Richard Bartle - the man when it comes to MMO design - held a very interesting talk at IMGDC. In it he’s discussing the different types of MMO designs, and how “social” mmo’s contrast with the linear World-of-Warcraft design and the more freeform games like Eve Online. His talk is definitely worth a read, I just wish there was a recording.

The PDF is here.

While I am on the topic of maps… The Map of Thraeton that I showcased last month is now done. That is, as done as it’s going to get without detailed world-building - the place names are mostly placeholders, and so on.

Thraeton World Map

Thraeton Eastern Continent

Thraeton Western Continent

Thraeton North-Eastern Detail

I think it came out quite well, if I may say so myself.

This is my entry for the Cartographers’ Guild’s “just for fun” competiton for March, the River Challenge:

Cartographer's Guild River Challenge Entry

The basic template of the landmass and some pre-defined lakes and rivers was provided by the guild’s community leaders, and there are various rules on the number of rivers the map needs to include.

I honestly did not enter this one to win - the guild counts far better artists than I am amongst its members - but rather I took the opportunity to try out a “fancy mountain” style. As you can see… it still needs some work. ;-)

Today was an art day:

Milky Way Galaxy

Milky way Galaxy II

I spent a lot of my spare time working on maps. Here’s what I have to show for my effort.

First off, Thraeton now has mountain ranges. I experimented a little and came up with the following abstract style, which I like a lot.

Thraeton

Detail view:

Thraeton Detail

I am currently working on climate - wind, ocean currents, climate zones.

In between, I revisited that world which started it all, and which gave the name to this website: Enderra. I began by recreating what geography has already been established over the past 17 years. As you can see, this is not the entire planet just yet - the entire “new world” in the west was never mapped out, so it’ll be added later.

Enderra

I also experimented with drawing pretty national borders. These are very rough, and I’ll have to redraw them as the map evolved, but as a stylistic experiment I think it was quite a success:

Enderra National Borders

As always, I work in Inkscape.

Lately, Ive been working on the outline for my Arnâron writing project. I’m behind schedule with the writing, but after my NaNoWriMo experience I really want to nail down the outline before I write even a single line of actual story. I guess there’s no real hurry anyway. I’m on chapter 7 of 12 for my revised outline, the other 5 chapters are basically still bullet point lists.

In addition, I have been working on Thraeton, which is one of my many worlds, and intimately tied to Terra and Arnâron. Specifically, I have been working on its world map. Currently, it looks like so:

Thraeton - Plate Tectonics

One thing noteworthy about this is that I am using Google Earth for visualization. If you ever build a world, give this method a try; the .kml files are well documented and easy to craft.

Thraeton in Google Earth

You can load the current WIP of Thraeton into Google Earth using this .kml file. Enjoy!

Here’s an assortment of links you might find useful.

How-To’s

• Map-making tutorial using The Gimp.

Inspiration, Locations

• Photos from Paris Exhibition, 1900. In color.
• Abandoned subway stations in New York City
• The Uros people of the Titicaca lake live on floating islands, which is a cool style of living for a conpeople.

Science Fiction Stuff

• Tests have shown that it is possible to protect long-duration missions from solar wind using a magnetic shield.
• Scientists figured out that Mars’ loss of atmosphere to the pressure from solar wind isn’t a slow, gentle process; instead it is quite violent: Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere.

NaNoWriMo 2008 Research

• Wikipedia on radioactive fallout
• Wikipedia on fallout shelters and blast shelters
• Mount Weather government bunker
• Gas masks vs bad smells: Gas masks do not filter out odors, unless they are designed for the job, but vick vapor rub is a work-around used by law enforcement and emergency workers.
• Geiger counters
• Compound bows - bow hunting is done in the US

Here’s a little bit of a bonus and post scriptum for NaNoWriMo. I didn’t just design a fallout shelter, I also sketched out a city.

Saint Brendan, so named after St. Brendan the Navigator, is a large city located in the US State of Acadia. The city rose to prominence as a trade port after the discovery of the Northwest Passage and benefited greatly from the increase in trade with East Asia after the World War. It is New England’s largest city, with over six million people living in the metropolitan area. This makes Saint Brendan the fifth-largest urban conglomeration in the United States, before the Delaware Valley but less populated than the Dallas-Fort-Worth Metroplex.

