Well, this is rather embarrassing. I was going to have a go at the standard 'Roundup of 2006' type of post - you know, pick out some big name titles, highlight some of the year's news events, predict 2007, that sort of thing, when I came up with this brilliant idea.

Since I'm not really a News Site, and since I probably haven't even played most of the 'Most Talked About Titles of 2006', I figured that perhaps the most honest way to go about it was to use the super-dooper spankey new post Categories that got added during the upgrade, trawl back through 2006's posts counting titles, and just award the Van Hemlock Game of the Year Award to which ever one I spent the largest portion of the year ranting about. All very democratic, and with that numberey goodness I tend to get off on. Numbers make me horny!

So I did that, and the here are the results:

Everquest II: 7
(I dabbled briefly at the start of the year, and am only now back into it with any real enthusiasm. 2006 seems to have been a quiet year for this game, in marked contrast to the absurdity of 2005 - Search for Antonia, /Pizza, Station Exchange, etc, and shows a new and quietly confident maturity that I'm quite liking. Currently active.)

Guild Wars: 9
(A constant back-burner for me, marred by an abusive and immature playerbase, and the occasisonal plot and progress bottleneck. This title never becomes my 'main' game, and is unlikely to - more a drop-in kind of throwaway fun. Currently active.)

Eve Online: 14
(A perennial return visitor, this year saw me try a real corp, fail, and essentially conquer the PvE content available in 'safe' space. I hang it up again, knowing that any future trips will have to be in a big active PvP corp in 0.0, or not at all. Currently dormant, but definitely one I'll return to.)

World of Warcraft: 15 (+3 'Ranterbury Tales')
(One I'd been picking away at all year and much of last, but which I ended up 'completing', to my own satisfaction, and subsequently wandering out of. The Burning Crusade sounds decidedly average at this point, and the End Game post-60 life has never really appealed. Currently dormant, but perhaps I'll return to start a new Lv1 chap at some point in years to come.)

Planetside: 16 (+5 'Boot Camp' Articles)
(The Reserves deal made this impossible not to install and play, but like GuildWars, this never becomes a 'main' game for me. Despite that, the seemingly repetitive nature of the basic game still manages to provide a surprising amount of varied material for me to write about. Currently dormant, but there if I need it.)

And the winner is...

Second Life: 21 posts!

Oh the shame! But in all fairness, the MMO that seems to have given me the most to talk about over the last year, is the  zOMG-a-verse. Bang goes any credibility I may have had, but credit where it's due. That's not to say all 21 of those posts seem to have been full of breathless glowing praise - many of my rants have been quite harshly negative about the whole endeavour, mostly critical slattings of the hyperactive PR machine that seems to have become synonmous with Second Life these days - a machine that is in danger of overshadowing and blotting out what noble egalitarian futurism that might still reside at the heart of the whole project.

Mostly, I'd put the above 'win' down to the fact that in most MMOs, not a great deal actually happens, from an outside news perspective. Wow attracts comment by virtue of it's huge numbers, but beyond that, most MMO experiences are very subjective, as in my Ranterbury Tales posts - it was interesting to me at the time, but would be difficult to impress The Man In The Street with - whereas SL tends to speak in a language everyone can understand - money, taxes, property, porn... I guess it makes for more interesting reading for a wider range of people, regardless of the actual news item itself. Perhaps we gamers are the dinosaurs, and the part of our subculture that will survive and enthuse the Real People, is the part that deals in Real Things, rather than goblins and magic missiles. The two biggest selling PC games of all time were Myst, and then the The Sims, for good reason maybe?

Second Life's year has been an interesting one - according to The Graphs (available all over the place), it's seen a rise in 'Residents' from about 100,000 to over 2,000,000. It's also seen a comparable increase in the grumbling about what a 'Resident' actually is, and for comparison, peak concurrency - people actually logged in - has gone from around 2,000 to 18,000 in the same timespan. This year has seen a marked increase in the interest of the Real People News agencies too, with the game rarely off the Technology section of the BBC's News Website, and Reuters setting up an in-world virtual office - a move not limited to news agencies either, with Sun Microsystems and IBM, among others, taking an interest in carving a piece of the new and hip digital frontier for themselves.

