Anarchy Online: Casual Intelligence (Part 1: Shopping)
I was speaking with my wife recently about Anarchy Online. If you’d like to learn more about this (free to play / pay per month for larger expansions) game, by all means click the link and find out, it will open in a new window. If you don’t care enough or already know about it, just bear with me for a moment whilst I explain one of those subtle points about why this game is so great.
In a word: Shopping. As a general rule in “real life”, I like shopping for cool stuff. Best Buy is my Disneyworld-esque shopping center of choice, naturally. I also don’t buy much there due to the prices, naturally. But it has awesome stuff that I like to look at and potentially make a mental note to shop for later online, naturally. And it’s also filled with tons of stuff that I have no intention of EVER purchasing, but it’s pretty nifty to know that they have it. Naturally.
Bringing that psychology into the world of online gaming, and you have a dynamic that is completely overlooked in almost every online game out there. When it comes time to shop for something (a weapon, armor, social items, clothing, buffs, potions, stims, what-have-you), in any standard well-known MMOG out there, you go to a very plainly labelled store, and it gives you a list of the items you can use. The list consists of three major categories of that item: Those that are too low level for you to care about, those that are too high level for you to use, and maybe one single item that is the current best of it’s type for you to use at your character’s level of experience. In a word: Boring.
Then go shopping at any level in Anarchy Online. Say you want to buy a weapon, so you go to a weapon shop by finding a store terminal center and logging into the terminal. You are instantly barraged with an array of weaponry so vast that it’s almost immediately confusing. You need to mentally filter out exactly what kind of weapon you’re looking for, then root through the handful of weapons in that terminal that fit your needs. The selection is random, and the randomness comes from a MASSIVE cache of server-side possibilities that are so vast, there is a very good chance that none of the weapons in the store fit exactly what you need as far as speed, damage, and general efficiency are concerned.
So what now? Now, unless you got really lucky, you need to shop around a bit more by finding another store. There are sweet spots (my favorite being the strip mall in Old Athens city) where terminal centers are aplenty, and you can also hop from city to city, checking out different stores to see what’s in stock at this moment.
The very act of shopping for items becomes a mission (or “quest” for you warcrappers) in and of itself, and it’s probably one of the most casually satisfying aspects of the entire game. This is mostly due to the psychological impact that searching-and-finding has on the average person, which is a point that is emboldened simply by the sheer number of single-player games and solo missions in MMOs that rely on that exact methodology: Go find an item. But the mental impact of actually acquiring the item becomes ironically much more personal when you’re not just drumming out the feeder-bar text given to you from a mission booth or quest giver; you are literally searching for something to help your character out for no other cause than to increase your own efficiency as a player in the game.
Personally, I love belt shopping. My wife is sitting next to me and just now lucked out in the OA “strip mall” by finding a three-slot belt wearable at level 12 (provided a few points were dumped into Computers, obviously). That’s a pretty sweet find, so I asked her to pick up a couple of them (one for me, one for some lucky sod I run into at some point, since I love helping out the newbz).
Anyway, that’s enough rambling. I love Anarchy Online for a lot of reasons, but today’s reason is all about the shopping. I’d much rather search through a hundred terminals of mediocre and unusable items to find that one sweet deal than press a feeder bar for the only next-better-sword-for-you at the obvious store of obviousness that is so prevalent in the fantasy MMOs soaking up the market today.
Maybe it’s just me. ;)
More later…
