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Africa, The MMOG

Posted by Zonk on Mon Feb 06, 2006 03:33 PM
from the travel-from-the-comfort-of-your-own-home dept.
Role Playing (Games) Government Politics
Via Joystiq, an MTV Games story about a MMOG that attempts to encompass Africa in a game. From the article: "Less reserved, Adam Ghetti, the teenage creative director at Rapid Reality, the company actually creating the game, said he hopes the game will right some wrongs. 'The white American board developers of the large MMO development companies out there right now don't honestly have the right background and knowledge on the continent of Africa and its lore, mythology and rich history, and quite honestly neither did I,' said Ghetti, who is white. 'They just don't teach it over here.' The game is designed, in part, to change that."
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  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus (138060) on Monday February 06 2006, @03:36PM (#14653230) Homepage
    It better run on Ubuntu!

  • factions (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Which faction will you roll your character as Tutsi or Hutu?

    Ah, PvP!
  • Anyone here remember the game "Heart of Africa" from the 80s? I thought it was a pretty good game for learning the physical geography of Africa.
  • this could be a great thing.

    When I was a teenager I read a lot of fantasy, until I realized that 99.9% of the fantasy genre is taken directly from Tolkein. The same can be said about fantasy games. Its all Knights, Wizards, Orks, Elves, Dwarves and Dragons. Maybe they will mess with the names, but the roles are set in stone.

    Anything realizeing a vision of its own would be a welcome change.

    Not that any of that will help a crappy implimentation...

  • This does not sound good... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stormwatch (703920) <rodrigogirao.hotmail@com> on Monday February 06 2006, @03:50PM (#14653369) Homepage
    "The average cycle on MMOs is two to four years," he said. "We can turn out the same content, better graphics, better gameplay in eight months to a year." He said games from his company, including "Africa," will have graphics that surpass the current industry gold standard of the Unreal Engine 3. When he talks about the ability for every computer-controlled character in "Africa" to react uniquely to each human-controlled character, he scoffs at prospective doubters. "They say it's impossible. Maybe if we were doing it in the archaic way everyone else tries to do it."
    Uh-huh. Yeah, sure. Whenever anyone makes such wild claims, you can be certain that they will blow it. This game will be either full of bugs or delayed for years.
    • You forgot the possibility of it being slow as Hell* because it's doing just what it's designed to do, but doesn't have enough horsepower behind it to deal with the load.

      * No, I don't know what the relatavistic speed of Hell is, I'm just using an American idiom.
    • My initial impulse is to agree with you, but sometimes someone really does have a better way of doing things. Robert Rodriguez [Sin City] said the same thing with his movies and he ended up being correct.

  • Africa (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alex P Keaton in da (882660) on Monday February 06 2006, @03:50PM (#14653375) Homepage
    I think one of the issues that we (Americans) have is that you normally hear of "Africa." It is the only continent that is mentioned as a country (aside from the obvious Australia which is a country, or Anarctica, which has no countries). I don't think people(in general) realize that Africa is made up of distinct countries with distinct cultures.
    Then again, many of my country men can't name 10 state capitals in the US... so maybe understanding other cultures is too much...
    • aside from the obvious Australia which is a country

      Well, we (the rest of the world) let them think that. ;-)

    • Re:Africa (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MMaestro (585010)
      Its because Africa is more or less the black sheep of history really. With the exception of Japan and Russia, nearly every single major imperial/regional/military power in history has exploited Africa at one time or another (slave trade, colonies, subjugation of local population, civil wars, colonial wars, 'border disputes', 'skrimishes', colonial fighting during World War I and II, etc.) No political group/government/nation really wants to get involved with Africa since it'll open up a lot of old historica
  • The things most worth talking about in Africa are unfortunately pretty nasty... things like ethnic cleansing and the yearly starvation of hundreds of thousands. Somehow I don't think that's what they have in mind here...

    It looks like the goal is more something along the lines of stereotypical Africa... a lot of elephants and odd piercings. That, somehow, doesn't seem educational either.

    I'm just confused. It's to be a fantasy game, but it's still somehow supposed to teach about Africa? Did anyone learn about

    • Re:What's the... point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by the grace of R'hllor (530051) on Monday February 06 2006, @04:14PM (#14653647)
      I think *you* are the point of making a game like this.

