Scott over at Broken Toys wrote an interesting article about the age-old conflict between so-called casual gamers and hardcore gamers. Basically, he talks about how casual players often are disappointed when they reach 60 in WoW and discover that the WoW end-game is as raid heavy as any other MMO. I think he may have hit the nail on the head towards the end of the article, when he talks about what the casual players are looking for:
Podz recently mentioned an article about game replayability that I found interesting. It seems everyone has such different ideas of the kinds of games that can be played over and over again, though there were certainly some titles that kept showing up in the comments. Anyway, I felt like a bit of a stroll down memory lane, so here is a list, in no particular order, of games that I can play over and over again.
It’s really hard to find games these days that are worth replaying. I do usually play through Final Fantasy games a couple times, but after that I often can’t bring myself to play again. That’s often the case with others as well. Once upon a time, I could play through Quest For Glory (I, II, III, or IV) over and over again, but I can’t seem to locate my disks for those any more (much to my dismay). Honestly, though, these days I’m just happy to have a game that’s worth playing through once, much less multiple times.
Looks like someone started up a contest to figure out how to dual boot Windows XP and OSX on an Intel Mac. The author of the site has started taking donations through Paypal for a pot of prize money to go to the first person or group to find a verifiable solution. As of this posting, the pot is up to $6702, which is a pretty nice prize! Hopefully that’ll inspire some hackers out there to figure out how to make the dual boot work.
Harrisonburg finally has a Chick-fil-a. Huzzah!
This is a big deal for me; I love Chick-fil-a food, and I’ve mostly had to go without while living up here. I’m surprised people were camping out overnight though.. that seems a little weird to me.
Blog memes are weird little things. Brendan has tagged me with the latest one, “Four Things”, so..here goes.
Four jobs that I’ve had
Four movies I can watch over and over
Four places I have lived
Four TV shows I like to watch
we don’t have cable, so we don’t really watch TV..
Four foods that I like
Four websites I visit daily
Four things I want to do before I die
Four Five people I’m tagging
Actually, that’s a bit excessive. However, the site for the new WD Raptor X SATA hard-drive certainly has that nice edgy feel to it. Hell, who *wouldn’t* want to watch their hard drive spin? Heh, explicit technology.. I know they say sex sells, but I don’t think this is quite what “they” had in mind. 
This painting is one of the best pieces of Warcraft fanart I’ve seen yet. Just.. wow. I really want to use it as a desktop wallpaper, but I suspect my coworkers would think I was some sort of Satanist or something. *grumble*
I’m not sure why, but I especially love the swoosh of Arthas’s cloak and Illidan’s ponytail. Hee. <^_^;
I found a very interesting article approaching the idea of artificial intelligence from a few different perspectives. It’s written as a dialogue between three students: a physics student, a biology student, and a philosophy student. Very interesting to see the different reasonings for why AI can or can’t exist. Quite long, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. [via]
Just for fun, how geeky are you? I’m 45.75937% - Super Geek. d(^_^)
Hell, I should get extra points for that Database post I just wrote yesterday. Database design, programming, AND roleplaying systems, all in one. *flex*
I know I’ve mentioned a couple of times this RoR project that I’ve been toying with for a while. The most interesting thing for me so far has been that I’ve had to learn a lot about database structure and modeling before I’ve even gotten to the Rails part.
It’s amazing how much abstraction our brains are capable of that we don’t even realize until we sit down and try to represent a “simple” concept for a computer database. What I’ve been working with for this project has been a way to store the Disciplines and talents from the Earthdawn system in a database - the eventual product being an app that serves as a management tool of sorts, allowing for simple editing, display, and adding new talents or Disciplines into the system. It’s possible that somewhere down the line this could be a community thing, but for now, I’m mostly interested in it for my own use. From my days of playing Earthdawn, I always felt that the Discipline system was fairly simple. Hah. Then I tried to figure out how to represent a Discipline as a row in a table, and all hell broke loose.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Earthdawn, let me see if I can summarize how the Discipline system works. Basically, a Discipline is a “class” that a character in the RPG may take that defines what role it plays in the party. This might include the warrior or wizard, familiar roles we all know and love (*cough*) from AD&D or WoW. Each Discipline consists of at most 15 circles, though many may have as few as 8 or 12. These circles represent levels of advancement and talent availability. The first circle gives the Adept (or follower of the Discipline) access to a specific 6 talents (differing by Discipline, of course), which he must learn in order for the magical nature of the Discipline to take hold. After some adventuring, he may then advance to second circle. From third to eighth circles, he gains access to 2 talents. At ninth circle (if the Discipline has one), he again gains access to 3 talents. And from 10th through 15th circles, 2 talents become available at each circle. From a database perspective, this is no simple object; a Discipline has available to it anywhere from 21 to 36 unique talents, each only available at a specific circle.
And that’s not all. Starting at 4th circle, each Discipline also gains at least 1 “circle ability” (though often more are available in the upper circles). These abilities may be simple bonuses to physical or spell defense, or they may be full unique abilities in their own right, much like a talent ability in WoW (Mortal strike or Improved Sap, for example). The tricky part is that the simple bonuses to defenses can and often are repeated at various circles.
Ah, and lets not forget the talents themselves. Each talent is based upon a specific attribute (perception or initiative, for example), though there are a few exceptions which have no base attribute. Each talent also must be specified as either an action (taking your entire combat turn) or not, requiring karma, and have an associated amount of strain taken to use the talent. In addition, some talents are considered “discipline” when used by a member of certain Disciplines, representing the fact that some Disciplines have a closer tie to specific talents than others; for example, a warrior or swordmaster is far more familiar with the nature of Melee weapons than a wizard or elementalist.
Having written the above, is it not impossible to conclude that the Discipline system is fairly complex? It’s funny how adaptable the human mind is. At any rate, I think I’ve finally figured out how to represent the data in a database. Essentially, we have three objects: talents, Disciplines, and circle abilities. Talents and Disciplines are related to each other in that each talent may belong to any number of Disciplines, and each Discipline has many talents; this relationship also makes relevant the circle at which a talent is available for a specific Discipline and whether or not that talent is “discipline” for that Discipline (I’m sorry, I know the wording is confusing). Additionally, circle abilities and Disciplines are related similarly, in that each circle ability may belong to many Disciplines (often more than once in the same one) and each Discipline has many circle abilities. To prevent ambiguity, we also need to know the circle(s) at which an ability is available to a specific Discipline.
In database terms, this leaves me with 5 tables: talents, disciplines, circle_abilities, and the two “join” tables to facilitate the “has and belongs to many” relationships: disciplines_talents and circle_abilities_disciplines. Rails is apparently going to make things a little sticky, because it doesn’t like join tables to have any extra information; it wants each row in disciplines_talents to contain a talent and a Discipline, for example, but I need to have each row containing the circle and a field indicating whether or not that combination is “discipline” as well. I think there may be a way around the problem, but I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, if anyone’s actually still reading, I just wanted to try and put what I’ve done into words. The whole thing has turned out to be much more complicated than I had originally thought, and I haven’t even gotten to the Rails part, but I’m proud that I’ve figured out this much on my own, with very little knowledge of databases at all. If any of you actually know much about databases and want to correct my logic, please feel free; I’m fairly certain that I’ve got things settled right, but I have to concede that I’ve probably missed something.