Monday, August 28, 2006

And The Winner Is...

... "Zombie Freakshow!"

Zombie Freakshow won another costume contest in City of Villain’s Liberty server this past weekend. I never thought of this character as being a well-designed character, but twice now I've come away winning a grand sum of cash based on her costume's design; first I won 100K, and this past weekend I won 300K.

I really like the ideas of in-game contests being run by the players rather than the game's Administrators... and I'm not saying this because I've won twice in 2 weeks. I really enjoy the idea of people creating extra curricular activities in-game, it really adds to the game's apppeal.

To me it is a type of 'player-created content', something I really enjoy talking about. It reminds me of an article I read in PC Gamer's magazine about players in Star Wars Galaxies and Guild Wars creating professions that were outside of the ones provided by the game. The example I remember from SWG, as I sit here and type, is the one of taxi cab drivers; people were selling time in their land speeders to get across Tatooine faster. In Guild wars people were taking payment as escorts to lower-level players seeking safe passage through dangerous territory. I really enjoy hearing about people coming up with such ideas, I adds an extra depth of immersion to the games and it shows that players are learning the provided game mechanics to create their own content.

Its small steps like these that I hope will eventually lead to games that give players the ability to create intricate content for the games we play. Until then I'll keep hitting the costume contests in CoV... there's some serious coin to be made!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home