and confused every time we stop for a minute. I have so many screenshots of my character, standing, looking overwhelmed or amazed at some new vista that's just opened up ahead of her, while the cat faces the wrong way, looking nervous. Or, better yet, both of them with their backs to the camera managing to express awestruck wonder through pure body language.

The interiors are as tastefully dressed and effectively understated as the exteriors. Nothing I've seen so far has been overdone. It's not minimalist but it shows good judgment and restraint. Dungeons are uncluttered yet interesting, convincing enough as lairs or mines or caves or tombs. Houses are appropriately furnished, functional. If there's a fault it's that everything is very, very tidy, neat and clean. There are worse faults to have.

Lens flare, for example. Actually I love me some lens flare. It's a lapse of taste, I know, but I'm easily impressed that way. When i came over the hill into this after-the-bomb evening glare I actually said "Wow!". Out loud.

Foliage is another weakness of mine. I do like to see undergrowth in a forest, flowers in a field. Blade and Soul serves me very well in that regard. Sometimes I can scarcely see my cat for the long grass. I think he likes it that way. He seems quite shy for a magical martial arts moggy.

There's much more along these lines. The swimming animation is good enough that I've been swimming back and forth across lakes just to watch  it. I particularly like the way the lower half of my character fractures and scatters when she stands waist deep in water. The cat's not so happy about that. Waist deep for her is up to the chin for him and cats and water don't play well together to begin with...

Perhaps the most impressive thing of all about Blade and Soul's graphics is how smoothly and effortlessly they display on my aging, low-spec system. I let the game choose the settings and it appears to have turned them all up to maximum. Everything looks great and there's been no hint of hitching, stuttering or any other issue so far.

All in all I'm enjoying the game a great deal more than I expected and that is in large part due to what I'm seeing as I play. The gameplay is nothing to get excited about and neither is the storyline but so long as I can find new scenery to admire I think this one will run.

More Human Than Human

Sometimes it's not the main argument of a post that grabs your attention but a throwaway line here or there. J3w3l's been writing about Personality and Playstyle and as she discusses her psychopathic tendencies, killer instincts and Bartle scores she observes " I also hold no compunction with my virtual avatars dying either, I do form certain connections to them but not enough to worry about their demise. They’re more tools than anything, tools that I do get connected to but as good as their usefulness."

I can get quite weirdly invested in my characters. At work yesterday, having recently read the news item about a British MP tabling a parliamentary question on the possibility of equating the theft of virtual items with real-life theft, I was idly pondering a world where human rights had been extended not just to animals (for which, of course, there has long been a strong and active lobby) but to imaginary entities.

At first blush this sounds fanciful in the extreme but there have already been murmurs. Both intellectual property rights and copyright law have listed badly under the onslaught of digital technology and the struggle to right those ships is ongoing. A few years back there was a loud buzz around the possibility of digitizing actors. There was much speculation that we might see new movies from long-dead, iconic stars like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe.

That little moneyspinner has turned out to be a lot harder to pull off than early reports suggested but, despite the difficulties, the potential benefits that would come from building a bridge over Uncanny Valley are huge. Spurred on by a series of inconvenient deaths of high-profile and high-value stars, like Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, during the shooting of big-budget movies, development on the necessary technological innovation continues.

AS : Artificial Stupidity.

Much of the discussion on the supposed ethics of this practice, should it ever pass from wishful-thinking to practical reality, revolves around the intellectual property rights, specifically the personal image rights, of the individuals concerned, or those of their estates. Not every country recognizes personal image rights to begin with, of course, and what you or others can or can't do with your own image varies wildly across jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the concept is well understood, as is the concept of ownership of intellectual property rights.

It's not difficult to imagine a not-so-distant future in which this technology has reached such a degree of sophistication that it's no longer possible to differentiate the flesh-and-blood actors in a scene from their digital counterparts. Then add another layer: AI. What if those digitized actors now move and speak according to autonomous algorithms sufficiently advanced to allow them to improvise and ad lib? What if the lines they are delivering have no other author than the imaginary actor himself?

And now flip that back to gaming. Wilhelm and Isey have both been pondering the shortcomings of gaming AI of late. If we ever get our hands on EQNext we'll see the fruit of the StoryBricks project, which purports to be a step change in this regard. I'm not holding my breath on that one, but at some point, just maybe in the lifetime of someone reading this, we might see NPCs in video games that are impossible to distinguish from characters played by humans.

Grawl have rights too! Oh, wait..no they don't.

Now we're deep in the rabbit hole. If Mike Weatherly or some future analog were ever to get his way and the theft of items owned and traded in online games was deemed equivalent to the theft of items of equivalent value in what we call, with increasingly ironic inaccuracy, "real life", then, if the digital denizens of those games were by then indistinguishable under the Turing and Voight-Kampf tests or some newly-ordained legal equivalent, shouldn't the destruction of one of those characters be treated as murder?

This is one of those threads that, if you pull it, the world will unravel. At some point stuff like this is going to be an actual, ethical and legal problem for someone. I just hope that someone is never going to be me and won't have to be anyone at all for a good long while yet.

Until that time, I guess we can all carry on our merry way, slaughtering and robbing all before us as is our established custom. The qualms I occasionally have, sending certain of my characters into tricky situations, or the existential angst that grips me, when Mrs Bhagpuss clinically presses the delete button on a character that my characters knew as a friend, all of that can remain as it is now -  an idiosyncratic character quirk, arch affectation, self-indulgent fancy.

All the same I'd be a lot happier if they'd rename the "Delete Character" button to something less disturbing. "Gone To Live On A Farm", say, or "Retired To Grow Roses By The Seaside". That's what really happens when you press it anyway. Everyone knows that. Not that I ever do press it. Hardly ever.

Excuse me, I think I need a lie down.