      Africa is a friggin' continent, for god's sake, several times larger than the US, with a lot (!!) more history. I am assuming you are from the US, here, for reasons that should be obvious. If, all over Africa, there were nothing other than millions starving to death or dying of AIDS, if everyone were killing everyone else, it would be a complete wasteland within the decade. And it's not. Mythology might be heavily animal-based, but so it is with American Indians. Not surprising, when you're living among so damn many of them.

      As for your jibe concerning LOTR, there's a difference to fantasy in an imaginary world, like LOTR, Krull or Star Wars, and fantasy based on mythology, like American Gods, Chronicles of Narnia or even The Iliad. Fantasy has many levels. If you look at Neil Gaiman's books, they tend to be about our world, with legends and mythology made flesh. Something like that would work well in 'the cradle of humanity'.

      The execution of the whole deal would be tricky, though, you're right. It's too easy to fall into triteness, rather than actual interesting cultural exchange.
      • This may be something of a troll, but since Africa is a continent, as you point out, you should compare it in size to North America, which is also a continent, rather than America, which makes up some fraction of North America.

        I have to say that my elementary school education regarding Africa was spotty, and completely non-existent in high school, except for the "cradle of civilization" part. As a teen (many years ago), I could have told you that Egypt was a part of Africa, and that the Congo was, but had

    • Beats my education on Africa (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RingDev (879105) on Monday February 06 2006, @04:37PM (#14653872) Homepage Journal
      Slaves came from Africa. Anglo-saxon men are bad.

      What I wouldn't give for a Multi-Cultural class that actually studied different cultures instead of how the white Anglo-saxon male has subjugated them.

      -Rick

  • Jilting at windmills (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Locke2005 (849178) on Monday February 06 2006, @03:52PM (#14653402)
    1) Africa is a big place with hundreds of different languages and cultures. No single artwork could possible "encompass Africa", it can only try to present a small representative sample.

    2) The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time! Also, much of the gameplay that works great when you're on the same Ethernet segment as the server is virtually unplayable when you're on a dial-up on a different continent than the server.

    In general, you can't be all things to all people; you need to pick your battles and focus on doing just a few things, but doing them well.

    • The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time!

      I'm not sure I agree with that compleatly. I've noticed that over the last ten years, graphics hardware has evolved at a much higher rate then graphics itself, something I've attributed to a propensity to develop software graphics engines that are bloated and inefficent. In the span of 18 months, the raw power of a graphics card may doubl
  • Seeming to be a comon thread amongst MMOG's these days (Star Trek, Star Gate...), this looks like it has tremendous potential. I truly hope that this project succeeds in all the areas that the spunky 19-year old developer hopes. If this goes well, perhaps we may see some other games in this genre; Pre-columbian Native Americans, Han-dynasty China, Shogun-era Japan. I could see this becoming a major franchise. As for that 19 year-old head, I just wish I had a company to help me put my game ideas to code...

  • Y0 NEED PARTY! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stavr0 (35032) on Monday February 06 2006, @03:55PM (#14653442) Homepage Journal
    CONNECT: SteveOkembo72
    SteveOkembo72 waves.
    SteveOkembo72> HAV3 10M GPS IN DUNGEON. NEED SOME1 TO /GIVE SOME GP TO UNLOCK CHEST
    SteveOkembo72> WILL SHARE LOOT 50% WIT U.
    SteveOkembo72 waves.
    SteveOkembo72> MSG ME. KTHXBYE
  • To do the Heart of Darkness quest. Willing to split silver that the yellow cons and up drop.
  • ...that it will turn out to be some over romanticized vision, and will be about as accurate as the Mars (Barsoom) of John Carter?

    Oh, that's right. I a total cynic. That's why. Never mind.

  • I wish the author well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jakuta (643082) on Monday February 06 2006, @04:17PM (#14653674)
    Africa, from an inside flavor. This will be interesting to see and i for one am going to be expectant of the views presented. Will this be of the time of Egypt? Will it cover the Congo and Llukumi existance and history of the west coast? The Ethiopia, Swahili and Zulu nations of the east coast? There are a number of pantheons and diverse cultural histories to be represented either correctly or fictitiously. Perhaps crickets are not all that would be heard and maybe you might learn something about Africa from the game, unlike LOTR which was not set in europe....
  • Adam Ghetti is Swahili for "Derek Smart".

    I bet this is the last MMOG anyone will EVER own.
    • !Xabbu and his girlfriend finally got out of Otherland and into business. ;)

      More seriously, if it works the way !Xabbu's was in the book, it could actually be educational.

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