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A Tale In The Desert's Social Evolution Examined 32

Posted by simoniker from the knock-on-wood dept.
Thanks to Gamer's Pulse for their revised review of A Tale In The Desert, discussing their re-visiting of the unique Windows/Linux MMORPG. The review sums up the combat-free MMO title's goals as: "working together, being social, and trading with other people, all in the name of a unified Egypt", and the reviewer talks about the "new laws and structures and new technologies" being implemented, and the new problem of virtual deforestation: "Recently, the skill of clear cutting was offered in a new university, and some people didn't heed the warnings [that] once a tree was clear cut, you couldn't get wood from it for a whole week." The resulting wood shortages mean that "newcomers to the game won't be able to pass their tests to become citizens", but in-game, tree-friendly legislation may be pending.
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A Tale In The Desert's Social Evolution Examined More

A Tale In The Desert's Social Evolution Examined

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  • Let me get this straight... there's a game where you can gather amongst lots of other people, harvest wood from trees, build things, buy things, work for a living, and NOT kill anything? I thought that was real life...

    Seriously thought, Star Wars: Galaxies offers the ability to go through life without killing anything, but, having done it myself for awhile, it's extremely boring. It may come as a surprise, but the amount of time and money you spend playing games trying to make money and/or friends, you co
    • Different strokes for different folks. Some people play these games solely to role play. And I could understand why as a combat person you find SWG boring, the combat system is pretty poorly designed. The crafting system, however, is great :)

    • Re:Combat-Free MMO? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Are there winners and losers? Is there some form of decision making? If so, it's a game regardless of whether the particular pixels look like combat or not.

      I don't know much about ATITD, and from what I've read I wouldn't enjoy it, but just because it doesn't have combat doesn't mean it can't be an interesting game.

      -Jeff

      P.S. I'm too wordy; how about tetris?

  • Premise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) * on Monday September 22, 2003 @02:34PM (#7027190) Journal
    Cooperative Gaming. neato, what a concept. Howabout we combine this with Flash Mobbing and get back to reality: cooperative living!

    WhoTF wants to get home from work to haggle about the rules of an imaginary country? If you spent that time participating in/giving educational compaigns for the real world (no matter what the cause), perhaps the typical apathy of the public would be gone.

    Instead, we have yet another excuse to sit on our asses. "MMORPG's Egypt accepts 1 millionth citizen!" reads the headline, while voter participation is near 20%. Sheesh! I'm starting a potato chip company.

    • Re:Premise? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 )
      WhoTF wants to get home from work to haggle about the rules of an imaginary country? If you spent that time participating in/giving educational compaigns for the real world (no matter what the cause), perhaps the typical apathy of the public would be gone.

      Of course, there are no statistics to back up any of your links to apathy and such, so we can just move on to this point: people interested in the politics of a virtual world may be more likely to participate in real world politics. It could also be poss

      • Re:Premise? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Matrix272 ( 581458 ) on Monday September 22, 2003 @03:35PM (#7027839)
        It could also be possible to 'try out' unusual political solutions in a virtual world to give some idea of how people may react (and what effects it may have), in order to fine-tune the ideas before presenting them to real-world political bodies.

        While I agree that it holds potential to get more people involved in politics, I don't think we have the ability yet to simulate a world that's as lifelike as the "real" world. For instance, The Sims 2 recently announced that it would have people getting older, and maybe dying... we'd need to take into consideration the parents, the schools, the friends, and all the activities that one may participate in to effectively model a world to test theories in. If, in the simulated world, we were going to test the real-life reactions and consequences of legalizing marijuana, how would we represent all the myriad opinions and reactions on the subject without a fully detailed background on each and every simulated person it affected? It would be like trying to build conclusions when you only have the latter 1/3 of the facts.

        Also, you'd have to get people to be more involved than simply sitting at a keyboard. You'd have to get them INTO the simulation... and I mean REALLY into it. Some people are willing to die over their belief that abortion should be illegal (or, more to the point, kill for that belief, ironically). If there aren't extremely serious consequences for any illegal actions, people wouldn't take it seriously enough to, for example, stage a protest, riot, revolt, etc.

        It's a lofty goal, to be sure, but just not possible yet... of course, I'm all for legalizing marijuana... (just thought I'd put that in there).

    • Re:Premise? (Score:2, Funny)

      by kuryakin ( 710127 )

      WhoTF wants to get home from work to haggle about the rules of an imaginary country?

      Given how successful MMOGs are it would appear that it's quite a lot of people.

      If you spent that time participating in/giving educational compaigns for the real world (no matter what the cause), perhaps the typical apathy of the public would be gone.

      Thank you for taking a break from saving the world and posting this comment in the games section of slashdot. I do appreciate it. But while you are busy being self-righteou

  • Social Experimentation (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In the real world, large-scale social changes often only occur in a physically violent and psychologically scarring atmosphere. In virtual worlds, people can test out different ideas for how a society should be run. It is much more fluid and revealing than the real world where it pretty much boils down to money and power in every situation.

    Online communities are the future...if you can't see this, well then you probably can't see the green code dripping down all around you either ;)

  • A Tale in the Desert is cool! But... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PeteyG ( 203921 ) on Monday September 22, 2003 @05:40PM (#7028929) Homepage Journal
    It's not a lot of fun. Conceptually, I was enthralled by the notion of the players creating and backing their own currency. Passing their own laws. Working together to accomplish a goal. Truly, these are things that hint at what wonders MMOGs could truly be!!

