marc-nottke
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MMOGology: Phasing phwns the phuture
It's been fascinating to watch MMOGs evolve over the past fifteen years I've been playing them. They started out as text based worlds populated by a few hundred people with over-active imaginations. Today they're a mainstream hobby endorsed by celebrities like Mr. T and William Shatner. Whoulda thunk? As the genre has matured so have the parameters of what defines an MMOG. One of my biggest gripes with them has always been that the worlds we play in are too often static and unchanging. You feel as though your character and his actions never have any real or lasting effect on the world around him. Thankfully that has begun to change with the recent advent of a technology dubbed as "phasing". For those of you that haven't played Blizard's Wrath of the Lich King, phasing allows players to view a changed version of their world based on triggering events like the completion of quests. It's amazing that it isn't more talked about because phasing has and will continue to change the way we experience dynamic storytelling in MMOGs.
View your Dungeon Runners characters online
For a while there I thought I was the only one up in here that played Dungeon Runners. Thankfully, Marc Nottke's recent post "Keep it simple, stupid" (the ole KISS principle) brought fellow players out of the dungeon! What's funny (aside from the game's humor) is that I don't much care for fantasy fodder. In fact, I hate it. Well, minus the upcoming, head hacking Age of Conan that is. But I digress... If you play the wonderfully humorous Dungeon Runners you can now look at you (or your friend's) character online through a few neat third-party sites, either here or here. All you need to do is put the name of your character in the blank space (there is nothing else to these sites so you can't miss it) and clickety-click on the provided button and... wham-o, presto!
