A few weeks ago, as a sort of birthday present to myself, I bought a copy of Neverwinter Nights. I went into it with my eyes open. I knew I was about to mainline the gaming equivalent of heroin and I could just kiss all my spare time goodbye.
Never mind the game itself, the thing is addictive merely from a programming standpoint. Those fiendish gnomes over at Bioware, knowing full well what havoc it would wrought in marriages, friendships and continued employment, gave us the tools to create our own persistent worlds and MUD’s (An obsolete term I know but, it all started with Rogue, ADVENT and Nethack, right?).
It’s all written in C and the user is encouraged to create their own scripts, libraries, objects, etc. What this means is that folks like me will spend more time just writing new code, objects and modules for NWN then actually playing it. A friend of mine even considered porting all his old ADVENT and Rogue code (Written in Fortran 4 no less!) into NWN just see how it would work.
In other gaming news, Caveat Lector has a lot of interesting commentary on roleplaying games–interesting insights into things nerdish. On the 23rd of August, my friends took me to the first gaming convention I’ve been to in a long, long time–Dragonflight. At first I was a little nervous that they all be years younger than me but, upon arriving, I found these fears to be baseless. It’s reassuring to discover that there is a large contingent of middle aged gamers out there.