An undead berry is a Lichee?

In many MMOs eating food is a downtime activity used to restore a character's lost health, and drinking restores mana for magic users. There are many curiosities with the nature of these mechanics, so let's extend our culinary cognisance and see what the Inferno has to offer on the subject.

But first I just need to grab a quick snack.

The first thing to note about food in MMOs is the sheer amount and variety of food that heroes carry around with them. It's astonishing. Imagine yourself on a family outing to a park somewhere and you're taking a picnic, maybe you've got a nice hamper and you've filled it with all sorts of goodies; you get to the park, and hauling the hamper out between three of you you nearly cripple yourselves under the monstrous weight of the thing, you lug the hamper the twenty yards it takes to find the right number and variation of trees to create a scene from a Jane Austen novel, and then you all collapse from exhaustion and try to find the strength to open the lid of the hamper and lift out the roast turkey with all the trimmings, the barbecue, the fondue, the umbrellas for when it inevitably rains, the backup fondue, the small diesel generator to power the microwave... Ok, so maybe that's just my picnics, but anyway, there's a lot of food, and it's heavy and a pain in the buttocks to move around. Now imagine that you're doing that whilst carrying a ten foot sword or staff, whilst wearing armour or flowing mystical robes. Now fight a horde of twenty orcs.

Let's just say that the gateaux is going to be slightly 'pancaked' (and don't even ask what the pancakes look like) and the martinis are going to be very much on the shaken side of things.

Nevertheless, in MMOs it is an absolute certainty that even in the deepest, dankest dungeon, adventuring groups across the land will be pausing next to a pile of fresh corpses exuding cerebrospinal fluids, rat nests full of disease ridden rodents and pits of strange and unnameable slimes in order to whip out a raclette and accompanying condiments, and having elevenses whilst trying to avoid getting cave mould in their Clos du Mesnil.

In skiing they have après-ski, and in adventuring you have après-abattage.

I think the NPCs are missing a trick here. Just set-up a restaurant at a suitable depth in any dungeon and wait for the adventuring clientele to come flocking in:

“Hello? Is that Lou Liches? Yes we have a table booked for a party of five under the name of Thrognar the Red. Seven thirty? Yes, that’s us. I’m just phoning to let you know that there’ll only be four of us now, I hope that’s not a problem, it’s just that one of our party has been unavoidably detained by a pit trap full of vipers. Oh wonderful, I’m glad it won’t be a problem. We should be there on time, but we do have to defeat Mordon the Undying Betrayer of Gotland just before we get to you, so we might be a few minutes late, but I imagine we'll be in need of some serious food by then. Tell me, do you have anywhere that a magic user can cast his wand about after drinking, if you know what I mean?”

Now don't get me wrong, adventurers have to eat, but many of the items of food that they carry are these absurdly wonderful gourmet items that wouldn't last five seconds being stacked next to daggers, rope, items of armour and whatever else is in an adventurer's backpack. Take the humble pie for example: it's probably one of the more robust items on the menu of heroic foodstuffs, but one whole pie is usually good enough to restore a depleted health bar once only, and a health bar is generally depleted after every other fight at least. So heroes carry around something like one hundred and seventy five pies in order to keep themselves going, and do you know how many calories that is? I mean, I know adventurers are an active lot, but seriously, never mind being able to find their way back out of a dungeon, it's a miracle that they can fit back out.

Who ate all the pies? Now we know.

This pie-eating madness could almost be forgiven, except that every fantasy MMO has these stick-thin females, with non-existent armour that protects them from the strike of a two-handed battle axe, and there they are between fights scoffing pies and steaks and the like. I can see the Female MMO Fitness Workout DVD coming out soon: basically girls, just eat whatever the hell you like and as much as you like. Essentially, eat like a pig if you want, just make sure you kill forty or more orcs a day and you'll fit into the tiniest outfit imaginable, and as an added bonus your breast size will triple!