Major industries are transportation, financial, and high tech. A large military presence secures the strategic location.

Destroyed Saint Brendan

Saint Brendan is an amalgamation of San Francisco, New York, and a few other cities. I decided to use a fictional city for several reasons:

1. I don’t know New York personally, having never been there, and certainly do not know any other major US city intimately either. Potential readers would likely be more familiar with the setting than I and that is a problem. Using a fictional city frees me from the risk of making gross errors when describing the location.
2. A fictional city gives me the freedom to arrange locations and other facts in a manner convenient to the story’s needs.
3. It’s a great way to tell the reader “dude, this is not YOUR world“.
4. I enjoy world-building. Duh!

I am a firm believer in recycling material, so expect Saint Brendan to pop up again in more detailed form.

Here’s another attempt at the CD cover game:

Eryx Elegans, 'Run Away From Life'

I actually edited the photo in question this time; if you look at the original you will see a woman in the photo which really distracted from the composition:

Original Photo

Edited Photo

Yes - it is quite easy to see the photo was edited, but after all this is not an exercise in forging photographic evidence :-)

To critique my own work, the speech bubble is probably a little too dominant and the “band name” logo colors might not mesh perfectly with the rest of the image.

Original photo: Feliz 2009, by murilocardoso. Licensed cc-by-nc-sa.

First off, a happy 2009 to all of you. I hope that you all had fun celebrating the advent of the new year, and that it will be a successful year for you.

I have worked on outlining that serialized fiction set in Arnâron I talked about last month, and I think I am fairly happy with the outline. It’s not gonna be the next bestseller, but for my purposes - advancing the world Arnâron - it will suffice. However, there’s one thing I have been mulling over that you guys might be able to give me an opinion on:

If and when I write these episodes, and if I and my “guinea pig” (I think the more correct term is “beta reader”) then think they are not totally terrible, what do I do with them?

Intuitively, I thought that I should just put them on the blog, but this is not really a fiction blog. Besides that would give them a sort of finality and I couldn’t go back and fix broken things. On the other hand, I do not really want to bury them in my document repository. Critique, feedback, and open development are Good Things. So what should I do with them?

Decisions, decisions!

If you allow me an aside from my usual design work: The defunct MMO Myst Online will be released under an open source license.

Myst Online Screenshot

The company stated on the Myst Online webpage:

Cyan has decided to give make [sic] MystOnline available to the fans by releasing the source code for the servers, client and tools for MystOnline as an open source project. We will also host a data server with the data for MystOnline. MORE is still possible but only with the help from fans.

This is, of course, major news - Especially since the Free Ryzom campaign failed after Ryzom was bought up by someone else. Details are scarce at this point. The license picked by Cyan will be a big issue, and it is not clear whether they will make the data available for use only, or whether they will also publish it under an open license as well.

Either way, this should be a great boost for future open-sourced MMO projects.

If you have played the Borean Tundra area in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft MMORPG, you probably came across the quest “The Art of Persuasion”.

In this quest, the player has to torture a prisoner to obtain information about the prisoner’s organization. This continues past the point where the NPC begs the player to stop, until he eventually reveals the location of a prisoner.

Stop! I beg you, please stop. Please…

When I reached this quest I was playing Juria, my sweet little innocent Gnome mage. Not only do I personally find torture disgusting; Juria would also never do any such thing. (In a perfect world, she would be a complete pacifist, but that is not a course of action that gets you far in World of Warcraft.) Quests in the game are completely linear “like it or leave it” affairs, so there was no option to refuse torture besides declining the quest. Since it seemed that the quest chain was important in the storyline progressing, and because I figured I’d have enough of an annoying time gaining enough experience points to level 80, I decided to simply do the quest. After all, I am capable of distinguishing between a vector model and a real human being.

