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- lol
- ty
- k
- brb
- My son's creative process involves altruism. Most of his time in Dereth is spent helping people and giving away his possessions. His life in the virtual world is quite different from my daughter's, which revolves around clothing and socializing -- she'll croak half a dozen monsters to acquire some loot, then happily scamper back to town to cash in her booty, buy the new gown she's been eyeing and chat with the folks in the village about where the best shops are located.
- The only suggestion I'd make to the developers of the game is to allow players who are not testosterone-driven and bloody-minded to get ahead in the game just as fast as the hack-and-slash folks. That would mean more high-level trade skills. Allow cooks to gain points for cooking difficult super foods. Allow altruistic players to gain more points for helping and healing others. Bring in tailors and armor smiths and enchanted weapon makers who can create useful products that don't exist in the stores. And increase the number of trinkets -- if, for no other reason, so that I'll have new doodads to dream about at night.
- The aspect that intrigues me most is how avatars are used. This was a subject we spent endless hours conjecturing on in the old VR gang: "Will people choose virtual personae that are similar to themselves in real life or adopt completely different characteristics?"
- Even without those additions, though, my French is improving. I'm meeting lots of interesting people while learning to understand a phenomenon I never quite understood before. And, even when I have a dismal day at work, I know everything waiting for me in the AC world will be okay -- I mean, "k" -- because it's always k there, sometimes more k than in the real world and certainly more k than I'd imagined all these years stuck in the real world. K. Cya.
- By Dikk Kelly
- One interesting part for both my son and me, since we're both linguists at heart, is the slang. All keystrokes are precious, so they're omitted whenever possible. TY is Thank You. NP is No Problem. RL is Real Life. AFK is Away From Keyboard. BRB is Be Right Back. LOL is Laugh Out Loud. ROTGLMAO is Rolling On The Ground Laughing My A** Off. Here's a typical conversation:
- It's not literature. But it is a kind of poetry because it distills human experience to its essentials. And the francophones who inhabit the virtual town I live in use the same approach. Pourquoi becomes pkoi to save keystrokes. Quebecois becomes kebekoi. Qu'est-ce que c'est becomes kes k c.
I roam around in the morning looking for my corpses saying, "Un autre jour, un autre corps" and hear back "r)" from the guys playing simultaneously in the suburbs of Paris.
- This year I led three lives: one as a defeated investor, one as a bedraggled employee and one as a glorious warrior mage intent on ridding the universe of suffering and rudeness.Maybe I should explain.
- Now I'm singing a different tune.
- Until we sat down to view the game.
- ded lugies round m, smel better n live ones
- here r comps I looted frm a decomped twinked og mage hu logged after buffing me in cit
- np he wasnt usin m n e more
- rotglmao
- sorry was afk coffe ready dang rl
- My own life revolves around exploration and the collecting of trinkets, tchotchkes, googaws and doodads. I'm so mesmerized by them that, for a few weeks, I even had recurring avaricious dreams about Green Seeds, which I'd been selling to a dye-making player for lots of virtual money. And I've done the same collecting/selling with Ravener guts, Lugian sinew and Auroch horns. I'm a regular rag-and-bone man; I'm the Fred Sanford of the virtual world. But I've also cooked every food there is to cook -- just to see what they look like. I've experimented with every type of armor and spell. And I've traveled all over the island -- it's the novelty and sense of exploration that intrigues me.
- I still see most games as a waste of precious time but I no longer raise the "non-creative" objection -- at least for virtual worlds like AC. What my kids and I do in our little world is creative, after all. I see that now; it's just that the medium is an unexpected one. Instead of creating in oils or language or clay or tones, we create in behavior. We create second lives for ourselves -- something I'd dreamed about back in my VR days when I was writing articles proclaiming that everyone would someday live a life divided between the V world and the real.
- Alpha held his hand in front of the screen to dramatically block the Medusa's head from our view. In the serious voice of a drug counselor he said, "I'm warning you now that this is highly addictive. Don't look at it unless you want to take that chance." I laughed. It's a game! I've seen videogames before -- what a childish waste of time!
- What I've seen in my little neck of the woods is that people around me choose avatars that are astoundingly similar to their real selves, even though their abilities are different from their abilities in the real world. For example, they can jump 30 feet into the air, shoot frost bolt spells at annoying goblins and distract monsters while their friends retrieve loot from their decomposing corpses -- but their appearances are often nearly identical to those of the real players. My own characters, for example, are all male with white hair and white skin, and the other graybeards in the game create similar characters. The darker skinned and younger players create darker skinned and darker haired characters. The women players choose female characters. They often experiment with hair color -- flaming red seems to be a popular choice -- but the basic configurations mirror real life.
- I had thought that women might choose male personae and vice versa, or that older players might make their characters younger. But since there's no benefit in terms of abilities to choosing one type of character over another, most people seem to model their virtual selves after their real selves -- as if their avatar is an extension of themselves rather than a fictional creation. Quite interesting.
- Why? A friend of mine -- we'll call him "Alpha" -- who works for a company that creates a virtual world called Asheron's Call invited us to visit his workplace so my son could get a sense of what life was like in a videogame company. The lad was thrilled. He walked past programmers reclining on the floor in bean bag chairs with keyboards on their laps banging out bugs in a darkened room; past artists grooving to trypno while building insectoid monsters and past writers cobbling together lyrical lore and violent backstory. He was entranced. He was mesmerized. And I was utterly unaffected.
- I still can't translate the Swedish I see rolling by on the screen, except for "Hej" which I've learned is "Hello" . And the Portuguese I've been reading lately is so slang laden I can't make it out. But I know there are a few other students of Japanese roaming the monster-strewn plains because one of my characters is named Dai Niwatori and occasionally I'll meet someone who'll LOL me when he translates my moniker. Usually it's someone with a Japanese name too -- often a character from a manga like Kozure Okami . But another of my characters is named Sugar Glider and I've been bumping into Aussies lately who recognize the reference . They'll have names like VegeMight and WizardOfOz and they'll greet me from Perth with "gd m8!" .
- All of these things keep me occupied in and involved in the game. And I derive things from running around in the V world that I can't get in the RL, so I'm planning to stay a while.
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