You Have Entered A Maze Of Twisty Arguments, All Alike
According to his website:
CrevoScope is a text-based game of strategy, community, wit, and commitment against a backdrop of the modern creationism / evolution debate. Represent your ideology – your destiny lies in front of you. Choose to become a renowned and knowledgeable scientist, a devout biblical scholar, a powerful orator, or remain moderate and balanced. Compete against other players to prove your side to be the more powerful, and join forces with other players to ensure your faction’s domination.
You level up by winning debates against your chosen enemy. Which is initially intriguing, until you discover that “debating” means “rolling a virtual die.” Here’s how it works:
To gain exp you must debate other people and win. To debate someone go to the crevocafe and click debate. Next find a person whom you would like to debate and if you are capable of debating them a yes will be next to their name. Click this yes to debate them and see who wins.
That’s it. That’s how you pwn teh n00bz in CrevoScope. Here, for example, is a transcript of my “debate” with aklouk90. Mind you, this isn’t a blow-by-blow account. I clicked on the “debate” link, and this is the text that displayed:
You turn toward aklouk90 and say “How could Noah possibly fit all those animals into a small boat?”
aklouk90 replies to your argument with “Well… um… all that matters is that he did!”
amber smiles with victory.
aklouk90 says his own argument: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
You think for a moment and say “Scientists say that we evolved from chimps, not monkeys! I guess that God of yours didn’t decide to give you a brain so you could realise this, huh?”
aklouk90 nods, enjoying seeing his opponent make a complete fool of himself.
Once again, you challenge your opponent: “How could Noah possibly fit all those animals into a small boat?”
aklouk90 replies to your argument with “Think about it, God is all powerful, he could have used a variety of ways to fit the animals in- He could have shrunk them, make the boat larger, or many other possible choices. He is God afterall!”
amber seems to be annoyed, un-satisified with the answer, but uncertain how to respond to that.
aklouk90 wins the debate!
I’m not even going to get into how somebody with more than a middle school science education could possibly lose this argument, but apparently my text-based avatar is a dumbass.
There are other problems with the game. For starters, successful “free” games usually operate by the rule that “our game is free, but we’ll make it slightly easier on you if you pay us a little money.” Crevoscope, through it’s use of “fossils” as the real monetary unit in the game (you can also earn in-game cash, but it’s insanely easy to farm), makes it darn near impossible to compete on any level unless you’re willing to either refer other players or “donate” real cash. These are the only ways to acquire fossils, other than trading for them. This is a huge design flaw. Because everything except fossils can be obtained through free play, nobody in their right mind would trade a fossil to a free player for something they can get already. So at some point (and as it turns out, very early in the game) you’re going to have to put up some real cash. And if Crevoscope offered any hope in the early game that the later game was worth paying for, that would be one thing. But between the horrible “debate” system (which should really be the hallmark of a game that purports to simulate the creationism versus evolution argument), poorly written and typo-laden dialog, and overall poor design, there’s just nothing there that makes me want to check out the areas that paying real-world money would open.
What really dooms Crevoscope is simply that it does nothing well. The interface is primitive and gives no sense of an actual community. There is simply too great a disconnect between the mechanics of the game and the realities of the ideologies to make Crevoscope a convincing “simulation.” (In fact, an argument could be made that The Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a better simulation of the complexities behind the Columbine attacks.) The writing is repetitive, uninteresting, and at a minimum should have at least been spell-checked.
And lest I be accused of picking on the little developer, let me just say that I think the core idea is at least interesting. But Crevoscope as it stands now is, at best, alpha quality. It’s simply too immature, and too broken, to be asking for players to spend money on it. Now is the time to be gathering player feedback, scrapping the “debate” system for something that’s actually fun, and polishing up the interface and community experience. Right now Crevoscope is only now pulling itself out of the primordial ooze. In a world where there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of web-based games competing for your microdollars, it will need to either adapt quickly or…um…be kicked off the ark.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I like the idea that I could pimp out my 60th level Philosopher, and activate my “post hoc ergo propter hoc” power to defend.
