I made the clean break
and defriended 200+ Facebook gaming friends doing it.

I no longer play World of Blood.

I no longer wanted to do what I had to to do to keep playing.

Sneaking in rounds whenever I could – even at work.

Staying up late to get that one more item to drop.

Something a friend (who knew not World of Blood)
responded, when I told him I’m playing,
“I hope you win.“

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
There is no win.

Just more of the game, with no end to it, no closure.

As in life, so in gaming -
some games just aren’t worth playing for the long run.

And then, quoting Joshua in War Games
“the only winning move is not to play.”

Found a mashable post that covers the same ground
as the original mana-tization post.

Anyway…

I found a way around the mana-tization trap -
but first a reminder of the original problem:

Mana
Aye, here’s the rub….

If you want mana,
(and you’ll need it to increase party size
without spamming your friends)
you either

buy mana directly
[1 party member = 8 mana = $2.00 via Spare Change (via PayPal)]
or
go the “win a free ipod” route by signing up for
pay per lead offers or Netflix
for varying amounts of mana
(the more the offer pays the app owners, the more mana you get)

That can get old really fast.

The answer was obvious once I realized it -
entire industries have been built around it….

Spam people who are willing to be spammed
in return for having large amounts of friends on Facebook.

The gameplay is going great now, although I’ve experienced
the massive timesuck that MMORPG‘s
can be if you don’t exercise discipline in playing time.

Like any other game or pastime (work, recreation, spirituality)
unbalanced and undetached play can easily be your undoing.

Well, it’s time for me to sign off – L8R

Leo

Second, I shouldn’t be disappointed that
a RPG at a social networking site
wind up being so friggin’ dependendent on society building.

But what really grinds my gears,
and not in a good way,
is the way the monetization of mana, or mana-tization,
has messed up a perfectly good soloable set of games.

Anyways…

I got introduced to this group of web based games
by a friend who is marrying another friend who played (in a stage play)
the interest of a Latino thug who gets religion.

Note: I played the Latino thug.
(Leo pauses whilst those who know what he really looks like are ROFLing)

World of Blood [Elven Blood, Blood Lust, Skies of Blood, and City of Blood]
is a group of Facebook RPG applications -
thus requiring no additional software download.

Normal RPG concepts apply -
a dashboard shows Life, Stamina, Character Level, XP, and Gold.

A horizontal navbar allows access to the main game functions:

• Quests (varying names are used)
• Shop (buy and sell items for fixed amounts of gold)
• Group (info on your party, with a chance to recruit more)
• War (PvP by any other name)
• Character (stats and point allocation on level up)
• Mana (called Blessings, Favors, etc )
• Scoreboard (gamewide player rankings)

Quests -
Dog simple -
Fixed Stamina cost,
1-click results (varying damages and gold gain)
Too few artefact-only restricted quests,
almost no user level restricted quests,
far too many party size restricted quests.

Shop
and I do mean shop -
not auction house.
fixed price sale of items,
fixed price resale (50% of value)
potions are used instantly.

Group
Here you can see your “party”
and send invites to other FB people
(read spamming) to increase your party’s size -
which is critical to have access to quest above a certain level.

Can you do it without spamming your friends?
Sure – but it’ll cost you some serious mana….

War
PvP by any other name -
fight directly,
get XP and gold,
but no mana….

Character
Here’s where you allot your level up points (3 per level).

Stamina, Strength, and Dexterity
level up at 1 point each.

Life only levels up
at 5 points each.

Mana
Aye, here’s the rub….

If you want mana,
(and you’ll need it to increase party size
without spamming your friends)
you either

buy mana directly
[1 party member = 8 mana = $2.00 via Spare Change (via PayPal)]
or
go the “win a free ipod” route by signing up for
pay per lead offers or Netflix
for varying amounts of mana
(the more the offer pays the app owners, the more mana you get)

That can get old really fast.

Scoreboard
Self-explanatory. Really.

Other Weaknesses
No game gold for mana (doesn’t fit the business model, I guess)

No auction house action

But what do I want for free, right?

I’d give World of Blood

gear

gear

an OK site, but the baseball cap’s on a smidge too tight….

BTW, mashable has an article on this as well

When describing a process of creating called Colonization
(i.e. find the unowned, repackage it and sell it), the author
described how the game of baseball got “colonized”.

His description inspired me to create what I call
the 5 stages of gaming abstraction.

1) Direct play (F2F)
This is where all games start, be it a game of stickball
or the dice rolling, physical character moving version of Warcraft
played on kitchen tables.

2) Observing play directly
This next stage has a larger degree of variance :
at one level, it could be a Little League game
or merely watching Warcraft being played at a game store.
At another level it would be watching professional players
play baseball at a stadium.

3) Mediated observation of play
This is the most abstracted level of play.
An example would be watching a professional team on TV
with commentators explaining the play, along with
the obligatory commercials and vendor promos.
Professional gaming, while not at MLB or NASCAR levels,
is out there and in some nations (not ours) prevalent.

4) Directly playing metadata
This would be the “Fantasy League” style of play.
We have Fantasy Baseball, Football, Hockey, etc.,
but I haven’t seen a Fantasy Warcraft, though -
perhaps when professional Warcrafting takes off…

5) Direct play (interactive)
Examples of this would be Madden [insert year name here](Football),
NHL [insert year name here] (Hockey), etc.

This is where World of Warcraft would be in relation to
kitchen table Warcraft.

But it’s not quite that easy – stage 5 could be construed
as a new stage 1, which would restart the cycle,
and these stages are cyclical.

That being said, please, oh please GOD,
let there not be a World of World of Warcraft

While reading it, I realized the same could be said for
both blogging in general and bloggers in particular.

The first hat is the beret,
which he associates with the fine arts.

The beret bloggers tend to be,
but are not limited to, A-list bloggers.

Actually, any blogger with a sufficiently
supertypical existence can become a beret blogger.

The content of a beret blog is suffficiently compelling
in and of itself aside from any reference to others,
be it born of a person’s life (Scobleizer, Instapundit)
or of a project (Post Secret, et al).

Many people like to think they are beret bloggers,
but, alas, are not….

The second hat is the baseball cap, which he associates with popular art.

The baseball cap bloggers tend to be
the bloggers who use blogging as a means to
achieve something else
(i.e. sell books, run ads, do affiliate marketing, promote a business, etc).

The content of a baseball cap blog springs,
not from the blogger’s life, but from what the blogger percieves
to be a topic, product or service that has market demand
and can be monetized.

Examples range from made-for-AdSense article niche sites
to industry blogs serving a well defined niche with content
optimized for search engines and ad placement optimized for revenue.

Many blogs incorporate various baseball cap techniques,
but aren’t truly baseball cap blogs.

The third hat is the straw hat, which he uses to represent folk art.

The straw hat blogger is the most common of all the bloggers mentioned here.

The straw hat bloggers blog mostly for themselves and friends.

Among the types of straw hat blogs are:
noodle blogs (what I had for lunch), online diaries,
cat blogs (look – more pictures of my cat),
and most (but not all) Xanga, Livejournal, Facebook and MySpace pages.

The Metagrind – at the intersection of gaming and life.

I’m Leo, and I’ll be your grindmaster for these festivities
as we explore how life imitates gaming and vice versa.