Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

EVE online used to inspire the best writing about games. The sandbox universe of New Eden gave rise to a million stories and the uncompromising ruthlessness of the game ensured that many of those stories were worth reading. Epic stories like the Guiding Hand Social Club's meticulous evsiceration of Ubiqua Seraph  caught the attention of main stream media but I have always enjoyed more mundane stories of the day to day experiences of capsuleers: tales of piracy and revenge, tales of exploration and discovery, tales of incompetence and mastery. I myself was never more than a very casual EVE player and yet it inspired some of my own favourite writing Where have all these great EVE blogs gone? Some stalwarths like Wilhelm over at the Ancient Gaming Noob   still write regularly about the game but these are stories of participating in mega alliances and huge wars. This seems to have become a feature of EVE writing lately. The politics of mega alliances dominates everything and g...

I actually bought a second hand PS3 in order to play this highly acclaimed game.  I love the strong characters. I loved the atmospheric music and settings. I loved the attention to detail in the rendering of a post apocalyptic world.  I loved the fact that  the game had such a strong story line. I am still trying to figure out whether or nor I actually enjoyed the story but that doesn't take from the fact that I know it is an exceptionally well done story.  I have more mixed feelings about the game-play. Shooting was awkward although it did get easier towards the end when I had a better selection of weapons and was more used to it. Melee combat is actually easier than shooting and more effective but melee weapons break after a few hits which severely limits the usefulness of melee. The stealth abilities in the game are really superb but there are many section s where you still have to kill all the enemies even if you use stealth. My biggest gripe with the ...

Perhaps that is not surprising but you might be surprised to know why it scares me. I have dreamed about virtual reality and virtual worlds since I was a kid back in the 1970s. The distopian fiction of William Gibson didn't put me off virtual worlds  instead it opened my eyes to the incredible possibilities. Virtual reality would offer humans a chance to escape from physical limitaions and the fictional representations of virutal reality in books, TV and movies whetted my appetite for it. During my formative years in the 1970's and 80's the hardware available could barely host crudely pixelated 2D environments and yet they fed the spark of my enthusiasm. When three dimiensional game worlds became possible with 1990's hardware I got further sucked in and PC gaming became my main hobby. The advent of online multiplayer worlds in the noughties was further proof that this was really going to happen. At the time I thought  / hoped that the mmorpgs might develop over time t...