Fun In There

There Is Hella Fun
It's the start of summer! Happy Memorial Day weekend. :) After today I'll be slowing down and posting the major There Inc events and big game release news. I've got a few stories for today and also maybe some general comments on gaming, the internet and fun. I've played There for over a year and I'll have to say that it's been hella fun and a wonderful gaming experience. I played Sims Online for six months before that and also enjoyed it very much. Before that I played Half-Life off-and-on for three or so years. These games are now all part of me. Gaming online is great and it's only getting better. The latest figures show that the average online gamer is 29 years old! How cool is that. Women and men both enjoy the social fun of internet gaming and this trend will continue to grow. People are watching less TV and logging in more frequently.

Drama
I think a lot of players think that "drama" is a There-only experience, when really it's a mix of human nature and uninhibited internet. There is a good amount of drama in There, but I have seen the exact same amount in my previous online hobbies such as half-life, poker, porn, foosball, and cars. Text based communication removes inhibitions and creates extra miscommunication and this is a formula for added fun drama action. LOL You just have to take it all with a bag of salt. :) The drama is not so bad when you take a step back.

Forums
I personally avoid forums since they offer a super-size portion of daily drama. ROFL :) Forums are often the focal point of any online hobby. This is where people all meet and discuss their passion. They are kind of a social microcosm of the "tribe". Most forums follow a pattern: they are born, they start small and grow, there is a love-fest, they reach a middle stability, then the mutiny comes and all hell breaks loose, then alternative forums break-off from the main one. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this happen. :D Forums often live on, long after the game dies. TSOzone was popular with players, long after they stopped simming.

Business
Games are made to entertain us, but we often forget that they are produced to make a profit. Both Sims and There have met with this cold reality. Games are now big business with movie-sized budgets. I think it the future we are going to see some amazing games. The down side of this is that the "garage programmer" will have a hard time breaking into commercial gaming with these huge barriers to entry. I can't forget about "counter strike" though, which started as a simple programmed mod to half-life, and eventually grew to insane proportions. Number one tracked gamespy game is Half-life and the number one half-life mod is counter strike, so the highschool garage programmer still has a chance. :)

GameSpy Reviews City Of Heros
Speaking of GameSpy, Nerina sent me in their review of CoH!

GameSpy for The Old-Schoolers
Do you know how gamespy got it's start? You old-schooler do. ;) Back when I was a young lad, with my first windows PC with a gamer video card, The Micron Millennia XRU with Monster 3D Voodoo1, quake1 and quake2 were all the rage. There were quake servers here and there, but how did you find them? Gamespy started out as a client server piece of free software. You could DL it free and fire it up and use it to find all the quake servers. I think it used to track four servers...I can remember quake and hexen and I can't remember the rest. That little game spidering free client went onto become the gamespy empire. :D Now almost every game comes with client searching built in. Some license gamespy technology...like Halo has gamespy server searching built into it.

Website Popularity
Ever wonder how popular a website or fansite is? It's very difficult to guage site traffic on any site because no two counters are equal. There are a hundred ways to count hits to a website, and this makes comparisson difficult unless all sites use the same counter. My favorite counter is MasterStats. It's free and super cool. I especially dig it because my old porn bud "KidSlick" invented it. ;) If you ever want to toss a counter on your website, give it a try. There are a couple other ways to get a rough gauge of websites popularity; the two I know of are Alexa and Link Popularity checker. The most popular There site that I can find seems to be Life In There. It's been around for a long time and is always popular.

Frisky Second Life
Oh My...SL Erotica is dedicated to the sexy side of second life. :)

What's Next For Twiddler
In terms of blogging, I am probably going to make about 60 posts on the site for my stock market book. This is to help promote it in the search engines. In terms of gaming, right now I am enjoying City of Heros. I have pre-orders in for Sims2, Doom3, and Half-life2. I'll most likely buy GuildWars or World of Warcraft, depending which hits the market first. I know I like guildwars so I think I would lean that way if I had to choose. I miss half-life and there is an 80% chance that I will run a full bore half-life server on 66.146.50.100. My old one was called "Cucamonga Chunk O Phlegm" and I'll call the HL2 one that as well. LOL I used to live in cucamonga so I like that name and my buddy Gene-La-Machine and I just used to say "chunk of phlegm" a lot for no good reason. LOL Here are some of my old marketing spams to Usenet, back in the day. Ohhh! I don't know if I've ever showed you some of my smaller gamer sites from the past. here is High Ping Bastards. Here is the classic Twid 36 Half-Life Jumps. The skirts cannot resist an old-dude in pink.

There was one gamer project I gave up on that I might try one last time; I had worked for two years with two programmers to try and make the greatest first person shooter stats site. The site was to be called Taunt.com (don't go there now or you will get the same boob in your eye as lips.com). Craig the Programmer had his php nimble spiders querying the 30,000 half-life servers, once every 7 minutes. The spiders hammered the database with snapshot after snapshot. My concept was to present stats like a search engine, since we are all very used to the search engine format. We hit snag after snag and the code was never better than 70%. I tossed in the towel. If HL2 is huge, I might give taunt.com one more run for the money and try and make a large gamer stats portal.