Is there a Facebook game that uses your friends list to name mobs in the game?
Zoso was talking to me about his adventures in S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, and explaining that there’s a character in the game with a very similar name to his own. This freaked him out for a few seconds, before he calmed himself down and realised that it was just a coincidence. And then shot himself in the face. The other himself, that is.
I thought: it might be fun to have an MMO use your Outlook or Address Book to derive names for mobs within the game. It would give a whole new meaning to “raiding the boss tonight”, if the boss mob in question happened to be named after Mr Johnson from senior accounts. There’d also be some pleasing karma in a giant flatulent ogre in the game being named after the attractive but spiteful secretary from down the hall.
Hey, if the MMO did this without asking your permission, and your friends were all able to log-in and see everything, we could call the game Buzz Online.
Considering how easy it is to talk about FPS gameplay among non-gamers, I see no way how this could possibly backfire.
“So I was busy backstabbing Mr. Johnson when he suddenly turned around and smacked me right into the wall. Fortunately, Mike quickly finished off Mrs. Coulter, tauted him and we managed to kill him. He had a nice ring.”
But think of the amusement around the dinner table when you explain how you skinned Aunty Ethel in order to craft a hat out of her tanned hide.
And how that’s a funny coincidence, because there was a character in your MMO called Aunty Ethel too.
I’ve noticed a ‘Zoso’ (Zoso Cerberus iirc) pipe up lately in the help channel of Fallen Earth. Whilst it’s certainly a player rather than a mob, it always brings a wee smile to my face. Could even be the real one I guess, but why shatter the illusion?
Wasn’t Black and White supposed to scour your Address Books and give you peons named after your unfortunate associates? Dunno, I could never get that bit to work…
Blimey, either I’ve started playing Fallen Earth without realising, or someone’s stolen my unique and entirely original name! T’ch…
And then you’ll have some fanatics get wind of this MMO and start a media frenzy about how it’s desensitizing children and making them think it’s okay to steal loot from friends and “sap” females against their will.
“Raiding the boss tonight”? That’s one map editor short of a training simulator for terrorists :P