I’m actually sitting in Star Trek Online right now, hovering above the Deferi Mining Outpost 3, waiting for the Breen capital ship “Desna” to show up. So I can kill it.

So, what it is with Black Friday? When did that become some sort of holiday in and of itself? Now we’re apparently exporting it to the rest of the world.

Rumor Control: Elder Scrolls V to be an MMO? People have been wondering ever since the next chapter in the Elder Scrolls series was teased way at the beginning of the year, if the game would depart from its single player roots and make the leap to become an MMO.

Because, a single player “sandbox” RPG which allowed unprecedented levels of freedom and customization would be a good fit as just another fantasy MMO without many of the things that made the series so popular. For instance, no MMOs let you mod the game. Why is this news now? Apparently a Danish gaming site has some more information on the next game, and, it’s just about time Bethesda finally made an MMO?

Single player RPGs don’t have a shelf life. You can play them for years. MMOs DO have a shelf life. Not seeing the fit here.

Spinks and company have been talking for a few days about the ups and downs of grouping in MMOs. Clearly, one of the differences between MMOs and single player RPGs is the opportunity to form or find a community. Single player games get played through, then put on the shelf. MMOs either end up on the shelf within days, or being played for years. Likely more than anything else, it’s the community that will either keep you or drive you away.

Everyone loves pets. Even your pets, right? The kids browser MMO Neopets(*) lets your pets have pets, too — they call them petpets. But what if the petpets want pets? Hey, we’re all in luck. Neopets now has the Petpetpet Habitarium, where you can breed petpetpets to your heart’s content. It’s actually a clever little RTS for young gamer geeks because, guys, we have to bring up the next generation of gamers right.

It’s good that petpetpets turn into gems after awhile, because otherwise, they’d be yelling about getting them some petpetpetpets.

(*) Neopets went from being a kid game portal to an MMO the very same second gaming blogs began treating kid game portal Clone Wars Adventures as an MMO!

Kasul and I were chatting the other day about speed run videos, those videos where insane people run through classic games in almost no time at all. While searching for some MMO speed run videos, I came across this video from the old EQ guild Parallax that shows them killing Cazic-Thule, Trakanon, real Faydedar(*) and Velketor. Yeah That was raiding.

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I got a letter today from Neopets (remember them? Facebook for kids?) warning me my account was about to meet the Great Blindingly Pink Maker if I didn’t log in pretty soon.

Talk about obsessions.

Three years ago, I casually played Neopets to keep in touch with my nieces Jazzmin and Ilsa. It was fun to peek into the lives of nine year olds, but I couldn’t help stray a bit and start playing some of the games.

Mostly reworks of classic arcade games and RPGs, of course but… Shapeshifter…

A seemingly innocent tile placing puzzle. The first few puzzles were trivial, then they got a little challenging, and then it got to… hey, I could write a program to do this!

That spark of inspiration will only bring you to about level 20, most dabblers soon discover. Some optimization gets you into the thirties, and there you’ll have to start thinking of some truly evil ideas, because the game goes to level 100. And there are people on the high score list all the way up there! You MUST have their algorithms!

It’s like the Da Vinci Code, except instead of some French girl and a professor, you have computer science majors and a children’s social networking site.

I started a blog specifically to discuss solving Shapeshifter. After nine months, I finished the fourth or fifth iteration of Shifter, a Python program that could solve Shapeshifter. You have to wait until the beginning of a month to get the #1 spot for the whole month, and mine came April 1, 2008. I spent the month as Shapeshifter Champion and got mega coins for it each day.

I was going to start up the ladder again, but there didn’t seem much point (although I recognize at least three of the names on the high score list as people I competed with back then, so it might just be me).

Anyway, in the intervening couple of years, I’ve been thinking of new algorithms…. I have other programming projects I need to do before Shapeshifter gets my time again, but… could be happening.

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Hungry and dying. Poor Spitefur. I’d been ignoring her since I won Shapeshifter last April. That triumph was my final goal in Neopets, and I had no reason to go on… and yet this morning found me walking through Neopia again, looking at the sights, browsing the games, and oh dear, who IS that Ixi in the corner? With that game of hers?

