Diminishing returns

[undyingking]

Thanks to the esteemed jiggery_pokery for linking to this great story about the far-sighted Chinese government's endeavours to stop people spending too long playing online games: "After three hours, the number of in-game "experience points" for, say, killing an opponent are reduced by half. After five hours you do not get any at all. It is called the fatigue system." Although I guess in what we laughingly refer to as the free world there would be strong feelings against the implementation of such a system (otherwise known as "gradually sucking all the joy out of it"), I could see a similar sort of thing on consoles being pretty popular with parents.

On a completely unrelated note, who has the oldest LiveJournal? I know some of you lot have been on here for yonks, but how many yonks? -- when was your first entry? And has your journal worked out the way you were expecting back then?

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

5 hours? But which 5 hours?

(See comments about Civ 4 from midnight to 4am...)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I was thinking about that. It would kind of suck if after a while your bombers could be defeated by spearmen. Oh, hold on...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

My LJ was created primarily because chrisvenus offered me an invite code (remember those ?) after I'd left anon comments on a couple of LJs. That was in April 2002, so it's been a while but hardly ancient history.

My LJ has worked out as I expected, but probably because I'd previously kept an online diary (of sorts) on the Monochrome BBS, so was quite familiar with the medium.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The lowest id number on my friends list looks like it's narenek, at 98 thousand or so. After that, it's indeed chrisvenus at 500 thousand.

(looks, because I didn't go through them exhaustively.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

How are you seeing that id number?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Go to the userinfo, and look immediately next to the username.

eg.

User: undyingking (6412915)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Aha, cunning. A quick glance looks like narenek is the oldest of mine too.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Mine was September 2002, but I'm not sure I had any real feeling for how it was going to work out ;)

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I note that the article comments that the restriction can be by-passed by changing account or changing game; whether this restriction can be bypassed in practice or not is another matter. (To be fair, if it's in place for, say, the ten most popular games then it'll probably have the desired effect, rather than redirecting traffic to the 11th most popular game.) My favoured tactic would be compulsory ad breaks, gradually increasing in frequency, length and clips from "Why Don't You?".

That said, on your console point, I'm also reminded of some TV show in the past about predictions for the future - no clue which one - which had kids playing some sort of horror VR game; the kids' mother called the kid to stop playing and go to bed, the kid objected, so the mother took some sort of in-game presence as a vampire and chased the kid out of the game. Interesting concept.

who has the oldest LiveJournal?

Globally, brad (Fitzpatrick), who originally wrote the site for himself.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

He is number 2!

Who is number 1?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

bradfitz. Hmm...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Don't think I don't see what you're doing there, young man.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

It's almost worth wondering who number 6 is now.

But not quite...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, I can see some parents getting into that a bit too much, to the point where they should really stop and go up to bed too.