Binary Bonsai

So, today was the release day of the infamous America’s Army. A tactical first-person shooter made by the U.S. government themselves with the purpose of getting teenagers to think about joining the army.

7 million tax-payers dollars went into the development. Not that I care, I’m from Denmark, I’m just happy that I get a free game, a game running on the Unreal 2 engine no less. I do however have a couple of moral problems with the use of this game as a recruitment tool.

First of all, the US government (Lieberman primarily) seems to be very much against games, accusing them left and right for having to do with the murderers of Columbine among others. And yet they actually go out and fund a game that’s meant to portray the most dispicable part of human culture? I fail to spot the logic. Especially seeing as this game has a T rating (Teen, which is 13 years and up).

I understand that we’ll probably see more and more of this coming from the governments, but I can’t help but feel somewhat … naucious about the whole affair. I dunno. It just brings a lot of questions to mind about what’s right and wrong when the government is portraying war. Make no mistake, there’s a huge difference between whether or not the government made this game. If they hadn’t it would just be another tactical squad-based FPS, but now it’s a propaganda tool, and with that the responsibilities are suddenly increased many-fold.

Either way, my initial point was that this game made me realize a range of things about the Internet and more specifically the people who use it. First of all, most gamers today are 13-14-year-olds, or at least so they seem. There’s no respect for the common good, it’s me me me. I went onto Gamespy, there were over 2100 people in the same chatroom at once, and 50% of them at least were typing. Most simply joined in, didn’t bother to wait and see what was happening and started asking questions.

“I can’t do this”… Well no-one can, which you’d know if you waited for a second. If you bothered with reading the manual, then maybe you’d know why.

“I’m getting this error”… So are other people, it might just be that it’s listed in the ‘known errors.txt’ file that comes with the game…

“How do I go on to infantry training, I’ve tried and I can’t do it”… So have everyone else, and no-one else can either…

And my favorite “Gamespy sucks ass, it’s so fucking stupid yada yada, servers are slow, pings are bad, I suck”. Because what all these people fail to realize is that Gamespy is nothing more than a fancy chatroom that lists a range of servers that you can join. It doesn’t run the servers, it doesn’t have anything to do with the bandwidth, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything except it helps you join a server simply by doubleclicking a servername. There are a lot of things that I don’t much like about Gamespy. Primarily their adverticement things (Casino Online, so help me god if I ever meet they people in charge of this… I really would get the urge to slay them dead… Anyways…). But the bottomline is that the service is quite good. You get pings, playerslots and server info all in one place. Now if only they would optimize and standardize the program it would be almost perfect.

Now the reason people were complaining so damn much was because the servers (of which I counted only 18 with 16 player slots per server) that held the infantry training game which you had to play were down or filled.

What were they thinking? 18 servers with 16 slots each? And the whole world wants to play their game… what the devil were they thinking? I understand that they want to get this game out on the 4th of July, national pride and all that, but if they had been just a little smart they would have included a dedicated server client with it, and I’ll promise you that servers would have popped up faster than you could join them.

Why didn’t they think it through?… Alas, it might as well have been the producer or publisher or whatever the hell they use since it’s a free game, that had been pressing them to do this, and as in the rest of the gameworld now a days, that’s such a major mistake that’s never helped anyone. No developer, publisher or game has been furthered from being pushed into release. But this little thing called money seems to blind people from seeing this clearly, and so we end up with a load of problems or issues as the enduser.

For instance, Neverwinter Nights.

Such a great game, I really really like it. I just bought it yesterday (although I’d been playing it for a week or two), and although it does fulfil a lot of the things that BioWare had promised, it also still has a lot of issues that if taken care of could elevate it to being the best game of all time.

For instance. The game comes with a toolset. With this toolset you can make your own maps. Forests, dungeons, cities, caves and so on. About 8-9 different sets I think. But you can’t make a castle in a forest… Castles only exist within a city… No castles in rural areas either… What’s up with that? I can understand certain technical difficulties in making it work, but seriously, if they had done that, then they would never have to work again, they could live off of NWN…

Given of course that they released the sourcecode (not all of it, just the parts that touch gameplay, like with Quake and Half-Life) and allowed us to create new tiles for the landscape. All of the sudden you would be able to do anything. You could modify it to become a cyberpunk world, or a WWII game…

It would be endlessly open to modification – But it isn’t, and that really dissappoints me

Well, I’ve rambled for long enough. Let me just send out a greeting to Bjørn who has his birthday today. He’s in Canada though, but if you read this I hope you’re enjoying yourself over there.

Over and out.