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into 'courses' will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Buffs from food is a wonderful tacked-on after thought isn't it? I mean, how does an adventurer eat a wolf testicle pie and suddenly gain mightily in strength for half an hour? Do wolves have magical testicles that imbue arcane energies into a person? Wouldn't that be the worst evolutionary design ever. Every wolf would be biting off his own 'bits' in order to make him stronger than his rivals and then when the strongest of them all has finally become leader of the pack he can't breed. Maybe they would develop an Amazon wolf society, where the females were in charge. Makes sense, in a 'none of this last paragraph made much sense' sort of way. Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn't know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you're struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Buffs from food don't last that long, and one can imagine this is because the food item has perhaps passed on its way through the adventurer's body. Yeah, we're talking toilets now. Why are no dungeons equipped with toilet facilities? I mean, I know these places are run by evilly evil overlords from the evil dimension, but no toilets? That's just a whole new level of evil, man. Not once in an excursion do you get a hero going "You know what, I've been down in this dungeon for four hours straight, I've seen sights that would make mere mortals crap themselves inside out, and I haven't had a chance to relieve myself in all that time". And thank goodness, can you imagine with the amount of food that gets eaten and the number of drinks that are quaffed, what would happen if nature was allowed to take it's natural course? An outside observer would watch a bunch of hardened folk, grimly venture in to the entrance of an ancient ruin, only to be washed out again four minutes later on a tidal wave of excrement; hidden entrances to the place would suddenly become clear as geysers of faecal matter erupted from them twenty feet into the air.

So along with all their other skills, such as melee mastery and fireball flinging, adventurers come ready trained with the ability to 'hold it in'. At least until they get to Lou Liches.

All-in-all it's a wonder that MMO adventurers don't just drag a cow along down with them on their dungeon delving deeds, they could all grab a bite from it in between fights without the need to crack open the picnic hamper. Don't worry though, the cow has a health bar, so all they have to do is feed it something and it'll be fine to carry on...

Thought for the day.

If drinking restores mana for a magic using character, surely it follows that urinating uses up mana.

Casting spells also uses up mana; so is urinating a form of conjuring?

Gives a whole new meaning to a wizard waving his wand about...

The MMOhhhhh

At this point on our journey we'll stop to take a brief look at the undercurrent of sexual tension in the MMO space by exposing the hidden meaning to several common MMO terms thus revealing their sordid alternatives.

Those who are of an easily offended nature may want to avoid delving this deep into the Inferno.

MMOhhhhh terms:

Meat Shield: Underwear.

Grind: What lovers do after they've removed their meat shields.

Two-boxing: See ménage à trois.

Ding: The result of a successful grind. Generally happens more quickly when two-boxing.

Spawn: The (sometimes unexpected) appearance of a new being when people have been grinding for a while.

Gold Farmer: Grinding where the sun don't shine.

Buff: It is considered good form to give your partner a decent buff before you start grinding.

Solo: Buffing yourself because there's nobody to grind with.

Bot: A device to allow females to solo more easily.

Bind on Equip: When improvised bots go wrong.

Instance: The female sexual organ.

Twink: The male sexual organ when it's ready for grinding.

Nerf: The male sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Instance run: The female sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Rez: When a male is ready to grind again.

Gimped: Those people who like to grind whilst wearing full-body leather meatshields.

Lag: When one person fails to ding during a good grinding session.

Wipe: Something that is bound to occur if there's been a lot of grinding and several dings.

DPS: Someone who's a little too enthusiastic with their grinding technique.

Con: If it cons red, you've been grinding too much.

Combinatorial, my dear Watson.

Priest: "There's the Ogre lord, attack in the name of the king! And his foxy daughter!"

Warrior: "Raaaaarghhh!"

Ogre Lord: "Puny fleshpods, me smish you!"

Warrior: <Holds up a finger> "Oh, hang on a second, I'm not sure if this is the right weapon to be fighting ogres with."

Priest: "What?!"

Ogre Lord: "Guards! Hit oomans wit yer hurt makers!"

Warrior: <Rummages through backpack and pulls out an abacus> "No, that's not the right one, that's for orcs." <Rummages some more, littering the floor with abacuses> "Ah ha, here's the ogre one! Right, I just need to calculate my DPS average and then we can perform a reverse linear interpolation based on his percentage health to determine overall hit points!"

Priest: <Surrounded by four angry ogre guards> "Mother."

Warrior: <Takes a swing at the ogre lord> "A hit. A most palpable hit! How are you feeling now? Would you say that you're feeling ninety five percent healthy? Or perhaps it's more like ninety two percent?"

Ogre Lord: "Ow, yoo make my not-left-arm bleed! Raaaagghh!"

