Serenely Seeking Sixth Screenshot

Spinks tagged me for this growing MeMe (read: me! me!), and while I’d like to think my ego is small and well-behaved, being namechecked turns it into a ravening Hulkish brute. That, and it’s a fun meme. The originator, incidentally, is here.

Like many others (as you’ll see if you follow the meme threads up and across and around), the screenies I have available on this machine are only the tip of the iceberg. Ah, if I’d known in 2000 or 2002 that I’d want my Asheron’s Call, EverQuest, and UO screenies… or my AC2 beta screenies… or even my Horizon beta screenies… Those were the days. Sadly, my occasional fits of deleting (because this comp only has a *cough* 80 gig hard drive) apparently led to my deleting screenshots with it, so I don’t even have my Vanguard or EQ2 or EVE screenshots anymore, and some of those were rather nice. Maybe by the time I’m 80 I’ll learn to have a little more foresight.

I’ve been taking a few WoW screenies since I’ve been back, but loads of people have much better ones, and I tend to take landscape shots more than anything else. For amusement’s sake though, the 6th screenie in my WoW screenshots folder is rather fitting, given the blog name. (It’s been cropped and resized.)

The for-real sixth screenie, though, I picked from my SWG screenies folder. It’s partly nostalgia (isn’t that what most screenshots are for?), but also partly to illustrate what cool things SWG let you do and other games should let you do, though in many cases the actual implementation could be improved.

It’s the sixth in a series of screenies I took that day — Christmas Lifeday 2007 at Galactic Senate city on Test Center Prime. The vegetation is the result of special Lifeday presents you could only open outside, that would cause a riot of wookiee-goodness plantage to flourish wildly for half a minute or so before disappearing. The rest is player-set decoration (or should that be player set-decoration?), the possibilities of which have expanded even more since the introduction of the Storyteller props & systems. The red-robed Wookiees are NPC “props,” for instance. (If you really need to know, I’m the Zabrak second from the right in the front row, with the baby Gurreck pet. That Kashyyyyyyk bantha isn’t mine, it’s just trying to sniff my butt.)

Now, I’ve done my share of griping about player cities in SWG, mainly because they abetted (if not caused) the progressive ghostification of the “real” cities and especially their cantinas, but then again there were many other things driving nails into that particular coffin (the increasing uselessness of the doctor profession as anything other than a buff-machine, and so on). Besides, the benefits of player cities were pretty enormous. I still have a wish-list a mile long for how those should have been done, one item on which would be allowing us to add ROADS or at least PAVEMENT so that our cities didn’t look like jumped up campgrounds plonked on the grass, but still… it’s a great and essential idea in principle. Fluff to the Nth degree.

And yes, fluff and player-driven stuff like housing, decoration, city-building and event-holding really DO promote community. They won’t create it for you, but they sure do make it easier. If you want to get a gathering together it’s a damn sight more fun (and attractive) to hold it at the Spanking Tusken Cantina in Spinksville, Tatooine, than to just mass up in front of the bloody starport. If you want people to lounge about and chat, it’s a damn sight easier to achieve if you have furniture players can *gasp* sit on.

Nostalgia isn’t always a waste of time, especially in MMOs. What we’re nostalgic for is (mostly) stuff that we really enjoyed, which makes it a signpost for future development.

But enough of the tomfoolery and MMOetaphysics. Now to try and get people who haven’t already been got… TAG, you’re it!*

— Melmoth AND Zoso from Killed in a Smiling Accident. Yes, you both have to do it.
— Pete S at Dragonchasers
— Wiqd at iMMOvation
— Ethic at Kill Ten Rats (not all of you — I’ll let other people tag the rest of your nefarious crew!)
— Sara at Symptom of a Greater Cure
— and last but not least, especially if it’ll make the bloody man post, Genda at Grouchy Gamer

PS: Not being tagged doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It just means my stabbing finger didn’t hit you when I was blindly poking through my blogroll. Can someone lend me some LCD-screen cleaning fluid?

_____

* Psst, if you’d like to be tagged and I missed you, just comment. Nobody said six was binding. I am not a number! I am a free meme!

_____

(EDIT — curse you, Spinks, unto the 6th generation! It’s all your fault that I’ve added about 73,239 (hyperbole? moi??) to my feed reader. Gah!)

(EDIT 2 — 6 tags just isn’t enough when you have a gajillion blogs linked and 100+ reader feeds. GirlIRL, you have been TAGGED! Git ‘er done!)