Lights Out!

source: Bill Joy's worst nightmare's worst nightmare
posted: Jun 4, 2004, 4:01 pm
by: rmk

The object of the game is to manoeuvre your opponents, the

rest of the earth's 6 billion population, into willingly exterminating themselves, thus ridding all time of their stinking stupidity, and leaving you the only one to get to watch the end of the world on CNN. (CNN staff are hypnotized to not exterminate themselves so their cameras are rolling, but of course, they're all too busy checking sound levels and their makeup, to even notice the end of the world).

"Lights Out!", the most massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game in history, differs diametrically if not dialectically from all other current MMORPGs, normally played with virtual characters who become so real that real people buy and sell them for high prices on eBay.

Instead, "Lights Out!", is played with REAL people who become so virtual that REAL players (i.e. people) don't seem to give a flaming flying fuck what REALLY happens to them or how many of them REALLY get wiped -- as long as, ultimately, it racks up lots of bonus points or contributes, in a substantive way, to some super-elegant game move.

Yet despite all that, a certain level of maturity prevails and it appears that actual body count, as an end in itself, has not (yet) become a compiled and rewarded and regaled statistic of the game, or actual element of play. As has also number of players incarcerated for first-degree murder, and/or sentenced to death by lethal injection, hanging, electrocution, or shotgun, not become a regaled or rewarded statistic or beloved and addictive element of play.

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