3) Join Her Guild

The internet has allowed us to meet loads of people without ever having to actually talk to them fact to face. Email, instant messaging, it has all allowed us to communicate in ways we’ve never imagined. Some people take it to a whole new extreme. MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role playing games) take it to a new level, no pun intended. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Project Entropia, and others have allowed groups of people, known as ‘guilds’ to battle online in real-time. You wouldn’t believe it but it’s actually a great way to meet women, that is if you know what you’re doing.



I actually had a friend who went to California to the annual Blizzcon convention and hooked up with one of the members of his guild after meeting her in person for the first time. If you’re not into these games, it’s very playful to challenge a girl to Guitar Hero or DDR if that option is available to you.

For more regarding these online role-playing games click here.

4) Pretend You’re a Famous Author

Nothing impresses a woman more than a man who’s written a novel, or two, or three. Fortunately for us, most people don’t keep tabs on many authors profile save for a few favorites. Simply say to her you’re a well known author who’s just finished his book signing for his latest novel. For extra points keep a copy of your ‘book’ handy to show her as proof. Just make sure it doesn’t have the author’s picture on the inside jacket. I suggest paperbacks for this. While copyright infringement may be illegal, pretending to be someone famous to sleep with a woman has been going on unregulated for generations. Keep this tip close to home.

5) Be Yourself

When all else fails this is the best advice I can give you, just be yourself. If you’re talking about us hardcore science fiction aficionados it is very much still a boy’s club. If a gorgeous woman is attending an event like that it is not by accident, she’s a fan of the genre. Use this as a launching point for your relationship and build it from there. It’s much easier to get into a relationship with a girl if you already have mutual interests. Don’t get discouraged. Be yourself.

In 1989, Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, defeated the computer, Deep Thought, in a two-game championship chess match. In the move before Deep Thought’s defeat it took the computer three seconds to decide its next move. Now why is it significant? It’s just three seconds after all. Answer this. Why would a computer that is capable of achieving millions of calculations per second need three of them to make its next move? Many scientists cite this example as one of the first instances a machine has shown intelligence, a consciousness.

As games get more complex, quality assurance testers are finding it increasingly more difficult to locate and eliminate computational errors. Conversely, gamers themselves are finding new and innovative ways to tamper with a game’s mechanics in ways the programmers never anticipated. This section is by and large an extension of open-ended gameplay but is further extended to include the technological progression of console hardware and the public’s influence to affect a gameplay’s mechanics for entertainment or economical purposes.

Consider the following examples:

• Machinima: The art of making films using a game engine. Cut scenes in games rendered using the game models instead of motion video or actors are examples of machinima. Usually though the term is used to describe content not originally developed for the game (i.e. the Red vs. Blue Series).




• Cat and Mouse: In online car racing games players came up with this variation. The racers play on teams of at least two cars. Each team picks one very slow car, and their goal is to have their slow car cross the finish line first. Thus the team members in faster cars aim to push their slow car into the lead and ram their opposing teams’ slow cars off the road (i.e. Project Gotham Racing).




• Lurikeen invasion: Inspired by the diminutive form of the smallest avatar in Dark Age of Camelot, a guild called ‘Lurikeen Invasion’ formed on the Guinevere Shard, Hibernia Realm, starting an imaginary political movement based on the power of the lurikeen class. Originally started as a Grief guild, Thousands of players quickly joined created characters ending in ‘*keen’ e.g. ‘cokekeen’, ‘iamkeen’ on a single game server. As Dark Age of Camelot requires a roughly equal balance of three different races on each shard, Guinevere shard quickly became unbalanced and overrun by the ‘keen invasion’. It became so large Mythic Entertainment had to re-design the guild statistics webpages.




• Real economy interaction: Traders in massively multiplayer online games with economic systems play purely to acquire virtual game objects or avatars which they then sell for real-world money on auction websites or game currency exchange sites. This results in the trader’s play objective to make real money regardless of the original game designer’s objectives (i.e. World of Warcraft, Everquest, Project Entropia, etc.)




• Glitch or quirk-based strategies: In several games, especially first-person shooters, game glitches or physics quirks can become viable strategies, or even spawn their own game types. In id Software’s Quake series, rocket jumping is a popular strategy (as is gauss jumping in Valve Corporation’s Half-Life series) — a player fires a rocket at the ground while jumping, allowing the weapon’s splash damage to propel him to otherwise unreachable areas.

More often than not I’m going on Youtube to find new videos of people hacking Guitar Hero’s game engine to custom-create their own songs, or reprogramming a Nintendo Wii controller to use on laptops. If what we’re seeing is a trend towards open-ended storytelling and away from linear narrative; than with regards to emergent gameplay, what we’re seeing is a shift from big-time developers/publishers to indie development and a hacking subculture bent on subverting a game’s mechanics and programming to the fullest extent. (Continue to Part Five)