CAN A GAME ARTICLE MAKE YOU CRY? [Author: Lum the Mad]
In the time-honored tradition of logrolling in our time, I’d like to hype Quarter to Three again. Mainly because Mark Asher and I have been trading articles on the state of the web publishing industry, and we’ve decided that the rules have changed. Linking is bad. If you link to a site enough, you can destroy them by running up their bandwidth charges and making them scream for mercy as they contemplate next month’s ISP bill. The only possible response is in the growing field of polymorphic encrypted domain URLs that change minute-by-minute to avoid “grief linkage“. Guerilla underground sites (no, REAL underground sites, homey) will remain hidden as long as possible, until MS-AOL Internet 2 rolls around, this time with an easily-accessible credit card swiper installed next to the user’s mousepad. Those guerilla underground sites will, of course, not have any readers, but it’s a small price to say for survival.
And, like Erik of Old Man Murray, I’ve rattled on for an entirely incoherent and insane paragraph to bring you to Bruce Geryk’s insanely funny writeup of, as best as I can tell, why you should hate Shadow Watch. In true “guerilla underground” style, the article actually has almost nothing to do with Shadow Watch.
Empire-building games with tech trees create a powerful desire for new technology (\’e2\’80\’9cIf I can just get Chariots, I can smoke him!\’e2\’80\’9d) that is never quite satisfied (\’e2\’80\’9cIf I can only get Chariots and Catapults, then I can smoke him!\’e2\’80\’9d). When playing games with individual characters instead of massive empires, this lament becomes, \’e2\’80\’9cIf only I had a submachine gun. Or a +1 broadsword.\’e2\’80\’9d Or a fucking life. Whatever. The point is, you want more stuff because it allows you to progress further in the game. Thus, when you get more stuff, you\’e2\’80\’99re happy. This is really the whole point of life, which is why Richard Mellon Scaife bought Pittsburgh.
Oh well, it’s during business hours, which means thanks to an overloaded web server (or evil hackers, or sunspots, or something) you probably can’t even read this website. Lah lah.