Virtual Femme

While planning out tasks for our project management system for our new game, one of my co-workers, who just so happens to also be a player who plays my active game, suggested, once again, that I create a developer’s blog.

“Tons of people would be interested in hearing about your hobby,” she declared.

So, here I am at today.com. I liked their look, I liked the possibility of being paid more for my writing, and I liked the fact that I could point people to a place they could read my blog without having to sign up and log in. With so many sites wanting people to subscribe and create an account, it’s a relief to find one that will share content without the need for all that. I liked to be wooed into subscribing rather than forced into it.

I write for a living, but it’s stressful writing. I design and write for text online games that are roleplay enforced. That seems like a mouthful, doesn’t it? It makes sense once all the words are broken down and taken one at a time. Our games are all text. Players log on to the game via a telnet client, and from there, everything is text. The room descriptions are fully written out by the creators of the game. The player characters show up as a line of text (”female catfolk with gray whiskers”), and people interact via typed out commands. These games are all online and played by hundreds of players at once. The special niche of the games in which I am involved are all roleplaying enforced. This is probably the hardest to explain. Each person who logs onto the game picks a role to play aided by pre-determined categories within the game such as race, class, and ethos. Once the player enters the game, he or she now plays a role within the world that the developers have created with care and enthusiasm (hopefully). It’s like entering a play and playing a part that one creates rather than reading from a script. Every now and then, the real world slips in, but players really try to keep that from happening.

Okay, so maybe I do have a pretty interesting hobby which I’ve managed to turn into a job. It’s a niche hobby that remains unknown to most of the people in the world, especially with the onset of massive graphical games like World of Warcraft, Everquest II, and Lord of the Rings Online. In an age where pretty graphics dominates over excellent prose, having a specific niche helps a great deal, but we have to be creative in our marketing as well as our game design. The biggest challenge still resides in enticing people to acknowledge that a mostly text-based game can provide a greater challenge and a greater sense character depth than the flashier, prettier competition. It can be quite difficult in the age of LoLcatz and l33t speak and the English language progresses further and further away from what I was taught in grade school.

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