Unlike last week, I didn't really totally grill myself this weekend working on the game. I sort of feel like I got a lot less accomplished, though I felt like there was more time for other things (or that other things happened at all).
Going to the park with the family yesterday was definitely a good thing, but I don't really know what all I accomplished today. In fact, I'm pretty sure there wasn't much at all.
Well, I know what I accomplished - I (almost completely) explored a new area and completed the quest in it with some online acquaintances in a game. I've had some sort of thing brewing against what I'm calling Social Games--the kind of games that leverage the (in my experience, in-game) community that they build up to keep you coming back to them and playing them. I feel that they're dangerous because you can sink a ton of time (and I mean a ton) into these things without really anything to show for it. You have some great experiences and neat stories to tell, but they don't really transfer that well to others who don't have a similar basis for understanding it. That is, nobody wants to hear about your raid. I don't want to say that they're unrewarding, just that I'm not sure the rewards merit the rest.
I feel like it's unnecessarily focusing your time spent playing games (consuming game media) on one narrow aspect. This is a terrible analogy, but it strikes me as similar to listening to only one style of music, or only watching tragedies on stage or something. As I write this though, I'm growing to see it more in the light of a depth vs. breadth of experiences question and considering that choosing depth may be acceptable choice to some. But I've been really turned off to it, lately. Between Wives of WoW, and my own experiences playing on a MUD as well as the revelation I had when I quit these sort of games completely coming off of Evony/Civony, I've got a pretty bad taste in my mouth for what these games have to offer in relation to what they demand.
I don't really want to come out and say they destroy your social life, but I think it's easy to see the feedback loop wherein 1) you establish very real relationships with online friends and 2) you spend time with your online friends, preventing you from doing so with your real life friends and 3) each time you play, you're making a decision to join one group of friends over another, and the more you make it the harder it is to break. Not a problem for everyone, of course, but I spent a ton of my time playing a trash game I wish I hadn't because I had forged friendships with some folks and enjoyed exploring and exploiting the game mechanics with them, and the general camaraderie that developed from doing that.
Now, that's just in the case where your real life friends don't also game. I guess that could also be good, but I imagine the case where one player gets more into it than the rest and surpasses everyone else, causing them to lose interest because they can't keep up is a common one.
Anyway, I've gotten back into my MUD a bit because I'm getting really excited for Guild Wars 2. They seem to be addressing a lot of the problems I have with MMOs. The two biggest things I want to highlight are these:
- No need to waste time looking for a particular type of player - everyone can control, support, or damage (that is: tank, heal, and blast)
- Events affect the world. Actually. I see the potential for stories and world involvement to be much more. Your story and experience is now not just the cool thing you did, but also all the knock-on effects that it might have, and how the world has changed because of your success or failure.
But there is a ton of things in general that look really good and really fun. Check out some of their talk about game design choices at their adver-blog-site-thing:
[Disclaimer: I have friends who work at ArenaNet, the developers of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. I have received discounts on their products in the past. I'm not getting anything out of writing this, though. I hate that the FCC have decided I need to write this.]
Oh, right, the game!
Well, I got it compiling again and things organized much nicer. Not much more progress than that, though I have discovered that the GL_VERSION strings aren't consistent across GLES version! Can you believe that? Total madness! So, like, there might be some future version of OpenGLES that my game just totally barfs on because they have decided to change the string around again. Insanity!
cf the 1.x version and the 2.0 version! 1.x looks like "OpenGL ES-CX M.m" and the 2.x looks like "OpenGL ES M <V>".
X is one of M or L, to indicate Common or Light
M is the major release number
m is the minor release number
<V> is vendor-specific-information, whatever that means.
Now that I know that, I can figure out the version pretty easily, but of course there's no reliable pattern for knowing what future versions will look like (let's hope they stick with the 2.0 pattern, but I don't know what to expect).
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