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Architect

Post 1

Afgncaap5

Those who know much about my frequent online activities know that I'm a big fan of the MMO known as City of Heroes. The main draw for me is the "Lore" of the game. As a writer and as a long-time fan of serialized adventure stories and classic pulp fiction, I really appreciate how the information trickles gradually to the player, starting as early as level 1. You don't realize the true significance of some of the things that the people in the city around you mumble until levels thirty or forty.

I think what keeps me playing, though, are the smaller systems. Heaven help me, I'm even a fan of the Gladiator matches in the Arena (the only system that Matt "Positron" Miller lists as a "failure." Come on, Matt, it's a great idea. It's like if the X-Men's danger room was used to play out a single battle of a Risk game.) One of the more noticeable "smaller" systems is Architect Entertainment, a kind of "Virtual Reality Arcade" where your players can go in game and design missions and story lines for other people to play.

Anyway, this last week I had a surprising number of comments coming in about one story line in particular. First it was surprising because it's rare to ever get comment messages about Architect Entertainment (AE) games. It was also surprising in that the story they picked, "A Very Merry Saturnalia", is about two months out of season. (Incidentally, I think that since The Warriors are a street gang that emulate the weapons and philosophies of ancient Greek and Roman warriors in modern days, and since the game lets you travel back in time to a place that is basically an amalgamation of ancient Greece/Rome/Cimeria, it's a travesty that there's no officially sanctioned story line bringing those two together.)

It was fun receiving player comments. Especially the one that said that "it was too short" but gave me a high ranking anyway. That's not *quite* Neil Gaiman's favorite three words ("What happens next?") but it's approaching that ballpark.

Man, I love writing.


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