Today’s image is the artwork for a card I plan to include in Age of Heroes. It’s called “Tigree Bone Armor.”
I’ve been actively involved in Second Life for about two weeks now. It’s starting to make more sense to me as I see the types of things that people are designing and building in the program.
In a sense, it reminds me a lot of Minecraft; there isn’t much point to the game. You just build and improve, build and improve. The biggest difference is that in Minecraft you have something motivating you to build: the monsters that come out at night. With Second Life, you have nothing that you feel the need to defend yourself against, so that initial “jump start” isn’t there.
My biggest problem with Second Life is the same problem that I had with the original Fighter Maker. The game has so much potential because it is so open ended, but that open ended nature fails if the thing that you are building your game for isn’t fun. In Fighter Maker, you had to make a fighting style and then send it to your friends so that you could fight each other. Once you had a few fights, though, there wasn’t much desire to keep playing the game. It had a mechanism to show off what you made, but once people see it, there isn’t much else to do with it.
Generally, I find that I prefer UGC mechanism to work well within the framework of an already outstanding game. To me, UGC as the sole game mechanic just seems hollow.
We’ll see how that opinion changes as we move along through the courses.