Warrior: "Hmmm, right arm is bleeding and he's pretty steaming angry, we'll call that eighty nine percent." <flicks some beads on the abacus> "Good news, I think we can defeat him in another ten rounds of combat!"

Ogre Lord: "Yoo never stop me, I are in der vincey ball!"

Priest: <Dodges another ogre guard attack> "Just kill him already!"

Warrior: "Your crown will be mine in a mere ten hits, and then the king's daughter will be rewarding us tonight in ways that are illegal in four other virtual worlds!"

Ogre Lord: "Actually old chap, I fear you've made a slight miscalculation. You see, I'm actually a mountain ogre, whereas you've been using the spreadsheet, sorry abacus, for standard ogres. We're an entirely different phylum, and quite unique in our general power and ability".

Warrior: "Really?"

Priest: "For the love of all stereotypically, misogynistically portrayed horny king's daughters, stab him and then help me!"

Ogre Lord: "Indubitably my dear boy. Look, here's the correct abacus, just take a quick gander".

Warrior: <whistles in admiration> "Impressive! Says here that you guys can hit for anywhere between one hundred and two hundred hit points!"

Ogre Lord: "Most certainly, but you're using that abacus with the armour bead over to the left which indicates a plate wearer such as your good self. If you move that bead over to the right..."

Warrior: <Flicks a few beads and calculates> "Good grief, it says that even a standard mountain ogre guard can hit a cloth wearer for anywhere up to one thousand hit points in a single shot!"

<Ogre guard hits Priest for nine hundred and ninety nine hit points of damage. Priest dies>

Ogre Lord: "You'll also see that in the notes section there's a calculation which shows that an ogre lord generally has a retinue of two ogre guards."

Warrior: <Looks up from his abacus to see four angry ogre guards surrounding him> "Waiiiit, that's not two guards!"

Ogre Lord: "My dear fellow, it is a fallacy to rely on the exactitude of numbers."

Warrior: "..."

Ogre Lord: "Bash im in der noggin boyz!"

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Can we do without all the numbers? Would it be possible to remove the numbers from the fore of MMORPGs, and would it make for a better game?

In current MMORPGs, everything seems to come down to spreadsheet crunching: this weapon is better because it does 0.2 DPS more in an offhand which has a swing timer that is 1.5 times that of the main hand; this spec is better because it allows an extra 20 mana regen per second whilst achieving a mana efficiency rating of 35% return on investment over a period of ten years at an amortisation schedule of three monthly intervals (terms and conditions apply).

In combat you already have the con system. You have the enemy's health bar. Why do you need to see how much damage you're doing to the exact hit point? Sure, have flashy effects in the game for critical hits and the like, because these are exciting things that should feel powerful and meaningful, but don't show every little numerical detail of how the combat is resolved.

If you break it down to the raw numbers, show the roots that feed the trunk of your game, you remove a large chance for immersion, magic and mystery.

There are a many examples of games where you aren't presented with the raw numbers, yet the games are fun and involving. I was playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii again the other day, and you don't even have enemy health bars in that game. You know what? It actually adds to the tension and enjoyment of combat: have I put enough shots into that guy to take him down? Is he going to get back up? Should I waste some ammo making sure? Do you think he'd mind if I took his jacket? At a basic level of abstraction, if you need to show that the ogre lord is really rather tough you can reflect it in the health bar, make the size of the bars relative such that a warrior facing off against an ogre that has twice as many hit points will see that the ogre's health bar is twice as big as his, he'll get an idea of how much effort it will take to defeat the enemy but it won't be an exact science involving slide rules and logarithmic charts.

The developers will still have the numbers in order to balance things and, you know, be able to create a working computer game, but abstracting these things away from the players seems like a way to make the game more than just Logistical Spreadsheet Combat Simulator IV. A sword which gives +Str and +Stam, could instead simply 'con' green to a warrior, and red to a mage. You could further adapt the 'con' of an item based on what the character currently has equipped. If the sword mentioned earlier gave less benefit to a warrior over his currently equipped sword, it would con orange or red to him, indicating that it wasn't an upgrade. Would the lack of focus on stats ruin it? Is it about making the power of an item tangible, evident to others so that you can show it off or work out exactly how many Pico seconds less it will take to kill a given mob? Could the fact that it's the most powerful weapon you've discovered on your adventures so far be enough?

