Newsbriefs

AOL Joins Federation, but
the Sailing Isn't All Smooth

A MUD-like scenario already familiar to many Internetters (on GEnie, for example, the game has flourished for years), Federation takes place in a futuristic imbroglio of interstellar trade and politics. As players sign on, their first tasks are to bribe an official to obtain a ship permit and then go into debt to purchase a spaceship. Players then need to hire themselves out for jobs--hauling cargo, for example--to pay off their creditors.

By completing a number of such jobs, players can earn enough Imperial Groats (the game's currency) to rise in rank. As players climb the virtual social ladder, they abandon cargo hauls for trading on the galactic exchanges. Next come simulations where players build factories to produce their own goods, then create and oversee their own planets. The ultimate rank is that of a politically suave Duke overseeing a group of planets.

The AOL version of this cyber-capitalistic game combines text- based chat gaming with libraries of maps and hint files, and lessons in politics, economics, and player cooperation. Federation members can create elaborate personas of either gender, complete with detailed descriptions that will be incomprehensible to nonplayers. Socializing and networking with fellow gamers can have good payoffs for wheeling and dealing for your mutual benefit.

There's a demonstrable interest in Federation, perhaps in the RPG genre as a whole, on AOL--at last count, there were over 4,000 downloads of the Federation FAQ since late May. But the Federation forum has already undergone some drastic revisions in its short tenure on AOL. If the message boards are any indication, the enthusiasm of many players is being tempered by frustration over interactions with some of the game "hosts" and confusion over some of the game's reorganization, rule changes, and missing player profiles. For example, game hosts may log on as Federation hosts, but they may also log on in character and as such be indistinguishable from other players. New players griped that these game hosts were unfairly altering the prime directive in a sense, by using their knowledge of answers to puzzles to affect other players' performance.

But the game's organizers appear to be making efforts to encourage more newbies to join the game by soliciting experienced players to act as "greeters" and by posting an extensive FAQ and messages for "newbods." The Federation game is still in beta, so hopefully an ironed-out version that makes it to an official release will help lessen the learning curve for AOL members.

-- Greg Soultanis

July/August Top 10 Picks
for IF on the World Wide Web

Night -- A graphical, interactive murder mystery
http://www.compulink.co.uk/arc/night/night.htm

Adventure (Web interface by Yuval Fisher)
http://inls.ucsd.edu/y-bin/adventure

Ron's IF Page
http://www.webcom.com/~rwhe/if-links.html

Nexor's Game/Adventure Page
http://pubweb.nexor.co.uk/public/mac/archive/data/game/adventure/index.html

MURC, IRC's Answer to MUDs
http://www2.novagate.com/murc/

Infocom Homepage (by Peter Scheyen)
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/

The BoReD Page
http://www.rain.org/~doctorx/bored

The Unending Addventure
http://www.addventure.com/addventure/game2/

Interactive Media Theory Seminar
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~xinwei/pub/img/img.html