An Observation
A very funny thing happened yesterday while I was work. I was doing some paper work when Ace popped up in MSN telling me to send His and Angels gratz to my wife Rose for her global.
So I called her immediatley whereupon she was like “Huh? whaaaat? How’d you know? Are you ingame?”
“Duh..am I up on your FL?”
“uhm…no. So how’d you know?”
“ESP…” lol
I confessed that Ace had told me when I got home from work. We talked about how the social interaction in PE is incredible and how tottaly virtual a world it really has become. PE was our first MMORPG but since we’ve started we’ve tried other games and have found them to be somewhat “sterile” when it comes to interacting with other players.
We wondered why that is the case. We’ve watched our oldest son play WoW and came to the conclusion that games of that genre cater to “instant gratification” which does appeal to the younger players.
PE on the other hand does have that feature,yet its not so instant,nor is it gratifying at times. You have to WORK to get anywhere in PE, even if you deposit.
This aspect could be one of the reasons why PEs community is so unique. Humans have a tendancy to form interpersonal relationships when they are faced with adversity and no where else have I seen this to be more true than within PE.
I had introduced a friend to PE not to long ago. He didn’t get far from PA but he did say that he seemed to like the game,but that was over a course of about 2 hours total. I told him to get out there and explore and on the way he was bound to meet other people. He leads a pretty busy life so he kind of dropped the game. He did go on to try other MMORPGs briefly but wants to try to get back into PE.
He had done a few websearches for other games and wondered why PE wasn’t way up there with the “Big Boys”
I told him thats because PE isn’t a game really, and that not many players that come in can hack the “Virtualness”.
“But it is a Game!” he said
“Yes..it is..and it’s not. It depends how you look at it. If you play it like its a game chances are very high you won’t succeed.”
“Huh?..It is a game!”
“OK…lets take EQII as an example” I explained. “You get in to the game and first thing ya gotta do is go do some stupid quests right?”
“yeah..so?”
“Then you go do more stupid quests like getting the Golden Phallic scepter of Ishtar or whatever. Then go gather holy shamanic feces. whatever…the point being is that you are being LED along the way regardless of what path you THINK you are taking.”
“In PE you choose what ever it is you want to do. And if you screw up? Too bad, just like in real life.”
“Huh,” he reponded “Maybe I’ll give it another go. Whaddya think?”
“It’s up to you,Mikey. But if your gonna start over, try not to make your Avatar look like Vin Diesel again.”
“Why?”
“Cuz your last attempt made you look more like a penis with legs..bwahahaha..”