The Draversi Tournament in PHQ has ended, and LordAsriel turns out to be our King of Draversi.
I've written another episode of my Quick Movie Reviews series, and added a review about the great game Dreamfall.
I've recently played twenty minutes of Lord of the Rings Online, which turned out to be World of Warcraft with a Tolkien skin. I also gave Vanguard a try, which - surprisingly - resembled World of Warcraft in a lot of aspects. Copying is a form of flattery, or in this case it's a sign of let's-do-what-we-know-works. I also installed Second Life, created a character, logged into a server and uninstalled it again.
After all, I think I'm done with MMORPGs. First of all, I don't need any virtual friends. I have my own community already. Second, I don't need Second Life to show off artistic skills, I have my websites. The same reason I believe MySpace is completely unnecessary for me - I already have websites with my content, why should I bother creating another website just because people on MySpace only surf around MySpace? I have set up a simple MySpace page and yet I still hear complaints and/or suggestions to spice it up with drawings or some such, because "it's like a business card".
Third, MMORPGs are designed to take long. You don't get instant entertainment value for your buck, you get it after running ten minutes from point A to point B, or after killing X of creature type Y. Whereas would you be playing, say, Dreamfall, you would receive constant entertainment. No struggle or unnecessary wasting of time involved.
And why are there still so many MMORPGs coming out? With WoW and Second Life taking over most potential gamers, what's left of the market for companies to decide and build a new world? Why does Sony think Home will work when there are things like Second Life and even smaller scale social platforms like Gaia Online already around? Where are the people to fill all those places?