{"id":133,"date":"2005-05-24T03:15:43","date_gmt":"2005-05-24T07:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/24\/gratuitous-gaming-2\/"},"modified":"2005-05-24T03:15:43","modified_gmt":"2005-05-24T07:15:43","slug":"gratuitous-gaming-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/24\/gratuitous-gaming-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Gratuitous Gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Retro post week.  Here’s one from many, many moons ago.  I
\ncouldn’t bring myself to post it at the time because it was just…
\ntoo… geeky.<\/p>\n

On the insistence of my cousin’s
\ndaughter, I made the mistake of peeking into the seamy world of Really
\nBad Games Written by High School Kids and Played by Tens of Thousands
\nof Users.\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

As the LoL newspaper<\/a>
\nsuggests, a lot of people are spending a lot of time doing really,
\nreally silly things. Like giving eachother six septillion gold pieces,
\nback and forth. Which is wrong on so many levels; for instance, our
\nsilly arabic numeral system deprives players of even the redeeming
\nfeature of teaching people how to spell “septillion.”\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of the more popular games in this
\ngenre, like the one my cousin insisted I check out, a) only let you
\nmake a few moves a day, b) require you jump through all kinds of hoops
\nto prove you’re a human, and c) have absolutely no plot, graphics, or
\ngameplay. Yet *hundreds of thousands* of people play them. Tends of
\nthousands play them for hours and hours every week. Entire high school
\nclasses are apparently addicted to these games, whose concept,
\ncomplexity, and execution are more or less on a level with a viral form
\nof Pong.\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Oh, this is too precious. Here’s a transcript from the online chat:\n<\/div>\n

– Lord CoolKat “how can I owe you if I have a 153sept hole?<\/span>”
\n
\n– Support Woden “ehehe ck i have 1.83oct hole wanna compare notes?<\/span>”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The game creators, who use english so
\ncolorfully in their game descriptions, came up with their own
\nabbreviations for large numbers, since they occur so frequently. “M1”
\nstands for million; “M2” for million million. So if you see that Duke
\nOmega the pseudo dragon has 91,080M4 Experience, you can quickly
\nconvert that in your head to 91.08 nonillion Experience. To put this in
\nperspective, that is approximately one Wilt Chamberlain squared.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Retro post week.  Here’s one from many, many moons ago.  I couldn’t bring myself to post it at the time because it was just… too… geeky. On the insistence of my cousin’s daughter, I made the mistake of peeking into the seamy world of Really Bad Games Written by High School Kids and Played by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}