I moved on with a bad aftertaste and eventually forgot about this quest until Pedro sent me a link to Richard Bartle’s blog posting criticizing the torture quest. Boy did Richard get a lot of (unjustified) FLAK for that, but he is of course completely right.

Games are - besides a fun activity - about teaching us something. Whether it is practicing one’s dexterity and reaction speed in a platform game, our logic or intuition in an adventure or puzzle game, or moral choices. This doesn’t mean games should be preachy, but when a choice can be made in the game, it should offer consequences for those actions and - ideally - reinforce correct moral choices.

The correct moral choice in this case is that “torture is bad”. This is a general consensus, and I would say that anybody who categorically disagrees with that statement has a serious mental problem. Humane treatment of humans and also of prisoners is the basic idea behind the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other such works.

This is also the morality that should be valid inside the game’s fiction. While the Alliance has not always been a “force of good” (there are the Orc internment camps, after all), the Alliance as represented by the players in World of Warcraft is definitely a force of good. Likewise, the Horde is attempting to reform itself to become better people than the horde of the early Warcraft titles. Torture of prisoners is what the antagonists engage in: The Scarlet Crusade for example.

Blizzard does not offer the player any choice; they reward the player for incorrectly torturing the player. The character will gain experience points and gold and - though I haven’t done the math - it is possible that the quest is required for certain in-game achievements like “Complete x quests in Borean Tundra”. There is no necessity to actually torture the prisoner (he does not reveal anything crucial, nor anything that could not be found out in any other way). There are no consequences. The whole thing is meaningless.

Blizzard has passed up a great opportunity to let the player make a meaningful choice. They have failed to teach us anything, and, even worse, are teaching us something that is counterproductive. It would have been very easy to implement two alternate quest lines, one where the player accepts to torture the prisoner, and one where he does not, with appropriate in-game consequences. (For example, in The Burning Crusade, you can choose to follow either of two factions at one point, so it is possible to do this with the World of Warcraft engine.) The torture quest could be the “easy option”, but result in a penalty; the “humane” quest may be a lot more effort, but result in a greater reward.

As it stands, this one quest is a good example of how not to do quest design, and also a very revealing insight into the minds of the Blizzard game designers - and the many, many World of Warcraft players who have attacked Richard for stating that torture is a bad thing.

I am now using DevianArt to host an art gallery / portfolio sort of thing. I will still post images here, but it’s nice to have a community on DeviantArt. It’s also nice to have a simple, art focussed URL that I can give people who are just interested in the art aspect.

My works can be found at http://nilsjeppe.deviantart.com/ - I’d love it if you drop by.

I haven’t spent enough time drawing lately. Today, I had the idea of attempting to create a reflection in a lake with Inkscape. This is the result:

Lake

I personally am happy with how this one came out. It took me 10-15 minutes, I would say.

Just an aside, because this is a bit of a peeve I have:

• You own the copyright to works that you create, in principle.
• Names, brand names etc are protected by trademarks, not copyrights.
• Ideas, concepts, etc can be protected by patents, but only if they fulfill the criteria as inventions, which is not the same as ideas.

Copyright is automatic. You do not have to register it, but where this is possible it might of course help with enforcement. Trademarks must be registered and actively used and defended. Patents must be filed, examined, and granted.

There are certain minimum standards on what is considered coyprightable. So for example writing the sentence: “I love you” does not mean you own it.

A lot of people do not understand copyright, don’t know what it’s for, and do not respect it. Always respect the copyright of others, if you want others to respect yours. I have seen too many blogs use pictures or other material they clearly do not own and are not licensed to use.

That said, the Internet is all about sharing, about a common culture for all of mankind. If you publish something on the Internet, please consider doing so under a creative commons license.

A CC license is an easy way for you to tell others what they are allowed to do with your works. This will help them because they should have an easier time understanding what they are allowed to do and it should help you because it encourages sharing in a respectful manner. And after all is said and done, don’t we all want others to read our works?

But, please, whatever you do… at least get your terms right. I can never take anyone serious who claims that “this word is copyrighted” or “I own the trademark on this idea”.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this posting is not legal advice. In case of questions on copyright law, see an attorney licensed to work in your jurisdiction.