Numbers allow people to min/max which is a form of enjoyment to some, but they also allow people to discriminate against those who don't min/max. Removing the numbers could be used as an attempt to remove a level of elitism from these games, when such elitism is so unwarranted.

Pen and paper games use dice rolls to simulate whether lady luck is smiling on the character, and stats are used to represent a characters abilities, because that is the way that seems to work best when you have to perform combat calculations yourself. But now we have these computers, and they can do all these complicated calculations of hit rolls and bonuses and skill point adjustments for us, so we should be able to sit back and enjoy a good game; except that the tradition of PnP was brought over wholesale, without perhaps considering the nature of the medium that they're being brought to, and thus computer based RPGs are heavily reliant on presenting the player with numbers when they could be put to better use in obfuscating the numbers and presenting us with a game that does all the hard work of calculating if another +1 to Charisma is really going to make the pot-belly dwarf barbarian succeed in seducing The Countess Snootington.

For the curious the answer is no, the seduction still failed. It might have been something to do with the fact that he was twiddling his nipple piercing whilst attempting the seduction. Hey, it works in the local tavern, how was I to know that it was considered bad form at the royal court?

Thought for the day.

"Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul." -- Carl Jung

"Or he could spend five minutes in an MMO." -- Melmoth

Roles Per Guild.

Welcome to your first guild, friend! To get you started, here's a brief list of potential members and how to identify them:

The Guild Leader
 Quote: "Holy crap, is this guild still going?"

 Most likely to: Turn up when it'll interfere with guild operation most.
 Least likely to: Be a leader.

The Raid Leader
 Quote: "No, I don't care that Tony has contributed five copper
         less to the guild funds. <takes swig of vodka> No you can't start a
         raid, we're in the middle helping this guy with his attunement. <drags 
         on a cigarette> No, I don't care that Tina is wearing the guild tabard
         as a thong again. <drinks vodka from bottle> No, I will not tell the
         healer group to 'Heal Better' in raids <drags on two cigarettes at the
         same time> No, I will not tell the DPS group to 'Go crit themselves'."

 Most likely to: Go postal.
 Least likely to: Have fond memories of their last five years in MMOs.

The Suckup
 Quote: "What do you think we should do, Raid Leader?
         Yes, that's what I was going to say too, you're so right.
         Raid Leader! Raid Leader! Tina wore my guild tabard as a thong again, and
         then gave it back without washing it!"

 Most likely to: Be ganked by their own guild.
 Least likely to: Take any action without approval in triplicate.

The Mouth
 Quote: "EVERYONE LISTEN TO ME I'M SAYING STUFF I'M JUST GOING TO DRIVEL ON NOW 
         ABOUT TOTALLY NONSENSICAL IRRELEVANT GARBAGE BUT YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION
         BECAUSE I SPEAK IN ALL CAPS AND I'LL BEAT YOU DOWN IF YOU DARE TO SPEAK 
         AT THE SAME TIME EVEN IF IT'S TO AGREE WITH ME WHICH IS TERRIBLY UNLIKELY."

 Most likely to: Have only just reached teen age.
 Least likely to: Breathe between sentences.

The Loot-linker
 Quote: "Hey look at these everyone! [Sword] [Shield] [Armour] [Bow] [Dildo] Shit.
         loot-linker has disconnected from the game"

 Most likely to: Link to a kitchen sink in guild chat.
 Least likely to: Have an item that other people don't know about in every 
                  excruciating and tedious detail.

The Psycho
 Quote: "Oh, so you like the Assassin class do you?! So you're some kind of racist
         then are you? Nazi lover. Of course you all love Nazis, it's not like 
         anyone loves me!"

 Most likely to: Take Tom Clancy novels too seriously.
 Least likely to: Be a florist in real life.

The Internet Lovers 
 Quote: smooch slurp giggle sigh hug

 Most likely to: Sit in public areas and force their deep emotional connection
                 down everyone else's throats through the medium of emotes.
 Least likely to: Be together once they meet in real life and realise that
                  they're of the same sex and neither one of them is gay.

The Silent One
 Quote: "Night all."

 Most likely to: Say "Night all" in the same room as the Internet Lovers when
                 they're in the middle of a cybersex session, scaring them
                 witless because they had no idea that anyone else was there.
 Least likely to: Be remembered by anyone.          
                                 
The Attention Seeker
 Quote: "Look at me I'm doing something crazy! Look how crazy I am!
         OH MY GOD MY ARMPITS ARE ON FIRE... cool!"