Sigh. So I started up Shapeshifter again. I always feel a little like Ragle Gumm as I set up the scripts and programs that solve the puzzles for me. I tore through the first 19, where I had to stop, as I’d reached the maximum number of Neopoints I could earn from that game in a day.

81 more puzzles to go… and they are about to get quite a bit harder.

Meteor Games, the new company, is hiring, by the way. A nice variety of jobs… but you have to work in West Hollywood. LA? Thanks, but no thanks.

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Some have asked how I can like games like Neopets and yet have few good things to say about upcoming titles such as Free Realms. Well, for one thing, being as it is (currently) just web pages, they can and do many surprising things. Neopets in particular has a very deep stock trading simulation, full auction house with lots of means of arbitrage, hidden quests, many many combat arenas with a surprising depth to their combat… since their barrier to innovation is set so incredibly low, nothing gets in their way. They have built-in blogging, guilds, player houses (which you can make *however you like* — mine is three stories tall with a tower at each corner, a courtyard, and landscaping I designed myself). Player stores with shopkeepers you can script — plus hundreds of great minigames. And more LOTS more.

Because there is so MUCH there, you can find yourself in little areas where you can make your own challenges — like solving the Shapeshifter puzzle to 100, a challenge that requires you to create a very involved program and teach yourself efficient tree-search and pruning algorithms. I met some fascinating people along the way to solving it; it took me about nine months (with breaks).

All I can be certain of with Free Realms is that SOE will have decided everything I can do before I even make my character. There won’t be any puzzles that require months to solve. There won’t be things to do that a kid would find hard or impossible to do — and so there won’t be anything that a kid could be challenged by. Like, I dunno, maybe a part of the game where a kid would need to know how to read and write in French, just a little. And if you moved deeper, you needed to know more French — and native speakers would be comfortable there, giving kids opportunities to speak to other kids all over the world in their native tongues.

There is so much opportunity in MMOs to not only socialize, but to learn and enrich people. If people can learn incredibly complex raids or how to fight in arenas in WoW, then they can learn other things as well.

If I’m going to let my kid play an MMO, I’m going to want to know what the tangible benefits of it are, or they won’t be playing. Learning how to shop — not a tangible benefit. Advertising a vendor’s products — also not a tangible benefit. Marketing does not usually benefit the target.

I guess what I’m saying is, what justifies a new MMO? It can’t be its own justification. WoW was an iterative collection of MMOs to that point, but has now matured and taken its own path. Lord of the Rings Online, to take advantage of the movie buzz to let you roam a famous world. EQ2, to remake EQ with better tech. Why Free Realms? (or Playstation Home, for that matter?)

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Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter.

It’s all very Karate-kid-ish.

I only played Neopets to solve this one puzzle, and now that it’s done, I won’t ever play again. I’ll put my Neopets up for adoption. But for the entire month of April, my name will live at the top of the high scores, and if I die tonight, I’ll die knowing that I died a bona fide champion.

This wasn’t the final puzzle, but it was close. Surprisingly, this is one of the easier puzzles.

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Yeah, I’m back on Shapeshifter again, that amazingly difficult puzzle game on Neopets.

I’ve been thinking about getting back in that race again. I burned out on the puzzle back in September, but I have been getting encouraging notes from people urging me not to give up. There’s a strange community of solvers out there. People get up to about 25 on their own, then get stumped and either give up or try to write a solver.

Anyway, I somehow acquired a mentor who is going to give me encouragement and algorithmic help on my road to level 100. I’ve just done levels 80 and 81 without any significant code changes, though I did download the Python-C compiler onto my dual core machine so I could pump up the performance of my current, Python-based solver.

Now I want to translate it all into Java and multithread it, see what happens there…

It’s still a long distance to 100.

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Thanks to Emily from Neopets who kept working with me until I remembered enough details of what I had in Neopets so that she could send me the info I needed to log in again.

Spitefur is staying in a luxury hotel the next five days until she gets back to good health.

Now to take a look at Shapeshifter again…

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