The massive growth over the year has brought massive problems however, and instability of the Grid (their name for the SL World) is now a daily fact of life that the dedicated resident simply has to put up with. As well as technical difficulties, high hardware requirements and a less than helpful UI, other players become a problem also, with anecdotes ranging from standard abuse and smacktalk, through assault by flying phalluses and/or nuclear missiles, financial cons and widescale copyright theft, right up to premeditated and methodical attempts to destroy the entire world via self replicated objects, and many blame the removal of a credit card requirement to sign up, earlier this year, as both the cause of the increase in abuse, and the massive growth of Residents overall - throwaway alts.

Beyond the abuse and marketing spin, many find a world in which they are given so much freedom, they don't know what to do with it, and a world where it is difficult to get by, or get involved, without having some kind of technical skills beyond those expected of the average MMO gamer, or chat client surfer, creating a very stratified society consisting of a technologically able elite of content creators, and a larger underclass of consumers who either pay significantly to play, or are forced to work in-world jobs, mostly to do with falsely inflating measures of a shop or club's popularity by just being there, AFK, for long periods of time.

Many do find a life for themselves however, and a surprising variety of special interest groups exist, covering all manner of interests, from the fringe religious and psychological support groups, through to fan-groups for popular TV shows and so on. The virtual chat-room aspect of the place holds perhaps the greatest appeal (including the cybersex, which is signficiant), even if the more advanced things promised by the 'metaverse', such as vehicle physics, PvP combat, realistic avatars and the like, tend to look better on paper than in implementation.

My own year in and out of Second Life has been quite a quiet sort of life, comprised in largely equal parts of tinkering, sightseeing and indeed, just sitting about chatting. I've made quite a few friends in there, most of whom have surprised me by being quite normal people, rather than the stereotypical image of the Fox-Headed-BDSM-Sex-Fetishist we all like to chuckle about. Those people are in there, of course, but so are a lot of reasonably balanced and normal folks too, it would seem.

One thing that does keep suprising me, when chatting with the more normal folks in there, is that they seem to be as annoyed with LL, and for the same reasons, that snarky blogfolk like me are - they don't like the zOMG2millionz! number either, are often skeptical of LLs ability to develop or even maintain the world and seem to get on with their hobbies and projects in spite of LL and The Media Coverage, rather than because of. LL have their breathless cheerleaders, certainly, but the average Avatar-On-The-Street doesn't seem to care about nebulous grand social experiments, or Roadmaps To Visions Of Future-topia, as long as they can just get on and use their own little bit of the virtual-worldas they see fit, in relative peace.

I found myself, quite early on, to be on the fringe of that Technological Elite, able to work most of the basics of making things - primitives, scripts, textures, animations and the like, and for me, this kind of mucking about with 'Lego' becomes 'the content', and it's always nice to be able to help out less knowledgeable friends with this rubbish. I don't really make any significant amounts of LL-money with it all, but manage to get by comfortably on donations for the bits I do, and mostly, but not really needing to buy anything anyway - merely cover upload costs. I'd hate to have an in-world business to have to come home to each night though - far more commitment than I want from a 'some nights a week' hobby.

I suppose you could say that at least in part, I've 'Gone Native', but it keeps me entertained, both with my own in-world pottering, and with it's continual and often amusing Real World News antics. These two experiences usually paint completely different pictures, of two entirely different games, I find, and it's hard to tell which is closer to the mark. I also find much in SL's world building tools, that doesn't, and probably shouldn't, exist in the more normal MMO's crafting mechanics, which strangely enough, makes me more likely to spend my time in those, playing it properly - i.e. hitting monsters with big sticks. SL has no monsters - well, not the sort you can vanquish with sticks anyway. I still like vanquishing monsters!

The future of SL is hard to see, but at a guess, I'd go with continual and constant 'growth' (whatever that actually turns out to mean), well into next year, but also continual and worse technical problems. I see a media shark-jumping, and a backlash as some of the less savoury aspects of SL's underbelly become apparent and well-known. (Indeed, this may have already begun). I also see a time, not too far off, when Second Life will start having to actually work hard for it's money and position, as a number of new and alternative platforms move in on it's currently uncontested turf. How, and if, it will survive a serious rival, will no doubt provide folks like me, with much more to rant about in future posts, I'm sure...

So there you go - for equal parts good reasons and bad, Second Life is my Game of the Year. Love it or hate it, it's always interesting to watch...



This is the last post before the hols for me, so enjoy the season, relatives, turkey and pretending to look enthusiastic and grateful about socks, and I'll see you all in 2007 for more bitching and complaining, and hopefully, the odd Positive and Life Affirming Experience too! Cheerio!