Done with the Desert

A Tale in the Desert was one of those MMOs I always told myself I'd try one day. And since they're just switching over into the Fourth telling, it seemed a good time to try out the public beta and see if I wanted to get in from the ground up, so to speak.

After all, a civilization game is lots more fun when you're hauling yourself up from your bootstraps, rather than in the midst of established culture politicking. To my immersion-seeking, asocial self anyhow.

Downloaded and installed the client. Graphics aren't anything spectacular, but functionally decent enough. It had this irritating habit of fatal error'ing and crashing every so often, which led me to restart the damn program enough times to end up on the 'frequently used' part of the start menu - in under 8 hours or so.

The technology building / crafting aspect is rather fun and addictive, for anyone who gets a bit of a buzz out of Progress Quest. (Guilty as charged.) It's quite clever how it all stacks on each other, and you find yourself trying to design ways to mass produce as much as you can, in a sort of productivity/time management/resource game.

Fer example, wood is harvested from trees. You run back and forth between trees to pick it up, different trees give differing amounts and so on.

Boards are produced from wood, and to do that, you need a wood planer, which is made from slate harvested at the shoreline.

Brick making is an involved little game all on its own, and so is flax-growing and all the other stuff produced from it.

However, I ran into problems with the other aspect of ATITD - which is the people. It's a social game. So there are these cliques all chattering away on the global channel, which you feel awkward breaking into. You try and be civil to anyone who passes you, even when you'd rather be running about like an industrious ant doing your crafty stuff.

And the social pretty much shits on the solo crafting aspect because after a while, you can't do it by yourself anymore. There are bottlenecks designed in the process that force you to rely on other people's stuff or waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel. The peer pressure suggests you'd better conform to what the big research guilds need to invent, cos that's what everyone else is doing.

The irritating thing about it is, because there's been three previous Tellings, it's like a secret code that no one bothers to tell to newbies. Everyone already knows what they're supposed to be doing. Or even if they are new, they harken back to some earlier golden age of First or Second Telling. The clique-y aspect gets on my nerves.

Most hilariously, in my search to optimize my resources and placement of my compound, I managed to plonk my house in the middle of 4 people who were apparently some kind of tight knit family, and had made a guild just for themselves.

Because they apparently had grand plans to occupy all the open space around them (nevermind that it's still beta and might be reset in a week), they'd pretty much staked out the area and assumed everyone knew.

Here comes my noob self, looking about at the currently small houses... Obviously, I go, ooh, there's a nice open space here. And start building!

1000s of bricks and 2000s of wooden boards later, this bitch comes over stiffly, going 'a word of ancient wisdom for you. This is very bad, you have built right in the middle of my family's houses.'

*blink* Like I was supposed to know that the four people around me were uber-tight. I thought the natural thing was for citizens to mingle and congregate and sort of build little squatter compounds to form a city together. But nooo, this is apparently some sort of sacred territory I have crossed.

She sits there staring at me. I blink back at her bemusedly. She continues to rant on, saying that she does not want to spoil my new experience to ATITD, but this is very very bad.

Ok, so you know I'm a newbie. Apparently it's obvious in the clumsy way I'm arranging my crap all over, being some sort of inadverdent eyesore. So um, tell me what you'd like me to do. Cut me some slack. Give me something to work with here, y'know?

I have to ask her what she wants me to do about it to get a straight answer out of her. And the answer is basically uproot everything, my family will give you some resources to help make a new compound elsewhere.

Let's see, you want me to uproot about 6 hours of work, when I haven't even learned any skill that can give me back any resources from tearing down crap, and accept whatever charity you can give me to get started again elsewhere?

*sighs* Evidently this is a very long term sort of game. But I'm not in it for the long haul. I tell her so. This is a trial account, I'll be gone in a day.

After a long pause, she goes, ok, on the condition that you move all your stuff outside the compound inside, and tear down everything when you're done, and if in 3 day's you decide you are staying after all, then you must leave my family's area and yadda yadda yadda blah blah.

An entire paragraph's worth of terms and conditions. I don't have the heart to tell her I haven't even seen such long paragraphs way back in the MUD. I give her a one word 'sure' reply and turn back to my own stuff, a new distaste in my mouth.

I hate this sort of social maneuvering. Whether it's Eve, in which you can openly attack anyone you don't like, or in ATITD, where the threat is social outcasting from achieving anything substantial... it strikes me as a sort of cult-ish way to make people conform to your in-group.

The hermit and rebel in me cannot take it. Especially when they come into conflict with the 'good lil girl' part of me that wants to play nice and be universally liked and live up to everyone's image.

So eventually, after puttering awhile longer and realizing that I'd pretty much hit the wall of what I could do solo, I compromised.

I took down all my stuff because I am a civil person. I left my chest full of resources open to any public to plunder. And I probably would have done all that anyway even without the selfish bitch bothering me.

(And I know she's a selfish bitch because I overheard on the region channel, that she 'stole' one of the camel resources from another person. Or rather, they must be out being competitive achievers for the same resource, and she got the camel. The sharing or cooperative charity bit can come later, after she did the initial breeding and all. Strange way to build up one's ego, come to think of it.)

Then I let my rebel out to play a bit, slightly off to the side of bitch's compound.

Since I didn't ever intend on coming back, I decided to indulge in a bit of landscape graffiti in the vein of Second Life and Eve's can-art. I dropped little pails of 1 mud all over to spell out some funky letters. Nothing vulgar. Just "OOK!" To say that I wuz here. And made some kind of mark, that someone would have to clean up.

I'd just about had it with conforming to rules.

And that ultimately, is why ATITD fails to enthrall me personally. Too many "need tos" and "should dos" and "ought tos." In a sandbox environment. The contrast is off-putting.