April 23, 2004
Outta My Way, Nerdlinger!
Oh man, this is getting scary. Thanks to Mallarme’s kindly enabling, I’ve spent my evenings for the past few weeks wrestling with an intransigent box of circuits – and I’ve found I’m kind of enjoying it. Now that I have a powerful computer, I’ve also been increasingly drawn, moth-like, to computer games that will use that power to make complex patterns of flashing light. A few days ago I found a game called Neverwinter Nights at Half Price Books for ten bucks – I’d heard it was good, so I picked it up.
It turns out this is the NERDIEST COMPUTER GAME EVER – and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s an RPG, for a start, but it goes far beyond the levels of nerdishness found in even such classic dorkfests as Ultima, Wizardy!, or Everquest. How does it do this? Funny you should ask . . .
Essentially, it would appear that NwN (a game this nerd-oriented must inevitably be referred to by an acronym) is the ultimate translation of Dungeons and Dragons to a computer environment. While it does contain a straightforward, linear “quest” component, this pales in importance next to the powerful toolset that it includes, which allows users to construct their own quests. Most importantly, these quests can be played online by small groups cooperatively, and many can be administered in real time by a Dungeon Master. If you never played D&D as a kid < coughliarcough >, the Dungeon Master is essentially a performance artist whose responsibility is to improvise the conversations, battles, and other events that make up a game of D&D, and the inclusion of that role is what really differentiates NwN from the games that came before – while those games provided battles and quests for players, there’s nothing like a real human coming up with new and surprising parameters for you as you play.
Every aspect of the game is fully open to tweaking by users. There are a ridiculous, almost unwieldy number of expansion quests, new creatures, new character models, etc. available at this site, which is just the largest of many.
We’ve been talking about nerdiness a bit lately, so I just wanted to share – I’m disturbingly excited by the concept of this game, though I doubt I’ll ever do more than dip a toe into the hugeness of its potential. Everyone’s abuzz about Massively Multiplayer games, but at least in concept it seems that this might be getting it closer to right – not just throwing a bunch of strangers onto a server, but allowing a small group to share a truly immersive, collaborative experience.
Is the shipping address the same as the billing address?
From what I understand, that game made quite a splash when it first came out. As further proof of its geek cred, there's even a version of it available for Linux, which is a great rarity in the world of computer games.