 Most likely to: Be run over by a dragon whilst wearing their underpants on their head.
 Least likely to: Be mistaken for the Silent One.

The Drama Major
 Quote: "Myn gentil fellowes, in feyth ich haue had a joly tyme! 
         Verily and forsooth!"

 Most likely to: Stay in character at the most inappropriate moments.
 Least likely to: Be understood.

The Drama Llama
 Quote: "I quit, you all suck! I am back, love me! You all hate me, I quit!
         I'm baaaaack!"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild.
 Least likely to: Resist rejoining the guild five minutes later.

The Clique
 Quote: "... do we know you?"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild and form their own. With a latin name.
 Least likely to: Like you.

The Real Life Champion
 Quote: "Hey look at the new car I bought. My new computer has seven graphics cards.
         I'd love to stay and play, but I have to go and pick up my new computer
         in my new car whilst having sex with five attractive members of the
         appropriate sex."

 Most likely to: Work at McDonalds.
 Least likely to: Wash.

The Levelling Machine
 Quote: "Hrm, I have twelve raid-worthy characters, which would you like me 
         to bring?"

 Most likely to: Wake-up one morning with the sickening realisation of what a
                 horrid waste of time and energy it all was.
 Least likely to: Recognise the big glowing ball of fire in the sky.

The Alt King
 Quote: "Hi! What? It's meeee. Oh, yeah, I re-rolled. 
         This new character is way better, I just wasn't getting on with the 
         last one."

 Most likely to: Have rolled three new characters by the time you finish reading this.
 Least likely to: Reach the next level on their current character.
 
The Knowledge Font
 Quote: "You are quite wrong. As can be seen by the four spreadsheets I have
         produced with special information that only I know because I'm the dev's
         favourite and they whisper to me in my dreams."

 Most likely to: Talk over someone else to prove that they know the answer too.
 Least likely to: Avoid being sickeningly smug in any situation.

The Good Guy
 Quote: "Hey! Are you guys groovy? We're all groovy! Let's all be groovy 
         and just get along. Groovy."

 Most likely to: Not cause guild drama, and to play calmly and happily to the 
                 best of their ability.
 Least likely to: Exist in any guild. Alas.

Toon on blondes.

The next generation of MMO players are already in training in games such as Toontown, and your intrepid adventurers of all things massive and multiplayer ventured forth into this strange new world to find out what MMO means to younglings that may never have heard of Everquest or World of Warcraft.

After getting past the initial hurdle of the hideous installation process, which involves Internet Explorer (AND ONLY INTERNET EXPLORER. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED), ActiveX controls, Flash installations and multiple webpage bizarreness, the game loads and you're presented with the character creation screen. Character creation is a simplistic affair, although it still offers more customisation than certain popular MMOs that one could mention. Zing! Take that, Big Kid's MMOs!

To start off with you choose the sex of your character and then Minnie or Mickey Mouse will lead you through the rest of the creation process depending on your choice. The girls go with Minnie, the boys with Mickey, in case there are any deviant 'Minnie Mouse fanfic' writers out there. Next you can choose what sort of toon you will play, such as a monkey, dog, cat or rabbit; height, body shape and head size can be altered, followed by body colour, which can vary from limb to limb as demonstrated by my lovely assistant Prof. Spiffy Frinkelzilla in the picture from yesterday's post. Clothing options come next, which includes style and colour, although you scroll through the options one at a time and each colour choice is effectively a new item, so if you don't like the Hawaiian shirt option you have to scroll through all the colour choices for that shirt style until you get to the next one. A minor niggle really, although for inveterate character customisers such as myself it got a bit frustrating when I had picked a shirt design and then found a pair of shorts I liked the look of but which didn't match that shirt, thus forcing me to scroll back through many items to find a new style of shirt that I liked. Whether people will be focussing on that niggle, or on how much effort I put into creating a cartoon character for a three day trial of a game for seven year olds is open for debate. But Sir Monty was the coolest cat on the block by far, which considering he is in actual fact a rabbit, shows just how cool we're talking here.

