Soon and very soon

So Cliffside is on the final edit/proof stage, catching any continuity errors, tense issues, grammatical mistakes, or misplaced punctuation. With any luck, I'll be converting it over Tuesday or Wednesday. I don't think it'll be too bad, given that GDocs exports to HTML and Kindle imports from HTML, but we'll see. I've heard the conversation software is a tad finnicky.

Libertarian?

So my business partner Nick has been all up in the face of economics lately, and how freedoms work, which inevitably ends up at the Libertarian viewpoint. It's difficult to argue against market pressure and the idea of negative rights. But of course, people point out that there hasn't really been a significant pure-free-market society in the past. I have a postulate. A libertarian society extends as far as effective communication. You see, since you have no central structure, and everything works by contract and agreement, the ability to coordinate is based on the ability of people to collect and disseminate information. Not a single entity, but all people. That works pretty well when you're on the level of a village of a hundred people, and maybe even when you've got two or three villages working together. But not so much when you have entire nations who need to coordinate on large projects. (There's also the fact that since a libertarian society wouldn't have a government, it wouldn't be recognized as a coherent state by historians, but whatever) Now, though, we have really, really good communication. Look at Kickstarter, Google Maps, Twitter, email, IM...all the barriers that stop people from being able to communicate and coordinate on any arbitrary level are gone. The actual logistics of what coordination can accomplish are solved problems, so we actually have a chance to give it a try. What the hell, it's got to be better than what's going on now...

Sense of wonder

So I was thinking the other day why I don't really enjoy most of the scifi or fantasy (in book, game, or movie form) that's come out recently, and I came to the conclusion that most modern fiction is missing a sense of wonder.

Let's define that: wonder is something that makes your soul ache for what might have been, what never was, and what may yet be.

Since that's not a really useful definition, I'm going to try and elaborate. Wonder comes from the unknown, being faced with it and exploring it, and most importantly with being left with unanswered questions. It's also a positive emotion, so the unknown must awe, it must inspire, it must grant possibilities undreamt-of.

However most speculative fiction these days doesn't do that. This is the worst in movies, but much scifi is in fact horror, where whatever unknown there is, is not something to be explored but hidden from or destroyed. Fantasy falls into "gritty and realistic" (GRR Martin), Urban Fantasy (Every fantasy book published for the past five years it seems), or A Clone Of The Lord Of The Rings.

While the first one fails the wonder test on the simple merit of striving as hard as it can in the opposite direction, the latter two make an egregious error in storytelling, to my mind. They have no original setting.

Urban fantasy comes with a big asterisk saying "Like Reality Unless Otherwise Noted." And how many fantasy settings are just Generic Medieval England or bog-standard Middle-Earth, with orcs and goblins and dwarfs and elves? This is familiar, it inspires not the imagination, and it's incredibly lazy.

You can't explore the unknown if you don't give the reader an unknown to confront. And the only way you can do that is to invent your own universe. In scifi, that used to be by inventing everything outside the Earth, but these days it seems everyone has the same Generic Interstellar Government Of Earth, sometimes with a vague threat or another. There's no outside context problem to confront, no immensity of concept, it's just regular wars and politics writ slightly larger and with starships instead of tanks.

So there's one fundamental thing people need to do when they write - forget reality. Stories are not reality. Oh, you need verisimilitude of reactions for human characters, but nothing else needs to match our world. Your politics, your wars, your histories, your laws of physics. We have an infinite sandbox to play in, your starships need not be buildable, and your magics explainable. Don't write people being terrible to each other because it's realistic - stories are for inspiring, for creating the reality we want things to be, not just ruminating over the grit and nastiness that plague us.

New cover is here!

Man am I ever excited. My good friend Patrick Benjamin did it for me, and...yeah, worth it!

Where's the community in MMOs?

This is going to be an extraordinarily broad-strokes statement, but it seems pretty accurate.

Every upcoming MMO - and most current ones - seems to be a single-player RPG that more than one person can play.

This is most obvious in terms of story, where the quest lines try to make it seem that the player is The Hero, capital letters intentional. That's the tried-and-true (and logical) architecture of a single-player RPG, but in an MMO each individual is just one of many. Some people may indeed be more important than others, but they become more important in terms of community rather than the scripted storyline (...with a few exceptions I'll touch on later). Groups and guilds are formed in order to take down bosses, but for the most part there seems to be relatively little support for these sorts of communities in the framework of the game. For the lack of a better word, the aspects of multiplayerness in MMOs are out of character attributes, completely ignored by the framework of the game universe.

There are exceptions to this. EVE, for example, uses the community to drive everything and in EVE, corps are a Big Deal. The biggest corps shape the way the game plays for everyone, arguably even more than CCP. And the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is Asheron's Call. Yes, it's still around after...what, twelve years? It competed with Everquest back in the day, and I think that if the MMO industry had taken more cues from it rather than EQ we would have been much better off.

Ignoring a completely original setting (come on, how many games need to have elves and orcs and goblins?), AC is one of the few MMOs that actually, in-game, addresses the fact that players have infinite lives, that there are thousands of them, that they can /whisper each other. It had a unique guild system that encouraged more experienced players to mentor newer ones. It had an ongoing storyline that continues to this day. Monthly updates, people. But even though it isn't as community-driven as EVE, it did a few unusual things by including the actions of players in its storyline. It's very hard to top The Defense Of Thistledown in terms of MMO awesomeness.

Let's compare this to the MMO that I've played on and off for five plus years - WoW. In WoW, the player is no longer even in the storyline. Thrall and the Dragon Aspects do all the work. People blame dungeon finder and LFR for the dissolution of "community" but there never really was one. Part of that might be sheer numbers - 10 million people is a lot. But I was there from the beginning, from the closed beta for Vanilla, and the problem started then. Blizzard made no attempt to shape that small a community, and the nucleus of seething contentiousness that was the Closed Beta testers informed the wider community as WoW was released and grew. They've also maintained a distance between themselves and players that, while it might make sense for a single player game company, only frustrates people who continually consume content.

Let's compare this to The Old Republic. Marvelous single player storyline that drives you to a certain level and then...stops. What's the point? If you're going to script the story of an individual within the world, use a single player game.

You need a different kind of storytelling for an MMO, a sort of universe-building, group-oriented storytelling. You need to acknowledge the efforts of players themselves, whether it's a company going in and changing an asset in honor of someone, or an automated way of players making a mark on the world. You also need to give them communities, and not just a guild channel. We have many, many templates for social networking, so how hard would it be to build one into an MMO's interface? It's not like people don't like being in communities, it's just that if the cost is too high (they have to go somewhere outside the game) it's just not going to happen. I think WoW has lasted as long as it has because it's frankly the most polished and best-feeling MMO to play that's out there. But I don't think it's a good model for the future. For that, you should look to the past.