The Escapist, Issue 53: 2020 Redux

[Evil Avatar]

As The Escapist turns one year old, it once again pulls out the crystal ball. The team gives its predictions of what lies ahead for its 15th birthday in this week’s Issue 53: “2020 Redux.” (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/1)

Tim Stevens: Filling the Immersion Gap (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/3)
"Back then, Super Mario Kart was hugely popular, CD-ROM games were all the rage and Joseph Lieberman was getting uppity about Mortal Kombat. Today, Mario Kart is more popular than ever, most PC games still ship on CD-ROM and Lieberman’s still trying to convince parents that games are corrupting the minds of their children." Tim Stevens explores how the games of the future will cross the final frontier by finally putting "you" into the game.

Shannon Drake: The New Gaming Society (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/8)
"The newly mobile class has human needs. One of those is entertainment, and rising from the Wal-Marts, rest stops and automobiles is a booming culture of the arts." In The New Gaming Society Shannon Drakes takes a nostalgic look back to the future at the return of the "Sneakernet."

Gearoid Reidy: Kill Your Darlings (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/11)
"In the topsy-turvy world of videogame logic, if a half-dead baby kitten weakly slapped Mike Tyson on the knees two dozen times, he'd eventually fall down. This was acceptable once upon a time." Gearoid Ready explains why sometimes you have to let go of the past to move forward into the future in Kill Your Darlings.

Allen Varney: Lifegame 2.0 (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/15)
"Neopets, Habbo Hotel, MySpace ... Whether or not these particular sites will continue to thrive is irrelevant. Online networking feels natural to this generation, like Grandpa’s Rolodex and Mom’s Franklin Day-Planner." Allen Varney revisits the concept of the lifegame, and explains how pervasive, demographically-targeted social networks may not necessarily be the ruin of us all.

Chris Dahlen: This One's For You, Coach (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/53/19)
"Nobody will play with me, nobody wants me on their team - so I spend hours every night, alone at home, sucking. But with Coach, I got used to having someone watch me play and lend me a hand." In Chris Dahlen's vision of the future, games will help you do more than pass the time.

[Roc Ingersol]

"Kill Your Darlings" is right on the money.

I can't bring myself to play modern fighters, due their overindulgence in tippy-tap crap. Even worse than fighters though, are modern RPGs. They really aren't any more advanced than TEMPLE OF APSHAI. In many ways they're less advanced than ULTIMA and ALTERNATE REALITY.

Do you know what I find to be the most awkward and unnecessary baggage in modern RPGs?

The infatuation with keeping the math in front of the players.

It's maddening that developers keep going back to such abstracted damage and magic models, borrowed nearly wholesale from a pen-and-paper RPG, and keeping all their internals visible to the player.

Abstraction works for tabletop games, because asking people to do lots of math isn't fun. But the fucking computer could resolve an entire compaign's worth of tabletop combat in a fraction of a second.

Why stick with it? Why put a 'to hit' roll in front of the player? Why show them an 'armor' score?

They're not rolling the damn dice anymore. Free them up to make the more important decisions: who lives, who dies, who goes first into the ominous dark.

Fuck the dice. Fuck the numbers.