I really hate english/alien puns and weird Idioms. two things I’ve been trying to be careful of in my own writing.

In World of Warcraft you can just kill cows with no reactions. It’s stilly, but I let it go because I enjoy the game. (WoW is hardly submersive anyway alot of the time because of it’s very self-conciousbess of the rules/stats and things like waiting in line to kill a creature.)

(Info on the world I’m creating is on my website link for the curious. feedback is welcome. My contact info is on the site.)

There are unrealistic things which happen due to bad writing or limited technology, which is what much of this thread has dealt with in regard to games. There are others which happen to further the game along, which exist for balance, fun, or game structure.

To me the unreality of the solo computer RPG games tend to be more fun than those of the MMORPGs. Obviously many disagree, given the success of WoW.

OTOH, if they ever made that Firefly MMORPG I’d be there in a heartbeat.

Happily I have real life friends who no longer live here but who like games so we meet on the mmorpg. The mmorpg then becomes more of a team thing where the group works to accomplish goals. We also share resources and information.

The mmorpg tends to be dumbed down from rpgs as well so it may also be a matter of mental laziness on my part… a laziness that seems to increase since I retired from my day job.

The better mmorpg do not allow looting of other player’s toons. Any battles with pcs tends to be in specifical designated zones where the only loss is a small amount toward repairing equipment and whatever personal esteem you give up when losing a battle.

In WoW these can be as large as 40 people vs 40 people with a set of goals required to achive victory, or with hundreds vs hundreds (Dark Age of Camelot in its heyday) for control of zones, castles and artifacts. Sometimes raids/tactics/logistics would be planned days in advance. It was fun though perhaps a bit involved.

For days when I do not have the time/desire to make the time commitment required for a mmorpg I play CIV4 (solo) or NFL Head Coach.

I used to play AD&D years ago with people from the office but the group broke up when several people left the firm (and in one case left the province). It doesn’t help that my beloved doesn’t care for this type of game though we still play cribbage and used to play Eurorails and History of the World (we would take two civilizations each) all the time.

I like some of the unrealisms of the game world in my solo play — I like being able to save and restart from a particular instance, so I can follow different paths of action and see where they lead. I like being able to stab the shop keeper and the guard (yeah my character is getting stronger) and rummage through his stuff, then maybe decide I wanted him alive after all. Similarly, games where I can realistically be taken out with one bullet tend not to be as fun. Also, I like that it is just a collection of 1s and 0s I’m interacting with, not someone’s character they’ve invested lots of time and effort into, only to have me stab them in the back for their 10 gold pieces and that pretty shirt I want to dress my avatar in.

This uncanny thing works for landscape and mobs as well. The cartoonish aspect allows for more artistic freedom. It is possible to achieve a greater appearance of variety while using the same basic chracter model with the cartoon figure as bold artistic embellsihment can be used with out being out of context. In Lotro, with its attempts at greater realism, it is more difficult to feel there is more variety with the pallette that is being used.

There is a place in the Outlands where the planets in the sky call to mind the earlier works of Vallejo (I think it was his works). Such a scene in LotRo (or Dark Age of Camelot) would be jarring but here it works.

Does the same priciple work as well in fiction? The lightly sketched character allowing more room for future growth/potential or does it translate into cliche? Does this still work for electronic games because they are still relatively new, without the centuries (milleniums?) of past works to compare them too? With advances in cgi, how long before entire game worlds are visually indistinguishable from real life? Will dialogue be the stumbling block (has someone said this earlier in the thread? there was a lot of talk of idiom)? Once the graphics are perfect will it all be characterization, plot and dialogue?

On another note I did find Morrowind a bit too clunky in terms of gameplay. It never held my interest very long though I have given it a try on several occaisions. It may also be the solo play aspect of it that lets me down. I prefer the interactive world of a good MMORPG to a solo RPG (I have the lifetime subscription to LotRo and am a regular player of WoW (horde LLande). It may be that I am not as interested in interacting with the computer non player characters as much as real people or it may be some other aspect of game play.

But seriously, yes, that’s how you can tell the author had a clue about the way science works, if an old SF novel still makes some sense. You always have to grant them some missteps and mistakes, but some old stuff does last surprisingly well. You can even go back to Poe’s strange work Eureka and see some surprisingly accurate intuitions about modern physics notions that I doubt most of Doc Smith’s contemporaries would have entertained.

Of course, then there’s the squickiness of implied incest in the last book… the scene where the Kinnison boy meets his mom in space was really uncomfortable to read… but that’s just Lensmen. Other writers predict things far more accurately, and some things (such as the tactical tank used in the last couple books) were borrowed directly from sci-fi.

I can say that as I’ve become more educated about certain topics, their mistreatment becomes more pronounced to me and more world breaking.

Case in point: I was playing around with my new Netflix account and decided to watch an older Sci-Fi called “Soldier” with Kurt Russel as “raised from birth to be a compliant soldier” type character. One world breaker was his character being transported to a “garbage planet” in a hold that, apperently, was pressureized. I couldn’t imagine a universe in which it would be economical to transport waste across interstellar distances to be dumpted on a planet that had a breathable atmosphere. What a waste! Admitedly, I was not expecting much from the flic, but there were so many gaping holes that it became a game of “find the next scientific inconsitancy” rather than enjoying the movie.

One of my guilty pleasures are the “J.D. Robb” (Nora Roberts) detective novels. They are pure pulp, but have engaging characters. The world breaker is that in 2059 everyone has a cell phone but the police cannot get a record of who called who. Lacking an explanation involving a sudden increase of personal privacy (which is unsupported by the rest of the world), this seems completly inconsistant.

Actually, failure to correctly predict the future is part of why I rarely read older Sci-Fi. Read sometihng from the 1960s and you have characters punching info into “terminals” and no one has a personal communicator. Internet? What’s that? With rare exceptions, technology that we daily take advantage of is not present in these “far future” worlds.