My enthusiasm for an online game that no-one else plays, and which isn’t really a game anyway, continues. As regular readers will know by now, I’m something of a butterfly with my interests, and indeed, because of this, I’m unlikely to ever have ‘regular’ readers as such, and can only apologise profusely to anyone still reading who thought this was a World of Warcraft blog, and the alarming number of Googlers who typed in ‘entropia gathering sweat’ and ended up here. (Am I really the only PE website left online?) I’m afraid it seems as if those were, like pretty much all the games I’ve talked about on here, merely a phase.

While I don’t think I qualify for actual Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, I would be the first to admit that my interests fluctuate often, and this is usually the death-knell of any MMO I fixate over; it merely question of ‘how long’, rather than ‘if’. I think part of it is that I tend to see the various tasks and skills a game sets me and immediately start seeking out the ‘rules’ and ‘laws’ behind it all. Everything is a game for me, and all games have rules. Once I understand those, and can prove to myself that I can use them effectively, I reach a sort of ‘That’ll do’ state of mind and invariably end up putting a tick in a box on a mental list somewhere, and then moving on to the next puzzle that needs unravelling.

Psychologically, I tend to be a pretty solidly classified Explorer archetype of player, using the Bartle distinctions of Action vs Interaction and Players vs World. I like poking the world to see how it all works; a preference for Interaction with the World makes me an ‘Explorer’. The fact that I bother to occassionaly write mini-essays here about it all is probably a part of it too. If you have time to blog about it, you are probably not a powergamer...

(For reference; Action + World = Achiever, Interaction + Players = Socialiser and Action + Players = Killer.)

Now it can be easy to see this as being an ‘Explorer’ in the literal sense; i.e. I like going to all the remote outdoor zones. While I certainly do enjoy that, I also enjoy poking around with crafting recipes, experimenting with combos and equipment, poking monsters to see how they’ll react, trying to swim off the edge of the world, jumping about on mountains to see if I can get somewhere they didn’t expect me to, joining and starting guilds, pickup grouping with different classes and learning each role, attacking people and being ganked, starting and running small businesses and studying markets, and so on, and so on.

In this context of ‘exploration’, I am not content with just learning the game ‘board’; I also want to know how the ‘pieces’ work, what the 'cards' are made of, what makes the ‘dice’ go, and even what makes the players tick. It’s all the same thing to me, and because even the simplest MMO has many such facets, I tend to adopt the pragmatic approach of getting ‘good enough’ at each aspect and then moving on to the next mystery. This may, to the casual observer, make me look a bit flighty, and means I always bomb out of any level-treadmill fairly early on – Ha! I only got 39 in WoW even! I suppose this does make me a lightweight, but the point is that I’m a lightweight in a surprising heavy number of different fields.

This isn’t arrogance, mind you; I know that there is a huge difference between knowing ‘it all’ and knowing ‘enough’. I’m unlikely to ever understand how a 40-man raid on Molten Core works, but I have so many other things I want to dabble in, that grinding up the levels and social network to get into a position to be able to poke around with End-Game seems to take so long, compared to say, starting up a new crafting profession, and to me, both experiences hold an equal level of fascination.

Anyway, all this pop psychology has done me well enough so far, but in Second Life, I think I might have trouble, because it’s game ‘rules’ and intricacies are far closer to the ever elusive ‘rules’ that power Real Life, than to any more conventional MMO, and are similarly complex and numerous; if you can imagine it, it is quite likely to be possible to create a close facsimile of it in Second Life. This means becoming a Jack of All Trades in there is a vastly more time-consuming and absorbing task, and there is every possibility that by it’s very nature, it is The Puzzle That Can Never Be Solved.

My latest fiddlings involve using LSL Scripts, their internal programming language, to turn a plank into a working seesaw. It’s a simple enough thing; an application of one of the most basic machines known to man; the lever, yet beneath the surface, there lies a whole ocean of ‘quarternions’, timers, variable states, radians and other such guff that I would never normally associate with ‘entertainment’, and yet, am now finding myself strangely drawn to. I’ve never been that interested in programming, or physics, or 3d modelling, but having a place where you can use it and see fun results right away, and more importantly, understand it and be able to help others do the same, lends a whole new motivation to it all. There is no point being an Explorer if all your knowledge dies with you! And of course there’s the added bonus that for the first time in my life, I’m playing an online game that is improving my mind, rather than destroying it.

All in all, I’m pragmatic but optimistic. I know that eventually, I’ll know ‘enough’ about everything in there for my own satisfaction, and then I’ll be off again to the next mystifying thing, so far but it certainly seems like I’ve found my most tangled online puzzle yet and I think I’ll be in Second Life for quite a while.