    So I payed my 13 bucks. I played for two weeks, and all I did was make bricks, run around, click on a bunch of trees, and 'farm' flax plants by repeatedly clicking on the ground. A Tale in the Desert SOUNDS really freaking neat, but I don't get off on doing the job of a peon or peasant in Warcraft.

    Seriously, these are things though that I would love to see in a game that's actually fun to play.
    • I've been in the desert for awhile now. I've gathered more than my share of mud and weeds and bricks. Indeed, the peon activities you find in RTS games. But I found a purpose beyond the crafting system which represents the core of the game. I looked beyond the various social tests which are designed to both bring the players closer together and tear our virtual society apart. And what I have found is something that is far more than the sum of its parts.

      I now find myself in a vast social web of politi

    • If you only build bricks and farm flax, that would indeed be boring. Maybe you were in a far corner of Egypt with no one else around to help you... that would indeed be boring. But if so, you really missed the game entirely.

      Did you not see the hundreds of other kinds of buildings that you can make and dozens of technologies you can use? Did you miss the challenges of the tests of the seven disciplines? The early tests are easy, and give you something of the flavor of the later, harder tests, which are
    • It's not a lot of fun. Conceptually, I was enthralled by the notion of the players creating and backing their own currency. Passing their own laws. Working together to accomplish a goal. Truly, these are things that hint at what wonders MMOGs could truly be!!
      Sounds like a graphical version of Peter Stubic's NOMIC.
  • have someone else try something like this: 1)A team of developers create, design and code the game, which is opensource. Lets call them The Founding Fathers 2)People who want to play, must pay a fee. This fee is to maintain the server, and pay the developers -as usual 3)After a period, comes election times. other developers step in, make their new propossal to the game and gammers vote. 4)So, this guys take the administration and improvement of the game on his hands, they rule the game and get paid for it t

    • Re:... and what about this? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's pretty much what ATITD is, without new people coming in to code. Laws in Tale ARE at the code level, allowing or disallowing behaviors, creating new buildings (i.e. gyuldhalls), whatever you can get to pass will be done. Recently a player tried to declare themselves emperor, and the lead dev contaced her to find out what powers she wanted as emperor.....

  • This is a great game! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I currently play this game as you may think that having no combat is terrible, well it isn't. There is combat, but in a different way. We are fighting each other through laws and competing. We can make fireworks and compete. Winner gets to run faster for example. Most of all, its about working together and figuring how the game works. A user recently figured out how the food works, and it was very complex. He spent a month working on it. I give this 5 stars, as it is one of the best games out there.

  • It's not just a social experiment... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noren ( 605012 ) on Monday September 22, 2003 @10:45PM (#7030944)
    I play ATiTD. It has its flaws, but I'm mostly enjoying it. A few very general things about the game:

    It is intended to be finite, lasting a year, starting over in a (presumably) modified form afterwards. There are specific goals (Tests) in the game, in different Disciplines- the players will need to have at least one player for each Discipline who's passed all the tests for that Discipline; and do some other things which are as yet not so clear, and as a group can win the game. Or lose it.

    So it's set up as a cooperative game in theory... although individuals will often act in their own self-interest much of the time, of course. Some of the tests are of a familiar accumulate lots of stuff and build a big object type; others require large-scale player cooperation, others are purely competitive; there are art design tests, competitive strategy minigames, design of minigames/puzzles in game... lots of variety.

    Another point of difference between this and other MMORPGs: communications and guilds. There is no talk to everyone command (like an Everquest /shout) normally available. A player may belong to any number of guilds (which establish a chat channel between members)- and these guilds run the gamut from full community property to being only a chat channel. There are metaguilds formed to discuss regional issues, to discuss experimentation in some area of the game such as brewing or viticulture, to focus on passing a particular Test or set of Tests, to accomplish some particular large-scale undertaking (e.g. the 'Nileside Cafe', building larger pyramids.) Reputation matters even more than in most other games. There are also now a few microphones, which allow one-way communication to everyone who's joined a corresponding channel to hear the messages.

    As to PeteyG's experience: if someone shows up and is willing to make bricks and grow flax or do other other tedious tasks all day, there will be some people happy to tell the newbie to do that... but there's nothing stopping you from leaving and finding something more interesting to do. There are no 'levels', within a few days characters can make most things as rapidly as established characters, and it's usually easy to trade for more difficult items.

    It's a free download, and the first 24 hours of in-game play are free as a trial account. It's not for everyone, but if the above sounds interesting give it a try. Finally, in addition to windows it's available in Linux... and this is Slashdot.

  • I have played this game since about May. In real life I am an engineer. I play various computer games at a moderate level. I have to say I am hooked on ATITD more than any game since I was in high school probably. First off, well this game is heavily advertised as being cooperative and not competitive, that is clearly a half truth. The resources needed to build things range from being very common to very rare. There is MUCH competion to get the rare resources, and have the biggest and best camp. Second
  • - Your specialisation?
    - Lumberjack.
    - Recent work experience?
    - Sahara forest.
    - Hey, Sahara is a desert!
    - Now it is...

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