Existensialism

[Avu]

He was born for greatness that one!

[stryfe1986]

Talking to Pacho made me realize this while I was paving a road to Sodom. He said that this game has no endgame features, and incidentally, I recalled a TIME article on Grand Theft Auto 4 and it's sandbox elements. In a game with no clear objectives, and with near limitless possibilities, what exactly are we doing here?

What are your reasons for playing this game, state them now;

after i grow board of this i will walk until i reach an invisible wall and then i shall create a road from one end of the world to the other (a paved one too) across the river and everything this is my last goal, but i just started like a week ago and so far my goal is to eventually found my own village; babylon stats.

[Cairon]

I guess a long term goal of mine is to drive Avu to rage quit by campaigning for features that specifically hamper his ability to enjoy the game...

I Lol'd quite heartily

As for me... Hrmm... I don't know. I enjoy mapping quite a bit. Currently building a new settlement after I abandoned my last one... (hence why I haven't posted any new maps )

[Jackard]

I guess a long term goal of mine is to drive Avu to rage quit by campaigning for features that specifically hamper his ability to enjoy the game...

unfortunately for the rest of us most of said features happen to be quite thoroughly terrible

[theTrav]

I guess a long term goal of mine is to drive Avu to rage quit by campaigning for features that specifically hamper his ability to enjoy the game...

unfortunately for the rest of us most of said features happen to be quite thoroughly terrible

What are you talking about man, crop disease is a terrific idea! REALISM++!

[Zirikana]

lol... hooray for REALISM!!! Let's all die of old age after so many in-game years! Let's be coerced into paying taxes or having our characters thrown in jail! Let's NOT be able to catch a wild rabbit by walking as CLOSE TO IT as possible, then grabbing it!

hehe, i'm just messing with you. Crop disease may not be too terrible, so long as there were ways of dealing with it, and it wasn't just a random "oh, by the way, your food supply is all dead. and so are you. BURN!". Maybe if you implemented compost or some kind of natural pesticide based on current objects (i'm not even gonna try to come up with an idea for that one... you guys figure it out if you want)... Then if you just were a lazy farmer, you'd stand a higher risk of losing crops. Beehives could work in there somehow too maybe.

and, oh yeah.... ahem... existenzialism... um.... errrr... i guess sometimes I feel a twinge of Sartreian nausea when I can't decide what to do next... Silkworms are all happy, food supplies are high, fence is all done, saplings and crops are all growing... But then I just log out and eat a cookie. So the game really is fundimentally anti-existentiallist since you can always quit and come back to it, and play the game on your own terms without being forced to act or die. But then again, so is every video game. Guess that's why we play them.

[theTrav]

erm... The crop disease stuff was a joke... quite definitely a joke, possibly the most horrible mechanic I could come up with...

Aging and death sounds good though

But then I just log out and eat a cookie.

I regard that as something of a weakness... The game should be fun and rewarding when you're not "working" I think I'd enjoy a virtual world where people spent at least a bit of their time just "hanging out" rather than grinding away and complaining when there was nothing for them to grind on

[Avu]

You should try second life dude.

[Zirikana]

... The crop disease stuff was a joke...

/sigh of relief/ my forum sarcasm radar isn't quite working lately. What is it called when you defend or try to elaborate someone else's idea even when you're not too fond of it yourself? Not devil's advocate... devil's prosecutor? i have no idea.... anyway, I know that having played (prepare to hurl shoes and dead cats and food scraps at me) runescape, they have a crop death system, and it was so godawful horrible even with herbicides and compost. A mechanic for squeezing out a little extra efficiency from farming if you put the effort in would be welcome. A random sword (scythe?) of damocles would certainly not be.

I second the hanging out thing, it's one of the biggest advantages of an MMO, but for the moment i'm pretty much alone in the hearthlands so unless the deer are feeling particularly talkative...

[Chakravanti]

Politics

This. This is end game. It's also the threshold that kills the majority of the playerbase. For better or worse.