It seems like at some level, an intricate debate system would require an extremely sophisticated AI that could be doing better things toward problem solving than a Massively Multiplayer Argument Machine.
Have you checked out the Passive Multiplayer Online Game yet? I’m working on my review now.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Actually, the first thing that occurred to me on a revamped “debate engine” would be to incorporate logical fallacies. In a turn-based system you could “attack” with, say, a straw-man argument. If the defender can identify your argument as a straw-man, and has the necessary skillage or whatever, then the attack is blocked, for instance. You could boost your attacks with your leet “advocacy” skill, use “spin,” “charisma,” etc. You could boost defense with “eye rolling” and “objection.” You could initiate different styles of debate, such as “Lincoln-Douglas,” or “FOX News Rant-fest.” I think something that incorporated actual debate flavor could be pretty fun. But just clicking a button and being told that you have won or lost your debate is not fun, especially when the flavor text shows you to be a complete moron for having lost that debate.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I usually make it a point not to debate with people that believe in talking snakes. But I like the idea of a text-based debate game. The only problem would be that, if you used real written text instead of a “roll of the dice” system, you’d need to have real people judging the outcome.
You’d have to have a message board-like system and you’d need strict guidelines for awarding points. Like, points awarded for supporting your own arguement, attacking the opponents, and for defending against the opponents comments, but points deducted for not being able to counter their comments. And then give players a certain number of times to respond (say three posts each), and just have it go back and forth between the two players until they finish the round (or let them call it quits instead of writing a new message).
It’d be just like yelling at someone on a forum, but you’d get points for it, so everyone can clearly see that you’re WAY smarter than that asshole who disagreed with you.
A game like that would take about a month to set up, and I imagine it’d be fairly popular. Yelling at strangers is one of the main appeals of the internet, after all.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Hmm, this one could gain the attention of The Resistance as well, Amber. Are you going for that? If you are, you should go for a hat-trick.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:04 am
Actually, in regards to the “for cash” versus “free” currencies, there was a page I remember reading where a designer of a game using that sort of methodology said it works out real well. It’s just real tricky to make sure that there are things worth paying while still not being overpowering. People who actually use real currency to buy in game items are not opposed to skipping a few steps, while those who are willing to farm in game currency in exchange (for what would be “fossils” in this example) still have a way of earning those same items.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:13 am
@Amel: Heh. It hadn’t occurred to me. But I doubt a platform for intelligent debate would interest The Resistance at all.
@Daniel: I agree that there are those who don’t mind paying real money to avoid the grind, and it does tend to work out well. But in the case of Crevoscope, I see a TON of 1st level players in the rankings, and relatively few higher level players. This tells me (and I could be misinterpreting the data) that the grind to earn the amount of in-game money that it would take to buy a fossil from another player (and this is the *only* way to obtain a fossil, other than referring someone to the game) is just too high. So you either have a ton of players quitting at level 1, or you’ve got a ton of fake referrals so players can earn their fossils that way.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:59 am
If they didn’t have platforms for intelligent debate, what would would they bitch about?
But seriously, that Crevoscope thing just sounds like a scam to me.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:27 am
This is like something I programmed in high school. Random number generator, random argument, random outcome. With graphics.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:08 am
It’s generally not a lot of fun debating with someone who plays the ‘God is all powerful’ card.
Anyway, on a more serious note, Amber, what happened to my Wordpress account? I click on your ‘log in’ button and try to login with my old ‘benro’ account (with password remembered from when I used to login regularly to the previous incarnation of your website) and it has no recollection of me. I don’t see anything on the login screen that is like a ‘register’ or ‘create account’. Am I destined to be an Anonymous Coward for the rest of my life? Will I ever be able to get my YPOJ avatar back?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
benro, I’ll look into this.