Finally name generation is required, and this is where the 'this game is for kids' aspect is highlighted for the first time. You can choose a name and type it in, as per normal MMOs, but it will be sent for approval before being allowed in the game, so no cartoon characters called Bugs Bunny69 or the Cockulator, which is a seriously good thing for a kids game but also not a bad idea for a Big Kid's MMO either, in my opinion. The other option, if you don't want to wait for approval, is to pick from a list of approved names which you build into a combination; there's an optional title, a forename and an optional surname which is made of two separate words combined, 'thunder' and 'nerd' seemed appropriate for me, so I went with that. There are some awesomely bizarre names in the name selection menu, and you can therefore create some weird and wacky combinations without too much trouble. My wife, who was staring over my shoulder in mild bemusement at the antics of Zoso and I, was particularly tickled by a duck we saw named Fat Max Spacklefoot; kudos to you Fat Max, the ministry of silly names salutes you!

Once you've created your masterpiece of anthropomorphized slapstick, you're popped into the game's very brief tutorial which, as with most MMOs, introduces you to the basic controls and interface elements. The game uses the arrow keys to steer the character around and there's no mouse look, which is excellent in the fact that you won't see any characters spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees at improbable speeds, but it does force you into becoming a keyboard turner by default. Being used to slightly more flexible controls as we Big Kids are, this made the thing feel very clunky, but I imagine it would translate well to the various console platforms which is perhaps the main motivation behind the restrictions. Also, this is a game for kids so, you know, I probably shouldn't be expecting a scriptable UI and multi-macro keybinds. Besides, you get used to the controls in short order as you progress through the introductory quests.

And quest you do. It really hits you quite quickly that Toontown is indeed a fully-fledged MMO training ground for kids, a staging ground for raising the next generation of virtual warriors and warriettes.

The basic concept of the game is thus: Cogs are invading Toontown and you need to help stop them. The Cogs are robots which manifest themselves in the manner of various 'dull' themes from the real world, such as bankers, lawyers, bureaucrats and Pop Idol. Ok, not the last one. Not that I discovered anyway; it's probably an end of game boss, thinking about it. These semblances of seriousness are prone to self-destruct under the onslaught of a player character's good ol' cartoon tomfoolery, or Gags. Gags are the character abilities of the game; as you level up these abilities you can gain more powerful versions of them, and as you perform quests you earn the opportunity to learn new classes of gags. You start off with two basic attacks: throwing a pie at the mob, or squirting water at them. It was hard to progress far into the game, but we did get far enough to see the next class of gags, one of which was an AoE attack and the other was a group heal ability; as Zoso pointed out, if people have the opportunity to shout out "HEAL MEH!!1" it must be a proper MMO.

And a proper MMO it is.

It has the grind of a proper MMO, with the two new classes of gags requiring an inordinate number of quests to be performed before you qualify to go on the final 'gag quest' to earn the right to use that class of gags. You can only pick one of the two new gag classes at any one time, so assuming you wanted to learn the other class of gags, you'd have to grind out a whole load more quests. New gags within each class are earned by using the existing ones. To level up throwing gags, you throw pie at mobs and each time you do your progress is shown on a meter to let you know how far you've progressed. Throw enough pies and you get the chance to throw... bigger pies! For slightly more damage! It's easy to mock, but when you think about it it's exactly what you get in a lot of popular MMOs these days; many of the rewards for achieving the next level on your character are just the same abilities, but ever so slightly more powerful.

Observing an MMO distilled into its most basic essence so that it is accessible to children makes you realise just how much smoke and mirror schemes are employed to give the sense of achievement and purpose that is the foundation of the grown-up games.

Mmmmm, deep. Ok, it was about as deep as a paddling pool. Speaking of paddling pools: combat! Nice link, eh? Smooth. Seamless. I should be on the radio. Speaking of radios: combat! Combat in the game is a matter of running up to a mob until you make contact with them, which will then initiate combat mode. As MMO training for kids, this can only be forging a new generation of Leeroy Jenkins and tanking cloth wearers who think that the only way to pull is to throw yourself bodily at the enemy, but it keeps things simple and obviously that's the name of this particular game. Actually the name of the game is Toontown, if it was called Simpletown I don't think it would go down so well, less so if they shortened it to Simpleton. Anyway! Once in combat your available abilities pop up on the screen, you pick one, and if you're fighting several mobs you pick which one to aim at. You don't group in the game, instead anyone can join a battle in progress up to a maximum of four players. This is quite a refreshing way of doing things, as it doesn't matter if the mob is nearly dead or at full health, if there's a space and you join before the mob dies then you get credit for helping defeat it. It's open to abuse, obviously, but this is a game for kids so I'm not sure that AFK Whore and XP Leech is likely to be a part of their vocabulary. The combat is turn based, where the toon group takes a go, then the Cog gets to return fire. The group gets twenty seconds or so to take their turn, so if you're used to Guild Wars pace you're probably going to think the world has stopped turning, but for anyone being introduced to the genre for the first time it provides enough of a sense of urgency to be entertaining, especially if you're seven years old.

To further it's classification to proper MMO status, mobs wander the streets and will add to the combat if they come close enough to your group while you are fighting, where everyone is locked stationary in position until all engaged enemies are defeated. The respawn rate was pretty crazy in some areas, and for such a 'basic' game it actually got pretty hairy on several occasions as additional mobs joined the fight just before we finished the current batch. At one point we had so many adds that defeat was inevitable and it prompted Zoso to jokingly exclaim "I donut leik this game. It's too hard. I'm going back to something easy for seven year olds. Like WoW". To which I could only cry "Forsooth!". They've got eight million customers, but you can be sure that Blizzard still feels the burn of biting social commentary from a couple of obscure MMO bloggers. Oh yes.

Once you've completed your quests (and quests can take an age to complete, because just like in 'real' MMOs, mobs of the type that you need for your quest are never to be found until after you no longer need them, then you can't move for that type of mob but can't find the new ones you're looking for) you can warp back to town, where warping is represented by you pulling a comedy hole out of your pocket, popping it onto the floor and jumping into it. Nice! This same animation is used for a lot of the cool travel warping abilities; a really cool one is the ability to warp to the location of anyone in your friends list. Genius! Absolute joyous revelation! Alas, anyone trained on Toontown is going to hit serious shellshock once they delve into one of the world-spanning, FedEx delivering, ever-running MMOs that the big kids play.

You have a limited number of gags to use before they run out, but never fear for they are easily recharged by hopping on the magic tram and visiting one of a number of mini-game areas. As with combat, anyone can jump on the tram while it's waiting at the station, and then whoever is aboard when it leaves joins together in a quick one minute mini-game which is selected at random. There are various games, the ones I played either involved cooperating as a team and getting a group bonus if you all achieved the goals (such as a perfect round on swimming through a bunch of rings), or they involved competing and trying to outperform the other players in the game to get the biggest reward. Even in a game for seven year olds, PvP is a brutal gladiatorial struggle to the death! Well, not 'to the death' so much as 'for greater quantities of jelly beans', where jelly beans are the currency that you use to replenish your stock of gags. Again, good training for the hostility of future MMOs, and some players were probably a little too desperate to win the Apple Catching tournament, or Minnie Mouse's dancing competition. I caught myself at one point in a game desperately shoving other player characters out of the way in order to get the best position to catch the juicy red appley rewards dropping from the sky, suddenly I realised the full horror of the barbaric PvP training camps that were churning out the next wave of gankers. Then I slapped myself and realised that seven year olds running around and enthusiastically nudging each other out the way is all part and parcel of playing at that age, and I was perhaps being a little too fatalistic in the face of cartoon animals chasing after fruit. It was late and I'd had a lot of coffee. Coffee makes me weirder than usual. On the scale of weirdness, that's very weird, to non-experts.

And that's about the gist of it for the short time period we played. Disappointingly for an MMO demo. a whole raft of functionality was disabled to the trial player, so I couldn't, for example, try the go-kart racing or the chat functionality; for chatting in the trial you're limited to selecting phrases from a menu, but it's very well implemented, with a huge range of phrases sensibly and tidily organized in menus, allowing you to spam 'Rock and Roll' over and over, or explain exactly what quest you're on and how many mobs you need to complete it. Rock and Roll! One final feature that I'll mention that was available in the trial, although I didn't play with it much, was player housing in an Animal Crossing stylee, allowing you to furnish the place with rewards and vendor-bought items!

I know! Player housing. From the outset. These seven years olds are spoilt I tell you! Why, back in the day there wasn't any housing to speak of, you just covered yourself with a sheet if you were lucky enough to have received such a rare drop, otherwise you hid under a tree! And that's only if your coal-powered graphics engine supported trees...